WHY I HATE MY GENERAL PRACTITIONER

    Doc Korver was a snake-oil salesman. He’d tap your elbow with a tomahawk hammer and diagnose you with noodle-bone syndrome, and then he’d upcharge you fourty-five dollars for an unnamed prescription that was only available at a back-alley pharmacy twenty miles away. 

And of course you’d do it, too. You’d drive all the way out to an Rx building with a faded sign missing half its letters and housing birds in the ones that remained, pull up to the poorly-designed drive-thru window, and fork over what was supposed to be your weekend golf money for a brown paper bag and a bottle of placebos. Then you’d rev your ‘64 Bonneville and curse the Pentagon for scheduling a thunderstorm in the middle of your drive home.

That’s what I did--or should I say do-- on a regular basis. And it’s not because I enjoy the insipid rural trips that serve no purpose other than to guzzle up my gas tank; it's because I'm a hypochondriac who’d swallow cyanide if I thought it could cure my headache. Everyone in Green Town would burst into a fit of hysteria if a member of the hoi polloi coughed, as fatuous as that may sound. We were all convinced, for some reason or another, either a result of being surrounded by corn or living in the wake of the apocalypse, that an unexpected bruise was a sign of cancer and that Doc Korver was the only one who could fix it.

I think it’s because he’s the only practitioner in town, which means his business is likely afloat from necessity instead of his qualifications. He has a myriad of phony-looking doctor’s plaques hanging up around his office, some of which are signed with a pink ball-point pen and most likely designed in Microsoft Office Suite. I don’t know what kind of electorate would ink his name in Springtime Lilly Blush, but certainly not anyone I would trust.

And yet here I was, trusting Doc Korver with my life. It’s a paradox I can’t understand, perhaps because I’m too stupid and never got my GD, but a part of me thinks there’s something more to it. But then again, I know how easy it is for rural Midwesterners to turn into tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracists. When your town has more corn per capita than living, breathing humans, it’s not wholly uncommon to make friends with inanimate objects just to say sane. 

“Have you finished your bottle of Pylosix?” Doc Korver asked at my appointment last Friday. “I can give you a refill and maybe prescribe you something else.”

“Something else?!” I stammered with fright. “What the hell else do I need a prescription for? You told me I’m in fairly good shape, apart from my varicose vein.”

The doctor strapped on his latex gloves and began pulling apart my eyelids. “I sense a hint of fatigue in you, Micah.” He said methodically, a shrink diagnosing on his couch.  “It appears to me like your eyes are turning yellow.”

There was a series of tongue clickings and heavy sighs as Doc Korver jammed a flashlight into his mouth and proceeded to blind me with the little bulb. He grunted with contemplation as I began to see the outlines of Heaven in my vision, squiggles of cherubs and writhing like phages on a test-tube slide.

“Wha…what’s wrong?” I choked out. “Do you think I’m gonna go blind?”

“No, no, I wouldn’t say that.” He said contritely. “It’s just a minor case of jaundice. Should be cured up right quick with the right antibiotics. I know a place out in Blue Pine.”

“Aw, nuts! Blue Pine!?” I said a prayer for my Bonneville just then. “Isn’t there anything closer?”

“Not unless you wanna trust the krocks over at Walgreens.” Doc Korver strapped on a head mirror for no reason other than to look professional. He grabbed a notepad hand-stamped with his personal logo of two apples next to a pill bottle and began to scribble over the tragically phallic insignia. “Those people only exist for a quick buck, you know. Don’t let yourself be fooled by big companies, Max.”

“Micah.”

“Micah.” The doctor finished his incantation and handed it over with the bold assumption I’d be able to make out what it said. “Right there’s your ticket to health. Another bottle of Pyrosix for the vein, and two bottles of Rolormoxyprofin for the jaundice. You’ll be spry as a young chicken in no time, just you wait.”

“Alright then.” I folded the tiny pink paper and slipped it into my pocket, then fished out my wallet for the inevitable bill. Doc Korevr was already looming over me with a hand outstretched.

“That’ll be one-oh-five ninety-five.”

                                                                    ________

I got to chatting with my neighbor Willie and it turns out he was also prescribed Rolormoxyprofin, but for a different reason. Although he didn’t feel comfortable going into specifics (which I suppose he gave me anyway), he needed another Viagra-adjacent stimulant after the last one caused a blood clot and turned his dingaling black. I assumed Rolormoxyprofin was a panacea pill-- either that or Doc Korver was using it as a multipurpose remedy because he didn’t know what else to prescribe.

That should’ve been my first sign to cancel my appointment at the Blue Pine pharmacy and spare my Bonneville thirty minutes of asphalt, but I was so caught up with the prospect of having jaundice that I ended up making the begrudgingly bleak trip anyway. Every time I considered canceling I imagined my eyes turning into cheeseballs and falling out and rolling into my hands, dripping in ocular fluid and feeling like clam-chowder phlegm. Taking the pills just seemed like less of a risk.

But the day after I finished my first bottle, Doc prescribed me an extra-strength refill that was only available in Yellow Meadows-- that should’ve been my second sign. He said my case of jaundice was a persistent son of a bitch, and that the way to kick its ass was a double-trouble sugar dose.

“Do I really need to do this?” I asked as the appointment ended.

“Yep,” Doc said matter-of-factly. “Yes, you really do.”

“Well alright. How much do I owe you?”

Of course, I forked over another Franklin and coaxed my dear old Betty back into the rustic tundra of Green Town the very next day. Every time we drove through a stretch of land where signs of life were as scarce as they would’ve been on Mars if the government wasn’t hiding E.T. existence, I said a silent prayer that my Bonneville wouldn’t drop dead on the road. Not only was the nearest payphone an ocean’s length away, but the clouds were growing darker by the second, swirling into a chainsmoker’s Sunday afternoon before my very eyes.

Once the rain began to batter down, navigating through the mud became a lethal endeavor. I must’ve missed my turn along the way because I wound up trailing a barbed wire fence that didn’t align with my map.

“Gah, shit!” I slapped Betty’s steering wheel with frustration. “Where the hell is this place?”

I eased into a crawl and began to study the steel snake coiling around its wooden posts, stretching far into the future and back into the past. With the rain coming down in a cataract sheet, I could only make out about ten feet in either direction, but my gut told me this mysterious fence was more than it let on.

“What in the hell?”

I dared to crank down the passenger window to see outside more clearly, letting in a swarm of pellets that stung my face with liquid needles.

There, beyond the barbs and further out into the pasture, stood a lonesome roadway sign rocking gently in the breeze. Weeds fawned over the spokes in the ground, curling towards the sky in a verdant mess of thorns, all pointing to a faded jumble of letters faded greatly by the ages.

                  GREEN TOWN: SITE OF 2,000

Below was a tiny orange biohazard sign scrawled over by graffiti and a gang tag that read “mojo dawgz.” I took a moment to admire the penmanship of the bubble-letters before returning to the original problem:

What did this sign mean, and why was it here?

The first thing that struck me as odd was the placement of quotation marks around the town. Unless I was mistaken, most towns only had their names on their welcome signs---and were underscored with population number inat not a site statistic. Not only that, but I’d never seen the trifecta of crescents brandished so abashedly to the public; this sign, almost Lynchian in nature, made my stomach churn at the possibility of its implications.

Were we all poisoned by radiation? And if so, where was it coming from? Were chemtrails actually real?

 It all felt oddly fanatical-- me sitting there in the rain, droplets pelting my face and entrenching Betty’s poor leather seats while I took everything in through the twisted looking-glass of a dream. At that point I’d completely forgotten about my kamikaze mission to Yellow Meadows and promptly turned around before both the sign and I got swept up into the black-licorice tornado brooding on the horizon.

                                                                              ________

“Ya ever see that sign?” I asked Willie the very next day. Luckily Green Town managed to evade the visceral storm that took out some northern part of Alabama. “That big ol’ blue thing, sitting on Larson and Elm?”

“Huh?” Willie raised a wiry eyebrow that was thicker than his mustache. “What in tarnation are yew talkin’ about? And why the hell were you out so far anyway? Larson’s on the very edge of town. No one in their right mind would go out there with no good reason.”

I explained how I was supposed to Yellow Meadows but ended up too far north.Willie just shook his head.

“Nah, I don’t believe yew. Ain’t nothin’ weird about Green Town. Nothin’ ever happens here, it’s all borin’ as shit.” Willie slapped me on the back a little too hard. “Yew prob’ly just saw things your brain made up cause yew were scared. Scary things happen when yer freakin’ out. If I got lost in a storm I’d be losin’ my marbles too.”

                                                                 ________

Doc Korver prescribed me more pills the next time I saw him, and then more pills after that. Within a month I had a rotating spice cabinet with a myriad of lotions and potions I took as both preventative measures and to cure whatever obscure illnesses my body sprouted overnight. A part of me was tempted to flush every lozenge down the toilet in fear of the pills being the source of my melancholy, but I never found the strength to do it.

After all, what if I was the crazy one? The doctor wouldn’t be making me sick on purpose, right? 

So many mental gymnastics turned my brain into a fourth grader’s oobleck experiment. I never took Doc Korver as a Munchausen syndrome freak, but that old adage about the people you least expect stabbing you in the back was tickling the back of  my brain. I watched Scream far too recently to avoid making connections.

And as soon as I willed myself to end it all, hovering over my toilet one morning with a nonsensical amount of yellow bottles cluttered in my arms like a giant plastic baby, Willie next door came down with an illness. The next time I saw him, he was hacking like a toddler with a cowlick and puking like a college girl at her very first frat party. Within a couple days his wife had it too, and then everyone else on the block, and before I knew it a full-fledged pandemic had burst like a blood capsule and tainted the heart of Green Town.

“It’s cuckoo-bananas,” Willie told me over the phone. I listened to him howl with the power of the Big Bad Wolf--it sounded like he just coughed up every organ in his body. “One minute I’m fine, and then next-- BAM! I’m lyin’ in bed in a fetal position, freezin’ my ass off and sweatin’ out all the water in  my system. I damn near looked like a raisin by the followin’ morning.”

“Whoa.” I replied. “That sounds scary.”

“Sure as hell was. I still don’t feel too good, to tell yew the truth.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Hope I don’t die, I guess. What other choice do I really have?”

In the wake of this frighteningly new and untreatable illness, I began to religiously take my medicine with every meal along with the sign of the cross, metaphorically digesting the holy spirit as repentance for every sin I’ve committed. Maybe, I thought, in a manic lapse of judgment, this recondite illness would somehow skip over me if I said enough Hail Mary’s. I found myself guzzling Pylosix up like Fruit Adventure TicTacs and then mawing and mewling for the doc to give me anything else that would bolster my immune system.

“I simply can’t do it.” He told me when I asked. “I just don’t have the means.”

“But why?”

“You know why.”

To Doc Korver’s credit, his janitorial office was bursting at the seams only a week after the outbreak, and amongst the flock of new and returning patients, he simply couldn't dole out medicine that didn’t exist. Despite being Green Town’s most lovable and influential mountebank (because we were all subconsciously aware he may have been feeding us sugar pills after all) he still didn’t have the power to demand a production surge for Topoloxin and Zerocolotussin.

But I really just wanted him to.

“Please. Just maybe one more bottle of Pylosix. Nobody has to know. You run your own practice-- you can slip it to me under the radar.”

“Sorry, buster. No can-do.” The doctor shook his head apathetically and turned towards the exit door. “I’m gonna step out to give you a moment to change. Put on that paper gown and I’ll be back in a sec.”

“Alright.”

I stripped off my clothes under the fluorescence of the overhead lights, feeling like a newly-skinned chicken on the chopping block. Fearing the mirror over the sink was secretly two-way glass, my cheeks began to burn at the thought of Doc Korver staring at my pallid and pasty flesh from the other side and fenangled my way into the awkward paper dress that was clearly designed for a Flat Stanley character. Taped up and ready to go, I began to mill around the office and poke at the materials.

And that’s when I saw the clipboard.

It was buried underneath a coffee-stained stack of another patient’s blood tests (thank god they weren’t mine) and consisted of nearly 200 names, aptly accounting for every resident of Green Town and scrawled in a nearly illegible font. As a self-proclaimed Friendly Fellow of the community, I recognized nearly everybody on the list, including Mrs. Havisham and her tragically ugly baby. Next to their names were a list of recent drugs they’d been prescribed, followed by either a green check or a red ex in the next column over.

Not fully comprehending what I’d just stumbled upon, I instinctively began to flip through the M’s until I found my own name in the roster. A weighted sigh escaped my lungs at the sight of a reassuring check mark-- although I had no idea what it meant, I knew it couldn’t have been bad. There wasn’t a single instance in history where a neon-green kachow meant anything other than good news.

But what about the rest? I wondered. What did the exes symbolize? Did it mean they had an adverse reaction to the drugs they were prescribed? Or perhaps it represented whether or not the pills they took were effective. Could Doc Korver be testing out medication>

“Ya all set?” As if on cue, the doc burst through the door and sent me catapulting through the roof. “Sorry I took so long. Bernie just went into cardiac arrest.”

“What?!” I nearly choked on my own tongue at that. I’d never seen a doctor proclaim the loss of a patient so flippantly.

“Yeah, a real shame. I think it’s a side effect of this bug that’s going around.”

“Yeah, no shit! People are dying!” I stammered in stuptor. “Jimmy down the block just passed away. Whatever this damn flu-thing is, it’s killing people off like flies. For all I know, today could be my last day on Earth. Oh sweet heavens!”

“Calm down!” The Doc waved a latex hand. “You’re not gonna die, Micah.”

I closed my eyes and tried to recall whether or not there was an ex or a check next to Jimmy Malcom’s name.

“And how do you know that?” I finally asked.

“Because I just know.” Doc Korver winked, and probably smiled below his surgical mask. “I am a doctor, after all.”