Sometimes people paint themselves into corners. I know I have at various junctures in my life. More than once and I never saw it coming any of the times. Life will give you clues, though. Sometimes subtle and sometimes with a lot of chili. I got myself into one of those cul de sacs during my time on the Trail.
There is a hexagram in the oracle I Ching called K'an – the Abysmal. In one possible variant of this situation it is wisest to do nothing for your fate is tied to the first person who happens along and sees you down in the trap you are in. Any action on your part will worsen your chances of getting out.
I was in my thirties and I had fried my bacon a little too crisp for a little too long. Something was going to crumble. We all get like that from time to time. Funny, how another euphemism for this situation is having too much on one's plate. Marrying, divorcing, working overtime, going to court, courting, re-marrying, fathering, paying bills, fees, fines, etc. ad nausea had all led me to lose twenty pounds which I sorely needed and had driven me straight into the arms of the Tuna Fish Solution.
There was an abandoned old house about halfway through my route with a big overgrown yard and a rotten front porch. The perfect place to take a break and refuel. I was working another eight hour shift five nights a week after my mailman duties at that time. To cope with sixteen hour work days, I had learned to sleep while sitting at my booth in a coffee shop near my Postal Station after completing my route while waiting for my bus to the next job.
It was too far to travel home before the next job. The waitress was an accomplice and she was my sweet alarm clock. I would place a book on the table and cradle my head as if reading intently so as not to alert the owners. The gal would come by every twenty minutes or so and act like she was refilling my cup. Because of her I never missed my bus.
I had been feeling worn out for some time and I decided that I needed two things. More protein and more serotonin. I hefted two cases of tuna and a case of salmon to the old front porch on my route and treated myself to a can or two each day as a supplement to my other meals. I befriended a stray cat who happily accepted the arrangement and also warned me of any interlopers.
A few blocks away there was a school I had dubbed, “Heartbreak High.” It was a last chance school for young people who were not going to make it through the regular system for a variety of reasons. Many of the students were far older than they should have been for the grades they were in and all of them had tragic stories that had put them there.
My firstborn son injured himself at the play area of the Daycare that was attached to that school once. We were having our scheduled bi-weekly post divorce father and son visit. He gashed his scalp on a metal slide. The doctor who had performed the C-section at his birth was only two blocks away. I took him there and within seconds and we stood dripping blood on the linoleum. I was told that doctors don't do stitches in their offices anymore and she phoned us a cab.
I was bitten a few weeks later by a homeless woman's dog only fifty yards away from my son's accident site and I went to the same doctor. I needed only a tetanus shot, some stitches and a clean up. After her usual disclaimer, I phoned my own cab and never went to that doctor again.
One morning in the rainy season, I stubbed my big toe on my postal route. I had only gone a block or so and my twin pouches were still jammed full and very heavy. I was wearing Canada Post issue rubber boots. They sported no tread, no insulation, no arch support and a full sixteenth of an inch of rubberized canvas. It was just after nine AM.
The combined force of my weight plus the weight of the mail and my rapid gait equalled a mighty sore toe. I hopped around swearing the same as any one would have. The only thing for it was to walk it off, I figured. Stepping lightly on that side for miles, I carried on through my route. Long after I reckoned it should have stopped hurting as severely as it did, I began to discern a new element inside the pain.
The element of heat. It was hot deep inside. I couldn't remember feeling that particular feeling before. The mail hike was difficult to say the least but eventually I was once again at my desk and eating my sandwiches. I took off my rain boot and pulled off my sock. My toe and my foot were both massive and their colour matched my black rubber boot.
I limped over to Mt. St. Joseph Hospital and after stopping at the Dairy Queen for a supplemental burger, I got an x-ray. The English technician swore at me when I told him at what time the accident had occurred. He held up the film and showed me the big joint, three bones back, which had a medial split. It was four thirty PM. He cussed me out for walking on it all day.
“You're a twit, mate. Now you've bolloxed-up the soft tissue, frayed all the ligaments and ground the cartilage to tiny fucking bits. And that's after it broke, yeah?”
He shook his head in disbelief and disgust. I figured he was just one of those Christopher Robin dudes who's mother used to remove the crust from his buttered toast. A finicky Englishman. I hobbled off home to tell the news to my new wife and son.
All these events bunched together over time and I was not reading any clues. After I was back on the Trail making do with a very unhappy foot, I developed pneumonia and fought it off with more tins of fish. I made the acquaintance of the cook at the Heartbreak High and we shared our smoke breaks together out behind his kitchen door. He was about seven or eight years younger than me and had a wholesome friendly demeanour reminiscent of an Owen Wilson character. I'll call him Cookie.
Once when he was away on a long holiday, I sat on the stoop by his kitchen door for my break. A group of four female students came out a side door and began walking to the McDonald's on Main St. a few blocks away. These young ladies had their backs to me as I watched them navigate the distance. Three lovely younger brunettes with various Kool-Aid tints and a striking tall young woman of proud carriage endowed with an epic cascade of natural white-gold hair.
I was immediately entranced by virtue of that long corn-silk hair and the other features of feminine beauty that she possessed in abundance. I saw a high-born Viking if not a Valkyrie in my poet's eye. They slowly melted down the sidewalk all holding hands.
Before long I saw them returning to school. I lingered where I was in order to see the face of the Nordic beauty. The group loomed into sight slowly and like a watched ship coming into port, if I took my eyes off for a second they closed much more of the distance than I would have expected.
Nonetheless, I looked away periodically, so as not to stare. When I looked up the third time they were fifteen feet away and I was rocked off my heels. For now I could see that the three brunettes were flanking a creature with no face. Instead there was a parchment coloured skull with no eye-lids, nose nor lips. The skin that had grown back after what must have been a devastating burn accident was paper thin and tightly drawn over the bone. Her hair, I have already described, though I cannot do so with full justice, so majestic was it.
I blinked and then focused again to make sure of what I was seeing. It was real and the three brunettes smiled as they passed by and went back into the school. The blonde girl looked directly at me held my gaze and nodded slowly. I felt something within my soul coming to a conclusion that I could not yet articulate.
When Cookie got back from his absence, we resumed our breaks together. He had been away on a retreat where men learn to confront their weaknesses and injuries in the company of other men under the tutelage of an Alpha male. The type of group thing I'd never do. I'd rather confront a bear in its own cave. People don't behave naturally in groups. My friend, however, said that he had gotten a lot of his own personal problems worked out in the time he'd spent at it.
I talked of my two jobs, my on-going custody battle wherein I had fired my lawyer and taken up my own case by cramming Family Law at the New Westminster Law Library, my pneumonia and the burst ear-drum it had caused, some interesting battles with a nasty pimp on my route and other such chit-chat.
When I got to the part about breaking my foot and walking the whole of my route on the crushed bone, Cookie's face changed from his usual friendly expression. He took two fistfuls of my shirt then slowly and deliberately lifted me off the ground to eye-level, walked slowly backwards to a brick wall, turned and started pounding me against it. Gently but very firmly.
He drilled me with his eyes and chanted in a voice loaded with ki, “Mike, that's not normal.”
He said it about ten times and my head banged the wall an equal number of times. When his eyes looked like he’d been cutting onions, he put me down. He swore softly and turned away to go inside his kitchen. I limped off. He had gotten my attention but we spoke no more after that.
I went to chiropractors, homeopaths, Chinese herbalists, massage therapists and even to an acupuncturist. He was a Chinese-Filipino doctor. He had a contraption that put electric pulses through the needles after he inserted them. It was supposed to heighten the healing effect and get your yin to hold hands with your yang, dispel evil winds, open the crystal gate to your pineal gland and balance out your hot and cold. I liked the nerve chart poster on his wall and the Kwan Yin statuette on his cluttered desk the best.
This acupuncturist had a potentiometer set up so he could adjust the current. It was supposed to be set by becoming just perceptible and then being backed off one mark on the dial. He kept asking me to tell him when I felt it. I waited and he waited. He repeated his instructions like I was a dumb child. We both became annoyed.
“In pipteen yirs I hab neber seen anyting like dis!,” he exclaimed when I signalled that I could just feel the juice.
He showed me the dial. It was three notches below max. I continued the sessions until my coverage ran out. When I bid him farewell, he told me that from what he could see, I had an "angry liver.” I thanked him for that diagnosis and went straight to a drugstore and bought a spiral notebook.
I decided to take his diagnosis out onto the corral and see if I could saddle it. My idea was to compile a list of all the things that could possibly be making my liver angry. I started from when the doctor slapped my ass unceremoniously at my birth. I started a new page and wrote about the loud music and yelling voices that had disturbed my nine month amniotic swim. First things first.
I continued this bullet list and it was a whopper by the time I got to the second notebook. I knew I had to fix up what I could, face up to what I couldn't fix and make peace with the remainder. I learned during this process that the raw materials for creating anger are the most abundant resources that the earth has to offer. I got the idea of using that ore to make useful implements instead of carrying it around in an ever burgeoning bag.
One afternoon during a rain storm worthy of a Hitchcock film, I walked over a mushy soccer pitch to visit my elder son after school with my younger son in tow. Halfway across, I got it. Just like that. Later, I dubbed it a "mud bubble” because that is how it rose up into my consciousness. Like the glob in a lava lamp, a revelation that was key to me ever having any semblance of a constructive life made itself firmly and quietly known.
I will write of it at another time but suffice it to say that it was about childhood abuse, misplaced guilt, self punishment, family dysfunction, parental instability, suicide, shame and my subconscious finally getting out of bed, putting on some pants and helping with the chores being borne by my consciousness. As I walked home in that downpour with my little boy, I realized that I could not recall myself crying after I was a dozen years old. I'd never pondered that fact but now it seemed incredible. I got itchy eyes when I heard certain music or watched certain movies but not a drop of water had crossed my cheek. I thought that was what Visine was for. I was so astonished, I mentioned it to my tiny son.
On the way home he said, “It's simple, Pop. Look-it, you just gotta squeeze 'em shut a lil bit and the water just squirts out. Anyone can do it.”
We went inside and my son brought his mother's Kleenex box straightaway to where I sat on the couch. His demeanour was like a man trying to help out in a delivery room. I was just then thinking of a heavily corroded sea-valve I had changed once at a shipyard where I used to work. It was on an old tug boat that was being retrofitted. I knocked it gently with a sledgehammer after being unable to budge it with my biggest pipe-wrenches, propane torch and WD-40. It took a few good blows before shearing off. Viscous muck had then burbled out. When I poked it with a screwdriver, clear water had gushed forth. Copiously.
My assistant ran off to re-supply me with a second box of swabs. Being a clever lad, he judged that it was really a job for paper towels instead of Kleenex and he returned with a roll. We killed the roll. Every physical and spiritual ailment I had been suffering for decades went out with the garbage that night.
My early days on this earth were corrosive, misplaced guilt was my sludge, music was my WD-40, my third wife was my propane torch, that Viking girl was my 18” Stillson wrench, Cookie was my sledge hammer and my little boy was my screwdriver. The rusty valve was my heart and the water was unexpressed emotions constantly drawn from the sea of life and bottled in a heart two sizes too big. The tug boat was me and the shipyard was the Trail of Tears.
fin