The Dying Animal

Donna Karen New York, a gold chain and a watch, a cigarette and a lighter.  Sometimes even a blind pig. . .  I don't remember taking this photo.  It surely was taken from the hip.  When I pulled it up from the memory card, I thought, "Sometimes, boy, luck is just the thing."  Life its own self, as someone once said.  

My view of life and humanity grows grimmer every day.  I am not the happy boy I used to be.  Oh, sure, I was always melancholy, but this is much different.  

My mother has been complaining that she thinks she broke her toe when she fell. 

"Look at this," she demands.  

I don't see anything.  

"Doe it hurt?"

"Yes.  My ankle too.  It's swollen."

It is the ankle on the opposite leg.  Again, I don't see anything.  

"Do you want to go to the doctor?"

"Yes, I think I'd better."

So yesterday I took her back to the ortho clinic with the walk-in patient thing that lets you get to see a PA and get X-rays and if it looks necessary, a doctor's appointment.  It is a nice thing, but it means sitting in the large waiting room again.  The waiting room is big and spacious.  This ortho group does a nice job.  But the room is full of people, and a room full of people is disturbing.  Maybe it isn't for others.  Some may find it funny or fascinating, but I see monsters, my mother and myself included.  In the wild, most of us would be quickly hunted down and eaten, too fat and hobbled and deformed to do anything about it.  I don't know what people are thinking, and of that I am grateful.  But I think I get too great a glimpse now living with my mother.  The window into the public mind must be the blaring of commercial television, the constant idiocy and jabber, the made up voices and purposely stupid and irritating commercials.  These voices surely run through the public mind day and night.  

The entire thing has me unhinged.  

As I say, the ortho clinic is sterling, and within minutes my mother was in for X-rays, and not long after, the PA came in to see her.  He was an older gent, perhaps in his 50s, and I thought about my undergraduate days in the university zoology program when people who didn't have all that it would take to get into medical school were thinking about applying to the Physician's Assistant program.  It was like being a doctor, almost.  These programs were something new at the time, but now PAs are everywhere doing all the things a doctor doesn't want to do--like talk to patients.  I have long thought of that horror.  You are the top of your class, smart, learned, and you get into medical school with others like you.  It is thrilling.  Eventually, you graduate, do your internship, and set up practice. And then. . . your days are spent trying to tell hillbillies they need to quit smoking.  Patients want to tell you things you don't need or want to know, and the brightest people you get to talk to in a day are usually nurses, one of whom you will eventually leave your first husband or wife for.  Things just didn't seem to go the way you had dreamed.  

But then. . . there were PAs.  Oh, fuck yea.  

I've looked it up.  PAs are well-paid.  It could be a satisfying life if you didn't try to pretend to yourself you were a doctor, if you accepted your role as a medical assistant with limited authority.  I'm certain, however, that is a rarity.  

Mom's PA certainly wasn't the exception.  When he came in, I simply nodded.  I let my mother do the talking.  The PA put up the X-rays.  Nothing, he said was broken.  There was arthritis in the first joint of the big toe she thought she might have broken and maybe a sprain in the ankle.  He suggested that she might wear a soft boot shoe on the painful toe foot to help her walk without putting pressure on it.  

And here's where the thing went off the rails.  My mother is a hillbilly, pure and simple.  Ask her a question.  She doesn't answer a question.  Not the way one would.  

"How bad is the pain?"

"Well. . . when I was a kid. . . . "

It is frustrating as hell.  The PA hadn't time for it.  

"Do you want to try the shoe?"

"I don't know.  What does it look like?"

"This wasn't a fashion question.  It is a medical one."

I bit my tongue.  He was holding himself too high and mighty, an intellectual giant among midgets.  My blood boiled a bit and I wanted to dress him down.  I thought to say, "Hold on, pal.  You've jumped to a mighty big assumption.  She said nothing about fashion.  She can't tie a shoe.  She has a broken wrist.  She is asking about the functional appearance, you moron."  But. . . I didn't think that was going to get us anywhere good, so I let it pass.  Besides, I know how frustrating my mother can be.  

When he left the room to get the shoe, my mother had obviously perceived his annoyance.  

"I'm not a good patient," she said.  

"You don't answer questions," I said.  "It can be frustrating."

But that is the hillbilly way.  Suspicion.  "Why do you want to know?"

The PA didn't come back.  He sent in some of the. . . I don't know what they were, technically.  Helpers in medical garb.  They fumbled around trying different sizes on my mother's foot.  There was also an ankle brace for the other leg that would never get worn.  

When we got back in the car, my mother said, "Well. . . I just wanted to know if anything was broken."

It was after noon when we got back to her house.  I'd eaten a yogurt before we went to the clinic.  Now I needed to go to the gym.  My day was going to be jammed up, my "free" time, I mean.  

I am not doing so well, as I've suggested.  I think I am getting better, but I am quite unsure.  In addition to the lingering thing, I have hurt my back badly so that I can not stand up fully without screaming.  I had no business in the gym, and yet. . . . 

I didn't get out until after two.  I went back to my place to soak and shower.  I was miserable, but the tub felt good.  After a shower, I lay down for a moment.  When I looked at the clock, it was going on five.  I had not eaten but for the yogurt.  I called my mother to tell her I was going to pick up some takeout chicken from the good Peruvian place.  She had told me earlier she was going to eat the leftover chicken, broccoli and rice from the night before, but I wanted to check.  O.K.  I was feeling low.  It had been a shitty day.  Now I was locked into the worst of the daily traffic.  I turned on the college jazz station and followed the interminable line of cars past my mother's turnoff and onto the major highway finally reaching the chicken shack.  But something was wrong.  There were no cars in the parking lot.  It looked like an abandoned building.  And. . . indeed, it was.  The place was no longer there.  WTF?  

I turned to go to my mother's house.  I couldn't think of what to eat.  I didn't want to face the traffic.  I would sit down, smoke a cheroot and drink a mocktail.  

I was shaky as I sat out with my mother.  I needed food.  I would have to go to the grocery store and figure something out.  It was late.  I didn't want to cook.  I guessed I'd get some deli chicken and. . . something.  

"Do you want to come?" I asked my mother in case she was getting cabin fever.

"No." 

The deli was out of chicken.  I was done in.  I couldn't think.  I walked to the frozen food aisle and got some enchiladas and some Ben and Jerry's ice cream.  

All I wanted was a drink.  I have had not trouble doing a Dry January, but last night, all I wanted was sit down with a couple whiskeys.  Today is the last day of January, of course, and I have been dry for nearly 40 days.  I've lost a lot of weight so far, from. . . well. . . I've lost a lot of weight.  Not enough, however.  Of late, I've even stopped taking anything to help me sleep.  My blood is pure.  My body is a temple.  

But Friday. . . . I don't know.  My outlook on things is pure shit.  I don't feel well and have nothing to look forward to.  So it seems.  My thoughts are dark and it is getting harder to put one foot in front of the other.  Yay though I walk through the Valley of Shit. . . . 

My mother is up now and complaining.  She didn't sleep well.  She is constipated.  Her arm hurts.  She shuffles from room to room.  It takes forever.  

"Can you open this for me?"

I will hear loud commercial television soon.  It is a disease.  People have become dumber, and "experts" don't know why.  This is a verifiable fact.  Reading scores for children continue their percipitous drop.  We're not talking about reading literature.  We're talking about simple instructions.  The kids at the checkout counter cannot make change.  They are easily confused.  "I need to get a manager."  The manager usually has the logical skills of a schizophrenic, a condition for which he or she is probably being treated.  

We've fucked everything up.  

The house next to my mother's is undergoing a facelift.  A man with a cell phone walks around talking.  A group of Mexicans works.  The man with the telephone will walk to his truck.  He'll come back and give instructions.  The Mexicans are stoic.  One of them is a young woman who is aging rapidly.  Maybe she is married to one of the other workers.  It is the end of the day.  She begins taking tools to the battered pickup truck.  It is getting dark.  The man with the cell phone left long ago.  Now they will go home--what is it like?  A small house on the outskirts, a carport into which they back the pickup?  Worn furniture and a small kitchen.  They take turns showering.  Do they cook or do they stop for MacDonalds?  Eventually they drop onto the couch and turn on the television.  The lawn, like all those around them, is mostly sand, cars parked on many.  They are glad to be home.  They go to worn beds and lie between old sheets under an old blanket.  They snuggle and kiss before they say goodnight.  Maybe there are kids, grandparents. . . .  There is barely time to think.  

I don't bother to imagine jefe's life.  I know that dick, too.  

I think of the title of a Philip Roth novel--"The Dying Animal."