Who, Me?

by Who, Me- A Memoir (retail) (epub)

  Totally against my will/wishes.

  In fact when I’d filled out the application forms and there was a blank in there that asked WHY DO YOU WANT TO BECOME AN M.D.?, I had written in: I don’t want to become an M.D. My M.D. father wants me to become an M.D.

  So they hadn’t accepted me. Normal, nicht wahr?

  My father made a call to the medical school. A Dr. Job, one of his anatomy professors, who had moved into administration. Must have given him a pretty poignant story, because two weeks later there was the letter accepting me for the freshman class.

  And just to add sulfuric acid to brimstone, when I said I still didn’t want to go, my father (with my harpy mother standing triumphantly next to him like Bette Davis in Jezebel) told me with parliamentary finality: “Either you go to medical school and fulfill your destiny, or you’re out of this house, ON YOUR OWN!”

  On my own? Back to my shovel again, huh?

  So, OK, I played the game and went to medical school.

  And it was just as horrible as I’d expected it to be.

  In anatomy class we got this shriveled up old woman cadaver who looked like she’d been shoveled out of some concentration camp grave.

  On this big wooden board that was all wettish with something.

  “Human ‘juice,’” said Andy Carney who was on the same cadaver as me.

  “Uch!” said Don Meller.

  It was kind of disgusting, wasn’t it? Human juice?

  Well, it wasn’t human juice at all, but formaldehyde. The ancient hag didn’t have that much juice in her; that was for sure.

  And bright me, I took out my brand new scalpel and cut open the chest, somehow managing to cut all the arteries and veins in the process, so that when our professor came along, this huge hippopotamic seven foot tall monster, Dr. Schelermaier, and saw all the cut arteries and veins, he demanded (in perfect Gestapo style) “Who massacred this circulatory system?”

  “Me? In an overzealous moment.”

  “Well, tie everything all back together again. We’re here to study anatomy, not to butcher hogs!”

  Off to a perfect start, nicht wahr?

  So I reattached all the veins and arteries and Carney took over.

  Not a thought about Elizabeth, Paris, the whole hyper-romantic plunge I had had into the real world.

  You would have thought I would have been happy in medical school, wouldn’t you? Seeing that I was all mind, spirit, God, prayer, puzzles, reading, thinking.

  The problem was that essentially what my parents had turned me into was a ballerina, singer,writer, artiste.

  Already in high school one day one of the brothers came up to me and said, “Listen, Fox, I’m the guy who kind of oversees the newspaper here, you know, The Oriole, and we need an editor, and, I don’t know, you look the part, if you know what I mean, and nobody else does. You want the job?”

  “OK. Why not?”

  So all of a sudden I became editor of The Oriole, would write editorials every week, got a “letter” (a big L for Leo) for being editor, and suddenly, in the midst of all the tough egg Irishers and Italianos, I was Mr. Prestige.

  I’d write all these editorials about fasting and Lent, going beyond The Flesh into higher regions . . .

  I was always reading books like Thomas Merton’s Seeds of Contemplation, St. Augustine’s Confessions, would go to Mass and Communion every day.

  I really can’t say I was “female,” because I was totally sexless.

  Not feminoid or masculinoid but pure artist, down at the Art Institute all the time at lectures on, say, the Madonna by El Greco in the permanent collection, listening to lecturers go on and on:

  “. . . El Greco did little wax figures in preparation for all his paintings. And you can see the waxen quality of the figures in the finished works. That’s what gives them their malleable, fluid, sculptural effect . . .”

  Malleable, fluid, sculptural effect, hmmmmmmm . . .

  Every night I’d be reading books like Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point, with a dictionary at my side, looking up the words I didn’t know. I read all of Huxley’s novels, then his essays, then the books he’d mentioned in his essays.

  He was kind of my idol.

  I never thought, years later, after I’d dropped out of medical school and gone and gotten a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Illinois, and gotten a job at Loyola in Los Angeles, that one day I’d be out at the Pickwick Bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard and I’d look up and see Huxley right there in front of me, on the other side of a table full of books. My God, Aldous Huxley himself! Tall, thin, archangelic. This old lady next to me browsing through the books. Instead of me shaking hands with him and introducing myself, I whispered to her “Look, it’s Aldous Huxley.” “What?” Again a little louder. “It’s Aldous Huxley.” Looked up and he was gone. What an idiot I was to blow my chances to meet my superhero, the source of so much of my literaryness.

  And Catholic authors, always the Catholic authors. Practically all of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Hilaire Belloc. Evelyn Waugh. Francois Mauric. Sigrid Undset. Peguy. The French and the Norwegian in translation.

  And when I wasn’t reading I was playing the piano, improvising, forever improvising, recording my improvisations on a wire-recorder, which was the first recorder to come out, long before tapes . . .

  At Loyola University, when I was in pre-Med I’d go up into the organ loft in the chapel and improvise on the organ.

  Never wrote the music down, but even now, a hundred years later, I still have the wire recorder and all the old recordings somewhere down in the basement.

  Ballet, concerts, a little Rachmaninoff or Orff or Vaughan Williams on the record player in the background full-time when I was studying, sneaking a little Huxley in before I went to bed, voices always whispering inside me, “Isn’t it time you started reading Virginia Woolf again, or Natalie Saurrate? What about Rachmaninoff’s autobiography?” Wanting to take out a canvas and start painting houses, barns, the Chicago skyline. Wanting to go to more lectures at the Art Institute. Managing to take slim-legged, beautifully busty Shirley Bourke out to a Chicago Symphony concert or a play at the Goodman Theater (at the Art Institute) on Saturday night, but somehow, somehow, somehow during the week I kept at the medical studies.

  It was funny. By spring, instead of worrying about our cadavers, we’d come into the lab with our sandwiches and eat lunch while dissecting a uterus or bowel or big toe.

  Histology was even fun, identifying kidney cells or lung or brain or testicular tissue.

  One girl in the class, Gina Moran. One of the black Irish. The whitest of skins, the blackest of hair and eyes.

  I took her out a couple of times which made Mom and Dad very happy.

  “Imagine! Dr. and Dr. Fox. Two doctors married to each other . . .”

  “And I suppose all the kids’ll be doctors, too, right? Dr. and Dr. Fox and all the little doctors. I suppose we can all live in a clinic and have dinner on an operating table.”

  “That’s not funny!”

  My bejeweled mother looking her most Medusa-ish. If she’d have come back from the beauty parlor some afternoon with snake-hair I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  But it didn’t work out with Gina anyhow.

  Once, when I went to pick her up, she was sitting in the living room while she still was getting ready, her mother sat down next to me, started practically whispering.

  “Listen, Hugh, I like you—a lot—and I ought to tell you something about Gina, in case you’re getting romantically involved with her. She’s as cold as a popsicle. Can’t be touched, cuddled. Totally mental. Cold, cold, cold. If I were you—” The bedroom door opened and Gina came out all resplendent in red velvet to fit the Christmas season, her mother instantly changing themes, “So you don’t know what you’re going to specialize in? Well, you’d better make up your mind; everything is specialists these days . . .”

  “I’m going to be a pediatrician!” Gina announced all warm and l
oving, as if to totally cancel out her mother’s refrigerator characterization of her.

  By spring I was so totally sick of medical school that I decided to just flunk out. Not drop out, but flunk out.

  Our biochemistry professor. Well, instead of talking about something biochemical that had something to do with people, all he managed to talk about was his research on amino acidic metabolism in dogs. Nothing about vitamins, nothing about minerals, herbs, fats and the heart or anything at all about biochemistry applied to people.

  And the physiology lab. We’d get these dogs from the pound. Stray dogs that were going to be killed anyhow; but should medical students be doing the killing?

  Like the time we had a unit on adrenalin.

  Adrenalin makes the heart beat faster.

  So we got a beautiful stray mutt (Collie) and I had been chosen to be the anesthetist. OK. Got it up on the table, someone else held its mouth shut so it couldn’t bite anyone. I injected some sedative into the saphenous vein in the leg, and once it was out Carney opened up the chest and we all listened while Professor Gangbusters lectured on adrenaline, put the formula on the board and then ordered, “OK, time to inject!”

  Me on the needle again. Saphenous vein.

  The heart started going crazy. We got the point.

  Then it was time to “sacrifice” the dog. My job again.

  So I injected it with the poison provided. And the poor thing died.

  At the table next to me, instead of injecting poison into the saphenous vein, the guy in charge of killing took a scalpel and vigorously and viciously stabbed it in the heart, “I’ll show you, you son of a bitch.”

  It was like stockyard slaughter class instead of medical school, nicht wahr?

  I stopped going to physiology labs and biochemistry exams, still hung around dissecting out our ancient lady cadaver. All kinds of little “pockets” in the lungs, which our professor told us was “because she had some sort of hacking cough for years and years,” looking at her more closely, “not tuberculosis, though . . . maybe a smoker.”

  Strange, the tiny little powder puff breasts and miniature vagina/uterus, the way her kneecaps stuck out like hubcaps.

  I remember Mike Gerrity coming by and looking at her.

  “Disgusting. That’s the way my girlfriend is going to look in another fifty or sixty years.”

  I’ll never forget the final exams.

  I did the anatomy exam OK. Kind of enjoyed that part of it. The artist in me. I was forever drawing colored pencil drawings of the corpses all around me, always with DaVinci’s anatomical drawings in the back of my mind.

  But the bio-chem exam was a joke.

  I remember leaving the whole page blank, sitting there napping through the exam-time, and then coming out at the end and tearing up the blank sheets throwing them on the table in front of the professor (who remains unnamed) who was sitting there waiting for the finished exams.

  “What an idiotic course! No connection at all with patients. This is medical school, not theory school. There’s people out there, not labs . . .”

  “Well,” he started to mumble, looking afraid, like I was about to pull a gun on him or something, “there are students here who will be going on for advanced work in biochemistry and—”

  I just walked away.

  Last day, last exam.

  Down to the locker room where I got my stuff, a big briefcase full of books and notes.

  Gerrity there, too, cleaning out his locker.

  “Well, I’m out. I think I’ll try law school . . . anything but this. How about you, Foxie?”

  “I was just reading an essay by T.S. Eliot the other day, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ in which he talks about every writer in every country working within a tradition that the new writer retrospectively changes. Every new work reaches back and changes the total picture Of the past. Only I’ve never read anything American. Just ‘foreign’ Catholic authors. Waugh. Peguy. Undset. Very international and all, but I’d like to soak myself in my American roots . . . maybe get a degree in American literature.”

  ”Well, good luck, pal . . . we’ll be seeing each other again.”

  And out he went after a strong, heartfelt handshake.

  Bonding.

  I can’t say I wasn’t bonded with my buddies in the class, guys like Gerrity, Carney, Don Meller.

  Only never saw Gerrity again.

  Fifty years later and I’ve never seen him again.

  Called Carney just the other day. Got his name off the Internet. All kinds of books of his published. Still living in the Chicago area. Oak Park. Wanted to ask him about the best possible treatment (seed implants, surgery, radiation, cryotherapy) for my recently diagnosed prostate cancer. And he couldn’t have been nicer, invited me down to visit some time . . .

  I remember my mother looking at him when he came to visit once when we were still in undergrad together. Carney and his big Slavic face.

  “Kearney—an Irish name—but he can’t fool me, him and his big Polock face.”

  “Slovakian. The name was Carnowski originally.”

  “Slovak! Even worse.”

  She was always such a sweetheart, wasn’t she?

  It would be nice to go down to Oak Park and see him. Let’s see how the radiation treatment goes, see if, in another month or so, I can go visiting anyone anymore.

  So Mama and Daddy’s little boy-girl artsy-craftsy poopy had flunked out of medical school and when I came home and told them . . . well, here’s the way it went.

  “So I flunked out of medical school,” I said as I came in the door, dinner on the table, my mother’s version of Chop Suey, which was really kind of a beef stew with bean sprouts thrown in for oriental flair, beef stew drowned in soy sauce.

  “W—w—w—what?” my father stuttering, holding his right hand to his chest as if he were planning a heart attack.

  “No more med school. I’m out. Fini!”

  “You rotten piece of . . . how do you dare do this to us, your loving parents? What are you trying to do, destroy us in our old age?”

  “If you think that we’re going to . . .”

  My father getting up and advancing toward me like an angry polar bear.

  He was going to bop me one, wasn’t he? I’d gotten it plenty as I was growing up. Pretty sparse on the love, but pretty plentiful with his slaps and punches. The Irish, you know: spare the saber and spoil the brood . . .

  Only I wasn’t in the mood for any more brutal authoritarian crap.

  “You touch me, man, and I’m gonna beat the shit out of you. I’ve been digging ditches summer, man, and you’d better not mess with me or you’re gonna not just be an M.D., but need one, and I mean it.”

  Standing my ground, Humphry Bogart-Peter Lorre-Sidney Greenstreet Fox.

  He stopped, looked down at the ground.

  “I want you out of this house tonight. You want to be a bum, man, OK, you’re on your own.”

  “OK,” feeling a strange mixture of exaltation and total despair, going back into my room, packing essentials into two suitcases, no idea of where I was going or what I was going to do. When I got packed, going into the dining room where the phone was, calling Father Jeremiah O’Callaghan, catching him in his room at the Jesuit house up on the Loyola campus; my father-confessor, my best friend, spiritual advisor. My father and mother sitting at the table eating now, pretending I wasn’t even there, I was Mr. Ghost, Mr. Has-Been, Never-Had-Been, “Listen, Father O’Callaghan, I just finished my last day at medical school, and I’m not going back. My parents are tossing me out, and I need help . . .”

  “Hugh . . . this is so unexpected—or not really—I’m not really suprised—let me think . . . you could stay here with me, but . . . no, Northwestern has a dorm downtown, I know the guy who runs it, let me make a call. It’s the end of the term, there’ll be lots of vacancies, and I know a guy at this bible factory on the near south side that’s looking for a shipping clerk—Protestant bibles, but nonetheless
bibles. I could get you in there by Monday . . . you probably have a little money in your account, right?”

  “Yeah, a few hundred—”

  “OK, let me look for the address of the Northwestern dorm . . .” a couple minutes’ pause, and he comes back with the address, the name of the guy I’m supposed to contact when I get there, the name and address of the bible press/distributor on the near south side, plus another contact name.

  The guy’s a miracle-worker, pulls dragons down out of the sky, kicks a rock and opens up a glowing gold mine.

  “Listen, my friend, I owe you . . . tons.”

  “Not at all, not at all, that’s what I’m here for.”

  “Be seeing you, then, pal.”

  “You bet. Dominus vobiscum.”

  The Lord be with you. And that’s it.

  I lift up my bags and start out down the long corridor to the front door, my parents don’t say a thing, keep picking away at their bean-sprouts as if I wasn’t there at all. But I stop half way down the hall, turn and announce, “I’ll be down at the Northwestern dorms downtown. I’ll be starting a job at a bible factory on Monday. I’ll call you—”

  “You can go to Hell as far as we’re concerned!” my father mutters.

  “Oh, is Hughie still here?” my mother asks my father.

  As far as she’s concerned I could just as well have been another abortion or tubal pregnancy.

  Like that last act of hers on earth, just before she died, that holographic will that willed her entire fortune to my cousin, Judy.

  So out I went, over to the Illinois Central RR as usual, took the train downtown, got in the dorm and started my job on the following Monday. Went over to Loyola and found out about summer school, put my whole plight on the table: a great undergrad record, medical school disaster, now what did I want to do? Get a degree in English, nicht wahr?

  Only I’d just had three years of pre-med, had to make up all kinds of courses, and they weren’t going to give me any tuition breaks now that I was the Outcast of the Islands.

  A couple of weeks before summer classses began.