Not every puzzle is intended to be solved.
Some are in place to test your limits.
Others are, in fact, not puzzles at all.
– Vera Nazarian
My name is Barker Ajax and everybody appears to be out to lunch.
I help myself to a blank copy of the Prostate Cancer Screening Questionnaire. A young woman, attractive yet competent-looking, I was hoping she might be the doctor, announces she is going to lunch.
Why is she telling me this, I wonder.
Overhead, I hear the eerie electronic click of a loudspeaker going live. Bouncing off the sanitary walls, mechanical words, in a distant clinical voice. I hear somebody remote say, “Mr. Ajax is ready to be drawn.”
‘Oh, shit,’ I remember thinking, ‘this is no time to do a caricature.’
I am so naïve sometimes. The last time I was in a similar situation, I was eighteen-years-old, humbly appealing in a peculiarly-athletic yet oafish farmboy way, and this traveling salesman lured me into his motel room with promises of, I can’t even remember. Free booze seems likely.
No arrows pointing the way out.
Snap! Startled by the pop of rubber. The suddenly swishy-seeming proctologist starts to grease his gloved hand. Petroleum jelly like clumped congealed cum and he looks like he could easily palm a basketball.
A veteran of foreign wars, I have had my body invaded before.
“You can breathe now.” I exhale.
My eyes remain bulged, imagine a cartoon wolf who sees a pretty girl.
“Abnormally large ejaculatory vessels,” the colorectal specialist announces.
Can’t decide whether I should feel proud or commence some serious worrying.
Sing or pray?
“Nothing to worry about.
“Another doctor with less talented hands than mine – nine dumb fingers, one smart one,” he stops, I was half expecting a twirl, and he proudly holds up the jellied index digit of his right hand, the finger looked to me about the size of a slalom water ski, “a guy like that wouldn’t even notice.”
And now I don’t know what to think.
“Prostate Exam Makes A Man Proud” is an excerpt from WAITING FOR WORD: A Collection of Eleven Incidents In A Day In The Life of a Writer With No Work Ethic. (1995)