Poor Tony Krause had a seizure in the fall. It happened on a Gray Line train from Watertown to Inman Square, Cambridge. He’d been drinking codeine cough syrup in the men’s room of the Armenian Foundation Library in ghastly central Watertown, MA, for over a week, darting out from cover only to beg a scrip from the hideous Equus Reese and then dash in at Brooks Pharmacy, wearing a simply vile ensemble of synthetic-fibre slacks and suspenders and tweed Donegal cap he’d had to cadge from a longshoremen’s union hall. Poor Tony couldn’t dare wear anything comely, not even his boa or the Antitois’ red leather coat, not since that poor woman’s bag had turned out to have a heart inside.* He had simply never felt so beset and overcome on all sides as on the black July day when it fell to his lot to boost a beating heart. Who wouldn’t wonder Why me? And his Chinatown connection Mr. Wo still had him marked for ghastly harm as a consequence of that horrid delivery mixup with Susan T. Cheese last winter, since which Poor Tony hadn’t dared show one boa feather east of Tremont St. all spring; and now since 29 July he was non grata at Harvard Square and environs, and even just the mere sight of an Aigner accessory gave him palpitations.
Thus Poor Tony had no way to cop for himself. He could trust no dealer enough to inject his wares. His former friend and associate Susan T. Cheese was now no more trustworthy than the hateful Wo himself; he didn’t even want Susan T. Cheese to know where he was. He began drinking cough syrup. He managed to get Bridget Tenderhole and the strictly rough-trade Stokely Dark Star to cop for him on the wink for a few weeks, until Stokely D.S. died in a Fenway hospice, and then Bridget Tenderhole was shipped by his pimp to Brockton under maddeningly vague circumstances.
Then Poor Tony had read the dark portents and swallowed the first of his pride and hidden himself even more deeply in a Dumpster complex behind the I.B.P.W.D.W.** Local #4 Hall down in Fort Point and resolved to stay hidden there for as long as he could send his last true friend and associate Lolasister out to acquire enough heroin to chip, accepting w/o complaint the shameless rip-offs he perpetrated upon him, until October, when the supply of retail heroin dried horribly up and the only people even copping enough to chip were people in a position to dash personally here and there under an open public-access sky and no friend, no matter how dear or indebted, could afford to cop for another.
Then, wholly friend- and connection-less, plus extremely low on funds, Poor Tony, in hiding, began to Withdraw from Heroin. Not just get strung out or sick. Withdraw. The various terms echoed in his head with the simply most awful sinister-footsteps-echoing-in-deserted-corridor quality. Withdrawal. The Wingless Fowl. Kicking. The Old Cold Bird. Poor Tony had never once had to Withdraw, not all the way down the sinister deserted corridor of Withdrawal, not since he first got strung at 17. At the very worst someone kind had always found him charming, if things got dire enough to have to rent out his charms. Alas about the fact that his charms were now at low ebb. He weighed 120 lbs. and his skin was the color of summer squash. He had terrible shivering attacks and also perspired. He had a sty that had scraped one eyeball as pink as a bunny’s. His nose ran like twin spigots and the output had a yellow-green tinge he didn’t think looked promising at all. There was an uncomely dry-rot smell about him that even he could smell. In Watertown he tried to pawn his fine auburn wig w/ removable chignon and was cursed at in Armenian because the wig had infestations from his own hair below. Let’s not even mention the pawnbroker’s critique of his red leather coat.
Poor Tony got more and more ill as he further Withdrew. His symptoms themselves developed symptoms, troughs and nodes he charted with morbid attention, in the Dumpster, in his suspenders and tweed cap, clutching his wig and coat and other comely habiliments he could neither wear nor pawn. The empty municipal Dumpster he was hiding in was new and painted apple-green and the inside was dimpled iron, and the Dumpster remained empty and unutilized because persons declined to come near enough to utilize it. It took some time for Poor Tony to realize why; for an interval it had seemed like a break, fortune’s one wan smile. A city sanitation crew finally set him straight in language that left quite a bit of tact to be wished for, he felt. The Dumpster’s green iron cover also leaked when it rained, and it contained already a colony of ants along one wall, which Poor Tony had ever since a neurasthenic childhood feared and detested in particular, ants; and in direct sunlight the quarters became a hellish living environment from which even the ants seemed to vanish.
With each step further into the black corridor of actual Withdrawal, Poor Tony stamped his foot and simply refused to believe things could get or feel any worse. Then he stopped being able to anticipate when he needed to as it were visit the powder room. A fastidious gender-dysphoric’s horror of incontinence cannot be described. Fluids of varying consistency began to pour w/o advance notice from several openings. Then they stayed there, on the Dumpster’s hot dimpled floor. There they were, not going anywhere. He had no way to cop. His entire set of interpersonal associations now consisted of persons who did not care about him plus persons who wished him harm. His late obstetrician father had rended his own clothing in symbolic shiva nine years ago in the kitchen of the Krause home, 412 Mount Auburn Street, Watertown. It was the incontinence that drove Poor Tony out of the Dumpster for a mad scampering relocation to an obscure Armenian Foundation Library men’s room in his old home district, wherein he hung his coat and wig carefully from the hook and tried to arrange a stall as comfortingly as he could with magazine photos and cherished knickknacks, and flushed repeatedly, and sought to keep true Withdrawal at some sort of bay with bottles of Codinex Plus. A tiny percentage of codeine gets metabolized into good old C17 morphine, affording an agonizing hint of what real relief from The Bird might feel like. I.e., the cough syrup did little more than draw the process out, extend the corridor—slow up time.
Poor Tony Krause sat on the toilet in the domesticated stall all day and night, alternately drinking and gushing. He held his high heels up at night when the staff checked the stalls and turned off all the lights and left Poor Tony in a darkness within darkness so utter he had no idea where his own limbs were or went. He left that stall maybe once every two days, scampering madly from Equus to Brooks in cast-off shades and a kind of hood or shawl made pathetically of men’s-room brown-paper towels.
Time began to take on new aspects for him now as Withdrawal progressed. Time began to pass with jagged edges. Its passage in the dark or dim-lit stall was as if time were being carried by a procession of ants, a gleaming red martial column of those militaristic red Southern ants that build hideous tall boiling hills; and each vile gleaming ant wanted a minuscule little portion of Poor Tony’s flesh in compensation as it helped bear time forward down the corridor of true Withdrawal. By the second week in the stall, time itself seemed the corridor, lightless at either end. After more time time then ceased to move or be moved or be move-throughable and assumed a shape above and apart, a huge and orange-eyed wingless fowl hunched incontinent atop the stall, with a kind of watchful but deeply uncaring personality that didn’t seem keen on Poor Tony Krause as a person at all, or to wish him well. Not one little bit. It spoke to him from atop the stall, the same things, over and over. They were unrepeatable. Nothing in even Poor Tony’s grim life experience prepared him for the experience of time with a shape and an odor, squatting; and the worsening physical symptoms were a spree at Saks compared to time’s black assurances that the symptoms were merely hints, signposts pointing up at a larger, far more dire set of Withdrawal phenomena that hung just overhead by a string that unravelled steadily with the passage of time. It would not keep still and would not end; it changed shape and smell. It moved in and out of him like the very most feared prison-shower assailant. Poor Tony had once had the hubris to fancy he’d had occasion really to shiver, ever, before. But he had never truly really shivered until time’s cadences—jagged and cold and smelling oddly of deodorant—entered his body via several openings, cold the way only damp cold is cold (the phrase he’d once had the gall to imagine he understood was the phrase “chilled to the bone”), shard-studded columns of chill entering to fill his bones with ground glass, and he could hear his joints’ glassy crunch with every slightest shift of his hunched position, time ambient and in the air and entering and exiting at will, very cold and slow; and the pain of his breath against his teeth. Time came to him in the falcon-black of the library night in an orange Mohawk and merry widow w/ tacky Amalfi pumps and nothing else, spread him and entered him roughly and had its way and left him again in the form of endless gushing liquid shit that he could not flush enough to keep up with. He spent the longest morbid time trying to fathom whence all the shit came from when he was ingesting nothing at all but Codinex Plus. Then at some point he realized: time had entered the shit itself, had become the shit: Poor Tony had become an hourglass: time moved through him, now; he ceased to exist apart from its flow. He now weighed more like 110 lbs. His legs were the size his comely arms had been, before Withdrawal. He was haunted by the word Zuckung—a foreign and possibly Yiddish word he did not recall having heard in civilian life. The word kept echoing in quick-step cadence through his head without meaning anything. He’d once naïvely assumed that going mad meant you were not aware of going mad; he’d naïvely pictured madmen as laughing. He kept seeing his sonless father again, stiffening in a bronze casket. “Chilled to the Zuckung.”
When, then, finally, even funds for the codeine syrup were exhausted, he still sat on the toilet in the rear stall of the A.F.L. loo, surrounded by previously comforting hung habiliments, the fashion-magazine photographs he’d fastened to the wall with tape cadged on the way in from the Reference Desk, sat for almost the whole next night and day, because he had no faith that he could stem the flow of diarrhea long enough to make it anywhere—if anywhere to go presented itself—in his only pair of pants.
During hours of lit operation, the men’s room was full of old men who wore identical brown loafers and spoke Slavic and whose flatulence smelled of cabbage.
Toward the end of the second medicationless afternoon, the day of the seizure, Poor Tony Krause began to Withdraw from the cough syrup’s alcohol and codeine and demethylated morphine, as well as the original heroin, a set of sensations for which not even his recent experience had prepared him—the alcohol Withdrawal, especially—and when the true D.T.-type big-budget visuals commenced, when the first glossy and minutely hirsute army ant crawled up his arm and refused ghostlike to be brushed away or hammered dead, Poor Tony threw his last bit of pride into time’s porcelain maw and pulled up his slacks—mortifyingly wrinkled from twelve days puddled around his ankles—made what slight cosmetic repairs he could, and donned his tacky cap with its Scotch-Taped scarf of paper towels and lit out in last-ditch desperation for Cambridge’s Inman Square, for the sinister and duplicitous Antitoi brothers, their Entertainment-’N’-Notions-fronted operations center he’d long ago vowed never again to darken the door of and now figured to be his one place of very last possible resort—the Antitois, Canadians of the Quebec subgenus, sinister and duplicitous but when it came down to it rather hapless political insurgents he’d once availed of services through the offices of Lolasister, the only persons anywhere he could claim somehow owed him a kindness, since the affair of the heart.***
On Watertown Center’s underground Gray Line platform, when the first hot loose load fell out of him like something off a shelf into the baggy slacks and down his leg and out around his high heel—he still had only his red high heels with the crossing straps to wear, which the slacks were long enough to mostly hide—Poor Tony closed his eyes against the ants formicating up and down his arms’ skinny length and screamed a soundless interior scream of incontinent soul-scalded woe. The beloved feather boa fit almost entirely in one breast pocket, where it stayed in the name of discretion.
On the crowded train itself, then, he discovered that he’d gone in three weeks from being a colorful and comely—albeit freakishly comely—person to being one of those loathsome urban specimens that respectable persons on T trains slide and drift quietly away from without even seeming to notice them. His shawl of paper towels had come partly untaped. He smelled of bilirubin and yellow sweat and wore eyeliner that simply did not fly if one needed a shave. There had been some negative urine incidents, as well, in the slacks. He had never in his life felt so unattractive or sick. He wept silently in shame and pain at the passage of each brightly lit public second’s pincers, and the driver ants that boiled in his lap opened needle-teethed little insectile mouths to catch the tears. He could feel his erratic pulse in his sty. The Gray Line’s trains were of the trundlingbehemoth type, and he sat all alone at one end of the long car and felt each slow second take its cut.
When it descended, the seizure felt less like a separate and distinct crisis than simply the next exhibit in the corridor of horrors that was the Old Cold Bird.**** The first thing that didn’t augur very well for the lobes was a shower of spark-sized phosphenes from the ceiling of the swaying train, plus a fiery violet aura around the heads of the respectables who’d quietly retreated as far as possible from the various puddles in which he sat. Their clean pink faces looked somehow stricken, each inside a hood of violent flame. Poor Tony didn’t know that his silent whimpers had ceased to be silent, was why everyone in the car had gotten so terribly interested in the floor between their feet. He knew only that the sudden and incongruous smell of Old Spice Stick Deodorant, Classic Original Scent—unbidden and unexplainable, his late obstetrician father’s brand, not smelled for years—and the tiny panicked twitters with which the unbrushable red ants skittered glossily up into his mouth and nose and disappeared, each of course taking its tiny pincered farewell bite as it went, heralded some new and vivider exhibit on the corridor’s horizon. He’d become, at puberty, violently allergic to the smell of Old Spice. As he soiled himself and the plastic seat and floor once again, the Classic Scent of times past intensified. Then Poor Tony’s body began to swell. He watched his limbs become airy white dirigibles and felt them deny his authority and detach from him and float sluggishly up, snout-first, into the steel-mill sparks the ceiling rained. He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.
Then he had a seizure. The floor of the subway car became the ceiling of the subway car, and he was on his arched back in a waterfall of light, gagging on Old Spice and watching his tumid limbs tear-ass around the car’s interior like undone balloons. The booming Zuckung Zuckung Zuckung was his high heels’ heels drumming on the soiled floor’s tile. He heard a rushing train-roar that was no train on earth and felt a vascular roaring rushing that until the pain hit seemed like the gathering of a kind of orgasm of the head. His head inflated and creaked as it stretched. Then the pain (seizures hurt, is what few civilians have occasion to know) was the sharp end of a hammer. There was a squeak and rush of release inside his skull and something shot from him into the air and hung there and sparkled. His father knelt beside him on the ceiling in a well-rended T-shirt, extolling the Red Sox of Rice and Lynn. Tony wore summer taffeta. His poor body flopped around without authorization from headquarters. He didn’t feel one bit like a puppet. He thought of gaffed fish. The gown had a thousand flounces and a saucy bodice of crocheted lace. Then he saw his father, still green-gowned and rubber-gloved, leaning to read the headlines off the skin of a fish a newspaper had wrapped. That had never happened. The largest-print headline said “PUSH.” Poor Tony flopped and gasped and pushed down inside and the utter red of the blood that feeds sight bloomed red behind his lids. Time wasn’t passing so much as kneeling beside him in a torn T-shirt disclosing the rodent-nosed tits of a man who disdains the care of his once comely bod. Poor Tony convulsed and drummed and gasped and fluttered, a fountain of light all around him. He felt a piece of nourishing and possibly even intoxicating meat in the back of his throat but elected not to swallow it but swallowed it anyway, and was immediately sorry he’d done so; and when his father’s bloody-rubbered fingers folded his teeth back to retrieve the tongue he’d swallowed he refused absolutely to bite down ungratefully on the hand that was taking his food, then without authorization he pushed and bit down and took the gloved fingers clean off, so there was rubber-wrapped meat in his chattering teeth, and his father’s own head exploded like an exploding star into light between his gown’s raised arms and a call for Zuckung while Tony’s heels drummed and struggled against the widening stirrups of light they were hoisted into while a curtain of red was drawn wetly up over the floor he stared down at, Tony, and he heard someone yelling for someone to give him air with one fingerless hand on his belly as he spread and bore down to push, and he saw the legs they held would spread until they cracked him open and all the way inside out on the ceiling, and his last worry was that red-handed Poppa could see up his dress, what was really there. ♦
- —Excerpted from Moment Weekly, 10 August, 20—:
. . . victim, a 46-year-old Boston, Massachusetts, accountant with irreversible restenosis of the heart, responded so well to the replacement of her defective heart with a Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart that within weeks she had resumed the active life style she had so enjoyed before stricken, pursuing her active schedule with the extraordinary prosthesis portably installed in an Etienne Aigner purse, where the heart’s ventricular tubes ran up to shunts in the woman’s arms and ferried life giving blood between her living, active body and the extraordinary heart in her purse.
. . . facts of her subsequent fate appear tragic, untimely, bizarrely [and] cruelly ironic: the . . . [woman] was actively window shopping in Cambridge, Massachusetts’, fashionable Harvard Square, when a transvestite purse snatcher, a known drug addict with a criminal history well known to [police], bizarrely outfitted in a surplus cocktail dress, spike heels, and tattered feather boa, brutally tore the life sustaining purse from the woman’s unwitting grasp.
The [victim] gave chase to the purse snatching “woman” for as long as she could, reportedly plaintively shouting to passers by the panicked words “Stop her! She stole my heart!” on the fashionable sidewalk crowded with shoppers. . . . [In] response to her plaintive cries, tragically, misunderstanding shoppers and passers by merely shook their heads [and] smiled knowingly at what they ignorantly presumed to be yet another alternative life style’s relationship gone sour. A duo of Cambridge patrolmen were witnessed quipping, “Happens all the time,” as the victimized woman staggered frantically past in the wake of the fleet transvestite, shouting for help for her stolen heart.
The drug crazed purse snatcher may have found even his hardened conscience moved by the life saving prosthesis the ill gotten woman’s handbag revealed, which runs on the same rechargeable power cell as an electric man’s razor, and may well have continued to beat and bleed for a period of time in the rudely disconnected purse.
That the prosthetic crime victim gave spirited chase for over four blocks before collapsing onto her empty chest provides testimony to the impressive capacity of the Jarvik IX replacement procedure. . . .
** International Brotherhood of Pier, Wharf, and Dock Workers.
*** The way Poor Tony Krause became in any way associated with the Antitois was that, for a heavily cut bundle to split six ways, Lolasister, Susan T. Cheese, P. T. Krause, Bridget Tenderhole, Equus Reese, and the late Stokely (“D.S.”) McNair had had to wear identical red leather coats and auburn wigs and strapless heels and go and hang around the lobby of Harvard Square’s Sheraton Commander Hotel with six mannish-looking women in the same wigs and coats while a strikingly androgynous Quebecer insurgent who filled out her/his red leather coat in a way that made Bridget Tenderhole dig his nails into his palms in sheer green envy came through the Commander’s revolving Lucite doors and strode purposefully into the crowded Epaulet Ballroom and fired two rounds of 9-mm wadcutter into the right eye of the Canadian Minister of Trade, who was addressing the New England press from a leaf-shaped rostrum. The decoys were then required to mill hysterically in the lobby, all twelve of them, and then hit the revolving doors and disperse in a dozen different vectors as the sharpshooting Québécois cross-dresser legged it out of the Epaulet Ballroom and lobby pursued by burly federal men with earplugs and Cobray M-11 subs, so the federal men’d see identical epicene figures high-heeling it away in different directions and get fuddled about whom to chase. Lolasister and Poor Tony had originally met the Antitoi Bros (only one of whom could or would speak, and who’d been in charge of the diversionary aspects of the Sheraton Commander operation, and had clearly been subordinate to still other Quebecers of way higher I.Q.)—had met them at Inman Square’s Ryle’s tavern, which had Gender-Dysphoric Night every second Wednesday, and attracted comely and unrough trade.
**** In actual fact the seizure—a kind of synaptic firefight in Poor Tony’s desiccated temporal lobes—was caused by Withdrawal not from heroin but from plain old grain alcohol, which was Codinex Plus cough syrup’s primary ingredient and balm. He’d consumed upwards of sixteen little eighty-proof bottles of Codinex per day for an extended period, and so was cruising for a real neurological bruising when he just up and stopped.
