Dying to Get Laid
My appendix burst while trying to *clears throat*
Last Saturday night, while entering a girl’s apartment building, I felt my appendix burst, and, like the horniest rendition of Sisyphus, dragged my feet up every step of her third floor walk-up until finally collapsing six steps from her front door. Like Orpheus I watched my chances of getting laid turn into salt as I screamed in a pitch embarrassingly high for a 6’5” man with hair on his chest, “Call an ambulance! God damn it, call me an ambulance right now—I’m dying!”
To save money, she called an Uber, and poor Muhammed drove me to Mt. Sinai hospital before dropping me off at the ER.
I met the girl a few hours earlier at KGB Bar, where I had gone to swap Faulkner books with my friend Curt. Curt is a gay man I met in college and is the worst wingman I have ever seen. I gave him my copy of Light in August, and he handed me As I Lay Dying.
(FORESHADOWING?)
KGB is a delightful bar in the East Village that hosts fun little events where established writers read their works to people with septum piercings and Doc Martens who carry New Yorker tote bags and use the term “aesthetic” to describe their instagram grids. I recently went with my good pal Zoe to listen to Stella Barry, a pornstar more commonly known as “The Anal Princess,” read passages she believed portrayed the experience of doing anal. I was infuriated when she didn’t read the haiku I had dm’d her a month prior:
HAIKU INSPIRED BY DAVE ATTELL
Anal is your dream
Until you remember that
You can smell in dreams
The point is, if there was ever a bar to roll into with a copy of Faulkner, it was this one.
Curt and I grabbed a table in the red room on the second floor, and I bought him a bud-heavy and myself a mezcal with soda. I can’t remember our conversation, but I’m sure it was incredibly high-brow and thought-provoking and at no point did I compare my penis to a flesh colored fire hydrant (no elaboration will be provided.) Two girls were seated next to us, and one was very cute. I kept side-eyeing her and waiting for an excuse to spit game, but I never found one. When she left, I said to Curt, “Bummer, I was hoping to talk to her.”
“Oh, yeah. She was eyeing you up and down all night. When you got up to get our second round, she told me she thought you were cute.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me this earlier?” I screamed loud enough to wake a small child in South Jersey.
The girls next to us were soon replaced by a group of five goths. I was scared to look at them lest they cast a spell on me and I grow a tail.
Curt told me he was tired. While I waited at the bar to close my tab, a cute blonde girl approached me.
“What are you reading?” she said in an unfamiliar accent.
LADIES, A NOTE: If you want a season pass into Otto Fischkin’s heart, ask me what I am reading. Once I am finished lying that I am between Joan Didion books, I will reveal what I am truly reading. If you tell me you hated that book, I will love you forever.
The blonde and I hit it off quickly. Curt did his best to entertain the girl’s two friends—I think he lasted 90 seconds before they awkwardly shifted their attention toward me and the new love of my life.
“Has he told you he’s a standup comedian?” one of the friends said to her.
The blonde looked at Curt. “Is he funny?”
This would have been an appropriate time for a semi-competent wingman to reply, “He’s soooooo funny oh my God you’re in for a treat with this one.”
This motherfucker Curt goes, “If he was half as funny as he thinks he is, he wouldn’t need his day job.”
GODDAMN IT CURT—YOU SHITTY WINGMAN YOU!
Curt’s wings couldn’t keep cotton afloat.
I flipped Curt off and he went home (thank God) and was soon followed by the girl’s friends (thank God) which left me and the girl to flaunt our gifts of gab and fall in love. It turned out she was a published writer in the KGB LitMag. I bought a copy of it and read her story and it was genuinely good which intimidated me enough to never want to see her again.
I asked if I could walk her home, and she said yes. She lit a cigarette and asked if I wanted a puff, and I said no. It began to drizzle lightly. I tried my best to find awnings to walk under because I look bald in the rain. Still, a little rain is always romantic.
We kissed when we got to her front door. It was one of those perfect kisses where each person’s lips seem to have grown solely to fit the other’s. I didn’t want to stop.
Suddenly I felt a stabbing pain in my stomach. I thought to myself, This bitch is trying to rob me! But when I looked down, there was no blood, and there was no knife. Still, my stomach was in knots. I felt a chill up my spine. My arms grew shaky.
This would have been the appropriate time for anyone with a normal libido to say, “Hey, I don’t feel so well. I think I need to go to the hospital.”
All I did was think to myself, After we sleep together, I am going to have to book it to the hospital.
Of course, that didn’t happen, and I was left with nothing but regret as I lay dying in the uber on the way to the hospital.
Thank God for Muhammed. Also, Praise Allah.
My pain was abnormally high on my abdomen for appendicitis, so a tiny Chinese woman named Li—my mezcal-tinted memory may be deceiving me, but I remember her being 3’8” and 65 pounds—gave me an ultrasound to check for gallbladder disease.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” I said, laughing at my own joke.
“Twins.”
I understood immediately she had been asked this hundreds of times. Now I hoped she would find something terminal. Hacks don’t deserve to live. Luckily, I thought of a line to save my reputation:
“Which one’s hotter?” I said.
“What?” she said.
Then I think she hoped to find something terminal.
They gave me a CT scan and told me I’d have surgery that night. I called a few people I love as well as my parents to let them know. My roommate Johnny Orange rushed to the hospital with a bag full of books and a change of clothes—God bless his heart. Charlotte Carolina, my friend who just finished her MFA, came as well. She interrupted the nurse to ask how I was feeling.
“You’ll have to excuse my mother,” I said to the nurse, who had moved here from Jamaica fifteen years ago. “She’s just a typical Jewish mom.”
The nurse turned to Charlotte Carolina. “You raised a very nice boy,” she said, unaware Charlotte was two years younger than me.
The anesthesia knocked me out like I was married to Floyd Mayweather, and the next thing I knew I was waking up to the nurse switching my IV. I looked over and saw my brother Nate, who came up from Philadelphia to help me for the night. I couldn’t help but smile. Next to him was Gizmo, my Jewish friend who wants to be the first rapper known for his use of Yiddish. He recently wrote a song called, Yentas Love The Benjamins. He’s sitting on a goldmine, in my opinion (Goldmine is also the name of his agent.)
I was released from the hospital that night, and spent the next four hours on my living room couch lying in the one position that wasn’t agonizing. At midnight, Nate lifted me from it and walked me to the bathroom, holding me while I peed, then walked me to my bed. This took a half-hour, I think. Nate and I have had a tumultuous relationship and once went through a period in which we didn’t speak for several years. But hand to God, there is no one who has been more consistently there for me when push came to shove than Nate. I told him this as he tucked me in. Through heavy tears, I said, “You’re truly the best big brother I could have asked for.”
He smirked. “I know,” he said.
That douchebag. He can go to hell.
Wednesday was my first day out of the house since my surgery on Sunday. I walked one street to Shakespeare and Company and was lapped by a 200 year old Jewish woman with a cane. I could only bring my laptop with me and no books, because I’m not allowed to lift more than ten pounds for the next month (nor lift weights for six weeks (nor “have any sexual activity” for two weeks (which makes no sense, if you think about it.))) I’m on enough pain medication to make fun of Mike Tyson’s lisp to his face. The medicine makes it impossible to think straight. I can’t read more than a paragraph without losing focus. I feel useless as a human being.
The homeless woman seated to my left spent twenty minutes reapplying her pink lipstick and rouge. She comes to Shake and Co every morning, and sleeps outside of it every night. She is always kind. I watched as she set down her lipstick, and began tearing out every ad from a copy of The New Yorker. If I was her, I would do the same.
My writing session was interrupted by a call from my surgeon. We caught up for a bit, and then he asked if there was anything else I’d like to know before he hung up.
“Yeah, one thing,” I said. “I’m just curious. If I would have had sex instead of going straight to the hospital, what would have happened to me that night?”
He paused. “There’s a good chance you wouldn’t have made it,” he said, void of humor. He paused again. “I hope you learned your lesson here.”
“I did,” I said.
And you know what? You want to know what I truly learned?
God damn it, I didn’t learn a thing.
Otto Fischkin is the alter ego of Sam Frank Jr. Sam is a writer and standup comedian based in New York City. He has been published in The Bangalore Review, The Gramercy Review, and his standup comedy has been mentioned in the New York Times. He was named “Best Screenwriter” at the 2021 Austin Lift-Off Film Festival. Sam is working on his debut novel about the circus industry.
Sam can be reached at samfrankjunior@gmail.com
•••
Disclaimer: This work is fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Made me chuckle a few times and had people throwing me weird looks because of it haha. Great piece
Nice work. gSr