Read Online Magnificent Vibration by Rick Springfield - Free Book Online Page B

sister briefly after they’d pumped her stomach and shot her full of something called Naloxene or Naloxone. She didn’t look like she was alive, so pale and fragile, with cables and wires running from her small body to vital life-sign machines bedside. I couldn’t tell if she was breathing or not. She didn’tappear to be. Her eyes were closed and with her head lolling to one side she gave me the impression that this is what a dead person must look like. And that I had been too late. Guilt comes naturally to me. A nurse has hustled us out into the waiting room saying the doctor is on his way to assess her condition. It sounds ominous to me and I hate the tone of it but at least she isn’t telling us they’ll send the body home after they’ve harvested her organs and given her clothes to Goodwill. Now contrition and despair are winding their way like boreal, binary serpents up my spine and into my brain no matter how many ways I come up with to free the damn peanut M&M’s.
    If I hadn’t been at that stupid church trying in vain to get Woody some female attention or ingratiating my little ass to some Mormon mucky-muck and if my pea-brained parents hadn’t picked tonight to try and settle some scores, I would have seen what was going on with Josie sooner. Or I might have been able to talk her down off her desolate ledge. I could usually make her smile, even if I couldn’t chase the demons away completely. And now all my selfishness, all my abhorrent degenerate pursuits, and my fucked-up, eternally combative parents have caused the death of my beautiful sister. The only one I really cared about anyway. Hot tears sting my eyes and burn my cheeks at the realization that I will probably never see her alive again. I am so goddamn angry. I decide right then and there that I am done with the Mormons. I am done with the Presbyterians. I am done with my loony parents. And I am DONE with girls and their wanton disregard and toying with my and Woody’s heart. Forever!! In my Josie’s memory and in honor of her sweet, tormented and much too short life. Done!!! Finito! Terminado! Expletum! Finished!! My new life will begin here and now!! A grand and staggeringly significant celibacy! A brand-spanking-new and meaningful destiny that will heal the cosmos in honor of my precious and never-to-be-forgotten sister!
    So who should walk past the waiting room window pushing a small trolley and dressed in a fairly tight-fitting, non-regulation nurse’s outfit, awesome hoo-ha’s mocking my freshly uttered declaration that I have just sworn on the memory of my precious sibling in four languages (and obviously God is in on this and having a really good laugh as well) but none other than Dracula herself!!! The intoxicating Mormon hot-hand-on-my-hot-thigh recruiting goddess. Woody springs to attention before she even clears the window and I go straight to hell. I move with such speed through the waiting-room door that no radar system on earth would be able to track me, so mom and dad don’t even look up. I almost bump into her, or more accurately, because I am still a kid and relatively short, her awesome hoo-ha’s.
    “Hi . . . (she never told me her name), it’s ME!” I say, beaming, stifling my present broken heart for this until now very absent succubus.
    She looks kind of bothered that I’m in her way and holding up the delivery of her much-needed plastic pee collectors, and says, “Do you need something?”
    “Yes I need us to go forth and multiply for the Mormons” I want to say but don’t. My whole damn tortuous libido-driven devotion circuit is reconnected and firing away, despite my newly sworn oath. She is even more astonishing than I remember. And clearly she has no idea who I am.
    Instead, I reply with a slight whine, “I’m Bobby Cotton. I’m the guy you introduced to the awesomeness of the Mormon Church, remember?”
    She brightens momentarily, smiles and says “Super!” then appears to be ready to move on.