I can't talk right now

 One day when I was about 16, I got a call from a girl who said her name was Pam Miller. We had gone to elementary school together and I hadn't seen her since, she went to a different high school across town. We had never been friends; my hazy memories of her were of a brash, lumpen child with thick glasses and a page boy haircut. I asked what she wanted and she said she just wanted to talk. She claimed to have gotten my number from another girl I barely knew, someone I'd seen in the halls at school but didn't have any classes with and in fact had never spoken to. 

Pam said she had a friend with her and they just wanted to chat. The other girl said hi and giggled. Being a paranoid kid who was often picked on, I was of course immediately suspicious, but the girls did indeed seem to want to just chat about fairly inane things. I kept waiting for them to mock me, or try to embarrass me somehow. They did ask "So are you cute?" and I said not really, that I had glasses and looked like a nerd. "Oh come on, I bet you're cute," they said. I reiterated the fact that this was, in fact, far from the truth. We talked awkwardly for ten or fifteen minutes, then I said I had to go. 

A few weeks later they called again. They both sort of prattled on about boys they'd been with, talking about how far they'd gone with them, and again I wondered if I was being set up for ridicule. We talked for a little while but in those days I was pathologically shy, so she did most of the talking. It didn't help that both of our phones, huge black rotary things we rented from the phone company, were permanently attached to the wall of the kitchen and my mother's bedroom, and you could only hide as far as the cord  would let you. You always had to keep in mind that everyone in the narrow, thin-walled row home could hear everything anyone said.

It was a number of months until she called again- without her friend this time. My mother answered the phone and I could hear the curiosity in her voice that a girl was calling me. Pam launched into a long story about this guy she'd been seeing. She described their sexual exploits in explicit detail. She was very matter of fact about it all, like she was describing a TV program. I didn't know what to say. t. Part of me wondered if she was still as unattractive as I remembered her. She asked if I was a virgin, and, feeling myself blush, I admitted that I was, expecting her to make fun of me, but she didn't. I've forgotten most of what she said but the detail that sticks with me is her describing the cum stains on the wall along the side of her bed. Eventually she said she had to go and I hung up, feeling sort of disgusted and a little aroused but mostly just baffled.

She called one more time. I answered the phone and told her I couldn't talk. She said okay. I never heard from her again and never did figure out what it was she wanted, how she got my number, what any of it meant. I don't remember if she ever gave me her number; if she did, I know I never used it. Though she didn't seem flirtatious or encouraging, maybe she was waiting for me to ask her out or something, but I was so neurotic and self-conscious  that I wasn't capable of doing so, even if my family hadn't been lurking around every corner. It was just one more thing to add some confusion and awkwardness to my already exceedingly confusing and awkward adolescence.

A couple of turkeys

When I worked for the art supply store Dick Blick, they used to give all their employees a free turkey for Thanksgiving. Even back in the mid-nineties, this struck me as being charmingly old-fashioned. The first Thanksgiving I worked there I took my turkey home and cooked it for myself during one particularly lonely holiday. I wasn't a good chef and had never tackled anything like a whole bird before, but it turned out okay. The following year I got another one, but my refrigerator suddenly died. It was an enormous model with vertical doors, seventies brown. I had gotten it from a friend, and my stepbrothers had helped me drag it up the three flights of stairs to my apartment. I loved that thing. Since the bird was thoroughly frozen, I thought it might keep for a day or two until I could manage to cook it. I was wrong. The smell was horrific.

In the meantime, I borrowed one of those little dorm room fridges, with a freezer just big enough for a single tray of ice cubes. Eventually a guy from work offered me a more reasonably-sized one. He and a couple of friends carried it up the three flights of stairs for me. He ended up wrenching his back really badly.  I felt terrible and of course couldn't ask him to haul the old one away, so the behemoth sat there for a long while. At some point I moved it into the dining room and turned it on its side and used it as a work table.

In the meantime I had left Dick Blick to work for Borders, a company which seemed to be irritated by its employees and in any case certainly wasn't about to give them any free poultry. While I was working there, my knee got fucked up and Jasmine moved in to help with my recovery. She was constantly scolding me for being such a poor housekeeper (she wasn't wrong) and eventually shamed me into calling someone to come lug the old fridge away. 

 

I found a junk man in the phone book who would do it for thirty bucks. He was just a scrawny guy and his equally scrawny wife with a pickup truck that seemed a lot smaller than one would expect for someone who made his living out of hauling away large appliances. They got the thing out the door and a few minutes later I heard a lot of banging and cursing. The fridge was wedged at a sharp incline in the very narrow stairwell, and the woman was perched on top of it. "I have to get to work," I said. They just stared at me, so I locked the apartment door behind me and scrambled over the appliance to get downstairs. I fully expected them to still be there when I got home, but they were gone.

 Some years later I went back to work at the art supply store again, and they too had stopped giving out free turkeys. They had also rebranded, dropping the Dick from their name. Times were changing. Everything was becoming more corporate, less personal. It would be years before I celebrated Thanksgiving again. Most years I just work. I never cared much for turkey anyways.  

Marmosets

 A silver-haired man sits at a table with a woman a few years younger and quite a few pounds heavier than him.

"How can these people be so pissed off about all this critical race theory stuff," he's saying, "when they live in a country which was created by killing off all the natives? I mean, come on, people." He laughs and shakes his head. The server brings them another round.

"People keep asking me about what I'm going to do when I retire," he says."

 "I was just going to ask you that!" she says.  

"I'm moving to Ecuador," he says. "It's beautiful down there. Not too many ex-pats. You can rent a house on the beach in Guayaquil for 300 bucks a month."

"Why Ecuador? Have you spent time there?"

"Not yet, I'm going to go down and live there for a while, see if I like it. I love South America. When I was young I spent a couple of years in Peru."

"You never told me about that."

"I don't ever talk about it. It was a long time ago. We lived in the jungle. My wife was studying monkeys. Marmosets, actually. Marmosets always give birth to twins, which obviously makes them very valuable for scientific research."

"Peru. Well isn't that something. After all these years I guess there's a lot about you I still don't know."

"Well, you guys come down and visit anytime once I'm settled."

"We will, I'd love that," she says. The man knocks over his glass, which bounces off the floor with a bang and lands without breaking.

"Don't worry, no alcohol was wasted here," he says loudly. "Just ice."

"They love gringos down there," he says. "Especially tall gringos. They trot out their daughters and grade them right in front of you."

"They what?" the woman asks.

"Not in a prostitution kind of way. In a marriage kind of way."

She starts talking about the time she spent in Laos. "This is going to sound bad," he says, interrupting her as she's describing a trip she took on a fishing boat down the Mekong. "This is going to sound really, really bad. But I'm going to say it anyways because we know each other intimately. I mean, have known each other... you know what I mean. You know. Anyways. I don't like Asians. There, I said it. I'm not proud of it, but it's the truth. I know, how can I not like Asians and love South Americans so much? I mean, they're practically the same. They're all short. But there you have it. It isn't personal. I just don't care for them. And with that, I'm going to use the mens room before I get myself in really deep trouble."

 

"So, you were going to tell me more about these Bitcoins," she says when he returns.

 

"Oh, right, Here, I'll show you how to log on... there you go. Five thousand dollars, and there's a seventy five dollar fee. Now if you decide to do it, you can use Venmo or PayPal. I like Venmo. When you're ready, all you do it press that button."

 "It's that simple?" she asks.

"It's that simple," he says. "You're not doing any of the actual mining, you're just buying a share of it, like stock. It goes up and down but mostly up. But think about it before you do anything, try to decide if you really..."

"I just did it."

"You did?"

"Five thousand dollars. I'm in. This is exciting."

"Well, there you go, welcome to the club. Here, let me take a look... see, in five minutes you made fifty bucks. That's the easiest fifty bucks you've ever made. Or maybe it's not." She takes her phone back, reads the screen without saying anything. "Maybe this isn't the first time you've made fifty bucks in five minutes. I don't want to assume anything."

"It's up to a hundred," she says.

"See, a hundred bucks in less than ten minutes. You show me an easier way to make a hundred bucks in ten minutes."

"Another round?" the server asks.

"I don't think we have much choice," the man says. "We need to celebrate!"

Podiatric Panic

My new doctor sits there staring as I wipe my eyes with the heels of my palms. I apologize for being so emotional. He's here to look at my foot but at the moment I'm more concerned about my knee, which has turned red and swollen overnight, obviously infected. I'm having flashbacks of the first infection I ever had, which was in this same knee over two decades ago. Back then, I didn't understand anything about infection, and didn't have health insurance, so I put off having it looked at until I finally ended up in the ER, feverish and incoherent. For the first and only time in my life I experienced hallucinations, an army of demonic faces pressing out of the drab green wallpaper. I'm not hallucinating now, in fact I feel fine, aside from the fact that I can't breathe and my pulse is racing and I feel like I'm going to scream because I'm certain they're going to want to keep me overnight and cut me open and

But the doctor doesn't seem overly concerned, just says he'll call in a prescription for antibiotics. He takes x-rays of my foot. It's amazing how much this technology has changed since my first infection. No more lying still on a table with a lead blanket covering you as the technician operates the camera from the other room; no more waiting for film to develop. Instead he leads me to what looks like a flatbed scanner and has me stand on it as he takes the pictures, which are ready instantly. The last two doctors had done the same, found them inconclusive. They'd spent months trying to figure out why my foot was not healing up, acting baffled the whole time, but he takes one look at them and immediately concludes that it's the same issue I've had with the other part of my foot, and that he'd like to schedule surgery for a few weeks from now.

When you lose your toes, as I have on my left foot, the ends of the metatarsals don't stop growing. Knobs of bone form on the ends, and in time these knobs press through the meager padding on the bottom of the foot, causing sores which won't heal up because of the pressure placed on them by walking. So what a doctor will do is essentially sand down the bone. I've had this procedure done on the right side of my foot three times now -it seems to need to be done every five years or so, which is a pain, but is much better than losing the entire thing, which I'm told will almost inevitably happen at some point. I'm not sure why it's never been an issue on the left side before, no doubt something to do with the way I walk on the weird trapezoidal remains of my foot. The doctor says that at some point he might want to cut and adjust my Achilles tendon, but for the time being he seems confident that a light shaving will suffice to allow me to walk again, and I very much want to believe him.

The following morning I receive an email from his office saying my surgery has been scheduled for a week from now. I'm surprised but happy to be getting it over with so quickly. The idea that I might be ambulatory by the new year is, in theory, thrilling. But hope leaves you vulnerable to disappointment. Adversity has not made me strong, but brittle, and I fear that the next disappointment may be the one to finally make me shatter.

 

Shark

It’s been raining incessantly but today it suddenly stops and the clouds peel back to reveal raw blue sky. I don’t want to leave the house but I can’t help myself, I feel myself drawn into the sunlight like a sleepwalker, or a cartoon hobo being pulled through the air by the wafting scent of a fresh pie. Besides, a newly-discovered live recording of A Love Supreme has just come out, and I want to see if they have it at the record store. 

At the bus stop, a woman in purple scrubs looks at my foot and asks if I kicked a shark. She has to repeat it a couple of times before I understand what she’s saying. Her hair is purple too, as are her glasses. “My friend used to say that when she broke her foot,” she says. “Makes you seem more interesting.” 

I get my record, then get hot wings for lunch. I sit at a picnic table in the sun and eat like a wild animal, getting orange hot sauce on everything. As I’m waiting for the bus back home, an old woman with her mask under her chin comes up and asks if the next bus is imminent. That’s the word she uses, imminent. I make some inane comment about the weather and she goes into a tirade about the homeless people downtown. “Tents everywhere. Garbage everywhere. It’s disgusting. I don’t know how they can live that way,” she snarls. “It seems like a hard way to live,” I say. She says her husband and her had to live in their car for six months. “So you know firsthand” I say; “Life is so hard, I try to be grateful for what little I have. Like those clouds. Amazing.” I realize I sound like a cornball but I think I actually mean it. 

She’s quiet for a few minutes, then says her husband fell out of bed and broke four ribs. “He’s such a baby, does nothing but whine,” she says. “It feels good to whine,” I say. “I love to whine. Most guys do. Makes you feel alive.” She cackles. She doesn’t have many teeth. “You know something, you’re right about being grateful,” she says. “I need to remember that. It could always be worse.” I say, “And it will be.” She laughs again, then, suddenly self conscious, pulls her mask up over her mouth. “I’m sorry, I know I should be wearing this thing. What happened to your foot, anyways?”  I look at my cast as if I’ve just noticed it and tell her I kicked a shark. 

Rain

The Autumn rains have arrived, bringing new challenges for someone who after three months is still forced to use a knee scooter to get around. I don't mind getting wet- I have a nice new rain jacket and a great wide-brimmed hat which acts as an umbrella- but the handlebars get slick and the brakes, already pretty rudimentary, become practically useless when wet. The leaves on the sidewalk hide all the bumps and cracks, not to mention the sticks and nuts which have been driven from the branches by the rain, so I roll along even more cautiously than ever. Leaves get plastered onto my wheels and I have to stop occasionally to scrape them off.  So I'm even less mobile than I was a few weeks ago, with no end in sight. The last time I saw the doctor she seemed baffled as to why I'm not healing up, and started talking about possible infection in the bone, which would require surgery. She took some x-rays which were expensive but inconclusive. I've only seen her twice and am already trying to decide if I need to find a new doctor. The first time she trimmed the dead skin from my wound (a fifteen second procedure which I get billed for as "surgery") she was concerned that it was bleeding more than she expected, and said it could be a sign of liver damage. Now she's talking about operating. It's true that it doesn't seem to be healing as quickly as it should, but then no one has been able to tell me why this happened in the first place. I know the medical system, already pretty pathetic, has been stretched to the breaking point by the pandemic. I know that everyone working in that hospital is stressed out. But I'm at my breaking point too. I'm tired of shelling out money to doctors who are incompetent or inexperienced or apathetic or a combination of the three. But the dysfunction of the system seems as predictable and inevitable as the rain, though unlike the weather, it doesn't seem likely to change anytime soon.  

October Pilgrimage: brief summary

For someone with mobility issues which aren't proving to be as temporary as I had hoped, I got a lot accomplished during my two weeks back in the Lehigh Valley. I went to New York to see an amazing show of Phillip Guston's late paintings. I read at an open mic. I wrote the first poem I've written all year and filled three sketchbooks with cartoons. I saw Robyn Hitchcock perform. Best of all, I flew my brother in from Minneapolis to surprise my mother for her 70th birthday. I smile every time I think about her reaction when my brother sauntered into the kitchen and casually asked "What's a guy gotta do to get some coffee around here?"

I also managed to relax quite a bit. The weather was cloudy but mild, so every day I'd get my coffee and sit on the back deck and read or draw and listen to the birds. I have been such a throbbing knot of anxiety lately that I really felt like I was starting to crack. I could tell that if I didn't get a break of some sort, that something bad was going to happen. But after just a few days of lethargy, I found myself feeling calmer and healthier than I have in the past three years. I didn't try to accomplish too much, just allowed myself to space out and spend a lot of time with my mother and a few old friends. 

 

I visited Jasmine's brother at the old Hoskins Hacienda, where he and Jasmine's old school friend Jana and I spent hours looking at one of the few remaining caches of our wee companion's paintings. It was extremely intense; both beautiful and incredibly painful. It felt like ripping a scab off of a wound that hasn't healed properly, and then probing that wound with a  rusty scissors. As more pieces of the story of her collapse are revealed, the more I'm sickened by how stupid and preventable it all was. While we will never know all the details of her death and what led up to it, I have enough clues now to conjure a scenario that channels some of the more unsavory aspects of a David Lynch production. As much as I want to cling to whatever memories I still have of her, and as much as I believe in facing the truth head on, no matter how dark, I wish I could forget everything I've heard about her final  moments, because they are irredeemably fucking grim.

It took me a couple of days to crawl out from the dark shadow cast by that evening at the house in the woods, but I did, and a week later Jana and I had lunch at the Italian place in Bethlehem she loved so much. Afterwards we sat on a bench in the courtyard behind the Sun Inn, reminiscing pleasantly about our dear little frenemy in a way that felt more healing than painful. Her and Jasmine's brother and I are the three who loved her the most, I think, aside from her parents, who both died swiftly of cancer, and possibly her ex-husband, whose heart remains as enigmatic as their marriage was. But looking at those wonderful paintings- all of which were done when she was in her teens and twenties, after which her output slowed considerably- I'm convinced that she really could have been a Great Artist, if only a couple hundred things would have been different. Or maybe just one thing. Regardless, she is gone, and my heart breaks every day thinking of her, wishing I could hear her laugh again, see that mischievous twinkle in her eyes. 

 

Even at the Guston show, I couldn't completely lose myself in the art because there was a painting- one of my favorites- which I last saw nearly 18 years ago at the Met, with her by my side. And there it was again, but with her gone, it was like a huge chunk of the picture had been painted over. I found it hard to look at, and yet I stood in front of it for a long, long time.

There are plenty of other things I'd like to write about the trip, but I haven't yet been able to sift through the many emotions which inevitably accompany my trips back East. I will state the obvious and say that it is hard to watch one's parents aging, and it can challenging to enjoy what time we have together without feeling overwhelmed by a half century's worth of conflict, loss, and sometimes difficult love. But we keep trying, and sometimes we even succeed.