In a masterful letter to Testing Unlimited, I questioned the wisdom of state governments mandating standardized tests for first graders to show how smart their kids are, so that the state receives more federal money…for more testing. I also felt it was a waste of money to pay college-educated people $10 an hour to analyze the spelling of “cat.” At the nearly-illegible end, I wrote a filthy word and suggested that one of their $13-hour PhD test scoring supervisors read the word to the Board of Directors to see if they could spell it. I signed the letter with a scrawl, stuffed it into an envelope, addressed it, stuck three or four stamps on it, and went outside to the mailbox.
The trailer park had looked good when I moved there in 1989, but now the grass was sporadically mowed, the rocks along the drive were displaced, the dumpster was overflowing with garbage, and many of the residents had the haggard look of people who worked underpaid full-time jobs, then went directly to their underpaid part-time jobs so they could afford their $600-a-month lot rents and gas for their 15-year-old cars.
The mailbox was stuffed mostly with junk mail, on top of which was a letter from my folks. I pulled the glasses to the bottom of my nose to read the letter. It seemed that it cost Mom and Dad a few thousand dollars to convert the front yard from grass to gravel. But, it would save the cost in water many times over. It seemed that Los Angeles was in the midst of yet another drought.
Under my folks’ letter was a bill from Harry Morton, M.D. Usually, I would not even have opened the bill, but a perverse desire for undesirable stimulation—the gremlins hate boredom—prompted me to tear open the envelope. The first thing I saw was the figure $4,579.92, the cost of a CAT scan I had undergone six months before. My general practitioner had thought I needed a chest X-ray because of a chronic cough and had sent me to a cardiac specialist, who in turn remanded me to the CAT scanner because I had moderately high blood pressure, that was treated with an ACE inhibitor.
I tried to tell everyone that the cough was caused by the ace inhibitor, which I had stopped using. The cough had stopped, too. But my GP insisted that I needed the chest X-ray, and the cardiologist insisted that I also needed a CAT scan, even though the stress test electrocardiogram and the other tests all came out normal.
“You can’t put a price tag on your health,” the cardiologist admonished with a used car salesman’s smile.
“Relax, I just called your insurance company. They’re covering it!” the medical assistant chimed in.
My insurance paid $77.64.
The results? High blood pressure controlled by medication, which caused a $4,502.28 cough.
Clutching the mail to my chest, I walked up the jagged path to my front door and tossed everything on the floor with the rest of the debris. Craving the hair of the dog that bit me, I opened the pantry, shooed away the cockroaches, opened a fresh can of chicory-laced coffee, and made a pot, black as coal, just the way I liked it. Stay at home, hunker down, drink coffee, and avoid all nerve-provoking stimulation. That was the ticket.
But I kept looking through the mail anyway. Next in the pile was another unwelcome letter from Marta, a hippie I’d met years ago while at SIU. Out of the blue, after almost 40 years, a series of letters from Marta had started arriving that summer. I’d never replied to any of them. The letters absolutely baffled me, but I read them anyway because they were so…interesting. This one was absolutely fascinating:
Dear Peter,
I trust everything is cool with you. Hopefully you and the instrument have reached an epiphany, and your life is in the groove by now.
Do you remember what we talked about while at SIU; that science will solve your problems? Well, if not science, maybe magic!
Hah, Hah.
If life has changed for you, you’ll know what I mean. But if it hasn’t, then you won’t know what the f--- I’m talking about. In any event, write me. I’d love to hear from the sanest guy I‘ve ever met.
Your friend,
Marta
I didn’t remember talking with Marta for more than two seconds, only to say “Hi” and “Bye” in the cafeteria at college, forty years ago. For the first time, I looked at her return address, which was illegible except for “Carbondale” and the first letter of her last name, which was an M. I took her cryptic letter and threw it at my new mail drop: the floor. By then, I had lost patience with tearing open envelopes, and threw the rest of the unopened mail on the floor as well.
I checked the front door to make sure it was locked. Although I had little tolerance for routine, I had even less tolerance for surprises. I didn’t answer the door unless I was expecting someone, and made sure I was expecting no one. Ditto for answering the phone and returning emails. I figured that if I didn’t read, see, or hear bad news, then the gremlins would have no tools to torture me.
I also chose to do without making decisions, even small decisions, such as how to clean my trailer, which caused me to be “conflicted,” according to the head shrinkers. A dust mop had been leaning against the wall in the bedroom for more than a year because, for the life of me, I couldn’t decide where to start the cleaning project. Should I vacuum the carpet first? The carpet was covered with stains, coffee grounds, eggshells, dirt, paper and what looked like dried-out olives. But to get to the rug I’d have to pick up all of the clothes off the floor, and they needed to be washed, didn’t they? But if I threw them in the car they’d get mixed up with the clean clothes in the back seat. So to get around that, I decided to leave the clothes where they were, and wash them individually in the bathtub as necessary.
And what about the tub? I hadn’t cleaned that since before the water heater had broken that past winter. Maybe washing the clothes there would clean the tub, but that left the filthy sink and toilet. In what order should I clean them? Until I figured that one out, they’d have to stay dirty. On a positive note, I considered the oven and the stove to such messes that they would be impossible to clean, so I didn’t have to decide which to clean first. And the refrigerator really didn’t need to be cleaned, either, because it had died three years ago, and anything in there was safely out of my sight as long as I didn’t open the door.
Hiring someone to fix up the place for me was out of the question, not only because I couldn’t afford it, but because another human being walking into my squalor would pin the needle of my anxiety meter deep in the red.
It had taken five years for the parallel deterioration of my home and my mind to progress to this point: I was now living and thinking like a street person.
Nevertheless, through my mental malaise I dimly realized that human relationships keep a person sane. But that depends on the people one is interacting with. Other than Ronald, my “friends” were intimate with their own personal gremlins.
There was Bob, for instance, who I’d met at an AA meeting. From time to time over the years, we’d sit and drink coffee all night long, scheming to make money. In the summer of 2007, we’d planned to sell water filters to trailer parks. We figured that the filters would keep the trailers’ hot water tanks from corroding with minerals, so they wouldn’t have to be replaced so often. The plan was to divide up the territory, with Bob phoning twenty-five trailer parks in the northern half of Illinois during the week, while I made twenty-five nerve-racking calls to trailer parks in the southern half. We agreed to touch base by phone the following Friday.
When I asked Bob about his progress, he responded: “I’m just about finished.”
Which meant he hadn’t even started yet.
After