Romance:From Fat To Fatale(17)
The guy in high school didn't have terminal dog-butt breath because of some rare and unfortunate gum disease. Absolutely not. What he had was a major gastro problem and that was the cause of the constant stream of eye-watering, paint-stripping, hog-stunning breath that caused birds to drop out of the sky and dogs to faint in his presence. I guess you can see where this is heading, can't you? We're about to get a little personal. Again. Sorry. So where do want me to start? Top or bottom? OK. It's all the same to me. My breath was so bad, even I was having difficulty coping with it. My tongue had sprouted a layer of fur that looked like a team of nomadic Mongolian carpet-layers had staked out my mouth during the night and nailed down one of their cheaper, tourists-only, Nylon models to the inside of my jaws.
Tasted like they'd corralled their entire herd of incontinent camels there for the night too. It was bad. This was more than a challenge for Listerine. This was a lifetime refund on every industrial-strength mouthwash ever marketed in the western hemisphere. And the episodes in the john were correspondingly worse. I wondered how much the Pentagon would offer for the priceless formula that was being flushed away every hour, a bacteriological weapon of such epic proportions that wars could be won and civilisations toppled with just one fragrant waft.
We are not talking rose petals and cinnamon highlights here. We're talking about the unflossed breath of Lucifer himself. Bad? We're talking the darkest depths of pure evil. I found myself gagging on more than one occasion but the lady nutritionist just took it all in her stride, lighting incense, spraying air freshener, checking my vital signs and encouraging me to keep going. Where I was supposed to be going was way beyond me at the time. Surviving to breathe another breath, living one more day, dreading the hourly torment of Johnny Cash and The Ring of Fire, hoping to be rescued by a masked and heavily-armed SWAT team before I had to take another spoonful of vegetable broth. That was about as far as my ambition reached. I was exhausted, sometimes shaking like a fully-certified crazy, tormented by cravings for something sweet and desperate to go home to the warmth and comfort of my familiar artery-clogging food supply.
You'd have thought that things would have got better as the hours rolled by but that's not how it worked for me. To be fair and to put the situation into a proper perspective, my case represented a fairly extreme example of intestinal toxicity so the side effects were also fairly extreme but the third day was the real time of crisis.
The cravings shot off the scale. I started to get desperate and tried to get out of the trailer with the sole aim of getting to the gas station to get some candy, something, anything remotely sweet.
It was a full-blown compulsion, an overwhelming urge to feed my body with sugar.
I was like a B-movie zombie. Compelled by some dark force to satisfy my unholy urges. Was this how it was for Mavenka on a Friday night? I felt a heady moment of sisterly solidarity. Just for the briefest moment though - and then it happily passed from my emotional spectrum without the slightest hint that it would ever come back to bother me again. Those compulsive urges couldn't be so easily distracted even though the lady nutritionist did her best to keep my mind off the problem. It was an uphill struggle but she never quit. The trailer door was locked - I'm serious! - And I couldn't get out. I was trapped. Imprisoned. Not strong enough in my weakened, delirious state to take out my captor and scared to admit that she was probably a lot tougher and stronger than I could ever hope to be. So I toughed it out. And let me assure you, my friend, it was tough.
I had the wildest dreams too. I recall the effort of trying to wade, knee-deep, through a swollen river of molasses, trying to walk against a tidal flow of sweetness, stopping to pause every few steps to dip a soup ladle into the molten syrup and taste the fast-flowing nectar, sitting down in the current and letting the warm tide flow over my head. I woke up gasping for air, my cot soaked with the bitter, acrid sweat as my body went through its personal toxic meltdown.
More than once, as I drifted in and out of sleep in that stifling hot trailer, I dreamed that I was tied to a four-poster bed, spread-eagled on the sheet, arms and legs tied off to the posts, a long line of faceless guys queuing to take their turn on my protesting body, the constant repetitive frustration of each guy finishing just before I could extract an ounce of pleasure from the encounter, the line forming an endless loop, repeated for the rest of eternity. I dreamed once of a strong, wiry figure holding I close in their arms and whispering over and over that everything was going to be fine. And I woke and found the lady nutritionist cradling my head and stroking my hair, calming my fears and sending me gently back to sleep.
The biggest surprise of all was what happened after that third night.
Admittedly I'd slept better than I had since I'd first bounced into the awful trailer on that seemingly faraway Friday morning. But when I woke up, something had changed. The pains and the aches and the shaking and the nausea had all gone. I felt different. I mean really different. I went to the tiny bathroom to brush my teeth and discovered to my surprise that the Mongolian carpet dealers had removed their low budget Nylon item of merchandise from my mouth and had driven their camels far from their temporary camp site.
My tongue looked, well, normal. Better than normal. My eyes looked different too. Clearer. Brighter. There was a light knock on the door and the lady nutritionist announced that breakfast would be ready in a few minutes if I felt like eating. Was it my fevered imagination or could I smell eggs frying in a skillet? The three days were up. I'd survived though I wasn't really sure how. My metabolism had been wrangled and wrestled and re-set. The craving for sugar had gone.