Four Polaroids of Pain on Drugs Ray Murphy (bio) Future of Flight Blue and red, the Motel 6 sign, appearing remote, even miniature, on its towering pole, visible for miles—flag of liquidity, the sacrosanct mobility of goods and services and persons—always had evoked the same sense of possibility whenever I sped west on the Boeing freeway. You could see above the exit ramp the flat gravel lot where tractor trailers idled long and sleek as locomotives. The dawning world empty, rudimentary, the huge margin of creation still to come. Beyond the motel lay a stretch as large as the National Mall in DC. Here were our Washington's monuments: Paine Field, the Lazy B's private airport. Then the wing assembly plant, in the World's Largest Building. And finally the Future of Flight Museum. With injury, such sudden vistas become pointless: whatever expanse opens before you immediately is abraded by pain, foreshortened, fore-closed. Soon enough, the vistas stop. Creation itself appears vestigial. You want a pill. Seventeen minutes later the sniΔes slow, your stomach settles, you can hold your head up. For forty minutes after that, your brain bathed in relief, you experience curiosity. At first it lasts four hours. After eighteen months you stop feeling the relief. With it goes curiosity. Alone with your uncut pain, each day consists of hiding in a ditch. You're confined to trench warfare like a soldier out of ammunition, his bayonet broken. It's all you can do to stay out of the way. Oxy Entropy At that hour waiting for a bus seemed akin to expecting Jimmy Hoffa back at the union hall. I finally got one. By the time I walked the long driveway back to my building, my feet were veering out from under me and my bowels churning. It had occurred to me of course that pain pills made an infant of me. They didn't. They made a scarecrow of me, eviscerated and [End Page 42] forlorn. Only the pills grew. You were allotted three a day and then four, then six and Doctor Patel and then Doctor Li said that's the ceiling. But the pills didn't know that. After a while, on your regular dose, your body began to flag. You slowed like a boxer over the course of the bout, until in the tenth round, glistening with sweat, your swing rubbery, your footwork a trudge, you leaned on your opponent and staggered through the ugly dance of withdrawals. As in all of life, it wasn't enough to battle to a draw. One of us had to go. Pocket Bomb On Wednesday morning, Souixie came in at three and we worked the response to television morning show ads running on eastern time. "Tick tick tick," she chuckled as I paced in my headset, scribbling notes. By the time I'd gotten off that call, she had fielded one, and now held up a leaf of legal paper with a drawing of a prescription bottle, out of its cap a fuse rising to a spark. And beneath, the caption: INCOMING! Later during a lull she said, "Sorry, but I can hear those poison pills rattling in the plastic every time you move." "Be glad you don't need them," I said. Lisa arrived, put her head in, got the sitrep. When she went for coffee I started wrapping up my open files. Joanne Salter in Miami hadn't returned my calls. I reached out once more. "No," said a woman who sounded early-twenties, "this is her angel." "Oh." I tossed a blue morphine pill into the air and caught it in my mouth. "Joanne died and came back as you?" For some reason she didn't hang up. "My name's Paige. You're in violation of Fair Debt Collection Practices Act—" "I'm not a collector. She called us." "What about?" "We'd like to represent her in her malpractice case." "I don't know what you're—she's doing chemo, okay. She's really, really disoriented." "Can I speak with her, Paige, please, for exactly half a minute?" "What do you want to know?" "The...
Read full abstract
Apr 4, 2018
N Ravichandran + 1
Open Access