The Medicine Burns

The Medicine Burns

Adam Klein

 

Dzanc Books

Dzanc Books
5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
www.dzancbooks.org

Copyright © 1995 Adam Klein

All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

Published 2014 by Dzanc Books
A Dzanc Books r
E
print Series Selection

eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-941088-16-6
eBook Cover by Awarding Book Covers
Cover Image:
Candy Filled Condoms
, by Jennifer Karady (
http://jenniferkarady.com/sugar2.html
)

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author
.

 

To My Teachers: Molly Giles and Thomas Avena

Acknowledgments

These stories are dedicated to the memory of Thomas Avena who first recognized, and later published the title story in
The Bastard Review
, and who fed me, encouraged and inspired me over many years. My sincerest thanks are offered to Amy Scholder who discovered and nurtured this manuscript, and to Rex Ray who encouraged me to send it to her. Special appreciation is in order to Ira Silverberg and those formerly at High Risk who gave me this start. Molly Giles was instrumental in the writing of this book; her generosity as a teacher continues to impress me. Thanks also to David Bergman for first publishing “Club Feet” in
Men On Men 5
, to Brian Bouldrey who published the title story in
Best American Gay Fiction, 1996
. Thank you to Dale Peck and Richard Canning who included “Keloid” in
Vital Signs: Essential AIDS Fiction
in 2007. Special thanks to Victoria Baker whose dedicated copyediting provided this writer with a million new things to obsess over. Thanks to the Volgelstein Foundation, the Authors League Fund, and Giorno Poetry Systems. I am grateful to Dzanc Books for rEprinting this book and making it available to the digital cosmos.

Contents

Club Feet

Undertow

The Medicine Burns

Keloid

Dr.K.

India

Club Feet

My mother and I were both born with club feet. For thirteen years she wore a cast on her left leg, and I imagine the current stiffness in her gait is what she learned from wearing the cumbersome iron. Advances in surgery, and perhaps even in the casts themselves, enabled me to overcome my deformity in only three years of my childhood. I don't remember the episodes my mother told of how I used my cast to bust open the door of my parents' bedroom, or how I loved to climb, and how I could swing that cast over any piece of furniture, always leaving a tear in the upholstery or scratches in the wood. I really don't remember it at all until I look down at my bare feet—a difference of three sizes between them. They're not handsome feet, but neither are they impaired in any way.

And I only mention the feet because no matter what other features I share in common with my mother, it is our feet, with the aberrations now corrected, that seem to express our bond most adequately. I remember rubbing calamine lotion into her arches and heels while she lay in bed watching “Redd Buttons” or “The Honeymooners.” She would croon, “my son, the podiatrist.”

Maybe I could have found some interest in that occupation if all the feet I encountered were as bad as hers, because I did enjoy bending back each of her claw-like toes, pulling off the dead skin from her heels, and watching the cracks fill in with calamine. Her feet were particularly ravaged, not simply because of the long years they were bound in casts, but also because she never wore a closed shoe, wearing instead Dr. Scholl's sandals during the years of her compulsive gardening.

After my first surgery, the doctors explained to my parents that I might not ever walk with grace, that dancing was just about out of the question. I'm still unsure whose determination, my mother's or my own, enables me to dance as gracefully as I do today. I suppose I'm lucky; there has always been a strong determination to conform in my family. And there is always the possibility that my dancing really has nothing to do with determination, that it was merely the improved technology around club feet that is responsible for the miracle. Maybe, as my mother would come to accuse me, it all came
too
easy, I never had to suffer the way she did.

I'm afraid I've already misrepresented her. She would claim that, in fact, she had never suffered, that thirteen years of wearing that cast on her leg (which would never share the shapeliness of the other) were survival years, not years of vanity. The stories she told of her childhood were as scarce as the food she'd had in her house. Her father committed suicide during the depression. She was born a month after they found his body on a railroad track. She was born into a family with an older sister and three older brothers. All of the children were forced to help their mother provide.

When my mother tells a story, she tells it to make a point. Her stories are used to exemplify what she considers to be a suitable response to the inevitable difficulties of life. They are like the spotlit moments when a character in the Bible converses with God or an angel. And though she is not a religious woman, the analogy is still apt; her stories always advance a moral. They are not stories that are told to engage the imagination; rather, they are used to correct what might have been imagined incorrectly.

So I am hesitant to talk about her past, to reiterate the few moments of her adolescence that she shared with me, enormously confident that her stories would not suffer by interpretation. I have already betrayed her, but not without some justification. Betrayal, like our club feet, has also been a bond between us. I nonetheless believe that
her
stories are a part of
my
past.

But I'll begin with a story of my own: I was fifteen years old, tall and too thin, with a horrible complexion. I still hoped that I might be considered beautiful by someone besides my mother. Even my parents shared this dream, and bought me clothes that I am now sure were out of their reach. My thirst for love was a challenge undertaken by the whole family, and my mother always had the names of one young girl or another who might fulfill the task of loving me. But at fifteen, I was already striking out on my own.

We were living in Miami, where my parents had moved just after my father had come back from the Korean War. He was a war photographer who kept his personal records of the carnage in old scrapbooks with rubber bands holding them closed. They bought a house in South Miami, spacious enough to hide the army lockers he couldn't quite part with. These and his photographs were stored in the crawlspace with the hurricane supplies.

Their quiet residential experience wasn't mine. A flotilla escalated changes that had for years been occurring in Miami. By the time I was fifteen, my entire circle of friends was Cuban. We shared an obsession for clothes, social life, and for freedom. Throughout the city, warehouses were opened up as large dance clubs. There were always
quinces
to attend, coming-out parties for fifteen-year-old Cuban girls, staged with more daring and more money than I'd ever seen at a bar mitzvah. Once I saw a girl lowered to the stage in a spacecraft, while a group of Cuban boys danced with glow-in-the-dark stars. Even the YMHA, where my parents had taught me to swim (I was four years old when they threw me into the pool), was converted into a Cuban nightclub.

It was at one of these clubs that I met Phil Marie. I saw him drawing a car on a napkin at the bar. He wore a Batman T-shirt under a jacket. He was beautiful. I walked up to him, spoke to him. He was an artist whose concern was “the deception of the image.” He was very straightforward in his work about deception; he cut styrofoam to look like stones: slate, limestone, coral even. He would cover their surfaces with glue and pour sand over the cut mold. Then he would paint the forms. They always looked like new rocks. He was tied up when I met him, waiting to speak to the owner of the bar about an installation. He was hoping to install a faux waterfall. This was going to be a challenge, he told me, as he'd never created fake water before.

I let him charm me with the sketches he penned and passed to me, evaluating each one and tucking it away in my shirt pocket. “You'd make a great illustrator,” I told him, but he took offense.

“My commercial work is rocks, but my drawings and paintings are fine art,” he said firmly.

He'd gotten drunk waiting for the owner to emerge out of the back room, and had gone through a stack of napkins. The bartender finally suggested he try back again the following day. Reluctantly, he turned to me and asked if I'd like to leave with him. Outside was the red Studebaker he drove. He told me he had no money except for that car. He loved that car. There were roses he'd left under the windshield wipers.

He was renting a small cottage in Coconut Grove. There was a dark path that led to it, and I remember thinking it was perfect for him, a real hideaway. He opened the screen door for me and we were on the porch under a torn, paper lantern. I remember him blindly kissing my face and tearing the buttons on my shirt, and how, blindly, I kissed him back.

When we went inside, there was only a mattress and a couple of boxes he was using as a table. “Once I get some work in this city I'll be able to set this place up,” he said. “In the meantime, it's just you, me, and a bed.”

“I don't need anything else,” I told him, but of course I did.

I started to spend all my time with him. I brought him lunches, dinners, things he needed around the house. I thought nothing at the time about taking things from my parents' storage space. When they weren't home, I'd go into the crawlspace and blow the dust off their wedding gifts. There were lamps and pots and pans still in boxes, even the stereo my sister had left when she'd gone off to college. The night I brought that over, we listened to an album I'd found up there,
Musk for havers
, compiled by Jackie Gleason. We danced together on the porch, and in the silence between songs, we could hear the lizards scrambling through the dead leaves.

Phil would stay in all day working on his paintings. I couldn't help it - to me, they looked like illustrations. He took them directly from young boys' magazines. Paintings of fire trucks, sports cars, and airplanes. I'd walk in and find him with his work scattered in front of him, and he looked just like a boy himself. I was startled when he told me he was forty-one.

I would be sixteen in two weeks. When he offered to have a party at the cottage, I was thrilled by the idea. “Invite your friends,” he suggested.

Three days before the party, he told me casually that of course he had no money, but that he would create something special for me. I financed the party by theft. I took liquor from my parents' bar, money from my mother's purse. I wanted all my friends to see how he'd gone all-out for me. There were cheese spreads, crackers, breads, wine, pâté. I took a string of lights from my parents' storage and hung them from the trees in the yard. By the time the guests began to arrive, I was exhausted.

Phil did all the entertaining. He made sure glasses were full. It didn't matter that he never bothered to refill my glass. I wasn't a guest. I was certainly independent enough to pour my own drinks.

The party seemed to be going on without me, and I was drunk enough to consider the possibility that may have been happening all the time. No one seemed to notice when I lay down on the grass and fell asleep.

When I woke up, the lights I'd strung in the trees were turned off. The party had dispersed. I staggered up to the cottage and let myself in. Phil was naked on the bed with my friend, Raul. They had a candle burning and the
Music for Lovers
record playing on the stolen stereo. I'd hoped for the comic moment when they'd both scramble for clothes, or tell me I was drunk and misinterpreting what I was seeing. But neither of them moved, except to turn and look at me, as though I was a maid who hadn't noticed the “Do Not Disturb” sign.