Franz Wright

The  Medicine Cabinet

It seemed to take half the day to reach the bathroom, dragging this skull like unto a kite, too, behind me, and I was about a quarter to dead. That little twinge I’d started out with? Off the smiley/frowny pain chart, children, my garden of scars. Now my whole body felt as if someone had been going at it with a baseball bat as I struggled to awaken this morning long ago. From having mastered and, I have this great fear, memorized the new manual of gender-correct English usage and just good old plain personal experience I can tell you the avoidance of mirrors represents one of humankind’s major ordeals among the stars, and I approached this medicine cabinet determined that there should be no eye contact, no full frontal glimpse of myself whatsoever. I knew that I looked like death getting ready to eat a cracker! Were you aware, incidentally, that heroin was invented by Bayer, the familiar aspirin company (thanks, Friedrich)? Or that it remained, in liquid form, an effective over-the-counter cough suppressant until its disappearance from the shelves of American pharmacies in 1910? One day I am going to start to cry and never stop until I die. So what. An hour later I could still be found there gnawing my way through the first gray pill, which was about the size of a pie and must have weighed ten pounds.