Kamikaze Lust Read Online Free PDF

garbage than a Staten Island dump—I could hardly refuse an opportunity to shower, dress, and leave my apartment.
    Camille, still singing to the Carpenters (not a cloud in the sky, got the sun in my eye), clicked her heels against the floor in time. I was so focused on her routine I didn’t notice Dr. Janis coming in until she was standing over me, rapacious blond mane swallowing the shoulders of her freshly pressed lab coat. She smelled like she’d just come in from the street. In her hand was the shiny, silver Novocain gun.
    “You don’t really need it,” she said.
    “Oh, yech, I do.”
    The needle bit into my outer gum area no worse than Freddy would do. I cringed, turned my head slightly, and saw Dr. Janis’s shoes—cherry combat boots. I trusted her.
    Within a few minutes my throat felt numb. Dr. Janis snapped a rubber glove over each of her hands, and I thought of this reporter I used to work with who mangled clichés. She once told me the problem with men—and this goes back to the mid-eighties—was they were becoming too sensitive. “It’s like you have to treat them with rubber gloves,” she said. At the time I found her stupidity hilarious, although now, I wondered whether she might have been on to something about handling life with latex.
    Dr. Janis pulled down my lower lip with a rubber-coated pinkie. As she reached for the drill, I felt the muscles in my stomach contract.
    “Relax,” she said. “It won’t be that bad.”
    I raised my eyebrows.
    “Remember your abscess?” Dr. Janis leaned forward. I could hear the piercing whir of the drill. “You thought you were going to die, remember?”
    “Ich was…grosch.”
    “But you lived to tell.”
    I nodded affirmatively. I lived. Aunt Lorraine was dying. I imagined her sitting in a chair like this, only instead of Novocain the gun pumped liquefied Seconal, Nembutal, or whatever hemlock of the moment. Dying should not be like going to the dentist. It would have to be less stressful.
    “You’re so jittery today,” Dr. Janis said. “It’s just a couple of cavities.”
    “I told you, she’s on strike,” Camille interjected.
    “Oh, right, right. So what do you do now?”
    I shrugged.
    “Hey, we have that guy, maybe she can write for him,” Camille said, her short, Betty Boop curls bouncing into my peripheral view. “You know, Phillip, the one who does those farm magazines.”
    “The Weekly Cow. ”
    “No, it’s Cow Week. ”
    “And what’s the other one? My favorite.”
    “He’s got like tons.”
    “ Suburban Hog, that’s the one I’m thinking of,” Dr. Janis said, nursing a subtle sparkle in her eyes. “They’re big in Texas.”
    “Huge in Texas,” Camille said. She and Dr. Janis smiled at each other.
    “I don’t think Rachel wants to write about farm animals,” Dr. Janis said. “You don’t, right?”
    I gave as much of a grimace as I could manage given that my mouth was propped open by Dr. Janis’ hand. I could smell my saliva on her gloves and was feeling too much pressure from the drill against my jaw. Lest my tongue lunge to stop it, I pointed to my mouth and said what surfaced as: “ Uh-gunkkah. ”
    “More Novocain?”
    I nodded, and she slipped the metal gun between her thumb and forefinger. This time I couldn’t feel the needle.
    Lying back supine, legs propped up in the rigor mortis of the moment with Dr. Janis drilling deep into the estuaries of my enamel, I couldn’t escape the carnality of modern dentistry. I wondered how Dr. Janis dealt with it. I once asked my ex-fiancé Sam, the gynecologist-in-training, how he could look inside vaginas every day and divorce himself from the notion of sex. “Oh grow up, Rachel,” he sneered. Some pussy doctor he turned out to be. But by then sex had become our Issue with a capital I, as Shade would say, and we’d made it into counseling, a dehumanizing experience if ever there was one. I hated the therapist, the way she prodded and probed, with Sam sitting there