Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Memoirist BS
Menagerie
Menagerie (Zoo) by Kenney Mencher
But back to Bud Camfield. He’d gone a little goofy in the head, which is why the school district demoted him from principal to teacher. I thought the world of him, too, and not because he’d give us hugs. Even in the 70s, teachers weren’t that dumb.
No, Mr. Camfield rocked because he once took me aside and said, “Doug, you and I are the two greatest people I know. You’re special and I’m special.” Which would have been, you know, a real Mr. Rogers moment, except he followed it up with, “And don’t leave your education to the schools. You’re better than that. You have to look for culture, Doug. Listen to music, read the classics.” And then he wandered off, talking to himself.
I took his advice to heart. When I got home that day, I ransacked my parents’ record collection looking for something that might qualify as a ‘classic’. Hmm. Barbra Streisand? Petula Clark? Andy Williams? Finally, I found something that looked suspiciously high brow: George Gershwin’s An American in Paris. All orchestral, no words — this had to be culture.
Shortly thereafter, I hit the library and somehow found Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography. In time, that led me to The Agony and the Ecstacy, as well as someone’s biography of Da Vinci. I picked up a Shakespeare collection and forced myself through Julius Caesar. That summer, I read Crime and Punishment, The Stranger, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and a whole bunch of other great stuff besides.
Thanks, Mr. Camfield.
D.
Suffer the children
In her July 6 post, Demented Michelle* told the story of a dickwad psychiatrist who told her she didn’t have sufficient life experience to be a writer (she was a teenager at the time). This jogged my memory the way a swift kick will turn over a Suzuki Samurai. Here’s my tale.
Summer after 6th grade, I decided to write a novel.
Deader is Better
Hellraiser VII: Deader
Gross Anatomy 101
Blog block vanished when I read Brian’s post today on FAF (Beaches) . I remembered something from high school — something you don’t need to know. But what the hey.
GF v1.0 and I used to agree that there were some high school couplings best left out of the imagination. One pairing in particular scandalized us. Let’s call them Archibald and Patricia.
Though blessed with a good heart, Archibald had one flaw which should have doomed him from any hope of young love. He looked goofy, and in high school, looks are everything. Patricia, on the other hand, only had a goofy personality. Actually, that’s too kind. If you spent any time around Patricia, any time at all, your face would freeze into an expression like this:
Because she was that weird. Honestly. (God. Do I really look that fat? And it looks like I’ve had hair plugs!) Nevertheless, these two goofy people found one another, and, soon thereafter, were sighted holding hands in the canteen, making eyes at one another outside of AP Calculus, even dating.
Every year, the school schlepped us smart kids down to Newport Beach as some sort of reward. We never thought to question this elitism because this was one time when the deck was stacked in our favor. After all, the lettermen got all the cute girls, the stoners got all the loose girls, and what did we get? The beach trip. It was better than nothing.
How it happened, we shall never know. Perhaps Archibald’s choice of bathing trunks was some sort of precognitive wardrobe malfunction. Perhaps things were going too slowly in that department and Archibald thought shock therapy would be just the thing. Perhaps he was simply too much man for Woolworth’s Clearance Table swim shorts. But the facts are clear: at some point during the beach trip, Patricia spotted Archibald’s package.
And the experience was sufficiently traumatic that she broke up with him that day.
GF v1.0 and I speculated endlessly about this. Was he that big? Or was he that small? Had Patricia never seen a penis, not even in books? Had Archibald suffered some horrific accident as an infant? Maybe, in the deep, dank, salty darkness of his drawers, this is what she saw.
Now, come on. Just because it was hyperlinked didn’t mean you had to click on it. If all your friends were clicking on a hyperlinked cliff, would you click on it, too?
I knew you would.
D.
Checking out the fruit
This is it, our 21st anniversary. After today, you won’t have to listen to another maudlin rant for, oh, another 360 days or so.
Where we left it: quite ignoring The Rules*, I’d chosen something threatening for our first date — dinner at my apartment the following Saturday night.
I felt pretty good about this date. Karen, I found out much later, was far more cautious. “I still needed to check out the fruit,” she said. I didn’t need to check. First date, courting, the sex thing, meet-her-parents, meet-MY-parents: technicalities. This relationship was inevitable.
That Saturday, I blew off studying and spent the whole day washing clothes, grocery shopping, and cooking. My place northwest of the Berkeley campus put me within three blocks of a bakery, three grocery stores, a produce market, a wine shop, a cheese shop, and a fish market. Only the best for this meal.
The menu: salad, sourdough bread, seafood divan, a Dutcher Creek Fume Blanc 1978, and chocolate mousse for dessert. I didn’t finish cooking until 8:30. My roommates were in and out; Roger came by to haze Karen mercilessly. Having just had his heart ripped out by a feminist (who, in retrospect, was a far nicer person than Roger), he had to make sure I wasn’t falling into the same trap. Karen, I’m sure, will recall that I took part in this hazing ritual (which involved the infamous fish joke) but she’s just plain WRONG. Roger did it. Roger.
A bit later that evening, my other roommate Russ came by to snag two helpings of chocolate mousse and do the dishes. Russ was always doing the dishes whether he’d dirtied them or not, because he figured Roger and I were too ignorant to use hot soap and water. And, you know, it bothered him.
Eventually, they all left us alone, and Karen and I spent the rest of the evening up in my room not having sex. We talked until 2AM. Actually, I think I talked until 2AM. I violated one of the most important Guy Rules, violated it the way an Atkins failure violates a Krispy Kreme.
Don’t tell her jack about yourself, because whatever she imagines about you is far superior to the Truth.
If I failed to reveal all my secrets that night, I made up for it in our many late-night talks in the coming weeks. Who knows; maybe it was the right thing to do. She was checking out the fruit, after all, and I’d given her plenty to squeeze and sniff.
I walked her home. At the door, we kissed a few times, and I said, “Well, I think we’re pretty compatible. What do you think?” She agreed.
In the boy-meets-girl story, you don’t expect smooth sailing. You’d be damned bored if Adam Sandler didn’t lose Drew Barrymore at least once before the end of the movie. You mean Karen didn’t have cold feet, not even once? You mean neither of you went running back to your ex for one last fling, to the horror of the other, followed by a tearful reunion and the confession, I never realized until now how much you meant to me? Nope. Sorry. This relationship was like going down a slide on waxpaper.
Three nights later, I was trying to figure out how to invite myself over to Karen’s apartment (for some reason, I’d lost the nerve to just drop in like I used to) when Karen showed up with Kira. They hijacked me. Karen, it transpired, still wanted to check the fruit, and Kira was along as an independent grocery inspector. I grabbed my books, intending to study later (har-har), and the three of us took a lunatic trip through Co-Op. Not long after, Karen and I ended up in her room.
She put Ravel’s Bolero on the stereo and we both thought of Allegro non troppo before we thought of Blake Edward’s 10. One thing led to another, although it didn’t lead to much more than — hey kids! Remember this word? Necking. And, once again, we spent a hell of a long time talking.
Two weeks of talkin’ and neckin’ later, we finally got around to checking out each other’s fruit for realsies. Karen asked me afterwards, “So. Feeling the thrill of conquest?”
“I thought it was all pretty mutual –”
“Conquest on both sides?”
“I think it was all decided two weeks ago,” I said. “That’s when the ‘conquest’ was, if there ever was one.” And she agreed.
Hey, we were a couple of over-educated science geeks who thought we could control everything with our brains. To some extent we were right. We had some stressful months ahead of us — Berkeley College of Chemistry was never what you’d call easy, and the elephant in the room was the question, Where will Doug be nine months from now? I hadn’t been accepted to med school yet (hadn’t even interviewed), and Karen still had a year left at Berkeley. But Fate gave us a cakewalk. Stanford accepted me into their medical school. One year later, they accepted Karen into their graduate program in Chemical Physics. In our year apart, we were never more than 60 miles away from one another; that’s a long distance relationship even we could manage.
Yeah, Fate gave us a cakewalk, at least until She decided to take a fat crap on Karen’s head in late ’83. Our first seven years of marriage were pretty rough, thanks to Karen’s multiple sclerosis. But the fact we’ve made it to 21 years ought to tell you something.
I love you, Karen. Glad you liked the fruit.
D.
*The as-yet-unpublished Guy Rules. More on this some other day.
Smorgasbord
My friend Stan, bless his heart, wanted to find me a girlfriend. Guess he’d finally gotten fed up with my two-year-long depression following my breakup with GF v1.0. A week or two before winter break, he hosted a dinner party and invited me, Karen, Suzie, and their roommate Kira.
At this point in history, Karen had broken up with BF v1.0, landing her in fresh rebound territory. Stan figured this put her off limits, which left Suzie and Kira, but Kira could serve High Tea on my head (she’s that tall), so that left Suzie.
We played monopoly and poker after dinner. I glistened like a coked-up Robin Williams and Karen was a whip-crack herself, witty and intelligent. Suzie was Suzie (cute and bubbly) and Kira was funny as hell, but Karen had most of my interest. In my anemic language of the time — what I told Stan, and soon after, what I told Karen — I thought she and I were on the same wavelength. That we were psychic twins. Amazing thing is, this didn’t scare her off.
I’ll skip most of winter break. I had a disastrous reunion with GF v1.0. You’d think after two years I could manage a let’s-be-friends scene, which was all I wanted*, but I didn’t give sufficient credit to my capacity for sheer unmitigated assholishness.
Winter quarter: Karen and I had one class together, Physical Chemistry Lab. She sat with Kira (we were all Chemistry or Chemical Engineering majors), I sat by myself. We had a senile instructor, Professor O’Konski, who provided endless jeering entertainment. Once, for example, he drew a stick figure of two-legged creatures and four-legged creatures (I think this was meant to demonstrate some subtle point regarding reaction kinetics) and said, “Here are the cowboys, riding on their cows.” I’m not kidding.
I’d have had more stories from that man, save for the fact my attention was riveted not on him but on Karen. Specifically, on trying to work up the nerve to ask her out. My tongue would not work. I had no trouble calling her on the phone, nor had I any qualms about dropping in at her apartment unannounced. I found ways of getting us together, but not in a manner that would be confused with a date. No, when it came to asking her out, I was verklempt**.
At the beginning of class one day, I passed her a note:
“This is a gimpish way to go about it but what the hell. Would you want to go out with me?”
I’d hoped she would pass the note back with a “Sure!” but no such luck. She made me wait until after class. Then she cornered me in lab, with Kira standing over her shoulder as bouncer-on-call.
“Are you going to explain this note to me?” she said. “What’s a gimpish thing to do?”
I hooked a couple of fingers around her arm and dragged her away from Kira.
“Will you go out with me?” I half-whispered.
“Elaborate!”
“Huh?”
“When? What? Where?”
But I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I mean, jeez, did I have to have everything planned? So I invited her over for dinner the following Saturday night. I gave her my address. As she walked back to her lab station, she called after me: “Jeez, some people are shy.”
Friday night, Kira and Stan walked over to my apartment in the rain. “Kira wants to see your apartment,” Stan said, but I think actually Kira wanted to check me out a bit closer. She borrowed a few books from my bookshelf, undoubtedly a ruse to see which books I had on my shelf. Fortunately, my 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, and Autopsy, Volume 3 were safely tucked away. And, fortunately, the half-naked Billy Idol poster belonged to my roommate Russ, not me.
Following a detour to Mama’s BBQ for Stan, the three of us returned to Kira’s apartment. Karen was there. We all played cards until 1 AM. That evening, the feeling returned — what I called kismet yesterday. A sense of inevitability.
On Sex and the City, the women hump their beaus like brain-lesioned rabbits and date for months before the subject of marriage ever comes up. Yet here I was, thinking about the future, the far future, and we hadn’t even dated yet. Sure, Sex and the City is a 21st century phenom, while all this stuff with Karen, that was in the OLD days — the 80s! Did people even have sex back then?
D.
*And isn’t that dishonest as hell.
**Fake American Yiddish, courtesy of SNL: overcome with emotion.
Some people have decided to cast their BlogHop votes according to their honest opinion. This misguided policy has shunted Shatter off the first page of their ‘Best’ list. Take a look at that list and ask yourself: does Whurdsderodan really deserve such status? Or Coffee Achiever? Or Much Ado About Me? It’s up to you, my non-voting lurkers, to boot yours truly back into the stratosphere. CLICK ON THE DARK GREEN SMILEY FACE (just check out the right-hand margin . . . scroll up a bit . . . there.) And, while you’re at it, hop on over to Bare Rump’s Diary and do the same for her. You wouldn’t believe how many arachnophobes are bringin’ the old girl down.
21st Anniversary: T minus 3 days
Karen and I met during my last year at Berkeley. I had recently changed my mind about my future. All of those pre-meds I had despised for the last three years — well, I still despised them, but I decided maybe they knew something I didn’t know. Mind you, I had zero interest in patient care, but that (my counselor told me) wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. There was this new creature, see. All the rage at places like Hahvahd or Stanford. They called ’em MD-PhDs. I’d get to live in a lab like a PhD (something I wanted at the time) but I’d get paid like an MD, and NIH would rain grants down upon me, a veritable golden shower . . .
Anyway, this change in direction meant I had to take a hard look at my appearance on paper. The one thing I lacked was research experience. And so, in Fall Quarter of my senior year, I cast around looking for a lab, and soon found myself with Professor Sung-Hou Kim.
I was years-young and world-stupid enough to get deliriously excited over the prospect of twenty hours work per week with no pay, and in that mood I first laid eyes on Karen. I left Melvin Calvin Lab and skipped over to Hildebrand Library. (I did a lot of skipping in those days, skipping and moping. A sure target for the Moonies.) I had to tell someone of my stunning good fortune. I ran over to a table where my friend Stan sat with two girls I didn’t recognize. I began to effuse, but Stan would have none of it.
“What?” I said. “Are you still mad at me?”
He was mad about something, and it was probably me. He’d dropped in on me at my apartment earlier that week, unexpected, and I hadn’t been too welcoming.
“Should I be mad at him?” he asked Karen and Suzie. They both kept quiet. You couldn’t really answer a question like that.
Later, he told me that Karen and Suzie were roommates, and I could take my pick. Later still, he found out that Karen had a boyfriend and retracted his offer. (Stan was like that back then. Different.)
This bummed me out. He’d hyped her to me — told me how smart she was, how she took math classes for fun. (Karen denies this. She says all of those math classes had a purpose.) It didn’t take much hype to keep me interested.
It wasn’t love at first sight. It wasn’t even lust at first sight. No, what I felt was far more ominous.
Kismet.
D.
Unrequited lust
John Scalzi openly flaunting his metrosexuality got me thinking: how many times has a gay man made a pass at me? I can count this on one hand, and that would be the hand of some guy who likes to use his band saw after two bottles of Thunderbird. Trouble is, that number still totes up higher than the number of hetero come-ons pitched my way.
Not that I’m complaining. Gay come-hithers leave me feeling good about myself. After all, what could be more flattering than the approval of some fella who might one day star on Queer Eye? But the hetero advances never fail to leave me nauseated and vaguely confused. After nearly 21 years of marriage, I’m still getting used to the idea that my wife is willing to have sex with me. Of course, it might be relevant that, left out in the cold, I become unbearably pissy. Whining: Spanish Fly for the 40-something Guy.
Back to gay men, and the few who thought I was hot stuff. In med school, I took my Preparation for Clinical Medicine rotation at the Palo Alto Veteran’s Administration Hospital. I’d partnered with Fred, a classmate with biceps big as my thigh, a guy credulous enough to accept, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, my tale of the Latest Proceedings of the International Jewish Conspiracy. Yet Fred couldn’t believe me when I told him about the slight-framed, red-headed male nurse who couldn’t pass me on the ward without giving me the eye. Homosexuality was not part of Fred’s world view. That sort of thing happened up the Peninsula, in shops like Hard-on Leather or bars like The White Swallow. You’d never — never ever ever — have to face that sort of thing here in the VA Hospital, surrounded by hordes of Bronze medal-punctured amputees with faded DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR tatts.
One day, I got my chance to open Fred’s eyes. I spotted my admirer from thirty feet away and elbowed Fred in the ribs. “Watch, okay?” I said. “Just watch.” As we passed my little red-head, he winked at me with his whole face. It looked something like this:
I’m really sorry you had to see that.
Fred dragged me off into a stairwell, nearly dislocating my shoulder. “You weren’t kidding!”
“Of course not. I never kid. And, oh, by the way, we were discussing the fate of Your People at last week’s IJC rally, and I’m afraid there are going to be a few changes around here.”
Kidding about that last bit.
Flash forward to 1990. Internship at Los Angeles County General Hospital, which at the time (pre-Northridge earthquake) ranked as the nation’s largest hospital complex. You would most likely know County from the exterior shot used for the opening credits of soap opera General Hospital.
Mandatory reading for any new intern: Samuel Shem’s The House of God, guaranteed to fill you full of misconceptions on the mechanics of internship — the chief misconception being that every female in the hospital, from medical students to attending physicians, nursing students to ward clerks, would, sans warning, drag you off into a vacant call room/operating theater/pharmaceutical cabinet to jump your living bones.
True enough, there were occasional sparks of interest, like the zaftig Filipina nursing student who always had a smile for me, or the Jewish medical student who had me pegged as a Jew the very first day, and whom I had to beat away with an IV pole because when I told her I’m married her response was So? But, with rare exception, no one got laid at LA County. No one.
Men of ambiguous sexuality abounded: nurses, aides, clerks. You never knew where you stood with these guys; wedding rings didn’t necessarily mean anything. Gay or straight, nearly all wore scrubs, so you couldn’t pick up on visual cues.
I remember one fellow in particular: a night clerk named Bub (not his real name — for a change, I’m not being a total dickwad). Bub was a fifty-something Filipino who wore white shirts stained with Ensure and the various other brands of kibble County fed its patients; white shirts that did remarkably little to conceal his whopping V-bagging elephant scrotum-sized man-titties.
One night, fueled by tapioca, Ensure, graham crackers, and Saltines (the only things available after the cafeteria closed), I worked past midnight on the ward, charting. I sat at the front desk across from Bub’s torpid form. The night nurses floated in and out of my field of vision like huge clumsy moths. My zaftig cutie was there, fighting with an IV drug abuser who insisted on smoking in the central hallway, tangling up her femoral line in the process. I had just reset the femoral line, and I was busy writing up the procedure note. Not easy, considering that every two minutes Bub roused from his heavy-lidded fugue to ask me for medical advice.
BUB: So. Doctor Hoffmah. What do you think of this thing on my neck?
All of my nights on the ward had a dreamlike quality, and this one was no exception. Comes from being half-asleep. My pen kept scratching across the page; the nurses kept flitting about behind me; Bub left his station to fuss with a chart rack. At the dimmest boundaries of consciousness, I felt him behind me, moving about. You know how you can sense when someone’s in your personal space, particularly if you don’t really like that someone? I knew he was back there, but I kept on working, because the sooner I had finished, the sooner I could get back to bed.
Then, without warning, I felt two of the warmest, plushiest breasts I have ever felt squeeze ever so voluptuously into my back and hold there for two full breaths, not that I was breathing, because (tapioca and graham crackers rising in my craw) I was too busy thinking
and then he moved away.
I jerked my head around —
I didn’t know what I was going to say to him but damn it I was going to say something. Interns are paid less than minimum wage! This is harrassment! What did I do to deserve this?
I jerked my head around, and saw my zaftig cutie walking away.
God damn! I wanted to scream. Get back here so I can enjoy it!
D.
That honeymoon glow
Early in the 1989 flick Sea of Love, Al Pacino’s character, a cop, indulges in a bit of thinking-out-loud with his partner (John Goodman). Pacino paints the picture of a first date for Goodman. Guy wines and dines the girl, gets her back to his apartment, does the wonder of me routine —
The wonder of me. When Karen and I first saw Sea of Love, that phrase jolted us out of our grad school-numbed complacency. For in those words, she saw me, and I saw myself. Yes, I had done this to Karen on our first date. Oh how I did it to her on our first date.
Hose down your minds, please. “Wonder of m”e refers to that state of being ON. You’re trotting out all your best stories. You’ve cranked your wit to the whip-cracking-snapping point. Baby, your cortex had better glisten, especially since the gal you’re dating takes Complex Analysis for fun (that’s mathematics, folks, not Freud).
It never lasts. Eventually, someone (me) develops a cortical flat tire, and some moronic, indefensible opinion slips the lips. You hope this happens after she’s fallen in love with you.
And it gets worse. One day, you realize you’ve run out of shtick. You have no more stories to tell, and before long you find yourself breaking up lengthy silent pauses at restaurants with, “Isn’t it nice that we can just be together and not have to say anything to one another?” And she says, “Yes, it really is,” but you know she’s thinking, Christ, what happened to him?
That’s when you start making shit up. That is the birth of fiction.
Well folks, I’m here to tell you, we’re still dating, and I haven’t run out of shtick yet.
Tomorrow: my close brush with man-titties.
D.