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Show Acting Alone Page 426 tionship with his private physician, who slunk and hovered around the rooms, waiting on Sam and observing the considerable carnal portion of Sam. The giant black bowling ball of death that Bouncy had placed in Sam's torso had gotten smaller, blacker, shinier, harder, a permanent pebble of pain, the Army doctors apparently having been incompetent to remove all of whatever it was the bouncer had ruptured, leaving the present doctor with no recourse other than merely to treat the symptoms. Along with the best synthetic penicillin and tetracycline for encroaching peritonitis, and megavitamin dosages whose sole function seemed to be to make it easier and more rewarding to take a dump, or shoot the mud, or squeeze off a loaf, as they say, his personal physician also periodically fired Sam up with injections of this smooth, debonair time-release pharmaceutical methamphetamine. "Now, son," Sam's old agent sometimes protested too much over the phone, "you should know that my chur - er, organization is violently opposed to the use of artificial stimuli of any form or description. Except in a pinch." The old man's "organization" notwithstanding, Sam had access to unlimited amounts of the kind of speed that makes you certain that whatever it is you're writing (whatever, indeed) will one day wind up extravagantly, even reverently vellum-bound, like those gaudy gilt-edged Poes powdered forever now in the tunnels sunken under the ruins of Saint Paphnutius. But, in the writing, the amphetamine must necessarily chew up your corporeal self and spit it out dead, cold and grey as old spearmint. That is part of the deal, and you have to welcome it. Sam had started his tenure here at Holly Sugar the eagerest of beavers. That first time he'd boarded the Holly Sugar express elevator he'd felt only |
