#437 Dee- Jerome Charyn

#437 Dee- Jerome Charyn

Dee grew up as a princess, the daughter of a west side mogul. But that wasn’t her world, she was drawn uncontrollably to the Hospital her father sponsored that housed all manner of odd and wonderful people.

“Sommerset had to pull her screaming out of the hospital’s halls. The sickly faces had frightened her, yet she dreamt of touching the wild patches of hair that belonged to these old men. There wasn’t one face as bewildering or as beautiful along Central Park West, where she lived in a monstrous cave of fourteen rooms at the Sam Remo.”

She eschewed her silver spoon life and became a freak herself. “She was the waif with cropped hair who lived in a pauper’s castle.” She spent her life photographing circus freaks and monstrosities like her good friend Eddie, an eight-foot man known as the Jewish Giant. After many years and many accolades she was stricken with guilt for exploiting her friends, but to Eddie, she was a muse. Without her, he could no longer write poetry.

Rating: 8-7-8-7 Total= 30

#112 Emergency- Denis Johnson

#112 Emergency- Denis Johnson

A few years ago somebody left Tree of Smoke at my bar. The book was on the Pulitzer short list. It was never claimed from the lost and found so I took it home and read it, loved it, passed it on to the next person in a fun read-it-forward string of events. I am very happy to be reading one of his short stories.

Just like his book, everything here is completely off kilter, bonkers, fubar. There is a bunch of craziness going on in an Emergency room. The orderly has been mopping up the same blood from the O.R. floor for hours. Its like the blood spot from Macbeth.

A man comes in with a knife sticking out of one eye, the other eye is plastic, but he can still see.

“[The doctor] peeked into the trauma room and saw the situation: the clerk- that is, me- standing next to the orderly, George, both of us on drugs, looking down at a patient with a knife sticking up out of his face.

‘What seems to be the problem?’ he said”

When asked by the hospital staff what happened:

“My wife did it, I was asleep”

“Do you want the police?”

“Not unless I die.”

Everyone in the story is messed up, or on drugs, it’s the theatre of the absurd, or something out of the LSD crazed mind of Ken Kesey.

Rating: 8-7-7-7 Total= 29