Body Surfing

pale purple, garnet maybe? amethyst? but like, so what? I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?”
    Pause.
    “I said, what’s the worst that could happen?”
    Pause.
    “Larry?”
    Larry pulled his head out of the beanbag chair he’d mushed it into, where he’d found the scent of cat piss to be oddly stimulating.
    “Huh?”
    “I said , what’s the worst that could happen?”
    Larry’s blink took the better part of a minute. Then:
    “Bam?”
    “The fuck bam. More like BAM! BAMBAMBAM! Only, fuck, man. I’m still thinking the worst that could happen is I die with whiskey-soaked pussy in my mouth. I mean, totally worth it, right? Except instead I end up in this piece of shit.” This piece of shit being the wheelchair Trim had eaten, slept and pissed in for the previous sixteen months. “But hell, man, at least the government pays for it. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen now? Dain bramage? The fuck. Pass me that glue, man.”
    “Seems to me,” Larry said then. “Seems to me,” he said again, because he’d momentarily forgotten what it had seemed to him. “Oh yeah. Seems to me there’s, like, at least one adganvatage to being pazalyred.”
    “You mean Medicaid?” Trim had the breathless voice of someone trying to keep a hit in his lungs.
    “Okay, two adganvatages. Ad-tange-uh-vage.” Larry shook his head. “Anyway. Seems to me, no matter how hard someone kicks your ass, it don’t hurt.”
    “Well got-damn,” Trim said. “I never thought of it that way.” And then: “There’s a Louisville Slugger behind the front door.”
    “You play baseball?”
    “Yeah, Larry, I play baseball. Shortstop. Roll my ass around the bases in record time. The fuck, man? It’s for security.”
    Larry sat up straighter, in an instant state of oxygen-deprived paranoia. “You hear something?”
    Trim shook his head. “Dude, you are so fucked up. I wanna test your theory.”
    “What theory?”
    Trim pushed his torso to one side, showed Larry a bit of pale butt cheek.
    “My ass? No pain? Remember?”
    And then they started giggling so hard it took nearly fifteen minutes to put their plan into action.
     
    Somehow Trim’s ass became Trim’s kidneys and then Trim’s gut and then Trim’s chest and then a couple-a good whacks to Trim’s forehead. He survived the various blows, even declined to press charges. “Hell, I told him to hit me,” he said when he woke up six days later. “Didn’t hurt me none, and the state pays my medical bills.”
    “What about the blows to the head?”
    “He hit me in the head?” Trim ran his fingers over the baseball-sized lumps on his skull. “That motherfucker.”
     
    Unfortunately, Larry had fled the scene in his McKennedy Fried Chicken delivery truck. He was still out of his mind on vapors, ended up taking a corner too fast and tearing through thePathMark parking lot at fifty miles an hour. Clipped some fat-ass woman pushing a shopping cart before driving straight through the plate-glass window of the garden department. The last thing he remembered was the giant chicken on the hood of the truck exploding in a shower of white plastic feathers—that, and the smell of hibiscus, which reminded him of the bubble baths his mother had given him when he was little. The worst that could happen to Lawrence Bishop turned out to be an eight-year sentence for vehicular assault, of which he served three, during which time he only had to take it up the ass twice.
    It was Larry’s parole officer who’d come up with the idea of being a paramedic. Told him to think of it as restitution. After Larry had figured out the difference between restitution and prostitution, he thought it sounded like a fine idea. Driving an ambulance was less exciting than he might have hoped. Automobile accidents, heart attacks, the various indignities of old age. He found himself handling a lot more feces than he’d expected. Most of the job was downtime. Hours spent sitting in the cab wolfing a slice of pizza or smoking a bowl and watching the sun set over the river. He and his partner, a six-foot-five-inch ex-runningback named Little Johnny, liked to conjure the kinds of emergencies they read about in Penthouse Forum . “I’m so sorry to bother you, but I seem to have gotten this zucchini stuck in a very embarrassing area.” “Thank you so much for coming over. I was riding bareback and I think I pulled a muscle in my cervix. Or maybe my coccyx. You’d better check both.”