Big Brother

Chapter 6: Big Brother

“As a lay person you would not be able to understand the science of my experiments at Harvard,” the doctor began his explanation to Madelyn.

“What experiments?

“They involved Heck. That’s all I want to say.”

“Like a guinea pig?” she asked.

“Yes, you could say that, although Heck wouldn’t like the analogy. Would you, Heck?” The doctor looked at the rat, who tilted his head, like a curious cat, squinting up at the doctor while rubbing his nose with his paws. “Fruit flies are very useful for experiments and so are guinea pigs,” the doctor continued. “But for my purposes only Rattus norvegicus, would do. Not as cute as the guinea pig, perhaps . . .” Heck made a tiny squeaking noise. “Have I hurt your feelings? I’m sorry, Heck,” the doctor said.

“He understands you?” she asked. Up to now she had thought of the doctor as being eccentric. Now she wasn’t sure what to think.

“He understands me, of course,” the doctor said proudly. Then he added, in a show of bitter humor. “He’s got an IQ well above the average Democrat.”

 “But why did you bring him to the office?”

“I received a warning that the authorities might be paying a visit to the clinic today.”

“Today?” She couldn’t believe he had waited until now to tell her. She had felt nervous when she had arrived at the office that morning because of renewed rumors circulating in the town about an imminent crackdown on the so-called pill mills.

“That’s right. Today.”

“Then why did you bring the rat here.”   

“Because I’m sure they want me to think they’re coming to the clinic when what they really plan to do is to go to my home.”

“But how would they get in?”

“My landlady would let them in. She’s easily intimidated.”

“She’d let them in?”

“With alacrity.”

“With who?”

“In a heartbeat.”

 “But what would they be looking for? What records we have are in my computer.”

“They’re not after records.”

“Then what?”

“Why, Heck, of course.”

“What would they want with Heck?” Puzzled, she looked from the doctor to the rat and back at the doctor.

“The ‘rat’ as you like to call him is the key to everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s the answer.”

“To what.”

“To the single greatest threat to freedom in the world.”

“What threat?”

“Big Brother.”

“Big Brother?”

 “Precisely,” he said.

“Who’s  Big Brother?”

“You’ve never heard of Big Brother?”

“I don’t think so.”

Shaking his head and turning to the rat, the doctor said,   “What do you think of that, Heck? She’s never heard of  Big Brother.” As he continued shaking his head slowly,  Heck tilted his head and peered up at him curiously while the kittens looked down on what was happening with the  look of total incomprehension.

“Haven’t you read this pamphlet?” he asked her, picking up  one from the little pile he kept on his desk. “I distinctly remember giving you one, and one for your daughter.” The doctor opened it to one of the illustrations, showing a menacing Big Brother figure. He held it up to show her, then he laid it down on the desk, leaving it open to the same page, which the rat edged over to and looked down at, as if it  could read or at least appreciate pictures. Madelyn felt stupid. Was it possible the rat had not only heard of Big Brother but had also read about him? It couldn’t be, she told herself. She had a tee shirt, which she had worn  only once, to a Fourth of July fireworks display.  REDNECK AND PROUD OF IT! But she never could have imagined encountering a rat smarter than she was, a  show-off, smart-ass rodent which, if it had a tee shirt, would probably read SMARTER THAN A REDNECK!

“But what does the rat have to do with Big Brother?” she asked.

“Heck and I made a remarkable discovery.”

“About what?”

 “About Oxycontin,” he said.

“What about it?”

“Oxycontin is the diabolical means by which the American government is attempting to enslave us.”

“Enslave us?”

“Yes, by eliminating all resistance to Big Brother.”

 “But why are you prescribing it if it’s diabiblical?”

“Diabolical,” he corrected her. “Because the ends justify the means.”

Talk about ends and means always passed over her head, as it did now. She didn’t want to show her ignorance by asking him what he meant. She just looked at him blankly.

“I’ve discovered how to turn  Oxycontin into  Anti-Contin,” he explained.

“Anti-Contin?”

“Yes, an antidote to Statism.”

“Statism?” Statism was not something she had heard of before.

“What the Democrats believe in. ‘That government is best which governs most.’”

“That’s statism?”

“That’s right. But it won’t be much longer before I have enough money to   manufacture it in Mexico.”

“Mexico?”

“Yes. I plan to open a clinic there.”

“But you’re  not  prescribing patients Anti-Contin now?”

“No, not yet.”

“What’s so special about it?”

“It’s derived from  Heck’s urine.”

“Heck’s urine? Hoy shit!” she exclaimed.

Madelyn looked at the rat on the desk, at the kittens on top of the file cabinet, at her own fun-house reflection in the doctor’s thick Coke bottle glasses, asking herself whether this was a bad dream or, worse still, a drug induced hallucination. At the moment, she believed she possessed the ability to feel the agony of the people outside in the line, most of them, like herself, who didn’t understand means and ends or statism from Adam.

 “A rat’s urine! That sounds disgusting,” she said. 

“That’s what you all say.”

“All?”

“All who are under the influence of Big Brother.”

 “A rat’s urine! Yuck!”

“Not a rat’s urine. Heck’s urine.”

“What makes Heck’s urine so special?” she asked sarcastically.

“You could never guess,” he said, looking  up at the photo of Hayek on the wall before pronouncing solemnly: “Heck now shares the DNA of the greatest mind of the twentieth century.”

 “Up to now, I must have been blind as well as addicted.”

“What?” the doctor asked in disbelief. “You addicted, too?”

 “What about the DNA business?” she asked.

 “I obtained a lock of the Great One’s hair through extraordinary luck. If I wasn’t a man of science, I would say that providence had a hand in all this, even if it’s only the invisible hand.”

“The invisible hand?”

“The the invisible hand of the free market.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

And neither did Oxy and Contin, who were mewing and walking in circles on top of the file cabinet.  The doctor looked at his watch. “Madelyn, we have patients outside  in the throes of Statism. They’re waiting for us.”  

“I’m very much aware of them, Doctor,” she said, feeling  very attuned to them as this moment.

Are you a Democrat?” he asked.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Excuse the non sequitur,” he apologized.

“ I’m not into politics,” she said.

“Whom did you vote for in the last presidential election?”

“Which presidential election?

“You didn’t happen to vote for the Black Big Brother, did you?”

“I don’t remember voting,” she said.

“You see, Heck, it’s the familiar vicious circle. One addiction leads to another, and people end up voting for  Big Brother.”

There was the sound of loud male voices with unfamiliar accents in the outer office. Huck flicked his tail nervously and the  kittens became even more agitated.

“Who’s out there?” the doctor shouted, bringing his little fist down hard on the desk. Panicked, the rat jumped off the desk and scrambled for a place to hide. Oxy overcame his fear of heights and jumped from the file cabinet  and Contin instinctively followed him. A cat may always land on its feet but the kittens tumbled over when they painfully hit the floor.

Suspecting it was a robbery, the doctor shouted, “I demand to know who’s out there?” A tense looking man in a gray suit and a striped necktie appeared suddenly in the door to the office. Behind him, looking over his shoulder, stood  a a square faced state trooper.

“Doctor Gudenoff?” the man in the suit asked.

“Yes, I am Dr. Gudenoff,” he answered defiantly. 

“I’m Special Agent Smith with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.” He opened a wallet and flashed his DEA badge.

“Your Big Brother badge doesn’t impress me Special Agent Smith, do you understand?”

“This is Captain Porter of the State Police,” Smith said. “We have a warrant to search your clinic.”

“Oh, you, do you?” the doctor said contemptuously.

 “Doctor, do you have a key to the  closet in the outer office?” the trooper asked.

“No,” the doctor said sharply. “You’ll have to ask my office manager.”

Madelyn reached into her blouse pocket and took out the key. It was only then that she remembered where her purse with the Oycontin was. She kept a pair of galoshes in the locked closet. Last night she had heard about an imminent crackdown on the pain clinics. After she opened the clinic that morning, she had put her purse in the right galosh of the fur-lined pair she kept in the closet. What she was thinking as she handed the key to the trooper was that she might lose custody of Barbie when they discovered she had forged prescriptions. They would probably lock the doctor up  for a long time. She had heard that it was the case with doctors that, with the complicity  of their colleagues, who are eager to maintain the priestly status or their profession, that they got away with malpractice, if not murder. But she doubted the doctor would get away with his promiscuous  prescribing of Oxycontin. In the time she had worked for him he must have prescribed as many pills as the McDonald’s sign said it had sold hamburgers. But what would they do to her for having forged prescriptions? At that moment of uncertainty, she would have given anything for an Oxycontin and so would Oxy and Contin, cowering in a corner, as would also the doctor and his pet rat, who were as hopelessly hooked on the drug as anyone in the town. The rest of the country was about to learn  that it was ground zero of Oxycontin addiction in America.

When the doctor and Madelyn were ushered into the outer office by state troopers, Oxy saw his chance of escape. The front door was half open and he scooted for it, with Contin right on his tail and Heck not far behind. 

“Your Big Brother badge doesn’t impress me Special Agent Smith, do you understand?”

Previous chapters

1 http://rivervices.blogspot.com/2010/12/new-years-tale.html

2 http://rivervices.blogspot.com/2011/01/oxy-contin-in-line-at-pain-clinic.html

3 http://rivervices.blogspot.com/2011/03/oxy-contin-meet-barbie.html

4 http://rivervices.blogspot.com/2011/04/4-oxy-and-contin-in-doctors-office.html

5 http://rivervices.blogspot.com/2011/05/from-zanesville-to-zanzibar.html

2: Oxy & Contin: In Line at the Pain Clinic

“The Freedom from Pain Clinic was the busiest of the city’s pill mills . . .”

An Associated Press  reporter had dubbed River City  “The Oxycontin Capital of America.” Whether or not that was an exaggeration, the city and the Freedom from Pain Clinic in particular had  become a mecca for people with legitimate aches and pains as well as those suffering from the illegitimate pain of addiction.

The kittens Oxy and Contin were so named because of the addiction they had acquired in their mother’s womb, but since their mother’s death they  had been able to  find  the drug  only in trace amounts, amounts so slight that it whetted rather than satisfied their craving. With their acute sense of smell, they had a nose for where to find it, but they had found it only in minuscule amounts. Of the half dozen pill mills in the River City, the one that became the kittens’ favorite was the Freedom from Pain Clinic because many of those who lined up outside it each day had not blood but Oxycontin on their hands. 

The Freedom from Pain Clinic was the busiest of the city’s pill mills, with  people traveling from far and near in the Appalachian region to line up with the locals outside the front door, six days a week,  before nine  o’clock, hoping to get a prescription for Oxycontin from Doctor  Phillip Gudenoff. In the three years his clinic had been in operation, the doctor had become  a  hero to those in the long lines and a maligned figure in the media, a cross between Dr. Albert Schweitzer and  Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Dr. Gudenoff's name had morphed into the more easily remembered “Dr.  Feel Good.” People advised friends and acquaintances in pain to “Go see Dr.  Feel Good. He’ll fix you up.”

The doctor’s "clients," as he referred to them, were a grim looking lot as they lined up on a  bitterly cold  but crystal clear Saturday morning, early in January. The men, cigarettes dangling from their lips. shifted from foot to foot to increase the circulation in their toes. The women stared down blankly at the sidewalk, looking like the dummies in the window of the  Salvation Army Second hand clothing store that was just a couple of empty storefronts away. The scene outside the clinic this morning was like a Movietone newsreel  from the Great Depression, only instead of a bowl of soup those in line were hoping for a prescription for the pain killer that was all the rage. 

As much to keep warm as anything, an older man in line cradled  Oxy in  his arms. In exchange for the warmth the kitten provided him, the older man allowed Oxy free rein to  lick the fingers of both his hands, which had traces of Oxycontin. Seasoned Oxycontin addicts, like the older man, took the pills home and, to defeat the  time release properties,  pulverized the pills on the kitchen table with a spoon. If they were impatient, they  broke the pills in half and ground the two halves between the thumb and index finger. That was considered the more manly method. The addicts then had the choice of swallowing the powder with a liquid or  inhaling it nasally, like cocaine. Hardcore users in ghettoes preferred inhaling smoke from burning Oxycontin, but that was a wasteful if quicker method that was not practiced in River City. Whatever method was used, traces of Oxycontin remained on the fingers. The euphoria Oxycontin produced in addicts the first hour was like the  ecstasy Appalachians had experienced in religious camp meetings and revivals in the nineteenth century.

“The pill kills the existential agony of life and makes you want to start a-singing and a-stomping like Jerry Lee Lewis,” said an older long-haired man to a chain-smoking younger man behind him who was in line for the first time. The long braided hair of the older man made him a lookalike for Willie Nelson, not  Jerry Lee Lewis. He had been a drummer in the Knocked-Up rock band in his teens and he had audited a philosophy course at the River City Community College in his twenties, which converted him to existentialism. 

In the older man’s arms, Oxy was not contaminated by traditional American addictions—caffeine, nicotine, sugar, salt, fat, sex, money, celebrities, sports, politics, and, of course, religion. Oxy was a purring purebred example of Ocycontin addiction. He licked the older man’s fingers as eagerly as a hungry bear cub would a beekeeper’s gloves.  

“What do you mean, ‘agony  of life’?” the younger man asked.  Fancy phrases made the younger man uncomfortable. A high school dropout, he felt that people who had attended the community college, looked down on him, using terms he  wouldn’t understand. Like his cousin  who was studying computers. His cousin was always in an input-output mode, using acronyms  like HTML and ASCII and words like cookies and Bluetooth that had nothing to do with cookies or teeth. Rarely awake before noon, the younger man  the night before had been up watching the Tonight Show, smoking Camels  and marijuana, coughing frequently. In line, in the cold,   everything seemed a little unreal and slightly sinister to him—the older man, the line of people, the clinic, even the kittens.  

“What do  I mean by agony of existence?” the  older man said. “I’m sixty-one. I had to declare bankruptcy in a recession twenty years ago.  Lost everything.  Felt  like shit until they came up with this stuff.”

“What stuff?” the younger man asked.

“Oxycontin,” the older man said.

 The younger man had been trying to ignore Oxy’s sister, Contin, who had been  rubbing against his ankle for a few minutes, meowing to get picked up. Following the example of the older man, the younger man finally reluctantly  picked Contin up, holding  her in the crook of  his left arm, holding his cigarette between the yellowed thumb and index finger of his right hand. Contin immediately began trying to lick  the fingers of his left hand. He had begun smoking cigarettes at eleven and by eighteen had smoked about sixty thousand of them. He had switched to filter cigarettes since he had developed his cough.

“You’d feel  even shittier if  you were my age,” the younger man said. 

“How old are you?” the older man asked.

“I’m twenty-one,” the younger man lied, struggling with  the squirmy Contin. Finding only  the unpleasant traces of cigarettes and  marijuana on the fingers of the younger man’s  left hand, Contin tried to get at his right  hand,  which held  the cigarette.
“It’s one thing to feel like shit when you’re sixty-one and another to feel that way when you’re twenty-one,” the younger man said, not wanting to admit he was only eighteen.
“Twenty-one, what’s wrong with  twenty-one?” the older man asked. The younger man didn't answer. He was watching  Oxy licking the older man's  fingers.
The younger man put his cigarette  in his mouth, and offered Contin his left hand since that was what she was squirming for.  She licked his fingers and thumb eagerly but because all she tasted were traces of pot and nicotine, she made a face.  She did not want to waste  time on someone  whose breath, hair, clothes and even pores reeked of tobacco and pot but whose hands didn’t have a trace of Oxycontin. She increased her squirming, wanting to be put back down on the sidewalk so she could continue her quest for Oxycontin. After he put her down, the younger man watched her walk  further down the line, wagging her little tail and mewing plaintively, trying to entice someone else to pick her up, like the drug-addicted street-walking pussies did on John Street in the heart of the red light neighborhood, which was close to the Freedom from Pain Clinic. 
Contin reminded the younger man  of   the street-walker he had picked  up on  John Street two years earlier. Driving his older brother's Dodge Dart, he had picked her up on his sixteenth birthday and drove her up and down John Street a couple of times, wondering where he was going to find a place to screw her. With her mascara and lipstick, she looked like an abused, over-the-hill kewpie doll. She had to be a least thirty. At sixteen, he was still a virgin and had no idea how to handle the situation but was trying to pretend he did.
"Whacha doin'?" the girl had asked him after he had driven  up and down the street a couple of times.  There were abandoned, boarded-up houses on John Street, and he was looking for one that they could use.
"I said whacha doin'?" she repeated.
"What do you think I'm doing. I'm looking for a place to screw you," he had said.
"Screw me?" she had asked incredulously. "What do you expect for two bucks?" Two bucks was the price they had agreed on before she got in his car, but what he didn't know was that she had been negotiating about a blow job. He  didn't know that the older guys cruised  John Street to get blown, not laid. He was so flustered and embarrassed that he finally gave her five dollars, which was the only money he had in his jeans.
Snapping out of his John St. reverie, the younger guy  said to the older guy, “If  you’re sixty you’re about to croak anyway, but  if you’re twenty-one  you’ve got to put in another fucking forty years at least, forty years with no job, no hope, no nothing. If  I couldn’t get stoned once in a while, I’d probably turn on the gas.”

“It’s those  foreign monkeys who’re willing to work  for peanuts,” the older man said. “They’re the ones. They’ve  taken our jobs. They’re ruining this country.”

“Yeah,” the younger man agreed, nodding his head. “They’re eating our lunch.”

Oxy began squirming to indicate to the older man that he’d  had enough, that he’d licked the man’s hands clean of all traces of Oxycontin, and that he wanted to be put down. But the  older man was too busy complaining about  the company he’d worked for for twenty years. “They just upped and moved the plant to Timbuktu.” He went on and on about the company, but the younger man, who had never held a job for more than a couple of months, was no longer listening to him.  He was watching Oxy struggling to get out of the older man’s arms, but the older man wouldn’t let go of him. All the kitten wanted was his freedom back, the freedom to pursue the drug he craved. He angrily turned on the older man, scratching the  back of his hand, drawing blood.

 “Hey!”  the older man yelled, dropping Oxy on the sidewalk like a hot potato. “What the hell is it with this kitten?” He stared  in disbelief at the blood trickling  from the scratches.

“You got to be careful,” the younger man warned, “it could be rabies.”

Neither the younger man or the older man understood  that it was not rabies but the Oxycontin that explained the kittens’ peculiar behavior. Only when Oxy was well down the line  did the kitten turn around to make sure  the older  man was not following him. The behavior of humans, especially the ones in pants, baffled him. Besides, he was exhausted from all his licking.  Now cold and tired, he wanted to  cuddle up with  Contin in the sun and take a catnap. He meowed for her and she meowed back, coming over to him, and they rubbed noses, reaffirming their bond each other, cuddling together in the cold, as they took a break from their search for Oxycontin.  

Contin and Oxy cuddling in the cold

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