Category Archives: Health: Mental and Physical

Mary and I, as I have said, were both auburn hair (though hers was nicer than mine) and, as I haven’t previously said, we both wore granny glasses and smoked.  And though I didn’t know it when I first met her she had grown up not more than a mile or so from the Tingle house in Casa De Oro too.  So she knew about things like the Hire’s Barrel, but she had gone to Catholic school.

But she wasn’t Catholic anymore having gone, as she said, a bit sex crazy when she got out of there and went to college.  Then she had married and had two kids and then got a divorce.  One night she asked me, did I think it was right for a husband to wake his wife at two and the morning and scream at her because there was some tomato paste on the kitchen wall and make her go and clean it up at two in the morning.  I said, no, because that didn’t sound right to me.  And she said it had gotten to the point where she just couldn’t stand it and felt like she was suffocating and didn’t exist anymore.  So she had left him.

She didn’t live far away over in Lemon Grove most famous to my mind for having a huge old yellow chicken wire and plaster of Paris Lemon stuck right next to the railroad tracks so when you drove by it you knew you were in Lemon Grove.  I would come over pretty late usually and we would drink beer and wine and hang out a bit.  I got along ok with the kids because I usually do get along ok with kids and dogs and animals generally.  They were still young and went to bed pretty early and then Mary and me we would retire to the bedroom.

 Coming from a Catholic family, she had plenty of brothers and sisters, and her favorite Sister had married a Mexican American who worked at the place for the Sons and Daughters of Migrant Workers.  That’s how Mary had got the job there, and he was a good guy and looked out for everybody he was related to.  So Mary had her own family and then this large Mexican American family.  And what with birthdays and barbeques something was always going on that involved eating and drinking. 

These were a really friendly people or let’s say they hugged a lot.  Maybe it was a cultural thing, but I had never hugged people so much in my whole life.  I sort of liked it, and my theory is that the Mexican people introduced the white people to hugging and that’s where all the one hug a day thing came from.

 I don’t know if Mary thought our relationship had legs or not. We didn’t really talk about that.  There are lots of things I will never know because I didn’t ask.  And I do regret that.  But since I am generally honest, I had made sure she was clear about what I was up to up front.  I was going off somewhere to graduate school.  So not to make too fine a point, but  the relationship had a sort of time-line attached to it, at least to my mind.  In fact, even in spite of my overwhelming desire to get laid and be normal again, I don’t believe any of that would have happened had I not known there was a time line.

Because if she had her fears of being suffocated, I had mine of being swallowed up. 

(I wrote a song about one incident we had.) 

The old man from his days as a farm kid to his days as a brick layer was out in the sun all of the time.  He wore a hat though mostly because people in the south wear hats to keep from passing out in the heat.  But he didn’t cover his arms, especially his forearms, and after a lifetime in the sun, the skin on his arms didn’t look like human skin, but more like alligator hide with some sort of alligator hide skin disease.  As a dermatologist might say, his forearms were just one big pre-cancerous lesion.  So he got to going to the dermatologist once a year and the doctor gave him some salve or maybe he spread it on right there, I don’t know, but this stuff was some sort of acid that would burn down the pre-cancerous lesions a bit.

So one day, I am looking in the mirror and I see this pimple forming on my upper lip, so I keep an eye on it, and it comes to a head, and I think it’s going to pop or disappear, and it does disappear a little, but then it comes back, and it looks like it is going to pop, but doesn’t, and when I squeeze the sucker it feels hard inside.  I am a hypochondriac, and every day I get up I think I am not going to live to the same day, next week.

So I am totally freaked out—like the time I thought I was getting herpes on my eyeballs—but I go to the dermatologist and my worst fears are realized.  I am sitting in that little fucking patient room where they make you sit, and the doctor is talking to the nurse right next door, and I hear the word “cancer,” and they said it with a sort of hush around it.

 So before I know it, I am across the hall in another room, flat on my back, and they numb my lip and the doc goes to work, and I have blood going up my nose and down into my mouth, and the what the hell, but I am r doctor pauses to call the nurses in, and asks them to take a look at that.  The fucker wants them to admire his handiwork.  And ight there and feel like I am a bent fender or something.

So the doc leaves and I ask the nurse like what the hell is going on.  And she says the doc just removed a cancer from my lip, something called squamous, maybe, and that the doc thinks he has got it all and that he did a good job sewing up my lip, since he has done the procedure about 300 times, and that’s good because some doctors screw up and sew the lip back together crooked and you come out with a crooked or twisted looking lip.  So while I am pretty pissed off at this doctor for being an egomaniac, vain glorious motherfucker and treating me like a piece of meat, I am also happy that the vain glorious mother fucker knew what he was doing.

I have to say but on the basis of my experience with five or so dermatologists I must conclude they all have severe personality defects.  They walk in and I point to this thing on my skin and without saying a word they grab the nitrogen bottle and blast the spot.  The first time that happened the mother fucker didn’t even bother to tell me what would happen, so I was like shocked when I got home and found these huge blisters all over my face.  The only dermatologist I met that seemed sane was a real old guy who retired soon after I saw him.

He actually talked with me a bit.  I know because I asked him a question, and he said being a dermatologist these days was not being a dermatologist at all.  Like a real dermatologist was supposed to cure mysterious skin diseases and such, but today all a dermatologist does is cut cancerous shit out of people.  And that is surgery, not dermatology. We are seeing. he says, cancers that we used to see only on sailors, and we cut the shit out and they go back and lie in the sun.

Perhaps every one is prone to it—the attempt to feel and assert that one is superior to somebody.  To all appearances the low man on our local neighborhood totem pole was little Richie White, the guy everybody, except me, beat up. 

Please understand I could have beaten him up.  One day he was there; I had to go into the house to see a man about a horse, and told Richie to stay OFF MY BIKE.  No sooner do I turn around than he jumps on it.  I knock him over; he’s like a paper bag.  I assume the beat the shit out of Richie White posture by jumping on his chest.  And I look at the guy and see him slobbering and snorting and wincing and I haven’t even hit him yet.  I got up and said, “Just go home, will you.”  And he did.

But one guy might have qualified as lower than Richie because he was funny looking and kids are not kind to strange looking people.  Fred Peace had been born a bit different.  For one thing he had been born with terrible eye sight; he had these huge coke bottle lens glasses and you really couldn’t see his eyes swimming around in those things.  And he had this very light, too fleecy hair, and skin that looked sort of leathery with little tiny bumps all over it. And he had no eyebrows to speak of. Something had gone a little tiny bit off in the genetic factory.  Clearly he was human but distinctly odd and pretty small too.

He got picked on, of course.  But after elementary school anyway people stopped it.  There was something about him that just took the fun out of it.  For one thing, he was remorselessly polite.  If somebody hit him in the teeth, he was as likely to say as not, “I apologize if my teeth got in the way of your fist.  I hope I did not damage your knuckles.”  So if you got to beating on him, you found yourself looking at this guy who was not going to beg, or flinch, or cry out in pain, or holler for help or anything.  He was just going to fucking take it because at some level he felt the situation was completely hopeless and there was just no use in whining about.  It was like whatever troubles he had with his genetics had taught him that nobody is in control and that whatever happened there was no point at all in being frightened.

Fred was a Boy Scout like me, and I liked him alright.  It was impossible to have a conversation with him because he really didn’t have much to say.  But he was a good companion if you didn’t want to talk.

The first year we went to high school we didn’t have what would be our high school yet, so they bussed us to another one.  People wore black leather jackets and such there, and there were people called “hoods.”  So one afternoon coming back on the bus,  Richie White, just as Fred is going to sit down, sticks up his pencil just where Fred is going to sit down, and the pencil goes right through the pants and hits Fred in the scrotum.  Fred like jumps up, he doesn’t yell or anything but tears start to run out from under his glasses. 

And somebody across from Richie hits him right in the side of the head and his glasses go flying and Richie says he didn’t mean to and it was an accident, and Fred you are alright aren’t you.

What a dickhead. 

People said that when Mr. Peace got home and heard what had happened to Fred he had to be restrained by Mrs. Peace and Fred from going down the Whites and beating the shit out of Mr. White and little Richie.  Because more was going on here than met the naked eye.  Maybe because of those genetic issues only one of Fred’s testicles had descended.  And that goddamn pencil had gone right into the one that had descended, though the doctor had told them that it would be all right..  Still the family jewels and the line of descent had been threatened by that errant pencil as wielded by one Richie White.