“No. And I do hope you haven’t gotten me up here for that, Mr. Victor. I came to pump your stomach, not to make change.”
“Sorry,” I mumbled. The hell with it! It isn't often one has the opportunity to feel like a millionaire with money to burn. That’s how I felt then, as I flushed eight five-dollar bills and three tens down the toilet.
I tottered into the other room. The doctor and his machine were waiting. The stomach pump looked dusty, as if it hadn’t been used in a long time. The doctor looked much the same. I felt a moment’s sympathy as I got a vision of him sitting beside the pump in some subterranean basement of the hotel, waiting, waiting for a call it must have seemed to him would never come, feeling superfluous and filled with self-doubts about is role in life. But now the call had come; at last his existence was justified; he rubbed his hands together and got down to work.
I’ll skip the messy details. When the stomach pumping was over, the doctor turned to me and delivered his professional advice. “You shouldn't use strong laxatives without consulting your family physician first,” he clucked. “I myself always advise my patients against any but the mildest purgatives.”
“Ex-Lax,” I muttered weakly, still groggy from the ordeal.
“No.” He shook his head. “You took something about fifty times stronger than Ex-Lax and you must have taken a lot of it in some concentrated form. However, in future I would recommend one dose of Ex-Lax for regularity. No more, however. Your intestinal tract has a lot of recovering to do before it’s back to normal. Also, if you should attempt suicide again—”
“It wasn’t a suicide attempt,” I protested in a voice that was still shaky.
“No? Well, if that’s the way you want it, Mr. Victor. Still, in future I'd personally appreciate it if you'd stick to the usual sleeping pills. It's a lot less messy. I'm not as young as I used to be and I have a nervous stomach myself, and I really can’t take this sort of thing."
“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “But it really wasn’t suicide.”
“Of course not,” he said soothingly. “All the same, I'm going to see to it that you have a ‘round-the-clock nurse to stay with you for the next couple of days. I’ll see that she’s sent up right away,” he said over his shoulder as he wheeled his apparatus out of the room.
The nurse arrived soon after he left, and she was a pleasant surprise. She was a Beverly Topless staff nurse. She wore a crisp, starched white uniform and cap—with the upper part of the uniform topless. I could see why many of her patients might take a turn for the nurse.
“Well, how are we?” she asked in that chicken-soupy plural bye which all nurses put their patients in their proper place—-a place somewhere between infancy and pre-nursery where toilet training is a way of life.
“We’re just fine,” I told her enthusiastically, my voice not quite so weak any more as I ogled her pink and white blossoms.
“Are we ready for our bedpan now?” she inquired.
“Never again!” I groaned at the thought.
“All right. Then we’ll have our sedative and we'll tuck us in and we’ll go sleepy-bye.” She produced a hypodermic needle the size of a sidewalk drill.
“What’s that?” I panicked.
“That’s our sedative. Now, We’re not going to be silly, are we? We know it isn’t going to hurt. We’re going to be a man, aren’t we?"
“We’ll never make it,” I opined, as her breast bounced off my nose when she bent over to give me the injection
“Now, we’re not going to be frisky, either,” she said firmly. “And remember, this isn't going to hurt us a bit.” She jabbed the needle into the alcohol-daubed target area of my upper arms.
“OUCH!” The hell it wasn’t going to hurt! She had the light and tender touch of a stabbing Ghurka gone berserk with a kris!
She ignored my reaction. “That’s a nasty sunburn we have there,” she observed.
“It’s not a sunburn. I scalded myself.”
“Well, we certainly are self-destructive, aren’t we? And I must say that our suicide attempts make up in originality what they may lack in stick-to-itiveness."
It was something, I suppose. Also, it was the sort of thing I was to get used to during the next few days. Nursey’s pluralisms were a constant stream of dubious praise-the sort of golly-gees a nanny uses to encourage a not-too-bright child to remember what the potty chair is, there for. In truth, Nursey did have a thing for the bedpan and her most enthusiastically editorial “we” was reserved for my performance of the most basic functions. Indeed, sometimes it seemed that my eliminations were her entire raison d’être.
Her services only came to an end when circumstances arose that made it necessary for me to leave the security of bed and her topless ministrations and once again confront the hostile world of double-double agenting. This happened when the hotel barber showed up one afternoon to give me a shave. I hadn't called for him, but by now I realized that he was my contact with Castor Oil.
He nicked my jaw neatly while slicing off my two-day growth. He slapped a large Band-Aid over the wound and departed without apology. As soon as Nursey left me alone I peeled off the Band-Aid. As I’d suspected there was a coded message between the gauze and the adhesive.
I called Putnam and arranged to have the message picked up and decoded. Another day passed before he got back to me with the results. “EX-LAX ELIMINATION SET UP TELETHON” was what the message said. Telethon? What telethon? It didn't make any sense to me.
But within a matter of hours, it did make sense. It started with a phone call from Donna Carper, the unattractive leg-girl for the queen of the Hollywood columnists, Ella Hooper. “Hello, Steve,” she greeted me, “how’s your acne?”
“Huh?”
“Your acne? All cleared up?”
“Acne is not exactly what I’ve been suffering from," I told Donna.
“Sure it is. You had acne and now it's cured. Right?"
“Wrong. I never had acne.”
“Yes, you did. But thanks to the researches and treatments of the Acne Foundation, you're all cured now. And you’re going on TV to tell the world at large about their wonderful work.”
“I am?”
“Yep. It’s one of Ella’s pet charities, and she needs a man who’s not too well-known to the public to get on the squawk-box and show how he was cured. He should be a good-looking man with a clear complexion so the difference can be appreciated. I told Ella about you and she agreed that you’d be just perfect.”
I got the message. In Hollywood you had to be pretty big to take a chance on turning down a request from Ella Hooper. There was nothing tangible that she might do for me at the moment, but I knew that a word from her would be enough to turn off most of the important people in Hollywood where I was concerned. Besides, it was obvious that this must be the telethon referred to in the message.
“All right,” I agreed. “So I’ve recovered from my terrible acne condition. But what’s this about showing the difference?”
“Louis Ching will be at the studio to take a picture of you before the show. He'll blow it up and doctor it so that your face is covered with pimples. Later in the show the picture will be shown and then you’ll come out and describe your miraculous recovery thanks to the Acne Foundation.”
“How will I know what to say?”
“Idiot cards. There’ll be a prompter to one side of the camera flipping them for you. All you have to do is read them out loud. Will you do it?”
“Okay,” I agreed.
“Fine. I’ll tell Ella. She won't forget.” Donna went on to tell me where the studio was and what time I was to be there.
“Okay,” I repeated again when she was finished. “I'll see you there.”
“I’m not sure if I can make it or not,” Donna replied. “But don’t worry. Most of the gang will be there. You won’t be lonely.”