The French Riviera, Vlad the Impaler & Liza Minnelli
Monday was an event.
Since I’ve been living the life of leisure and relaxed luxury, I’ve been waking at a civilized hour – somewhere between 8:30 and 9:30. It’s traditionally when Gentlemen rise… those commoners who are chained to the work-a-day drudgery of being known as those “early riser types” – wouldn’t know whereof I speak, suffice to say – my way, is the right way.
There’s nothing you can do before 9AM that can’t be done after…. oh yes, go ahead, I’m sure someone will pipe up with “well, how about seeing the sun rise?” To you I say, movies, tv, photos, paintings, sonnets, poems, enchanting period piece novels, in most cases they’re all superior to the real thing anyway. Besides I’ve seen it… you wake up early, its dewey and a bit chilly, real quiet, and the sun isn’t up, then, after a few minutes… it’s up. Then it’s the same thing the next day and so on….
No Sun…
Sun…
OK we get it….
Well look at how I’ve prattled on…I started out telling you about when I get up, I told you that to tell you this – in the name of Sweet Baby Jesus on a Tuna Melt, what possible reason is there to schedule an echocardiogram at 7am? Seriously, to what end? Listen doctors – at night my heart shuts off – it doesn’t really get going again until about 8am, so any test before then will pretty much come up bone dry. But they insisted, so what can I do? I go.
For those of you who’ve never had an echocardiogram, let me give you a description of one. You walk into the room and then this random dude walks in behind you. I say random because he has no identification, he isn’t wearing one of those reassuring white coats, or the colourful scrubs, some medical professionals wear. He’s in shorts and a golf shirt.
On top of that, I can’t emphasize how disturbingly ugly the golf shirt was – I seriously doubt any respectable golf course would let him tee off in that shirt, Ok maybe in Vegas or perhaps Thailand, or maybe The 2011 Liberace/Liza Minnelli Invitational at Rolling Meadows – but nowhere else. Really, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it was skewing all the readings from the machines, with some kind of weird, ugly vibe it gives off.
Anyways he strolls in and says “hi, take your shirt off and lay down.” Now when I worked on the Riviera, I would make thousands by doing just that very thing for wealthy european women – but here… well… it’s a whole different story. The Gigolo market has all but dried up for me …
So I did as he asked, then he turns out the lights, uh-huh, Riviera flashback, then he takes out a bottle of warm lotion and squirts it onto my chest, uh-huh, even stronger flashback – the room is lit by the soft purple, blue glow of the machine and the light of the “wand” he uses to probe my most intimate secrets. Then he sits and leans over, asking me to scoot closer to him and lay on my side, I do… he raises the wand and the machine begins ever so gently humming, he moves it towards me, I brace myself, slightly arching my back. He gets within inches of my well oiled chest…
… then he proceeds to dig that sucker into my ribs, like I’m dirt and he’s looking for Gold in the Yukon pan-handle circa 1886. I mean he is really going to town and I can’t be sure if it was two or three, but I know he broke a number of my ribs with that first jab.
I felt like asking if it wouldn’t just be easier to have my tied to 4 horses so he can have me drawn and quartered – then taking a couple of pictures with his iPhone. But I didn’t, because he was firing that wand all over my mid-section, and rational thought was quickly in retreat… seriously at one point I think I may have fainted, or at the very least I cried out, like a frightened Scarlett O’Hara…. I just remember shouting something about Tara and how I was willing to take the pain if it meant saving Tara…. weird right?
So after he takes a break from carving the ten commandments into my chest with his rusty chisel, he tells me to roll over and lay on my back, I rightly guess this was so he could perform his “killing maneuver” and then he goes to town on me from above, and again with the searing pain.. after about 15 minutes, Vlad the Impaler puts the wand back into its cradle and gives me a couple of towels and says “please clean yourself off” – another Riviera flashback – Hey pal, I wasn’t the one driving the final railroad spike into anyones chest just now, maybe you should towel off, then go ahead and burn that ugly-ass golf shirt.
.
In reality, I thanked him and left.
OK well I think that’s enough for today, but there is still so much more to tell you about including the guy I saved, who then died and my actual doctor visit…. it’s all so exciting so Y’all come back now, Ya hear!
Have a Great Day