“The luck o’ the Irish!” he said, with a demented leprechaun accent. Laxmi lost it again. “Gland of the free! Johnny, we hardly knew ye—or ye pituitaries.”
Some of the cadavers had been “hollowed out”—any and every organ that was market-redeemable had been removed.
Laxmi shook her head. “That is so totally surreal.”
“I just saw a movie on Sundance,” said Chess. “What a fucked-up channel — they’ll, like, put anything on. I mean, this fuckin car ride would be better than Tarnation. Anyway, it’s about this Jewish guy from New York — Maurie Levin! — who flies to Austria after hearing about some old doctor on trial for experimenting with disabled kids back in the 40s. Killed em and took out their brains. His name was Dr Gross.”
“Of course.”
“The guy gets there—”
“Dr Levin!”
“Right. Dr Levin the documentarymaker gets there just in time for this public ceremony called the Burial of the Brains…”
“Of course.”
“Laxmi, I shit you not. It was so lame. I thought it was a Chris Guest movie — you know, the guy who did Best in Show?”
“I loved that! Isn’t he married to—”
“The chick from Psycho’s daughter.”
“She died, right?”
“The mother. The one from the shower.”
“So creepy. I heard that guy Hitchcock really hated women.”
“He’s like a duke or a lord or something.”
“Hitchcock.”
“No, the guy who’s married to — the Guest guy.”
“Sir Maurie! Lord Levin!”
“I think he’s a duke. Duke Guest. Guest Host. Patty Duke. Whatever. I read it in People.”
“People…people who read People…are the loneliest people in the—”
They passed the kiddie train you could ride on, and it triggered a meditation on his dad. Maybe my father is rich — a rich man. Maybe my father is a public figure and knows who and where I am but is hesitant to contact me. Maybe my father has been in touch with Joan and Marj all along. Maybe it was actually my father who loaned me the 10K through her auspices. Maybe my father is a CEO or COO or CFO of a major media corp. Maybe my father is the key shareholder of the parent company that produces Friday Night Frights…she saw him zone out and let him be. According to Laxmi her father was rich but Chess wondered if she had some fantasy-exaggeration element goin on. Maybe my father is her father, he thought. Seeing it for the still-stoned musing that it was, he shook his head and laughed. He’d keep that one to himself.
LAXMI said they should rent go-carts because they had a lot of ground to cover before getting to the elephants, some of it uphill, and she didn’t want Chess to be uncomfortable. Much better than the tram. He was surprised at how easy it was; for 20 bucks, anyone could trip around on a handicapper scooter. Even a fucking terrorist. There wasn’t paperwork to deal with (all they needed was your John Hancock) because evidently the San Diego Zoo had already been sued by some pioneering class-action gimps who said it was demeaning for them to sit there signing full-on legal disclaimers before being allowed to ride. That’s what the person who gave them the single-page form said, anyway. Still, it was refreshing that you didn’t need a doctor’s note. They could only go so fast but were actually pretty smooth and efficient. And Laxmi was right — no way would he have made it walking.
Once they got going, Chess looked at her as if to telepath, This shit is getting weird. She vanished in a puff of hippiegiggle.
Laxmi zigged and zagged and had a grand ol time but Chester was self-conscious as he steered, feeling a touch of the paraplegic, wishing he had a military outfit so it would at least look like he’d survived some roadside blast in Fuckistan, but the hiking pedestrians that they slowly overtook didn’t seem to give a shit. The pair was invisible as they navigated sundry paths and This Way To The Reptile House tributaries. He took more pills. He wanted to make sure to have a little something in his stomach so they stopped at one of the multicultural shacks for some Mex (triggering another series of McBurro riffs). The nascent panicky mindset that the pain might never end was almost as bad as the pain itself, that he was now one of those people—or at least in the process of getting his membership approved — on the torture rack till the end of their days.
The Inderal lasted 24 hours and was used primarily to quell the fear of public speaking; another shriven skull the witch doctors said to throw in the cauldron. One of the brainiac medicos Chess saw at UCLA told him there were lots of new “management stratagems.” He rattled off a bunch of meds and the eager patient went home and did his search engine thing. Scared the shit out of him. There was something called Pamidronate, for sucky bone cancers like Paget’s disease, but you had to inject it. That really freaked him — that the guy’d even mention it, unless he was showboating. Is that where he saw Chess heading? Shooting up some exotic cancer drug in the bathroom at JAR (for brunch)? Who knew: maybe these types of injuries did eventually lead to the Big C — what used to be laughable, myth and folk wisdom, had hardened with Sweeps Week logic into unassailable doctrine in the clinics’ hallowed halls. Made perfect sense. People weren’t enrolling in medical school because of DeBakey or Albert Schweitzer — they were being recruited by House, Grey’s Anatomy, and CSI. There were antiseizure drugs for stumpers and something called gabapentin for the neuropathy that went with renal failure or diabetes. The whitecoated putz looked at Chess like he was a fool for not having already gotten his epidurals; the needles they used were Tommy Lee — gauge. The “epi” delivered morphine or bupivaicaine directly to the spinal cord, so you didn’t have to do that zombified painsoaked stiffwalk anymore, but all Chess thought about was a 1st-year student hitting a nerve and infecting him, botching the very procedure little old ladies sailed through. He saw himself on a zoo scooter 10 years hence, his own motorized pushcart, covered with KEEP IT GREEN stickers and cannabis logos, diapered, wheeling through Whole Foods for fish oil and Centrum—
Not gonna happen…
THEY found their way to the enclosure. He used to come with Joan and his mom. Laxmi thought it so cool that Marjorie was “into Ganesha.” She said there was no way elephants should not be in the wild, and Chess concurred, after mulling over the double negative (his brain wasn’t working too well), realizing she meant they shouldn’t be caged. They stared in silence at a family of pachyderms (that Fleetwood Mac song “Tusk” went idiotically through his head), cute and anciently weird and even spooky to apprehend, before disgust at their voyeurism washed over. The couple was still high, seized by intense reefer outrage re captivity that quickly segued to melancholia.
Laxmi said there were a thousand myths about how Ganesha was created. While her husband Siva was away, Parvati created a boy from her “scurf”—the flakes and scales of her skin — so he’d keep away nettlesome visitors and guard her bedroom door. When Siva came home, Ganesha didn’t know who he was and wouldn’t let him in. Siva cut off his head. Those gods don’t fuck around, huh. When he realized it was his own son he had decapitated, Siva freaked and restored the kid to life by giving him the head of the creature closest by: a white elephant.