IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

Einstürzende Neubauten is the name of a German band that has been making unconventional music for over 40 years. What makes them sound so unique is that they augment their traditional rock instruments with various home-made ones constructed from scrap metal and power tools. Their songs often feature metallic scraping, banging, and revving, with a fair amount of hushed angry lyrics and guttural screaming. Imagine Yoko Ono singing a duet with a chainsaw above a chorus of squealing car brakes and pounding jackhammers. Or a bleak angry version of Blue Man Group in a Mad Max apocalyptic universe. Over the years, their music has gotten tamer and more melodic, but it’s still not the type of stuff you’d expect to hear in the background during high tea at a ritzy white tablecloth restaurant.

Now I am very well aware of how obscure Einstürzende Neubauten is, so referencing them does not really make for a good analogy. Rarely is a joke funny when you have to explain the punch line first. But so perfectly spot on accurate was my comparison to Einstürzende Neubauten, that I could not resist using it a few weeks ago when the technician assisting me out of the MRI machine politely asked, “how was it?”  As expected, my reply of “I felt like I was at an Einstürzende Neubauten concert” drew a confused blank stare.

This left me with an important snap decision to make.

OPTION A: (also known as the smarter choice) Say “oh never mind, everything was fine.” Thus, allowing us both to happily move on with the rest of our lives as quickly as possible. 

OPTION B: (otherwise known as the Legendary Lunkhead Move) Become the annoying lout, rudely oblivious that other people are waiting to use the machine, and awkwardly stand there barefooted in an open back patient gown and embarrassing droopy disposable shorts, rambling on with a long description (similar to the above first paragraph) explaining who and what Einstürzende Neubauten is, to the indifferent nonplused hardworking underpaid tech politely feigning interest in an effort to hurry me along.

WHEWWWWW.   Which

OPTION I actually chose, is unimportant to the story right now, so for the moment, please feel free to imagine I did whichever one is more amusing to you. 

For those who know as much about MRIs as they do about Einstürzende Neubauten, the large room-filling Magnetic Resonance Imaging machines basically use jumbo magnets and radio waves to take 3D moving x-ray type pictures of your insides. While one person sits behind a glass window at a desk of knobs and buttons, like a recording engineer overseeing a studio jam, another tech walks you into a cold darkish room dominated by a monstrously massive donut shaped metal machine. The tech lays you on a slab similar to an embalming table sticking out of the giant donut hole, then instructs you to be astoundingly still while the machine repeatedly moves you in and out of the long tight metal tube, that from the inside feels like a cross between a water slide and an insanely deep front-loading clothes dryer. 

Truthfully, I have no real clue how the damn thing actually works or why the machines always make a cacophonic symphony of loud clunking clacking beeping grinding sounds. But the creepy discomforting noises are nothing compared to the HAL-9000-like disembodied futuristic computer voice that repeatedly warns you how long you will have to remain motionless before each successive scan. Worse than all the current A.I. horror stories filling the news, the MRI machine’s emotionless commands delivered while you are laying there helplessly entombed, makes you fear the technological singularity will be here sooner than we all thought.

Luckily the process does not physically hurt. Although it is off-putting the times they have to inject you with the metallic juice, gadolinium, that makes your veins feel chilled and gives the feeling you are chewing on aluminum foil.  The only real issue with getting an MRI is if you are claustrophobic, because it might give you the impression you are being buried alive in a sealed white aluminum casket.

Though noisy, the MRI machine alone does not typically sound like Einstürzende Neubauten. But that day as they hustled me into the room wearing the supplied weird-feeling disposable blue string-tie shorts and flimsy open-back hospital style patient gown, the machine operator quickly asked me what music I wanted to listen to.  In hindsight I should have said something soothing like 1950s cool jazz or maybe a mellow classical string quartet. But in my hast, my gut reflex was to say They Might Be Giants, because they always make me smile.

The technician then assisted me into the machine like he was loading a twitchy triggered nuclear missile into a long submarine torpedo tube. He handed me a plunger button to push if there was an emergency, told me not to move, and at the last minute slipped a pair of tight-fitting headphones on me just as I started to slide into the bowels of the giant metal monster.

If you have ever heard an AM radio tuned just a little off a station so it was 50% static… broadcasted on an old very cheap radio… with horribly low-end speakers… with a slight tear in the woofer… cranked up way too loud to the point of mostly unrecognizable ear-splitting distortion… then you know exactly what I heard in the headphones blaring into my skull when they eventually turned the music on.

Yeah, I should have immediately mashed that button, but I just wanted to get the thing over with. And I did not realize how long it would take. My last MRI was done in like 10 minutes. But remembering that I had once sat very heavily medicated through an entire evening retrospective of Yoko Ono films at the Ohio State University Wexner Center Mershon Auditorium, I figured I could muscle through this auditory agony with no problem.

Each time the machine repositioned me between scans, I shrugged my shoulders just enough to slightly slide the left headphone off my ear. Eventually after a few wiggles, the blaring grossly distorted screeching sounds of the streaming Pandora playlist of 80s alternative folk punk music of TMBG, the Violent Femmes, Oingo Boingo, and Dead Milkmen stopped melting my brain into a steamy pile of goo.

For over 40 minutes I put up with that nonsense while I was trapped near motionless inside the belly of the beast. To pass the time I imagined I was lying on the wide tongue of a big round-headed metal-mouthed screaming pachycephalosaurs, just waiting for him to finally say a doctor requested depressor style ‘AHHHHHHH’ and spit me out. My actual final ejection from the machine was far less dramatic than that and was more akin to a 30-year-old VHS tape clunkily limping its way out of a tired old recorder. Either way, I was relieved to get out of there. As soon as I was allowed to move, I flung off the headphones like they were a giant attacking spider engulfing my head, injecting venomous poison directly through my auditory canals up into my throbbing cochlea.

So even if you have never heard them, I’m sure you can imagine how that ear-splitting shrill music(?) blaring above the MRI machine’s robotic impassive voice, and unpleasant clangor of dissonance grinding pings, clanks, and boings, would put one in the mind of Einstürzende Neubauten. Despite it being such an obscure reference, it was by far the most astoundingly accurate description I could come up with.

My head was still ringing as I slid off the body-contoured table. That was when the tech questioned if everything was okay and I referenced Einstürzende Neubauten. Now I assume most of you think I chose the lengthier OPTION B as my follow-up reply. And maybe if my brain was not still vibrating like a Sunday morning church bell clapper, I might have gone that route. But instead, I ‘neverminded’, ‘just fined’, and got the hell out of there.

Well…  not before changing back to my real clothes. And I did kinda’ surreptitiously sneak the disposable shorts out of the place in my pocket to show them off to my wife. I thought they were wacky funny, but she was not impressed.

As I was paying the chunk of money that insurance did not cover, I did mention to the receptionist / medical assistant that they might need to adjust the volume of headphones before they torture the next person. But based on the woman’s crooked smile, I had a hunch maybe the young staff already knew and were possibly passing the time by making bets on how long each patient could tolerate the auditory pain before pushing the button. I wondered if that were true, did any of them predict I’d go the distance.  Before I left, they handed me a DVD of the MRI scan which I am still considering editing under a soundtrack of Einstürzende Neubauten.

Inside Me

Recognizable Spooky Dude That I Thought Of During My MRI