This is certainly some written words! All together got about 14800 of them.
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'I don't think this'll work, Mike,' said Dave, both hands clasped protectively over his naked crotch.
'It'll work,' I said. 'You just need to pull out your drip and we won't look like patients at all.'
'Yes, but then we'll just look like a couple of naked men in a hospital,' said Dave.
'Exactly!' I said. 'And who in the world is going to pay attention to two naked men in a hospital?'
'Everyone?' hazarded Dave.
'No, no, no. Look . . . remember a year ago, when we went down to your grandma's place, and two men in the same leotard tried to arrest you for public indecency because your top button was undone?'
'Vividly,' said Dave.
'And remember when it turned out they'd been filming us the whole time, and we turned up on some weird-ass Bulgarian reality show?'
'Yeah, that was pretty retarded.'
'Yeah!' I said. 'Are you getting my point? These days, we've got Punk'd, and all these stupid reality shows where people are stuck in a big house, or they're singing at you. I guarantee they'll just let us run out of here, because, one, no one wants to tackle a naked dude, and, two, they'll think we're actors, or pranksters, or we're doing a street theatre kind of thing. And they'll all avoid us. No one wants to be on the camera.'
Dave looked doubtful, but he said, 'I'll go with that.'
'Better than your stupid jumping out the window idea,' I said. 'I mean, there's practically no danger involved in MY plan. Now rip out your drip from your wrist.'
'Are you sure this won't kinda kill me?'
'Pretty sure.'
'How pretty sure?' asked Dave.
'Well, it's all relative, isn't it?' I said. 'I'm not as sure as I am that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I'm a hell of a lot surer than Jesus was when he said to Ice-T: "Sweet ride, dude." Because Ice-T's ride is shit.'
'That never happened,' said Dave.
'I'm pretty sure it did.'
'How pretty sure?'
'Look, just rip the damn drip out,' I said. 'I took off my plaster cast.'
'You left the bandages on.'
'Yeah, but if I took them off, I'd just be bleeding everywhere and that'd be pretty obvious that I'm a patient here, wouldn't it?'
'How do you know I won't bleed if I pull the drip out?' said Dave. 'And besides, I just had a chunk of my prostate taken out, and my appendicitis ripped out of me like Poland was ripped from the Polish by Hitler.'
'That's a stupid metaphor,' I said. 'And I had my appendix out, too, but you don't see me having any morphine.'
'That's because you were in a mini-coma for three days,' said Dave. I simply raised my eyebrows. He looked from the drip to my eyebrows and back to the drip, then shrugged. 'Oh well, fuck it,' he said, and pulled. The drip came out inch by inch, uncurling like a snake, and then it was out. A drip of blood came to the hole it had left in his wrist and trickled down his arm.
'I'm bleeding!' he shrieked like a retarded banshee. 'Jesus Hannibal Lecter fucking Christ!'
I hit him in the face. Not hard enough to break anything, just hard enough to stop his whining. I wiped the blood off his arm and pointed to the door. 'Let's go,' I said. 'Walk slowly, walk calmly. Walk like you own the world, walk like you're the biggest dude in the world.'
'The biggest dude in the world can't walk,' pointed out Dave.
'What?'
'He's some fat-ass Mexican dude. He can't walk. They pick him up in a truck.'
'Well, walk like you're the most IMPORTANT dude in the world,' I said.
'It could be argued that, according to yourself, you yourself are the most important person in the world,' said Dave.
'Well, walk like you're you and you've just had a coffee and you're out to take down a god-damn velociraptor,' I said.
'I can do that,' said Dave. He set his jaw hard, his head high, and opened the door to our room just as the nurse did the same from the other side. He jumped back, turned, then slipped on to the floor, crashing to the tiles in a twist of limbs.
It was the nurse from before. She looked from the bare ass of the prostrate Dave to me, covering my crotch and standing next to Dave's leaking IV tower. 'Get back in your beds,' she said. 'You've just had your appendixes out. And put some damn clothes on.'
'No,' I said. I darted over and pulled Dave up, then tried to pull the IV bag off to throw at her. It was fiddly as hell, though, so instead I just picked up my pants, threw them at her face and ran, pulling Dave behind me.
'Look like you're an actor,' I hissed, slowing to a light jog as we came into the corridor. A nurse coming out of a room stopped and looked at us in shock.
'We're actors,' explained Dave. The nurse immediately set about fixing her hair for the presumed cameras. We jogged past her and into the elevator. A man in a business suit was standing inside, one hand in his pocket, the other idly drumming a beat on his leg. He looked us up and down, his brow furrowing as we stood slightly sweaty next to him.
'Hi,' I said.
'We're actors,' said Dave.
The man coughed. 'Good on you.' He looked around the elevator; maybe he was looking for cameras, maybe he was just uncomfortable. Maybe both.
Dave had long ago abandoned covering his crotch and now stood with his legs slightly apart, leaning against the wall casually. 'Up or down?' he asked, leaning forward suddenly, causing significant movement.
'Up and down,' said the man, trying not to stare. 'I mean . . . uh, down.'
'Cool,' said Dave, pressing the ground floor button, 'we're going the same way. I'm Dave, by the way.' He extended his hand and the man shook it gingerly, as if it were disease-ridden. Which was, considering where it had been, probably accurate.
Dave tried to make small talk, but the man didn't seem very receptive.
We stopped at ground floor and the man got off. We followed him, me trying to look as much like an actor as I could. To tell you the truth, I wasn't very good at it; I wasn't a good enough actor for the task. I think by this point Dave was just enjoying himself too much to care about what our original purpose had been. If we even had one.
A big, heavyset nurse in scrubs and brandishing a stethoscope like it was a sword confronted us in the foyer, her moustache bristling with anger, her ass wobbling about in indignation like a whale breaching the ocean. She looked 30 or so, and she was holding the stethoscope so tightly that her hand was going white. Have you ever seen those statues of Aphrodite, the Greek god of love and beauty? This nurse looked exactly unlike Aphrodite.
'Explain yourself!' she roared. She sounded kind of like Zeus, if Zeus had been a three-hundred pound ogre-sloth.
'We're actors,' said Dave.
'If you're actors,' she said, sounding as if she were pointing out some great fault in our excuse - which, coincidentally enough, she was, 'where are your cameras?'
'They're in the ceiling,' I said. She looked up. There was nothing in the ceiling. I tried to push past her but she blocked my way like she was a mountain and I was a passenger plane. Dave tried to sneak under her arm; she brought her ham-like fist down directly on the crown of his head. He collapsed, groaning, clutching at his head.
This wasn't how it was supposed to go. I didn't know how it was supposed to go, but it certainly wasn't meant to go like this.
'Look,' I said, 'it's a long story and you wouldn't want to hear it. There's not really many interesting parts, and most of it will just be me recounting conversations about nothing.'
'This is public indecency!' cried a doctor from behind her. Quite a crowd had gathered around us. Dave, slightly dopey on morphine, and very dizzy, was trying to part them with his hands like Moses.
'It's a reality show,' I said. 'Secret hidden cameras are in the ceiling and we film the reactions to, uh . . . naked patients. Or something.'
'You're patients here?' asked Ogre-Sloth.
'We're doctors,' said Dave from the ground, and giggled.
'You're doctors?'
'No, don't listen to him, he's stupid. We're famous actors. I'm Steve Buscemi.'
'He does look like Steve Buscemi,' said someone from the back of the crowd. There was a murmur of agreement from the crowd.
'And who are you?' asked the nurse to Dave. Dave giggled and looked down at his crotch.
'I have a very small penis,' he said, frowning.
'Ah, Carrot Top,' said someone.
'He doesn't look like Carrot Top,' said another anonymous voice. 'He looks more like JFK.'
'No,' said another. 'More like Teddy Kennedy, really.'
'Teddy Kennedy is much older. And dead.'
'I mean young Teddy Kennedy.'
'Now that I think about,' chipped in another, 'he does look a bit like Teddy Kennedy.'
'I'm not Teddy Kennedy,' said Dave, who still hadn't risen from the ground. 'I'm Dave.'
'Ah, yes, but that's exactly the kind of thing Teddy Kennedy would say, isn't it?' pointed out someone. 'Wouldn't want to reveal his true identity, yeah?'
'He's Dave,' I said.
'What do you know? You're only Steve Buscemi.'
'No, he's Dave,' chimed in someone.
'No, no, he's Steve Buscemi. The other guy is Dave.'
'No, that's Teddy Kennedy.'
'Then who is Dave, if that's Teddy Kennedy, and that's Steve Buscemi?'
'I'm Dave,' said Dave, to the concern of no-one in particular.
'No one's Dave,' said someone angrily. 'Who the hell said anyone was Dave?'
'I did,' said Dave, but no-one was listening.
'I didn't say anyone was Dave,' said Ogre-Sloth. She looked around at the crowd accusingly. 'Whoever said anyone was Dave stand up right now.' Dave stood up. Ogre-Sloth turned her brutal, focused rage on him and told him to sit down again, and he did. She once again demanded that whoever said anyone was Dave stand up immediately. Dave stood up immediately, and she was taken with such a rage at him that she promptly kicked us out of the hospital, with an armful of hospital clothes each, charging us with public indecency and being Teddy Kennedy. We put the hospital clothes on and wandered aimlessly out into the Brisbane afternoon. The Suncorp Tower, which had a digital clock on it that was seemingly eternally broken and only ever showed the time on one side and even then sporadically, told us it was half past the bottom line of something that could be a three, a five, a six, an eight or a nine.
Dave looked at his watch instead. 'It's three-thirty,' he said. 'I know a costume place like 10 minutes from here that closes at four.'
'Why are we going to a costume shop again?' I asked.
'So we can get doctor costumes,' said Dave.
'Oh yeah, I remember that,' I said. 'Yeah, sure, let's dress up as doctors, I'm sure that'll help us get Josh and Alex.'
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