TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 145

[Tobie Shapiro]

February 8, 200000007


Dear,

	In the divorce settlement wars, things 
are heating up.  villainman wants to under fund 
the trust that will be set up for Meyshe and 
Feyna.  That will leave us with not enough to get 
by month to month.  My lawyer and the hired judge 
have tried to reason with him, but he's stubborn, 
fixated, unmovable.  That is, so far.  If the 
case went to trial, no doubt, there would be 
surprises for everyone, as the judges for the 
county can be unpredictable.  The other news is 
that according to my lawyer, the facts came in 
that villainman's new wife is really the one 
steering the boat.  This makes sense, as the 
behaviour is mean hearted and vindictive.  That 
sounds like Rebecca as I once knew her.  She has 
this case against me because I severed our 
friendship so I could survive.  Now she's getting 
even.  But she's getting even all over my 
children.  Well, I'm sure she has to roll her 
ideas past villainman before she launches them 
into the world, so he's responsible.  I just 
don't understand how people can hold back 
sustenance from two disabled kids.  I really 
don't.





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Harry saves my life

	I was staying with Harry Lum in San 
Diego.  That was always an open ended visit. 
We'd agree over the phone that it was high time 
we see each other.  We'd set a date.  Then I'd 
pack everything I needed in my Datsun 510 
Japanese little white freedom and I'd set off 
early one morning, figuring on arriving around 
supper time.  There is a freeway that cuts a 
straight line on a north/south axis right in the 
middle of California.  It is highway five. 
Leaving Berkeley, you drive east for about fifty 
miles and then join the onslaught of automatons 
speeding their way from one end of the state to 
the other.

	It was a frightening journey.  The 
monotony of the flatness of California's central 
valley made drivers crazy.  The speed limit was 
marked up to seventy and when you are driving 
endlessly in a straight line, the speed becomes 
abstract.  People going seventy miles an hour had 
to drive in the slow lane, because the automatons 
were doing ninety, reading books propped up on 
their steering wheels, on cruise control, 
shaving, or feeding themselves, looking on the 
map for something.  This is high risk 
multi-tasking, and it's best to give these people 
a wide berth.  The most I'd do was seventy five 
or eighty.  It made the five hundred mile trip go 
faster and faster is what mattered when I was 
screechingly anxious to get the long drive over 
with, uncomfortable from sitting in the same 
position for so long, and about to fall asleep. 
I'd listen to the radio, but that was little 
help.  It would fade away, give it fifteen 
minutes.  Slapping myself in the face sometimes 
did the trick, a good whack across the cheek and 
an equal swack on the other cheek on the way 
back.  Whack - swack - whack - swack!  I'd shout 
at myself, too.  But I wouldn't listen.

	 I'd drive up to Harry's apartment 
building, shake the humming out of my ears and 
knock on his door.  From then, it was unspoken 
that I would stay for several weeks, neither of 
us knowing how long.  It added spice to the 
affair.  Actually, Harry and I weren't having an 
affair.  We were conducting an ersatz marriage, 
long distance.  In the summer time during 
Grossmont College's recess, Harry would come up 
north to Berkeley and we'd stay in his duplex. 
It was either south or north and never meeting in 
the middle.  We were a couple of extremes.

	During one visit, I came down with a bad 
case of trichomonas, a foul smelling vaginal 
amoebic parasite that comes over you when the 
flora and fauna are out of balance.  It is 
unmistakable and itches like mad.  I went to 
Kaiser Hospital's San Diego branch.  They 
prescribed a medication called Flagyl, a nasty 
concoction that they warned me would leave a 
metallic taste in my mouth, "like you've been 
sucking on a penny."  That was the side effect I 
was expecting.  What I wasn't expecting was to be 
violently allergic to it.  About an hour after I 
took the first pill, we sat down to a lovely 
dinner.  I started breaking out in hives.  The 
hives spread and became huge raised white 
plateaus on a bed of red skin.  Then my tongue 
started to swell up.  I informed Harry and 
displayed my malady.  He said, "Never a dull 
moment," as we rushed out to his car.  The 
hospital was quite a ways away.  There were no 
cell phones in the '70s.  We just had to ride 
this out, and hope they weren't too busy at 
emergency.  A long wait could have been fatal.

	By the time we got there, it was getting 
hard for me to breathe.  He pulled up outside the 
bright emergency entrance, and I staggered in 
shouting out my Kaiser Permanente member number. 
I was directed toward a gurney and set my sights 
on it, but wavered.  The world started to go 
white; my knees gave way.  Suddenly two medical 
personnel appeared out of nowhere to scrape me up 
off the corridor floor and drag me to the gurney. 
I remember them ripping my shirt off of me, right 
down the center of my body, like highway five. 
One of them said, "How's that for hives!" as they 
gave me a shot of adrenalin.  As soon as the 
injection found my blood stream, the red and 
white hives receded and I became my pink self 
again.  Something in me collapsed.  The crisis 
was over.  They explained to me that I was 
allergic to the Flagyl, something I had mentioned 
on my way to the floor.  What would I do for the 
trichomonas, I asked them.

	 "You'll have to take Gentian Violet. 
It's what they used to use for trich before 
Flagyl came along, but it stains everything 
purple, so use old underwear."

	I thought of deep rivers of vibrant 
violet cloth, purple pubic hair and geysers of 
violet streaming down my legs.  I thought I'd tie 
dye my underpants.  This was not a minus.  The 
artist's mind is always alert to new applications 
of old techniques.  The doctors wrote out a 
prescription on a tablet, tore it off and put it 
on my stomach.  He told me I'd have to stay there 
for a while, until I was safe to go.

	"Do you want to see your husband?"

	The intricacies of our relationship 
ricocheted off the insides of my skull.  How to 
explain to the good doctor that this wasn't 
actually my husband, but may as well be, and we 
were --  oh nevermind.

	"Yes.  Send him in," I nodded.

	For those few moments, Harry and I were married.



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Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net