Parking Suns reader David Schneider contributed this amusing-but-still-kinda-scary short story about a man dealing with Parkinson’s on a typical day.
Thank you, David!
The Joke Machine
– – David Schneider
Once a friend had come for a weekend visit and ended up staying for two years. The “guest” paid half the rent and slept with a single blanket on the hardwood floor.
It occurred to Payton Dillard that the joke machine in his brain had moved in with equal suddenness, but there was a noticeable difference in the length of stay; the joke machine would be sticking around until Payton dropped dead.
The machine had charisma and tended to direct Payton’s thoughts into the realm of dark, ironic humor. It was all right with him; things rarely got boring and you were never alone.
Up at 6 am, Payton gazes in the mirror and is not impressed. He appears old and tired. He looks no better but will move more quickly after taking his meds, currently five different pills.
Washing, shaving, and brushing his teeth take Payton close to an hour. Then comes fun with getting dressed. Payton manages to stay calm during the ten minutes he needs to deal with two of the banes of his existence: tucking in his shirt and doing up buttons, especially the ones on the sleeves. He once got so aggravated with the buttons that he punched a wall, breaking three fingers in the process. When he posted an account of the episode on an Internet site, laboriously using his left hand to type, about twenty people responded, coming out of the closet to admit that they, too, had committed wall assault.
“They fought the wall, and the wall won.” (Doctor to Payton: “That wasn’t very bright.” Payton: “Yeah, but you should have seen the wall.” Doctor: “Okay, what happened to the wall?” Payton: “Nothing.”)
Payton shuffles into the kitchen. Assembling a modest breakfast of fruit and cereal makes him feel like he’s just completed one of the Seven Labors of Hercules. But at least he gets to eat after the exertion. He glances at the pile of mail on the table, two weeks’ worth, unopened. He pulls out a PD publication and skims through it.
There’s one story with an ungainly headline: “LAPD PD KO’D BY PD.” Would anyone bother reading something with that title? It had all the drawing power of a line on an eye test chart. Rather than go through the story, Payton guesses at the content. He decides it’s about a police detective who loses his job because, in the words of an anonymous source, “The criminals are the ones who are supposed to freeze, not our officers.” He’ll check later to see if he got it right. Maybe.
There’s another story about most popular places for PD retirees. Oddly, the top two turn out to be in Ohio. Payton can go along with Shaker Heights, probably a nice enough spot. But he is unsure about Yellow Springs, unless it is favored by those suffering from nighttime incontinence. While it is tough to pull himself away from such gripping fare, Payton has things to do.
The serious part of Payton’s day, or at least as serious as it would get, looms ahead. This is the one day a month he drives to the pharmacy to pick up his meds. Halfway through the usual ten-minute trip, Payton makes a lane change and cuts off the vehicle behind him. The offended motorist leans on his horn and turns on his flashing lights. Payton pulls over and the trailing black patrol car does the same. As the honkee in this instance, he knows he’s at fault. Meanwhile, the cop is loudspeakering-it-up and blasting a generic stay in your car message. Payton stays.
When he opens the window, he looks up at officer Mike Bark, whose name Payton gets from the cop’s eye level name tag. Bark, an obvious by the book type, conducts the ensuing dialogue like he learned the lines in an audio-lingual language class. Payton plays his required conversational part. A guy like Bark probably doesn’t appreciate deviations from the script.
Payton is told to exit the car to take a few tests. Predictably, he fails all of them but the most important one. He can’t walk in a straight line, balance on one leg or tap fingers and feet at the same time. But he’s clean on the breathalyzer.
Officer Bark, quite sure Payton is drunk, but with no smoking gun for evidence – though that could always change quickly for cops – looks annoyed. Payton, with a lull in the proceedings while the officer ponders his next move, wonders if the police ever “plant” beer in the cars of suspected drunks. Officer Bark appears to have the pedigree to plant incriminating alcoholic evidence, though it probably makes more sense to plant marijuana. But you never know. Beer, after all, is bottled in a plant.
The joke machine backs off as Payton leaves the realm of speculation. Amazingly, Bark is letting him off with a warning. He thanks the officer for his professional demeanor and gets in his car. Payton looks in the mirror and sees officer Bark, his hat off, scratching his head. He won’t be writing any letters of commendation, but admits to himself that for a guy with that last name, the cop isn’t a bad cat. Payton, not a strong proponent of the examined life, formulates his own incident report as the officer recedes in the distance: For a relatively young guy, Bark sure is losing his hair fast.
Payton can’t park in his usual spot due to construction work. He’ll have to walk several long blocks to the pharmacy. He moves stiffly with an uneven gait and a shaky right arm. The cop stop, traffic, and unfamiliar parking set-up have combined to knock him a bit out of equilibrium.
Meanwhile, the joke machine has been on low throttle and can use some maintenance. It won’t be getting any on this street, which Payton has dubbed “Bone Yard Boulevard.”
BYB is a rundown stretch that could be described, if you were looking for positives, as a unique opportunity for those in the paint and windowpane business. The street has its share of drugs, drunks, crazies and hookers, but there are other reasons so many businesses in the area have failed. Besides being terrible startup ideas, many had chosen…uh…unfortunate names. Take the abandoned store front he was passing now. The owner had opened a game store that sold only board games of the “Monopoly,” “Clue,” and “Scrabble” variety. And then he had decided to name the place, “Walking the Plank.” The business had become a dive in a very short time.
“Which Way to Nowhere?”, while definitely in synch with the local street vibe, had turned out to be a bad name for a travel agency. Compounding the poor name choice, though also in tune with what was going on outside, was the decision to invest major time and money into promoting new travel destinations. The push to send group tours to the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, however, had not been well received. As small consolation, the owners were able to leave their bankruptcy hearing secure in the knowledge they had done nothing to undermine the concept of truth in advertising.
By now, Payton is walking better, and his tremor is gone. He approaches what is virtually the only functioning building in the area. And this place is humming. The joke machine, with its human-like ability to recognize opportunity, starts to crank back up. A steady stream of visitors leaves and enters. There are posters of Osama and Saddam in the windows and advertisements for flight school training, quick cash and one-way tickets to destinations around the globe. There’s also an announcement of the results of a poll on whether John Walker Lindh looks better as a bearded Taliban or a clean-shaven defendant in a court docket. The actual ballot is on display along with the relevant before and after images. Besides “bearded” or “clean shaven,” there’s a third option. This alternative has by far the most votes.
Payton is convinced of the poll’s legitimacy, based on the fact that this third choice is so wordy only the most conscientious of voters would bother to read it: “My instincts are to vote for the beard, but he looks so dirty I’m afraid I have to abstain. What’s the problem? Couldn’t you have found a better picture?”
Payton knows an organization called The Educational Enterprise for the Resurgence of an Islamic Empire (EERIE) runs the building and is headquartered inside. The FBI has checked out the group and run unannounced sweeps at least three times. The TV news segment he had seen covering one search had not enhanced Payton’s confidence in the country’s ability to stay on top of terrorist and general security threats. In this particular case, not a single agent had known enough about the group to bring along an extra jacket to counteract the lake effect.
The joke machine quickly taps into a plethora of new stimulation, riffing on the whole issue of changes related to September 9/11. One change prompted by events had been a total reevaluation of the nation’s revered “One if by Land, Two if by Sea” anti-terrorist doctrine. After two hundred plus years of utility, the system had been exposed as having a major loophole.
A second change had caught the literary world by surprise. Payton guessed even “The New York Review of Books” had missed this one. There was now a companion term for the German coming-of-age novel. Henceforth, writers who produced fiction on the interior lives of Islamic terrorists or the collapse of the Twin Towers would do so through the medium of the “Buildingsroman.”
Having negotiated BYB without incident, Payton crosses over into more hospitable territory. He wades through pedestrian traffic and, inside the destination, heads for the soda fountain. He throws himself heavily onto a stool. The joke machine has gone on a brief sabbatical, producing nothing of note for the past ten minutes.
A glass of water appears before him and Payton drinks down his pills. He orders a sandwich and a milkshake and starts to feel “more like himself.” He’s not sure what that means. Hmmmmm…. The meds start to work and take Payton, a little roughly, from pre- to post-pill reverie. All to the good, as there is business to be conducted downstairs.
Payton always noticed the incongruity between the piped-in background music and the elevator trip to the depths. A Muzaky version of “Up, Up and Away” was today’s offering for his subliminal listening pleasure.
Payton tells himself he could do better. For gritty realism, how about “Workin’ in a coal mine, goin down, down, down ….” Even “Father, father, father we don’t have to escalate ….” might work. Or maybe the theme from “Shaft.” Yeah, “Shaft” is pretty good, thinks Payton. Two for the price of one. An elevator link, plus what they do to you when they take your money for meds.
Payton’s usual ability to view what came his way with ironic detachment was always put to the test when he arrived underground. He guessed it had something to do with the fact that each time he came down, he knew he’d be leaving with a lighter wallet. Make that a much lighter wallet, to the tune of about five hundred bucks a visit. And the bonus evil clunker: the cash was all out-of-pocket. He thought of himself as being “functionally uninsured,” meaning he could afford the bills. For now. And yet, he was one of the lucky ones in the overall scheme of things. It was enough to make him want to do a goddamn dance right where he stood. How about a variation on a craze from the 60s, “Come on baby, let’s twist slowly in the wind.” If you were looking for ways to fall into a black hole, getting financially stuck in the American healthcare system was certainly an attractive option. It was right up there with going to prison and waiting to talk to a real person on a business phone call.
The pharmacy is located in a rather dimly lit, remote basement corner. Nice touches, thinks Payton, and hard not to notice: A dark, difficult to access drug counter for a large number of customers with failing eyesight and limited mobility.
Payton hoofs it over to the drug area and takes a spot at the end of the end of the line. It looks like a fairly long wait.
To amuse himself, Payton formulates a question: What changes would really help the pharmacy get things right? Well, for starters, they can make wearing masks and carrying guns mandatory for all employees working behind the counter. Then they could replace the “Pick-up” sign with the more accurate “Stick-up.”
Payton looks around for a suggestion box, the kind that asks questions like, “How can we better serve you? Fill in this card and let us know how we’re doing.” On second thought, it should say, “Get the hell out of here, go home and conduct your business on the Internet, the way normal people do. And always know that at our stores ‘Quality Customer Service’ is a slogan, not just a phrase.”
With no formal means to critique the quality of the experience, Payton has to settle for snatches of conversations around him.
Pharmacist #1: “I’m afraid this new medication is a little bit more expensive than what you’ve been taking.”
Customer A: “Why am I not surprised?”
Pharmacist #2: “Did the doctor tell you about the potential side effects of Tetratoxinal?
Customer B: “Only in general terms.”
Pharmacist #2: “Well, in clinical trials, 89% of folks who took it developed all body soft-ball size infected boils. A bit like that scene in the movie, ‘Alien.’ The one where the Alien pops out of the doctor’s chest. But the boils you’ll likely get don’t pop, they just kind of fester.”
Customer B: “Uh …. are we talking a 12- or 14-inch softball?”
Pharmacist #2: “I don’t play softball. But read about what you can look forward to in this pamphlet. I’d tell you to give us a call if you have any other questions, but when this stuff kicks in, I doubt you’ll be coherent enough to talk or even have the strength to pick up a phone.”
Customer B: “That’s okay. As long as I can drive.”
Customer D (to Customer C, who is paying a relatively cheap bill): “Boy, I’d like to get out of here for that price.”
Customer C: (rather sarcastically): “Oh, yeah? Come back tomorrow when I pick up my other 4 prescriptions and tell me if you still feel the same way.”
Pharmacist #3: “And you continue to have no insurance coverage?”
Customer E: “Hey, doc, do I talk funny or somethin’? Cause we don’t seem to be communicatin’ too well. I come in here, every time you ask me the same question. And guess what? Every time in here I got the same chronic disease. People with a chronic disease, they can’t get insurance. Got it? Now on, I’m operatin’ under the theory this little speech has ensured your assurance I won’t hear no more about insurance. Hey, Vito, give this guy his pound of flesh and meet me back at the car. I gotta go buy my granddaughter a bunny rabbit for her birthday.” (A milestone of sorts here, Payton believes; possibly the first instance of a patient enrolling a doctor in a state high risk pool.)
Pharmacist #4 (to Customer F): “If you’re having trouble with payments, we have some exciting new programs that might help. Perhaps something can be worked out. To give you just one example, our ‘Indentured Servitude’ plan has generated quite a buzz. And I note from your file that you have a young child. Would that be your first born?”
Payton’s head is spinning, but he’s not entirely surprised. The joke machine has been known to blow the odd gasket on pharmacy visits. Nevertheless, who or what is responsible for today’s production? It’s not quite “Fellini Roma.” Maybe more like “Fellini Roman?” When Polanski meets Fellini perhaps coming away with a splitting headache is a small price to pay. Unlike the 500 bucks Payton has just left on the counter. With his meds in hand, he beats a hasty retreat up to the light.
Payton finds himself once more at the soda fountain, drinking iced tea and water. He hears his name, and rather stiffly turns around. A couple of buddies in another booth are waving him over to join them. It’s Norton North and Grayson Biggs. Payton has known both these guys for years. He sees them fairly often, but he’s not sure they’re his friends in a traditional sense. More like “niche” pals; you have to be in the mood for them or they can be hard to take. And he already has a basement hangover.
North is married to a hotshot doctor who apparently doesn’t mind having a deadbeat husband. Biggs lives off some kind of inheritance or trust fund. The next time he gives a straight answer about the source of his income will be the first time.
North had worked as a lawyer 20 year ago, while Biggs, as far as Payton knew, had never held a job. It might not be unreasonable to conclude that neither had ever done an honest day’s work in his life. These were two guys with serious time on their hands. They were so good at getting through a day unscathed they’d retired from hanging out; within the realm of leisure and recreation they had attained the status of Higher Beings.
Payton, against his better judgement, awkwardly slides into the booth. North is about to launch into one of his trademark rants, an oral form of non-interactive communication he has elevated to high art.
“Hey Payton,” North begins, “me and Biggs are talking about telephones.”
“Hey, North,” Payton responds, “people usually talk on telephones, not about telephones.”
“A cogent point, but not a particularly germane one.” Payton gets ready for what he knows is coming. If nothing else, both he and the joke machine are guaranteed some real down time.
“Now…. I just don’t get why people think these new phones are so convenient. These cell phones, like the one Biggs has here, they’re for morons. Figure it out. Take any random group of 10 incoming calls. How many are gonna be for your benefit, or even a little bit interesting? Throw 2 out off the top. Telemarketers, salesmen, scam artists, whatever you wanna call ‘em, 2 of 10 calls are gonna be from con men tryin’ to separate you from your dough. Throw another one out for a wrong number. Then there’s always a chance you get a call from work. If you work, heh, heh. They want you to sub because somebody’s sick, they want you to come in early, they want you to double check something, you get the idea. Then there’s family calls, usually from your wife. She calls because she wants you to pick up something from the store. So instead of sitting in an air-conditioned room somewhere havin’ a drink, you gotta hit the aisles on a 90-degree day and stand in a long line. Then your wife calls back and tells you she forgot something. And it’s always something heavy, like a 12-pack of 64-ounce Cokes. That’s 6 calls so far. Next, you get a couple of calls from friends who wanna do something boring like eat at a crummy restaurant or see a crummy movie. Then for number nine, you might get a reminder call for a doctor’s or dental appointment. Pointless. If I got a raging toothache or a third degree burn on my leg, I’m not gonna need to be reminded to show up somewhere for treatment. One more. Even if it’s something good, like the phone company saying your service has to be cut for a while for maintenance purposes, that makes one good call outta ten. Explain to me how that’s a good deal. And don’t talk to me about emergencies – only idiots are in a hurry to hear bad news.”
Biggs’ cell phone rings. “Yeah …Yeah … Okay.”
“Who was it and what did they want?” asks North.
“My girlfriend. She wants me to pick up half a dozen durian on the way home.”
“The smelly fruit with the spikes the looks like it could double as a medieval torture implement? Hey, Biggs, there’s a reason they call it a cell phone. There oughta be a federal law requiring outfits with horizontal stripes as a throw-in with these things.”
Biggs changes the subject, “Hey, Payton, who’s the smartest Beatle?”
“Hey, Biggs. are you talking bugs or people?
“Bugs are irritating, not smart.”
“You don’t know any people like that?”
“Let me try again. Insects aside, who’s the smartest Beatle?”
Before Payton can answer, North cranks up, “No contest. It’s gotta be Ringo. Yeah, he’s usually considered the dimmest bulb Beatle, but figure it out. First off, John and George are dead, so how smart can they be? That leaves Paul …. hey, …. Payton, where ya goin?”
“Across the street to get my phone disconnected.”
“A germane point, but not a particularly cogent one.”
As Payton gets to the exit, he can still hear North ranting something about Barbara Bach and candlelight dinners. Where was “Up, Up and Away” when you needed it?
Outside, Payton stops and takes a deep breath. The joke machine, having been put into neutral by the King of the Soda Fount Filibusterers, is now percolating on low. Payton, knowing excitement is an overrated commodity, especially once you hit 50, decides he’s had enough for one day. He slowly retraces his steps back up BYB to the car and drives home. Though his driving is erratic, he manages to avoid any unwanted attention from law enforcement. The joke machine is baiting him to address the issue of why you drive on a parkway but park in a driveway. He deflects the suggestion and settles things by simply parking the car.
Inside the house, he finds there are messages on his phone. He’ll listen later. He does a little housecleaning – actually, very little – and uses the computer to compose a couple of letters.
Payton cooks, eats and does the dishes, all very slowly. He’s tired. Once he would have picked up a book under such circumstances, but he doesn’t concentrate well enough any more to do much reading. Payton turns on the TV. A quick run through the evening offerings proves the wisdom of whoever first realized that he was paying for some 2,000 channels but somehow there was never anything on.
Payton turns off the TV, ready to turn in. But he’s forgotten something: the 5 messages on the answering machine. One is from a friend who wants to attend a crummy movie. Score one for North. Another is from a con artist who wants to sell him a water conditioner. Score 2 for North. But the other three turn the tide in favor of the anti-rant forces. His ex-wife says she hasn’t seen him for a while and wonders how he is doing. His daughter wants to finalize plans for an upcoming visit. And the disability insurance people need him to come in for a second meeting sometime next week. He knows mental notes aren’t his strong suit these days, but he thinks he can muddle through and make the three calls tomorrow.
That was another thing about sharing a brain with a joke machine. The machine had a certain stubbornness and tended to overpower the mental processes needed to get through practical, ordinary, day-to-day life.
That night, Payton would dream vividly. He was at a train station on a platform with no one around. A train was leaving. He had to run to catch it. A conductor reached down a helping hand and said, “Come aboard.” He did and entered a car full of passengers. It was nothing he could pin down, but the people looked, moved and seemed like him. He found one of the few empty seats and sat. He looked out the window. The train was headed up a steep incline, covered by thick forest. It was dark in the car. A voice piped up. “It’s awfully serious in here. Anyone know any jokes?” A second voice: “I don’t know any jokes, but here’s a category: Inappropriate Campaign Songs for Presidential Candidates.” Payton honed in on the two usual suspects, Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon. Before he could take his thoughts any further, Payton was beaten to the punchlines: “Bill Clinton: ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’,” someone said. “Richard Nixon: ‘Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme’,” said another.
The train wasn’t quite out of the woods, but it was getting brighter inside the car. Payton looked around at the other riders. A few were laughing, while most had a kind of wry smile on their faces; they’d gotten the joke.
Payton caught the attention of the woman next to him and winked. She smiled. And winked back.
* * * * *
David Schneider has traveled to some 50 countries and spent 25 years toiling in the field of TEFL ln Sri Lanka, South Korea and Japan. These experiences have resulted in an early choice for an epitaph: “He had a pretty good look around.”
