Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

Burroughs looks at Williams this time, an expression of mixed compassion and skepticism on his face, as if he knows he’s being conned, but maybe not. “You tell him you don’t want him to die. Tell him to stop taking the drugs.”

“Life is so sad,” Williams fades, this his concluding line.

Jim Grauerholz arrives with a priest in tow, to introduce to William Burroughs. I slip over to the bar where I grab a shot of Bushmill’s, only one of the drugs available here in Notre Dame, Indiana, and from coast to coast with few restrictions.

I got back from Haiti. My marriage was disintegrating. I’d been gone for two weeks, researching in Cap Haitien for a script about Toussaint Louverture. I wrote the script, called Toussaint . The movie never got made. One enigma about Toussaint Louverture, slave, autodidact, superb diplomat and politician, is why he capitulated to Napoleon III. He surrendered even though he had the war won. Dessalines and Jean-Christophe finished off the French after Toussaint turned himself over, was taken into exile to die in a prison in the Alps. He’d never seen snow before. He froze to death.

Meanwhile back in Pine Bush, Jingle was seeing our mutual friend, Masato. He was an excellent cabinet-maker/carpenter. She had him make a door from our dining room to the patio. It was an old house, post and beam construction, and nothing was plumb or square. I couldn’t have made that door. Masato was a small man. He made a small door. I could hardly squeeze through it. He also had skills at masonry and gardening. There was a lot that Jingle, author of The Craft Of The Country Cook , could learn from him.

For most of the year Masato shipped out as a merchant officer, a second mate. His profession inspired my oldest son, Avrum, to enroll at Cape Fear Tech, in North Carolina, to get his seaman’s papers. He joined the NMU, and shipped out himself. Avrum honed his poker skills on the ships, and he would often come home with triple his salary. Once, when he was just eighteen years old, he went to a VW agency and bought a new Scirocco, peeling hundred dollar bills from his poker roll, into the astonished salesman’s hands.

I spotted the new door immediately as I walked into my house, back from Haiti. Then I saw that the house had filled with plants. Jingle was a great gardener, and supplied the family with tasty vegetables, but she was never interested in houseplants. I knew that among Masato’s accomplishments was his skill with the potted plants. When I saw what was happening in my house, all my fury, my self-righteousness, whatever buzzsawed through this dismantling marriage, now steamed my philandering blood. I stealthily circumambulated my house, pulling the potted plants from all their shelves and niches. I smashed them against the walls. When I finished I stepped back to look with perverse satisfaction at my floors covered with potting soil and the remains of geraniums, aloes, hydrangeas. Who knows? Whatever the hell else they had potted together.

Jingle came in with a broom and dustpan.

“Don’t clean it up!” I insisted. “I want the kids to see it.” I had done what I had done and I wanted them to know what I had done.

We went to bed, leaving the mess as it was. All the time we were breaking up we’d sleep in the same bed. At the time Jingle was reading a lot of the early feminist literature, and it made part of our pillow talk. I was both her advocate and her adversary. It was all tender and contradictory, how we could still love each other while we were in the zones of mutual scorn.

Early the next morning I went downstairs to find my youngest son, Rafael, squatting in the muck, repotting all the plants he could rescue. He filled the new pots with soil he swept off the floor, and tenderly fitted the plants I had doomed into their new life. I felt like a child being taught a lesson.

“Do what you have to do, Dad,” said Nikolai, the middle son, when I gathered them all in my studio to tell them I was going to move to the city.

I went back up to Pine Bush several times in the fall. Jingle couldn’t bring herself to slaughter the two lambs we had raised for meat. She sharpened the knife for me. I took the creatures into the shade by the barn, and lay them down and held their heads cradled one at a time in my lap. I explained to the first one how we had given them a good life, and now it was time for us to take it away. I didn’t really have words for this ritual. It was harder with the second lamb. It was a beautiful fall day, leaves blowing in the air, but this was a dark time for me. I was like draped in lead, pressed down to the ground. The lambs, however, got very calm before I slit their throats. Jingle didn’t watch. They bled out onto the ground around my leg.

The anesthesiologist was young and unattractive. She pulled her black hair back in a bun, accentuating her ruddy complexion and sharp features. Her bony hands were quick and accurate. I should have been appreciative, but I would have preferred a beautiful anesthesiologist. Once she had me hooked up to the drip she had concocted, she left, without a smile, not even bidding me a safe voyage.

A male nurse came by before I tripped away to brief me on what my experience would be as I came out of anesthesia. He had been a medic in Vietnam. His compassion was powerful. Everything he predicted turned out to be accurate. The most uncomfortable tube, he said, would be the one coming out of my throat to drain my lungs. It would be removed, he promised, soon after I was conscious. His most life-affirming notion was that I would be able to have sex three days after I came out of surgery. All the tubes would be removed by then. I would be recovering big time. He warned that the sex would have to be with my wife. I explained that I wasn’t married. Then do it with someone you know really well, he countered. You don’t want too much excitement.

Fluorescent light seeped into the pores of my recovering consciousness. I was on a gurney, headed for intensive care. I was wasted. I was in big trouble. They had me where they wanted me. I wanted to rip the tube that seemed to be choking me out of my throat. That was why they had my arms strapped to the gurney. I was sweating into my eyes. I had been under heavy anesthesia when they cracked me open, but some part of me must have been aware of the violation. I was angry. Some people suffer depression as they recover from a bypass operation. I was just pissed. With the tube in my throat I couldn’t even ask someone to wipe my forehead, just to keep the sweat out of my eyes. I’m here, you pricks. Just wipe it, goddamit. The sweat’s in my eyes, you motherfuckers. Just wipe my face, bitch.

They parked me in intensive care. I was wearing a hospital rag that kept slipping off my privates. I saw one of the nurses, a big handsome nurse, checking me out. It was embarrassing. I knew my dick had disappeared, was hiding in its vestibule. She looked from my groin to my face. Wipe my forehead, cool moist rag to my face, bitch. She did it, the angel, as if she’d heard me. It was an act of love. I was alone now in the intensive care chamber. This environment felt like it was designed for Star Trek , unlike any hospital space I remember from when I was a kid sick with polio. It was like one of the glassed-in reptile cages in a zoo. My primary care physician never dropped by to ask what was up, but one at a time a regular file of emdees I’d never seen or heard of before popped in with hardly a stethoscope; these specialists introduced themselves, with expertise in stuff hardly pertinent to my case. They each asked the same questions. It was exhausting. Why couldn’t they read the chart? I soon realized that this was the freeloading scum of the medical profession, milking me like a goat for payouts from insurance or medicare. Hippocratic hypocrites. One rodentine medical researcher, a beady-eyed woman with a nasal squeak of a voice, approached me when I was barely conscious to ask if I would participate in her research, letting them draw blood over a period of time from two places. “It won’t hurt much.” If I’d had the strength I might have leapt from the bed like a rat terrier to tear out her throat. That would have been a great show for the passing gawkers.