Dad had read everything, including the books assigned for me to read in elementary and middle school. I think that he thought I would grow up to be a writer or poet. I think he would have been proud of me if I had done that—whether I wrote Captain Kitty Comes Ashore or What if Holden Caulfield Goes to Law School? When I got to high school, if there was a book assigned that he had not read, he would read my copy at night after I had gone to bed. It was not that he wanted to quiz me about the plot or engage me in a conversation about the themes and symbols of the novel or play so that I might get a better grade in class—sometimes we did discuss the symbols if he thought the author had done something particularly noteworthy. Instead, I think he read the books because he thought that reading developed a student’s understanding of the world; and, as a concerned parent, he wanted to be in touch with what it was that the public schools of Abilene were doing to shape my mind. Considering the fact that I can still recall passages of Captain Kitty, there may be some validity to that.
He was opposed to censorship in any form. If it was published in a book, I could read it. While there were always annotated copies of Macbeth and Hamlet lying around the den, there were also copies of the complete works of Dan Jenkins and Peter De Vries. He cautioned me not to be too caught up in trying to determine if any part of a work of fiction was true or “really happened.” Sure it is interesting to know what we can of what happened to Mr. Shakespeare while he was alive, but not because we assume his plays are autobiographical. Instead, it is interesting to know about his life to see how the things that happened to him influenced what he wrote. Dad told me that “wondering what happens next” is the highest compliment you can pay a writer of fiction. He carried this philosophy to such an extreme that he would open a modern novel in the middle and read to the end while trying to guess what happened in the beginning.
When Little League started up in the spring, the dinner conversations were cut short because Dad always coached my team or my brother’s team. If I didn’t make it as a poet, Dad wanted me to be a shortstop and my brother to be a catcher or first baseman. Some years our teams would be better than others. But I don’t remember Dad ever raising his voice at the players. His focus was always on telling us what to anticipate doing in any given situation—choke up on the bat if you’re behind in the count, never throw behind the runner, move up to the grass with men on base during late innings in a close game. Sure, he wanted to win, and he blamed himself if we lost—he should have changed pitchers earlier in the fourth inning, he never should have sent that runner home on a passed ball, he should have sent the runner to third base in the sixth inning.
Baseball to Dad was like an intricate, theatrical play, with peculiar subtleties and nuances that changed every time a pitch was thrown, not unlike trying to control the outcome of a trial with each question that is asked. He thought boys could learn about life from playing a game or reading a classic work of fiction, but I couldn’t recall a game experience or a work of fiction that had prepared me for handling the situation in which I found myself. Previously I had worried about how, as a young lawyer at Peters & Sullivan, I would ever have time to coach my son’s Little League games or get home in time for dinner to discuss what had happened at school that day. Now I was wondering if I would even be around to watch my son grow up.
In high school, the occasions when my family would sit down for dinner became less and less frequent. I had a job in a store at the mall, and I usually worked evenings. After I got cut from the baseball team at the end of my sophomore year, I found my way onto the debate team, and my weekends were spent at out-of-town debate tournaments.
Most weekdays though, my dad would still cook breakfast, and he would use that time to catch up with me. In my senior year, the honors English class had a vocabulary test every Friday over words selected from whatever it was that we were reading at the time. We had all week to look up the words and learn the definitions and how to spell them. It became a running joke at my house for me to sit down for breakfast on Friday and ask Dad what each word meant. Then, I would go take the test first period, repeating the definitions that Dad had given me at breakfast. Usually, he would use the word in a sentence so that I could understand what it meant, rather than giving me a definition per se. It’s easier to learn the meaning of a word in context rather than in the abstract. Sometimes, I forgot what Dad told me, but I don’t think he ever missed a word.
When I went away to college at Texas Tech, I called home religiously once a week at first. By the time I completed law school at The University of Texas, I was calling home only to make arrangements at holidays to come home.
Sitting in my office, I wondered what Dad had fixed for breakfast that morning.
I thought about calling Beth back. Suddenly, I had questions to ask that a minute ago I had not contemplated. Where did she go to the doctor? What do the pills do? What does herpes do to your body? Had she told anybody else about the herpes, or about the affair?
Part of me wanted to call Michelle. Lonely and detached, I needed to talk to someone who was a friend. I needed to tell the whole, sordid story. But I couldn’t call Michelle. I couldn’t tell her about sleeping with Beth. I was too ashamed to tell her that I thought I had herpes. And for the first time, it occurred to me that I might have infected her the previous night. As I stood up from my desk, I could feel the blood rushing to my head and I thought I might faint.
Sweating, I picked up the phonebook from the credenza and rifled through the pages until I found the number and address of the Houston City Health Department, Riverside Clinic on Delano Street. I considered tearing out the page, but I thought better of it and scribbled down the address and phone number. I put on my navy blazer, felt in the pocket for my keys, and left without telling Eileen where I was going.
9
MY FIRST STOP WAS at Ninfa’s restaurant on Navigation. I circled the building a couple of times to make sure that Sullivan wasn’t there. I’d been there many times with him, for a Mexican breakfast of migas or huevos con chorizo accompanied by a Bloody Mary or two. When I was satisfied that Sullivan was not at the restaurant, I parked my car, went in, and found a secluded table near the bar in the back. A waiter recognized me, and nodded. In a moment, he brought over a menu and a Bloody Mary. I told him I didn’t need a menu, but that I would need another Bloody Mary by the time he could get back with one.
The place was almost empty, although even without customers, it had a festive feel. Multicolored cutouts hung like banners from the ceiling, Tejano music blared over the speaker system, and numerous waiters in pastel-colored Guy Ybarra shirts milled about wiping tabletops and putting out place settings in anticipation of the noon rush. The place had long been a Houston institution because of its good food and strong margaritas. I wanted to have a third drink before going to the county STD clinic, but I just couldn’t take the chance of seeing somebody I knew in the lunch crowd.
The clinic was between Ninfa’s and West University. I parked as far away from the front door of the place as possible. The building was a small, drab, brick building with no windows on the front. After entering through a foyer, I stopped at a frosted-glass sliding window behind which a woman sat typing at a computer terminal. Without looking at me, she handed me a clipboard, and asked, in a tone loud enough for all of those seated in the tile-floored lobby to hear, whether I was there for “STD or TB.”
In a voice barely above a whisper, I said, “STD.”
“Venereal diseases get the green form,” she said as she directed me to fill out the paperwork on the clipboard. I took a seat and noticed that several other people in the lobby were also completing questionnaires on clipboards, while others sat holding laminated cards with numbers on them. A few seats down from me, a couple of pretty teenage girls were whispering to each other and giggling. One of them held a card with the number “8” on it.
I considered giving false information on the form—a fake name and address, a bogus rendition of the recent onset of sym
ptoms—but ultimately wrote in my correct name and used my office address and direct-line phone number. I didn’t check the box for married.
As I handed the clipboard with the green form back to the woman behind the frosted-glass window, another woman at different sliding window down the hall called the number of one of the teenage girls. I watched as they both went to the window, and the one holding the card reached into the front pocket of her blue jeans and handed a crumpled ten-dollar bill to the lady. The lady behind my window handed me a laminated card with the number “30” on it.
I returned to my seat and waited for about an hour before the woman at the other window called my number. At this second window, I paid my ten dollars. The lady handed me a receipt and ushered me through a set of double doors to another waiting room. The teenage girls were still there, but they were quiet now, and the one still held her laminated card.
The dusty beige room had metal folding chairs around the walls and a low table in the middle that was littered with out-of-date magazines that people read while waiting so that they could avoid making eye contact with the other people in the room. On one wall was a display of informational brochures on various STDs. After a while, the teenage girl with the laminated card was called down the hall, and in another hour, I was called as well.
I was taken to what looked like a hospital room where a man in rubber gloves and a name tag that read “Dr. Neftali” instructed me to sit down and roll up one shirt sleeve so that he could draw two vials of blood. After he capped and labeled the vials, he escorted me to a tiny room barely large enough for a small desk, a secretarial chair, and a metal folding chair like those in the last waiting room. On the walls were photographs depicting various maladies of the male sex organ. Looking at the photos, I diagnosed myself with herpes before the tired, middle-aged woman came into the room with a folder that I presumed was my file. She sat at the desk.
“The good news Mr. Jessie is that you do not appear to have AIDS.” She said in a sterile, emotionless manner. “Of course, you should repeat the test six months from your last possible exposure to confirm that you do not demonstrate antibodies to the virus. Unfortunately, the bad news is that you do have genital herpes. It will be necessary for me to examine you to confirm the diagnosis,” she said, still without introducing herself.
I stood and removed my pants and underwear while she slipped on a pair of rubber gloves and some reading glasses. I tried to drop my pants and underwear casually onto the metal chair, but the pants, and whatever dignity I had left, fell to the floor and my change spilled out of the pockets. Coins rolled noisily across the dusty tile floor.
The lady scooted over to me on her secretarial chair and lifted my flaccid penis away from my scrotum so that she could examine the now angry red blisters on the shaft. She then rolled back to her desk, popped off the glove, and made a few notes on my chart. Then, she scribbled her name on a preprinted prescription pad that sat on the desk and handed me the page. “This is for acyclovir. You should take three pills a day for five days, or until the symptoms disappear.” She said it in a way that made me think she had memorized the explanation. “This will help dry up those blisters, but it isn’t a cure. Different people have different rates of recurrence. Some will have symptoms every month. Some may have them only once or twice a year. Some never experience another outbreak. The virus that causes the outbreak lives in your spinal cord, and this drug only assists your immune system in suppressing the outbreak. You should be very careful about direct skin to skin contact as well as sexual contact during an outbreak, as that is when you are most likely to spread the disease. But, even when there is no outbreak, the disease can be spread through a process called viral shedding. I’ve given you a prescription for enough pills to cover several outbreaks. I think you’ll find over time that the number and severity of the outbreaks will diminish. Do you have any questions?”
In my stunned state, I could only shake my head. As I walked out of the clinic my mind wandered. Was the disease named “herpes” because of something having to do with snakes? I knew that a person who studied snakes was called a “herpetologist.” Maybe whoever it was that originally identified the disease thought the scabs that formed where the blisters had been were reminiscent of the scales of a snake. Or maybe a diseased penis reminded him of a snake.
I had never much cared for snakes myself. I can remember walking home from school one day to find my mom in the driveway with a hoe chopping the head off a long kingsnake whose decapitated body continued to flip and curl and try to escape. Several kids my little brother’s age who had gotten home before me were standing around watching the spectacle. One of the mothers, whose child was watching, commented to my mom that it was just a harmless kingsnake.
Mom responded, “The only good snake is a dead snake.” The memory of my mom wielding that hoe still makes me uneasy, and I have never been able to understand how anybody could be interested in snakes.
Even the fall from grace story in Genesis didn’t make much sense to me. Oh, I understood that the phallic serpent represents evil and all that, but would you take an apple or a pomegranate or a quince or whatever from a snake? I can see a snake sneaking up on you and eating your plant of immortality, but I can’t see taking food from a snake. Assuming that the devil could take whatever form he wanted when trying to distribute the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, it seemed to me like he would have had a better chance of success as a cute little squirrel or maybe a raccoon with those tiny, almost human hands.
The whole “tree of knowledge of good and evil” story has always left me thinking that something, a few paragraphs or maybe a page or two, was missing. I am not referring to the two stories of creation in Genesis or the problem with how many wives Adam had or the sudden appearance of additional cast members about the time that Cain and Abel showed up. I mean that when I read about the tree it always seemed to me that the punch line had been redacted or lost in the transcription process. So, I tried to figure out how to fill in the blanks left in the text. What would be the drawback of having the knowledge of the difference between good and evil? Was Gilgamesh a hero because he killed the Bull of Heaven or because he sought knowledge of the human condition?
Of course, God told Adam not to eat the fruit of the tree, but there must have been a reason that God didn’t want him eating the fruit beyond just the parental “because I said so” reason. Could it be that having this knowledge might elevate man to a level that usurped a role that God had relegated to Himself—deciding what is good and what is evil and differentiating between the two? A great deal of human history from before Hammurabi to after Napoleon has been spent trying to define what is legal and good or illegal and evil. Maybe God wanted to be the source of all law, and eating the fruit put man in a position whereby he felt compelled to take over the role as the giver of law.
Could it be that God didn’t want man having knowledge of good and evil because He didn’t want man to be in a position to criticize the fact that God, though seemingly all-knowing and all-powerful, had permitted evil to slither into the creation picture? If Adam ate the apple, then it would just be a matter of time until Job started shaking his fist at the heavens. Setting aside the idea that God might have a reason for having evil exist in the world—the “it’s all about choices” sermon—the notion that man would steadily nag and complain to God once man learned that evil existed—the “what have I done to deserve this” lament—would surely be the kind of outcome God would want to avoid.
Or could it be that, once man had knowledge of good and evil, man would see that he was capable of both. Each of us, no matter how well-intentioned, can violate even the most rudimentary concepts of right and wrong. When we learn that something as simple as a broken promise can give birth to a lie which by our action or inaction can fester into something truly injurious and sinister, we see that we’re something less than good, and our opinion of God, if we assume arguendo that He put us here, suffers with the realizat
ion.
Outside, in the bright light of the beautiful spring day, I noticed the two teenage girls crying in the front seat of their car as I walked across the parking lot to mine.
I drove to an ATM machine and withdrew two hundred dollars. I realized that I had to enter my personal identification number to initiate the transaction, but I left my shades on and tried not to look at the security camera while the machine spit out my money in twenty-dollar bills. I had no idea how much the medication was going to cost, but I wanted to be sure and pay cash for it so that there would be no record of the transaction on a credit card bill. The ATM machine was close to work, and I used it frequently. Michelle wouldn’t pay any attention to the amount or time of the withdrawal when the bank statement came through.
Then I drove east toward the ship channel, and away from our home. Eventually, I found a drive-through pharmacy in a part of town where I didn’t think anybody would know me. Again, I left my shades on when the pharmacy attendant came to the window and took my prescription slip. I avoided looking directly at the camera in the corner of the pharmacy window and waited in the car while the prescription was filled. When the attendant returned, she asked me if I wanted to put the charge on my insurance, but I told her that I didn’t have insurance and paid the bill with cash. Several cars lined up behind me while the pharmacist explained the regimen for taking the pills right away, how to begin taking them again when I anticipated the next outbreak, and how many refills I had remaining on the prescription.
A Minor Fall Page 13