The
Chickasaw
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“Imelda, make yourself comfortable. How are you today?”
“I’m a wreck,
Doctor Feingold. Maybe it’s the Awards Ball, maybe my success in general. I
feel so bad. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Sometimes it helps
to talk about these things.”
“I…I hardly know
where to start.”
“Why not start at
the beginning. You’ve mentioned that you came from difficult circumstances.”
“Yeah. I was born in the
primordial sea, worst neighborhood you ever saw. I was the love child that
resulted from a one-night-stand involving an amine group and a carboxyl group.
Atmospheric electricity and ultraviolet light fired their passion. There was plenty of both in that thin atmosphere, and they liked
it straight, no chaser. They got it on, right there in the ooze, without
benefit of love, marriage, or lubrication. And here I am, these eons later,
Miss Human Immune Deficiency Virus. That’s right, the incomparable Human
Immunodeficiency Virus, as they say, but that’s actually my stage name. My real
name, as you know, is Herodius Imelda Virtuoso.
“My parents were so
self-absorbed, they couldn’t have cared less what
happened to me. We were poor. And there were no government give-away programs
back then.
“I knew, so help
me, that somehow, I was going to escape the ooze, that
I was going to be a star. I did a little bit of everything along the way,
including some things that I don’t like to talk about. You know,
the casting couch stuff, and cheap flicks, where everybody wears their socks
and nothing else. Maybe that’s why I have such a problem with being a star
now.”
“You feel
unworthy?”
“Yes, Doctor,
unworthy and worse, dirty sometimes. There was the thing with the Dolphin. Tursiops truncatus, Mister IQ,
some people say. What I remember is his spade-like, retractile penis. That’s
why there’s a whole collateral branch of the HIV family that frequents dolphins
only. And then there’s the cat thing. Same story. Then the monkeys. This one I was involved with, Simian, a
Green Monkey, so-called. I’ll never forget the big brute. To put it bluntly, he
was just plain ugly. Receding chin, poor posture. I was broke, had zero
prospects, so I got involved with him. I mean, but like, he was really also my
doorway to success. I loved him for it, and I still love him. He bought the
farm; coronary, I guess. Some thought I had a hand in that, but no way. The
people in Simian’s neighborhood, they liked bush meat. You know what that is?
It’s like some guy in
“So this black dude
came bopping through the rainforest, and he saw Simian’s body, dragged him
home, barely singed him on the outside, and ate him. By luck, I survived and made
the leap across species gap. After all, I’d done it before. From there on, it
was Fat City.”
“You were
successful with people?”
“Yes, not to brag,
but it’s common knowledge. I’m adaptable. So, I got
started doing my people gig in
“The
“When I heard them,
the preachers and the pols, I laughed. I knew I had
it made. I had them working on my side and I also had a few tricks in my bag no
one knew about, Doctor.”
“Tricks, Imelda?”
“Sure. Falwell and his clones said I was proof that God hates
fags. Most of the pols were right behind them,
clapping to the beat like a gospel choir. Really, though, I proved something
else entirely. See, once I find a home, I reproduce so fast that, unlike
monkeys, seven-banded armadillos, humans or whales, people can see me change
again and again. Another way of putting it, the reason I can be gay in
“I’d like to hear
it from you, really.”
“Well, I take over
the reproductive machinery of my host’s immune cells. It’s sort of like
commandos taking over a factory for their own purposes. Then I force the
copying machinery to produce copies of, what else, me, every few minutes. It’s a sort of miniscule surrogate
motherhood thing. So before long, there are billions
of copies of --
moi. But,
and this is a big but, not all of the copies are perfect. Upwards of one in a
thousand are defective.”
“How do you feel
about that?”
“I feel good, real
good, Doctor Feingold. ‘Cause that’s the whole thing;
the beauty is in the defects. Most of them are worthless; short-bus types, you
know. They die off fast. But every once in a while, one of
these imperfect copies is defective in a useful way. So, to take an
example, when Retrovir came along, the word was, it
was going to do me in. But within days, there was one hardy individual whose
“imperfections” caused her to be able to neatly defeat Retrovir.
Poor Retrovir. I weep to
think of it.”
“I’m sure.”
“So, we that
survive a certain hardship become predominant. Know what that’s called?”
“You tell me,
Imelda.”
“It’s called
natural selection. It’s E-V-O-L-U-T-I-O-N, evolution, big time, same as in
whales and aardvarks and reticulated pythons. It’s the same things, no
disrespect intended, Doctor, that made Sigmund Freud
out of Australopithecene. Yeah! Brought
you right on in from the Serengeti, Doctor. Same with
AIDS and the gender thing in people. I evolved as necessitated by the
habits and circumstances of a given population. We become a homosexual or
heterosexual disease as needed. We made it big, Doctor. Thank you, Chuck
Darwin, thank you.”
“But still you’re
unhappy.”
“Yeah. When I got the
award, it was worse.”
“Tell me more about
the award.”
“We bugs work hard,
we’re awfully good at what we do. So we do the award thing once a year.
Sometimes, in
***
The cameras pan the audience, then
focus in on the contestants. The band plays a fanfare, and there is a sustained
drum roll as the Master of Ceremonies speaks: “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s that
time again, the time for the
The band breaks into a triumphal melody. Tears, cheers, whistles, applause fills the hall. Miss Prion, radiant in a designer gown created for this occasion
and studded with a thousand baby pearls, weeps and laughs at the same time as
the other contestants hug her and congratulate her.
“Miss Prion,
though a sub-viral particle, a naked protein really, you developed the clever
trick of turning host proteins into more prions. You
found great success as the agent of Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis as well as
other disease entities. Miss Prion, you caught the
entire world’s attention for disrupting the food chain for humans and doing
severe damage to the beef industry, especially in the
The MC hands the golden statuette to her. It depicts a
microorganism mounted on a rearing horse, lance in hand, victorious over the
dead body of Sir Alexander Fleming. She departs to the cheers of the audience.
The ceremony continues, and the MC crows, “Our second runner
up, is none other than the beautiful and talented, METHCILLIN RESISTANT
STAPHYLOCOCCUS AUREUS, our own, MRSA! Recently noted in such divers
locations around the globe as
Miss MRSA receives her award and leaves the stage.
There is a drum roll, and the MC continues. “And now, the moment you’ve been
waiting for: our first place winner.“ The drum roll
crescendos, ends in a cymbal clash, then there is silence. “Who will it be? Who
will receive the world’s greatest honor for microbial accomplishment?”
He opens the envelope. The fist place winner, the Miss
Universe of pathogens, i-s-s-s, the lovely and
ever-popular, MISS HUMAN IMMUNODEFICIENCY VIRUS.” The audience comes to its
feet as it roars its approval. The orchestra begins playing a dulcet rendition
of “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody.”
Miss HIV takes stage center to a continued
standing ovation.
***
“That’s the way it
was. Me, li’l ol’
Imelda, wowing them all. But I still can’t seem to stop crying.”
“Imelda, let me hand you a tissue.”
She blows her nose,
snuffles. ”Thanks, Doctor. So I guess that’s it.
That’s my story. At the top of my game, but feeling so down.
Doesn’t make sense, huh?”
“Oh, perhaps it
does. We can work on these issues, Imelda. Generally people who have
self-esteem issues and work on them do quite well. So you’ve got a lot to look
forward to.”
“And there is the
remainder of the world to conquer, isn’t there?”
--End—
The
Chickasaw
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