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Featured Writing

Swimming With a Hole in My Body, extract

by Kevin Murray

Chapter 1

IF IT’S YOUR BIRTHDAY
~Aries~
Shit happens.  You already know this.  The Aspects indicate that Mars is in Transition.  Prophecies, premonitions, and messages from the past are on your mind for much of the day.  Listen up − they may be telling you what you already know or have been told. Do not make travel arrangements tonight.

Horoscopes. Hell, I don’t need an astrologer to tell me what I already know: I’m a bitter and angry human being. I’m bitter that I’m not famous.  I’m bitter that my wife left me.   I’m bitter about my job: stand-up isn’t easy you know, it’s not like we get a couple of shooters in us and tell jokes, it’s a job just like any other − except it pays minimum wage and it fucks up your life.

Some days are worse than others of course and today the world is full of questions.  I work at the Barrel of Laughs comedy club.  I’m lucky I make sixty bucks a night; plus beer (I don’t drink) and groupies (I can’t get it up).  I’d pack it in, only I don’t think I’m capable of doing anything else.   I’m a joke teller, a professional teller of jokes.  Actually, my unused passport reads ‘Comedian’ and that’s true enough, such as it is, but I’m really a joke teller.  If you look up the word Comedian in the OED it’ll tell you: ‘come-dian n.  actor in comedy.’  Run your finger down the list—’comedic’, ‘comedist’, ‘comedo’, ‘comedienne’—and you’ll find comedy rubbing shoulders with the riffraff, sandwiched between ‘comely’ and ‘come down’:  representing everyday life with a happy ending.  Happy ending?  Listen, I have a set of eye brows that hang above my eyes like a mink pelt.  My eyelids are puffy because of the failed kidneys; the kidneys are failing because of the pancreatitus; the pancreatitus was probably caused, so Dr. Chandler tells me, because of all the needles I do − no smack, just a mix of expensive and exotic drugs he gave me to clear up the last infection, caused, so he now tells me, by the last mix of expensive and exotic drugs he recommended (last year my body shut down completely). I’ve been on the Controllium for over a year and now I have a host of new maladies: auditory hallucination, loss of depth perception, imbalance, and − this explains the Tickle Me Elmo brows − hair growth.  Would you like to see the pigtails on my back?  I’m no comedian.  I’m a joke teller.

I take out my hand-mirror.  There’s a good joke for you.  I’m so puffy and hairy I look like the cowardly lion from Wizard of Oz.  It’s The Life.  It’s why Sally left, I guess.  It’s night work: fluorescent lighting, grey coffee, butt-filled ashtrays, carpets that reek of stale beer and smoke, managers looking for something to sell, wanting to shaft you for a lousy sixty bucks, thinking that strippers would be a better idea anyway.  And up front its worse: the half dozen frats and their threats, jeers, groans.  Big Boy too.  I know him well − I see him every night peering out of the darkness, sluiced on cheap beer and cigarettes.  He needs a laugh, Big Boy, just like the rest of you, so I do myself before he can do me (“I’m here courtesy of The Addams Family − contract waiver for Eddie Munster”).

The audience thinks I’m exaggerating, but every word is true.  I was born with faulty, no-luck DNA.  (My most popular skit is called My Life).  Even my birth was a joke.  I was born premature and very small.  My size is due, I think, to family trauma.  I was born on a bleak Scottish beach in the middle of the night.  My mother was touched, I think − a little too much glue.  She disappeared the minute she could walk and no father stepped forward to proclaim a likeness.  My Grandmother − the reincarnated gypsy, the Grand Priestess of Shit-Wouldn’t-Melt-In-Her-Mouth − prophesized a raging storm and certain death by morning.  That night a massive solar flare lit the sky and shattered the stars into a thousand pieces.  The horses bolted and so did I: catapulted into the world like pulp shot from a cannon, lungs seared, skin the color of stunned Ketchup.

People laugh (and buy more drinks) when I tell this story.  I know everyone likes to say their family is nuts, but mine really is.  The Balfour family history is a study in dysfunction and depression: death by self-injury, suicide − spectacular suicides that ran through the generations like a virus − booze and beatings, debt, schemes, mother-loss, father-loss …

C-ch-ch-ch-chaanges! Turn and face the straiiin!

Early morning and David Bowie is playing a live set downstairs.

C-ch-ch-ch-chaanges!

I turn over, cough up a solid lump of astroturf, grimace, swallow hard and grimace again.

C-ch-ch-ch!

The music is loud − deep staccato bass punching through thin drywall.

C-ch-ch-ch!

The guy with his finger on the volume control is Tyger. Tyger is a swimmer, a joke teller like me, like everyone else in this house.  He’s been throwing everything out for weeks now, all the music he grew up with.  Christ, I wouldn’t mind − if only he didn’t sing along to Bowie, Ferry, T-Rex  … I stomp my foot on the floor.  The volume increases.  Tyger: a man of subtly and good grace.

It’s turn and face the strange anyway, you stupid David Lee Roth wannabee.

“The strange! The strange!”

I stand up too quickly and feel the usual early morning razzia head rush, its top-heavy aftershock like a slow walk along the high wire or a glance down the forbidden cliff.  I reach for the meds, vials of pink and yellow pills loom high over the bathroom sink like a drug-store superstructure.   The headaches I’ve given nicknames to just to keep track:  Meat Cleaver (slice you right through the eyes);  Fuzzy Warble (can’t make up its mind, bit of damage here, bit of damage there); Auntie Jean (shows up unexpectedly, drinks all the gin and then disappears without saying goodbye) and finally, the Hurricane (F5-Full Force).  If I get an F5, I’m on my back for a week.  The only thing that can really cure an F5 or a Meat Cleaver is a Java the Hut Double-Dose.  I don’t know what they did at Java’s − strain the coffee through a sack of soil or burn the beans right at the plantation − but their Double-Dose was legend.

I climb out of bed and use my bare feet to scour the floor for used syringes (not a wise move you might think, and you’d be right − last time I sliced into my lower arch and bled for days).  I walk like a baby taking its first steps.  I think about coffee.  I think about what Dr. Chandler is doing to my mind.  I pop a pink pill.  I pop a yellow pill.  I am always waiting for some pill to take affect.  I seem to need more and more all the time now.  I am a burning synergism of weakened immunity, and the drugs are finally deserting me, losing their strength, their ability to cope.

Sally lost her ability to cope too.  The morning she left I found a note on the kitchen table.  I’m leaving it said,

Sorry.  I can’t do this anymore.
ps.  I’m at my mothers.  Don’t come by or I’ll set the dogs on you.
S.

Above me, rising above the headboard, a wasp buzzes in, butting its head into the closed window, the transparency of the clear sky holding the promise of freedom, the compound eye unable to penetrate a reality that includes fine-spun glass.  I look at the poor fella, wing duvets and screw-worm larvae littering the window-sill − I see myself in his exhaustion.  He’s treading time, this guy.