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Audio/Video chapbooks cc&d magazine Down in the Dirt magazine books

 

cancer

kurt nimmo


��I’m in Florida.
��My mother is in a house five miles away and she has a tumor in her brain and she is dying very slowly.
��I park my father’s BMW in the parking lot at a shopping center. I sit there looking out the window at the palm trees, at the blue sky with its puffy white clouds, and then I light a cigarette and get out of the car.
��It’s hot outside. I walk over to the stores.
��I throw down the cigarette.
��I go in the drugstore. I don’t know why I go in the drugstore but I do and the air conditioning is on high and it is suddenly cold like a freezer and there are these seniors walking around buying things like umbrellas and prescription drugs.
��I think: My mother is only 56 and she is dying from cancer.
��I walk over to where they have the magazines. I pick up a magazine. I don’t know what magazine it is because I don’t look at the cover. I simply turn the pages and think that it’s too cold and that everything is weird and distant and I can’t feel anything, no emotion, nothing, I think that this must be what it’s like to be dead. I’m in a place where I don’t know anybody and I’m dead.
��I’d taken a valium from my father’s prescription before I left. I can’t feel it. I’d drank about half a fifth of good expensive scotch earlier in the day. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon and I’m not drunk. I’m high but not drunk. I flip the pages of the magazine and I focus on a photograph of a woman -- she is one of those female body builders with obscene muscles and dark brown skin. I think this is strange because she has this beautiful head with curly blond hair and nice features but it’s all ruined by the ridiculous almost male looking muscled body.
��I put the magazine back.
��I walk around the store for a minute. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not thinking about anything in particular.
��Occasionally I flash on my mother in bed. Her head’s shaved from the operation. She can’t walk. She’s in this bed with wheels on it in the back bedroom of my father’s house. Once a day a woman from the hospice organization comes in and does things -- the things my mother did before the cancer and the operation. I sleep in the room with my mother. I listen to her talk nonsense, a kind of baby talk. Cancer is slowly eating away her brain and she talks like a little girl, or a senile old woman. About fifty percent of the time she does not know who I am. Sometimes she thinks I’m her brother.
��I drive along until I reach a toll bridge. I slow, reach in my pocket, and find some coins. There is a uniformed woman inside a small toll booth. She has on sunglasses and I can’t tell if she is looking at me or not. She turns her head a little as I give her two quarters. She has dark hair and thin lips. Then I put the BMW in first gear and continue across the toll bridge.
��I pass the cream-colored building where Burt Reynolds has a condo. My father had pointed it out a few days before. We were driving down along the Gulf. The hospice woman was at the house with my mother. As we drove past I looked for Burt Reynolds but I didn’t see him. I saw a few old people walking around but not Burt Reynolds.
��Now I pull up at the county park and get out of the car and walk over to the beach. I stand there in my shoes, long pants, and short sleeved shirt. It’s hot. It’s like the sun has something against me, against everybody. I look at the water, at the sun, at the people walking and swimming and doing nothing at three o’clock in the afternoon on a day in the middle of the week. I cross over to where water meets sand and I start walking south. I watch my feet sink into the wet sand as I walk and I think that Florida is a horrible, terrible place -- the weather, the sun, the water does not make life any less meaningless and inequitable.
��I notice a woman in a bikini.
��It’s a hot pink color and the sun makes it look like it’s on fire. I stop, move away from the water, sit down in the warm sand and look at the woman in the hot pink bathing suit. She seems unaware that I am staring at her. Usually I’m careful not to stare at people but today I don’t care about anything. I stare at her for a long time. I like looking at her short brown hair, the slender and graceful length of her neck, the rich brownness of her skin, the longness of her legs, the narrowness of her hips, and the cool whiteness at the bottom of her feet as she flattens herself out on a green and yellow beach towel and lets the sun lay on her.
��Finally I get up, brush the sand off my pants, head back to the car.
��On my way back to the car I see a dead fish.
��It is big and partially rotted and it lays there in the sun with its fish mouth open and its fish eyes clouded over and slightly sunken.
��Death always looks about the same.
��I drive up the highway, past Burt Reynolds’ condo, over the long bridge, and back to my father’s house. I park his BMW in the garage. I sit in the car for a long time, in the darkness of the garage, and I don’t think about much of anything. I don’t concentrate on any one thing for very long.
��Inside the house I can hear my father’s grandfather clock ticking and the murmur of the TV. He’d bought the grandfather clock for my mother three years before. When they’d first detected the cancer. Now it counts the hours, minutes, and seconds.
��My father is watching TV in the other room.
��Kurt, he says. Is that you?
��Yeah, I say. It’s me. Has Mary gone? Mary is the hospice woman.
��Yeah, he answers. She’s gone...
��His voice trails off, lost in the sound of the movie he’s watching on HBO. I hear guns, screams, the urgent and angry sound of machinery.
��I go to the liquor cabinet and bring down the good scotch -- it’s almost gone. Later my father will go to the drug store and buy another quart. When he does I will go in the bedroom and tap out three yellow valiums in my hand and I will take them and the pills will do nothing. Or nothing that I can ascertain through the heavy nearblindness of imported alcohol.
��Maybe the valium will make me calm...
��I find two ice cubes and put them in the glass with the scotch. I lightly swish the scotch around to get it cold and then I walk out in the backyard where it is hot and unbearable and something maybe like a privatized segment of hell.
��I close my eyes and listen to the gulls.






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