Brokenhearted in Bakersfield

 

28 - AN UNEXPECTED TURN

When I woke up next, Nurse Gotti had taken up position around the nurse’s station.  I weakly raised my hand to wave her to come next to my bed.  Once she came over and leaned down to catch what I had to communicate, I howled like a Kentucky pig caller, “Release that clamp on my IV and let those painkillers flooooow!”

Nurse Gotti jumped back and rubbed her ear.  Her face contorted real weird, and she began to laugh again, like a mad doctor in a scary movie, so I started to scream like a hysterical little girl and I kept right on screaming, until she called for some backup.

Another nurse came running in with another needle.  “Dorothy, what happened?  I thought he was over his dementia episodes.  What triggered this?”

I heard Nurse Gotti say, “You know, Molly, I can’t explain it.  The patient was fine one minute, and going completely nuts the next.”  Nurse Gotti grabbed my arm.  “Help me, Molly,” she said.  “Sit on him, will you?”

I got my shot and begin drifting off again, my head rolling from side to side, when there in the doorway, standing in a mist of light, I saw a filthy little 8-year-old hamburger clutching what looked like a deflated onion ring.  The room’s temperature dropped to freezing cold.  The specter raised a grimy little finger and aimed it directly at me.

 Later, when I opened my eyes, I was in darkness and all alone.  Then my memories started coming back.  I remembered going to a golf tournament for celebrity sightings and the no-host buffet, and we was all standing around pretending not to notice the rotten smell, when Cheeky Monkey placed his tee and the ground suddenly started to rumble and shift.  As if on cue, the earth exploded up right under our feet, and screaming people was sinking into the quicksand soil at Jasmine Links.

I remembered trying to claw my way upwards while fighting off that Jezabel Jewett lookalike who was clamped onto my backside with press-on nails that pinched like razors.  The harder I tried to go up, the more she tried to yank me down.  Luckily, I somehow got pulled from that purid pit of a golf course and taken to St. Ides, where I presently found myself.

I decided right then and there to make my escape.  Sprinting undetected outta St. Ides in the dead of night was easy, but it wasn’t until I was standing outside in the parking lot before I considered the complications of traveling while dressed in only a hospital gown that was open in the back and with flimsy hospital slippers for running shoes.  But I was determined to forge on anyhow, my personal indignities be damned.

I tiptoed back of the warehouses behind the infirmary, belly crawled past the PriceCo parking lot, slipped on down along the onion fields by Burger Prep, then finally traversed the other side of the irrigation ditch in the dry flats till I hit the interstate.  Once there, it was no time at all before I could get to my coach and pack a duffel bag of personal belongings.  I aimed to heed the advice of Edna Peevy’s ghost who warned me to run far, far from the light.  I figured this meant leaving Bakersfield, so I decided to pay an extended visit to my family in Ulele.