DISEASE OF THE WEEK

Greetings from Covidland

I admit, I was one of those vaguely superior, annoying people who cast their eye over the vast swath of humanity, especially those of you have gotten covid, and flattered myself thinking, “Well I’m not sure what it is, but whatever the hell I’m doing must be right because I never got the thing.” Until, of course, I did. I got it. I have it. And I have to say – so far - as diseases go it’s nowhere near those gaspy, death’s-door, dragged-to-the-hospital news-clips from the first flush of the disease, when people were bribing their congressmen for ventilators, and patriots were fighting for the right to gag in public, footloose and facemask-free.

No, in my own humble estimation, the experience, here on Day 3, is roughly equivalent to a somewhat mild heroin kick. Not great, and you feel like you’re going out of your skin and yeah, maybe once or twice a day you want to take a cheese grater to your face, but apparently the cheese grater is busy being lodged in your lung when you’re trying to take a breath. And hey there are only so many cheese grater metaphors to go around. So there’s that. In other words it’s tolerable. Not great.

And, if we’re gonna keep the cold turkey comparison going, I will say, there’s none of the projectile spewing and scream-pukes I remember so fondly from the last time I had a Mexican tar withdrawal problem, many decades ago. (It’s the little things… ) I remember thinking, back in the bad old days, that if there were any enterprising execs out there, they would definitely stage competitive kick-fests. Because, yes, I like to think my own well-honed hoarking skills could have brought home the gold. A guy can dream! Sadly, my last narco-go-round was so long ago, neither YouTube nor Instagram had been invented, so there was no forum for my talents

But never mind. They don’t make much Mexican tar anymore; it’s all Fentanyl all the time. Which, means, for better or worse, a lot of enthusiasts will keel over dead before they get the chance to kick their habit – or even get one. Silver lining!

And yes – just to acknowledge the elephant in the hamper - it does feel as if Covid symptoms, at least the ones I’m sweating through now, are affecting more than my lungs. There’s another organ in play. I’m speaking, of course, about my brain. In fact, I’m not going to lie, trying to write on Covid is like trying to write on any other unpleasant and judgment-altering drug. It’s not giving me wild ideas, like some blow-bent 90s screenwriter doing lines and staying up till five planning his Rabbi Tarzan trilogy. “He’s not just King of the Jungle, he’s a graduate of Theological Seminary - and wants to circumcise chimps!” (A conversation, by the way, I actually had with a powder-sniffing million-a script-guy who was tired of cranking out feel-good animated epics and wanted to do something real.)

Maybe bad cocaine is the sensation I’m trying to describe. Because my body kind of hurts. And my cerebellum is throbbing. Though good cocaine, from what I remember, is arguably worse. Because you actually think, since you feel great, your ideas are great. When in fact the opposite is true. There is no self-delusion like snorting-coke-with-a-rich-guy delusion. Not fun. (Voltaire did say that “Self-delusion is the key to happiness.”But that’s a different column…) I can only claim, in my defense, that half of what made doing drugs so heinous was the fact that, if you didn’t have much money, you had to do them with people you were only with because they, you know, had the drugs. The exception. back in my snorting days, being an older lady named Glo, my fave dealer, who’d been married to Fred C. Clark, the chrome-dome slow burn artist who played the pissed off boss in a bunch of Three Stooges episodes, and the director who gives bad news to washed up William Holden in Sunset Boulevard. Glo, in her day, had been a high-end Manhattan escort, and smuggled guns for the Panthers. In other words, she had stories for days, and they were so riveting you didn’t need the coke to get lost in them. Plus, when she talked about Count Basie, of all people, she called him “Bill.” Which, jazz legend-wise, seemed like the ultimate inside baseball.

That said, the majority of my later cocaine experience – he said defensively - was spent alone in a bathroom shooting coke in my arm and flushing the toilet for that cosmic whoosh that sounded (at least to me) like God’s eyes rolling back in his head. But don’t let me get sentimental.

It occurred to me, a few days into my Covid Adventure, that I should probably speak to a medical professional about the whole situation. A step I avoided, admittedly, out of my irrational fear of portals. A large part of my online medical insurance adventure involve portals, a technology that seems designed to drive the non-tech bro client to give up on actually availing themselves of medical services their union and, thanks for asking, their government provides, and to throw themselves on the mercy of Urgent Care.

To make matters worse, out of the gate, my insurance entity’s facial recognition system seemed to balk in horror at the image of my own face. Which felt, irrational as it sounds, as if the system were trying to protect me from the burden of actually accessing my own life insurance. “LUIGI GETS IT,” as a bumper sticker I saw at my car wash insisted. Although, during the whole United Health Care hitman fracas, all I kept thinking about was Chuck Mangione - wondering if the big selling MOR trumpet legend was helped by his nephew Luigi’s headline. (And no, I don’t know for certain if Chuck Mangione and Luigi Mangone are related. But like to think so. Chuck, in photos, always looked like a pretty chipper guy.

When I finally did crack the portal code and nab a “tele-health appointment,” my doctor, God bless him, sounded like he’d interrupted a hot game of naked bible charades with in-laws to talk to me. And no, I’m not sure why I did not merit an actual face-time Medi-zoom type event, where I could see the doctor’s eyes. The whole time, speaking with him, I had this vague image of a man walking around in his Christmas boxers. (As a boy, when it seemed like all the other kids had Christmas and we were stuck with stuffy old Hanukah, one of my cousins told me that Christians wore special, super-fun “Christmas boxers” for the holidays. Since then, immature as it sounds, on some deep level I’ve clung to the imagine of the all the non-Christians souls on the planet being denied the fun of holiday party drawers.

Forgive me: Jesus Envy.

But hey…. My telehealth professional told me he would agree to write for Paxlovid, with the caveat that, if I’d already lost my sense of taste, the stuff wouldn’t bring it back. But it might make food I could still taste taste absolutely horrible. “Like overcooked dog dirt,” he said, chuckling like he’d gone blue at a church bingo party.

“I’m a little confused,” I admitted. Since getting the disease, I’ve been pretty confused about everything. Addled, I think, is the word. But because the disease also seems to mess with my memory, I can’t remember if I was always that way, or if this is new.

“Don’t worry,” the doctor reassures me, and for the fiftieth time, I can’t tell if his accent is New Jersey, or Swedish. “Just remember, you’ll have the poop taste in your mouth two days less than you would withoutPaxlovid, because you’ll be cured faster. But if you don’t take Paxlovid, the FTC won’t even be a problem.”

“FTC?”

“Fecal Tongue Coating. So gross! But harmless. Of course, with covid there is always a chance you won’t ever be able to smell again”

“What?”

“It happens,” he goes on, and I swear I can hear him lighting a cigarette. Or maybe it’s a joint. Or crystal. Who knows? Could my doctor be smoking meth? Before I go down that road, he piles on some more info. “Being smell-challenged, that’s not a Paxlovid side effect. We don’t think. Those are pretty much just hives and nausea. Though that could be Covid, too. Or it could be some hereditary thing, and all this SARS business is such a shock to your system, it sort of lets the bad juju out of the cage. Like the toxic fungi in Iceland that came back to life when the tundra melted. People don’t realize, if those wooly mammoths ever thaw, there’s going to be a flea circus of lethal organisms hopping right back into the ecosystem like ticks off a dog. There’s things in the mail that make Covid look like a fun getaway…. It’s like the Climate wants revenge, am I right? The truth is, we really don’t know anything. It’s an interesting field of study. Ut don’t worry. Chances are you’re going to be fine.”

By now I’m not sure I’m hearing right. I’m not even sure if he said the toxic fungi thing or I dreamt it. Can Covid affect your hearing? Jury’s out! But in the doctor’s defense, I can imagine, after talking to needy sick people all day, you just want to say whatever the fuck makes them go away. Or maybe I’m projecting. Maybe that’s just what I’d do. Which is why it’s a good thing I’m a subscriber-challenged Substack author, and not a practicing over-the-phone MD.

As my Grandma Essie used to say, “If God didn’t make mistakes, he wouldn’t have any friends.” And no, I don’t know what it means, either.

Jesus, what is happening to my brain? Covid really is starting to feel like some weird drug. (Seriously, If the column sounds incoherent, or more incoherent than usual, I’m blaming my inflamed brain stem. Or maybe it’s vax residue. Could that be happening? In years to come, will cutting edge psychonauts like the great Hamilton Morris start shooting up covid vaccine for a really transcendent toxic buzz? Even if RFK’s right, and the government prick does cause the odd bout of defects and autism, nobody ever said drugs were health food. I mean, I’m the last person in the world to start bitching about what I put in my body. I once spent a week injecting Kiwi shoe polish, because I’d paid for five grams of it, and even though I knew it was bunk – I could literally have gone full Roy Orbison and polished my hair - I figured maybe there was some heroin in there, and who was I to waste it?

The weird thing, to me, is how the ferocity among those who are anti-vax seems only matched by their ferocity on the subject of being anti-trans. A curious phenom. Given that our new president was vaccinated way back, but hush-hush about it, you wonder what else he’s hiding. Am I only late-night researcher who believes that Trump was so quick to hop on the anti-trans wagon because Eric - and this could be idle chatter - was born a hermaphrodite, but had himself testosteroned to within shouting distance of “normal” manhood and gone on to live a happy and fulfilling life with his balls in a jar on the nightstand, like Dad’s dentures? But whatever. Live and let live. Not my business.

But wait – I was just about to gulp my emergency dose of hydroxychloroquine, and now I read it doesn’t work! Except, you know, against malaria. On the other hand, I have heard if you speedball hydroxy and ivermectin, its better than mainlining DMT. Plus you can wipe out parasites. Including the ones that lodge in your brain. Win-win!

Speaking of RFK - hats off to the bear-chomping presidential nephew for spilling the beans on the dark truth about heroin. You can do your homework on it! All true! Thanks to smack, the future health czar said he went to the top of his class. And I believe it. Dope can, in the right circumstances, KO A.D.D. It helps you focus. Bobby said so right there in People Mag. And I agree.

Way back, when earnest interviewers would ask yours truly if heroin made writing easier, I would always say “No – it just makes the chair a lot more comfortable.” But William Burroughs explained it better than anybody. When some earnest talk show host would ask why he did heroin, Bill Lee’s alter ego liked to say, “So I can get up in the morning and shave.” A genius answer on nine different levels – not the least of which is the implication that, with enough smack in him, a junkie was so respectable he could not just get up in the morning, but get up in the morning and shave. That’s shave, ladies and gentlemen, as in groom.

Imagine! “Junkie” and “Grooming” in the same sentence. I’m busting my buttons! Even better, I have also heard a rumor, who knows how real, that in one interview Burroughs went a step further and said, in his classic St Louis deadpan, that “hard narcotics made it easier read the bible.” Which I like to think is true, even if it’s apocryphal. Impossible not to to love the heady implication that opiates will not just help wayward youngsters up their GPA, but help them find the Lord, as well.

For the record, I will say I don’t know of any school shooters who were strung out on dope. Draw your own conclusions. Am I advising, before they abolish the Department of Education, that someone in the MAGA brain trust should start adding smack snacks to school lunches? Absolutely not! But can we, at least, keep an open mind? I mean, I’m no social worker, but damn it, if dosing kids with H chills the mass murder out of them, well, can we at least talk about it? Sure, the stuff’s habit-forming. But hey, life’s a tradeoff. (And is it really worse than Adderall? Just asking!)

Drug-wise, friends and neighbors, you need only look in the eyes of Kash with a K Patel, Venmo Gaetz, Trump himself, or God forbid Don Junior to see the kind of toxic glitter that can only be explained by white sinus powder. Or in the case of the Ketamine Cowboy, Elon Musk, Special K. (And really, how great that The King of America lives in a K-Hole? Makes you want to hop right into a driverless car and head to Arby’s.) But the best news is, thanks to these guys – I’m talking about E-Dog, JR, Gaetz of Heaven and Kash Money, if we can use their “player” names - there is absolutely nothing cool about drugs any more. Despite its popularity as party favor and high-priced psychoactive anti-depression fix, I can’t even think of ketamine without seeing Elon’s man-baby tummy exposed and pinchably plump where his tee-shirt creeps up and his pants creep down when he jumps for joy at rallies… Elon, you sexy bastard, you!

Forgive me for obsessing – but Scorcese could not make Don Junior look cool with gold molars, a Maserati, and a hologram of Anita Pallenberg shooting him up in the neck. Doesn’t matter if DJR’s a full-on coke fiend. Lame is lame. Thanks to these pasty jim-jims ending up as the face of entitled white drug abuse, perhaps the lives of a generation of future users may be saved. Why? Because nobody wants to looks as douche-nozzley as Don Junior, Musk-Muffin, “Sloe-Eyes” Patel or Matt the Knife. The same thing happened when Rush Limbaugh became the face of Oxycontin. Suddenly oxy-gobbling was not so cool any more. Unless you, too, were a thick-in-the-middle, Viagra-crunching right wing hophead half-deaf from excess painkiller consumption. Not to judge. In this country there’s a lot of pain to kill. Nobody’s trying to look good.

My own prediction? In 2025 the Trump administration will start administering scopolamine (AKA Devil’s Breath – look it up), hiring blowgun professionals to spray old-school Voodoo powder in the faces of incipient friends and enemies – and in so doing get them to do their bidding.

Perhaps, just spit-balling here, Trump 2.0 will discover how effective the zombie drug can be in getting a recalcitrant congress to do its bidding. Not only can you make foes – and friendlies – do whatever you’d like, the better news is they won’t remember they did it. The perfect drug for our time.

But don’t quote me. It’s the Covid talking.

END

PS My Substack advisors have pointed out that Covid is a grossly unpopular and out-of-date topic, but I’m just gonna buck the tide and say that I’ve always been a late-bloomer, not to mention out-of-step with the vicissitudes of social media. Plus, with a subscription rate in the high threes, I can afford to be un-trendy. (Some people say “obscure”; I prefer “under-the-radar.”) Let those other hepcats troll for clicks. In high school, I always found the bands that only ten people liked, and made them my own. Now, for better or worse, I seem to have to become that band. Sometimes life really does work out.

Happy Easter!