FINGERS IN THE RIGHT TOP DRAWER

After some time in the penitentiary, I went back to my studio home but it was gone, a guy wearing a real T-shirt, the type with no sleeves, never understood why they went out of style, anyway he answered the door, displaying his armpit’s generous head of hair, he was probably Italian, skinny but manly, Italians are the only men in the world that manage to look macho even when they are short and skinny, Napoleon was actually Italian, he was from Corsica, but don’t tell that to the French, anyway it is not like the French admit to anything that doesn’t serve their pride. Anyway Mr. Italian armpits just opened the door, stared at me with dark deep socketed eyes, did not say a word, I looked at him, imagined that puppy dog must have been bludgeoned to death in some kind of human dog wrestling match, I did not bother to ask about Cassandra, she was a survivor, I didn’t ask about her, but my heart would miss her always.

After doing some time in the local bars, performing a sort of liver cleansing ritual, I managed to get accepted to Medical school in Caracas Venezuela. I would miss America somewhat, but I did not want to have to lie in my employment applications: “Have you ever committed a felony?” “No.” Its hard to lie even when you are liar, people do not seem to understand that liars like me don’t do so because we like it, we do it because we are afraid, afraid of the truth. Anyway Caracas was to me a far off land, new and fresh, and accompanied by some cash that I had managed to acquire by innocent credit card fraud, I was admitted to the fine Medical School of the Americas. MSA, was sort of the great Latin hope for producing enough doctors to abort Catholics while they were still in the womb. Their graduates were all over the third world, some were as far as Italy and Spain. Their credentials were respected as long as they did not try to get into a specialty outside of their general practice: prescriptions and abortions. I was trying to get into prescriptions, the lofty end of it.

My counselor, forty seven year old Consuelo, a woman of means when it came to legs and ass, had a thing for doctors, and while many of us were not yet doctors, she pre-qualified us, I don’t think anyone graduated without her approval, but again it wasn’t that Consuelo was saying “You don’t have what it takes to be a doctor of the Americas.” It was that between her, laid the archers to the Americas.

It was with Consuelo that I learnt how to Salsa dance, music full of ripe fruits, papayas, mangos, bananas, and pineapples, Salsa is not so much a dance as a fruit feast of delicious succulent admirations. Pelvic compliance was one of the first lessons, which can be safely done during nocturnal awakenings to the memory of the music. The best Salsa dancers are always lusting lusciousness, there is no legal way to measure that in a person, no way to add it, you either have it in you or you don’t, I almost had it in me, but my overly active mind always got in the way of my lascivious lusciousness. I guess if you have lost the animal in you, if you don’t have the savage green jungle inside of you, if you can’t swing through the trees like one big ass monkey, if you can’t snake your way through the foliage, if you don’t have it in you to scare the existence pale out of a few giants, then you don’t have the rhythm, you don’t have the unhinged ass that Salsa demands and worships.

Some people feel, that if you don’t have the monster jungle in you that you can just feed it inside of yourself through avocados. Avocados are the creamy butter of the jungle lust, pregnant nippled bellies of the lush green lust, and greener still. They even rot with wanton, you have never seen anything leave existence with such perfect disregard for hygiene as an avocado does, when it throws itself into the dirt and just rots loudly proclaiming a kind of massive escalating vomiting of self dance that darkens and grows the night until the entire jungle is simmering in its darkness. The Indians always call it avocado darkness, it is considered the night in which the children are born, where bellies grow voluminous, where avocado darkness hides parenthood, where the night is not slept, where the night is not slept.

No one really knows if this is really true, though I personally believe it is; but there is one interesting fact, that many have been found dead from over stuffing themselves with avocados. The authorities sometimes dare to question the authenticity of the practice, wondering if it is possible that some involuntary assistance is given during avocado night feasting, but it would be difficult to prove that, there are certainly much easier methods of putting away your enemies, for instance, snake bites are popular and exceed chance encounters.

Anyway the villagers always keep an almost religious silence about avocado nights, they quietly condone the stuffing of one’s lover with avocados as a way to get Salsa in them, equal to a large ass monkey.

I have marveled at the life in this place, even my nights in the slammer there were muddy joys, there is something dirty about the place, dirty about the peoples, dirty about being there, dirt filled auras as wide as the planet, but the dirt is soil, pure life affirming soil, you are one with the cockroaches that chance in size with bullfrogs, the beer spits at you, the water is dirty, you have to drink the beer, the beef is tasted by the flies first, then by their vermin, the church bell rings but there are no saints here, everyone is into incest and rape and stealing from their neighbor; and wives are just as treasonous as husbands, and they all beat each other up, and they forget about it over hot chocolate and sweets, and dirty cock fights and even pigs laugh at the fun.

I was afraid of blood, demonios, I was afraid feces, of urine, of everything unsanitary, so I was glad to find that our medical school had suffered severe budgets cuts seven years back and so there was only one cadaver, and only one dead corpse of rotting flesh that was fresh enough in blood not to fall apart encountering living human contact. Still we were mostly kept away from the bodies. But for one so as not to shame our education. There were plenty of drugs to instruct those of us reaching for the pharmaceutical industry, while there was an arrangement for our fellow medical practitioners to test their talents on the local women who volunteered for free abortions. Everyone was a winner here, even sometimes the abortions would turn into frantic tube tying sessions.

But let me not skip the one corpse that was still good enough to eat, still clinging to a semblance of its past self. Some said that he was Consuelo’s failed love, a passionate romantic that got strangled by her thighs or maybe merely a metaphor for his having failed medical training, he looked German in origin, which fits the romantic part nicely and he was trying to be a doctor, which again fits the German theory nicely, but who knows, he could be anybody, he could even be a local, he was preserved in pure alcohol or formaldehyde or something like that which us doctors used to retain a certain scalable freshness in things, all the while killing other things that were trying to be borne off of them.

Anyway, obviously our school could not afford a full body suit or a decent refrigerator so they had hacked the guy up, into portions of himself, and placed him in these drawers on a sort of large aqua dilapidated table desk; legs and arms, each in separate drawers, even fingers got their own little drawers, toes too, it wasn’t quite a neat operation, and his head was in a pickle jar, kept behind the largest cover door. Pointless for me to tell you that this table desk was the center of attention. Somehow we were all connected to him, in order to graduate we would have to get to know him, personally I could have graduated myself without him, but you know modern medicine is not to be taken lightly.

His head was really only used during exams, it was a treasure, lightly handled, we were all very bright anyway, a shortage of medical schools in the United States had sent us abroad, some of us were here to please our parents, which is more evidence that we did indeed know where the frontal lobe was, the Petunias, and the Amygdala, an old time favorite of mine. Consuelo liked it too, we use to pay little boys to dig the Amygdala out of the head of dead bodies that had been abandoned in cemeteries, and then we would fry them over a fire and toast their crispy mush down our throats. Then, well, you know what then.

It was during these long humid nights that I would tell Consuelo that she could save her earlobe from my piranha teeth if she were to tell me about Aqua man. Yeah, that is what we called him. Oh Jesus, I am already telling you too much, why my doctor’s license might be at risk, say I more. Consuelo would say nothing, not a word, her fingers would glide to remove her long dark hair away from her earlobe, and motion closing her big dark eyes as if she was going into some kind of a voodoo trance, where all pain was equaled to ecstasy. I limped my way to her lips, held her cheeks with my palms, and kissed away the sands of all of Latina America.

I don’t think anyone slept at night, around these parts people wanted to be too tired to work and too tired to study, besides the dark underpinnings of the culture just called for us to accomplish our deeds at night, we sobered our days away, the heat was too much, we memorized body parts, and practiced listening to our hearts with stethoscopes, and when no one was looking we really enjoyed pricking each other with those long, silvery, pump glowing, seventy-five dollar syringes, I don’t think I can translate how exhilarating it is to prick a friend with a needle. It kept us awake even as we were sleep.

But the oddest of things, was the body of that young man in our main study room, the center of attention, was a truly fantastic affair; we loved him, everyone loved him, we never wanted to hurt him, we wanted to be near him, even Consuelo, that showed a severe indifference to him, had a certain way of coming into the room to see him. She would make a sort of dancing entrance, twirl herself 360 degrees and back right into the table, arching back, leaning her marvelous spine, which was as highly defined as her ribs, backwards, and then she would lift herself up with both hands, as if he were lifting her, only it wasn’t so, then she would lay her humid bulging ass cheeks on the table top, her hands would release her, and she realized a smile to our group; asking away our doings, as if she had just finished pleasuring her own. We were moved, twitching from the heat and from her, and from what was going on, the flies would land upon us and use the privilege of our humid stupor to nest on our pores.

When Consuelo wasn’t dancing with Aqua man, we were, that was the oddest thing about it, he made us want to dance, appropriately Salsa music, covered by tuition, was piped through the old and dysfunctional speaker system, and as soon as the music would start to dance, we would all stare at each other’s smiles and move to dance or flirt with one another into exhaustion. We would chat, we would laugh, we would joke with Aqua man, some of us, the sicker of us doctors, would toss his fingers around, and others would try to prevent it, and that was the whole dance, and the music blearing from the speaker would squabble, and pierce our ears, and our incessant laughter would inundate all. We finally ended by putting back all of Aqua man in the drawers, though not always in the right drawers, and often then a power failure and faulty generators would cause the music to cease poking at us, and so we drifted to the local bar, where we were considered rich because of our hasty cadence towards alcoholism. Many of us never made it to our home rooms, many of us were mud ditch dwellers, many of us would not graduate or make it out of there alive; one of us would be the next Aqua man, you see there had been some budget cuts seven years back, alumni contribution to our alma mater.

Consuelo, the name means consolation, the consoled one, she had been cured of all her suffering, appropriately by the medical school, not because she could forget whatever pains torture a woman with as many beautiful scars as she, but rather because she had Aqua man.

You probably want to know if I graduated, how simplistic might you be, would the answer make any more of a difference on big ass monkey salsa and dark avocado rotting nights?

Weeping surrendering hermanos embracing Aqua Man’s home.