On the Intersection of Chemistry, Biology, Human Community and Infection, in a Grand Conspiracy...

...to put my crappy little ego on notice.

Today, bad shit happened to me. In waves. But, it started last night.

It began with a toothache. Koestler's toothache. Malraux's existential, isolating tooth pain. Suffering, mandated by the human condition its very self. The kind of agony that leads even anti-meditative monsters to consider a drink from the well of consolation. The type of pain what makes a person contemplate self-defenestration. The restfulness of a welcoming death. Drugs. Every drug, ever.

Abscessed, I feared. And did next to nothing about it. Because, like whatever man, I can handle it. My wife, a more reasonable species of human than I, called our dentist. I'd left a message. She called him at his house.

He called in a prescription for an antibiotic.

Dutifully, I trudged to the drug store, adjacent to a Catholic hospital that always has a batch of old ladies and withered nuns out front protesting the evils of everything. I mean, everything. One day it was an alleged merger with a godless women's health practice (nope, they don't do abortions, but that doesn't matter, does it?). On another occasion it was the failure of local Mancunians to properly venerate the Virgin Mother. Replete with a gaudy five foot tall plaster statue of the same. A painted plaster statue. A Bathtub Mary, liberated from her habitual digs on some old Canadian's lawn, to give mute protest to the failure of passersby to take her seriously. Or some shit.

Anyway, the drug store. Shuffling in line. Begging for pills. The bright lights and the wan fluorescence, competing for the pride of painting us all in our own dirtied plaster tones.

A bottle with a command. Take immediately. We got back home and dutifully, again, I did just that.

Sat down to some bad teevee. Got itchy. Found welts all over my abdomen. Mewled pitifully until my wife stopped whatever productive work she was doing in order to coo over my booboos.

Spider bites, she pronounced. Seemed reasonable. But, it's taken me a while to trust her diagnostic skills, again. She blew a big one, you know. Well, I blew it, but it's still convenient and funny to hold her to account, because it put me in the hospital for more than a week, recovering from a ruptured appendix riddled with worms.

Nasty fuckers. I got them from our little piece of urban heaven. A half acre of garden plot we'd scratched and scribbled and dug into existence. Beans and 'matoes. Chives, mint, basil, lettuce, carrots, peppers. thyme, oregano and squash. Potatoes and scallions. First year asparagus. Echinacea, cucumbers and even a few fiddleheads.

And the worms. Our neighbor's sewer pipes had busted. See, our garden was preternaturally well fertilized. A subterranean mysticism of fecundity. Me, turned into a warning system Jack. I thought it was my wife's green thumb. It was our neighbors' poo, instead.

But, back to the appendix. One day, I got the sweats. Preacher in a hot tent somewhere in northern Louisiana, jumping around, arms flailing, mouth sputtering in the noon heat of the hottest summer on record, sweats. I turned green. Well, greener. Fucking olive skin.

Told my wife. She smiled, and suggested perhaps I could bother her a little less with my whimpering. (I still play this card. It doesn't work anymore, but it's taken on the gilding of a rite, or tradition.)

I "toughed" it out for another day. Collapsed into a cash register and half a dozen cigarette displays, while doing a tobacco reconciliation report. Got a cosmetic scar and one of those nifty morphine drips with the auto-serve buttons. Mmmm, morphine.

Could have used that shit last night, or for most of today.

Last night, man that tooth.

At least I was distracted by the spider bites. The indignity. Just because it's the damned New England Monsoon season, doesn't mean those fuckers get to come inside our flat and bite on me. The bastards. I was pissed. Which is another way of saying that I can be preeningly ridiculous.

So, off to the more evolved one for a little soothing, and back to the bad teevee. Fucking spiders. The gall.

I didn't sleep well. Or, as my son's friends say, I didn't sleep so good, no good.

"Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head..."

That last part is a lie. I don't have enough hair for a comb.

But, I did what the label on the bottle told me. Dutifully. Pills, cherry juice, swallow.

And a fucking spider bit me again. Right next to the other bites. Inauspicious, I thought. No, really. I used the word inauspicious, silently, in my own head. What an asshole, amiright?

What, was the fucker hunting me in my sleep? Not content to bite whilst awake, he had to bite me while I was sleeping too?

Told me wife. She was heroic. She suppressed that chuckle with muscular resolve.

Then it happened.

A taut, burning, itchy donut ring of vanity erasing fleshy vengeance. Actual donut sized. And I means it. I really do.

My unreal gods be damned penis.

"Wife," I says, "could you look at this?" I did not do my best to channel John Wayne. I couldn't even manage a Kevin Spacey. My voice cracked. I did a little panic dance. I said, over and over again something like, "My dick?!" My dick?!"

That's not exactly accurate. I didn't say it. I whined and mewled and whimpered it. Plus, the panic dance was more like a drunken, spasmodic jig. Several of them, haphazardly strung together, and acted out across several rooms, to a mishmash of competing instrumentalizations from a variety of cultures and epochs - all while I tried not to let my now awake children in on the cosmic joke unfolding beneath my waistline. A failure, on all accounts.

Now we had a family affair. I have good boys. They did not giggle. My oldest, ever compassionate and sweet, gave me a hug. One of those unselfconscious embraces only truly noble, benign and benevolent people can manage. Needless to say, I rarely manage them.

I do manage to make a fool of myself. And there was this morning...

Pounding tooth ache?
Check.
Embarrassing inability to handle pain or surprises, coupled with choppy gesticulations?
Check.
Squandering all dignity while I bounced around our bed room, chanting, "My dick!?"
Check.
Hives all over my belly, threatening to drown out the pain with intestine deep itchiness?
Check.
Panicky dissolution of my pride and vanity, asking my wife to look at it again. And again?
Check.
Swollen jelly donut where the end of my dick used to be?
You betcha.
Sudden certainty that, no, jackhole, it wasn't spider bites at all?
Duh, idiot.

Dawning realization that I was going to have to show all this to a doctor?

Fucking priceless.

An hour and half later, I was waiting for a physician I'd never met, ruminating on the question asked by the nurse, after I'd described my symptoms over the phone. "Mr. Crow, do you mind if you see a woman?"

"Nah," I lied. I couldn't possibly think of a better beginning to this morning's conclusion. What guy raised in late capitalist uber macho America isn't jumping at the chance to show off his swollen and retreating dick to a female doctor he's never before seen or met?

Did I mention that she was pregnant? It doesn't matter, but it seemed so funny at the time.

She walked in, very pregnant. And happy enough to make a few dick jokes for my amusement (seriously) and her own. A kindness, that. Pregnant lady doctor making dick jokes while she examined my donut ringed penis as it made its best attempt ever to crawl up into the gap left by my long absent appendix.

The juxtaposition of her life-giving, swelled and late stage abdomen with my ridiculous, vanity destroying, ego minimizing grotesque of a caricature of a Gieger abomination...it was funny. Existentially absurd. Camus has got nothing on me, baby.

I almost lost it.

I almost forgot the line I'd rehearsed the entire drive to the practice.

"Today I finally fail in my enduring quest to maintain my vanity in the face of women I've never met."

But, I said it. Yep, I actually said that stupid shit.

I am an asshole. In case I've never told any of you that before.

That's when she made the first dick joke. It was perfect.

A perfect moment, in fact. There I was, swinging in the air conditioned draft - well, not quite swinging, sort of puckering like a new swimmer's over inflated pool floatee - covered in hives, while we discussed what I had to do if the swelling didn't stop (to preserve "the tip," as she put it).

A moment of absolute immediacy. Of immediate, unfiltered presence, my own and hers. A moment without vanity or my ego to be found anywhere.

A moment of perfect humility.

And all it took was an antibiotic to which I have developed an overnight allergy, my traitorous dick, a snarky pregnant doctor, a throbbing abscessed tooth, a couple of dick jokes and a discussion about saving the tip of my faithless, jerk of a penis.