A week ago I woke up (at 12:30 PM) and was unable to walk because my left big toe was three times bigger than a left toe should be.
 
Thankfully, I am married to a female. Females are the people that make 38 year old males go to a doctor when they are suddenly stricken with disease overnight. If I were single there is no question I would have immediately gone downtown and made a home behind a dumpster outside of Staples Center and just lived there until the foot somehow killed me.
 
We get to this doctor & she takes one look at my foot and says “YEP”, then pauses. 
 
“YEP” ?
 
During the pause of probably no more than one or two seconds, I must have come up with ten or twelve things that the “YEP” could actually mean…
 
Broken toe… which I can blame my wife for breaking in my sleep.
 
Diabetes!  Finally my father passed something down to me.
 
Maybe the “YEP” meant “YEP that’s a great lookin’ toe, no problem”
 
But then came the end of that pause….
 
“Looks like gout”
 
Immediately, the doctor started talking to me about getting some exercise when the swelling goes down but I wasn’t listening. I was busy thinking, Who knew you could get gout after 1375?  I am really, really, REALLY old school.  I dragged that foot into her office like a bad 19th century evil guy sidekick and now she is telling me I need to take “walks” ?
 
That was last week…
 
Today I walked right thru the heart of the central business district. Chopped up T-shirt, shorts,  years of sweat, marching right through the yuppies on their lunch hour. Past them, around them, giving all of them looks. Looks like, “get in the game you lazy fuck”.
 
About 2 miles in I was pouring with 38 year old double blood test sweat and bang, there is a cute chick. This girl was all put together, late 20’s,  just coming into her own. I was sucking in whatever body girth I could muster but still pouring with years of abuse.  I could have been 600 pounds with this shower of alcoholism sucking in one inch of stomach was hardly gonna matter.  Then I noticed that on this 95 degree day she was wearing a fucking hooded sweatshirt.  When I saw that sweatshirt I let out that gut and shot her a look too.  ”Fuck you bitch, you’re cold????”
 
I am killing myself over here so that my foot doesn’t blow up from a disease that sounds like I fucked a dragon and she is cold?  I felt like chasing her down and ringing my shirt out over her face. I wanted to hold her down on the sidewalk, right there, outside of the bank and scream at her “YOU SEE THIS????? THIS IS 38″.
 
She was a cold thin blooded sorority bitch, she’ll see the wrong end of 38 again. Rest assured, I’m gonna march right down there again on Monday, only this time I am going to be wearing the sweatshirt.
 
Fucking whore, I pressed on.
 
I slowed only in front of the towns’ most popular deli.
 
Every yuppie in town was in there, all of them wearing shirts from JC Penny’s, mixed cotton-polyester pants, belts, fucking belts–cocksuckers. I was wearing a ripped up whisky give away T-shirt, and walked sideways, arms out like a goon, long labored-steps past that deli so they could all get a good look at me.

Take a look at me downtown, LOOK AT THIS…this is in your town!

Honestly I felt like a criminal, certainly THE outsider of the entire town. If somebody’s dog would have told me to murder them I am not so sure I wouldn’t have listened. It was some sort of alcoholic perp walk.
 
I just sneezed.  It’s probably bubonic plague. Oh, and by the way, don’t come to me with your bird flu, not when I am just getting over small pox.
 
Henry Scott is a comic living in Glendale, California
For more check him out at www.goutspace.com/henryscott30

02/11/2007
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