hate is stupid

Before Disembarking, Let’s Get Lost in a Strip Mall

            It’s one of those dog days of summer, much like the day I was born.

            Impossibly warm and sun-soaked for this late in the day, Harvard Square writhes with the hush of old-city beauty. Three-story brick apartment buildings abut Harvard University near the Charles River in a network of narrow one-ways. Oh, these brick-paved sidewalks and quaint brick alleyways, they make young-American-aspiring-world-traveler me feel so wonderfully foreign. Like I’m a European in my own land.

            Melody, of course, is a foreigner and European for real, that lucky duck. As she senses with her dark French eyes my attempt to make her feel at home, she has to let her ambivalence show. Melody simultaneously loves America and wants to leave. Once we continue on to France, she will have finally encircled the globe after seven years ‘on the road’, as she calls it. I can only dream of such a thing, not sensing I will do it many times over in the years to come.

            On this day in Cambridge, I am twenty-six, and I hold Melody’s hand like the boy I am, tugging her along brick pathways, cutting through alleyways willy nilly, swinging around the light poles and tree trunks that force us momentarily apart. And for me being here in Boston brings a double-edged sensation, a childhood memory of a pleasant past, a psychedelic dream of an unforeseeable future. I am enchanted yet disenchanted. For I will always be more foreign to this place, my home, than the world at large.

            How we came to be here, together, is not an uncommon story. Two young travelers meet on the other side of the world and bring one another home, one after another, for family and fresh tourist visas and, well let’s face it, for money... We get free places to stay and paint boats and houses and make a stone terrace in a day. And we do it all only to continue on around the world once again. But we are done working on this day, this doggone dog day of summer, to take the opportunity for Melody to see the America in which she has been illegally laboring. And all I get for my efforts is lethargy and weak laughter.

            I pick up an old bottle cap and offer it to her. It is really a nice bottle cap.

            ‘Ew!’ She recoils from my gift on the brick sidewalk, ‘You always give me things that you just pick up somewhere.’ She drops my hand and pulls ahead.

            I chase her and catch her stride, ‘Yeah but, no but, yeah I know,’ I joke, getting her to smile again with my cheeky antics. Our lives aren’t really that hard, all those ten-hour work days are in the name of travel, in the name of sitting on some beach somewhere under a palm tree and just swinging in the breeze…

            ‘Remember, babe,’ I say, ‘we gotta be thrifty. One day of work here will get us through a week in India. Two weeks, if we are thrifty there, too.’

            She does not accept the bottle cap, so I pocket it, sure the right time will come.

            For now, I’ll tell you how I left home to Asia for the first time in my life by starting at the beginning.

            Starting at the beginning…

            It was one of those dog days of summer, much like the day I was born.

            ‘Hi! I was wondering if you could give me some of your rates?’

            ‘Yeah, sure,’ the receptionist at the doctor’s office says, ‘what is it that you want?’

            ‘Hmm, let’s see,’ I unfold the sheet of paper covered with phone numbers and scribbled bits of directions and find the list I have compiled, propping a paint-splattered foot on the windowsill of the open car door while gazing out at the crisp, brown lawn from beneath the canopy of the crabapple tree at my uncle’s new house. ‘Oh, here it is. Okay, how much for hepatitis?’

            She says in an unenthused way, probably in some air-conditioned office in scorching downtown Boston on the hazy horizon towards which I gaze, ‘Hep A or B?’

            ‘Umm, I’d like to start with Hepatitis A.’

            ‘That’s sixty-five dollars.’

            ‘Okay. And typhoid? Polio?’

            She clacks away on her keyboard, ‘Do you also want tetanus and diphtheria?’

            ‘I don’t know, maybe?’ My words come out uncertain, ‘I’m going to India, so, uh, probably?’

            ‘Great, I’ll put you in for a tetanus and a diphtheria’

            ‘And I need pills for Malaria, too. I think I want to talk about rabies and yellow fever with the doctor. You know, before I splurge on diseases I don’t need.’

            When I find the office hidden in the back of a little Cape Cod shopping plaza, the cold AC air spills out onto the sidewalk even before I enter through the door from the heavy, sticky and oppressive morning air. There are several waiting rooms and I chat with waiters who are already dissatisfied, pre-pissed off if you will, even before they’ve met with any doctors. In one area, a long hallway dead ends where two people are sitting outside a closed door.

            ‘Hi, is this where I wait?’ I ask them, looking around, seeing no more than their two chairs.

            ‘They told us to sit here and someone would come out that door,’ a sour old man says, incredulously looking at his surroundings: cheap purple carpet, hospital white walls, one of those mass-produced plastic-framed paintings of a boat. There isn’t even a table with some nurses’ old magazines with the mailing label cut out for his entertainment.

            I turn around and find another room. There are a bunch of old people in there, too. Before I can approach the nurses’ door that sits ajar, a lady yells, ‘Hey, you have to sign in and wait!’

            ‘Oh, hi,’ I shrug, inching towards the doorway and seeing two conspiring nurses through the crack, ‘I just want to make sure this is the right office.’

            ‘Are you here to give blood. They’re taking our blood!’

            I look at the crumbling, blue old lady before putting my face to the crack in the door, yelling, ‘Is this the office for vaccines?’

            A nurse yells back through the crack, inches away, ‘Across the hall!’

            When I open the door on a waiting room across the hall, it’s even colder. CNN is delivering propaganda from a TV in the ceiling and a single girl in a pink tank top, jean skirt and Birkenstocks has her crossed legs wound around one another two or three times, rubbing them back and forth and breathing into her white-knuckled hands.

            This isn’t the office, either, but with permission from a pasty receptionist, I am allowed to tip-toe through the network of superficial partitions and paperwork, capering my way down a hallway to arrive at a high counter decorated with a skeleton dressed as a Red Sox fan where there is a woman at a desk somewhere far below. Anyone smaller than me (which is everyone) would never have found her.

            This time I say with confidence, ‘I’m here for the eight forty-five!’

            ‘Oh yes!’ She pokes at her computer, then pulls out a clipboard and a couple sheets of paperwork, handing them to me, ‘And what insurance do you have, are they covering you for this?’

            ‘I am certain,’ I announce, ‘they are not.’

            I walk away. When I sit in a small walk-in freezer of a waiting room with last years’ Time magazines strewn across a low table, hearing the receptionist on the phone explaining the really very simple directions for finding the office to another gullible victim, I feel relatively comfortable. This is all supposed to be a positive thing, these diseases, the vaccines for them, I mean. A trip to India, Nepal, and possibly the Middle East or Southeast Asia has its price, if I want to live to tell the tale.

            A medium, shapeless woman whom I presume is a nurse fetches me and sits me down in a room with a bed made up with paper sheets, a plastic chair, and graphic pictures on the walls. I have ample time to take in the horror show of shingles, mumps, chickenpox, smallpox, malaria, dengue and yellow fevers, and their corresponding geographical charts indicating that I am going where most of the diseases (and some that I thought extinct, like leprosy) exist.

            The nurse returns, sits down beside me and reads what I wrote: England, France, Italy, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Tibet.

            She looks at me, tan and fit with buzzed hair, in a t-shirt I came up with that says: Live Gently, Intelligently.

            ‘Six months. You must be in the military. Navy? Are you an airman?’

            ‘Not quite, no.’ I smile at her, ‘I work on boats in the summer and travel every year. My girlfriend’s French, so we’ll be living in France, before India.’

            ‘Oh.’ She looks at me as any small-town American would observe any foreign object, ‘And where are you from?’

            ‘Here!’ I laugh, ‘I was born in Boston.’

            ‘Oh, it’s just that you have such a thick English accent anyway.’

            I blush. Not for me, for her.

            ‘He’ll be in in a minute,’ she stands up, the purpose of her visit presumably serving the American tradition of making it seem as though the strip mall medical establishment is providing a service I could not administer on my own. Stick it in your arm, push the plunger.

            She opens the door and turns to me, ‘Oh, you’ll love Italy!’

            The doctor arrives, eventually. We go over the diseases she should give me today and I decide to take all five and she hands me a stack of internet updates on all these epidemic and endemic diseases. And this is the stage where I realize I’m going into another world, not as a local, but someone culturally, racially and immunologically separated. We—Melody and I, but also all Westerners—aren’t supposed to drink what the Indian people drink or eat the food the Indian people eat. But we are, paradoxically, going for the express purpose of doing those things.

            I feel a rumbling in my stomach, perhaps from the watery sludge Americans like to overheat then call coffee, but more likely from the realization that this visit makes it all real. I am administering costly and painful treatment to my body so I can deliberately make my life more challenging and dangerous than it would be if I just stayed right here.

            The nurse comes back in with a handful of hypodermic needles wrapped in a paper towel. She sits me down on the rustling white paper of the black pleather bed and rolls up the sleeves of my t-shirt.

            ‘Oh!’ She says this to herself as she sees my left shoulder, ‘It looks like I’ve got a bulls-eye here,’ she wipes the red star tattoo with alcohol, then starts stabbing away.

            I sit there learning about smallpox and recalling my doctor’s visit this time last year where I got tested for HIV, gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, herpes, hepatitis and the lot, ‘the gamut’ the doctor had joked. It’s the third time in a year I can feel the needles break the surface of my skin and slide into the flesh one after another.

            I look to the opposite wall when she switches sides to do the other arm.

            ‘Well,’ she says, tossing the last needle in a biohazard bin on the wall, ‘you have certainly been one of the best patients I’ve had. You’re so relaxed.’

            ‘I used to watch them taking the blood when I was a kid, but I can’t watch anymore,’ I tell her, feeling the frigid pharmaceutical serums spreading one after the next through my bloodstream like a showering of cold water on a humid day.

            ‘I guess we all grow up,’ she says.

            My body will build up antibodies to fight these diseases. But it won’t immunize me from the horrors humanity faces, horrors I’m prepared to face, even if it will fundamentally change my life.

            ‘You know the way out,’ the nurse says with hope in her eyes.

            ‘I know the way out,’ I smirk. Because remembering where I came from, well, that’s the only way to keep from getting lost.