THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY
BC PIRES
LIFE IMITATES art in the rest of the world, but in Trinidad, life imitates Westerns. No matter how bad things get, a Trini audience or electorate just knows that, in the last reel, either the cavalry or Kamla will ride een to save the day. And that faith remains unshaken no matter how many times they've voted for that party or seen that movie and know it's always the bandits that turn up, to rape anything still breathing and loot the corpses.
But this week I'm thinking my own life imitates Westerns completely.
On Tuesday morning, as the Grand Old Neo-Nazi Party was sizing up the US elections for its potential for American Kristallnacht, I entered the cancer ward at St James for my fourth chemo blast. If that's not a scene straight out of Shootout at the OK Corral, it'll do until one arrives, as Cormac McCarthy would say.
Maggot Republicans and chemo are persistent, like hatred, and have similar side effects. My pre-surgery chemo cycles comprised four 24-hour infusions, with two weeks between them, a schedule allowing just enough time to begin to lose the taste of lead pipe from your coffee before the next blast shovels iron filings back into everything; I've had betrayals by old friends that left a better taste in my mouth.
The chemo is abrasive and invasive. You feel it enter your bloodstream as the hot alien liquid chemical it is and often see it, too, as black marks on your skin. If you forget, fleetingly, the dread taste, a chemo burp will remind you; it's easy to imagine this stuff killing everything in its path, like the Russian army, or clinging to and incinerating everything it touches, like napalm.
And tell me the Republicans in the US weren't doing the same thing to democracy that FLOT was doing to my tumour on Tuesday.
Hundreds of maggot Republican election-deniers are likely to win. Not even in Nazi Germany did they so openly boast of their evil intent. There is nothing like hate emboldened.
You only have to look at the images of my tumour or any photo of their figurehead - grotesque, fat-arsed, fatheaded, stupid, proudly ignorant, self-obsessed, hoggish, hateful and emotionless - to understand why people never twig that their cause is evil. Maggot Republicans are as much of a cancer to democracy as the adenocarcinoma in my gullet is to me.
But I have chemo. And the promise of surgery.
They have the conviction that American Hitler was sent by God.
I hope you never find out firsthand how chemo works, but you spend two to three days physically tied by a plastic tube in your arm to something that looks like a mini-cash register on a mobile rack. (I am literally getting mine in the neck: my chemo going straight into my jugular vein via a port attached to my clavicle.) For 48-72 hours, chemicals are pumped into you. You spend hours shuffling from your hospital bed to the toilet, to empty the bladder that never stops being refilled with mostly toxic
