The morning sun fell out of its bed of clouds and onto the cold floor that was the early sky. It stretched its arms out and inadvertently lit up the earth with bright light. The daylight crept on down into the homes and buildings of the city centre with silent joy. The same couldn't be said for those on their way to Sacred Heart Hospital.
The Monday morning shift pulled with it the remains of interns long hung-over from too much partying on a particular Sunday evening. They dragged their feet, like their own hangdog expressions, across the recently cleaned floor. Doctor Kelso stood in reception glowering over the flowing river of young doctors. Certain people thought he would suit a pointy black hat and green skin, and have the most terrible aversion to water; certain people like J.D.
J.D was not usually the one to stand out from the wrecked crowd of young doctors somehow managing to find their way into Sacred Heart, and today was no different. His head swung around the corner like a pendulum and gradually slid inside with all the other lifeless shells known as interns.
His head was spinning (and not because he decided to jump off his scooter and chase that squirrel on the drive over). J.D's groggy steps slipped over the shiny floor and into each other. He stumbled, yet casually (well, as casually as possible in such a situation) pulled himself up and proceeded to perform a smooth Fonzie-style comb of the hair, just to confirm his total control over the fall.
What J.D failed to realise was the piece of day-old pizza still clung to the back of his head. In his attempt to look cool, his hand had smeared the crusty cheese all over the back of his head. It was just dumb luck that everyone else was too hung-over to notice.
It took a while for J.D to register his action. He drew out a good minute to scutinize the slimy slab of Italian food on his hand, and then to peel off the pizza from the back of his head. He quickly shimmied to the side to avoid blocking up the reception and examined what was he held.
The first thing to strike him was the fact he had just removed a hunk of pizza from the back of his head. That scooter helmet must be tighter than I thought, babbled J.D inside his head; I wonder how it got there in the first place? Then he remembered something.
The most minute snippet of memory inched into his brain. He and Turk had gone out last night. Doing what: he didn't know. Doing it where: he didn't know that either. For what occasion: it didn't seem to be that important at the time. All J.D had to go on was that he came back to his apartment from somewhere and needed to know what went down.
The thing is, J.D often speculated, you can always tell how good a night was by the new scars left on you in the morning. The problem is that you can never remember on your own how good the night was, (this is usually due to consuming your own weight in peanuts and alcohol and will end up with you not having the ability to see when daylight finally arises the next morning). Why should we base how much enjoyment we've had on how much it kills us? Do we need the pain to counteract the pleasure? Or is life just really unfair?
As J.D stood there, deep in thought, pizza in hand and slightly on back of head, it never occurred to him to wash what was left of tomato/cheese/mould hybrid from the back of his head. He simply slipped the remains of the pizza into the bin, wiped his greasy hand on his pants and continued into the hospital. As he turned inwards to the main corridor, the pizza had managed to become precariously perched on the rim of the bin. It teetered from one side to the next, like some gooey seesaw. Catching the faint breeze from a passing intern the pizza lost its balance and hurtled toward the floor. It connected to the floor with a doughy, and quite revolting, splat.
Deep within the bowels of Sacred Heart, a figure stopped mid-action and uncontrollably shivered. Like a well-trained bloodhound, the Janitor pricked up his ears and narrowed his eyes into a menacing scowl.
"Someone, somewhere, has misplaced Italian food. And I think I have a good idea who it is…" He grabbed his mop from its convenient dull grey bucket and thrust it under his arm like a sergeant's baton. "Only Scotland Yards' finest can crack the case!" he announced in a regal British accent, before parading around the corridor, suspiciously eyeing up the passers-by.
"Hey Bambi," came the cooing maternal tones of Carla from over the nurses desk, "You don't look so hot. You okay?"
"No Carla, not really," whined J.D, "Is Turk around? I need to ask him something…"
Before J.D would get an answer, Carla yanked a hold of his collar and brought him in face to face. Fury bubbled in her eyes and she hollered at him, "Whatever you did to my poor baby, I want to hear it now!" J.D cowered at Carla's fuming rage, yet just as quickly as she had sprang up, she subsided saying, "'Cause I really enjoy the peace and quiet."
J.D looked about, puzzled.
"Did that just happen?"
"M-hmm" came Laverne from behind the desk, "She ain't bin used to having her man so hung-over he can't string two thoughts together, never mind two words."
"Listen Laverne, I know what kind of stuff Turk talks about." J.D took a second to remember their debate on whether chilli-cheese fries were their own food-group, and their discussion about the possible injuries from Women's Pro Jelly wrestling. I don't think that Carla could have any real lasting effect on his conversational skills…" Or could she…?
Again, the door to J.D's memory creaked open and let a little chink of light to flash through. Turk didn't come home with him, although Turk was in his room when J.D managed to fight himself awake from the sofa.
I never was any good at jigsaw puzzles,thought J.D, so having to piece together a picture with flashes of memory that look like a pre-school art gallery doesn't seem all that fair. Damn tequila; one day I shall conquer more than seven shots of you and still retain my short-term memory!
As J.D stood there, sitting in first class on his train of thought, time fluttered by like a swarm of frantic and jittery butterflies. When he finally realised his lack of movement (and the sudden jump forward in time by ten minutes) he remembered why he came up: rounds. He collected his things and ran off down the corridors, head full of unanswered thoughts (not to mention remains of an Italian takeaway).
Back down in the reception, the Janitor approached the bin that J.D had left the guilty pizza in (or near enough). He picked up the pizza with the end of his mop and examined it like a kitten examines a ball of wool. His eyes scanned the surface of the offending food product and he began to draw up his ideas and presumptions.
"Hmmmm," he pondered, "This pizza's topping has been disturbed, and guessing from the amount of hair on it…" he plucked some of J.D's hair from the pizza, "It has been attached to someone's head for about…" he took a deep whiff of the pizza and then put some of the hair in his mouth. His eyes helped aid his deduction of the hair in his mouth by fleeting around in his head. The Janitor spat out the hair and came to a conclusion; "The culprit has had this slice of Italian delicacy stuck to their head for the duration of the previous night. Now to find someone with pizza cheese on his or her head…" he removed a plastic wallet from his pocket and placed the pizza inside it. On it was already scrawled "Exhibit A" in crayon.
"You know," came a chirpy voice from behind him, "If you hadn't put the hair in your mouth, you could have sent it to the lab for testing." The Janitor turned around and looked down; inside his head he had the words, "Why don't you shut up?" repeating on a continuous loop. That was what he was going to say, until he realised who it was.
Elliot looked at the mouldy chunk of pizza in the plastic wallet and gave a discerning look at it, "Urgh, wouldn't want to touch that. Except that one time where I got locked in my high school cafeteria and had to live off month old potatoes and use gravy as mascara so that the stale fish sticks wouldn't laugh at me. But what do they know? They're just processed junk food sold to fat kids." She eventually returned to the point at hand and gave the janitor a cheeky smile. He stood there feeling quite sheepish, even after she had left with that quaint skip in her step.
As she left the reception area, the Janitor felt that numbing feeling all over and let go of the pizza-wallet. Just as you would expect, a travelling doctor stood on it and smushed it over the floor.
"Ooo, you should clean that up" the doctor noted and continued walking off, a footprint of pizza marking his journey. The Janitor was vexed and turned to face the doctor, but didn't get a good look at his face. He grumbled and put the pizza in the bin, as he mopped up the mess of the pizza he murmured to himself, "Looks like another name for the hit-list"
From a small pocket he removed a piece of paper that read "My enemies". The only other thing on the paper was "The Jerk that I don't like". Under it he wrote with a stumpy pencil, "The Jerk who stood on the pizza". He forced the pencil and paper back into his pocket and whistled a merry tune as he plotted his vengeance.