The Tumours Made Me Interesting (3 page)

“Umm… yeah… I guess. There’s a dude I know. I’ll chuck the tumo… ah, the
growth
to him and get him to check it out.”

“When?”

“I’m going to his place for a jam session tonight. I’ll drop it off then.”

“Will he look at it tonight?”

“You’re a needy little fucker, aren’t ya?” said the doctor, disbelief filling his face.

If I hadn’t felt so weak and pathetic, I’d have introduced my fist to the doctor’s face. This is what I told myself anyway. I’d only ever been in one fight before and that was just a bout of shin kicking when I was five. I was more of a natural born coward than fighter. What
really
stung was the knowledge that despite the indignity and apathy this bastard had thrown my way, I’d still thank him and offer to shake his hand afterward. It didn’t matter that I thought I was going to die; I’d still shake his fucking hand.

“Look… I just need to know,” I said. “I’d appreciate whatever you can do.”

The doctor dropped my anal apple on the table, where it landed with a wet splat, and helped me up, smearing my shirt with his bloody hand. He even pulled up and buttoned my pants for me.

“Look, dude. I’ll do what I can. I’ll try to get him to have a look tonight. When we get jamming though, we rock pretty damn hard. I play a bag of scraps that I hit against things. I know what you’re thinking, sounds like a shit instrument, yeah? Well, like anything, you can spend your whole damn life mastering it. I wave a scrap bag like a rock god! He plays a coil of rope. He just throws it at things mostly but sometimes he rubs stuff with it. He’s damn good at what he does. We’re recording a demo that will blow you the fuck away! I’ll sling you a copy.”

“That would be nice,” I found myself saying, regardless of the fact that his demo was the last thing I’d ever be interested in. He gave me a thumbs up in response. “Do you need my number so you can contact me?”

“Yeah, why not? Wanna write it down for me?”

I scanned the room for a pen and paper. There was absolutely nothing to write with or on. Given the appointment up until now, I don’t know why this surprised me. I made do with a toe nail clipping and a length of pipe that I’d found on the thinning carpet. With the clipping, I began furiously scratching my number into the pipe like a prisoner counting down his stay. I passed the pipe with its slight engraving to the doctor who tucked it awkwardly into his pant leg.

“Alrighty, I’ll contact you soon. Don’t forget to grab your free spoon on the way out.”

I made sure to do just that, but not before thanking the doctor and shaking his hand.

2.

I
t’s hard to find the motivation to work when you think you’re going to die. I sat at my desk, staring vacantly at the empty data spreadsheet on my flickering monitor. A pile of invoices sat to my right and my phone to the left. I kept casting my gaze toward the phone, willing it to ring. I needed closure. I was too afraid to fall asleep the night before. I’d managed to neurotically convince myself that if I closed my eyes, they’d never open again. Considering how pathetic my life was, I was slightly surprised that the concept of it ending wasn’t one I could comfortably accept.

I work for a company called ‘The Nipple Blamers’. As far as I can ascertain, the company makes its profit by abusing a legal loophole that allows the blame for certain criminal charges to be transferred to nipples. Of the more serious charges tied up in this loophole are arson and matricide. A slew of lesser charges are also covered. This works well because juries are typically reluctant to send a nipple to jail when it has a legally innocent person attached. Would be jailbirds are willing to part with a lot of money to avoid their fate. As a result, I have a job. I don’t know the first thing about the mechanics of the loophole. I’m just the guy who transfers information from the invoices to the databases. I’ve been doing this for 13 years. Any hope of following some ambiguous ‘dream’ died in my 20s. Now it looked like the rest of me was going to die in my 30s.

I was still hurting from yesterday’s medicinal fisting, which served as a constant reminder that my body was failing. My phone remained frustratingly dormant and no amount of telepathic voodoo would change this. I get about five calls a year, usually from my mother so paying such close attention to my phone felt alien. I defiantly slid it into my pocket, determined not to be its slave. Sure, I was most likely dying but that didn’t mean I had to neglect my work. I picked up an invoice and tried to make out the information scrawled on it. My eyes weren’t cooperating. Where words and numbers should have been, all I saw was a whorl of black smudge. An attack of nausea ravaged my stomach and before I could get it under control, a spray of vomit flew from my mouth, coating my shirt and keyboard.

I sat in my own cooling filth, completely still and feeling the eyes of coworkers boring into my back. My only desire was to run away and never look these people in the eye again. Jerry Turnbull made this impossible. Jerry was the only coworker who actively engaged me in conversation. You certainly wouldn’t call what we had a friendship – he spoke to everyone at least as much as spoke to me. He was just a slightly odd guy you could depend upon. Someone who helped you momentarily forget about your loneliness by virtue of his dependable presence. He had a reputation as a bit of a maverick, which always made me feel a little uncomfortable. Today his maverick nature had manifested in his extremely confronting nudity. He slid up to me like a waterless surfer, his penis sticking to his right thigh.

“How goes it, Brucey Ducey? Haven’t had a chance to talk…” He stopped mid-sentence when he saw the vomit that caked me. “Shit, my man. Are you alright?”

I managed a thumbs up that didn’t exactly ring true.

“You got a gut nasty? Shit, dude. You gotta get outta here. I’ll cover for you.”

“I’ll be fine,” I moaned. My watering eyes scanned up and down Jerry’s body. “Why aren’t you wearing anything? You’re going to get in so much trouble.”

Jerry laughed. “Fuck that, dude. If those fucks upstairs don’t like my freak flag flying, they can throw me out of here themselves.”  

He turned his back to me and bobbed into an unstable Cossack dance that might have been amusing had it not been for my burning esophagus. Sometimes I envied Jerry to the point of hatred. He was stuck in the same day job as me and somehow he hadn’t fallen prey to it. Somehow he retained a personality. When you watched Jerry go about his daily interactions, you got the sense that he
really
lived life. He always had a story to tell and unlike most people of his age, he didn’t have to recycle stories from his delinquent teenage years. His stories were new – always some new girl or vaguely dangerous adventure. He had lived a thousand more lifetimes than me and he was only a couple of years older. It wasn’t so much that his life was more fulfilling than mine that bothered me, no, it was because he had the decency to ask me about mine. What’s more, he never responded in a judgmental way when I admitted my weekend had been spent watching DVD box sets of television shows that no one else in the world remembers or cares about. He bothered me because, save for his attitude toward public nudity, he was the sort of person I wanted to be.

“Look at 'em,” Jerry said, still Cossack dancing. “They’re all ignoring me!” he yelled. “Ain’t ya ever seen a naked dude before?” He commando rolled out of the dance and sat up on my desk. His genitals were spreading like an oil spill. “Look, if you’re feeling up to it, you should totally come out with me tonight.”

The concept actually made me laugh. Jerry had a habit of asking me to go out clubbing or bar hopping with him and although a part of me had a strange desire to accept the offer, the anxiety-ridden cripple that made up my greater self always refused. “Nice offer, Jerry but look at me? Think I need to get an early one.”

“Suit yerself, man,” he said with a firm back pat, “but the offer stands. Nothing gets rid of them gut nasties better than drunken debauchery.”

He leapt from my desk and began mock flying around the office cubicles yelling,
I am Super Batman!
I remained soaked in vomit and wishing
I
was Super Batman.

I’d managed to get myself more or less cleaned up. I flushed my soiled shirt, clogging up the unisex work toilet pretty bad in the process. I just wore my singlet and suit jacket and from a distance, I looked comfortably banal. My keyboard was still an issue. It was caked in vomit and my tentative keystrokes were met with a squishy resistance. It was official: I needed to request a new one. This was easier said than done. In the 13 years I’d been an employee at The Nipple Blamers, I had never been given a technology upgrade. I was the only one in the office still using a computer less powerful than my piece of shit wristwatch. It drove me crazy. While the other staff were enjoying widescreen LCD monitors, Blu-Ray burners and computers faster than male orgasms, I was stuck in the mid-nineties. My primary mode of data transfer were floppy discs. I had three which I had to juggle my important data between. The fact I was able to fit my important data on these discs indicated how unimportant my job was. I didn’t have internet access, which meant I had to commandeer other computers to read the fusillade of work e-mails that arrived daily. I had to stoke a bellow-desk furnace with coal just to keep the monitor illuminated and my keyboard possessed an ancient alphabet, no longer in use by the populace. It was a cruel timestamp, never letting me forget how long I’d been here.

I unplugged my rancid keyboard and walked it toward my supervisor’s office. I’d requested tech upgrades before and it was always met with,
I’m sorry Bruce, we’ve blown our tech budget – try again next quarter and I’ll see what I can do
. I needed stark proof that an upgrade was necessary and my fetid vomit was the ticket. The fetid stench it kicked up was firmly on my side. I couldn’t help but think that if my impending death helped earn me a new keyboard, it was in some ways worth it.

My supervisor, Kerry, was a strange woman both in appearance and demeanor. She had an obese person’s head, which sat atop an anorexic body. It was a jarring combination that, no matter how many times you saw it, always led to double takes. Encounters with Kerry always made me a little nervous. If I were being honest, this had more to do with my relationship to authority figures rather than her curiously confronting appearance. As I approached her office I could see her hurling heads of iceberg lettuce against the wall and yelling the names of zodiac signs with each impact. She caught me out of the corner of her eye and ushered me into her office.

“Hey, Bruce. Want to sling some lettuce?” she said in a voice that fluctuated in pitch. “What’s your star sign?”

“Umm… I’m a Scorpio.”

She took a step back and waved her hands comically. “Oh, I should keep away from you. You’re a dangerous one.”

I don’t know whether the smell hit her first but she caught a glimpse of the keyboard in my hands. “What’s all this about?”

“I had an accident, Kerry. Think I finally need a replacement.”

“You threw up on that, didn’t you?”

I nodded slightly, my cheeks flushing with shame.

“Are you okay, Bruce? Perhaps you should go home and sleep it off.”

“It’s okay. Just need to get my keyboard changed over so I can get back to it.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” She hurled another head of lettuce. “The tech budget is blown… unless… give me a minute, Bruce. I think I can help you out.”

A smile filled my face. I was
finally
about to receive something new. I imagined my fingers tapping the pristine keyboard and the smile grew larger. Kerry was on her hands and knees, boney arse jutting skyward. She was shuffling around under her desk. I remained lost in new keyboard fantasies.

“Eureka!” she yelled, eventually reemerging with another keyboard.

My heart sank. It was
exactly
the same as my current keyboard, sans vomit.

“I thought we’d trashed all these things. Pretty sure yours is the only computer it even works with. Your lucky day!”

“Thanks,” I seethed. I plucked the new/old keyboard from Kerry’s hand and stormed out of the office. I flung the old one in a bin. The sound of pelted lettuce accompanied my exit.

I was ruminating on the sheer inequity of life when my phone started barking. I dropped the new keyboard, a few keys coming loose and shooting straight up. With my phone in hand, I stared in dread. The message was from my doctor. I opened it with eyes shut. When they opened, I was faced with the following:

Hey Bruce. The Doc here. Checked out the tumour. It’s definitely a tumour. You’re pretty much fucked. It’s okay though. Heaps of people die of cancer. You should come and hear me jam some time. We seriously fucking rocked last night! Later, dude.

3.

“Y
ou’re gonna love this place, man. It’s called ‘The Tent’. All the people behind the bar dress in a tent! It’s nuts. You should see ‘em try to pour a drink in those things.”