Here's the flotsam and jetsam of my med school education.
And I tell how sometimes they tried to save the little boy by cutting off his scrotum, but this was before hospitals and drugs. In the eighteenth century, they still called these kind of tumors "soot warts."
"And those soot warts," I tell the kids, "were the first form of cancer ever invented."
Then I ask, does anybody know why they call it cancer?
No hands.
I say, "Don't make me call on somebody."
Back in the smokehouse, Miss Lacey was running her fingers through the clumps of her damp hair, and said, "So?" As if it's just an innocent question, she says, "You have a life outside of here?"
And wiping my armpits dry with my powdered wig, I say, "Let's not pretend, okay?"
She's bunching up her pantyhose the way women do so they can snake their legs inside, and says, "This kind of anonymous sex is a symptom of a sex addict."
I'd rather think of myself as a playboy, James Bond type of guy.
And Miss Lacey says, "Well, maybe James Bond was a sex addict."
Here, I'm supposed to tell her the truth. I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.
In a way, being an addict is very proactive.
A good addiction takes the guesswork out of death. There is such a thing as planning your getaway.
And for serious, it's such a chick thing to think that any human life should just go on and on.
See also: Dr. Paige Marshall.
See also: Ida Mancini.
The truth is, sex isn't sex unless you have a new partner every time. The first time is the only session when your head and body are both there. Even the second hour of that first time, your head can start to wander. You don't get the full anesthetic quality of good first-time anonymous sex.
What would Jesus NOT do?
But instead of all that, I just lied to Miss Lacey and said, "How can I reach you?"
I tell the fourth-graders that they call it cancer because when the cancer starts growing inside you, when it breaks through your skin, it looks like a big red crab. Then the crab breaks open and it's all bloody and white inside.
"Whatever the doctors tried," I tell the silent little kids, "every little boy would end up dirty and diseased and screaming in terrible pain. And who can tell me what happened next?"
No hands go up.
"For sure," I say, "he died, of course."
And I put the poker back into the fire.
"So," I say, "any questions?"
No hands go up, so I tell them about the fairly bogus studies where scientists shaved mice and smeared them with smegma from horses. This was supposed to prove foreskins caused cancer.
A dozen hands go up, and I tell them, "Ask your teacher."
What a frigging job that must've been, shaving those poor mice. Then finding a bunch of uncircumcised horses.
The clock on the mantel shows our half hour is almost over. Out through the window, Denny's still bent over in the stocks. He's only got until one o'clock. A stray village dog stops next to him and lifts its leg, and the stream of steaming yellow goes straight into Denny's wooden shoe.
"And what else," I say, "is George Washington kept slaves and didn't ever chop down a cherry tree, and he was really a woman."
As they push toward the door I tell them, "And don't mess with the dude in the stocks anymore." I shout, "And lay off shaking the damn chicken eggs."
Just to stir the turd, I tell them to ask the cheesemaker why his eyes are all red and dilated. Ask the blacksmith about the icky lines going up and down the insides of his arms. I call after the infectious little monsters, any moles or freckles they have, that's just cancer waiting to happen. I call after them, "Sunshine is your enemy. Stay off the sunny side of the street."
Chapter 29
AFTER DENNY'S MOVED IN, I find a block of salt-and-pepper granite in the fridge. Denny lugs home chunks of basalt, his hands stained red with iron oxide. He wraps his pink baby blanket around black granite cobbles and smooth washed river rocks and slabs of sparkling mica quartzite and brings them home on the bus.
All those babies that Denny adopts. A whole generation piling up.
Denny carts home sandstone and limestone one blocky soft pink armload at a time. In the driveway, he hoses the mud off them. Denny stacks them behind the sofa in the living room. He stacks them in the kitchen corners.
Every day, I come home from a hard day in the eighteenth century, and here's a big lava rock on the kitchen counter next to the sink. There's this little gray boulder on the second shelf down in the fridge.
"Dude," I say. "Why's there a rock in the fridge."
Denny's here in the kitchen, taking warm clean rocks out of the dishwasher and swiping them with a dish towel, and he says, "Because that's my shelf, you said so." He says, "And that's not just a rock, that's granite."
"But why in the fridge?" I go.
And Denny says, "Because the oven is already full."
The oven is full of rocks. The freezer is full. The kitchen cabinets are so full they're coming down off the wall.
The plan was only one rock a day, but Denny's got such an addictive personality. Now he has to cart home a half-dozen rocks every day just to maintain his habit. Every day the dishwasher is running and the kitchen counters are spread with my mom's good bath towels covered with rocks so they can air-dry. Round gray rocks. Square black rocks. Broken brown and streaked yellow rocks. Travertine limestone. Every new batch that Denny brings home, he loads in the dishwasher and throws the clean, dry rocks from the day before into the basement.
At first you can't see the basement floor because of all the rocks. Then the rocks are piling up around the bottom step. Then the basement's filled to halfway up the stairs. Now you open the basement door and the rocks piled inside spill out into the kitchen. Anymore, there is no basement.
"Dude, the place is filling up," I say. "It feels like we're living in the bottom half of an hourglass."
Like somehow we're running out of time.
Being buried alive.
Denny in his dirty clothes, his waistcoat coming apart under the arms, his cravat hanging in threads, he waits at each bus stop cradling each pink bundle against his chest. He bounces each armload when the muscles in his arms start to fall asleep. After the bus comes, Denny with dirt smeared on his cheeks snores leaned against the drumming metal inside of the bus, still holding his baby.
At breakfast I say, "Dude, you said your plan was one rock each day."
And Denny says, "That's all I do. Just one."
And I say, "Dude, you are such a junkie." I say, "Don't lie. I know you're doing at least ten rocks a day."
Putting a rock in the bathroom, in the medicine cabinet, Denny says, "Okay, so I'm a little ahead of schedule."
There's rocks hidden in the toilet tank, I tell him.
And I say, "Just because it's rocks doesn't mean this still isn't substance abuse."
Denny with his running nose, with his shaved head, his baby blanket wet in the rain, he waits at each bus stop, coughing. He shifts the bundle from arm to arm. With his face tucked in close, he pulls up the pink satin edge of the blanket. To better protect his baby this looks like, but really to hide the fact that it's volcanic tufa.
The rain's running off the back of his tricorner hat. Rocks tear out the inside of his pockets.
Inside his sweaty clothes, carrying all that weight, Denny keeps getting skinnier and skinnier.
Heaving around what looks like a baby, it's just a waiting game until somebody in the neighborhood gets him nailed for child abuse and neglect. People are just itching to declare somebody an unfit parent and put some kid in a foster home, hey but that's just been my experience.