This is how I got my jaw caved in - no horse kick could’ve done this to me, no sir… it’s not a sad story either, don’t look like that, it’s better if you let me tell it. I was working down at the racetracks at the time - you weren’t even born, I know, they’ve built the local soccer hooligan place over it now, one of those cads broke his toe on a fencepost they didn’t dig up…
Yes, Napellus Racetrack is what it was called, back when that’s what everyone wanted: the races. Those stunted little jockeys in their livery with the horses’ tails dyed the same colors, painted women too: houndstooth up and down their thighs, a man your age would’ve liked that. How we all got to painting ourselves like Celts no-one really recalls, but soon everyone tired of having to stand off to one side to dye those horsetails Easter colors - the beasts nearly as leggy as the women, you’ve seen it. And the jockeys and owners were always complaining: “It’s faded, it’s too bright, the colors don’t match”, et cetera. That plus the hazards made it high pay, low age. Like me. I promise we’re getting to the denting-in, hang on.
A doctor by the name of Rancun came up with this neat little trick - a solution mostly of an inorganic dye and a chemical irritant, something that the body would reject. Intravenously injected the horse would get these little cysts or buboes around the tail and - wham! Colored carry-tin. Purple horse hair growing right from the root. That was the first color, a dolorous purple, the other ones came after. Well that just tripled the craze - now everyone was dyeing and painting themselves like mad, and I was one of the few to try to bend Dr. R’s ear and make the switch from hauling sloshing dye buckets to scurrying around like a greasy little doctor, white coat and syringes and all. He was no hippocrat, that I’ll say that much, and a lot of the other boys wound up quitting or too sick to work. To a horse doctor everything looks like a horse.
Of course all these needles and syringes opened everything up to rampant cheating, how this was overlooked I don’t know. Steroids have always been the drug of choice in the horse-fixing community, but the poorer ones would pretend to go in for a last-minute injection and mix it with capsaicin, garlic extract, any extra irritant to make the animals ornery. And of course I was in on it- of course! The hazards didn’t get any less and the pay not much more, and the medical training under Dr. R was scant as it was, what could I do? When you’re alone in the mixing room, the ochre looks the same no matter what it has in it.
Again, is this the reason I’ve got my half-steel smile? No. I worked on all of them - Easy E, Cottoneye, Chicago Manual of Style, Vitamin K, never got caught. But I remember the day - a Sunday, the church bells rang eight minutes early. A local religious group came and tried to muck up the day’s proceedings (anti-gambling, what do you expect) - their plan was to mix gunfire in with the real starting shot, causing delay in panic and response from authorities, but of course bets were still being placed when the first shots ran out. Chaos, like someone dropped an easel. And what did I do? Rush back to the mixing room of course, to retrieve my doped belongings, when - WHAM! Dr. R clocked me with a truncheon round a blind corner. He felt terribly sorry for me, of course, and I was glad he didn’t use his .38 special like he had on some of those fanatic monks. He managed to hold the authorities at the crime scene while I, per his instructions, poured everything - dyes, drugs, notes, textbooks, horse tranquilizer - into a big parcel and mailed it to his clinic. The tracks had everything - post office, barbershop, department store. Funny thing was they never did show up at Dr. R’s address. Well, this is me.
***
An elderly but spry gentleman sitting across from a tired-looking teen straightened up and greeted the nurse that called his name under the sign that said EMERGENCY - WAITING. His robotic, clicking steel jar was visibly stamped with BOSTON SCIENTIFIC down the left side. It was functioning perfectly, but as he turned into intake a shrewd observer could see a long, printer-cyan streak up one forearm from elbow to wrist.
***
The boy didn’t find this tale very interesting and would never find anything very interesting again. He had overdosed on a new anti-narcolepsy drug called a “beta blocker”, essentially inhibiting production of those electrical brain signals called beta waves in favor of alpha waves. His glassy eyes also showed no response when the orderly found him an hour later.
-- Ann Mauser is a nature enthusiast and mother living in the Carolinas.