The Literary Review
Issue 9 Page 38
Full Body Exam
The beautiful Dr. Barbara Baxter swept into the exam room, her
flaxen hair draped over her white doctor’s coat.
She was as beautiful as I remembered from my first visit in which
she recommended that I receive a “full body exam.”
She asked if I had any Irish in me because, I thought, Irish skin
incubates the big C. I regretfully admitted that I did have
Irish in me. She laughed and began her examination. She eased
down the top of my paper gown while telling me, in her
sing-song voice that, after she took her boards in dermatology,
the examiners played recorded bagpipe music.
“Are bagpipes Irish or Scottish? she wondered, as I felt her hands
move down to my shorts. “It upset some people to hear bagpipe
music after the exam,” she purred, and peeled off my tighty-whities.
She studied my business, if you know what I mean, and then,
as if asking me to pass the salt said, “Would you pick up your penis
so I can look underneath it?” She wants me to turn it over?
I thought. Well, if she grabs my balls, it will flip itself over.
Then she grabbed my balls with her
unspeakably soft hands and noted that they sported some purple moles, but
“nothing to worry about.” Frantic to prevent the inevitable, I said,
“Did you know that the English hated bagpipes so much they considered them
weapons of war?” She smiled, “There’s a mole on your thigh, next to
your scrotum,” she said, while still cupping my jewels. “Here, look at it.” I raised
my head, beheld the beautiful Dr. Barbara Baxter holding my nugget pouch
in one hand, while pointing to the mole on my thigh with the other. “I see it,”
I lied, and lowered my head. “Do they play bagpipes only at funerals?”
she asked, a sugary lilt to her voice. “Oh no,” I gulped, trying to control my quivering
voice, “they play them at weddings, at all occasions.” “Turn over on your tummy
please,” the beautiful Dr. Barbara Baxter said. I obeyed and felt her hands nudge down
my skivvies again. “You have a mole on each buttock,” she said, gently replacing
my underpants. “It’s nothing to worry about.” Her fingers on my hiney caused
my lips to tremble, my toes to twitch. Had there been a power outage
my body could have served as an emergency generator. After my exam, the beautiful
Dr. Barbara Baxter gave me extra samples of hand and body lotion.
How precious these emollients were to me—especially now. As a token of undying gratitude,
I promised, as we parted, to send her a CD of bagpipe music.
Trepanning
I flunked my license exam in clinical psychology
by four points—a respectable score
for the over forty crowd in California,
but a flunk in Pennsylvania.
Foolish me, I’d studied the body of knowledge
the test purported to examine
when I should have focused on learning how
to take a modern multiple-choice test.
Some of the items were all incorrect. You
had to learn how to choose
the least incorrect answer. Should I have
used that strategy with my patients,
encourage the least incorrect way of dealing
with their depressions and obsessions?
Remember, only use Ivory soap when you
wash your hands 200 times a day.
I fell into a deep depression. My analyst,
a lovely man who knew as much
about psychotropic medication as I did
about astrophysics, put me on Tofranil,
an antiquated antidepressant from the sixties.
Almost immediately an impenetrable
plaster wall appeared in my large intestine that
required enough daily Metamucil to
blow me up like an irradiated tomato. Then,
Mr. Happy donned a sombrero and took
the fast train south to Tijuana where he embarked
on a protracted siesta. Try as I might, I
couldn’t get in touch with him, if you know
what I mean. So clogged and cramped
on one side, limp as a bizkit on the other, I
thought of trepanning, the ancient treatment
for depression. The Greek physician would
take an iron stake and pound it into
the melancholic’s head. If the patient
survived, he was no longer depressed.
If he didn’t…well, at least they tried. Hippocrates
observed that patients’ depressions often
disappeared at the mere mention of trepanning.
As usual, the Greeks had the right idea.
I stopped the Tofranil and enrolled
in a course on how to take multiple choice
exams. I learned how to pick the least
incorrect answer, avoided forever the chemical
trepanning prescribed by my analyst,
and passed my license exam with flying vapors.
Back on the Farm
My father’s death was easy enough,
or so it appeared. July 8, 1964,
a hot summer night in the
doldrums of Cheyenne.
I’d camped out on our couch
in the living room. His last
venture into my parents’
bedroom a passing blur—
the only time in my 14 years that
I didn’t kiss him goodnight.
My mother’s shrill voice
shattered the early-hour silence—
Ward! Ward! she cried.
His snores, loud and grating
staccato blasts—
only inhales.
At 4AM I straddled his body,
pounded on his chest like they
did on Ben Casey. His pinched
brow tight across his livid face:
he looked confused.
Sixty years now and I still
wonder what dream pierced
his psyche that last evening.
Was he back on the farm with
his brother Francis, sipping
warm milk from the pail
under their cow, or had he
fallen into their pond, his
tight muscular body caught
on something in the depths—
his breath, a temple of air, held
until that last desperate gasp.
© Tim Tomlinson: Your Dreams
Hotboxing
We’d jam into the boys’ room on the first floor at St. Mary’s High.
Twenty squirming adolescents in a space made for eight or nine.
We should have renamed that bathroom the cancer ward. With
visibility near zero, the smoke-cloud so thick you could cut it
with a crucifix, someone would light a fag and pass the
gleaming death stick around. The idea was to keep puffing, one
boy to the next, until the gasper turned into a red-ashed lung dart
of unsmokeable heat and finally gave out. We must have smelled,
all of us, like the bottom of an ashtray left to bake in the back of a bar.
The priests and the few male teachers had their own restroom
and rarely ventured into our smoke-cave. Every now and then,
with no predictable frequency, Sister Hendrick, whom we lovingly
called “The Great White Whale” for her girth and pristine
Dominican habit, would open our bathroom door, gag and yell,
“You asses, get out here!” That’s what we loved about her, the only
nun we had who swore. Still, we ignored her entreaties to exit our
pack-generated gas chamber, so obsessed we were, as Ahab with
his fish, determined to feed our addiction to capitalism’s leafy Lethy.
Cowbell
I was in my teens before I realized that a cowbell originally dangled
from the neck of an actual cow. Did I finally encounter a cow
with its mini-gong swaying under its rawhide neck, or did
I see one in a John Wayne or Gabby Haze movie, or on one
of the ubiquitous cowboy TV series of childhood:
Roy Rogers, Sky King, Gene Autry?
Before my enlightenment a cowbell was, to me, the obnoxious tinny rattle
that some athlete’s mother brought to one of our football games
and shook whenever our quarterback, Mike Barrett, hit Ace Evans
with one of his infrequently completed bombs during the perpetual
losing seasons endured by the St. Mary’s Gaeles in Cheyenne.
I put cowbells in the same category as other irritating noisemakers like those
straw horns that made awful noises as they unraveled when you blew through
them at some miscreant’s birthday party or that goofy thing you’d spin that
sounded like a ratchet.
A cowbell came mounted on my first gold spackled cheap Japanese drum kit.
There wasn’t much of a place for the cowbell in sixties rock but I played it
on You Can’t Do That by The Beatles and Honkey Talk Woman by the Stones—
never connecting it with anything but an outdated prop that added rhythm to a song.
I was a callow city boy far removed from the truth of what gave me milk,
what trod on the dust of dairy farms, and the white health squirted into pails
eventually transformed into cream and butter.
We are held hostage by our upbringing and the lacunae it inevitably creates.
A cowbell clanged of dung, dun, and dirty callused hands—what high school
football, asphalt, and amplifiers took for granted and left behind.
Miracles That Keep Me Going
It’s her sleek slacks on Mondays,
the way she waltzes into our porch-room,
even when in a wheelchair.
On Tuesdays it’s her black and white
blouse that has always reminded me
of the strength of an orthodox
prayer shawl painted by Chagall.
How much I enjoy the careful way
she cuts into her eggs on Wednesdays—
how she portions a bit of yoke atop
a slice of bagel and eases it into
the mouth I’ve so often kissed.
On Thursdays it’s her “Raindrops are
Falling On My Head” T-Shirt that causes
the corners of my mouth to rise.
Fridays bring blousy colors of blacks, blues,
orange, and turquoise with a splotchy scarf
to match that makes me think I’m
living with a Matisse painting.
It’s her earrings that sparkle on Saturdays—
how they bounce and jangle against her
comely earlobes while she recites
a poem she’s just written.
Then there are Sundays, our Sundays, where
her face, doe eyes, aquiline nose, and olive
skin turn our house into a temple of
her benevolent presence, a place
where the sacred blooms.