Valium, Librium, and Tylenol with codeine—that's what Velma
the head nurse at the Florida House of Representatives
would dish out when you came in with your period, a hangover,
a cold, a broken arm, a hangnail. She called it the Triple,
as in It sounds like you need a Triple or That calls for a Triple.
God, the Triple was beautiful. You could do your job,
but instead of sitting at your squalid Bartleby desk
and turning into a cockroach while proofreading
legislative bills commending beauty queens and putting potheads
in prison, you would be floating on a cloud so silvery
that the words were a kind of neo-beatnik Dadaist poetry,
and our goddess was Velma, a chunky bleached blonde,
who knew what was going on, so you couldn't show up every day
or even every week, unless you were a big shot
representative from Palatka, say, or Steinhatchee or Miami Lakes
in a sherbet-colored polyester leisure suit. Oh, they could
go in any time they wanted and get a quadruple Triple,
or so we in the proofreading pool fantasized,
because we needed a Triple to get from eight o'clock to lunch,
when we were released from our cubicles
for sixty minutes, which seemed like sixty seconds, and Cindy
used to say she wanted them to pay her every hour,
just pop the bills and change down on her desk,
so when she got fed up she could walk out with her cash
and never come back, and we couldn't imagine someone
staying at a job so long they could retire, but Velma retired,
and the party was like an inauguration, because everyone
who was anyone was there and plenty of nobodies, too,
stiff flower arrangements, and a bowl of orange juice and ginger ale
punch, and then she was gone like a dream,
and the new nurse was doling out plain Tylenol, which changed
nothing, in fact made it worse, because when your head
or uterus calmed down, you'd go back to the trenches
and wait to be blown apart by a German howitzer
or chewed by rats, so those of us who were able to escape
might be forgiven for asking how it happened that one day
the door to that particular realm of hell opened and then closed
behind us, much the way Burt Lancaster's hands gripped
Tony Curtis's in Trapeze when he did the triple somersault
in the air or Babe Ruth's as he clenched the bat
and hit a home run with the bases loaded, but sometimes
I find myself saying, “Velma, I need a Triple,”
and she comes down like a Caravaggio angel and pops them
in my mouth and for a couple of hours I feel
as if I could do anything if only I knew what that could possibly be.