Cat Comforter
Oh the cat's been pretty good about being left alone for many days these recent weeks, with her cat window for egress and that man who comes every couple of days and fills her bowl. No apparent tantrums on my returns discluding the blood drawn from my flesh and not much to suggest extreme angst while I'm away, the shredded toilet paper rolls really only good clean fun. I write the blood drawing off to over-exuberant joy or possibly she just likes to see the peroxide bubble on my wounds. I'm coming for you Virginia, I'm all packed up and waiting for the sheets to dry and then I'll drive up from NC and pick you up and bring you down here for one last visit. No, you won't be happy about the driving and you will poop yourself and drool but we'll clean that up and let it fade into the recesses of our memories. When I left you were snuck up under the comforter like a wadded up pair of pants. I knew it was you though, ain't no fooling me but what I let you.
...more recent posts
The Barrel
In North Carolina there is a fifty gallon plastic barrel full of chicken manure and water out in the back yard, one of the last troublesome remnants from the former tenant and I'm not real sure how to go about dealing with it. A neighbor with a garden might be interested but I suspect they would feel the same trouble I do, that is how to move it without sloshing the top layer of water all over you, or how to remove the top layer of water without an unfortunate result.
I have imagined drilling a hole in the barrel to remove some water but not knowing how much water is in there or being able to figure out the projectile force of the ensuing stream I am hesitant to go that route. Rubber gloves and a small handled bucket I could use and then dip out until the water is gone or enough of it to roll the barrel away somewhere with the handcart seems like an ok idea. In its resting state the barrel does not give off any odor and it may be that as manure it is thoroughly processed and the stink will be minimal but uncertainy still resides deep inside me. Years ago in a job that had me walking across vast stretches of East Texas farm and woodland I came upon a fairly large commercial chicken coop and etched pretty deeply into that part of my brain that assists with the gag reflex is the memory of the crude effluvium drain running out of the coop and through a shallow ditch alongside it. That part of my brain and I have come to an understanding that if I won't visit it, it won't visit me.
If you have ever siphoned gas out of a tank you know it is close to impossible not to get at least a little in your mouth so I have ruled that out completely.
I have it on my list to call Bruce and Pizza to haul away the several hundred bagged pounds of non burnable remnant which I have raked from the burn pile and a couple of other junk graves on the property, the bones and cans and plastic and assorted metal parts and rubber hoses and twine and discarded toys and spent shotgun shells just floating up on their own over time, and I'm sure they would deal with it without out all this namby pamby considering but I hate to lay it on them, kind of in the same way you straighten up the worst of your mess before calling the cleaning lady.
I guess I'll just put it off and deal with something else today. Might drive into town and get breakfast and then over to the Home Improvement to pick up some flexible heating duct to replace that section or two into which mice moved and infected my interior air with the aroma of their urine and feces and, I daresay, their dead selves.
In North Carolina there is a fifty gallon plastic barrel full of chicken manure and water out in the back yard, one of the last troublesome remnants from the former tenant and I'm not real sure how to go about dealing with it. A neighbor with a garden might be interested but I suspect they would feel the same trouble I do, that is how to move it without sloshing the top layer of water all over you, or how to remove the top layer of water without an unfortunate result.
I have imagined drilling a hole in the barrel to remove some water but not knowing how much water is in there or being able to figure out the projectile force of the ensuing stream I am hesitant to go that route. Rubber gloves and a small handled bucket I could use and then dip out until the water is gone or enough of it to roll the barrel away somewhere with the handcart seems like an ok idea. In its resting state the barrel does not give off any odor and it may be that as manure it is thoroughly processed and the stink will be minimal but uncertainy still resides deep inside me. Years ago in a job that had me walking across vast stretches of East Texas farm and woodland I came upon a fairly large commercial chicken coop and etched pretty deeply into that part of my brain that assists with the gag reflex is the memory of the crude effluvium drain running out of the coop and through a shallow ditch alongside it. That part of my brain and I have come to an understanding that if I won't visit it, it won't visit me.
If you have ever siphoned gas out of a tank you know it is close to impossible not to get at least a little in your mouth so I have ruled that out completely.
I have it on my list to call Bruce and Pizza to haul away the several hundred bagged pounds of non burnable remnant which I have raked from the burn pile and a couple of other junk graves on the property, the bones and cans and plastic and assorted metal parts and rubber hoses and twine and discarded toys and spent shotgun shells just floating up on their own over time, and I'm sure they would deal with it without out all this namby pamby considering but I hate to lay it on them, kind of in the same way you straighten up the worst of your mess before calling the cleaning lady.
I guess I'll just put it off and deal with something else today. Might drive into town and get breakfast and then over to the Home Improvement to pick up some flexible heating duct to replace that section or two into which mice moved and infected my interior air with the aroma of their urine and feces and, I daresay, their dead selves.
Did You Hear The One About
I am trying to think of a story to embarrass Mr. BC on his birthday but I can't tell that one and the other one would break his mother's heart and there's another one that would land him in jail, and it would not make sense to put the guy who bails you out of jail, in jail. I think I've already told the one where he is holding hands with the two girls on either side of him in the film room in 2nd grade, watching what--And Now Miguel, or that teacher's favorite featuring the animated hemoglobin, Hemo the Magnificent?
He was the Babe Ruth of our neighborhood baseball games, a real long ball hitter, but that's like a compliment and I don't really see him getting embarrassed over a comparison to Babe Ruth.
He threw a dart at me once and it stuck in my index finger and he never apologized for that, unless you accept hysterical laughter as apology, so he has a dark side, make no mistake about that.
He developed a technique for cheating at pool where he would follow through with a shot with such a flare of forward momentum that you would hardly notice he was knocking one of his balls in with the butt end of the cue on the back swing.
Oh here's one, his family had a game room called the Texas Room, complete with bar and a player piano and that print of dogs smoking and playing poker and for awhile anyway, during the sixties, the entrance to the room was covered with long strands of plastic beads and before the pool table there was a bumper pool table, which was a lot of fun and I always thought it was so cool that his parents set aside a room in the house where they never, hardly ever bugged us but as time has passed I realize that the real motive behind that Texas Room was that we would have a place at the far end of the house, with separate entrance, so that we would not bug them. But what I wanted to say, about the bar stocked with his parents liquor was that...we never touched it. Sure his father looked a little like John Wayne but John Wayne never punched kids so I don't know what we were afraid of. Or what BC was afraid of, Mr. non parental liquor stealing sissie. Yeah that's right, body blow. Bet you wished you hadn't thrown that dart now huh?
There's some stuff with teenage girls and BC and our friend TA who lived in the blue and white house across from mine but pretty innocent stuff really and I won't bore you with it. He's always had good honest enthusiasm for the sweeter mysteries of life I'll just say that.
He was good with maps and diagrams and planning capers and I think if we had been living through the depression together he would have devised ways to take care of all of us, providing us with food and clothes and hell, even baseballs. Of course without a depression to shape him into a kind of a syndicate boss he has pretty much taken care of all of us anyway, albeit with hard work and blah blah blah. Although we could still see a depression so his real skills may someday come into play.
BC, a legitimately talented musician and artist was always quick to encourage me (as a ten-year-old) in my own music career, though as it turned out I was a one hit off key wonder with an unfinished song called--The Motor Scooter Song, a song which as far as I can tell somehow made it many years later into the hands of Bruce Springsteen and in rhythm and subject matter was the basis for pretty much every other song he did in his heyday. I'm not bitter about it, I'm just saying.
Hell, there really aren't any stories I can tell where BC doesn't come out a shining star, including the ones I can't tell. On three everybody--ridin' down the road on my motor scooter tonite, motor scooter, hoo motor scooter...
I am trying to think of a story to embarrass Mr. BC on his birthday but I can't tell that one and the other one would break his mother's heart and there's another one that would land him in jail, and it would not make sense to put the guy who bails you out of jail, in jail. I think I've already told the one where he is holding hands with the two girls on either side of him in the film room in 2nd grade, watching what--And Now Miguel, or that teacher's favorite featuring the animated hemoglobin, Hemo the Magnificent?
He was the Babe Ruth of our neighborhood baseball games, a real long ball hitter, but that's like a compliment and I don't really see him getting embarrassed over a comparison to Babe Ruth.
He threw a dart at me once and it stuck in my index finger and he never apologized for that, unless you accept hysterical laughter as apology, so he has a dark side, make no mistake about that.
He developed a technique for cheating at pool where he would follow through with a shot with such a flare of forward momentum that you would hardly notice he was knocking one of his balls in with the butt end of the cue on the back swing.
Oh here's one, his family had a game room called the Texas Room, complete with bar and a player piano and that print of dogs smoking and playing poker and for awhile anyway, during the sixties, the entrance to the room was covered with long strands of plastic beads and before the pool table there was a bumper pool table, which was a lot of fun and I always thought it was so cool that his parents set aside a room in the house where they never, hardly ever bugged us but as time has passed I realize that the real motive behind that Texas Room was that we would have a place at the far end of the house, with separate entrance, so that we would not bug them. But what I wanted to say, about the bar stocked with his parents liquor was that...we never touched it. Sure his father looked a little like John Wayne but John Wayne never punched kids so I don't know what we were afraid of. Or what BC was afraid of, Mr. non parental liquor stealing sissie. Yeah that's right, body blow. Bet you wished you hadn't thrown that dart now huh?
There's some stuff with teenage girls and BC and our friend TA who lived in the blue and white house across from mine but pretty innocent stuff really and I won't bore you with it. He's always had good honest enthusiasm for the sweeter mysteries of life I'll just say that.
He was good with maps and diagrams and planning capers and I think if we had been living through the depression together he would have devised ways to take care of all of us, providing us with food and clothes and hell, even baseballs. Of course without a depression to shape him into a kind of a syndicate boss he has pretty much taken care of all of us anyway, albeit with hard work and blah blah blah. Although we could still see a depression so his real skills may someday come into play.
BC, a legitimately talented musician and artist was always quick to encourage me (as a ten-year-old) in my own music career, though as it turned out I was a one hit off key wonder with an unfinished song called--The Motor Scooter Song, a song which as far as I can tell somehow made it many years later into the hands of Bruce Springsteen and in rhythm and subject matter was the basis for pretty much every other song he did in his heyday. I'm not bitter about it, I'm just saying.
Hell, there really aren't any stories I can tell where BC doesn't come out a shining star, including the ones I can't tell. On three everybody--ridin' down the road on my motor scooter tonite, motor scooter, hoo motor scooter...
The Mice Wars
Have you ever noticed how in common usage, or perhaps regionally, certain Interstate highways are referred to with the definite article "the" in front of them? As in I am on the I-5 or I am on the I-95? And for all I know, or to the point don't know, using the article is proper usage and my public school upbringing which has me saying, I fell off that boxcar and had to find my way back to I-10 is just completely wrong. Anyway, I mention it because it is a minor distraction to me, not necessarily an unpleasant one, and I thought I would pass it on so that we could be distracted at the same time. I have no intention of going on about Interstates or parts of speech.
Well it's happening again, that seasonal change on the east coast bringing cloud art to the skies and a lighting scheme infused with more juice than there was a month ago and you have to wonder did God accidentally plug his overhead lighting into the 220 outlet instead of the 110 and is there going to be a crackling explosion, sparks flying everywhere burning little black spots into the linoleum and then blackout until His handyman, who is vacationing in Purgatory, can come and straighten things out?
I am driving down 29 South just beyond Charlottesville in Nelson county and it is taking the better part of me to not to stop in the middle of the road and gaze dreamily at the surrounding scenery, perhaps not with impunity as there is an eighteen-wheeler barreling down my ass and so I shift into a more concentrative frame of mind and like that, I'm in the Fiat cruising down the A-19 in Sicily (where using the definite article seems appropriate.) I go from transporting (if you include the hastily packed wadded up clothes in my overnight bag, two paint brushes, and a chainsaw as cargo) to transported in the blink of an eye. This transporting thing happens now and again and I don't mean to imply it as vivid memory but rather to say it is existing in one place while you are clearly in another. Sadly, or not sadly at all, it can't go on for very long.
And like that I am choking on a thought, gagging, eyes watering, face turning purple if not blue, so taking my hands off the steering wheel I give myself a Heimlich and what comes out is this common memory from barely two hours previous.
I am carrying a small pail of rodent chunk bait but don't be fooled by the term "bait" because this is not a catch and release program. Around the Virginia bighouse I have strategically placed three plastic hollow faux granite boulders. Prying open these boulders with a special tool which is included in the 23 dollar a piece price tag you find inside four metal rods. The green rectangular chunk bait has holes driled down their middle, longways, and two of the chunks will fit on each rod. Then I close the boulder until it clicks, letting me know that it is securely fastened and therefore safe for children, pets, indeed the whole family, unless you are a family of rats or your pet is a mouse.
This method had proven very effective and rarely (but occasionally) does there end up inside the house a cute furry defenseless shriveled malodorous pissing and shitting disease carrying rodent, usually pretty well dried up and crusty by the time I get to it. Compared to using the more hands on method of spring traps I liken this to the Bomber pilot versus the Infantryman. Whereas before, as Infantryman, I had been entering the house with bayonet drawn, carefully peeking around corners, and always on guard against the merely wounded and that accompanying spine tingling chill when hearing a trap moving on its own across a wood floor, now I was flying peacefully over the terrain, looking out my cockpit at the pretty mountains below and when my target shows up on the grid map I just press a button and fly on. But I don't mean to suggest that later in a bar back home after the ticker tape parade both these men aren't suffering the realities of past duties, that they aren't transported back to something unpleasant done. And that could be why transporting out of your current time and space must be short lived, because even if it is a pleasant transport the reality remains that almost always there is an eighteen wheeler barreling down your ass, and you should be focussed in the here and now so that when it is safe to do so you can move out of its way. Likewise for the bombadier and infantryman drowning in their sorrow, there is outside the periphery of their horrific memories a woman at the bar wishing they would buy her a drink.
And now back here in North Carolina, there is an oven door handle to replace, receptacle and switch plate covers to put on, overhead lights or ceiling fans to buy and install, some touch up painting and a little varnish to apply, and so on and so on.
Have you ever noticed how in common usage, or perhaps regionally, certain Interstate highways are referred to with the definite article "the" in front of them? As in I am on the I-5 or I am on the I-95? And for all I know, or to the point don't know, using the article is proper usage and my public school upbringing which has me saying, I fell off that boxcar and had to find my way back to I-10 is just completely wrong. Anyway, I mention it because it is a minor distraction to me, not necessarily an unpleasant one, and I thought I would pass it on so that we could be distracted at the same time. I have no intention of going on about Interstates or parts of speech.
Well it's happening again, that seasonal change on the east coast bringing cloud art to the skies and a lighting scheme infused with more juice than there was a month ago and you have to wonder did God accidentally plug his overhead lighting into the 220 outlet instead of the 110 and is there going to be a crackling explosion, sparks flying everywhere burning little black spots into the linoleum and then blackout until His handyman, who is vacationing in Purgatory, can come and straighten things out?
I am driving down 29 South just beyond Charlottesville in Nelson county and it is taking the better part of me to not to stop in the middle of the road and gaze dreamily at the surrounding scenery, perhaps not with impunity as there is an eighteen-wheeler barreling down my ass and so I shift into a more concentrative frame of mind and like that, I'm in the Fiat cruising down the A-19 in Sicily (where using the definite article seems appropriate.) I go from transporting (if you include the hastily packed wadded up clothes in my overnight bag, two paint brushes, and a chainsaw as cargo) to transported in the blink of an eye. This transporting thing happens now and again and I don't mean to imply it as vivid memory but rather to say it is existing in one place while you are clearly in another. Sadly, or not sadly at all, it can't go on for very long.
And like that I am choking on a thought, gagging, eyes watering, face turning purple if not blue, so taking my hands off the steering wheel I give myself a Heimlich and what comes out is this common memory from barely two hours previous.
I am carrying a small pail of rodent chunk bait but don't be fooled by the term "bait" because this is not a catch and release program. Around the Virginia bighouse I have strategically placed three plastic hollow faux granite boulders. Prying open these boulders with a special tool which is included in the 23 dollar a piece price tag you find inside four metal rods. The green rectangular chunk bait has holes driled down their middle, longways, and two of the chunks will fit on each rod. Then I close the boulder until it clicks, letting me know that it is securely fastened and therefore safe for children, pets, indeed the whole family, unless you are a family of rats or your pet is a mouse.
This method had proven very effective and rarely (but occasionally) does there end up inside the house a cute furry defenseless shriveled malodorous pissing and shitting disease carrying rodent, usually pretty well dried up and crusty by the time I get to it. Compared to using the more hands on method of spring traps I liken this to the Bomber pilot versus the Infantryman. Whereas before, as Infantryman, I had been entering the house with bayonet drawn, carefully peeking around corners, and always on guard against the merely wounded and that accompanying spine tingling chill when hearing a trap moving on its own across a wood floor, now I was flying peacefully over the terrain, looking out my cockpit at the pretty mountains below and when my target shows up on the grid map I just press a button and fly on. But I don't mean to suggest that later in a bar back home after the ticker tape parade both these men aren't suffering the realities of past duties, that they aren't transported back to something unpleasant done. And that could be why transporting out of your current time and space must be short lived, because even if it is a pleasant transport the reality remains that almost always there is an eighteen wheeler barreling down your ass, and you should be focussed in the here and now so that when it is safe to do so you can move out of its way. Likewise for the bombadier and infantryman drowning in their sorrow, there is outside the periphery of their horrific memories a woman at the bar wishing they would buy her a drink.
And now back here in North Carolina, there is an oven door handle to replace, receptacle and switch plate covers to put on, overhead lights or ceiling fans to buy and install, some touch up painting and a little varnish to apply, and so on and so on.
Yonkers v. Crossover
The Virginia cat Virginia missed me enough to draw blood on first greeting and the little beads of blood on my hand are testament to her devotion to me. I spank her lightly on her right haunch which is something she actually likes so it's not really punishment. She listens attentively and without blinking to my brief recitation of Roman adventures and then retires to her cardboard box. I don't tell her about the cats of Palermo. She crowds me on the bed now and I pet her when I tire of the keyboard.
Three days in New York after finishing the Italy trip with three days in Rome and I am a little disoriented by being able to understand what people are saying and wishing to some degree that I could not. Also I find it harder to understand the architecture in New York so I wander off on Saturday in search of something to relate to and instead of crossing the Williamsburg Bridge stop at the East River. Walking back and forth looking for a spot to own I pause at a little league baseball game and end up staying for the double header. The boys are twelve or thirteen I think or maybe a little older. There is a little league football being played on a field that takes up part of the baseball outfield and periodically the game is stopped while eight and nine year olds line up for third and long. I stand mostly, to the right of home plate and watch a Chinese kid for the Yonkers team throw slow looping curve balls with fairly decent accuracy. I was rooting against him though as the prevailing sun and dust storms caused me to move over and by default root for the Crossover Phenoms.
I was like a scout as far as anyone was concerned and with my uncanny understanding of the game and ability to recognize talent there hung in the air the possibility of some young player being drafted into a better league. This was a shared fantasy (with little or no factual basis) that was however shattered when tossing a ball back to a kid practicing off in the grass, my arm, surely constricted by the wide padded straps of the small backpack I wore, conspired against all fantasy and the ball went several feet short and to the left of its target. Perhaps the worst throw of my life and one that brought back memories of my own little league career, a mediocre one at best. I wandered off shortly after that, all dreams on hold for the time being, and walking back up Houston instead of Delancey I was again dismayed by the prevalent lack of architectural integrity.
The Virginia cat Virginia missed me enough to draw blood on first greeting and the little beads of blood on my hand are testament to her devotion to me. I spank her lightly on her right haunch which is something she actually likes so it's not really punishment. She listens attentively and without blinking to my brief recitation of Roman adventures and then retires to her cardboard box. I don't tell her about the cats of Palermo. She crowds me on the bed now and I pet her when I tire of the keyboard.
Three days in New York after finishing the Italy trip with three days in Rome and I am a little disoriented by being able to understand what people are saying and wishing to some degree that I could not. Also I find it harder to understand the architecture in New York so I wander off on Saturday in search of something to relate to and instead of crossing the Williamsburg Bridge stop at the East River. Walking back and forth looking for a spot to own I pause at a little league baseball game and end up staying for the double header. The boys are twelve or thirteen I think or maybe a little older. There is a little league football being played on a field that takes up part of the baseball outfield and periodically the game is stopped while eight and nine year olds line up for third and long. I stand mostly, to the right of home plate and watch a Chinese kid for the Yonkers team throw slow looping curve balls with fairly decent accuracy. I was rooting against him though as the prevailing sun and dust storms caused me to move over and by default root for the Crossover Phenoms.
I was like a scout as far as anyone was concerned and with my uncanny understanding of the game and ability to recognize talent there hung in the air the possibility of some young player being drafted into a better league. This was a shared fantasy (with little or no factual basis) that was however shattered when tossing a ball back to a kid practicing off in the grass, my arm, surely constricted by the wide padded straps of the small backpack I wore, conspired against all fantasy and the ball went several feet short and to the left of its target. Perhaps the worst throw of my life and one that brought back memories of my own little league career, a mediocre one at best. I wandered off shortly after that, all dreams on hold for the time being, and walking back up Houston instead of Delancey I was again dismayed by the prevalent lack of architectural integrity.
Pesaro Archipelago
It was not altogether unlike an I Love Lucy episode in that the way things turned out was a bit more frenetic than what we initially anticipated. They did have a conveyer belt you bent over but instead of wrapping chocolates you picked through the passing grapes for any remaining stems the de-stemming apparatus had missed. And it did go faster than you could handle but you were never tempted to shove the passing stems into your mouth. For every small piece of stem you grabbed, and tossed behind you onto the floor, the more refined this 2009 batch of Cabernet Francs would be, despite all the literal blood, sweat and tears that would eventually over a very long process also end up with the grapes. There was not however a large wooden barrel of grapes we all climbed into, smashing them with our bare feet, nor did tempers flare and lead to a grape throwing fight with the locals. No, these grapes went from red plastic totes into the de-stemmer and up the conveyer into flexible suction tubing that led up to twenty foot tall 7 foot wide stainless steel containers, where mixed with a little yeast or other secret ingredients they would sit for a week or so and then be hand raked from a small door at the bottom into another suction device that leads them to the ATI Softpress 12, which very effectively removes every bit of juice and sends it I'm not actually sure where (but eventually into wooden barrels) after which the nearly dry clumps of grape husk are fed down that earlier (now repurposed) conveyer, into blue 50 gallon plastic barrels, which along with all those stems, will be used at some point to make grappa.
The night before, at dusk, after a day of sightseeing in and around Pesaro and a swim in the Adriatic, the four of us--our host, Antonio Ramone, Bernadette, and I--followed behind a specifically sized John Deere tractor driven by the brother of our host, that fit without room to spare between the rows of grape vine, and from the tractor our host off loaded to us an impressive quantity of red plastic totes that we then space out every third vine or so down each row. It took no time at all to do this and when we were finished we had the totes spread out down about 5 or 6 long rows and I went to bed that night thinking this would be no big deal and how it was sort of quaint that we were helping out with the 2009 harvest. In fact that is how I had been thinking of it since first learning we were going to Italy and that we would be for a brief period of our trip "helping" with this year's harvest. Quaint it was not.
What I did not understand, until it became painfully obvious, was that after the totes were filled with the clipped clumps of purple blue grapes and then picked up and stacked ( don't fill the totes so full we were admonished early on, they have to be stacked) on that same tractor and off loaded near the de-stemming apparatus, they were then brought back to the field empty and it was after nearly ten hours of this, with a short break now and then (one break was in the de-stemming line where eyeing carefully the passing conveyer of loose grapes for minute bits of stem I did have brief but unremarkable hallucinations), that I could feel it coming on, although in the end I did fight it off, a fit of uncontrollable full out weeping. I was determined though not to let the young Moldavian pickers see me cry nor any of the 65 year old men, especially that one with the bad leg, nor any of the Italian women, least of all that bossy one, good God would she ever shut up. Bernadette and I picked together, facing each other and attacking a vine from adjacent rows, and we were not the only pickers who purposefully searched for places to pick grapes out of earshot from that bossy, relentlessly chatty woman. Our friend Antonio Ramone, who is one of the original partners, along with Bernadette and a few others, of this NYC five floor walk up, and who lives just across the hall up here on five, has been traveling to Pesaro for the last three or four years and was no stranger to any of this process spent almost all of his day in the extremely arduous stem removal line. Antonio, who at times is a most expressive and gregarious fellow, was however from first mention that we would join him on this trip, mute to us about the rigors of what we were getting ourselves into. Which on his part I thinks shows a good judgment.
Early in the day, after we had picked barely a crate or two, the first line of women showed up with fresh cold mineral water and fresh breads, some of which, while without cheese or any other ingredient beyond a smear of marinara could almost be little pizzas. And they did this throughout the day but whereas early on it seemed like a wonderful and classy way to run a work project, by the end of the day, with knowledge of a promised grand feast of wine and pork, lasagna, chicken, rabbit and even pigeon, this bread and water break became to seem more like a picture from some slave labor story, or a prison road gang movie, and from one such famous movie the line "what we got here is a failure to communicate" began to ring into my consciousness with a tone so much clearer than ever before.
All of this I say with an attempt at humor because far from slave like treatment our accommodations were splendid and our host was most gracious and heaped onto us so much exquisite food (much of it prepared by his mother) and wine and tour guiding over three days that I would have to work another three harvests just to make up my share.
Next year we are traveling to a dude ranch in the Gulag Archipelago.
It was not altogether unlike an I Love Lucy episode in that the way things turned out was a bit more frenetic than what we initially anticipated. They did have a conveyer belt you bent over but instead of wrapping chocolates you picked through the passing grapes for any remaining stems the de-stemming apparatus had missed. And it did go faster than you could handle but you were never tempted to shove the passing stems into your mouth. For every small piece of stem you grabbed, and tossed behind you onto the floor, the more refined this 2009 batch of Cabernet Francs would be, despite all the literal blood, sweat and tears that would eventually over a very long process also end up with the grapes. There was not however a large wooden barrel of grapes we all climbed into, smashing them with our bare feet, nor did tempers flare and lead to a grape throwing fight with the locals. No, these grapes went from red plastic totes into the de-stemmer and up the conveyer into flexible suction tubing that led up to twenty foot tall 7 foot wide stainless steel containers, where mixed with a little yeast or other secret ingredients they would sit for a week or so and then be hand raked from a small door at the bottom into another suction device that leads them to the ATI Softpress 12, which very effectively removes every bit of juice and sends it I'm not actually sure where (but eventually into wooden barrels) after which the nearly dry clumps of grape husk are fed down that earlier (now repurposed) conveyer, into blue 50 gallon plastic barrels, which along with all those stems, will be used at some point to make grappa.
The night before, at dusk, after a day of sightseeing in and around Pesaro and a swim in the Adriatic, the four of us--our host, Antonio Ramone, Bernadette, and I--followed behind a specifically sized John Deere tractor driven by the brother of our host, that fit without room to spare between the rows of grape vine, and from the tractor our host off loaded to us an impressive quantity of red plastic totes that we then space out every third vine or so down each row. It took no time at all to do this and when we were finished we had the totes spread out down about 5 or 6 long rows and I went to bed that night thinking this would be no big deal and how it was sort of quaint that we were helping out with the 2009 harvest. In fact that is how I had been thinking of it since first learning we were going to Italy and that we would be for a brief period of our trip "helping" with this year's harvest. Quaint it was not.
What I did not understand, until it became painfully obvious, was that after the totes were filled with the clipped clumps of purple blue grapes and then picked up and stacked ( don't fill the totes so full we were admonished early on, they have to be stacked) on that same tractor and off loaded near the de-stemming apparatus, they were then brought back to the field empty and it was after nearly ten hours of this, with a short break now and then (one break was in the de-stemming line where eyeing carefully the passing conveyer of loose grapes for minute bits of stem I did have brief but unremarkable hallucinations), that I could feel it coming on, although in the end I did fight it off, a fit of uncontrollable full out weeping. I was determined though not to let the young Moldavian pickers see me cry nor any of the 65 year old men, especially that one with the bad leg, nor any of the Italian women, least of all that bossy one, good God would she ever shut up. Bernadette and I picked together, facing each other and attacking a vine from adjacent rows, and we were not the only pickers who purposefully searched for places to pick grapes out of earshot from that bossy, relentlessly chatty woman. Our friend Antonio Ramone, who is one of the original partners, along with Bernadette and a few others, of this NYC five floor walk up, and who lives just across the hall up here on five, has been traveling to Pesaro for the last three or four years and was no stranger to any of this process spent almost all of his day in the extremely arduous stem removal line. Antonio, who at times is a most expressive and gregarious fellow, was however from first mention that we would join him on this trip, mute to us about the rigors of what we were getting ourselves into. Which on his part I thinks shows a good judgment.
Early in the day, after we had picked barely a crate or two, the first line of women showed up with fresh cold mineral water and fresh breads, some of which, while without cheese or any other ingredient beyond a smear of marinara could almost be little pizzas. And they did this throughout the day but whereas early on it seemed like a wonderful and classy way to run a work project, by the end of the day, with knowledge of a promised grand feast of wine and pork, lasagna, chicken, rabbit and even pigeon, this bread and water break became to seem more like a picture from some slave labor story, or a prison road gang movie, and from one such famous movie the line "what we got here is a failure to communicate" began to ring into my consciousness with a tone so much clearer than ever before.
All of this I say with an attempt at humor because far from slave like treatment our accommodations were splendid and our host was most gracious and heaped onto us so much exquisite food (much of it prepared by his mother) and wine and tour guiding over three days that I would have to work another three harvests just to make up my share.
Next year we are traveling to a dude ranch in the Gulag Archipelago.
Palermo
In Palermo we travel dark alleys but this day it is light and Bernadette and I are being chased down by a guy with a mug like Quasimodo. He is shaking his finger at us and ordering us to hault. It is Giovanni and he is reminding us to honor the Saint. I reach into my pocket and take out my Euros and let him pick out what the Saint wants. He takes four or five and drops them into a slot and that is that. We have recently stood by and watched two men break into our rental car, a very nice handling Fiat Punto.
On the way to Agrigento yesterday I am down shiftng into third to get a little torque up so I can speed past those motorists doing the speed limit. Antonio Ramone and Bernadette and I looked at enough ruins to give us a good feel for what a ruin is.
We were recently behind a student driver to get the idea that not all drivers start out with the pure skill necessary to maneuver like a mad person. It is exhilarating but requires a concentration I have not fully used for such extended periods during any time in my life. Bernadette has map skills, without which we would get nowhere.
I have not lost a key in a long time but I was due so this morning I locked the one key in the Fiat. The car rental agency had also lost their spare key so that is why they were breaking into the car. We were on our way to Tapani I think or maybe that is not even a place. Giovanni looks over the lot we park in and treats us like a friend. Giovanni and the lead mechanic breaking into our Fiat with a coat hanger seemed for a minute like they might go to blows but it all worked out. Pretty much you have to let the guy with the coat hanger do his thing. It is another skill which requires a certain amount of concentration. I had not said a thing or gotten too close and may have even dosed off for a moment when the guy, the lead mechanic, who had so far not really shown any sign that he knew I was there, called out to me so that I could be made aware of his success. He and his partner we rewarded with 10 euros a piece and I think seeing this, and knowing that he could have done just as well is perhaps why Giovanni later chased us down and suggested we honor the Saint with a little appreciation as well.
I cannot really go into what we have eaten but some of it has been spectactular, especially anything resembling a little fish. We have had pasta so fresh that it is like born on your plate and speaking of birth I am after ten days in Italy starting to resemble a man who while still skinny as a rail, is about to give birth to a 12 pound baby.
We were in Rome for only enough time to land, eat two meals and be driven the three hours to Pesaro by our friend. We picked enough grapes on our third day in Italy to remind me of that distant distant past when I for about a year worked in the Texas oilfields, 12 hour days, ten day stretches. I should say more about the grape picking and maybe I will later but now I should get back to the house. I have gone swimming in the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. I have not been that tempted to be online and I cannot find the apostrophe key on the keyboard so if you have been wondering why no contractions, well there you have it.
I think we are going out to eat in a few minutes. I am not the least bit hungry but that does not seem to be stopping me. We are not going to the opera tomorrow but The Teatro Massimo, around the corner from us, is going with Madame Butterfly for its opening night. Ciao.
In Palermo we travel dark alleys but this day it is light and Bernadette and I are being chased down by a guy with a mug like Quasimodo. He is shaking his finger at us and ordering us to hault. It is Giovanni and he is reminding us to honor the Saint. I reach into my pocket and take out my Euros and let him pick out what the Saint wants. He takes four or five and drops them into a slot and that is that. We have recently stood by and watched two men break into our rental car, a very nice handling Fiat Punto.
On the way to Agrigento yesterday I am down shiftng into third to get a little torque up so I can speed past those motorists doing the speed limit. Antonio Ramone and Bernadette and I looked at enough ruins to give us a good feel for what a ruin is.
We were recently behind a student driver to get the idea that not all drivers start out with the pure skill necessary to maneuver like a mad person. It is exhilarating but requires a concentration I have not fully used for such extended periods during any time in my life. Bernadette has map skills, without which we would get nowhere.
I have not lost a key in a long time but I was due so this morning I locked the one key in the Fiat. The car rental agency had also lost their spare key so that is why they were breaking into the car. We were on our way to Tapani I think or maybe that is not even a place. Giovanni looks over the lot we park in and treats us like a friend. Giovanni and the lead mechanic breaking into our Fiat with a coat hanger seemed for a minute like they might go to blows but it all worked out. Pretty much you have to let the guy with the coat hanger do his thing. It is another skill which requires a certain amount of concentration. I had not said a thing or gotten too close and may have even dosed off for a moment when the guy, the lead mechanic, who had so far not really shown any sign that he knew I was there, called out to me so that I could be made aware of his success. He and his partner we rewarded with 10 euros a piece and I think seeing this, and knowing that he could have done just as well is perhaps why Giovanni later chased us down and suggested we honor the Saint with a little appreciation as well.
I cannot really go into what we have eaten but some of it has been spectactular, especially anything resembling a little fish. We have had pasta so fresh that it is like born on your plate and speaking of birth I am after ten days in Italy starting to resemble a man who while still skinny as a rail, is about to give birth to a 12 pound baby.
We were in Rome for only enough time to land, eat two meals and be driven the three hours to Pesaro by our friend. We picked enough grapes on our third day in Italy to remind me of that distant distant past when I for about a year worked in the Texas oilfields, 12 hour days, ten day stretches. I should say more about the grape picking and maybe I will later but now I should get back to the house. I have gone swimming in the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. I have not been that tempted to be online and I cannot find the apostrophe key on the keyboard so if you have been wondering why no contractions, well there you have it.
I think we are going out to eat in a few minutes. I am not the least bit hungry but that does not seem to be stopping me. We are not going to the opera tomorrow but The Teatro Massimo, around the corner from us, is going with Madame Butterfly for its opening night. Ciao.
How To Make Dried Flower Arrangements
The tobacco leaves are harvested from the bottom of the plant upwards as they begin to yellow and I guess are vine ripened in this sense. The leaves are picked by hand by mostly Mexican workers and loaded onto small 6 by 8 foot trailers with 4 foot high plywood sides and stacked high and slightly above the top and then pulled behind slow moving pickup trucks down highway 49 in North Carolina, on their way to being graded and weighed at area processing plants. The bigger and bottom-most leaves may be picked in mid summer but the harvest begins in earnest in late August and into September. During this latter period the roads are littered with tobacco leaves and suggest a time gone by unaffected by a hundred years of progress and all things modern.
There is a well maintained family cemetery less than a mile behind the house I have been working on, through thick hardwood forests cut here and there with footpaths opening onto tobacco or corn or soybean fields, ponds with forgotten bass and bream, and the occasional sagging barn and farmhouse, and in the cemetery is the remains of a man who in the mid nineteenth century was an area "Negro speculator," which to my imperfect understanding means he acquired and then resold slaves as a profitable business. He and other landowners in the area are commemorated for their years of hard work and sizable real estate holdings by having most of the area's back roads named after them, and many are also remembered, with surprising detail, by recorded slave narratives. Slaves, some one hundred years old, interviewed in the 1930s and 40s, offer a remarkable insight into a time that for some people is surely looked back to as a "good ole day" and to others is seen as a time of unimaginable horror. The slave narratives are as interesting for their kind memories as they are for the evil retold. There was it seems always a good man or woman doing battle with the bad. Which is not meant as an overly simplified blanket of forgiveness for badness but just to suggest that there have always been people willing to stand up and fight the good fight. And that nothing is hopeless.
Not without my good friend Doubt but feeling ok, perhaps even full of myself, pulling away from the end of the dead end road and the property almost entirely detail-cleaned of it's momentous yard garbage--garbage spread and in some cases buried over one-third of the two and a half acres, and taking in the house prepped and scraped and primed and double-coated with fresh paint, inside and out, and even allowing for its persistent appearance of lower, working-class dowdiness, which cannot be cured with paint or new roof or new central air and heating system, or refinished wood floors, new linoleum, new second hand appliances, some repaired plumbing and electric, the new coat of varnish on kitchen cabinets or even the new shelving paper on every cabinet shelf and in every drawer, I am still driving away with a sense of pride, which has been long in coming and is a pretty fair distance away from the palpable shame and I dare-say horror I experienced pulling up to the property two years ago, after ignoring it for every bit of fifteen years.
Knowing that this is but my penultimate exit, that I will be back for a final go over, I turn left from gravel onto the paved highway 49, away from that family cemetery behind me, and I begin passing tobacco fields with large clusters of Mexican workers. I wave to them and see them in my rear view mirror turning to see who it was waving and perhaps wondering could I be the better employer (or who knows, employee) sometime down the road. The heat had broken a few days previous and the red dirt and green/yellowing tobacco and blue sky is not mired by the haze of superheated wet air and the view is crisp and clean. I look at a variety of weeds growing on both sides of the road and see possible dried flower arrangements.
The tobacco leaves are harvested from the bottom of the plant upwards as they begin to yellow and I guess are vine ripened in this sense. The leaves are picked by hand by mostly Mexican workers and loaded onto small 6 by 8 foot trailers with 4 foot high plywood sides and stacked high and slightly above the top and then pulled behind slow moving pickup trucks down highway 49 in North Carolina, on their way to being graded and weighed at area processing plants. The bigger and bottom-most leaves may be picked in mid summer but the harvest begins in earnest in late August and into September. During this latter period the roads are littered with tobacco leaves and suggest a time gone by unaffected by a hundred years of progress and all things modern.
There is a well maintained family cemetery less than a mile behind the house I have been working on, through thick hardwood forests cut here and there with footpaths opening onto tobacco or corn or soybean fields, ponds with forgotten bass and bream, and the occasional sagging barn and farmhouse, and in the cemetery is the remains of a man who in the mid nineteenth century was an area "Negro speculator," which to my imperfect understanding means he acquired and then resold slaves as a profitable business. He and other landowners in the area are commemorated for their years of hard work and sizable real estate holdings by having most of the area's back roads named after them, and many are also remembered, with surprising detail, by recorded slave narratives. Slaves, some one hundred years old, interviewed in the 1930s and 40s, offer a remarkable insight into a time that for some people is surely looked back to as a "good ole day" and to others is seen as a time of unimaginable horror. The slave narratives are as interesting for their kind memories as they are for the evil retold. There was it seems always a good man or woman doing battle with the bad. Which is not meant as an overly simplified blanket of forgiveness for badness but just to suggest that there have always been people willing to stand up and fight the good fight. And that nothing is hopeless.
Not without my good friend Doubt but feeling ok, perhaps even full of myself, pulling away from the end of the dead end road and the property almost entirely detail-cleaned of it's momentous yard garbage--garbage spread and in some cases buried over one-third of the two and a half acres, and taking in the house prepped and scraped and primed and double-coated with fresh paint, inside and out, and even allowing for its persistent appearance of lower, working-class dowdiness, which cannot be cured with paint or new roof or new central air and heating system, or refinished wood floors, new linoleum, new second hand appliances, some repaired plumbing and electric, the new coat of varnish on kitchen cabinets or even the new shelving paper on every cabinet shelf and in every drawer, I am still driving away with a sense of pride, which has been long in coming and is a pretty fair distance away from the palpable shame and I dare-say horror I experienced pulling up to the property two years ago, after ignoring it for every bit of fifteen years.
Knowing that this is but my penultimate exit, that I will be back for a final go over, I turn left from gravel onto the paved highway 49, away from that family cemetery behind me, and I begin passing tobacco fields with large clusters of Mexican workers. I wave to them and see them in my rear view mirror turning to see who it was waving and perhaps wondering could I be the better employer (or who knows, employee) sometime down the road. The heat had broken a few days previous and the red dirt and green/yellowing tobacco and blue sky is not mired by the haze of superheated wet air and the view is crisp and clean. I look at a variety of weeds growing on both sides of the road and see possible dried flower arrangements.
Hey There
As August wears on Mr. BC's mom wonders what is wrong with that boy and his blog. Doesn't he have anything to say? He mumbles in response, no ma'am not really. She taps the table with her coffee mug and says I can't hear you, did you say something? No, I didn't. Well, what are you doing? I'm just looking at the shirts hanging in the closet. Why?
They are freshly laundered.
Is your arm broken?
Nope.
Tummy ache?
No.
Stub your toe?
I think not.
Lose your rhyme and reason?
Not really.
How about that swine flu?
Yeah, it's really something.
Are you still feeling remorse over that mole you shot with the bb gun at Lake O' the Pines?
I think about it from time to time.
How long ago was that, must be...?
About 40 years ago.
Think maybe you should move on, get over that?
I am going to work it out very soon.
Well don't wait too long.
I am in North Carolina, getting ready to go to the Duke Medical Center for a routine follow up for that kidney stone I passed a few weeks ago. Then I have to go order some roofing supplies and set up a delivery for next week because I got a guy who said he can put a new roof on this rental house I have been puttering around with over the last year. I finally got my passport in order and am going to Italy for two weeks in September. I have never been to Europe or any other place that requires a passport. I lost my previous passport thirty years ago and never got around to getting another one. My last trip to Europe in 1980 ended after hitchhiking from Austin to the Dallas airport where I lost my non-refundable one way standby ticket to London. I had 200 dollars in cash and a belief in adventure. Some have argued it was probably better that I lost that ticket, others have suggested that I lost it on purpose, and still others have implied that maybe the hand of God reached down and swiped the ticket, which was bookmarking my place in The World According to Garp. I had only been out of the bathroom for a few minutes when I realized I had left the book there and when I went back it was gone. My attempts to retrieve it proved fruitless. I was nineteen or barely twenty and the drinking age in Texas at that time was 18 so I went to the airport bar and had three shots of tequila, then phoned a friend who picked me up and let me spend the night at her mother's house, because I hadn't really told my own mother that I was in town, much less that I was going to Europe one way. I told her about it later though. Boy, I used to put some worry on that woman. You can't really blame me for her gray hairs though, because as you know she was pretty much gone gray when she had me, and certainly was by the time you met her, five years after she brought me into this.
Sometime this year I have to get to New Orleans and do a little maintenance on my house there but I haven't figure out exactly when that will be. In the meantime I'm finishing up this NC house and acting as absentee manager of your son's weekend property in the Shenandoah foothills of Virginia. And slowly, ever so slowly I am gravitating towards New York to spend more time with my sweetheart, Bernadette. We both occasionally wonder how that's going to work as one of us is pigheaded and the other muleheaded. I'm not sure which of us is which but in the end I will be whichever one she tells me to be. Give my regards to the Mister, hope you are both doing well. jml.
As August wears on Mr. BC's mom wonders what is wrong with that boy and his blog. Doesn't he have anything to say? He mumbles in response, no ma'am not really. She taps the table with her coffee mug and says I can't hear you, did you say something? No, I didn't. Well, what are you doing? I'm just looking at the shirts hanging in the closet. Why?
They are freshly laundered.
Is your arm broken?
Nope.
Tummy ache?
No.
Stub your toe?
I think not.
Lose your rhyme and reason?
Not really.
How about that swine flu?
Yeah, it's really something.
Are you still feeling remorse over that mole you shot with the bb gun at Lake O' the Pines?
I think about it from time to time.
How long ago was that, must be...?
About 40 years ago.
Think maybe you should move on, get over that?
I am going to work it out very soon.
Well don't wait too long.
I am in North Carolina, getting ready to go to the Duke Medical Center for a routine follow up for that kidney stone I passed a few weeks ago. Then I have to go order some roofing supplies and set up a delivery for next week because I got a guy who said he can put a new roof on this rental house I have been puttering around with over the last year. I finally got my passport in order and am going to Italy for two weeks in September. I have never been to Europe or any other place that requires a passport. I lost my previous passport thirty years ago and never got around to getting another one. My last trip to Europe in 1980 ended after hitchhiking from Austin to the Dallas airport where I lost my non-refundable one way standby ticket to London. I had 200 dollars in cash and a belief in adventure. Some have argued it was probably better that I lost that ticket, others have suggested that I lost it on purpose, and still others have implied that maybe the hand of God reached down and swiped the ticket, which was bookmarking my place in The World According to Garp. I had only been out of the bathroom for a few minutes when I realized I had left the book there and when I went back it was gone. My attempts to retrieve it proved fruitless. I was nineteen or barely twenty and the drinking age in Texas at that time was 18 so I went to the airport bar and had three shots of tequila, then phoned a friend who picked me up and let me spend the night at her mother's house, because I hadn't really told my own mother that I was in town, much less that I was going to Europe one way. I told her about it later though. Boy, I used to put some worry on that woman. You can't really blame me for her gray hairs though, because as you know she was pretty much gone gray when she had me, and certainly was by the time you met her, five years after she brought me into this.
Sometime this year I have to get to New Orleans and do a little maintenance on my house there but I haven't figure out exactly when that will be. In the meantime I'm finishing up this NC house and acting as absentee manager of your son's weekend property in the Shenandoah foothills of Virginia. And slowly, ever so slowly I am gravitating towards New York to spend more time with my sweetheart, Bernadette. We both occasionally wonder how that's going to work as one of us is pigheaded and the other muleheaded. I'm not sure which of us is which but in the end I will be whichever one she tells me to be. Give my regards to the Mister, hope you are both doing well. jml.
Life: Scene 2, Take 1 Or 2
It's sad really only if you think it is, the image of a man standing in front of a pedestal sink, pushed up a little on the balls of his feet and leaning forward so that his penis, held lovingly in his hands, will clear the ceramic edge, him searching expectantly the flow of urine into a screened funnel for foreign treasure. Like panning for gold he picks through the paltry particles remaining on top of the fine mesh with a sliver of oak shaved from a scrap plank. "Is that a speck of dried blood?" he wonders aloud as he picks it out and sticks it to the side of a plastic specimen bottle. Hardly seems possible that it could be dried blood but it's dark and the doctor had said there was blood in his urine. He harkens back to his days as a junior hobo when in San Francisco a thorazine carrying Vietnam Vet was trying to school him on how to cheat the government out of assistance dollars. "The surest way to get disability dollars is to prick your finger and put a drop of blood in your urine specimen bottle." At the time he was just a middle class kid, dropped out from college, trying to travel on the cheap, and he had opted for the less deceitful and smaller payoff of the Mission District blood bank.
In the present he spies another minute specimen resting on top of the mesh and picking it out with the sharp oak point it appears gelatinous, with a fine thread of a tail and he wonders if it could be his unborn son. Can sperm be in your urine? It seemed plausible but as he had not had sex, or masturbated in...?...well, too long, it seemed not so likely. But what did he know about it? A screened funnel, a sliver of oak, and a specimen bottle does not a doctor make.
The first day he thought it was just food poisoning. The second day, with only two hours of severe pain, seemed an improvement and reaffirmed his food poisoning theory. The third day, with two separate pain sessions lasting multiple hours, he began to worry, and while not exactly hallucinating, his world view, small as it was inside the nearly finished 800 square foot renovated rental project, changed, and his vision became sharper and his sense of smell was registering every drop of mouse urine in the house. Later when he saw the mouse poke it's head up through a hole in the floor (holes a past renter had drilled to run extension cords or speaker wires), he threw a water bottle at it and then positioned a paint can over the hole. And cans of stain over three similar sized holes in other rooms. He made a mental note to plug the holes, as he should have done when he refinished the floors. On the fourth day, which started at 4 in the morning, for now his days were measured only by the onset of pain, he started to worry in earnest and began plotting out a trip to a doctor. By eight the pain had subsided enough that he thought he could drive without blacking out and crashing into a tobacco barn and he set off for the thirty mile drive south, the tobacco fields along the way showing mature crops with bottom leaves yellowing.
He signed in, and waited. There was a woman with a walker in the waiting room, who looked like Whitney Houston, and he wondered momentarily if she had indeed fallen this far. It made him sad to think so. After an hour the pain had come back and he prayed it would not come on full strength because he did not want to moan, or get on all fours, or lay on his back with legs up to his chest, or pace restlessly about the office, or perform any of the other unsuccessful pain management techniques he had tried over the last four days. He opted for an exaggeratedly upright posture with one fist clenched tightly on a rigid arm positioned slightly behind him on the seat. He kept his eyes averted and hoped the little Samoan boy with mother, father and grandmother in tow, would not engage him. The kid was all over the waiting room, pulling on pictures and rolling on the floor, generally seeming way too happy to be sick enough for a doctor's visit. The boy did start crying when his father carried him back to a doctor and the man unfairly took some pleasure in this.
His name was called after about an hour and he was elated but hoped his pants didn't fall down because he had unbuttoned them at some point in one of his attempts at relieving the pain. But it was just for temperature and blood pressure and basic questioning by nurses that he had been called back, and then he was sent out to the waiting room again. One of the questions was on the one to ten scale how would he rate the pain and misconstruing the meaning, thinking they meant relative to what he could conceive and not relative to what he had ever experienced, he said six. Over the next twenty minutes back in the waiting room he realized the more likely meaning of the question so when he eventually did see a doctor he said ten. Later, in the parking lot outside the pharmacist's office, while popping one non-narcotic and one narcotic pain killer, he remembered the time the top half of a faulty 24 foot extension ladder had broken free and slid in free fall to connect with his upright thumb, and amended the pain he felt now to a 9.5.
What the doctor had said was "welcome to the world of kidney stones."
It's sad really only if you think it is, the image of a man standing in front of a pedestal sink, pushed up a little on the balls of his feet and leaning forward so that his penis, held lovingly in his hands, will clear the ceramic edge, him searching expectantly the flow of urine into a screened funnel for foreign treasure. Like panning for gold he picks through the paltry particles remaining on top of the fine mesh with a sliver of oak shaved from a scrap plank. "Is that a speck of dried blood?" he wonders aloud as he picks it out and sticks it to the side of a plastic specimen bottle. Hardly seems possible that it could be dried blood but it's dark and the doctor had said there was blood in his urine. He harkens back to his days as a junior hobo when in San Francisco a thorazine carrying Vietnam Vet was trying to school him on how to cheat the government out of assistance dollars. "The surest way to get disability dollars is to prick your finger and put a drop of blood in your urine specimen bottle." At the time he was just a middle class kid, dropped out from college, trying to travel on the cheap, and he had opted for the less deceitful and smaller payoff of the Mission District blood bank.
In the present he spies another minute specimen resting on top of the mesh and picking it out with the sharp oak point it appears gelatinous, with a fine thread of a tail and he wonders if it could be his unborn son. Can sperm be in your urine? It seemed plausible but as he had not had sex, or masturbated in...?...well, too long, it seemed not so likely. But what did he know about it? A screened funnel, a sliver of oak, and a specimen bottle does not a doctor make.
The first day he thought it was just food poisoning. The second day, with only two hours of severe pain, seemed an improvement and reaffirmed his food poisoning theory. The third day, with two separate pain sessions lasting multiple hours, he began to worry, and while not exactly hallucinating, his world view, small as it was inside the nearly finished 800 square foot renovated rental project, changed, and his vision became sharper and his sense of smell was registering every drop of mouse urine in the house. Later when he saw the mouse poke it's head up through a hole in the floor (holes a past renter had drilled to run extension cords or speaker wires), he threw a water bottle at it and then positioned a paint can over the hole. And cans of stain over three similar sized holes in other rooms. He made a mental note to plug the holes, as he should have done when he refinished the floors. On the fourth day, which started at 4 in the morning, for now his days were measured only by the onset of pain, he started to worry in earnest and began plotting out a trip to a doctor. By eight the pain had subsided enough that he thought he could drive without blacking out and crashing into a tobacco barn and he set off for the thirty mile drive south, the tobacco fields along the way showing mature crops with bottom leaves yellowing.
He signed in, and waited. There was a woman with a walker in the waiting room, who looked like Whitney Houston, and he wondered momentarily if she had indeed fallen this far. It made him sad to think so. After an hour the pain had come back and he prayed it would not come on full strength because he did not want to moan, or get on all fours, or lay on his back with legs up to his chest, or pace restlessly about the office, or perform any of the other unsuccessful pain management techniques he had tried over the last four days. He opted for an exaggeratedly upright posture with one fist clenched tightly on a rigid arm positioned slightly behind him on the seat. He kept his eyes averted and hoped the little Samoan boy with mother, father and grandmother in tow, would not engage him. The kid was all over the waiting room, pulling on pictures and rolling on the floor, generally seeming way too happy to be sick enough for a doctor's visit. The boy did start crying when his father carried him back to a doctor and the man unfairly took some pleasure in this.
His name was called after about an hour and he was elated but hoped his pants didn't fall down because he had unbuttoned them at some point in one of his attempts at relieving the pain. But it was just for temperature and blood pressure and basic questioning by nurses that he had been called back, and then he was sent out to the waiting room again. One of the questions was on the one to ten scale how would he rate the pain and misconstruing the meaning, thinking they meant relative to what he could conceive and not relative to what he had ever experienced, he said six. Over the next twenty minutes back in the waiting room he realized the more likely meaning of the question so when he eventually did see a doctor he said ten. Later, in the parking lot outside the pharmacist's office, while popping one non-narcotic and one narcotic pain killer, he remembered the time the top half of a faulty 24 foot extension ladder had broken free and slid in free fall to connect with his upright thumb, and amended the pain he felt now to a 9.5.
What the doctor had said was "welcome to the world of kidney stones."