redguard
Commie Bastid
Registered: Aug 2000
Location: Cnafilornia
Posts: 405 |
 Losing my mind
This must be what it feels like to lose your mind.
I shaved my head last evening.
It’s not the first time.
Several years ago, I met a cute little girl in the cancer ward of the UCI Medical Center. Her name was Jessica. She was a pale, diminutive, little waif of a creature. It’s funny, but now that I think about it, I never saw her stand. She was always reclining on one of those awful infusion-beds while bags of powerful toxins dripped their way, slowly, into her tiny veins.
Sometimes, hope can bear a terrible price. (Hope is a frivolous concept. Life, after all, is a terminal condition from the very start, isn’t it?)
She was always wearing these scruffy, pink P.J.’s with little white clouds on them. God alone knows who bought them for her. I never saw a single visitor with her during any of the many hours that I spent in that horrible place. She was always just there, waiting. Alone.
The first time that I tried to talk to her, she covered her face, turned away from me, and just started crying. Hmmf…it’s funny, but I’d been known to have that sort of effect on women before. Naturally, I didn’t want to frighten her into paroxysms of terror, so I carefully avoided her for the next few times that I saw her there. It wasn’t until later that the charge-nurse laid the honest facts upon me.
One day, she decided to tell Mary (the nurse) that she thought I was the handsomest, nicest man that she had ever seen (poor kid must not have gotten out much). In her seven-year-old way, I guess she was in love with me. That, in itself, wasn’t the problem, of course. The problem was that she was ashamed of the way that she looked. The chemotherapy had robbed her of all of her hair. She cried when I came by because she thought that I must’ve seen her as ugly.
So, with that in mind, I made sure that I had Mary reserve the infusion-bed next to Jessica’s for the coming Tuesday (that was always her day). When Tuesday came around, I bopped into the room and plopped onto the bed next to hers. Naturally, she was making every attempt not to look at me as I paged through one of the handy magazines that are always piled on the tables in between. To be honest, she did a pretty good job of it, until I doffed my cap and exposed my newly shaven head. I heard her gasp, and I knew that she was looking. Hell, all of the other kids in the room were laughing outright. I played the part like a true stoic. I just sat there, flipping idly through the pages, and waiting for her resolve to break.
Finally, I heard this little squeak of a voice peep out from the next bed. It said, “How come you’re bald? You don’t have to take the medicine.”
Half of me wanted to jump up and shout, “It’s working” while that other half was reduced to gibbering incoherencies from all of the grief and sorrow that I felt for this poor child. Oh my God, it hurts now. It still hurts now. The merit of this particular moment is a weightless inconsequentiality against the backdrop of horrors that I carry inside of my mind. Clouded windows crowded with the collected faces of those whom I cannot forget. Where is my solace?
(That must be the root of it. That’s when you know. Mental divisiveness on that kind of scale can only mark the prelude to true insanity. Dichotomy of thought helps breed incoherencies like this. If sorrow has a color, it must surely be white.)
So, I sat there and played it off, as if I didn’t notice that I was bald. I just continued to vacillate between reading my little magazine and looking over at her from time to time until she started to giggle.
It was tentative at first, but then she just cut loose and couldn’t stop laughing. She thought I looked funny. In retrospect, I’m sure that I did. I was all tanned on my face and neck, and there I was with this big, gleaming-white scalp. She said that it looked like I was wearing a helmet. Spot on, kid. I couldn’t have called it better, myself.
That was the formal beginning of our acquaintanceship, I suppose. From that point on, I would make a point of stopping by every Tuesday to hang out and chat with her about stuff. She had been sick since she was five. I don’t know if it was a result of her having been bed-ridden for a large portion of her life or what, but she was very well read. She used to love reading National Geographic. That’s the way that our visits would usually start. She would pick-up a National G and start paging through it, asking me questions about all of the places I’d been and such. I would lie there and tell her about all of the places that I knew she’d never live to see. I would tell her about all of the strange people that had entered my life in the past, and all of the really stupid things that we had done together. She’d listen, enraptured, and always I’d promise her that someday we’d both take a trip to so-and-so, or that she’d have to come with me to meet so-and-so, and always she’d say, “As soon as I get better. Promise.”
You don’t have to jump on the hotline to Dionne Warwick in order to figure out how this little vignette ends. One Tuesday, I walked into the infusion room and she wasn’t there. It’s just the way this bullshit world works, I guess. All of the beautiful butterfly dreams of a sad little girl, bagged up and lying in the morgue like a piece of discarded meat. She had died only a few days earlier, right there on that filthy fucking infusion-bed, with that needle still pumping the poison into her. All I could think about were my unkept promises, and all those hours upon hours that I spent with her wherein I had still not yet managed to meet a single member of her family. I wondered if she died alone and afraid.
Mary told me that they found her about an hour and a half after she had come in for treatment. She was curled up there with her face buried in the blanket, just the way she used to curl up whenever she’d get cold. The only reason that anyone bothered to question the state of her health was that someone noticed that her gravity-bag was still almost full after an hour’s worth of session. Alone.
So, I shave my head from time to time. It helps me to remember. More than that, it’s like a symbolic divestment of my woes. I don’t know how that last aspect crept in there, but somewhere along the line, it did. Perhaps that’s her gift to me. Yes, it pleases me to think of it as so.
My head, I shave it bare. The cool kiss of the razor’s blade has become beautiful to me. It promises change. The grim determination of the whole act has taken on a queerly ceremonial feel. There’s this moment right before the first stroke when vanity cries out and says, “No” in the loudest of voices. But, when the cutting begins, the voice fades into resignation. Only through direct action can we affect change. The cutting reminds me so. A job half finished is worse than a job unstarted. The whimpers of vanity remind me of that little morsel. Even mundane acts can be valuable lessons when weighed against the backdrop of the world, and all the things in it.
As I said in the beginning of this extended rant, I shaved me head last night. This time I shaved it for Tina.
When I was done, I stepped into the shower and let the water wash away the last vestiges of hair that had fallen onto my shoulders. Symbolism. If only emotion could be expunged with such soothing ease.
I climbed into my car, dropped the top, and headed into the Azusa Canyons at break-neck speeds. I don’t know why, but I feel better when I am away from cities, and the people in them. Someone once told me that all energy is simply vibration. With that in mind, I cannot help but conjecture that modern cities are absolutely vibrant with cold negativity. Look around you. Everything that we do, everything that we own, all of the collected progress of man is simply the result of a prolonged condition of discontent. I am away from that in the mountains. Or, rather, I allow myself the comfort of that illusion.
Whipping through the night in my tiny convertible, the wind felt exactly like cool fingernails tickling at my scalp. I abide within that feeling. I think that’s the last form of human contact that I still perceive to be clean, kind, loving, and sacred. There’s no room for taking when you’re idly stroking your lover’s head. It’s not sexual or selfish. It’s just giving. I think it puts me back in my mother’s arms, before I had to deal with the eccentricities of sight and sound (The eccentricities of man and all of his painfully contrived artifice).
As I was drifting in the comfort of my mother’s arms, I began to shift consciousness. I had a beautiful vision of me, sailing off of a cliff and out into the black night beyond. Just as I began to reach the apex of the arc, I burst into a million streamers of light that wound their way into everything. I pulled out of my dreamstate and wondered, for a brief moment, if such thoughts are the stuff that successful suicides are made of.
A point, a point. Everything has to have a point, and so must this.
Once again, I am betrayed. Where is honor? Where the fuck is love? I have searched the parched fucking earth for my entire existence, and still I cannot find it. I wonder now, what have I become in the quest for this simple grace that has made me so unworthy a man?
How can you answer me? I am nothing more than a faceless bunch of blips on your computer screen.
Tina, Tina… I suppose this one’s for you, too.
Be Well,
redguard@blackvault.com
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redguard@blackvault.com
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Last edited by Dingle on 03-29-2005 at 01:14 PM
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08-06-2000 08:06 AM
