"Buddies of Beelzebub" Friday, May 20th:
(Yet another one I forgot / was too pissed to upload at time of writing)
I thought I might as well apologise for this weekend's round of drunken phone calls. They would appear to have started sometime around 3:00am my time and continued through until noon of the next day. This was either Friday or Saturday...I really can't recall. This weekend's record for messages left on an answer machine was six, and is held by a certain couple from South West Wales...and I'm sure they won't mind me mentioning the fact that, well, they live in South West Wales. The weekend record for longest call, at approx 1.2 hours, goes to my father. I'm pretty sure I held it together for the most part of this 6.30am call (GMT), however, the fact that I've never ever called him before midday probably raised a few questions that will, in the fullness of time, require answers. The record - one which could possibly lead to a criminal record - for strangest call is still up for grabs. There are probably a few very confused and or upset people out there still trying to work out how Care in the Community could have gone so badly wrong and allowed one particularly sick and twisted individual onto the streets of Britain/Barbados with unfettered access to the public telephone system. Drop me a line before you made that call to your local Psychiatric Services department - let's talk first.
A quick roll call of apologies (for calls I remember):
Lyn - sorry for waking you
Philly - for bollocking on
Clare & Adam - a number of calls of minimal and worthless content
Frank - for making little sense and persisting when you clearly had other far better things to do - you are a gent
Sarah H - for multiple answer machine calls
The Gunther Bushells - for all six answer machine calls
The Potts & parents - can't quite remember if apology required
Nicky C - repeated answer machine calls
Ronaldo - talking utter crap
Dad - being the attentive son and thus extremely scary
Debs - talking film reviews at clearly the wrong time of day/night
Janine - hope you got to your office answer machine before anyone else on Tuesday morning!
Douglas - you never return my calls you bastard, so you deserve early morning abuse
Please don't feel offended if your name doesn't appear on this list. You were either sensible enough not to answer your phone or I was too drunk to hit the right keys in the correct order.
There was, however, one very satisfying sting in the tail for those of you who were less than pleased by my errant behaviour - at whatever stage of the weekend it was that my errant behaviour came to pass. Having sat on my veranda for a good 18 hours, and having consuming the brown rum, all of the white rum and most of the vodka (you know the point where you end up on tap water mixers) and having had no sleep for 36 hours, I eventually turned in/passed out. However, some hours later (exact number unclear) I awoke in a heart thumping, sweat oozing, eye popping, mind frazzling panic. And boy, I've ridden a few of these buddies of Beelzebub before, but this one was a real multi-headed screaming medusa of a beast, with doom emanating from each and every one of its hideous slithering scales. There was no reasoning with this baby, not even after 15 milligrams of two year old, orally ingested Diazapam. There is very little that can be done in a situation like this; when both reason and logic have been brought to bear, and both have been found wanting. The eminently sensible thing to do at this stage is to run...run like a bastard to somewhere you know possesses a more powerful pharmaceutical weapon to slay the beast, and hope that the powers that be see fit to sort you out. And so it was, racked with fear and shaking slightly, that I mounted my faithful scooter steed and made my way down the 15 or so miles of pothole ridden road to Bridgetown...and the Queen Elisabeth Hospital. Now some my consider this to be an extreme reaction, but as an agoraphobic living alone on an island in the Atlantic, a few miles off the coast of South America and more than a few thousand miles from home, I thought it was eminently sensible one.
Anyway, by the outskirts of Bridgetown the aging Diazapam that I had consumed earlier was beginning to kick in, or to be more accurate, ease in, and things where slowing down a touch - if 35mph on a scooter can seem any slower - and my vague recollection of the location of the Queen Mary Hospital was was getting very much vaguer than it already was. Rather than endlessly weaving my way through the back streets of Bridgtown for three hours - and believe me parts of Bridgetown are inauspicious enough during daytime, let alone once darkness has added its shadows and threat to the mix - I decided to seek help from what must have been the only on-duty police car in Barbados. This was, as it happens, sitting by the side of a road that I had passed up and own a number of times that night. Now, this could have been one of those "in hindsight not a wise move" moments, but fortunately, and most unlike any of my previous encounters with the boys in blue, it turned out to be quite the opposite. Clearly missing the wild but strangely numb look in my eyes, the occupants of said police vehicle calmly directed me to the big building in front of us with the huge sign saying 'hospital'.
I made my way to the entrance of A&E and parked up...only to be informed by a lone security guard that the large but totally empty car park was reserved for hospital employees only. I could of course have argued that my little scooter was neither causing an obstruction nor preventing an employee, critical to the effective running of the hospital, from parking and carrying out his or her life saving duties. However, I'm wise to this particular flavour of island behaviour, which differs from its British equivalent, where when an official instructs you to do something that is not totally necessary, the underlying motivation is a desire to exercise power. Here in Barbados, where, it has to be said, motivation is a abstract concept, officials are simply doing what they have been told to do. As a consequence there is about as much point in arguing as there would be in sharpening a biro. Now, those who know me well will be only too aware that I tend to have a theory for just about everything, or, at least that I have something to say on just about any subject that crops up in just about every conversation I enter into. Some, and for 'some' read very few, people see this as the product of an inquiring and perspicacious mind, others as an endless torrent of bullshit, and just because I have a theory or have something to say on a given subject, like the behaviour of security guards in different parts of the world, doesn't necessarily mean it holds any water...apparently. But on this occasion my theory was instantly proved correct, as I was instructed to park not in the empty staff car park...but directly in front of, and blocking, a set of fire escape doors flanking the main entrance. This seemed equitable solution given that in the event of fatalities arising from the blockage of this particular fire escape, neither of up would be held to account; Mr Security Guard had not been instructed to prevent people from parking in front of the fire escape and I had been instructed by an official to park there.
I re-parked and quickly made my way into reception. Here I was confronted with a sight that chilled my blood...an empty waiting room. Never in all my days have I seen such a weird sight, and as such I was spooked. Why, why was it empty? Three o'clock in the morning is prime bottle-in-the-head, glass-in-the-face drunken brawl territory, and no self respecting A&E (ER) department should be empty. I should, by rights, have been facing at least a three hour wait amongst a rag-tag motley crew of drunks and degenerates. What was going on. Had all the bars in Barbados shut that evening? Had convivial behaviour broken out on such an epic scale as to make late night emergency medical services totally redundant? Or had I, a hardened late night visitant of British A&E departments, finally stumbled on the truth...that the British have a predilection for mindless violence that is absent from my those upon whom we once visited organised imperial violence? Clearly they have learnt from our mistakes!
The large lady behind the heavily bruised and chipped Formica reception desk appeared half asleep...largely because she was half asleep, and with nothing else to do apart from stare at an empty reception area and a television mounted high on the wall tuned to an American cable home shopping channel, who could blame her. How different her union representative's job was to his or her British counterpart, having to argue, as he or she presumably did at the annual round of pay negotiations, that an inflationary pay rise could in no way compensate her for the hours of sleep she had to put in night after night, week after week. I gave her my details and was directed to sit...and wait for the doctor. I waited whilst someone tracked down a doctor and presumably roused them from their peaceful slumber. After five minutes the security guard from my car park encounter shuffled in, nodded at me, stretched and lay down, in a well practised fashion, across a run of five deeply contoured chairs with a good line of sight to the television. There was nothing to read, not even a copy of Woman's Weekly - or the Bajan equivalent - from the early eighties. Nor where there any health leaflets lying around or notice boards with staff rotas and public information posters to read and away the endless minutes. I sat back, adjusted my eyes to the fluorescent glare of the strip lighting above, focused on the muted television and tried to imagine what the heavily coiffured, orange tanned, manically smiling sales presenter on the shopping channel was saying. The graphic along the bottom of the screen stated that she was pitching a fruit and vegetable peeler, and she was certainly peeling up a storm as the mountain of discarded fruit and vegetable peel contested. Quite how she managed to keep up an interesting and informative narrative on what she was doing and how this simple piece of plastic with a blade could revolutionise the lives of her viewers, was a mystery to me. The only thing I could come up with is that she must have consumed a hideously large quantity of cocaine in make-up before she had come on. This could have worked, I guessed, but in my experience, only if the audience had consumed roughly the same hideously large quantity of cocaine and was roughly on the same wavelength as her and numb to much of what she was saying. Before I could ruminate on this interesting little theory any more and just as she was wrapping up her, by now, fifteen minute pitch for the wizzo, semi-automatic multi peeler, a large lady in a white coat appeared from behind a curtain and ushered me into a cubicle. 'What can I do for you?' she intoned. This was a good question, and, as the 15 milligrams of two year old, orally ingested Diazapam had belatedly, virtually totally eased in, in truth, the answer should have been, 'not a lot, please, go back to sleep'. But this would not have sounded right and besides, the chances of referral to the house psychiatrist and a late night trip to a padded cell loomed far too large. So, omitting the 15 milligrams of two year old, orally ingested Diazapam, and with a bit of twitching and wild darting eyes thrown in for good measure, I explained that I was having a panic attack.
Five minutes later and having been admonished for drinking far more than my body was accustomed too, I was shown the door...with a prescription for 20 milligrams of Diazapam. Result! 5 milligrams to the good.
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