Such a Lovely Place
By Megan Koester
It takes eleven seconds for the nicotine in a cigarette to reach the brain. I am told this fact by a soft-spoken, self-consciously bald gentleman who then proceeds to describe to me, in minute detail, the neurological specifics of the experiment I am participating in, a study of nicotinic receptors. I zone out as he speaks. My eyes throb. I am ineffably hungover on a bright, cloudless Tuesday morning.
I am standing upright and pantomiming alertness for no other reason but having agreed to let the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center fill my veins with low-level radiation. For this, I will be paid $20 an hour. The amount of radiation that will soon course through my veins is, according to the consent form I signed in a shaky scrawl, tantamount to four years worth of living in America or 20 months’ worth of living in Los Angeles. Radioactively, then, this study will make up for the decades of my life I have spent living outside of L.A. Once it is complete I could, theoretically, tell my friends I am a born-and-bred Angelino. I have no friends.
“Even though the dose of radiation is very low and not one that has been known to cause deleterious effects,” the consent form reads, “you should be aware that not all effects can be predicted. Some effects are clearly related to the dose of radiation, like radiation burns. Other effects like cancer and genetic defects don’t have a worse effect with increasing dosage. However, the probability of their effects goes up with increasing dosage.” I have signed this form thrice before.
A nurse injects me with a violently pigmented radioactive substance she has procured from a metal box, holding it as far from her body as humanly possible. I take this to be one in a never-ending list of bad signs but I ignore it because I am alcoholic and desperate and unemployable. She instructs me to sit upright in a dark room for forty minutes. She tells me to not sleep and to “try not to think of anything,” as doing so will prevent the radiation from evenly electrifying my brain. Telling me not to think at this point, however, is as futile as telling a Catholic woman to try birth control. I think. Oh, how I think. Mostly maudlin thoughts of self-pity.
Once my mockery of a meditation session is complete, a lab-coated lass asks me to urinate and follows me to the restroom; she says to “flush the toilet three times so the radiation doesn’t stick to the bowl.” She then places a sign on the door indicating that no one else is to enter the restroom for an indefinite period of time, as RADIOACTIVITY IS PRESENT. For this additional shaming, I am paid no further premium. In her defense, however, no additional premium would be high enough.
After hours lying prostrate in a PET scan machine, blood tapped from my dehydrated veins at 30-minute intervals, I am led out of the hospital to smoke; in the process, I pass by the Autopsy Center. Were someone to write this scene into a screenplay, it would feel too on the nose. I smoke on the hospital’s loading dock, both arms tethered to IVs (a tricky proposition, to be sure, but one I have perfected by this point—the key is to smoke as if your arms are completely encased in casts which reach your shoulders, never flexing the elbows as that will remind your body of the inflexibility of the needles in your veins and thus generate piercing pain) while a radio blasts “Hotel California.” I can, indeed, check-in any time I’d like, I tell myself, but I can never leave.
Squandering my youth as a lab rat felt like a death sentence, but I welcomed death at the time. The stacks upon stacks of consent forms I collected, which I still can’t bring myself to throw away, acted as suicide notes I was too lazy to write. I have allowed a camera to be shoved into my colon by a doctor who took great delight in chiding me for not properly enema-ing the evening prior. I have drunk bottom shelf white wine behind two-way glass after taking a medication that made me vomit with such force I wondered if it had even entered my system before it exited it. I have let a translucent liquid designed to trigger a panic attack be shot into my veins in order to expand the ventricles in my heart and therefore make them easier to photograph while laying in an MRI machine. I did all this because I thought it was what I needed to do to survive. I suppose I was right at the time. The medical experimentation industry capitalizes on human desperation and I was desperate, willing to subject my only living body to untold horrors for pittances I would quickly squander on my poison of choice.
Addiction is funny — I was desperate, yes, but also suffering under the delusion I had agency. I mean, what profession could possibly be more “be your own boss” than selling your body? I thought all the Johnny Lunchpails working 9 to 5s were morons, plebes. Sure, not hitting “snooze” on the alarm at 7 AM when I was still drunk from the night before in order to drive to the West Side in rush hour traffic qualified as a drag, but once the people in the lab coats were done having their way with me at noon I had the rest of the day to throw my life away.
Laying an MRI machine with the DTs is not ideal. Your head is strapped down, as movement ruins the results. In order to do so I would lie, lie, lie; emphatically declare I had not consumed alcohol in the past 48 hours, was not clinically depressed, had never contemplated suicide. No one ever called me out on this, as I’m sure I wasn’t the biggest fuck up they had to deal with. Yes, I would show up still drunk at 9 AM, but I would nevertheless show up. We all knew the paperwork was just for show anyhow.
I can’t blame them for using me as a living cadaver; at least I was of use to someone. If I didn’t have the hospitals, and their grants, and their experimental medications (none of which ever got me high, much to my chagrin), I’d probably be turning tricks to get my fix — I could disassociate with the best of them. Come to think of it, why didn’t I? Sucking dick seems less invasive than getting a camera stuck up your ass. More profitable, too. But I digress.
A textbook lush, I had bitterly accepted myself as a lost cause and thus would do anything (well, anything that didn’t require cogency, that is) to facilitate the underlying illness. I blamed my creator, my upbringing, my—insert perceived oppressor here—for what I had become. My ego told me I was simply acting in my own best interest in a world that wanted me dead. The world, however, could have given less than a shit about me. I wouldn’t realize this until I was sober, at which point the realization would actually make me feel free. In the interim, I thought I was free but I was not.
I believed I had subverted the system, I believed I had blazed my own trail, maaan, but at the end of the day, I was simply sitting passenger in a car that was driving directly into a school bus filled with nuns and the remaining family members who cared about me. Once I stopped signing my paychecks directly over to Old Grandad, I began to understand my worth, and it ended up being more than $20 an hour in exchange for radiation poisoning.
Sobriety provided me a reprieve from desperation. Existence is no longer a matter of life and death, and death is no longer preferable to existence. My blood now remains safely ensconced within my veins. I can look at the years I spent bleeding in metallic tubes for money with the same clinical detachment of the doctors who used to poke and prod at my bloated, miserable form. I no longer need to sacrifice my health in order to slowly, painfully, kill myself. I can, instead, use my mind to write this. To speak this. This does not necessarily negate the years of radiation, but I can now sleep well with the knowledge that my piss is clear and requires only one flush to rid itself of this world.
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Megan Koester is a writer and comedian who does lots of things. But her newsletter is amazing. Subscribe here.
