As if having one case of severe genital distress in the
family isn’t enough…
As if taking a young man’s innocent and relatively
unstructured brain and twisting it around and around and around over and over until
it’s molecules shimmer and pop like oil on a hot griddle...if all that isn’t
enough…
Do we really have to go looking for evidence of rogue cells in
the old man’s strafed, raked and chafed colon? Is it really necessary at this
point to bring Donald Pleasance and Raquel Welch into the picture, even in their
microscopic state, to travel up my anal canal in their little white plastic pod
with their polyp zappers? Especially now, after David Sedaris has forever
ruined the idea of a discreet and gentlemanly colonoscopy, and comics on
postcard stages from Rapid City to Parkland to Las Cruces have had garage sales
full of colonoscopy jokes dump trucked onto their unsuspecting and too-young-to-know
audiences?
Are we saying that, after all the indignity heaped on the small
piece of bodily real estate – the scrotum – of the son, that it is now right
and just to heap another bucket of steaming monkey puke on the father, as if
the testicular cancer was his fault? And to atone, he must forego a day of food
and at the end of that day start drinking Fleet soda by the gallon, turning the
contents of his guts into a bubbling cauldron of steaming Linda Blair vitashake?
Yes. It would appear we are saying all that and more. For
nobody is ever more downright feeble and pathetic than the guilty father of the
newly one-nutted son; the ego-maniacal father who feels his historic
wrongheadedness about nearly everything and everyone and most especially
number-one son is a curse passed down through generations of wrongheaded
fathers. And that only he, through the divine intervention of a camera shoved
up his ass, can alone atone for the sins of generations of males gone and males
yet to come.
But is this wallowing wall-eyed wimp okay with his seriously
sickened son grabbing all the attention? Or does he secretly hope the gastroenterologist
will find something terrifying deep in his literal bowels – Dobby, the house
elf? Pottery shards of the ancient Anasazi? A Titleist 3? A signed copy of Catcher in the Rye? A Troll doll? A
vintage P-bass? Or perhaps a note, written on yellow legal paper and stuffed in
a tin of pipe tobacco, with instructions and a map showing the way, along with
the words he is to say to his boy under repair when he comes back from The
Fantastic Voyage.
Then of course it is likely that the old man, true to form, is
pretty well full of shit and nothing else.
