Heart Attack Friday

   According to one of the cardiologists, I had a “big” heart attack on Friday. It actually began Thursday evening with discomfort behind the sternum, from stress I thought from financial concerns in retirement and because my wife was ill. Took aspirin and meds for my arthritis and went to bed. Awoke at 4:30 Friday morning with the same discomfort and knew that was unusual but went back to sleep for a while, always the best way to escape. Inclined as most are when it comes to doctors and hospital, I put off doing anything, aware of the discomfort and now some pain on the back of my left bicep—something felt plenty of times from arthritic pain in that shoulder. For short periods of time, the discomfort and bicep pain were joined by slight pain along the jawline and all three were with me until early afternoon Friday.

   My father died over forty years ago of a heart attack at the age of 58, and I had experienced sympathetic chest pains for months after the funeral. Despite being profoundly scared and knowing from that experience the symptoms of a failing heart, I was still surprised I so willingly drove myself to the hospital. The pain was hardly severe, not at all like the pain radiating across my father’s back that had made him sick to his stomach. What I was thinking in going to the hospital was not being in annoying discomfort for the weekend. I had books to read and writing to be done.

   If you ever want to immediately get admitted to the emergency room, do as I did. Tell them, “I know this may sound dramatic, but I need to see if I’m having a heart attack.” From the moment of uttering those words until I was on the gurney in an operating room, naked except for a gown until one of the men put a warmed blanket on me, in that span of an early quick EKG and a doctor asking if I knew I was in atrial fibrillation and had high blood pressure (no to the first, never ever had the second), from the moment of being on a gurney amid a gathering heart team and racing down a hall, from that first utterance about checking to see if I was having a heart attack to having a line installed from groin to heart along mysterious pathways and three stents installed in an artery with 99% blockage, in that time, maybe, maybe, maybe far less than one hour had raced by.

   I was never in a great deal of pain, feeling only flushed warmth during the procedure. There was some pain from two IVs, some slight pain from the shaved pubic start of the pathway to the heart. The endless blood gathering always hurt and bruised, but the most pain came from countless sticky contact pads for always awkward and tangled lifelines connected to them. Despite shaving various hairy areas, the worst pain was the removal of two hand-sized sticky pads stuck to chest and all the hairs upon it in case I needed some shock therapy other than to the head. After just one was yanked off I was ready to confess all the bad things I had ever done.

   I believe there is always a value to serious illness. After my daughter’s almost deadly battle with encephalitis, it was learning not to sweat the countless and ultimately meaningless small stuff that makes up so much of life. Her illness also brought an appreciation of living in the moment. True of all serious illness, I guess. But I learned something entirely different from having a heart attack.

   Dreading it despite knowing it is mostly an infinitesimal part of living, I have always been afraid of the actual act of dying since I was old enough to understand the process. Somehow, lying there on the table before snaking a line up to my heart and installing three stents to save my life, despite knowing I could go into a full-flown attack and die, I felt no great fear, and part of that may have been the speed of the process from when I first spoke to the lady at the ER window. It was a feeling that one of the shoes had dropped, that finally the end process had become visible. Not that I wanted it or welcomed it, but it was a dance with the actual end game that binds all humans most strongly to each other.

   I am not sure what the lack of fear during that dance with mortality means ultimately. Maybe I’ll be a better person. Wife and children would have welcomed that early on. If it means I’ll appreciate even more the time I have left, that will be grand. I will enjoy my family and watching my granddaughters grow into beautifully brilliant young women. So far though other fears are creeping in, no doubt to balance my earlier lack of fear when I was having the heart attack, small daily concerns now: the blood thinner that has created problems already; no leafy greens in the diet because they cancel out another medicine; and being told not to miss taking another drug because I now have foreign bodies in my artery and the body loves to clot around anything not its own. Perhaps another lesson for me from my illness: sometimes you do have to sweat the small stuff.

  Lovely.

  I’m just glad I’m still in the classroom.

Reelin' in the Years

   After my husband passed away, oh, several days later, a nice man took me in.

   My mother has compressed time, my father dead of a heart attack 43 years ago, and the man is my older brother, Willie, who a year earlier brought her to live with him and his wife.

   I am the youngest son standing, bringing my mother for weekend visits where she perseverates like a sad Abbott and Costello routine, the same litany over and over, wondering when her family is going to pick her up.

   Oh, I don’t know what to do.

   What do you have to do, Mama?

   I thought somebody would come for me.

   You’re living with Willie now, your oldest son. You're visiting me, Raymond, your youngest son.

   Her mouth rounds in momentary understanding.

   Pause, rewind, repeat.

   My Mama will spank my butt ‘cause I didn’t come home.

   Her memories are a collapsing star, my grandmother gone almost six decades.

   Sometimes she can be diverted briefly.

   After a supper of fried chicken, I lean over and say she must have eaten a lot of fried chicken growing up on the farm in Mississippi.

   You raised chickens, right?

   Oh, Lord, yes.

   So you must have eaten plenty of them.

   Oh, yes. And eggs.

   And your Daddy had a smokehouse, didn’t he?

   He did.

   She nods once, the memory sharp for a moment of the smokehouse some distance away from the farmhouse.

   Meat was cured there, right, Mama?

   Another nod.

   Probably butchered hogs and calves, maybe some venison.

   Yes.

   There was a garden also.

   Oh, yes.

   A nod, chores growing up: picking butter beans and string beans and peas, potatoes and okra.

   You ate good things on the farm.

   A nod, less decisive, looking down at her hands, rubbing them.

   Your hands hurt, Mama?

   Old and wrinkled, she says softly.

   That’s okay. All of our hands are getting old and wrinkled.

   My Mama is gonna whip my butt.

Daughter

My answer to the good and bad shocks of life has always been to write about them, maybe years down the road as an experience shaded to fit some character I am writing about. Recently my daughter Jennifer, who battled encephalitis and coma for her very life, was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, an insidious and incurable systemic disease I have battled for 35 years, more than half my life. Occasionally poetical with words, not at all a poet, this is what emerged about passing things on.

                 Daughter

  

She comes to visit limping across the yard

along uneven areas of grass and gravel,

favoring her stiff knees, twisting left hip

to swing her leg out to avoid bending it,

every ginger step at the corners of her eyes

as wrinkles appearing and smoothing quickly,

stamped like the beating of her heart.

Smiling, raising wrapped hand, greeting

her mother near the small plum tree snowy

in first bloom, hugging, bound hand on

her mother’s back, another hard-earned smile

and allowing her face to be touched, studied.

Turning body with stiff neck, flashing eyes,

quickly a gritty smile, nodding to her father

on the deck, he lifting a beer, remembering.

The porch steps, the onset, tears in big eyes,

pain-rendered with questions, greeting

dying in his throat, his own swollen hands

little help, useless joints, fingertip sparks

transmitting traits and quirks and bumps,

eye and hair color and skin tone to kin,

the family body made manifest, her spirit

fired at times mixing spirits, locked cells

behind brave new faces, love and fear

constant companions, the gravity of living.

Self Salute

In the arena of accomplishments, in the sort of having something accepted for publication vein, tonight and tomorrow and Saturday my words will again be projected from a stage in NYC. If someone had told me years ago (or whenever), “Oh, yeah, you will have a couple of short plays done in New York but you won’t see either of them,” my mouth would have dropped from disappointment and disbelief. But I’m old enough to know things never turn out exactly how you envision them—whether getting published or having something on the boards. But like with any small success, I do take pride in the accomplishment, in the ability to toss off the small potatoes of being able to say, “Oh, yes, I’ve had a couple of plays done in New York.” Never mind that they were short plays and in festivals or however flawed the productions may have been. Let anyone who asks about my playwriting fill in those blanks with ideas of a huge production with dancing chorus boys and girls and the like. Other than some stories published early on, real accomplishments in the writing arena came late for me, late bloomer that I am. Tonight I will have a drink in an unabashed salute to myself. I plan also to tilt the glass toward NYC in a salute to those actors saying my words and the audiences hearing them. Pardon me, but here’s to me, a boy who grew up loving film and music and all things written and who turned out to be a writer.

The Pallbearer's Social

The first chapter of an adaptation of the play The Pallbearer’s Social.

The Well

   Lacey left instructions to have the pallbearers for her funeral gather in the Well of Mercy Bar, just across the street from the Absent Friends Funeral Home. The bar was a converted grocery store (next door to Harold’s Pool Hall & Jeep Shop) with two old Standard Oil gasoline pumps bleeding rust from all sides, both still standing on the side of the sagging building and serving as hitching posts for folks who needed fresh air after drinking too much. Old metal signs from the bar’s heyday were still nailed to the outside walls, fossilized scales advertising Grape Nehi and Coca Cola and Royal Crown Cola, 7up and its First Against Thirst slogan, Viceroy and L&M Filters, Sir Walter Raleigh that Packs Tight Smokes Sweet, Hav-A-Tampa Cigar, Bayer Aspirin, the First Choice for Fast Pain Relief, Ken-L-Ration dog food, and Bordens Ice Cream and the smiling cow head with flowers for a necklace. There was a handmade sign among the metal ones and one sign on the front door, both declaring in a scrawl, Private Party! Closed Until 7 PM!

   There was still an outside bathroom used by the bar regulars who at some point in the evening stood around in the parking lot, some leaning against the old gasoline pumps to steady their swaying as they slurred words with friends who were standing off the concrete island and scratching with the toe of their boots a smoother place to plant themselves among the dirt and crushed shells.

   The Well of Mercy bar was pure south Louisiana, football helmets and jerseys of different teams hanging from the ceiling and twisting in the stale air, the gear of LSU, Tulane, the New Orleans Saints, the local high school team, all sporting name tags hanging from lengths of fishing line. The jersey from LSU, purple and gold, had the number 20 on it, the number 17 on the green jersey from Tulane, and the Saints jersey with the name Taylor on the back, all dusty and fading from years on display. Behind the bar a handwritten menu with curling corners was tacked to the wall listing what po’boy sandwiches were available: roast beef, ham and swiss, catfish, shrimp, oyster, crawfish. An old upright piano sat in the corner of the bar alongside a snare drum, both near the juke box and an old style South Central Bell public telephone; tables and chairs were scattered about, both showing plenty of wear: the cloth-backed vinyl tablecloths stained and torn, the padded chair seats split and the material inside clearly visible.

   Alone in the bar and lounging in one of the chairs while looking around, it occurred to the guy dressed in a dark suit at one of the tables that the Well was still the hub of civilization here in Travellers Rest, some folks spending more of the evening in this watering hole than they did at home, and it was sad and funny to Adam Macauley to know living here hadn’t changed much, the after work idleness still the same: drinking and forgetting the everydayness of drinking and forgetting.

   Adam glanced at a journal he had been reading. It was all there, the important parts anyway, the transcriptions of Lacey’s sessions, many of the pages copied from her own journals she kept all of her life, meticulously copied by Adam with one of his favorite ink pens he collected, dog-eared entries of his own musings, and even recollections of conversations that all pertained to Lacey, no matter when they took place in those long ago days.

   Putting the journal on the table, Adam got up and slowly toured the bar, checking his memory against the way things were now, smiling when he came across his carved initials on the top of the piano, letting his hand fall to the keys and playing a chord. He dusted his hand off and glanced up at the ceiling, remembering rifles and two black pajama uniforms of the Viet Cong once hanging among the football jerseys. Back at the table—sitting and extending his legs out in front of him, closing his eyes and letting flashes of Lacey play out in his head—he had no need to open the journal for any prompting, from thousands of readings over the years he knew the placement of every comma and period, every single word written there.

Atomic Shadows

There were two big old boys in the neighborhood living a street over from us on Lafaso, Mert and Dick Tugwell, older, maybe my brother Wayne’s age or maybe even older than that. They are nice guys, fun-loving, always horsing around with the younger kids, and I am one of those one day, doing whatever, maybe trying to tackle one of them by wrapping arms and legs around one of their stout legs. One of the Tugwell brothers reaches down and pries me off, grabbing my legs with one hand and the other hand on the back of my neck, lifting me up and making gorilla noises like he is going to slam me to the ground. When he does release me on my feet, I am aware of slight pain under my ears, his thumb and middle finger pressing under my ears while suspending me above his head, like some native in a Tarzan movie holding up a sacrificial child. It is not long before there are rounded lumps under each ear the size of a tennis ball. What is lost is whether I go to the doctor then or the next day or go quickly to the emergency room. The next distinct shadow is being in one of the hospital rooms, one bed only, windows always presenting a view of home.

Whatever my illness is—ruptured lymph nodes or salivary glands?—it keeps me in the hospital as a pampered patient for weeks, doctors coming and going and hushed whispers to my mother, nurses coming and going and a daily series of injections in my buttocks, first one cheek and turn the other, please. There are two other particular shadows imprinted during that time.

After several days, my backside looks like a human dartboard, a chaotic pattern of blue on both cheeks like bruised fruit. And the injections sting and the hurt lingers. Finally one of the nurses starts giving me a sharp slap on whatever cheek is up for duty right before the injection. It works, her sharp swat masking what quickly follows. Bless you, nurse-angel, whoever you are.

The other ghost image is books—probably many of them comic books—scattered always over the bed, on the nightstand, stacked on the window ledge. There is no television in the room, I don’t think, I would remember that, so the days are spent in adventures far beyond the hospital room, with Batman and Robin and Superman in thrilling deeds of capturing criminals and rescuing always grateful ladies in distress. There is the absolute joy also of my mother reading to me, being able to lie back on the pillows and watch the changing sky while those escapades play in my head, the imagined stories fulfilling some need in me I didn’t know I had, allowing me to leave behind any pain in my neck and backside, presenting an escape route from the hard truths of growing up in the neighborhood nearby.

School Days

Baton Rouge High School opened fifteen years after the Civil War and finally relocated for the last time on Government Street in the late 1920’s. By mid-century, it is easy to imagine James Dean coming down the front steps of the Late Gothic Revival main building dressed in jeans and white t-shirt with a cigarette behind one ear. Turning to his left, he would saunter along the sidewalk through the shade of huge oaks, heading toward his ride parked behind the school. Of course, really, earlier in the day—during first period—he would have been sent to the principal’s office and maybe expelled for the day—or at the very least—told to go home and change from jeans to appropriate pants and to change his t-shirt for good measure. He would have been asked to put the cigarette in his pocket and told he could smoke it during lunch recess in the Bullpen, which was actually under the bleachers facing the oval track and the grassy area in the middle where the football team practiced every hot afternoon. Cool Mr. Dean, the future icon of disillusioned youth everywhere, would have passed an exit door from the one-balcony auditorium with a wood floor stage where Elvis and Faron Young played in May, 1955, a mere five months before the Porsche Spyder sports car Dean would be heading toward crashes and kills him near Cholame, California.

Eight years after Mr. Dean takes his imaginary stroll, the school campus looks pretty much the same—maybe the oaks grown some in height and girth, the same bleachers and another bunch of boys in the Bullpen under them to escape the direct heat, the pattern on the ground around them like sun through enormous blinds, many of the cars in the parking lot probably now the same model year as the famous Porsche. For all the studens (still no jeans to be seen), sitting in classrooms with tall windows during long days of study, they want to be hip like dead Mr. Dean and pretty like Natalie Wood and sensitive like Sal Mineo, but they also want to be cool, literally, for they are always hot since air conditioning won’t be installed until 13 years after they graduate. No Negroes in desks beside them, some students slightly more aware and the others only vaguely from parental whisperings that there was a bus boycott ten years earlier that gave Martin Luther King the blueprint for the Montgomery bus boycott. While marches for Civil Rights are taking place in the city around them—primarily by Southern University students—it is a time of innocence for most, uninvolved and not knowing, more important the day to day tests and romantic maneuverings and the scandal of Mrs. Dugas’ 10^th grade daughter dropping out of school because she is pregnant.