“How Do You Feel, Mister Pliers?”

   I awoke in a strange bed. 

   Aha, you say, how interesting! 

   Hold on, I say, because it was a hospital bed in a hospital room that I awoke in. 

   I think. I wasn’t sure.

   The room smelled faintly like a zoo or stables, which contrasted oddly with its exceptionally clean appearance. I had a headache and my mouth was dry, but otherwise I felt okay. Maybe a little weak. No need to be in hospital, surely. 

   I looked around me. It was a hospital room, of that I was certain, but there was no medical equipment of any kind to be seen. There was only the hospital bed I was in, inclined slightly to let me sit up a little, a small bedside table with cheap reading lamp, and a simple, hard-backed chair for visitors. There were no windows in the room. 

   On the bedside table was a half-eaten box of inexpensive chocolates, a lipstick-smudged glass of flat Coca-Cola and a pack of cigarettes. 

   Not my brand, lipstick or smokes. 

   How long had I been unconscious, I wondered? 

   I didn’t know and couldn’t remember.

   I reached up to scratch an itchy spot at the back of my head. What the? Upon touching it I instantly withdrew my hand! What I felt back there was not my usual head, with its lustrous, flowing locks and solid, skin-covered cranium. No. What I felt back there was a swollen, shaved, stitched-up mess at the base of my skull! 

   I reached up and carefully touched it again. There was stubble growing where the space had been shaved and it was tender to the touch. Beneath the stubble it was soft and kind of gooey, like I was pressing my fingers into an overripe peach. I thought I heard it squish and it hurt when I timidly pushed against it.

   “Ouch,” I said to myself.

   Myself, I suddenly wondered? Who’s that? I had no memory of who I was or how I got there. 

   Before I had time to panic, however, a doctor entered with a clipboard under his arm. I assumed he was a doctor, dressed as he was in a white lab-coat with stethoscope dangling round his neck. He had come through a door that I hadn’t noticed before, after first unlocking it. 

   I heard it distinctly when he unlocked it. 

   So, I had been locked in. Why? 

   The doctor was a very small man, perhaps not even four-and-a-half feet tall, but with large hands and feet for his size. His dark hair was slicked back and he sported, beneath his flat little nose, an old-fashioned pencil mustache. There was a great deal of rough, dark hair on the back of his hands and sprouting from his shirt collar at the neck. 

   Coming up to the bed, without introduction he took me by the wrist and studied his watch as he began to speak. “Ah, Mister Pliers!” said he with a big smile. “I see you’re awake. Wonderful! How do you feel?”

   He had a high pitched voice to match his diminutive size and he spoke with a slight English accent. 

   “Yes,” he continued, “you look fine today! Just fine! How’s the head? Any more headaches?”

   “How long have I been here, Doc,” said I, “and who the heck am I? I can’t remember. Who brought me here? Why was I locked in?”

   “There’ll be plenty of time for all that later,” he smoothly assured me while he continued to take my pulse. “No need to worry.” 

   I lay back, feeling weak and disoriented. My head had begun to hurt, too, deep inside where it had never hurt before.

   Finished with my pulse, the doctor smiled at me patiently while he gently lowered my wrist to my side and patted it comfortingly a couple of times. He had very long hands, with the thumb well back towards the wrist. I noticed again how hairy he was. 

   “Please don’t concern yourself with too many questions, Mister Pliers, it will only slow the healing process. Now, roll over onto your side and pull your pajama bottoms halfway down.”

   “Pajama bottoms?” I answered. “I don’t wear pajamas, Doc.”

   That much I knew about myself  That I would never wear pajamas.

   I felt myself and what do you know? Pajama bottoms. With resignation I rolled over unto my side and pulled them halfway down. As I did so he produced, from seemingly nowhere, a fiendishly large hypodermic needle which he jabbed without ceremony into my backside.   

   “Now,” he said encouragingly as the hot serum flowed into my bloodstream, “about those dreams you’ve been having ...”

   I now noticed, standing quietly in the corner, my publisher. Had she been there all the time, I wondered? Was she even there now? The drug was beginning to take effect. I shook my head and looked again. Yes, there she was, dressed impeccably in a taupe-colored cashmere skirt and crisp silk blouse, standing quietly, holding the hand of a chimpanzee who stood at her side. They were both staring at me. The chimpanzee was wearing a little white lab-coat and smoking a cigarette. I think it was a female chimpanzee, because she was wearing lipstick.

   This odd sight had me wondering, as you can imagine, but it was becoming difficult for me to keep my eyes open. 

   All I wanted was to close my eyes and go to sleep.

   I fought to keep my eyes opened, watching as the chimp took another drag on her cigarette, causing its tip to glow a fierce red. After blowing a few lazy smoke-rings, she exhaled the remaining smoke through her nostrils. Then she shook her head insanely for a minute before barking something up to my publisher. My publisher nodded. As I lost the fight for consciousness and my eyelids fluttered to a close, the chimp released her grip on my publisher’s hand and started stepping towards me. 

   I could hear the chimp’s angry chattering, coming at me in the darkness. 

Doctor’s Orders

   There are many reasons for a writer to write. 

   I write because I enjoy entertaining people and as a way to deal with the world around me. To try to understand and have a laugh at things that to me are incomprehensible and somewhat sad. Of course, it might be said that cooping myself up in a room for days at a time writing is not dealing with the world at all, as my wife often suggests, but is it any different than practicing yoga or working in the garden or playing golf or the millions of other things people do to deal with, or escape from, life? 

   Anyway, whatever the reason, a writer’s first responsibility is to write!

   The reason I’m writing this particular blog today is because I’m under orders, after a stay in hospital, from my doctor. 

   Don’t worry though, I’m okay now. Except for these damned doctor’s orders. 

   Yes, doctor’s orders. He got a court order, him and his lawyers, with a lien on my house and a garnish on my income, demanding that I pay my overdue hospital bills. There’s a restraining order in there too, somewhere. And let’s not forget alphabetical order and the Franciscan Order, I think he’s got them lined up against me also. 

   But the joke’s on him. Ha! Ha! 

   You see, being a writer, I don’t have any income.

   He wasn’t much of a doctor, as it turned out. 

   I could go on and on, listing his defects and having fun with that (fact is, I’ve spent the entire morning doing so with much hilarity on my part, but alas, to little purpose, they being so mean-spirited as to be completely unusable here) but let us just agree to say that his idea of overdue, and mine, are two very different things. 

   I have every intention of attending to his bill, by the way, but I have a strict rule of paying my bills in the order they arrive. It’s only fair. Dr. X (my publisher forbids my using his real name) is way down on the who-gets-paid-when list, and if he keeps on having these ‘agencies’ calling me, demanding money and threatening me in the middle of the night, he’s going to drop further down the list. Or maybe I’ll take him off it entirely. 

   That’ll show him! 

   I don’t know why I should even be paying him anything. After all, it wasn’t me that left his gold Rolex wristwatch inside the patient at the hospital in Orlando, next to the pancreas.

   I mean the Rolex watch was next to the pancreas, by the way. 

   Not the hospital. 

   That’s on Lakemont Ave. 

   

   May I take a moment and encourage the reader to admire my deft use of product placement in that last group of paragraphs? Smooth, huh? It’s a new thing we’re trying. Please watch (no pun intended) for further subtle placements like this, dotted throughout my blogs. 

   My publisher suggested it when she read my latest manuscript. 

   She insisted, really.

   “It’s good business,” she said. “You need the money, don’t you?”

   “Yeah, sure. But what about my art?” I whined. “Won’t people think I’m selling out?” I always end up whining when I’m in her office. 

   Whining, or crying. 

   “Remember my rule?” she said sweetly but somehow threateningly. “People will think what I tell them to think!”

   “Yes, ma’am.” I also become timid and meek in her office. I think it’s something they put in the coffee, because the coffee is truly horrible. Or pump in with the air conditioning in the freezing-cold reception area, where she always keeps me waiting before she sees me.

   “So, you want to be an artist, do you?” she asked me.  

   “Yes, ma’am.”

   “You’re such a hotshot writer, work in some goddamned Ferraris then!”

   She shook my manuscript in my face. Three year’s work, flapping angrily at the end of her arm. 

   “I have to stay true to my art, don’t I?” I asked.

   “Art, schmart! What about GM, the NFL or the Food Network? How about some freakin’ Nike, Apple or American Express?”

   “Okay, ma’am, if I can.”

   “And would it kill you to mention the new Honda? My daughter’s sixteenth birthday is coming up!” 

   “Yes, ma’am.”

   She glared at me.  

   “I mean no, ma’am.”

   I didn’t know what I meant. Confused and flustered, I looked up at the ceiling, then down into the half-empty coffee cup in my hands. It’s something they pump in with the air conditioning, I decided. The coffee can’t taste this bad and be doctored. That would be too obvious and they’re much too smart for that.

   But if that's the case, why wasn't she affected?

   Was she immune? Or taking an antidote? Or, and this is my favorite, was she some sort of alien? 

   “Here!” She tossed my MS into my lap. Three year’s work, crushing my testicles. “There’d better be some goddamned Ferraris in there next time my freakin’ assistant reads this!”

   “Yes, ma’am.”

   “Anything else on your mind?” she asked.

   I shook my head no.

   “Then hadn’t you better be getting back to work?”

   "Yes. ma'am." 

   With the briefest of adieus, I was dismissed.

   I was so happy to be out of there, I stopped for tree martoonis on the play to the scubway station where, feeling as flight as a leather and possessed by love for my mellow fan, I handed an incredulous panhandler a twenty-dollar-bill for good luck!

   “Hey!” he said. “That’s a twenty, Mack! You crazy or something?” 

   “Take it, my friend!” I told him. “Consider this an offering to the gods.”

   “Huh?” he asked.

   “It went much better with my publisher than usual today!”