with the death-glaze on them, seem to be mocking me.
Do gulls have brains in any quantity?
Are they edible?
January 29
No chow today. One gull landed near the top of the rockpile but flew off before I could get close enough to “throw it a forward pass,” ha-ha! I’ve started a beard. Itches like hell. If the gull comes back and I get it, I’m going to cut its eyes out before I kill it.
I was one hell of a surgeon, as I believe I may have said. They drummed me out. It’s a laugh, really; they all do it, and they’re so bloody sanctimonious when someone gets caught at it. Screw you, Jack, I got mine. The Second Oath of Hippocrates and Hypocrites.
I had enough socked away from my adventures as an intern and a resident (that’s supposed to be like an officer and a gentleman according to the Oath of Hypocrites, but don’t you believe it) to set myself up in practice on Park Avenue. A good thing for me, too; I had no rich daddy or established patron, as so many of my “colleagues” did. By the time my shingle was out, my father was nine years in his pauper’s grave. My mother died the year before my license to practice was revoked.
It was a kickback thing. I had a deal going with half a dozen East Side pharmacists, with two drug supply houses, and with at least twenty other doctors. Patients were sent to me and I sent patients. I performed operations and prescribed the correct post-op drugs. Not all the operations were necessary, but I never performed one against a patient’s will. And I never had a patient look down at what was written on the prescrip blank and say, “I don’t want this.” Listen: they’d have a hysterectomy in 1965 or a partial thyroid in 1970, and still be taking painkillers five or ten years later, if you’d let them. Sometimes I did. I wasn’t the only one, you know. They could afford the habit. And sometimes a patient would have trouble sleeping after minor surgery. Or trouble getting diet pills. Or Librium. It could all be arranged. Ha! Yes! If they hadn’t gotten it from me, they would have gotten it from someone else.
Then the tax people got to Lowenthal. That sheep. They waved five years in his face and he coughed up half a dozen names. One of them was mine. They watched me for a while, and by the time they landed, I was worth a lot more than five years. There were a few other deals, including the prescription blanks, which I hadn’t given up entirely. It’s funny, I didn’t really need that stuff anymore, but it was a habit. Hard to give up that extra sugar.
Well, I knew some people. I pulled some strings. And I threw a couple of people to the wolves. Nobody I liked, though. Everyone I gave to the feds was a real son of a bitch.
Christ, I’m hungry.
January 30
No gulls today. Reminds me of the signs you’d sometimes see on the pushcarts back in the neighborhood. NO TOMATOES TODAY. I walked out into the water up to my waist with the sharp knife in my hand. I stood completely still in that one place with the sun beating down on me for four hours. Twice I thought I was going to faint, but I counted backward until it passed. I didn’t see one fish. Not one.
January 31
Killed another gull, the same way I did the first. I was too hungry to torture it the way I had been promising myself. I gutted and ate it. Squeezed the tripes and then ate them, too. It’s strange how you can feel your vitality surge back. I was beginning to get scared there, for a while. Lying in the shade of the big central rockpile, I’d think I was hearing voices. My father. My mother. My ex-wife. And worst of all the big Chink who sold me the heroin in Saigon. He had a lisp, possibly from a partially cleft palate.
“Go ahead,” his voice came out of nowhere. “Go ahead and thnort a little. You won’t notith how hungry you are then. It’h beautiful . . .” But I’ve never done dope, not even sleeping pills.
Lowenthal killed himself, did I tell you that? That sheep. He hanged himself in what used to be his office. The way I look at it, he did the world a favor.