I like to debrief from surgery in this place with its dusty rose walls, and warm lights – red halogen and yellow incandescent. The first step into the renovated warehouse with the high-ceilings from the blast-furnace of the late summer afternoon on the Texas high plains inspires an immediate sense of shelter. I tip my head back to greet Alfredo, the assistant manager.
Nothing clean and simple about the prostate, working among the bowels and bladder, especially when it’s the last surgery of the day. The slightest awkward cut and you get slapped with the stink of urine and feces.
The smell shouldn’t bother me. Especially with the prostate, I should concentrate on not slicing the surrounding nerves. My delicate sensibilities are not as important as maintaining the patient’s ability to urinate when he wants to or to have sex when he wants to. But sometimes the smell bothers me.
Nothing pretty about it either. That cold blue surgical light flattens everything out, makes you wonder if you haven’t killed the patient already, stretched out, anesthetized, like a modernist London sunset.
My small booth in the back is open as usual. It’s just far enough from the doors leading to the micro-brewery equipment to keep the noise down, but not so desirable a table that it gets taken first. I like to sit here, in the quiet and try to rewrite a better version of my memories.
Thirty years ago, I walked into a metal shelled Quonset hut about a half step behind my dad. We came out of a slate-colored high-plains winter into a cave-shaped barn, littered with metal machine parts and smelling of diesel and motor oil.
The welder sat at the far end of the hut on a homemade seat, a bare metal saddle from an International tractor welded to the wheeled swivel of an ancient desk chair. The wheel supports were crusted over with welding compound dripped from years of work, red flecks of enamel adhered to the seat in spite of being well past the tractor’s warranty.
From our end of the steel hut, the welder seemed to sit encased in a globe of green fluorescence from one double-banked workshop lamp, which was intensified and reiterated in the jagged blue flame of the welding torch, searing compound to metal parts, bound by a ragged, knurled metal scar. The process left behind a short-lived trail of red that too soon cooled to the predominant steel gray.
The soft rumble of evaporative air conditioners take the edge off the West Texas heat and coat the air in the bar with enough humidity to soften the atmosphere. Alfredo brings my Gin and Tonic without a word and sets it on the table with a cardboard coaster advertising Modelo cervesa and a stack of napkins. I sip the G & T, hold the swallow against my front teeth and let the antiseptic flavor start to seep into the crevasses of my mouth.
Most surgeons let the O.R. nurse or a resident close an incision. I do it myself, which makes me a little unpopular with the residents. They need and like the practice. I get satisfaction from seeing a hairline mark at the follow-up exams. A thick, knurled scar gives me a sense of failure.
The only relief from the cold came from the kerosene heater next to the welder’s station. Its hot exhalations bent the frigid air into waves. I parked myself as close to it as I could stand, searing my front and then my back, enjoying the momentary temperature equilibrium that lasted only long enough for the side toward the heater to begin scorching.
The welder finally looked up at Dad, the only evidence of recognition a jerked movement of the medieval steel visor, the gleam of reflected shop lamp from the thick blue-glass eyepiece.
The welder flicked off the welding torch that popped dormant. He pushed backward on the wheeled chair and carefully placed the brass gun-shaped torch behind a six-foot length of 18-inch metal I-beam. He flipped up the visor and hailed Dad in a high-pitched voice as metallic as the cold blue flame of the welding torch.
Dad’s voice answered and filled the space with its warmth.
They were talking about a piece of equipment that Dad designed for increasing the efficiency of spraying insecticide on young cotton. The welder was complaining about some kind of order problem. Dad always said he would never give him any business, he whined about everything, but he was the best welder in the area and Dad’s designs needed a good hand. So they were tied to each other, no matter how much they disliked one another.
I started to feel the skin on my lips crack from drying out in the alternating heat and cold so I had to find something else to do.
The rubber hoses clamped to the oxygen and acetylene tanks coiled from a dark corner just to the left of the welder’s station and disappeared behind the I-beam where I had just watched the torch set down.
I approached the brass gun from the other end of the beam and sat on the cold concrete floor to hold the torch, testing its balance in both my small hands. It was awkward, not like the Wyatt Earp six-shooter that I used to bring down so many of my enemies, the acrid smell of paper-cap smoke encircling my head.
I tried to look down the sight of the torch and the end tipped too quickly, almost slipping out of my grip. With my fingertips I jerked it back up and it smacked me in the nose.
The torch fell, butt-handle first, slowly to the concrete floor and struck a spark at the same time the cold acetylene-filled hose snapped off the end. The spark ignited the suddenly free flowing gas. I watched the rubber hose burn back on its self like a make-shift gunpowder and twine fuse. Dad and the welder kept arguing in the back part of my consciousness as I watched the hose burn to the joint at the tank and bloom into an initially soundless blue explosion that inspired its sister tank filled with oxygen to match its blossom.
The shrapnel-filled shock front from the explosion tore the welder into tiny pieces of gore, most of which burned to ash that disappeared into darkness at the other end of the Quonset hut.
My father laid out on the gust of the explosion until it hit the kerosene heater, which breathed out its red flower of force. It threw my father upright to meet shrapnel in a jerky, macabre dance that ended in dad’s own explosion in the last, white hole of my consciousness behind the standing I-beam.
I don’t know why this damn scar always itches when I drink alcohol. It never fails, a couple of drinks and I sit and claw at my scalp like some kind of psychotic street person. This itch is all that’s left from the explosion. A single piece of hot steel shrapnel creased my head, searing the wound shut even before it could bleed.
The bloodless seam on my head as they pulled me out of the wreckage, convinced my mother that God had spared me miraculously and I would be a faith healer. We spent the next 7 years among traveling evangelists.
Alfredo serves another G & T as I drain the last one. Alfredo wishes me a good afternoon. Alfredo is an educated man. He lisps the final consonant of his name in the stylized Castilian manner. It is a professional affectation. The local tex-mex dialect doesn’t lisp and neither does Al when he’s off duty.
For the next seven years we followed the Pastor Billy Mack Gregory in his healing tent show across the Southwest. I set up tents and ironed clothes, learned to change the oil in the powder-blue bus painted with the radiant hands that seemed to stroke the open road.
Pastor Mack never claimed that healing was a miracle from God. He told me that it was more like psychotherapy. The people who came to his meetings were too poor to afford a real psychologist and the big churches didn’t pay much attention to them, since they couldn’t endow a building fund.
So they came to Pastor Mack. He took as much as they would give in the collection plate and gave them a show. He also gave whoever wanted it fifteen minutes of fame.
Lubbock isn’t a big town. I see Alfredo often enough. When we see one another at the store, the school, across the lawn, he calls me by my first name and I call him Al. While he’s on-duty, though, I am Dr. and he is Alfre-tho. There are certain conventions to respect.
My crisis with Pastor Mack came unexpectedly. He was really not bad, as travelling healers go. He never tried to make my mother, that I know of. Or me. At about 14, I started to get tired of the healing circuit. Thankfully, Mom had kept me reading. I didn’t have much formal education, though. For three years, I had lost myself in whatever reading material I could get my hands on… usually by trying to hide out in the caravan of converted school busses and old Winnibagoes. Mack and most of the healing groupees didn’t trust anything but the Bible and only a few parts of it.
Lately life science had preyed on my imagination. Besides curiosity about all the dark secrets of biological processes, I started to get interested in how the body actually healed itself.
The two weeks I spent reading On the Origin of Species were some of the hardest I ever had. Since I had killed my father I had been immersed in Bible-thumping, Holy-Ghost healing, God-terrorizing religion. To read Darwin and have the flimsy curtain of fundamentalism shredded to pieces in the dark corners of gas station bathrooms and mesquite-covered ditches almost broke my sanity. I cowered in silent places and scratched the scar across my head.
It certainly broke my faith in Pastor Mack.
Pastor Mack listened to all that came for healing with his head down and his arm around their necks. He listened and grew more tense, hugging them closer and closer until they stood embracing in front of the whole crowd as though they were alone in a cheap motel room.
Then Mack would start to stutter and spit, doing a jerky little, strange dance while he held the person in a bear hug. He danced and spat and stuttered until the person’s eyes went wide with terror, then he grabbed them by the shoulders, gave a good hard shake and smacked them on the forehead with the heal of his hand.
The person almost without fail gave a full body flinch, then stood stock-still. This is where the public got their time to perform. Some would convulse until they broke down in tears or laughter. Some would drop to the stage floor and roll around. Some stumbled backwards, shaking their heads until the Spirit moved them to tongues or song. All of them swore they’d been touched by the Power.
The day before I left Mack’s sideshow, he caught me with the Darwin early in the morning while I should have been arranging chairs. I had hidden in a small tent that served sometimes as a dressing room, sometimes as a prayer chapel. He called all the groupees to the tent. For the next 7 hours I had grimy hands laid on every centimeter of my body, mumbled intercessions and shrieked tongue-speaking, tears and anguished prayer for the healing and protection of my eternal soul from the filth of unholy knowledge. I was exhausted and humiliated and my ears rang.
That night was the last I spent in his circus. He called up a 30-something woman with MS. She didn’t want to come, but Mack’s droning on and on that God had revealed the demon of her ailment and she only had to step up in faith to him.
She finally struggled to the stage on her crutches. The lights that we used were two sets of tungsten bank-of-nines that someone had found at a highway construction site. They threw off a cold blue glow. The woman’s face, red from the effort of climbing to the stage, looked purple in the light. Mack started his clutching and convulsing and at the apex shouted for her to throw off her crutches and walk.
I knew how physically strong Mack was. He could throw a bus tire to the top of a barn roof. As the woman threw out her crutches, Mack passed his arm around her and paraded her around the stage like a puppet-master… and right out the back of the stage to his bus, where he wouldn’t let anyone see her the rest of the night.
We took in a huge collection that night. I took most of it and disappeared into the darkness to start my life again.
The fourth Gin and Tonic finally washed out the taste of the operating room. I love my work… usually something only artists can say. But surgery is pretty nasty business, especially when there’s bowel involved, like the prostatectomy I just performed. Nothing cleans out the filth left by the human body like the astringent taste of gin and tonic, gulped in a warm colored room with no noise.
Through the side window I can see the quality of light changing from the hard, flat blue of a high plains afternoon to gold and red. It’s getting on toward sundown and I should go home, but I don’t, quietly sucking the gin out of the last few ice cubes, staring out the window.
A woman stops in front of it and I move my hand away from the scar on head. The window is mirrored on the outside, so she can’t see in, though she seems to stare back at me. She’s a full-grown woman, not old, her eyes foreshadowing crow’s feet that creep up so early on the plains. She used to be blond, has the subtle color gradations that artificial color never quite captures, a slight red tint that reflects into her skin. She turns to one side, holding her hazel eyes on her own reflection, and for just a lingering instant the sun paints a perfect, golden parabola against her cheekbone.
Something just south of my solar plexus relaxes as I trace that curve with my mind’s fingers softly stroking that small bit of flawlessness suddenly appropriated from a complete stranger.