Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

I got called in to stitch up Jasper Carroll, a fireman, for the fourth time in nine years, each due to being stabbed by his wife. I don’t think she intended to kill him and he always offered the same explanation: “We was having a discussion and she come with the blade.” You might say that I had lost all respect for Jasper’s injuries. He always brought his dog, a little Chihuahua named Manolete, for fear his wife would take it out on the dog. He lay on his stomach on the operating table with very little anesthetic, the nice wide but fairly shallow gash extending from just below his left shoulder in a downward angle to his spine. Jasper was an old hippie, and his gray ponytail hung below his black Chevron gimme cap almost far enough to be in the way. I listened to ZZ Top singing “Mexican Blackbird” as I worked and Billy Gibbons’s loping guitar created a nice rhythm for the stitches — poking, yanking, snipping. And Manolete’s occasional howls punctuated the soft-shoe boogie I performed next to the table. Alan Hirsch peeked in to watch me work and said, “Get down with your bad self.” I kept the Chrome, Smoke & BBQ boxed set in the emergency room to lift my spirits when the hours got long. I suppose it hurt my reputation with the rest of the staff. They had had a word with me about what they considered to be an excessively festive atmosphere. I think it just places me on the side of life, where a doctor should be.

The next time Jinx and I had lunch she tried to bring up the subject of my general unseemliness. We had taken pita wraps and beer to the park on an unseasonably warm day. Jinx wore a thick gray-green sweater with a shawl collar and the oddest pillbox hat I’d ever seen. I quite admired her indifference to her appearance and the impatience that caused her to speak through her hand when she was eating. Canada geese were standing at the edge of the park pond, which was so dark and still that their reflections were indistinguishable from themselves, and on a nearby bench an adoring young father rocked and gazed at his baby boy with shining eyes — a kind of Pietà but for the big ears and long black beard. I had spent the morning counseling a meth-head roofer from Walnut Creek, California, who had hit bottom here in town and wanted to talk about it. Surprisingly, he hoped to find a medical approach to maintaining his addiction and seemed strangely unaware that he was on a short straight road to hell. I got him in touch with our addiction counselor from my office phone, and I could tell by the upbeat dialogue he affected that he was not going to do anything for the time being. I told him I could see he wouldn’t even keep his appointment. He was a handsome young fellow of moderate height in jeans, Hush Puppies, and a worn blue suede jacket. He had jet-black hair that stuck out and clear blue eyes. I could see how bright he was, his imperfectly concealed suffering showing just under the surface of his bonhomie.

“No, Doc, honest, I’ll see him today.”

“No, you won’t.”

“You don’t think so?”

“No, but I wish I was wrong. I think you’re young and tough enough to picture that great feeling. I realize it’s like falling in love, but it’s a lie. Wait till you start rotting, it’ll seem like expensive love.” He didn’t like this and his face soured.

“You get this from Nancy Reagan?”

“Uh-huh.”

The young man backed to the door.

He said, “I’m Chad, by the way.”

“See you, Chad.”

Our most pleasant lunch in the park led up to the oddest question from Jinx: “What are you doing here? Have you no pride?” That’s really all I remember. No, not so. I remember the food, or the taste of it, but it disturbs me that I can’t remember who brought the food or why I kept looking at Jinx as though I were seeing her in a book of old photographs. For the moment, I was lost in her heedless sort of antique beauty. It always moved me. The fullness I felt in my heart I mistook for general high spirits.

After lunch with Jinx, I saw numerous patients, but while I may have given them appropriate treatment and advice I believed I did so from afar. Something was stirring, as though someone were standing in an adjoining room, the shadow on the floor the only sign of his existence. To give good medical care you must really see the patient and if possible lay hands upon him or her where convention permits. You must not stand behind the counter as though selling tickets at a shooting gallery. Every patient measured this distance subconsciously and weighed your suggestions against the measurement, and either results were achieved or they were not achieved.

On returning home at about midnight, having sat in a somewhat dumbfounded state on a barstool for several hours, I went to the windowsill on the north side of my bedroom and contemplated the alarm clock. I had owned this clock for several years without fully understanding it. You held one button to set the time, another to set the alarm, one to set the hours, another to set the minutes. AM and PM came and went like the days of my life and I often failed to set them properly. Sometime, hours after midnight, some woman came into my bedroom and asked me to not come to her house ever again. And she handed me a bill for the beer. She must have picked up my bar tab. I remember that it was almost undrinkable Grain Belt and I asked her if she carried any top brands. She slapped me and left. Whatever was disturbing me, it was not this, because I went straight back to sleep and had not a single dream until the alarm went off. I gazed around at the gray early light, arose, turned off the alarm, and went back to bed. I remained there for two days in a state of non-specific, writhing anguish. As it was rising in intensity with no end in sight, I arose and dressed from the pile of clothes at the foot of the bed and fled the house into frightful, fast-growing morning sunlight. I began passing people, some of whom must have recognized me. To allay my desperation, I pictured myself and attempted to arouse a sense of absurdity. The result was a hissing giggle emitted from between flattened lips. Though I was going nowhere, I was making phenomenal progress and passed through one neighborhood after another. When I recall the many automobile horns honking at me I feel very fortunate that I was not harmed. My mother loomed up taller than the ninety-foot Virgin Mary statue in Butte.

It was Sunday.

I stood in front of the old creamery, a concrete-and-stucco edifice with no windows and a remarkably small entrance, a commercial area that had been bypassed by the frontage road to the north where today’s activities centered. During my teenage years and later, this had been my mother’s church, one of several buildings around town where the ministry congregated. When I was a kid, a snake handler from Alabama brought his own rattlers and cottonmouths and offered to join but was turned away. He was told, “We don’t do that anymore.” Seeing it immersed me in pain: I had never gone inside. Why? Because I was embarrassed by my mother. Nothing gives you greater shame. I knew its reputation as a Holy Roller church, and it was infamous around town as a crackpot hotbed. As I stood there trying to connect its shape to my own history, I tried to keep up my well-practiced detachment, but it seemed to have little power in the face of my shame and guilt, all of which had been frozen in time by my mother’s death canceling all possibility of reconciliation. Wait a minute. What reconciliation? My mother and I got along well enough and knew each other’s limitations, but maybe this was different, my being ashamed of her beliefs or ashamed of the widespread view that she was crazy. Was she behind my remorse over Tessa? Behind my guilt over Cody? Anyone would see that I was headed inside.

I didn’t know if I was just late for services or if they were nearing their end, but at first sight it was bedlam, a large, earsplitting crowd pressed between the walls of the old creamery. Most of the men wore cowboy hats. Some of the women did too, but they were attired as though they were at home, some in unpretentious wash dresses and some of the younger women in jeans and halter tops. All had a faraway look and my ability to wander across their lines of sight without being seen was unexpectedly reassuring. Opposite the doorway, shipping pallets and planks had been used to create a stage where a drum machine blasted out a relentless pulse. Only one musician was on the stage, a bass guitar player, an amplifier at his feet, who throbbed along to the drum machine. A fraught woman stepped from the crowd and asked me where my shoes were. Next to the bass player an old man with a white beard and huge belly swayed and threw his arms from one side to the other. There was nothing menacing about this mob, and the further I penetrated it the less anxious I felt, the better I felt. Given that I had left my bed in a state of unbearable anxiety, it was a relief to be in a group so exalted that the eyes of half of them rolled out of sight. Several were clearly in the ecstasy of holy laughter. My mother had done some holy laughing around the house, and now, my seeing so many others at it seemed to absolve her in a way I found cleansing. Leading this pandemonium was the pastor, Rawl Pennington — one of my patients! — who stood a few feet from the bass player with his own amplifier and microphone, a very long cord necessary to his feverish movement. He was an older man, astoundingly active. As he exhorted us, he moonwalked from one end of the platform to the other, or raised one leg repeatedly to the height of his chest, a kind of goose step, as he shouted about the Rapture, the need to meet the Holy Ghost, to read the Book of Acts — I mean, this was beyond shouting — and as he invoked a mighty wind of what he called apostolic witnessing to the end-times, the crowd seemed to rise with him, the youngest skittering off with chattering teeth and faces in a peculiar mask like the last stages of diphtheria. There was much weeping, though it was weeping that expressed relief rather than grieving. I must have been drawn in, because my eyes filled with tears. Groups tottered with raised arms while others ran through the crowd in a low crouch. I joined the latter and was transported in a state of fascination at being able to run blindly without hitting anyone. Shoes and cowboy hats flew. When I leapt straight up, an old woman cried out, “He’s under a special sign!” The pastor stalled out on the shouted word “Unto!” He kept crying, “Unto, unto, unto!” before resuming about false signs and lying wonders and the need to cast out the devil and be anointed now . I very distinctly remember the sense of a pulse, a throbbing, possibly the music, if you could call it that, the exhortations of the pastor or the collective cries and moans as the whole crowd seemed to lose the beat and individuals, jerking in spastic movement, began to fall out. The pastor was down among us then, and to be perfectly clear I stopped racing around in my crouch, and I fell out too. Wonderful! The pastor was standing over me in a state, burning eyes, trembling jowls, hair tumbling over his ears from his bald crown. I was acutely aware of everything and could hear his legs slapping around inside his suit trousers, see the glint off his microphone, the triumph and rapture in his face as he called out to his flock, “He wants his mama! The doctor is calling out to his mama!” A grand affirmative noise filled the room.