Fitzgerald’s famous story “The Rich Boy” begins with two oft-quoted sentences: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are very different from you and me.” Hemingway is supposed to have deflated this pseudo-sagacity by responding, “Yes, they have more money.” That was a great crack, but Fitzgerald still had a point. Despite all our democratic pretensions, the actual disparities between Americans in wealth, power, and well-being have become something of a scandal. To be fair, the democratic dogma, degraded or not, was never very realistic. For example, it should be obvious that the life of an American president is necessarily very different from that of an ordinary citizen like myself. Just for starters, I don’t have a red button I can push if I want to destroy the world—an idea that, on fleeting occasion, has come into my mind. I don’t have Air Force One at my command. I did make a model airplane once when I was about eight, but God only knows what became of it. Nor do I resent my own humdrum obligations of which the President, ex officio, is free. It would definitely be infra dig to have the President of the United States wandering around his basement in bedroom slippers wondering what the hell became of the toilet plunger. Every now and again, though, there is an intrusion of the Higher Democracy. There are a few shared experiences that might be called the Great Levelers, in which the commonality of the human condition is exposed in its ineluctable simplicity. None of us can avoid death and taxes! Well, just to be safe, maybe I had better say none of us can avoid death.
It was the Immortal Bard himself who wrote, in a charming song in Cymbeline:
Golden lads and girls all must
As chimney sweepers, come to dust
and it is in that inevitable dust-heap that Donald Trump and I shall find our eventual equality. But of course human bodies don’t just become dead for no reason. As the Duc de Somewhere-or-Another famously said, Pour être mort, il faut mourir. For many of us the prospect of the process of transition is more unnerving than its inevitable end. Some sudden or gradual interference with the physical requirements of vitality arrives. Frequently this is a somewhat unpleasant experience. Medical science does its heroic best to defer the inevitable, and in its magnificent delaying tactics I have discovered a kind of prelude or premonition of presidential parity: dexamethasone.
It has been reported that when the President returned to the White House from Walter Reed Hospital he made a few remarks that puzzled reporters from our newspaper of record, who just will not get off his case. He said this, for example: “I’m back because I’m a perfect physical specimen and I am extremely young.” Physical perfection may be in the eye of the beholder, but there is at least a rough consensus concerning the Seven Ages of Man. It is true that Mr. Trump is ten years younger than I, but seventy-four is not usually thought of as extremely young. Hence the journalistic puzzlement. Indeed Mr. Trump himself injected ambiguity into the matter when he added: “I’m a senior. I know you don’t know that. Nobody knows that.” Letters to the editor in that same journal tried to make a big deal out of such remarks from the Unknown Senior. One Dr. Fink, an internist in Beverly Hills, noting that Mr. Trump has been prescribed dexamethasone, insisted on quoting the minute print of the little paper that comes with that particular medicament: “Psychic derangements may appear when corticosteroids are used, ranging from euphoria, insomnia, mood swings, personality changes, and severe depression, to frank psychotic manifestations.” It adds that should you already be psychotic, the medicine may exacerbate the psychosis.
Well, I perked up when I read that because here was an arena in which I could compete as an equal with the President of the United States. I myself have been ingesting these same pills on an occasional basis for quite a long time now. With me it has been five the night before and five the morning of a chemotherapeutical infusion, followed by one or two for a couple days after. The tablets themselves are tiny but terrific, sort of like the Monty Python rabbit. I persevered into old age in my naïveté concerning our national drug crisis, but I now see it’s possibly less complex than I had been imagining. Drugs make you stop feeling bad and start feeling good, and there is a certain simple-minded attractiveness to that sequence. Fight fire with fire, or as Ovid puts it, speaking of the pains of romantic disappointment, drive out the old nail with a new one. Dexamethasone is a steroid that, by inhibiting the ordinary operations of the immune system, leaves you in blissful ignorance of the full extent of your body’s revulsion to what is happening to it. Of the dire possible side-effects on the little piece of paper, I suffer only insomnia, which is quite enough, as it could accurately be described as insomnia on steroids. And the little paper leaves unmentioned a number of interesting anal, oral, fetal, fecal, and armpit sensations that you simply can’t get from Nehi grape soda.
cuniculus audax (montepythonicus)
There is a problem with dexamethasone. It is quite a mouthful—linguistically, that is. Try repeating the word three or four times, fast, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s hard enough to say the word even once while you are actually on it. Much of the English medical vocabulary is artificially invented, constructed from Greek roots, sometimes with Latin intervention, by scholarly physicians in the Renaissance. Linguists speak of “inkhorn terms,” manufactured words as it were siphoned directly from the ink bottle into the linguistic mainstream rather than developed from earlier vernacular forms. Big, intimidating words are almost inevitable under the circumstances. For example, the Greek roots meta and its variant meth are practically invitations to long-winded pretension, as in metempsychosis and metamorphosis and methodology. Though our national meth problem is primarily chemical, one cannot wholly ignore the linguistic side. That’s probably the reason the pros favor streamlined jargon. If you hang around an infusion bazaar long enough, it is inevitable that you will overhear a certain amount of elliptical conversation among the highly trained staff, such as “Are we sure she took her dex?” That’s because having to say dex-a-meth-a-sone every time really sucks. Speaking of which, aficionados of Medical Forensic Files and Nurses Who Kill will certainly know that succs is short for suc-ci-nyl-cho-line, the drug of choice used by eight out of ten homicidal health professionals when offing their patients, parents, or intimate partners. It’s even harder for the coroner to detect than it is for him to pronounce. Fortunately, there are no such persons in the establishments I frequent, but I have noticed that the medicalese spoken in those parts is characterized by frequent elision and abbreviation: A-fib, Catscans, EKGs, meds, MRIs, chemo itself. That’s how Dex has transitioned from the pharmacological to the familiar, and become as much of an old friend to the Donald and me as Darkness was to Paul Simon.
