To the Opera
I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Not that there is any other side. The one extant is mine. Marlou's side, once the site of shared slumber, amorous activity and death, is now blank as a sidewalk. So there's my side, neither right nor wrong. Good morning, good mourning. Things started going wrong early, that is what I'm trying to say. I had these tickets to the opera, and I was going to see the end of the season, the final matinee, La Traviata on jetlag. This required nothing much of me, only that I get up, get dressed and either hit the train or hit the road.
Which? Rails or asphalt? These days, both seemed fraught. On Sundays, Caltrain runs on an hourly basis, and the trains stop at every tree on the Peninsula. A slight miscalculation on the way home can result in a 55 minute sojourn in Milbrae, gateway to Burlingame. As for the drive, that seemed even more formidable. The battery in my van had gone dead, according to Tom my landlord and personal protector. So an AAA towtruck would figure in the journey, and maybe that wasn't such a bad idea. Get the van jumpstarted, drive to San Francisco, and after 70 miles on the freeway, coming and going, the thing should be charged.
Such were my options as I made tea, listened to NPR drone, and tried to feel good about Sunday morning. I had not slept well. Saturday's Fourth of July party was quite pleasant, but I didn't like staring at a familiar Palo Alto backyard without Marlou. A quiet rage drifted into my consciousness around 5:30 AM, and there was no getting back to sleep. And now Sunday morning, having started unpleasantly early, was progressing in a functional way. Things were taking too long, yes, and the unpleasant combination of jetlag and chronically bad balance was making me feel woozy. But, what the hell. Shower completed. Underwear and socks somehow on. Green gabardine trousers off the hanger, moving up the legs and ready for closure. Just a matter of slipping the little metal thing into the other thing, then buttoning the button.
Bound to be a bit of a challenge. Definitely put on some weight during the month away. Easy matter of lying back on the bed, pulling the waist tight. Even better, lying back on the bed and resting the legs on the seat of the wheelchair for best stomach-flattening effect. Better try that again. And again.
By 9 AM, the train option was looking bad. The trousers...well, by 9:15 what was there to do but give up on sliding the metal hook into place and just fasten the button? After all, I had a quadriplegic button hook, which came in handy, although it was quite a stretch. The real stretch, of course, having occurred in my abdomen. And there were certain images coming at me now. Wiltshire sausages, fried potatoes, Queen Mary china plates whizzing into position like flying saucers; London evenings of vindaloo curries, onion bajis, stuffed nan, Oxford blue cheese, Lincolnshire poacher cheese, Gloucestershire cheese. Not to mention McVities plain chocolate digestive biscuits. The latter are thinly coated in chocolate the way a good drug pusher thinly coats heroin. And all these English foods were now marching at me like Grosz caricatures of fat and grotesque burghers. And I was one of them. My half fastened trousers could only partially zip. Good thing my cotton pullover could be pulled low.
And where had the hours gone? I had been awake since the dawn of time, missed the train, and now there was barely time to get my fat self out the door to wait for the towtruck. The AAA woman on the phone asked if I was in a safe place. No, I wanted to tell her, my home was not safe. I was enraged most of the time, and particularly this time, and it was not safe to be here. Twenty minutes, she said. I hung up. My belly hung out. This was going to be a long day without exercise.
The towtruck guy got my hood open, clamped jumper cables on his truck and mine and stared in puzzlement. My van demanded too much power. This didn't surprise me. With a hydraulic lift designed to raise and rotate over 400 pounds of wheelchair and lead batteries and human cargo, the latter expanding, my van deserves its own electrical substation. To even function, it requires two robust batteries. The AAA man shook his head. I would need a new battery. He looked at my tires. I would need air. He began poking around the engine.
Sadly, I regarded my watch. Yes, there was the opera. But before there was, or was to have been, the psychologist. We were meeting just a few blocks away from the Opera House. I had already phoned to say I would be late. While the AAA guy went at my engine with a spray can of something, I pulled out my mobile phone and canceled the shrink appointment. After a month of grieving madness on the road...the New York road, the North Atlantic road, the Gloucestershire road and the London road...I needed an hour with a psychologist. Perhaps a month. What I did not need was anymore opera, having achieved all the grand lyric passions with excessive frequency and entirely on my own.
Okay. The AAA guy was snapping shut his tool case, asking me to sign the credit card slip for the new battery and giving me leave to depart. I ascended the hydraulic lift and for the first time in five, maybe six, weeks, started the engine of my van. I was going to have to drive. Routine enough, rolling through the leafy streets of Menlo Park and Atherton. Accelerating for the freeway...the 65 mph reality settling in around me. Fuel. When had I last been to the service station? Surely there was enough gas in the car. I mean, this was 5 July and sometime around the end of April hadn't I filled up? The answer should have been simple enough, but in my van the especially adapted automatic transmission shift obscures the gas gauge once I'm on the road.
Well, it does not quite block it out. Surely just by craning my neck to the right...or maybe the left...I can see how much fucking gas I have or do not have.... A car honked. I had swerved out of my 65-mile-per-hour lane. Another attempt to glimpse the fuel level, another swerve, and I was driving recklessly without even trying and without even drinking. And it was 35 miles to San Francisco, the concrete cruel as sandstone.
And something was happening with my foot. Something vague. Not that things with my left foot are ever definite, everything there being neurologically numbed. Some sort of slippage. Of course. I hadn't tied my shoe, just pulled the laces as taut as possible on my own, one-handed knotting being a very advanced occupational therapy goal, sort of the Eagle Scout level of quadriplegia. And the freeway was getting even faster, crowded with more people speeding to the opera or Aunt Claire or the Rod & Tackle Show. And with my foot slipping around in the shoe, the difference between the brake and accelerator and life and death were becoming mushy. All the basic questions were coming at me, along with the concrete teeth in those grooves ground into the pavement. Like what if it all ended now? Life stopping the way a newspaper tears, the edge sloppy and ragged. How much had been completed? How much had been missed? And all because of my shoes not being tied.
Because I can see how it will end, my foot slipping out altogether, going for the brake and catching the edge of the loose shoe now upside down. In the final desperate moments, sock sliding along the accelerator...and because I can see all this, and am acutely aware of how it will happen, it doesn't. Hypervigilant, adrenaline-charged I make it to South San Francisco, even Van Ness Avenue. And it can't be an accident, the name of this street, not after the morning's harrowing ride, which is all about vans and vanness.
There was a sign in the lobby of the University of London residence halls explaining which unwanted personal items could, at the end of term, be donated or recycled. Absolutely no traffic cones, said one notice. They are iconic, as emblematic of an era as gaslights, and in the hightop disabled van space by the Opera House parking structure, an orange traffic cone is blocking the space. Fuck it. I drive right over the thing. I am parked. I am alive. And because I am too late for counseling, but too early to meet my opera friends, what is there to do but find a latte?
This seems the noblest pastime, sipping a latte on Hayes Street. I fumble through the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle looking for the Insight section, can't find it, decide it doesn't matter. It's time to head for the north door of the Opera House anyway. I roll across Franklin Street, and the bouncing of the uneven pavement jars loose inside me the thing that has been building, stretched over the hour the tow truck guy took to do his job on my car, enhanced by the white knuckle drive north and now manifest in all its fullness. My bladder.
No way I will make it to the Opera House men's room in time. There is no way I will make it past Hayes Street, in fact, not without a smelly yellow stain flooding my too small trousers.. Failure and shame and humiliation heading toward me on the sidewalk. But fortunately there are not many people, and although I am in plain view, and the occasional pedestrian will stroll by, I jam my wheelchair against the stage door of the Symphony Hall, stand up, unzip and pee. This is a moment of supreme liberation. I could be arrested. But I will arrive in jail dry.
Which? Rails or asphalt? These days, both seemed fraught. On Sundays, Caltrain runs on an hourly basis, and the trains stop at every tree on the Peninsula. A slight miscalculation on the way home can result in a 55 minute sojourn in Milbrae, gateway to Burlingame. As for the drive, that seemed even more formidable. The battery in my van had gone dead, according to Tom my landlord and personal protector. So an AAA towtruck would figure in the journey, and maybe that wasn't such a bad idea. Get the van jumpstarted, drive to San Francisco, and after 70 miles on the freeway, coming and going, the thing should be charged.
Such were my options as I made tea, listened to NPR drone, and tried to feel good about Sunday morning. I had not slept well. Saturday's Fourth of July party was quite pleasant, but I didn't like staring at a familiar Palo Alto backyard without Marlou. A quiet rage drifted into my consciousness around 5:30 AM, and there was no getting back to sleep. And now Sunday morning, having started unpleasantly early, was progressing in a functional way. Things were taking too long, yes, and the unpleasant combination of jetlag and chronically bad balance was making me feel woozy. But, what the hell. Shower completed. Underwear and socks somehow on. Green gabardine trousers off the hanger, moving up the legs and ready for closure. Just a matter of slipping the little metal thing into the other thing, then buttoning the button.
Bound to be a bit of a challenge. Definitely put on some weight during the month away. Easy matter of lying back on the bed, pulling the waist tight. Even better, lying back on the bed and resting the legs on the seat of the wheelchair for best stomach-flattening effect. Better try that again. And again.
By 9 AM, the train option was looking bad. The trousers...well, by 9:15 what was there to do but give up on sliding the metal hook into place and just fasten the button? After all, I had a quadriplegic button hook, which came in handy, although it was quite a stretch. The real stretch, of course, having occurred in my abdomen. And there were certain images coming at me now. Wiltshire sausages, fried potatoes, Queen Mary china plates whizzing into position like flying saucers; London evenings of vindaloo curries, onion bajis, stuffed nan, Oxford blue cheese, Lincolnshire poacher cheese, Gloucestershire cheese. Not to mention McVities plain chocolate digestive biscuits. The latter are thinly coated in chocolate the way a good drug pusher thinly coats heroin. And all these English foods were now marching at me like Grosz caricatures of fat and grotesque burghers. And I was one of them. My half fastened trousers could only partially zip. Good thing my cotton pullover could be pulled low.
And where had the hours gone? I had been awake since the dawn of time, missed the train, and now there was barely time to get my fat self out the door to wait for the towtruck. The AAA woman on the phone asked if I was in a safe place. No, I wanted to tell her, my home was not safe. I was enraged most of the time, and particularly this time, and it was not safe to be here. Twenty minutes, she said. I hung up. My belly hung out. This was going to be a long day without exercise.
The towtruck guy got my hood open, clamped jumper cables on his truck and mine and stared in puzzlement. My van demanded too much power. This didn't surprise me. With a hydraulic lift designed to raise and rotate over 400 pounds of wheelchair and lead batteries and human cargo, the latter expanding, my van deserves its own electrical substation. To even function, it requires two robust batteries. The AAA man shook his head. I would need a new battery. He looked at my tires. I would need air. He began poking around the engine.
Sadly, I regarded my watch. Yes, there was the opera. But before there was, or was to have been, the psychologist. We were meeting just a few blocks away from the Opera House. I had already phoned to say I would be late. While the AAA guy went at my engine with a spray can of something, I pulled out my mobile phone and canceled the shrink appointment. After a month of grieving madness on the road...the New York road, the North Atlantic road, the Gloucestershire road and the London road...I needed an hour with a psychologist. Perhaps a month. What I did not need was anymore opera, having achieved all the grand lyric passions with excessive frequency and entirely on my own.
Okay. The AAA guy was snapping shut his tool case, asking me to sign the credit card slip for the new battery and giving me leave to depart. I ascended the hydraulic lift and for the first time in five, maybe six, weeks, started the engine of my van. I was going to have to drive. Routine enough, rolling through the leafy streets of Menlo Park and Atherton. Accelerating for the freeway...the 65 mph reality settling in around me. Fuel. When had I last been to the service station? Surely there was enough gas in the car. I mean, this was 5 July and sometime around the end of April hadn't I filled up? The answer should have been simple enough, but in my van the especially adapted automatic transmission shift obscures the gas gauge once I'm on the road.
Well, it does not quite block it out. Surely just by craning my neck to the right...or maybe the left...I can see how much fucking gas I have or do not have.... A car honked. I had swerved out of my 65-mile-per-hour lane. Another attempt to glimpse the fuel level, another swerve, and I was driving recklessly without even trying and without even drinking. And it was 35 miles to San Francisco, the concrete cruel as sandstone.
And something was happening with my foot. Something vague. Not that things with my left foot are ever definite, everything there being neurologically numbed. Some sort of slippage. Of course. I hadn't tied my shoe, just pulled the laces as taut as possible on my own, one-handed knotting being a very advanced occupational therapy goal, sort of the Eagle Scout level of quadriplegia. And the freeway was getting even faster, crowded with more people speeding to the opera or Aunt Claire or the Rod & Tackle Show. And with my foot slipping around in the shoe, the difference between the brake and accelerator and life and death were becoming mushy. All the basic questions were coming at me, along with the concrete teeth in those grooves ground into the pavement. Like what if it all ended now? Life stopping the way a newspaper tears, the edge sloppy and ragged. How much had been completed? How much had been missed? And all because of my shoes not being tied.
Because I can see how it will end, my foot slipping out altogether, going for the brake and catching the edge of the loose shoe now upside down. In the final desperate moments, sock sliding along the accelerator...and because I can see all this, and am acutely aware of how it will happen, it doesn't. Hypervigilant, adrenaline-charged I make it to South San Francisco, even Van Ness Avenue. And it can't be an accident, the name of this street, not after the morning's harrowing ride, which is all about vans and vanness.
There was a sign in the lobby of the University of London residence halls explaining which unwanted personal items could, at the end of term, be donated or recycled. Absolutely no traffic cones, said one notice. They are iconic, as emblematic of an era as gaslights, and in the hightop disabled van space by the Opera House parking structure, an orange traffic cone is blocking the space. Fuck it. I drive right over the thing. I am parked. I am alive. And because I am too late for counseling, but too early to meet my opera friends, what is there to do but find a latte?
This seems the noblest pastime, sipping a latte on Hayes Street. I fumble through the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle looking for the Insight section, can't find it, decide it doesn't matter. It's time to head for the north door of the Opera House anyway. I roll across Franklin Street, and the bouncing of the uneven pavement jars loose inside me the thing that has been building, stretched over the hour the tow truck guy took to do his job on my car, enhanced by the white knuckle drive north and now manifest in all its fullness. My bladder.
No way I will make it to the Opera House men's room in time. There is no way I will make it past Hayes Street, in fact, not without a smelly yellow stain flooding my too small trousers.. Failure and shame and humiliation heading toward me on the sidewalk. But fortunately there are not many people, and although I am in plain view, and the occasional pedestrian will stroll by, I jam my wheelchair against the stage door of the Symphony Hall, stand up, unzip and pee. This is a moment of supreme liberation. I could be arrested. But I will arrive in jail dry.
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