As my blog is now getting several hits a day regarding former internet celebrity Arafat Kazi, and I presume this is related to his health, I’m going to post a little update as to what I presently know.
I just got off the phone with Arafat. He is currently in the ICU of a Boston area hospital, where he has been for at least a night, and I guess will remain. He’s been running a kind of malaria fever on-and-off for over a year and seems to have been particularly plagued over the weekend, leading to an E.R. walk-in with a 104 degree fever, a return visit, having shot to 105, and, finally, hospital admittance.
Actually getting an overnight admittance to a hospital under the current American health care system is one of the twelve modern tasks of Heracles, so it’s safe to assume that Arafat’s present condition is exceedingly serious. Frankly, he sounded awful. He was too weak to talk longer than a few minutes.
From what I gather, and I do remind people that this is filtered through Arafat’s understanding of science, which is somewhere between piss-poor and shit-awful, our man seems to have a malaria-like infection that is residing outside of his liver. The doctors have told him that it’s treatable but that they’ve never seen anything like it and can’t figure it out.
That’s what I know.
I spoke again with Arafat, and his mother, with whom I haven’t talked in possibly two years. A nice reunion, even if under exceptionally gruesome circumstances.
Despite his weakness and addled state, Arafat gave me a refined diagnosis: along with his malaria-like illness, he has typhoid. Seriously, typhoid. I tried to make a joke about getting cholera and/or TB next, but the humor was lost.
He still sounds awful but says he’s getting out of the hospital tomorrow. Hopefully, this is good news.
His mother is very upset! And asked me repeatedly to pray for her son.
She didn’t specify to which God.
I was there, I saw it happen.
Given free entrance to the affair & invited to the Best Parties, one can find himself staring out the window of a Suite at Caesar’s Palace at 12am Friday (with only the loveliest view of air conditioners and the back of the faux-Colosseum), whilst grown men play $100 rounds of beer pong. On the walls will be cheap imitations of Roman freize painting, in the bedrooms will be unused hottubs, and everywhere one looks will be plaster reproductions of the statues of Antiquity. (Limbs pre-broken.)
One will hear the international sound of fun, every twenty minutes: glass bottles shattering, followed by crowds of men screaming their approval. One will be amongst them. For as Antonin Artaud says, and the Misfits too: “If you’re gonna scream / scream with me.”
At 2am Saturday night, in a Penthouse suite at the Riviera, after watching a live band cover the theme songs to Double Dragon and Castlevania, one will find oneself on a filthy floor, watching grown men in The Wall t-shirts playing Wii Sports baseball. One will look at himself, at his surroundings and at the pornography being projected on the wall above one’s head, and one will say: “It is most certainly time to go home.”
One will run to his hotel room, gather his belongings, and take the long drive back I-15, to home, to sanctuary: with the sun breaking over Pasadena at 6am, just another freak in the freak kingdom.
Arafat Kazi, former internet celebrity & my Bangla-buddy, came to America for a visit and nearly died of the Typhoid that he had contracted back in his homeland. Thank the Sweet Lord, for I am able to report that the manifold marvels of Western medical science have saved our modern day Mary Mallon. The man is cured!
Arafat, meanwhile, has seen fit to share images of his hospital stay, which I now pass on as a warning. Enjoy!
