Brokenhearted in Bakersfield

 

27 - BACK FROM THE LIGHT

Suddenly I was startled awake by a different voice, and the phantom of Edna vanished like so much swamp gas.

“Are you all right?”  My aching bones rattled at the sound of a familiar and strangely sweet voice.

“It’s time for your injection,” the words poured over me like syrup, and my vision revealed an angel all dressed in white.

“Mercy, you finally stopped babbling about monsters trying to pull you into some hellhole,” she said while preparing my shot.  “We were worried about you.  The morphine just didn’t seem to be taking.  But you seem a lot better now, thank goodness.  Ready for a little booster?”

“Are you an angel?”

“No,” she smiled angelically.  “I’m just your nurse, Dorothy Gotti.”  She proudly pointed to her name tag.  “But call me Dottie, everybody does.”

It all seemed so familiar to me.  She held up the syringe and gave it a little thwack with her finger and asked, “Do you remember saving Jezabel Jewett?”

Jezabel Jewett?  The star of tabloids and TV infomercials?  But I could hardly recall a thing about what happened that damn day on the golf course.  I only remembered some hellish hag trying to drag me down into a pit of anguish and despair.  Or was it all a hallucinatory dream, like seeing the apparition of Edna Peevy?

“Well, actually you didn’t save the real Jezabel Jewett,” Nurse Gotti explained with a smile.  “The tournament hired a celebrity imposter.  She turned out to be some part-time character actor named Morrie.”

Nurse Gotti slipped the point of the syringe between my toes, while I gazed helplessly into her soft velvety eyes.

“The emergency response teams were successful in rescuing many victims.  Luckily we managed to revive Cheeky Monkey, although Spunky and Spanky weren’t so fortunate.”

“Nurse Gotti,” I interrupted her retelling of my most recent agony, “how long have I been out like this?”

“About two days now.”

“Well, while I was laying here unconscious, a dear friend came to visit me in the shadows, and she told me that I should run from the light.  Now, I don’t see no oncoming freight train like she did, or didn’t, but if I understood her correct, I intend to get as far from the lights as a boy can get.”