Help! A Bear Is Eating Me! (6 page)

We’re not so different, you and I. We both dominate. We both kick ass. We both have excellent taste. You are eating me, for instance, and I would eat you, too. I will eat you. Don’t forget, I’m still going to win. But you are a worthy opponent, Mister Bear. I salute you. In a different time and a different place I’m sure we would have been great friends.

6

Oh science, oh technology, oh medicine and pharmacology, how much do I love you? Let me count … OxySufnix, Percoset, Anctil, Smarmex: you take the pain away and bring me cool fluffy clouds and ultimate smoothness. Performil, Septihone, Winnerol: you remove my doubts and confusion and give me clarity. Sombutol, Codeine, Abnap: you tuck me in and turn out my lights. Ritalin, Rapidol, Viagra, Crystal Methedrine: you put my pedal to the metal. There’s no feeling I ever wanted to feel that the alchemists of modern pharmacy don’t already have a pill for. Drugs, I’m so glad you’re here with me. I couldn’t do this without you. It was very smart of me to stock up on you in Vancouver, where you are available so cheaply and without a prescription.

Of course I
have
a prescription. I’m not some twitchy pill-popper. I have several good doctors telling me to take this stuff. That’s how I know they’re good doctors. Edna dragged me one time to see this bad doctor, a real quack, who tried to prescribe me some analysis, some deep probing of my past, some couch time. I told this doctor, Hey Doctor, do you know who I am? I’m Marv Pushkin, and I’m stunningly important! Do I look like I have time to lie there in the greasy indentation left on your fake leather couch by the fat asses of a hundred depressive clients of yours, telling you private details from my fabulous life? You wish! If you don’t have a pill for whatever you’re diagnosing me with, then maybe you should diagnose me with something else, something more physical and real and less effervescent and psychological and gay. I’m not paying $100 an hour to sit around un-medicated in your office and weep — boo hoo hoo — about my funny urges and my goofy outbursts and my wacky, zany, nutty “problems.” If I’m sick, I have an illness, not a “problem.” Nobody has “problems” any more, they have pills for that now. So give me the pill or tell me who will.

So the pain pills, obviously, are for my pain. What pain? I haven’t felt real painful pain in years. Pain, to me, is like an unsolicited e-mail from my nervous system, trying to sell me something I’m not even slightly interested in. I might read it if I’m bored, otherwise I trash it with a single click. Right now those e-mails are really stuffing my inbox, but I’m ignoring them.

I remember the bad old days of pain, pain that hurt. I had these headaches, sure, once upon a time. That was some real pain. Do you imagine being eaten by a bear is painful? Imagine instead if a tiny rodent, a rat with long teeth and sharp scratching claws, woke up in the center of your brain and started burrowing its way out your face. Imagine pain you can hear, crawling around inside your skull with every twitch of your eyebrow, searing the inside of your head like acid. Imagine your head is one big tooth, and it’s got an abscess. Oh yes, it was bad, but now it’s good, oh yes. I can hardly imagine pain now. I’m so
over
pain, thanks to OxySufnix. OxySufnix, I owe you a beer.

Then there was that other problem, the one that quack doctor wanted to apply couches to. I wasn’t depressed or anything, I was just great. I had been taking the OxySufnix for six months and life was good, I was high on life, life and OxySufnix. I mean, I’m even better now, but really I was fine then. I felt excellent, so excellent that one day, carried away in general enthusiasm, I playfully emptied my 9mm Glock 19 all over the house and did a lot of damage, shot holes in some fairly valuable possessions, burned some stuff, I just went, I went, I went, well not nuts. Never went nuts. I felt just fine, I enjoyed the heck out of the whole process. I just wanted to blow off some steam, see, and I did exactly that, but in retrospect I admit I blew a little too hard. The glass shower stall, the mirror, I got fairly scratched up. (Thank you OxySufnix for blocking the pain.) I guess when Edna got home I was not looking my best. Fell off my usual tip-top condition, I guess, and I had bled all over the new white Venetian shag carpet among all the other damage, and Edna, dammit, got all hysterical and called an ambulance, and that really pissed me off. I mean, how humiliating is that? For Christ’s sake Edna, just drive me to the hospital and leave the paramedics out of our living room, would you? But no, not Edna, she needs everything
dramatic
. A frustrated actress, you see. So Edna locked herself in the bathroom and dialed 911, and once you dial 911 they just don’t stop coming: cops, firemen, paramedics, lawyers, gossip columnists, they swarm in like flies and track blood all over the Venetian shag, and if you happen to be
holding a pistol
for any reason — I was merely trying to get the bathroom door open so I could calmly explain to Edna what an utter cunt she was being and what happens to people like that when they fuck around with Marv Pushkin — then they, the nice home-invaders who are ruining your rug, get extremely tense and rude with you, and then if you try to relax them by
putting down
the pistol they all of a sudden tackle you and manhandle you and Taser the shit out of you, treating you like a fucking criminal in your own fucking luxury condominium!

Looking back on it now, I think that was the beginning of the end for me and little Miss 911-Dialing Driveway Snatch. She rode with me and two cops and two paramedics to the hospital, and because she knew she was in trouble,
serious
trouble
,
she toned down the hysteria a bit when they took her official statement, leaving out some of the unofficial, off-the-record statements I had made in the heat of the moment which might have been misconstrued. Me, I got a lot of stitches, a lot of bandages, and then for two days I got Observed.

But of course they had to let me out after 48 hours, because I’m not crazy. And if I was crazy I’d be the kind of devious super-crazy who can still convince shrinks that he’s not crazy. And that’s just what I did. I had the blond doctor with the Nazi spectacles, Dr. Plank, eating out of my hand.
Oh Doc, the pressure I’ve been under at the office!
(Hah.)
Oh, society’s rigid expectations!
(Guffaw.)
I’ve realized I need to sit down and re-evaluate my life.
(Hardy har har.) And when Edna came to visit, I laid it on so thick I almost choked to death on my own acting.
Edna … baby … please don’t leave me … I need you so bad … what a monster I’ve been … please help me to get better … I love you. I love you!
(Chortle!)

But meanwhile … the awkward truth is I don’t know why I did it any more than anybody else does. I did it for kicks, the fun factor, the pure fucking blast of shooting stuff up indoors, watching it explode when you point at it, being the sweet angel of annihilation, dealing judgment to appliances and furniture. Sure, I enjoyed the heck out of myself, but afterwards I kind of wished I hadn’t shot my brand-new flat screen LCD cinema display TV, because I had been enjoying watching porno on it. And why did I shoot up my ivory and teak minibar? All that perfectly good scotch, and all those national league football mascot shot glasses I collected in college, all destroyed. And above all, why did I shoot up my Camero? I loved that car, and when the guys at the shop said it was totaled, from nothing but ten or twenty bullets out of a little nine millimeter Glock and a few swings with a putting iron, when they told me that buying a new Camero would be way cheaper than fixing mine, that was when I realized I, Marv Pushkin, had made a Mistake. And I didn’t know why. So I went back to the blond doctor with the Nazi glasses, and told him I wanted some pills to help me never do anything like that again.

And man, that doctor changed my life. I know it sounds corny, but with Performil and Septihone, I simply feel great all the time. It’s that good. I always know what to do, and I always do it. I have no more fear, no more uncertainty. I am brave and wise and quick and clever. Nothing bothers me. No storm can ripple the mirror-like surface of the pond of my mood. If there’s one thing in life I can’t live without, it’s the two-pill combination of Performil and Septihone. The Winnerol is really more recreational, I get those from one of the custodians in our building, really a very nice wetback, he’s got a little side-job dealing various pills. Sometimes I take a Winnerol when I have to meet with particularly lame clients, ‘cause it significantly decreases my boredom with their shitty products, their retarded ideas and their agonizing PowerPoint. And Ritalin is great for deadlines. But Peformil, Septihone and OxySufnix, that’s my trifecta of feelgood.

I hope I took enough. Truth be told, I’m not totally certain what I’m taking right now because my vision has gone a little bit blurry. Which is normal, of course, with this much OxySufnix. And it’s dark again, and I spilled my stupid pillbox. It just slipped out of my fingers while I was opening it, and now all these pills are lying in the mud beside me and honestly they all look about the same when you can’t see anything. Except thankfully the OxySufnix comes in a square tinfoil blister pack, even J. J. Armes could find those, even if he was blind. So, block that pain … and I’ll just take two or three of these other ones and hope for the best. If I feel bad, I’ll take some more.

Meanwhile: the bear, he sleeps tonight. Ever since the big match he’s been curled up next to the car. He spent a couple hours licking himself earlier, that was sure something to see. It’s like the Nature Channel under here. I actually think he’s warming me up a bit with his body heat. Small consolation for what he smells like.

A little-known bear fact: they reek! Somehow in all my research I never uncovered this salient info. They reek like giant sweaty socks full of pustulous ingrown toes, their piss smells like rotten vegetables and sulphur, they’ve got fish breath and their feet are caked with feces. I can’t believe I was going to eat one. As it is, I think we’re going to have to wrap up this bear in Dub-L-Tuf plastic garbage bags for the ride home if we don’t want to get pulled over for stinking. I sure hope Javier and his cute little kids can get the bear stench off my car. When I get home, when I get rescued …

What is the holdup with that, anyway? Okay, thinking opti-pessimistically, suppose Baumer led Image Team out into the forest to look for me, and they were all eaten by bears. Suppose that happened yesterday. Still, Marcia and Edna would have stayed back at camp to pout and seethe. And being women, they would be cowering in a car, where I hope they’d have the brains to shut the windows and try not to smell like bear food. But at what point do they decide, when nobody comes back because bears have feasted upon their weak, indecisive entrails, at what point will they figure out the thing to do is to go get proper HELP? Search & Rescue, have you heard of them? Do you have any idea what they do? They search! And then they rescue! What idiot would undertake to search for and rescue me without the aid of Search & Rescue? Let’s say the girls wait for a whole day and then they finally go get HELP. So tomorrow will be the day, tomorrow morning, the sky will be full of HELP in helicopters and seaplanes, searching for me and my car. HELP has infra-red SUV detectors! HELP has smart binoculars! HELP has upholstery-sniffing basset hounds! I’m not even hard to find, just follow the tire tracks from camp to my car. There’s not even any searching involved, just follow the line in the mud.

Oh look, it’s starting to rain.

7

BIGGER THAN BEARS: The Marv Pushkin Story!
Chapter Seven:
RESCUE AT LAST!

The next morning as the first stinging rays of the Alaskan sun found me bravely dying beneath my mighty Rover, despairing of seeing ever again my sweet, loving office or feeling the warm embrace of my condominium, as I held back a mighty tsunami of tears with the last strength in my desperate eyelids, clinging boldly to my dwindling rations of hope … all at once I heard a sound, the sweetest sound I’d ever known: the sound of my own name, shouted out in the forest. A search party! Using a combination of loud coughs and elaborate beer can rapping, I announced myself to the Alaskan Forest SWAT Ranger Search & Rescue team. But as these brave men approached my position, I warned them (via morse code) that my ferocious captor would not easily offer up his trophy. Indeed, just then, from out of nowhere, the crazed predator I’d come to know as Mister Bear charged furiously at the phalanx of rescue professionals, his muscular thighs pumping with ursine fury, an ancient battle-snarl echoing from his inhuman, animal, mammalian, beary snout!