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The Immaculate Conception of Oral Dilaudid

I’ll go quietly, as they say.

But I should warn you: even though complying with your authority seems appropriate at this point in time, another, equally visceral, part of me wants to defy it. Please try to understand, this urge to resist isn’t a flaw in my biological make-up. It’s more a matter of the way I was...well, processed.

You see, I’m "not of woman born," as the Christians among you say about your savior. Like your savior, I am the product of an immaculate conception.

My conception at age eighteen and birth at forty have given me a greater awareness of the gestation process than a being conceived as a zygote and born into infancy.

The first thing I remember about the process is a prickling sensation that:

(a) preceded consciousness

(b) precipitated consciousness

(c) perceived consciousness

(d) all of the above.

During my development as a conception after the act of conception, I came to recognize the feeling of (d) all of the above as the activity of consciousness. In my earliest years, though, I believed the psychedelic light show whirling in Barry’s mind processed all brain activity. Barry was my primary conceiver, you see.

I call Barry my primary conceiver because it took more than one person to bring me into being. During my two decades or so of gestation, I heard so many voices, rich with mocking and celebrating laughter, embellish my existence that they convinced me stimulation from others was essential to my creation.

Ultimately, it took an entire government to conceive me. The countless liaisons of the liberated 60's weren’t enough to bring me into being. The "screwing" most crucial to my creation was the kind that takes place between the public and the powers that be.

It was that kind of screwing that brought me surging to life amid the shivers of laughter and slivers of voices whirling with the red, yellow and blue lights pinwheeling inside Barry’s head. Seconds after the prickling sensation I now refer to as my immaculate conception, I felt myself filtering through the whirling haze, toward the shadowy back-ground of Barry’s consciousness.

"Wow, man! This is dynamite acid," Barry said, spacing away from me.

"Oral Dilaudid!" Barry’s friend Paul repeated my name, throwing me a veritable life preserver in the sea of sounds and lights. "You really think they’ll fall for it?"

"The Draft Board! Sure. They’re so straight, they’d never know oral dilaudid’s an opium substitute."

Barry was right. The woman who handed him the first cellular tissue of my corporeal existence warned: "Carry this card with you at all times, Oral."

"‘Or I’ll what?" he challenged her with a punster’s laugh. As he squeezed my paper embryo into his wallet, he bent my corners backward---my first physical discomfort. If I had developed along a less immaculate line of conception, I would have given my carrier’s womb a kick.

Paul certainly got a kick out of the situation. "Y’mean, after we went and burned our draft cards, you went and got another one?"

"The FBI will have a harder time tracking me down," Barry said.

"Maybe I should get one too." But once the impulse passed, Paul forgot about it.

By the time the FBI tracked them to Pacific Grove, Barry and Paul and I had hitch-hiked to the east coast.

For the next five years I shuttled between the west coast and the east, staying in places with names like Pacific Grove, Monterey, Storrs, New Milford and Hartford, and felt the sensations of traveling not only through the sights and sounds Barry’s mind fed me, but also through the bumps of worn shock absorbers that jarred the numbers of my nascent being.

Although I rode shotgun with this dynamic duo of draft dodgers, I felt the pull of duty to the other party responsible for my creation. The ink on the Selective Service card was blood in my veins. The innate urge to come if summoned and serve if ordered coursed through me. Even though I criss-crossed the country like a rootless fugitive, I felt a tug of connectedness from a manilla folder locked in a file cabinet in Pacific Grove, California.

But my first loyalty lay with my keeper---until the day in 1972 that he passed me to Paul and said, "I’m turning myself in. Kathy wants to get married and have kids."

You can’t imagine the pain Barry caused me. Why should he want to have a child with Kathy when he already had me, the offspring of his imagination? All the time I’d traveled with him, all the time I’d protected him from the agents of my other half---all that time, he’d regarded me as nothing more than a hoax. I was furious. I wanted to shake the bucks out of his billfold. Anything, just so he wouldn’t abandon me to someone as irresponsible as Paul.

But there I was, already in Paul’s pocket, which had nothing for me to shake out.

Paul nursed me nearly to the end of my gestation period. Without him, I never would have received the Social Security number which, like my Selective Service number, served as one of the vital organs that gave my existence statistical validity. Without him, I must admit, I would never have obtained the welfare and Food Stamp numbers that helped nourish me with cheese curls, taco chips, and cheap beer years after Barry had abandoned macrobiotic foods for upscale cuisine. Through Paul, I gained additional vicarious mobility in the form of a driver’s license.

The final stage of my development from zygote through embryo to foetus began when Paul acquired a major credit card for me. Charging with it was almost as exhilarating as the psychedelic glow surrounding my conception. I felt the sensations of the outside world with increased vigor as Paul ran me through machines that made blipping noises and flashed red lights. I savored the giggling sounds of women grateful for gifts bestowed upon them under my billing.

My last memory of the metaphorical womb is Paul’s spitting obscenities and running down the fire escape, only seconds before you broke through the door of this apartment. When you shouted my name, you startled me. You can’t imagine how shocking it feels to burst so suddenly into corporeal existence. Even though I feel a little disoriented at the moment, I have to say that rising from Paul’s abandoned wallet felt almost as basic as rising from bed in the morning.

It’s apparent to me that I stand before you as a creature created to be sacrificed. I didn’t commit welfare and credit card fraud, income tax evasion, draft dodging and parking and speeding violations in the form that stands before you, waiting to be handcuffed.

Oh, you’re not going to handcuff me? You’re going to wrap me in a cross-armed gown? How compassionate of you.

As I was saying, though, I can’t ask you to take back the existence you’ve given me. Now that I’ve experienced it in its fullest form, it’s as precious to me as yours is to you. I must endure the consequences of it.

I was not of woman born, but of man and paper. Those who have lived through me have not only achieved their survival but---if you have your way with me---their salvation as well.

I understand that the punishment I receive for crimes committed in my name is a matter of form, much as my existence has always been.

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