by Tom Wilson
I followed him around the corner and turned my face into a stripe of warm muscles in the neck of a horse. "Look out!" he said, as I was buried in a blonde mane smelling like a combination of saddle soap and my seventh birthday. Good and Plenty spilled out of my bag and across the asphalt as I tripped backward. "What the -?" I blurted, leaning away from the animal into the greasy cinder block wall. Tied by a leather rein to a section of pipe behind the building was the most gorgeous animal I'd ever seen, a cream colored stallion, brushed to soft perfection, with the curves of a black leather saddle resting on its back on a blanket of wool and sheepskin. Silver studs lined every edge of the tooled leather, leading down to the stirrups, polished like the shoes of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"Silver?" I whispered.
The Ranger hoisted a foot into the stirrup and mounted, gliding into the saddle like a gymnast. "No, I suppose not, now."
"I thought your horse was named Silver."
"Silver is the Lone Ranger's horse."
"Come on, seriously. Silver, right?"
He smiled. "Well, not if I'm the One Ranger, huh?
I approached the horse slowly, and he nuzzled his head into my chest. My hand followed the sinews down his soft neck, scratching his ear, and patting down his head to his nose. "Well, you could drop the "S" and call him "Ilver."
"Doesn't really fit, does it?" the Ranger said, "How about Bullet?"
"I don't think so."
"Why not?" he said, "Fast as a bullet!"
"Nobody's calling anything "bullet" anymore," I said.
"Why is that?"
"Bullets aren't that popular," I said.
The Ranger rolled his eyes. "If you say so," he said, "Roy Rogers beat me to that one anyway."
"His horse was Trigger, wasn't it?"
"Yes, but his dog was Bullet."
He looked into a small stand of trees next to the parking lot, rubbing the back of his head, pulling the horse in a tight, dancing circle until it's front legs crossed a bit too far and it shuddered, slipping on the gravel glowing blue in the moonlight.
"How 'bout "Twister?" I said.
The Ranger tipped his hat back just enough for a speck of light to shine through the eyeholes of his mask, showing the excited, blue glint.
"Twister," he said, trying it out more than once, "…Twister."
"Yeah," I chuckled, "Right foot blue."
"Pardon me?"
"Nothing. Forget it."
My asthmatic lungs were already wheezing from my clumsy dance within the horse's mane, and I took out an inhaler, squeezing it into my hungry lungs.
"Are you alright, there?"
"Yeah, I'm fine," I said, "Allergic to horses."
"Oh," he said, pulling the reins to back Twister away from me, "I didn't know that. Sorry."
"No problem. It's not the horse's fault."
"Nobody's fault, I guess," he said.
"Well, if God really runs things, maybe it's His fault," I said.
He didn't have much to say to that, and sat in the saddle staring at me.
And then I began talking again, staring up at him on horseback in the moonlight.
SEVEN
In the savage world of boys in Philadelphia in the nineteen sixties, there was a popular game that was handed down from generation to generation, usually in a too-small basement during a sweaty first communion party, known as "Smear The Queer." None of us had a clue what the title of the game meant, but when older boys called it Smear the Queer, it sounded a lot better than just "Kill The Guy With The Ball."
All you needed was any kind of ball, or if you couldn't find a ball, a rolled up pair of socks, a t-shirt tied into a knot, or in a desperate game at my aunt's house, somebody's shoe. There weren't any real rules or choosing up sides, somebody just threw the thing into the air, starting a frenzied riot as everybody jumped wildly to catch it. To do less than your best to wrestle that thing away from every other kid would doom you to a lifetime of humiliation, calling your manhood into serious question, since the object of the game was to mercilessly attack whichever kid caught it. And when the pummeled victim was crushed to the brink of death, he had to throw the ball in the air, beginning the entire savage process again. "Smear The Queer" was the original slug-fest that inspired the concept "You won't be happy until someone gets hurt."
Nobody ever won the game, but there was always a clear loser – the kid who got hurt. It was usually a smaller cousin who got into the game because we weren't allowed to play unless we let him play, and it was only a matter of time before he got bashed in the teeth by a big pair of P.F. Flyers. After five or six big group tackles, when every freckled Irish face was red, and everybody was in grave danger of being "over-heated," we played just one more time.
You watch the arc of the Spalding tennis ball, a dirty white in 1967, and, though hot and afraid, jump higher than anyone else and grab it out of the air. Before your one handed grasp tightens, somebody's forearm is at your throat, sweaty hair in your face, and the cool linoleum of a basement floor at your back, as a pile of sixty and seventy pound bodies fall on top of yours. Laughter, and piling on, and cheerful grunts as Moms yell to get your coat, the game is over, but nobody is getting up. Celebrating the end of a hard rough-house, the middle section of the pile is giggling and jumping up and down while grunting, and you are on the bottom, arms pinned at your sides, trying to squeeze breath into forcefully emptied lungs, gasping "get off…unhh." You're at the bottom of an inverted pyramid and nobody knows you can't breathe. They can't hear your grunted, breathless pleas as they laugh and you squeeze the tennis ball, giving a wheezing cry as the weight on your chest doubles by the second. "Get off, GET OFF, GETOOOOOFFF!!" you cry into the small of someone's back, and when he hears, replies "I can't! Hey guys, get off!!" into the layers of undulating bodies as you begin to turn blue and for a frightening flash realize the horror of what it must be like to drown.
That's what an asthma attack is like.
I grew up with severe asthma, and it's a challenge because when all is said and done, nobody knows what it's like, and nobody really thinks it's that big a deal. In fact, plenty of people don't believe you even have it, or you could certainly get rid of it if you would only eat less dairy, or think positive thoughts, or take some fashionable snake oil that morons like to suggest to people they don't know when they go to barbecues.
Asthma doesn't come with the convenience of crutches or a wheelchair, doesn't give you a sling, a pronounced limp, or even a dramatic series of bloody noses and runs to the nurse's office. Asthma forces you to sit in a chair and spend every bit of energy that could be used for homework, or math quizzes, building friendships, or even speaking, to the simple but nearly impossible task of inhaling and exhaling. Asthmatics understand the connection between breath and life far better than those easy breathers with lungs so incredibly powerful that their owners can take up hobbies like smoking. Nothing concentrates the mind quite like suffocation, but unfortunately asthmatics don't call a lot of attention to themselves with loud and dramatic symptoms, or even a sympathy producing prop. Even our prop is pathetic, inviting more derision than empathy. The only proof we have, the only symbol of our other-ness, our desperate fight for oxygen, is a tiny piece of plastic cradling an inch long, harmless looking aerosol can. The inhaler. Savior of the wheezing, and international symbol of all things weak and unathletic.
"You've just got the skinny-away disease is what you've got," my grandfather, "Pop Pop" would tell me. He was an Irishman with a black moustache and a hatchet under the front seat of his impeccable Cadillac, just waiting for someone to mouth off. I watched him wave a wad of bills under the nose of many an unlucky loudmouth, as he promised to pay their medical bills after breaking both their legs, and at one of my earliest little league baseball games, I was called out on strikes by the umpire and my mother sent Pop Pop home, afraid that he would split open the man's head in front of a bleacher full of people. I brought home stories of teasing, humiliation, and arm punching, and he took matter
s into his own hands.
"I'm telling you, you got the skinny away disease," he said.
"What's that?"
"Too skinny. You're gonna blow away!"
"I can't help it!"
He assigned my mother the job of making me muscle building milkshakes, thick with dark Karo syrup and chocolate, a hopeless project to add the slightest heft to my bony, wheezing frame.
"When these guys tease you at school, you tell them to go to hell," he said.
"I can't say that!" I cried.
"You have my special permission. Tell them to go to hell," he said.
"Then they'll just punch me!"
"They punch you?!" he said, almost going to his car for the hatchet.
"Yes!"
"Then you punch them right in the face." He said.
"Even girls?"
He held back a gasp. "Girls punch you?"
"Yes, all the time."
He leaned closer. "Next time you see any of them, before they say anything, punch them right in the face and say go to hell!"
"Okay," I said, certain I'd never do it.
He called after a couple of days "Are you drinking your milkshakes?"
"Yes," I said.
"Are you still skinny?"
"Yes."
"Did you tell them to go to hell?"
"No."
"Did you punch 'em in the face?"
"No."
"Oh…" he said, passing the phone to Nana.
I drank sweet milkshakes every day, not gaining an ounce, crushed by Neanderthal fifth graders every day, and never punched one of them, for fear of turning to run and having an asthma attack, forced to stop and going back to square one to start the whole process over.
My asthma was so bad that my parents searched the country for information on the root causes of my suffocating, and pored over medical reports and alternative mumbo-jumbo for a cure. Long into the night, my father read brochures from clinics across the country, full of testimonials and color photos, as he filled the house with smoke from an endless chain of Parliament 100s. They finally decided on a place where cures for asthma were being mumbled about across the country. It was announced to the School faculty, my classmates, and everyone else I'd ever known that I was flying with my mother to an advanced medical center on the gulf coast of Mississippi. I was being sent to a place called "The Gay Clinic."
"The Gay Clinic?" I cried, "Why do I have to go there?!"
"It'll help your asthma," my father said, flicking ashes into the roaring fireplace.
"I'm not going to a gay clinic!"
"It's not that kind of thing! It's for your asthma!"
"Why do they have to call it that?"
"That's the name of the man who runs it," he said, "Doctor Gay."
"No way! That's not his name!"
"That's the man's name," he said, "it's not his fault they changed the meaning—"
"Don't tell anybody I'm going there!"
"Why not? It's the man's name!" he yelled, "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!"
The plane from Philadelphia to Biloxi, Mississippi was the first one I'd ever taken, and I couldn't help but get optimistic about being cured of asthma, since I was getting free Sweet Tarts at the airport, and "Eastern Airlines" playing cards from a pretty lady who felt so sorry for the kid on his way with his mother to the Gay Clinic. After a cab ride through the Magnolia scented streets of Biloxi, we were dropped off at a small doctor's office in the shadow of the estate of the President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis. The Gay Clinic didn't look like much of a national hub of pulmonary medicine research. My mom pulled open a creaking screen door, and we took seats in the sparse waiting room under tired posters of lungs in various states of disease. The place seemed so old I expected to see a few Confederate soldiers with bayonet wounds sitting on the ancient, empty chairs, using their inhalers twice before croaking out "Dixie."
"How ya'll doin'?" a nurse said, greeting us.
"Hello," my mother said, explaining who I was and what we were there for, though she didn't really need to, since it looked like we were the only patients for the week.
The doctor's office had way less equipment than other hospitals I'd been visiting for relief. The University of Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson University Medical school, and Temple University hospital all had spinning breathing machines and X-ray robot stuff and wires, meters, and oxygen tanks. This office had an exam table, some old glass cases full of gauze pad and cotton balls. I was afraid they might have giant medical contraptions that plunged spiked probes into the lungs of little kids, and it turned out they didn't have any of that stuff. Just a table, and the blood pressure cuff in the basket on the wall.
A thin reed of a man, moving slowly with age and wearing a wrinkled lab coat walked in. He shook my hand, looking me straight in the eye for so long that I was too afraid to hear if he was Doctor Gay or not. He examined my chest, thumping it and feeling it, tapping and massaging my entire torso with spidery fingers, asking me questions about myself.
"How're yuh doin' in school?" he drawled.
"I dunno," I mumbled, shrugging and waiting for Mom to answer for me.
"He's smart, but he misses a lot of sch-"
He waved her silent, looking me in the eye again.
"How are you doing in school?! Speak up!" he said, smiling big and leaving no doubt that he wanted a clear, audible answer, directly from me.
"Okay," I said, lying to the southern gentleman.
"Your ribcage is bent, son," he said, running his hands over the concave part of my chest that should be convex. Mom noticed that he was right and went pale. He was right, my chest is a weird shape.
He handed me a brown paper bag filled with plastic bottles of pink liquid.
"Take two tablespoons, morning, noon, and night." He said.
"Okay."
"Calcium," he said.
"This is calcium?"
"No, this is a special medicine formulated by the Gay Clinic. Get calcium on your own. Take calcium."
The treatment of the Gay Clinic was an unspecific dose of calcium, and a secret liquid the ingredients of which could not be shared with patients or their mothers. He rolled his chair very close to mine until our knees touched, leaned his pruny face to mine and said, "Take this medicine, but there's one more thing I want you to remember. The most important thing. I'm gonna ask you about this tomorrow, so remember."
"Okay."
He stared through his round glasses for a few seconds and said "The kingdom of God is within you."
After saying it, he looked at me for so long that I had to turn away and look at the ceiling fan, wafting the scent of camellias through the open window.
"The kingdom of God is within you," he repeated, "You say it."
"The kingdom of God is within you."
"No, you!"
"Me?"
"Yes."
"Within me," I said, rubbing a palm over my pants to feel the reassuring form of my inhaler in the pocket.
"Say it," he said.
"The kingdom of God is within me."
"One more time, Thomas."
"The kingdom of God is within me."
"That's right. Good!" he said, standing up and writing on a chart, "I'll see you tomorrow. Go see Jeff Davis' house, they've got the death mask of Napoleon over there. Go see that."
"Okay," I said, unable to say anything else.
"You've got a lot on Napoleon, you know," he said, "know why?"
"Why?"
"You already know!"
"What?"
"What did I just tell you, son?!"
"The kingdom of God is within me?"
"That's right, young man. See you tomorrow."
My asthma didn't get any better, and the entire school knew that I had gone to the Gay Clinic in Mississippi, so the spitballs rained toward me when I returned, but Dr. Gay dispensed far more than a secret tonic that tasted like what would come out of a car fender if you squeezed really, really hard. He called me
to higher things than simple breathing, and into the abiding kingdom of God."
My lungs were still wheezing puffs of phantom air throughout high school, but I was one of those kids who sprouted a foot taller in height and sixty pounds of testosterone pumping beef over the long summer, and at the same time that the football coach began to invite me to come and try out with the team of slobbering morons who had tortured me consistently for the past decade, the theatre teacher saw the transformation and cast me in the next play.
"Frankenstein," by Mary Shelley is not really the grunting horror movie of the forties, but a grand tragedy about an innocent giant turned murderous monster by the evil manipulations of a control freak. I was cast as the Creature, the hulking victim of cruel fate, driven to rage and murder by the callow mob surrounding him.
I was very good.
"Tom, are you supposed to be in class or something?"
Yes I was supposed to be in class, but I thought it was more important to sit in an empty stairwell and read the play over and over, grasping it tightly to my soul, than to answer Mrs. Calhoun's pointed question. I ignored her for another few lines of dialogue until she tapped a foot on the linoleum and asked again.
"Fifth period has started. Are you supposed to be somewhere?"
"No," I said.
She shook her head, wondering how to punish a kid for quietly reading a play.
"I think you need to go to class," she said, "Let's go."
I got up and walked to another empty stairwell, memorizing the lines of Frankenstein's monster and sliding into the ranks of the misunderstood artistic kids like a doubles luge racer, ready to set the world afire with art, and maybe years in the future, find all those abusive jock types and kill them with farm implements.
Brian Morgan was the school's theatre teacher, a young man fresh out of an east coast liberal arts theatre program and several anti-war rallies, so being directed by him was an illuminating learning experience, because apparently, every play in every age from every culture in human history was actually about Richard Nixon somehow.
"Tom, I want you to think a lot about the Creature," he said.
"Yeah, I am."
"I mean his broken humanity, his damaged limbs and deep need for love, a longing that turns to revenge, despair, and murder."