The FDA has become supercautious: DMSO—dimethyl sulfoxide —is still not released for any but experimental use. Many ordinary citizens have become wildly experimental (“Here, try my pills!”). The laws governing narcotics are hopelessly confused, and apparently as hopeless to enforce.
Once upon a time, common sense could distinguish between cures and quackery; but then, we used to think charlatans and miracle-makers were identical in the twentieth century.
THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING
M. E. White
It was Saturday. When I got up I found my cousins (I was raised by an uncle, an aunt, and two older cousins) packing away a lot of men’s clothing that hung in the closet in Uncle Joe’s bedroom. I said, “Good morning.”
They both smiled and said, “Go call the Goodwill Industries, darling.”
I said that I would be very happy to phone the Goodwill. First, however, I made a routine check of the house—for Uncle Joe. I didn’t find him, and so, naturally, I assumed that he was no longer with us and that we were giving his clothes away, that’s the way it was with Aunt Maude. We gave all her clothes to the Salvation Army. I called the Goodwill.
Then I just sat there in the hall for a while and thought about calling a practitioner to pray for me. I have been thinking wrong all week and am still menstruating as a result. Interestingly enough, I think wrong on the average of once a month, but I hate to call the practitioner this often; so, instead, I just thought that I would work on it myself. I have had an extremely religious upbringing, but this religion is no fly-by-Sunday affair, and one has to work constantly at becoming better and better. That is what finally happened to Uncle Joe, you see, he just became so good that he finally divested himself of all mortal error. Right there at the end, though, I thought he’d lost his faith —moaning like he did. That is probably one reason that I am menstruating today because I thought wrong of Uncle Joe.
I went back into the bedroom and relayed the phone message. “They’ll come this afternoon,” I said. My cousins were still busy emptying drawers of socks and ties. A large number of boxes were piled in the hallway, and I began to drag these out to the service porch.
What bothered me about Uncle Joe’s disappearance was the necessity of speaking to Miss Collins about it. Miss Collins is one of the headshrinkers at our school, which is quite progressive, and, since I don’t take Health and Hygiene, because of a religious conflict, I spend an hour every day talking to her. Last week she got quite upset when she found that Aunt Maude was no longer with us either. She said, “How is your aunt? I haven’t seen her for quite some time,” and I had to admit that I didn’t know because I hadn’t seen her for almost a year myself.
After all the clothes had been bundled and lugged out to the service porch, I drove my cousins down to the hairdresser’s. They always have their hair done on Saturdays. Then I came back to wait for the Goodwill truck to come. The truck and three men came about the middle of the afternoon.
“Lots of clothes,” the driver observed.
“Yeah,” I said, dragging out boxes.
“You folks moving out or something?”
I said, “No,” and smiled, trying in a friendly manner to discourage conversation.
All three of the Goodwill men were dressed, or tattooed, similarly: battleships, anchors, hearts, large mothers, pinup girls designated, from the left: Ida, May, and Rosalie. The driver of the truck also had a large number of butterflies tattooed around his navel, and his Levi’s were pulled low enough to make me wonder where the butterflies stopped, but I’ve learned to keep my curiosity to myself.
“That it, girlie?”
I nodded, and they drove away.
Then I went down to the Farmer’s Market to get the bread. We get three loaves every two weeks and freeze them. At the Market I ran into a couple of girls from school. They said, “Hi, diphtheria,” referring to a disease that I don’t believe in and a shot that I did not take with the rest of my classmates. Instead, I had spent the time with Miss Collins, who said that, even though the shots conflicted with my religious beliefs, I should take them in respect to those who believe differently and might, therefore, catch diphtheria from me. If I don’t get the disease, I can’t see how anyone is going to catch it from me. I did not upset Miss Collins with this simple explanation, however, and told her that I would think seriously over the matter of contagious diseases.
After I got the bread, I picked up my cousins at Ivan’s. At dinner that night there was another empty place and an extra potato. We all sat at one end of the dining-room table.
Clarice said, “Have another potato,” at regular intervals.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t very hungry.
Finally, Alice ate the potato, which was a relief. I mean it was nice to get rid of the potato. “Did the Goodwill take everything?” she asked.
I said, yes, that they had come about two.
“That’s nice. I hope it didn’t keep you from doing anything you wanted to do this afternoon.”
I said that it didn’t. It didn’t.
After dinner I went right to bed. At first, I couldn’t get to sleep, and, then, when I did, I had a dream. People started crawling over me like ants. The room squirmed with them, big, dark, on the walls, the ceiling, the dresser, and me. Then, suddenly, they began to disappear, the ones at the back first and then the ones nearer to me. Pretty soon I was all alone. I went outside—nobody. I drove down Wilshire to Figueroa without meeting another driver although there were a few empty cars parked at random in the street and at stop signs. Olympic was strangely lifeless, too. Finally, I stopped at a gas station to use the pay phone; no one I knew answered, so I phoned some people I didn’t know in the A’s. They didn’t answer either.
In the morning Clarice shook me and said, “Get up, darling.” I was certainly surprised to see her. “You won’t have time for breakfast if you don’t get up,” she said. I just stared at her.
“Get up,” Clarice repeated. She combed a high forehead wave of bluish gray hair into place and smiled at me in the dresser mirror.
I got up and brushed my teeth. After I had dressed and stuffed down two biscuits, we left for church.
The lesson was “Probation after Death,” and the church was filled when we arrived, which struck me funny. Dreams can seem very real, and I wasn’t quite awake. The first reader got up and said, “Depart from evil, and do good; and dwell for evermore.”
Then everyone stood up to recite the responsive reading:
“Know ye not, that so many of us as we were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?
“Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in the newness of life.
“For if we have been planted together in the likeness of death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.”
At this point my mind began to wander. I pictured myself pushing the rock away from the sepulchre and staring down at the nail holes in my hands. Then I sat down on the ground and began examining the holes in my feet. A lot of other people followed me out of the cave and began doing the same thing:
“No one will believe it when I tell them.”
“Where are my gloves? Looking at these holes makes me feel like puking.”
“By God, I can stick two fingers through each hand.”
“Now ain’t that lucky. I can damn near get my whole fist through mine.”