His wife was playing with his penis when she said “Good God, you’ve blood coming out of the hole.” He went to a doctor, afraid he had something serious. His wife went with him, saying “Don’t get excited, it’s probably nothing. People always think they have the worst when they should think that nine times out of ten they have nothing, and if they do have something, it can usually be cured simply and quickly.” The doctor said it was a minor case of prostatitis and prescribed pills that would clear up the infection in two weeks. “Can I have sex during this time?” he asked and the doctor said “By all means — it’s good for the prostate gland. Only thing to stop you from it now is if your wife for the next few days minds a drop or two of your blood.”
For a year his uncle showed him a lot of attention. He took him to professional baseball and hockey games every other week, took him to first-run movies or Broadway plays at night, let him stay with him an entire summer month at his beach house, gave him a hundred dollars on his birthday and told him to buy what he liked with it. They were never close before then, and after the year his uncle stopped calling or coming by. He’d call his uncle and his uncle would say “I’m busy this weekend, kid. I’ll see you next Saturday or Sunday,” and the next weekend he wouldn’t call or show up either. Finally Don’s mother told him “I think my brother’s going through some change-of-life crisis — don’t feel it’s your fault he doesn’t act the way he used to with you.” Ten years later his mother called and said “Uncle Nat died in Miami last night — a heart attack. I’m flying down with Dad — can you look after my plants?” He said “I’d like to come too,” and she said “What for? — you two were never close.”
His wife said “Let’s renew our marriage vows, just together, Carole can stay with my mother. We’ll write the ceremony ourselves, be our own witnesses and judge, go on the Caribbean honeymoon we never took, not tell anyone what we’ve done and only my mother where we’re going — it’ll be our one secret we’ll keep from everyone for life.” “Let me think about it,” he said, and that was the last they spoke of it.
He was thumbing through the phone directory looking for the zip code page when his wife said “Excuse me, I don’t mean to bother you if you’re doing anything important, but would you like to go to bed for fifteen minutes?” “I just want to find this,” he said and she said “What are you looking for? A zip code; for Christ sakes. Forget my proposal,” and he said “No no, I have it now just let me mark it down,” and she said “Next time I should try to catch you when you’re reading page five of the Post, because I’m not asking too much, am I?” and he said “No, I can always do it; just it might take a little more time.”
His wife said “Please don’t take it — it can’t be good for you. The others here are all heads and know how to handle the stuff,” and he said “I always wanted to take a trip — now’s my chance, and I swear I’ll be okay,” and swallowed the LSD tab. First they were all gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus and his wife, who hadn’t taken any, said “If this is all it’s going to be, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all,” and he said “Drop another grape in my mouth and then come kiss me, you lovely beast — oh God, I love you,” But soon after that he became a famous black gospel singer and sang gospels in her voice and then he went outdoors to embrace all of nature and crawled low in the snow because he thought one of the other LSD takers was trying to kill him with a rifle and then he was in a circle with three other naked people in a dungeon, all with their heads yoked between the thighs of the person in front of them and turning a horizontal wheel for what would be an eternity and then he was a bug on the dungeon floor and human feet were trying to smash him. He was given a strong tranquilizer and while he was coming down he told his wife he had gone mad and nothing would ever make him sane again and he’d be completely dependent on her or in a squalid institution for life, “so listen, your friend with the gun before, get him to put it to my head and shoot perfectly.” Then he fell asleep and the next morning his wife said to him “I know how you hate I told-you-so’s but I wish you’d listen to me on things like this,” and he said “You’re right, no need to hedge around it, but I’ve seen the darkest I can become and nothing so much before has made me appreciate sanity and day-to-day sameness and simple sleep and just sitting here with you, for instance, and admitting any of this.”
“You’re being hired for your musculature and height, not your potential to teach,” the assistant principal said to him, and an hour later, after he introduced himself to the class as the new permanent sub and asked the students to one by one tell him their names, a boy stood up, the first student to ever respond to him in his own class, and said “I’m not taking orders from any white man,” and left the room. “Come back,” he said, “you come back.”
He was in college, dating a girl from New Jersey. He took the bus from Port Authority and was walking in the rain along the street to her house when she jumped out from behind a tree just to the side of him and said “Boo,” He looked at her from about ten feet away, sheepish grin on her face, body still partly hidden by the tree trunk. That was the single happiest moment of his life. Other than that he was in love with her and had looked forward to seeing her that day, he can’t really explain it beyond that. He went over to her, they hugged and kissed, but the most rhapsodic part of the experience was over for him.
He finished The Idiot, thought it the best book he read and wanted to talk to someone about it. No one he knew had read it, not even his brothers and mother who among them seemed to have read everything. A couple of high school friends said if the book was that great they’d start reading it right away, but he said by the time they finished he’d probably have forgotten most of it. “I need someone to talk about it with now. Maybe someone in your family,” and one friend reported back that his father had started it in college but couldn’t get past the first fifty pages.
He sent away ten cents and a box top and every Saturday after that waited for the mail in the building’s vestibule or on weekdays rushed home around lunchtime when the mail was often delivered. His mother said “It takes time,” but he said “Maybe this company just wanted to steal my dime.” Two months later the mailman said “I think this is for you. I could’ve left it by your letter box yesterday hut I knew the contents were especially precious to you,” and he gave him the small package. He opened it in his room, put the ring on his finger, adjusted the band, blew the ring’s whistle, peered into its sight, learned where north and south were in the room, held the ring under a light and then went into a dark closet, shut the door and brought the ring up close to his face and was able to make out the ring and the knuckle of his ring finger.
His mother took his sister and him to see Macy’s Santa Claus.
Santa’s helper ran the specially decorated elevator, other helpers led them down and around a dark corridor that looked like a funhouse’s and at the end of it gave them each a brown paper bag of Christmas candy. When his turn came, Santa sat him on his lap, called him “a skinny lad” and asked what he wanted for Christmas. “An electric train set and the right to change my name to Toby Tyler.”