Why do I have to be productive? Why do I have to
create? Why do I make everything work?
Consider it—I have the monga. This phantom disease regularly visits every
Puerto Rican, and is greeted joyfully—bed, soup, television! And snoozing,
snoozing—while the morning or afternoon traffic jam goes on without you!
MONGA—you inform
the boss, and no more will be expected of you.
What is it? A myth that descends if ONE drop of
rainwater touches your skin. In 12 hours, you will be limp (the literal meaning
of the word), you’ll be congested, you’ll be sneezing, then coughing.
It strikes variously. With Mr. Fernández, a troublesome
itching of the eyes commonly presages the syndrome. On other occasions, it’s
the feet. Virtually anything, in fact, can signal the disease.
Well, I had been warned of this in nursing school. In
fact, said one instructor (rather instructress...though for especially severe
pedagogues, shouldn’t it be an instructrix?), there is something called the
Puerto Rican Syndrome.
With good Nordic types, one probes for symptoms.
A dairy farmer carrying the bulk of his weight in his
gut presents with slight chest pain. The alert nurse questions—shortness of
breath? Left arm radiation? Quality of pain?
A Puerto Rican appears: the wise nurse questions—what
are your symptoms?
Every sensation the man or woman has ever had will come
spilling—rather, gushing out. Nor will the information be solely verbal—the
eyes, the hands, the body itself will be brought into play.
What one doesn’t do is ASK for any specific symptoms,
for God’s sakes.
In the early days I tested this on Mr. Fernández.
He presented with a headache.
“And do you have any itching under your fingernails?” I
inquired.
This is clinically unheard of.
“Oh yes,” he crooned—I don’t know how he does, but he
does. Or rather, he did.
(Has he stopped, or have I gone deaf to it?)
“It’s terrible—I couldn’t sleep last night, the itching
was so bad. I finally had to put my fingers in ice water….”
Right….
And me? Now? In the present?
Well, I certainly have congestion—my nose is running.
I’m coughing, I’m weary, despite having slept like a rock from 8 PM to 4 AM.
It’s now 10:42 AM—thanks, bottom right of my computer screen!—and I have had 6
hours of fretful stewing, that is, wakefulness.
And have not been productive.
And I need to produce something because if I don’t
produce something—if one single goddamn DAY goes by and the world has not heard
from Marc Newhouse…
…then
I’m gonna be a ditch digger!
The words my good father, damn him, said to Eric when
he got a D on a spelling test in third grade.
So Eric had to run out and get himself a Pulitzer just
to be free of the old man….
Well, it’s now 10:47 AM—sorry, but I did have to leave
the keyboard and get myself a paper towel to mop up this nose of mine,
which is now red and blazing sore from the roughness of the damn paper towel
since of course, of COURSE, I can’t buy Kleenex.
What?
Kleenex?
When you have some perfectly good paper towels that you
mistakenly thought were toilet paper when you were crashing through CVS one
day, months back!
We also don’t believe in paper towels.
A rag is perfectly good and doesn’t cost anything and
is environmentally correct. And since you have the damn things, then you’ll
just have to use them, disfiguring your nose into perpetuity.
Now as I was saying….
If the world doesn’t hear…
And guess what?
The world couldn’t care LESS about Marc Newhouse.
The world is NOT rushing to its feet to get to the
phone to call me. The New York Times—shouldn’t they be reviewing Iguanas?
All right—it’s not out there, yet…but shouldn’t there
be some prepublication buzz?
I virtually had to take a CHAINSAW to my brothers to
get them to read the damn thing, and even so, it took them weeks!
And the younger generation?
A silence that fell like a fire curtain in a theater.
So now my body is aching and weary and—thank you
Jack!—OF COURSE I can’t go to bed, or even the bathroom to get toilet paper
which might be fractionally less abrasive than this triple X sandpaper I’m
using on my nose.
NO NO!
Gotta sit down and right!
Damn, that’s write.
Well, wherever he is, dammit, I hope he’s busy—that
father of mine! I hope he’s moving that damn woodpile of his in the celestial
skies from one side of heaven and back—just as his damn Norwegian-American
mother made him do—a century ago when he wanted or needed the damn 25 cents for
the movies!
811 words, now, says the bottom left of my screen.
And can I please go to bed????
