My Struggles with the Family Fungus (ROUND 5)
Let's workshop this short story about a caste-ascending man's battle with onychomycosis, which becomes a darkly humorous metaphor for his dysfunctional life of strained interpersonal relationships
My Struggles with the Family Fungus
Years before the family fungus claimed me as its own, Grandpa would bribe us with obsolete arcade tokens to play undertaker to his toenails. The dank and deformed black-and-yellows, all but the pinkies (and perhaps the rings) thicker than our thumbs, would crumble—brittle ruins of plaque—under the pick-picking of our grubby digits. We figured, if we figured much at all, this was just what old-people toes looked like. And we knew, from free-range lives in the beer-glass alleys and the tick-poised weeds pouncing on each other like feral cats, little else than flea-infested trash: even the toys at school, although more operational than our wheelless yard-sale wonders, bore in their nooks the ineradicable grime of wish-sandwich poverty. What fear, then, could live in our hearts as we pee-ewwed and giggled in a huddle under the kitchen table, competing to harvest the bigger pile of decay? Like some leviathanic manta ray nibbled of parasites by little reef fish, Grandpa would sit there—wheezing in emphysematic struggle—under the sagging ceiling in sunlight browned by nicotine windows, chain smoking unfiltered Camels in a lumberjack flannel daubed with housepaint.
It was normal for my cousin and I. We would work in drooling oblivion on those ten pumpkin stalks in that kitchen of free-floating linoleum tiles the moldy mop only muddied, squinting our eyes and mouth-breathing to bear the yeasty reek of stale beer and rotting gouda that always remained on our fingers into the next day like a curse—becoming, like the acrid kerosine in our heaters and stoves, as much a homey scent as punching a wall (or even a wife) a homey behavior. But one time, locked in our flow-state trance (the kind that makes the riddling loop of birth and death a nonissue of white noise even for the headiest abyss gazers), Grandma stormed into our innocence. “You’re gonna get the fungus. Get away from that sicko’s feet!”
By the nape of our necks she dragged us into the cold, out back under the deer-hanging tree whose every cranny oozed that sticky sap we would lick alongside the ants. She poured kerosene on our hands. It was me she manhandled with blazing eyes, jostling my hands for me as a parent would at the sink to demonstrate the feel of how to work up a lather—only the wrist squeeze was too tight, the speed too furious. My cousin, eyes wide with trembling, knew to mimic the blurred madness. And we all kept scrubbing—“Don’t stop!” Grandma insisted—as more glugged forth, like an infernal baptism, from the galvanized can.
The ominous urgency of Grandma’s reaction that day, how she yoked us from those toes—how could it not plant kudzu vines of fear? But the fear, with time, remained dormant—like the fungus itself—for a time.
Divorce battles between my parents were literal battles complete with leaping-from-moving-vehicles and mug-hurling-in-the-court incidents—and, so it became legend of pride, a crowning moment of blouse-torn tits bouncing with mobster braggadocio and a hawk-tua at the bench: “Fuck you, your honor! How ’bout you suck this fuckin’ cunt!” My indefinite sentence to a foster home meant the judge, however impotent his gavels for order at that flapjack pinnacle of marital implosion, got the last laugh. And I imagine it was the sweetest possible last laugh. For, and this points to why humans demonize and verminize before they exterminate, did not his vengeful decree—perhaps otherwise conscience-riling, even if stoked by outdated echoes of 1980s panic about HIV-transmission through spit—harmonize perfectly enough with God’s work that he could toast his decision as salvation at the Thanksgiving table?
No fungus showed itself during the months with my new family, the toys there—although just as dirt-caked and yardsale-like as ever—proving superior as disease vectors given the glut of snot-nosed paychecks running around: each head, four to a room, no doubt foremost—for parents that looked and drank, cursed and groped, just like mine—a walking and (unfortunately for overhead) eating cha-ching. The merry-go-round of stomach flu and lice plus the godsend of cortisol, filling fractures that otherwise (under the tension of uncertainty) might have faulted to my core, rendered even the smell of familiar petrochemicals (pervasive here as well) powerless to invoke fear of the fungus. But not long after I got out (having entered the social-services car with a Palpatine figurine secretly stashed in my pocket), not long after I had received my half-assed delousing, another incident sure did.
My mom had latched onto a new guy in those months of parental sabbatical. Custody awarded to her not by the courts but by my dad (who, after a few weeks of me, had been overwhelmed less with an empathetic heart than with an itching, an insatiable mix of tickling and pinpricking, that only picked up—riled by the uncertainty of which sensations were merely phantom—to wall-punching fury at night), I had a new father figure in my life. His bushy armpits reeked of onions even at our first meeting, where his rebel-flag ring dug into my hand. Always sucking at an abscessed tooth with metronomic tsk-tsks, the man kept himself holed up in Poughkeepsie’s Red Bull Motor Inn: a pay-by-the-week dive infamous—after the rashes of homeless clientele—for inspection failures, its roach-ridden outlets helping time devour whatever nostalgia for roadside Americana still clung to its name. Black kids chucking beer bottles in broad daylight at the motel sign (a peeling red bull, head dipped in goring charge)—that was my welcome wagon. The parking lot, a crumbled asphalt of cigarette butts and those haggard people—him too, my mom at his side—picking through them in squat, reached right up to the front door, which swung open to the queen-sized mattress and the antennae-TV kitchenette: no more than a plugin pot to boil church-pantry ramen.
That room became home. My dad lived not even an hour away, back in Beacon. But that might as well have been Boston. Only my mom’s boyfriend had a car, reliable for jumpstarts not for distance. And who would hear it, who would pay, if that graffitied rust-bucket to some beyond—tagged up more each day by “all the nigger kids and their wigger friends"—conked out on the grudging journey to the man he mocked for smoking “Newports like a nigger”? With his hands-on approach to dating and parenting alike, and with the rising price of unleaded (a topic white hot in this dead-end stretch of America), and with my insecurity and ineptitude around going out at night to “work for it” (namely, to use his cut of garden hose to siphon gas from parked cars), weekend visits dwindled to near nothing.
After what felt like forever without seeing my dad (probably only a few months), one morning my school bus lurched to a sudden stop just as I had settled into my seat. I followed everyone else’s gaze down the aisle to figure out what was happening.
“They parked right in front of the bus!” a boy near the front shouted.
The driver pulled the door handle to end the banging. The school bus not being a place in which he was ever to appear, it took me a moment to register what it is easy to imagine I sensed all along: that the man who staggered aboard was my dad. In that bloated flush of inebriated concern, a look I would come to know well over the years, he cried out to the poor driver “Where’s my boy?” The driver, not seeming too out of his depth (more resigned than surprised), shrugged his shoulders. But my dad, before the shrug got a chance to unfold its full presentation, had already turned toward all of us.
“Johnny boy!” he called out, his gaze wandering woozily over the staring seats. He begged for recognition, lifting his pitch: “It’s Daddy.” I offered no relief, edging from the aisle until barely one eye peeked past the cracked faux leather in front of me. A few boys—their stares as serrated as my dad’s was bleary—watched me, perhaps connecting the name with the crimson shrinking. My prayer—hard to call “silent,” as even more gazes narrowed upon my façade (crumbling likely all the more under the tension of my own bracing against the tension)—was that he would lose heart before his sloppy sweep of faces landed upon mine. Heart cortisoled into a tumult whose analgesic power I have come to crave (however Sith-like, self-destructive to point of sirens and cuffs), I wondered if he was here to take me away and what should be my response if so: concede or resist. I knew better than to leave school with someone not supposed to be picking me up. My dad was no stranger, and yet I was unsure whether he was supposed to be picking me up. And did the bus, still grumbling at my stop, even count as school?
As he wobbled closer, his drinking buddy Paul negotiated the steps. Shirtless and reeling as he leaned on the steering wheel, Paul had the driver wincing back no doubt from halitotic murmurs. That familiar black can of King Cobra braced for dear life against his hairy gut like a metallic parasite, looking back I can almost hear the dysarthria of unneeded de-escalation: “Man’s juss . . . tryna see ’is shun.”
My stomach sank when I realized it was Paul, identifiable by the sigil of the beer lush: that flabby top lip made for wrapping around the mouths of cans, or that likely developed precisely by wrapping around the mouths of cans—the trumpet lip of my kin. The sour ending of our last encounter had left me fearing what he might do if we ever crossed paths again. And there he swayed.
Inside the Chinese restaurant on Main Street in Beacon (Fu Xing, whose owner throughout my teens would buy the Hudson catfish I caught and, in flagrant disregard to longstanding rumors, would pay bigtime for stray cats)—that is where the story of perceived bad blood began. Paul had suggested that I help him carry the food while my dad, really feeling it (he blamed not the fishing beer but rather the river sun), hung back in the car curbside across the street. Having met Paul only once before that night, and under the disturbing circumstance of watching him bawl and booger at the edge of a chair as he crossed himself like a Jesuit again and again in the glow of The Exorcist (a warbly VHS he had carried in with a torn case of beer), I made sure to keep my dad in sight through the storefront glass.
Paul placed the order while I kept craning back at my dad. Despite rock music blasting its distorted bassline into the restaurant, my dad kept lolling forward—each forward slump more a caricature than the last—like a child in a losing battle to stay awake. One hard nod of summum drama sent his forehead into the glove compartment. He jerked awake and left the vehicle. Braced against the trunk and bumper, he looked both ways as if about to cross to us. Instead he careened his body to the driver’s seat, wild with purpose (as if he had glimpsed God’s eternity in that split-second sleep). I wanted to rush out. But Paul—imploded in his own stupor—had my hand, gripping tighter (a good-hearted man in retrospect) at the sensation of my unease. My voice caught in my throat like a nightmare as I watched my dad screech away with the dopplering music, his revoked license no match for his reckless resolve.
My Uncle John—materializing in the time blur—found me walking down Main Street, clinging to Paul’s hand with desperate intensity. He clunked Paul’s face with a brown-bagged 40 without a word. I kicked Paul in the gut while he was down, confused about what was going on and frustrated by my confusion. Uncle John, wearing a red and beige flannel like my grandpa (perhaps it was Grandpa’s), had Paul in a naked choke from behind. I kept kicking, the exposed paunch palpably begging for it in the increasing yawn. I kept kicking—numb with power, electrified with control. I kicked until a hooker in holey stockings, that very pockmarked mumbler I would later chuck rocks at from the East-Main shadows while she stood rain or shine in front of Tikos Hair Salon, cradled me and the stapled bag of Chinese from harm’s way. My fingers, I remember, ripped at the underclass Madonna’s pissy stockings a bit more—a micro self-soothing amidst the maelstrom, like Grandma’s fingerings of her turquois rosary (which I eventually stole).
I gave no overt indication that I knew the man smashing into rows of children (mistaking heads, more than once, for seatbacks in his attempts at stabilization). So even though I surely stood out (slouched in sullen flaccidity, in contrast to the wide-eyed erectness all around me), it took my dad a few blurry seconds to recognize me when he got close. Breath of beer as it always was (which has made kissing my wife when she’s been drinking quite uncomfortable), he kissed me full on the lips and started to cry.
“I luv ya, boy. Your father luvs ya.”
A boy’s voice from behind me cut through the moment: “Ill! Look at his feet. They’re rotten!”
I looked down with everyone else to find Grandpa’s bare feet, the first time since Grandma and the kerosene can.
My dad pretended not to hear the comment and gave me another kiss.
“Your dad’s feet stink,” a girl said, pinching her nose with cartoon disgust, pink clips in her blonde hair.
“Hey!” my dad said, turning around with a temporary burst of sobriety. “Don’t knock the big toe ’til you try sitting on it, babe.”
My dad handed me a pack of Lucky Lights candy cigarettes and took his leave, negotiating the aisle in such a way that the bus seemed to be zigzagging through an abandoned parking lot. Tension remained in my chest. But it was a relief to be out of that bind as to whether it was right for me to go with him.
The perfect snapshot to explain why I feel such hankering nostalgia watching footage and portrayals of Dr. Gonzo and Raoul Duke’s twisted camaraderie, there they were under the oversized rearview mirror. Paul gave me a cheers gesture with his can as he comforted my dad with an arm around the shoulder. Paul and I were clearly okay. I was just a kid, after all, and this was a hood where alliances like grudges were as short-lived as employment. Looking to the back with streaming eyes directed unbelievably toward the wrong row of seats, my dad managed to raise his fist in a show of solidarity.
It was the horror of the fungus, not the humiliation from what was happening, that filled my mind. Perhaps this was precisely to protect myself from the humiliation—a smokescreen, a redirection. The kids, a few of them already puffing out sugar smoke from the tips of the cigarettes, crammed against the windows to wave or to raise a middle finger as the bus pulled away. The Trans Am tilted quarter on the curb, striper fishing poles extending out the back window and the radio blasting Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” My dad stood on the firebird decal of the hood, doing his best to cover the struggle to keep balanced. Paul was in the driver’s seat squinting and bobbing to the power of the song, a white Styrofoam cooler for beer and maybe for bloodworms on his lap. Their right arms hypertrophied like fiddler crabs, both drunks had foaming cheers raised high.
This second grade incident revived my fear about the fungus getting to me. I would get nauseous anytime the picture of the feet under the kitchen table, or the feet against the black ribbed rubber flooring of the school bus, fully developed in my mind. When I finally worked up the courage to voice my fear, my mom and her boyfriend told me not to worry, that only dirt bags get toenail fungus. “Dirt bags” was the phrase they used. Both had just started doing door-to-door vacuum sales for Kirby, and so I pictured vacuum-cleaner bags full of dirt. In truth, we were all—depression humped, soda-rotted in teeth, and smelling of perspiration long harbored in various pits—dirt bags. So by their logic I should have indeed been worried. And yet, especially because I needed some pretense for shaking free from my blooming fungal obsession, I bought into the idea that my dad and his side of the family were the dirt bags, not the people with whom I lived.
I guess it was because I had bought into that idea that others realized my fungal issues before I did myself. As a part of some outreach program to prevent poor kids from falling into drugs and crime, the fifth graders who got free lunch went to karate class after school at a place called Estelle and Alphonso’s Dance Studio on Route 9. After a couple classes the afroed sensei took me aside and said I needed to tape my feet up before stepping out onto the floor.
Showing off with jump kicks and high roundhouses before the wall of mirrors, I felt badass: feet wrapped up like Van Damme’s fists at the end of Kickboxer. I don’t even think it came to my mind that the special treatment might have been due to a fungal issue. Perhaps the prospect of having the fungus was so horrible to me, together with the fact that I wasn’t a dirt bag and my feet were nowhere near the ravaged state of my dad’s, that I blocked the possibility.
By my high school years there was no denying the presence of the family fungus. Still, I had convinced myself that it wasn’t too bad. I had some pain walking, but it was nothing I was unable to handle. The doctor was not an option. Not only did going to the doctor rarely cross my mind (having gone only a few times in my life) and scare me when it did cross my mind, we didn’t have insurance at all (let alone for some podiatrist issue). As perhaps with many families who also leaned heavily on church and school for food, even if we could have gotten insurance somehow (and, thinking back, there had to be some way), we didn’t have the time and the confidence and the intelligence to go pursuing it.
My main concern was making sure no one at school found out about it. I hid my feet as best I could in the locker-room: going stinky unless I could sneak in a private shower and get back to my holey socks in a hurry. It was the worst on those occasions when the entrance guards, executing a full airport search each morning, made me take off socks in addition to shoes. My face would shoot red with shame standing there exposed before the females.
I was hopeful that no one in the school knew of my fungus. But in the course of what played out in the most humiliating incident of my high school years, it seemed that somehow people were aware of it and had been talking about it.
I was at my friend Nick’s house, Bacardied out of my mind on his loveseat after a bonfire party in the mountain. Nick told me that Marissa was coming over. Marissa was the freshman I had been talking to since summer, when she approached me at a party wondering why I didn’t come in the pool with her.
Like that, she was walking through Nick’s door. Her fuchsia top, lacy, exposed a black bra underneath. Behind her came a girl I didn’t know and two thugged-out guys a few years younger than me: Dustin, whom I used to bully back when I was food-desert fat (making him fight people for my entertainment), and Hector, whom I had played basketball with a few times before.
The blot of black and fuchsia came straight at me and sat down on the armrest. For some reason I gave her a kiss on the birthmark of her bared shoulder. I wished she hadn’t come. I wasn’t coherent enough to strategize my courting interactions with her, and the spin of the room had been picking up.
“We hear your dad’s a pretty good rapper,” she said. None of the four had been at the mountain party that evening, but apparently it had already gotten around. (Likely Nick said something.) What had drawn the party to an early close was that my dad wouldn’t stop freestyling. My dad was there at the bonfire that night because he had been living in that part of the woods, storing his groceries (twelve packs of Busch) in tree hollows.
My salivation went excessive and tart. I went to the bathroom and threw up. I went back to the love seat, red from worry that they had been laughing at my expense.
“Jen coming over?” Hector asked Nick.
Jen was a friend of Marissa’s. A couple of nights prior I had been stroking Jen through the crotch of her jeans in the backseat of Nick’s car on the way home from a house party. I had stroked so much that I woke up the next day with a patch of scabbing skin on the joint of my thumb. Glitter lotion had Jen sparkling the night of that party from, the region from just above her vagina to her belly button exposed, fit and firm. What made her especially desirable was that I had watched her grow up from that girl on my bus with pink clips to that club twerker, thighs and ass blossoming out gradually through the interim. What also contributed to my ripping apart my thumb against her denim crotch was the fact that Marissa, instead of coming out that night as she was supposed to, was in Tarrytown with an ex-boyfriend. From Jen’s phone I called her a few times. The time she picked up she was in the guy’s car. She evaded giving me a straight answer on whether she would be returning home that night.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” I said over the house party music.
“I won’t.”
I was jealous and upset. She was screwing my mind up with all the let’s-take-it-slows and sleepovers at her ex-boyfriend’s place. Still, I imagined it was Marissa’s crotch I was clawing away at in blind fury. And when I was kissing Jen, either I was imagining Marissa or was thinking that this would be good rehearsal for Marissa. It was all so foolish. Jen had a healing herp-chirp, rough and brown, that I had tongued several times in the middle of the damn house party. And when she went to the bathroom once, this Hawaiian shirt came up to me all smiles and said one time he and his friends blew loads on her face, cheering me with his Corona. The worst, though, was that Marissa was bound to find out what went on. Jen was her close friend, and so if she wasn’t a test in the first place, she would probably confess anyway. Such considerations were beside the point, really. We had been kissing in front of Marissa’s other girlfriends.
“I hear you trying to get with that, Johnny boy.” Hector was talking about Jen.
“Nah,” I said.
“I heard what happened,” Marissa said. Hector, on the rocking chair to my right, laughed.
I felt my face go red as everyone in the room stared at me. Attempting to reverse thrust on this reddening process, and praying that something would come out of my mouth with the power to defend me, I tried to articulate that this was a taste of her own medicine.
“You’re out and—and, its.” I couldn’t find the words. I was embarrassed to have this out with her in front of people. Besides, I had never stated to anyone that Marissa and I were in a courting process, and was myself unclear—typical, given my general insecurity—about her view on the matter. I didn’t want to say anything that would imply our courting. That might have invited her to hit me with something only making for more humiliation, something like: “You were under the impression that I was considering getting with you!?”
I tried to continue. “I don’t, I—”
“Cut to the chase, man!” Hector said.
“Don’t write me off, bro,” I said, whatever that was supposed to mean. “You understand me?”
“Whatever, fungus among-us.”
I sank into the couch a bit and paused in the laughter of the girl across from me. Then I sprung out at his throat, possessed. I didn’t decide on what I was going to do to him. I was just going to lay my hands on him and see what happened, I guess.
Before I knew it, he was up and my shirt was over my head, my head down almost to my knees. Being tangled up in my own shirt, manhandled, was a splash of cold water. I was wondering how the hell I wound up like this and whether the situation was even real. Dustin was helping him keep me locked in place as I struggled for breath through my shirt. Perhaps I took a few shots to my exposed ribs. I don’t recall. My friend Nick, despite having been recovering from a lung collapse, broke us up.
Free of the tangle, I said, “I thought you were my friend.”
Hector disregarded my words, nonsensical for various reasons, and made it known that he wanted a fight. I walked away through the dining room. He struggled to get around furniture and people. The hole in my sock caught a raised nail in the floorboard and I allowed myself to fall. I could hear female laughter. Nick told me to hurry upstairs.
Hector continued voicing threats toward me from the floor below and questioned Nick as to why he was “holding enemies in his house.” I was sitting in a dark room, ashamed by my cowardice.
“I’ll break up this fucking house, Nick! Get that fungal fuck down!”
Nick found me huddled in the corner when he turned on the light. I was putting on an air of being too blown to go down with him. I had sense enough, nevertheless, to hide my bare fungal foot. I slid my hand down my leg and over my toes in one of my jerky rocks. He shut off the light and left the room.
Downstairs Nick continued to argue with them, concerned about the possible wreckage of his mother’s home. He told them I was in no condition to fight. He told them it was unfair to be making threats against his property.
And me? I was actually worrying about having touched my foot with a bare hand. I wondered if I could sneak a wash in the bathroom and return to my swoon without being found out. Such preoccupation with the fungus might have been partly to protect myself from the dangerous reality at hand: a coping mechanism. But there was indeed genuine worry about of the fungus spreading to my fingernails. There long had been by this point.
The argument started coming up the stairs. “Let me in there. Just to talk,” Hector said. “Nick. Just let me in there.”
The light was on in the hall and I could see them. From the pitch black, I told him to come in—another effort to confuse them away from the belief that my cowardice was the issue. Nick tried to stop them, but I made it known, in a feigned word-salad slur, that I wanted him to come: “Entrance let ’em okay.” Before the flick of the switch, I tucked my fungal foot out of site under my left thigh.
Dustin and Hector promised Nick they would not attack me. I was against the wall in an alcove a couple feet deep. Dustin leaned against the wall right before the start of the alcove, looking down at me. Hector pulled up a chair and sat in front of me. Level with his knees, I made gestures to apologize.
“I did—. It’s no good. No good.”
“We’re gonna have to fight,” Hector said, the coldness of a reporter.
“Never.” I feigned a head bob out of consciousness, quick to right my head so as not to make it too obvious that I wanted out of this. “Never needed. When was it?”
“You’re going to the hospital tonigh—.”
“Hate it there,” I said before he could finish. Dustin laughed at that. My lips quivered and teeth chattered without much willing, as pumped up as I was. “Tonsils,” I said.
Dustin seemed to think I was blown. This I’m sure was because I used to beat him up when he was little, and it’s hard for one to shake the fear of an old bully even if one becomes bigger and much more street than the old bully, as was true in the case at hand. In reality, I was aware of what was going on, having thrown up and having had a second shot of adrenaline when I lunged out.
Hector knew what was up. I was scared. Fights never ended up being fair here: multiple people rib-booting one guy. My glasses were bound to go off anyway. I’d be done for in my myopia.
“You hidin’ somethin’?” Hector asked.
I was silent in my swoon. It just couldn’t be the foot, I thought.
“Let’s see the foot, motherfucker!” They grabbed my leg.
“Yo! That shit’s hideous,” Dustin said.
“We need to get a picture of that shit,” Hector said.
Dustin called downstairs to see if anyone had a camera.
“Hold up,” a girl said.
Hector went a few steps away to meet whoever it was whose only sounds were footfalls on the steps and perhaps a whisper.
“Got this shit,” Hector said, coming back into the room with excitement in his step. It was a disposable camera: good luck in a time prior to smartphones. I empathized with and envied the fun I knew they were having, the pain-killing feeling of power rushing through their systems.
Hector squatted down. Dustin, laughing and shaking his head, lifted my foot high into the frame.
“Cheese,” I said, as if unaware of the gravity of the situation.
Hector was satisfied. “You’re a pussy” were his last words. He flicked the switch and slammed the door closed, cutting me off from the hallway light.
I knew somehow he would not return to add to my degradation. Still, a distant sense came over me that such an abrupt and definitive closure, which left me in dark and echoless isolation, approximated being cast away by God at the grand gates. I entered a sort of timelessness, a sort of hibernation. I was not sleeping. And yet my mind really wasn’t doing anything.
Marissa came in, jarring me from this half sleep of escape. She helped me up from the alcove and walked me to the futon. In drunken-slur speech taught to me by my dad, I told her I loved her (yet another intentional misdirection to corroborate that I was out of it—that that was why). She made no response. She went to lay a goodbye hand on me, probably intending to give my leg a little squeeze so as to convey something like “poor boy” through touch. Happening to grab the mini pumpkin stems of my one bare foot, however, she recoiled with no concern to hide her repulsion. Breaking her tranquil demeanor, the soft and slow demeanor of a mother carrying her sleeping toddler from car to bed, she rushed out of the room. Once again the splash of hallway light was out on me.
The bathroom faucet went full blast in the next room. Completely in black except for street light made ruddy through the veil curtains, and lulled by the sound of cascading water, which I was waiting to cease so I could go wash my hands myself, I passed into a dreamless sleep. The burden of my behavior and the knowledge that my dark private parts were now known was perhaps so great that it knocked me out.
I woke up in the bright morning in a snap, as if someone had grabbed my shoulders and shaken me. I felt good for a second, staring at an unfamiliar ceiling fan cooling me. But that innocence was soon violated. All that had happened came back in a flood of horror augmented by the nothingness that was my dream.
I looked at my foot sticking out from the blanket. I recalled the feel of the small hand recoiling from it, the cold of her touch disappearing as soon as it came. I went to scrub my hands in fear that the night without washing had given the fungus a rooting chance. Indeed, I continued to scrub them over the next week, as I prepared for the one-on-one fight by duck-taping a pillow around a tree in the back yard to use as a punching bag.
The fight never ended up happening.
The family fungus has contributed to my doing some pretty regrettable things. One of the worst incidents occurred last August, after it had seemed to me that the fungus had spread to a fingernail.
At the beginning of that summer, my wife informed me that her mom, stepfather, niece, and nephew would be staying with us in August, the final stretch of my preparation for the comprehensive exam in 19th century literature. Because my summer was supposed to be spent in uninterrupted study until test day (right before the start of the fall semester), and because I was already worried about interruption being that I had a newborn child, this prospect—even though it was several months away—had me elbow a hole through the sheet rock in the room where they were to stay; it had me threaten that I would just live in a motel for that month. I didn’t want to be bothered by anyone, let alone a judgmental bastard like her stepfather.
For the first week I put up the best front I could, which simply involved staying away and studying. Since they were set up in the guest bedroom (the one with the oddly low-hung still-life of flowers in a vase), I had to work in my office off the garage. Usually I would work in the guest bedroom during the summer season because no air duct flows into my office and August heat in Texas is unbearable. That first week I handled the heat pretty well. I resigned myself to being soaked and sticking to everything, being one with it.
Their marveling not only at my work ethic (staying in that dungeon from 8am to 10pm each day), but also at my ability to handle the extreme heat (which had put more people from our county in the hospital that summer than the last ten summers combined), fueled my dedication. I did find myself getting annoyed almost every time I would go in to piss or get a drink, with this guy harping on such things as the table edges needing to be lined with rubber cushions so that our one-year old wouldn’t get injured. And yet, against my typical instinct, I didn’t harp on it. I didn’t let all the usual types of scenarios play out in my head: scenarios where I’m telling him off, calling his God a child-killing rapist, making fun of the fact that he’s an ignorant fucker who works at Walmart, or swinging the hammer at his head.
Beyond the first week, though, my wife’s stepfather started to get restless, apparently wanting to avoid feeling that he was not contributing to the household. He was that sort of Christian, the sort that just had to be the one giving. The disempowerment of receiving being too much for him to bear, he could not do otherwise than be the one to do unto others as he would not have them do unto him.
One afternoon, while I was laboring away in my office, he started cleaning up the garage: stacking my car ramps, organizing my paints, breaking down my boxes, ordering my sockets, commenting out loud about all the mud-dauber mounds and bees nests, and so on. The noise was not the only distraction. Since my office door needed to be open so that the CO2 from the water heater wouldn’t build up on me and I would get at least some airflow, he kept passing through my sights. I couldn’t concentrate on my work. It wasn’t just the sensory stimulation. It was the fact that this guy was acting in charge of my home. These were my duties.
His next move was to start up the car, my car, letting it run in the garage even though I needed fresh air. It had to be a whole minute that passed. I was on the verge of shutting the car off and explaining to this ignorant asshole that I don’t want to be breathing exhaust fumes. Just as I was getting up, though, he came out and backed the car into the driveway.
He started sweeping the garage. Each stroke knocked me away from the words. My thoughts started taking me down that addicting path to the dark. He was saying, in effect, that I wasn’t handling my duties, that I wasn’t handling the captain role of the household, and so someone needed to step in for me. It didn’t help that he was a big black motherfucker, palms you could strike a match on.
I stormed into the house with a glabella-creased look of anger so that my wife would see. Deep down I must have been expecting the impossible, what I often expected of her: that she would make this all go away. Frustrated by the impotence of my look to make the impossible come to be, I stormed to the closet of the master bedroom. I flung myself about the small chamber, beating my fists against the floor and my chest, filling the space with hot sighs, and ripping all the clothes down so that she would see what she had brought about.
Later that night, ashamed at my behavior and hoping the guests didn’t think anything of the commotion, I reasoned that the outburst was a good thing. It purged some of the rage from my system. It allowed me to begin the next day afresh, calm and grateful for not ruining things despite how close I came. And even if the worst was true, that they had been aware of my tantrum, at least they would know to keep clear and stop meddling.
My wife’s stepfather did get the hint that I didn’t want him around me, that I didn’t want to hear him. What he didn’t get was that I didn’t want him doing anything—indeed, that I didn’t want him or his wife in my damn house. He went ahead and installed child-safety locks on the cabinets early in the morning, as I found out when I had to bust the door off to get some cereal on that first day of the new me.
A few hours later, when I went inside for something, he was standing in the middle of the backyard, shaking his head at the condition of the lawn. It needed to be cut, which is something I wasn’t going to do until after the test, and there were brown patches all over. I was watching him from the kitchen when he called out my wife’s name. I was in the middle of a conversation with her, and yet she broke mid-sentence to sprint out to him. Along with the fact that my wife was expected to serve his food, dress his meat, poor his drink, wash his clothes (even though I’m the one who does the cooking and laundry in the house), here was yet another sign that I wasn’t the captain.
It was clear that he was scolding her for the lawn looking the way it did. This set a fire in me. I tried to snuff it out and concentrate on what was really important, telling myself that I just needed to chill out with my control and insecurity issues. I walked back to my office. I breathed in. I breathed out. I breathed in. I breathed out.
Then I heard him start tugging at the rip cord to the lawnmower. I ran in and told my wife that he needs to be wary of hitting one of the in-ground sprinkler heads, which was my passive-aggressive way of saying that he needed to stop what he was doing. My wife assured me that he knew about them and would be careful. I tried to think of something else to discourage the mowing, something else to give her the hint that I didn’t want him going through with it. Nothing came.
Having returned from a car ride (both to cool off and to show my wife my frustration), I noticed that he had set the mower-level higher than I usually did. The implication was that I had been cutting the lawn too low. I noticed that he had bagged the clippings. The implication was that I should have been bagging the clippings. The lawn was looking better than it ever did.
I sweltered in my office in dampness. I tried to block out the sound and the idea of someone fixing my problems. I tried to convince myself that letting this get to me was silly. I tried to concentrate on the wavy words of the study outlines that I had spent the entire summer constructing. These words rocked my attention over to the paper’s edge.
I stared for a while at it, not believing what I was seeing. The nail of my right thumb was yellowed and buckled up like sidewalk from sub-surface tree roots. Not even my grandfather had it on his fingers. It was this, and so not only his upsetting my routine and exposing my inadequacies with all his help and oppressive ministrations, that had me swooning to lash out.
I went in, high once again on that rage familiar from youth, looking for something. I filled my cup with water at the fridge, hand trembling from the onset of the drug, brow down and lips tight to let my wife know how pissed I was. The mower started to make a strange sound. I looked out at the man in the noon sun of the backyard and right away noticed that my small gas container was outside of the shed. The small gas can had gas-oil mix. The gas-oil mix was what the weed-whacker took, not the lawnmower. I shot a look at my wife, who was sitting at the table still pussyfooting around me.
“Did he fill the mower with the small gas can?” I tried so say calmly, as if I was not already high as a kite.
My wife should have known better, but she immediately responded with what she believed was the case: “I think he did.”
“See, I fucking knew this shit would happen!”
Possessed, I found myself decide to slam the filled glass down onto the tile. Possessed, I found myself slamming the glass down onto the tile. Shards flew everywhere before my wife and kid. I stepped through the glass, careless. Although I was already feeling guilty, as I always do right after outbursts, I tried to justify my outburst and yet block out the memory of my outburst with an even more radical outburst: I punched and kicked the shit out of the door to the garage that was in my path, feeling power as I blasted right through the hollow core with ease in my demonic fury.
I was ashamed. I was sorry mostly because I was afraid (and only a little because of the danger in which I had put my child). But still I stormed barefoot down the driveway and down the street. In a voice of deference and concern for me that would not have been there had she waited a few more seconds to realize that this was unacceptable and that a strong woman shouldn’t tolerate such abuse, my wife called out from the garage: “No. I don’t think he did it.” I knew she was lying.
I said nothing, plunging forward barefoot. As I passed the next-door homes, I prayed not to encounter anyone. Neighbors would’ve heard the commotion if they were out, and I didn’t want to face them.
My wife, I feared, would come after me. I didn’t want the drama to play out in public. As I came to the second and third streets, I kept the same powerwalk. I gave waves, smiles, and even cracking-voiced “beautiful days” at those mowing or sitting out on their porches, knowing that my eyes blazed with too much brightness. Right after eye contact I would glance down at my own feet, likely with and because of these people. I just couldn’t fight the urge each time to see how they must have looked, bare and bloody in the street. Legs spotted with blood and a big shard of glass in my foot, I plunged on as if there was some explanation for all of this, an explanation not serious enough to keep me from being polite.
I said, “Hey bud,” in my old cheery voice (just a little hoarse), to a neighborhood boy. We had met earlier that summer when I was out bike riding, my child in the trailer towed behind me.
“Cut’s better,” he said. He stuck out his chin to show me as he approached on his scooter. The boy was referring to our first meeting. He had been doing tricks on his scooter as my son and I passed that day, and one move sent him face-planting into the street. I had walked him to his door, telling him that it would be okay as I held my son’s bib to his mouth for the gushing blood.
“Where’s your little boy?” he asked.
“Back at home,” I said, looking away from his eyes ashamed.
“You’re bleeding!” he called out after me, my feet slapping the concrete.
“Prickers in the woods,” I found myself say. I clenched my eyes and mouth shut for a moment, praying that he wouldn’t keep on with questions or come after me.
Finally I reached the path on which I often rode my bike. A good way into the woods, in the relief of privacy, I lay down. The pains of my injuries swept into the foreground. I sat up. Pulling out the glass in my feet, pulling out the shards of wood from my knuckles and ankles, I started crying. “What the fuck did I do?”
The setting sun flickered through the trees. I was wishing I could take it back, unable to see how life could go on. This was the end to things, I feared. But I hoped that everyone might consider that I was under a lot of stress studying for the major exam. What do they know about getting a PhD? Remembering that the fungus had reached my hand, I put my head down on the dirt path.
Night fell. Eventually, I slunk back and sat in the driveway. All were taking turns looking out the door with light spilling not only from the window, but also from the three new holes beneath it: my mother-in-law, my stepfather-in-law, my wife, and even my niece and nephew—everyone worried-looking. My wife left in the car several times. I hid low on the side of the house as she did, probably under the eyes of the neighbors. Finally she waited in my garage office. I made myself known then, pouting. I wanted to reveal that the fungus had spread. But I reasoned that this would be in bad taste right away. She was aware of my obsession about the fungus. But she wouldn’t accept this as an excuse.
I bandaged myself in the master bathroom. She yelled and scolded me. I expressed how ashamed I was to show my face. Soon enough, though, she tried to make me feel better, as she always did.
“No one knows what exactly happened,” she said.
I knew they did. The delusion into which she was desperate to lure both of us could not stand the test of reality. How could the door be explained anyway? Her words, nevertheless, were a welcomed sign that our life together would go on past this point.
Might it be possible to reestablish my character after such a disgrace? In the dark, lying back to back in bed, I cut the silence.
“I think the fungus spread to my thumb.” I was about to add, “That’s what set me off.” But I restrained myself just as my mouth opened.
She said nothing. I wondered if she was thinking that my fungus being out open on the hand was the last straw for us, the last straw especially in light of my most violent show of rage to date.
The next day I told my mother-in-law I was ashamed. I asked for her forgiveness.
“Are you scared of him?” she asked.
“I just don’t like confrontation,” I said. “I didn’t want to tell him he made a mistake. He was doing me a favor. This test has me screwed up.”
The typically story after I overreact to a legitimate gripe, I was the one that needed to apologize. I said sorry for making him uncomfortable and hugged the man, my guilt giving him full control over the ship.
He still wanted to do work. My wife and mother-in-law asked me repeatedly on his behalf if it was okay if he did. I said “Yes,” out of shame. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want the worry of him being out there doing work, making me look even worse than before by continuing to serve the household after what I had done. But I didn’t want to say “No,” especially after what I had done.
He claimed he needed weed-whacking glasses, an item that I didn’t have and so yet another sign that I had been doing things wrong. Needing to get a replacement door anyway, I went to Lowe’s.
The sales associate asked, “First, is it an interior or exterior door to be replaced?”
I tried to appear as if I wasn’t trying to angle my knuckles—scabbed and glistening with puss—away from his line of sight. The thought came to me that I was going to be doing this a lot now that the fungus had started to spread to the light of day.
“I guess interior,” I said. “Goes garage to kitchen.”
“Well, that’s an exterior, actually. So you’ll need steel reinforced, not hollow-core wood like this.”
“But this is more like the old one.”
“That’s no good for an exterior. You can actually put your first right through it. Tear you up, but its easy.”
“Really?!” I said in feigned surprise. “Steel reinforced it is, then!”
It turned out that my door frame was special and I didn’t want to risk damaging things more by installing it myself. So I called to have the Lowe’s people install it for me. The quickest they could do it was in two weeks. So for the next week that the kids and my wife’s mother and stepfather were at the house the door remained with its glaring holes. Someone had to stop my son from sticking his hands through several times until my wife’s stepfather eventually taped them up.
That afternoon thereby lingered on in the bloody knuckles and the holes through which my toddler would constantly peer and try to break through. I tried not to look at the door in their presence and in my presence they tried to do the same. But it was there, there with its own personality—like each nail ravaged by the fungus.
Grateful that I still had a family, I accepted the prospect of my hands going hideous as punishment. And it turned out that I had more to be grateful for. The fingernail issue turned out to be a false alarm. The buckled region of the thumb, likely due to some injury, grew out over the months. The close call intensified my obsession. It was a wakeup call. And so began my full on war with the fungus.
I had been battling all along, of course. For years I had been clipping and filing the bastards down bloody. And before that I had consistently employed the home remedy my dad taught me one weekend visit when, against better judgment and usual practice, I gritted through a shower at his place.
On the Friday afternoon in question, a summer blackout had swept across the eastern seaboard, cutting off the fans, the Richard Bey Show, and the lights on the Christmas tree. The radio reported that this was going to last several days, which meant my dad wouldn’t have his refrigeration.
We walked to the A&P and bought out the remaining ice bags. There were so many bags and twelve packs of Busch that we pushed the rogue-wheeled shopping cart through Groveville projects and back to our apartment across from Fairview Cemetery.
The tub was still full, from the previous weekend, of purple water and a mixed load of darks and lights: a pair of jeans, some shirts and socks and underwear. We just added the ice to that.
Usually I wouldn’t shower there. My dad had well water and just one hard ratty towel. But not only was I sizzling away without any fans, I hadn’t taken a shower in about a week because the bathrooms at my mom’s building (the pay-by-the-week in Poughkeepsie) were suspected of harboring meningitis. (Several people were hospitalized, one a classmate who went into a coma and eventually died.)
“Dad, when can I shower?”
“What you mean? Whenever you want. Daddy’s place is your place.”
“What about the clothes?”
“Go in with those mahfuckers,” he said, there on the toilet with his Busch and Newport. “How you think they’re gonna get clean? Stomp me some grapes, boy.”
He turned on the faucet for me, aware that I didn’t know how his shower worked. No more than four thin streams of water shot their own crooked direction from the barnacled showerhead. The space filled with the smell of rotten eggs. I stepped into the frigidity and closed the mildewed cloth to block myself from him, back on the toilet: his spot since the blackout. The iciness almost to my knees, the fact that I wasn’t really getting wet, and the prospect of pissing on clothes had me all clenched up and unable to free my bladder. It was not hearing me go, so it seemed, that prompted my dad to give me the advice that I would use every shower afterwards, almost always recalling this occasion as I did.
“Don’t worry about pissin’, Johnny boy. It’s good for the clothes. It kills the fungus. Like when daddy pisses on his toes.”
He fished through the clothing waters for a brewski.
“Madonna does it.”
The familiar crack cut through the space, followed by an “Aahh” of refreshment.
“Nature’s disinfectant, boy.”
Obviously the pissing all by itself didn’t work. At the counsel of my wife, and since for the first time in my life I had health insurance now that I was in a graduate program, I went to the doctor’s. The doctor touched my toes barehanded. That was amazing to me. He said that my fungus was a systemic condition and that no topical remedy would work. He told me that he could prescribe a pill, but that the costs—especially for my liver—drastically outweighed the benefits. He recommended going the pill route as a last resort: if my walking was badly hindered or if—since I told him this was a great concern of mine—it spread to my fingers. He did give me a nail polish to put on before the shower to keep the toenails dry. Since fungus flourishes in dampness, this and good hygiene practices he said would inhibit the spread.
The doctor’s words were a comfort. Even so, my desire to carry out an offensive attack had not been satisfied. I was confident that with the sort of dedication only I could muster, the sort that made me the first in my family—several of whom were bottle-collecting illiterates—to graduate high school (let alone to be on the verge of getting a PhD), I could prove the doctor wrong about how no topical approach could snuff out the embers. If my Newburgh-Beacon hometown could be changed from an urban-decay hub of condemned-house drug-spots to hipster-paradise of farmers markets, community gardens, deep-clay art therapy, year-round scarves, gluten-free grains, cowboy boots with grandma dresses, and all these shutter-shaded whites of Hitlerjugend hair and artisanal green tattoos riding fixed gear bikes with ukuleles to see their fen shui guide or to pick up locavore cuisine, then surely I could do this.
I invested in quite an expensive repertoire of blog-sworn home remedies. I combined them all into what I just knew was going to be the master cure. There was apple cider vinegar, Listerine, hydrogen peroxide, rubbing alcohol, tea tree oil, garlic oil, garlic pills, Vick’s vapor rub, bleach, Selsun Blue, nail polish remover, Clotrimazole, Monistat 7, ammonia, and yes—urine.
I bought a maroon cat litter box at the dollar store and each morning, after scrubbing my feet with Selsun Blue and drinking a few tablespoons of apple cider vinegar (the one with “The Mother”), I would fill it with piss and let my feet soak while I watched the morning news, the back end propped up with books so that the fluid would gather at the toes, ensuring submersion. This was not going to be, to use the phrase of the local politicians from my youth, a “one block at a time” deal. I would wash up afterwards with Selsun Blue again and apply hydrogen peroxide followed by rubbing alcohol. After air-drying, I would Q-tip them lightly with bleach, then garlic oil, then vapor rub.
For my midday procedure I would wash with Selsun Blue and soak in apple cider vinegar. After washing again, I would follow up with a peroxide and alcohol rinse. Once air dried I would apply tea tree oil followed by Clotrimazole. I held off on the bleach for fear of too much getting into my blood stream, which presumably was not that hard for it to do since a major part of my whole master procedure was keeping the nail emery-boarded down bloody to the nailbed.
Before bed I would first do any needed filing, dish gloves on my hands and carpenter’s mask on my face so that none of the airborne flakes would set up shop in the moist depths of my lungs, the perfect environment for fungus. After rubbing them with nail polish remover, I would soak in Listerine. The challenge was to keep my feet submerged in the footbath until at least the midway point of the show I was watching. (At the time I especially enjoyed Intervention, an hour program about drug addicts. Watching Intervention was a way to reminisce from a safe distance about the hometown now so far away: the toothless bums, the busted factory windows. It was also a way to stoke the thrust-fire of my exit ambition, so that I wouldn’t succumb to whatever had my family collecting bottles toothless or living in the woods. No doubt it was also a way to satisfy my thirst to witness the exploitation of the self-destructing. As I learned before even double digits, exploiting the crazies around me, instigating them to drink and to fight for my own amusement, was an aikido move to twist what was a cortisol hell of helplessness into a dopamine heaven of control.) After a peroxide-alcohol rinse of my blue-stained feet, I would dab another dose of the tea tree fungicide and follow it with Monistat 7.
Almost two weeks had gone by and my toenails were looking pretty good. How I understood it, the enemy was on the retreat. My feet, on the other hand, were looking like shit. A week in they were red and sore to the touch. I remedied this by attempting to submerge only the nails during my disinfectant soaks, keeping my feet arched and paying constant attention.
The foot as a whole responded well to this break from the chemicals. The skin around the nails never themselves got a break, though. Soon sores formed on the toe skin below the base of each infected nail. Because it happened to be only the infected nails, I reasoned that it wasn’t the chemicals themselves causing the sores. I imagined that the fungus had receded deep within the toe, not just under the nail, and the sores were a sign of its dying and surfacing. Come to think about it now, it was probably just that I was only filing the diseased nails down, thereby allowing the chemicals to react with tender areas.
The sores had gone away after a while as the skin around the nail got used to the harsh chemicals, got somewhat brown-calloused even. As I kept up with the process, though, in between my toes and a ways up the topside of my feet got extremely itchy and red. What I had pictured going on was that the fungus from the nails were so desperate to escape into the skin and away from the tips of the feet that it was heading in a wave for my leg, this being what my extreme sort of toenail fungus must look like when it infects the skin.
All my toes at this point had been flared and itching, even the good ones. On one occasion, when the itching got poison-oak-times-five uncontrollable, I flew into a rage against the scourge, frantically soaking my feet to the ankles in bleach. Sizzling, I could endure only a minute until I had to jump into the shower.
Over the next day the rash had spread a bit further up the topside of the feet. The itching bloomed so intolerable that I was compelled to stop the treatments. I avoided scratching, not only because that would just rile the itch, but because I figured that was what the rash “wanted,” allowing it to spread to unpunished places like my fingers. I had convinced myself that it was just athlete’s foot or a close cousin, manifesting so severely because the treatments had made the feet so raw, cracked, and lacking in any infection-quelling microbes. I bought tolnaftate foot-and-sneaker spray and some foot power, applying these after I would wash my feet gently and then blow dry the itch—sometimes violating the riling taboo by turning up the heat and speed of the air, and then closing the nozzle-to-skin distance.
The itching opened up full throttle one night when I was sleeping. Knowing what I was doing but caring less about the consequences (dreamtime providing a pretense, as it so often had throughout the history of humanity), I started itching the itchiest foot with the other. I figured that this was exactly what the fungus wanted. I had already broken down and scratched, and so realizing this didn’t make me stop. I threw my left foot, the itchiest one, onto the rug and scraped it back and forth in a burst of fury, intentionally striving for rug burn. I was hitting the area perfectly, but the excruciating itch was never fazed. It was as if its epicenter were some part of my foot dwelling in a spatial dimension inaccessible to me.
Mad at my breakdown, I went to the bathroom to clean off my feet, throbbing and itching all the more. My toes were all blood and puss. I threw Listerine on both feet. The pain woke me up even from phony dreamtime. I sprayed and powdered afterwards. Before going to bed I wrapped Saran wrap around my feet and put socks on over that.
By morning the foot was covered with pustules leaking fluid that crusted green. I couldn’t move my feet, couldn’t wiggle my toes or anything. Blisters had formed in other areas that I didn’t even target during the rug burning. And every time I tried to bend the toe of my left foot, a gash would rip open, oozing puss and blood.
Throughout the next few days I found myself wishing I could have my old condition back (four nails affected by the family fungus) if this pain and discomfort would just end. The rash did go away since I was no longer doing my treatments. But the original fungus was left behind unfazed.
It was the one that wouldn’t stop paining since the treatments began, the fourth toe of my left foot, that I eventually chopped. It was a crazy scene that day. Fighting with my wife about her mom and stepdad coming to stay here yet again this summer, I had stubbed the toe on the couch walking away. I yelled, as I had yelled many times with no intention of actually following through on it, “I’m gonna fuckin’ chop this bitch off!” I had hoped for some reason that these words would shock her despite the fact that she had heard them before. My wife wasn’t fazed. She thought I was just flapping at the lips, being a coward.
Pissed off all the more by her not believing me, fueled by her not trusting that I was capable of doing such a thing, I stormed off to the garage. I grabbed the bypass loppers mounted on the wall, well-rusted from having spent the spring forgotten in the lawn. Just as plopping down on a pissed toilet seat makes stroking out a nut in the public bathroom so much more risqué, the same went for the fact that I was going to use blades in such a blunt state of corrosion.
I rested the tip of the metal head, covered in orange powder, down to the concrete. Palms of my hands resting overtop the ends of the together-handles like palms overtop the hilt of a sword in the case of a knight in prayer, I leaned over and doubted my nerve to do this. The recognition that I wasn’t going to go through with this made me feel like a coward. I was tired of it. I found myself pushing open the left handle to the side until it leaned against the edge of the workstation counter where I keep my sockets. Stubby blade mouth open, I set my toe in. A little plucked note of doubt sounded off in my mind. But at once I muffled it out with a tuba-blast slam of the right handle down toward the other braced against the counter’s ledge: “Uh-sa!”
The toe was alone, away from me—a mere thing on the concrete. Despite being in that familiar position of did-I-really-just-do-this?, there was undeniable gratification—liberation—seeing detached from me the very fungus that had smoldered down the paternal line, reaching me in the early 90s through that very toe. Whatever regret was present, it was not the sort to have me put the toe on ice. I was done with it. I tossed it in the oil pan, among the grasshoppers dead in the blackened grease.
My wife threatened to leave me for being “sick in the head.” I refused to go the hospital. The bleeding was contained. No medical attention would’ve been needed if it weren’t for the fact that now, a few weeks past the incident, my jaw muscles won’t stop locking up on me. We will be going in to see if it is indeed tetanus. People my age and in this country are supposed to be immunized against it. But if anyone had fallen through that vaccination crack, it was me. And I definitely didn’t get any booster shot.
