Witness the wonderful 80s, prosperity, happiness, national
unity, and the benefits of high technology.
Ronald Reagan was in office. He
employs supply-side economics and Loeffler’s Economic curve and corporations grow,
and the gross economic product increases.
He might have gotten shot because he suggested a flat-line tax, but it doesn’t
matter anyway because he was prepared and survived another day. The eighties rolled by like a grand tsunami,
and then they were over, and the baby boomers started to die and Generation X took
over.
Where was the Wracks?
He probably waits in the ready room in surgery, sipping coffee and
eating doughnuts before his next assignment.
He is not aware of the booming economy or Ronald Reagan’s pretty
daughter who is a denizen of Tranquil Hills too, just one state away. Today he
meets the guy from NYU. Like all ivory
tower iconoclasts, the guy from NYU is tall, with Sheldon-Kretchmer ectomorphic
habitus, in green surgical garb with a green hat and a large light on his
forehead. He seems to be made of Norwegian
or Anglo-Saxon stuff, and he moves slowly, turns slowly, and begins to talk to Dr.
Wracks.
The apparatus in question is situated on top of a securely
movable cart with feet that lock to the floor.
A long spigot, about six inches long and one-quarter inch in diameter blends
into a square body with two stainless steel tubes arising in parallel from the
far end. The entire fixture is made of
24-carat gold and must be worth at least one hundred thousand dollars in ingot value.
We had to go to gold says the man. All other metals get brittle and crack at
the temperature of liquid nitrogen.
Assisting me at the station with the patient in a stereotactic headset
and temperature-regulated vest, you will instill liquid nitrogen into the
device which inserts into the brain of a patient with a large glioblastoma
multiforme tumor. The liquid nitrogen
will freeze the tumor, thus destroying it and the expanding gasses will exit
through the other aperture in the device, through a tube into the ambient air
after being filtered. I will monitor the
entire procedure, in real-time through a fluoroscope and then you will bring
the filter unit to Pathology for analysis.
Don’t forget to tell Dr. Santos I said hi.
Today is a slow day.
Dr. Wracks will have to settle for a tendon release rhabdoplasty in a
woman stenographer with carpal tunnel syndrome. The plastic surgeon is Chinese and he tells
the Wracks he will make five thousand dollars for each radial release and I
should be a cosmetic surgeon just like him.
All surgeons say the same thing.
They want you to think that the tons of money they make is worth the constant
stress and subterfuge they encounter daily in the e-coli-infested surgical
rooms that used to be sanitized in the 19th century with
phenol. They don’t use phenol anymore,
only cheap emergency rooms in the inner city put up with the smell. Poor people can’t complain much. Dr. Lister tosses in his grave and they are
thinking of installing black light panels on the ceilings to bombard the DNA of
microbes when the operating room is not in use.
Dr. Wracks looks at the board. He
is up for an Orthro procedure after this where a Saudi in a one hundred-thousand-dollar
Mercedes Benz went off the Brooklyn bridge and ended up in the drink. He is broken up well. Dr. Ich is his surgeon. Dr. Wracks pulls another Marlboro cigarette
from the pack on his fanny belt and lights up.
It is going to be a long one and nicotine and caffeine will get me
there.
It is hot and it is summer in the smog-infested central
inner city of LA. The Wracks wears a
beret and his cheap glasses bear flecks of paint in the shade of beige. He now is an apartment redeveloper in the
inner city and drinks a lot of Coca-Cola.
He likes to roll paint because a sprayer gets paint on everything. His two helpers hide and get some sleep
underneath the kitchen sink and in the hall closet because they are illegal
immigrants and work two jobs to support their families. On payday, the Wracks brings them to Western
Union and they wire their paychecks directly to their families in Central America. These people live five to a room and live on
McDonald’s cheeseburgers for sustenance.
His main man Ramon says that since he doesn’t live on beans and rice
anymore, and he eats quarter pounders all his hair is falling out but the
Wracks don’t dare to tell him otherwise.
He is happy, his brother offered to sponsor him for citizenship if he
agreed to work as a slave for seven years, and the Wracks light up a filter less
Pall Mall to keep going and then extinguish the smoke and put the but in his
front pocket. Everyone is happy, it is the eighties, and the Wracks is happy to
have a job and make some money. He couldn’t
cut it as a surgeon and they let him go.
He was tired of blood squirting in his face and having to shower after
each procedure. The Wracks wonders what
happened to Ronald Reagan’s daughter. His friend from the upper class whose
father was on the medical faculty of the big U would drive by the Reagan house
and shoot all his nightlights out and then scream like a crow and smoke some
black hash. She had pretty dark hair and
the eighties are up in flames and soon we will experience Clintons and the white
house a three-ring circus. President Clinton’s
wife was the sister of an infamous rock singer of the eighties who turned
southern California upside down with his antics.
I never wanted to be a doctor in the first place thinks the
Wracks as he drinks a coke and takes some Herbalife ephedra. I am just not nice enough or stable enough in
this great big, wonderful world. I hear
some old timers say that the quality of life was better in the eighteen
hundreds but they are all dead now and it doesn’t matter.