Community Acquired Pneumonia

…When they tell you you’ve got pneumonia, the first thing you feel is more sick.

You think about the drive from Georgia to Colorado, the way you believed you could feel your heart, a bruise, your lungs, jellyfish on either side of it.

You think about St Louis and the Arch and the little cigars you smoked to keep you awake through the night.

The two hour nap in the cold cab at dawn.

Missouri, with its exit ramp porn stores and Kansas, which goes on forever and should have, even in the spring, killed the pioneers with its lack of variance, the unforgiving cop there who could have not written you up for lack of seat belt, or taken ninety down to eight-five, or ignored the fact that you were following the little yellow car too closely, but who didn’t, who spoke through the bad teeth under little a red near-Hitler moustache, who told you, “Your driving is getting erratic” and gave you tickets for everything he could.

Your arrival in Colorado, the picking up of your son, the long drive to the house of his grandparents. Your parents.

You think of the snowball fight at Bishop’s Castle, the scrambling on the red rocks of Garden of the Gods, the night of the blizzard and your discovery that falling snow in the dark shows up beautifully in the flashed photo.

You think of how you’ve been tired some long time, but more so this last few days, this last week …

You think: Here I am, only 33 (my age, it shows in every photo, in every passed mirror, in the reflection that is my father), and already pneumonia.

...And the Doctor, there’s some red rash behind her glasses, beneath one eyes, she’s peering at you sternly, telling you things you should and should not do, and to everything she says, you nod, though you are deciding secretly which of these things to take seriously, and she’s telling you: rest.

And you think: What does that mean, rest. Seriously, you think, what? Do I spend a lot of time in bed? May I drive places? May I laugh a lot? Cry a little? Do I refrain from sex? Masturbation?

And she tells you: don’t get stressed.

…And upstairs, at the pharmacy, there’s an hour wait, and the woman, she can’t find you on the system; she can’t prove to herself that you’re Kaiser; you have no card with you, have left it 1200 miles back; they made no fuss of it downstairs; your standing there, trying to tell her that surely with your social she can look you up…

Thinking to tell her: Look, the Doctor, she said not to get stressed. She said to take it easy. I was standing in line for an hour. And now, you’re stressing me…

But thinking, It’s not her fault.

Handing her your credit card. Saying, Thanks for trying. Saying, Merry Christmas. And meaning it.

…Down the street, there’s a hotel.

…And I am dumb enough—no, dumb is not the right word, it’s Christmas so let me put the good spin on it—and so I’m young hearted enough, to have the urge to flirt with the hotel check-in girl, to after stifling that urge, to ask her, Is there a fitness center here?

Not that I’m in the mood or health for seduction, for working out.
These old habits.

…And I think, as you must have thought if you’ve read much of my blog:

This is what you get when you choose flesh over meditation, smoky bars over your bed, exercise over therapy, pleasure over happiness.

…And I think, as I don’t doubt that you have thought:
Everything you’ve brought upon yourself.
Like this sickness, you earned.
Every disconnect.

No tragedy here.
If anything, you’ve lived a life of serendipities.

…This trip half over.

Those days with my son in the looming house of my parents, where my father keeps it near dark and too cool, where my mother folds her phone card and a bit of cash secretly into my hand, where I don’t battle my father about the lights or the heater, where I return the phone card unused.

The things your mother tries to make you owe her.
The things you father tries to show you he doesn’t owe you.

But for all of it, because of the time of year, because of the weakness in my heart, because of my age, their ages, whatever…

I soften.

…And the Man in the Moon, my father, he drops balloons with a letter and rocks from the fourth floor window, and my son, he gathers up these gifts, he shouts his thank yous, his cheeks are red, his eyes are shining.

…He watches A Christmas Story, the first full length non cartoon movie I’ve seen him watch, enthralled, really, and then, celebrating an early Christmas with those grandparents, he sees my father open a rifle, and he says, “Don’t shoot yourself. Don’t shoot your eye out.”


..My father getting himself this gift of a rifle he’ll probably never fire, the hunter in him retired, and a man who takes the firing of bullets too seriously not to have a death in mind when pulling the trigger, collecting guns even yet.

But that’s ok. We all collect things. Most of us. Anything to hang on our walls. To try to speak of who we are because we do not say it well enough. It doesn’t show on our faces, will not be written on our tombstones.

The dvds by the hundreds in my book case.

…And my son, a collector of Lord of the Rings action figures, and of Spiderman things, when he opens a pair of spider man boots, boots too small, but covered with Spiderman pictures, in a wonderful Spiderman box, my son, who heard from his grandmother, my mother, of a little boy on her caseload who has nothing for Christmas, who has no boots for the snow, my son says that we should give the boots to that little boy.

…And hugging your father when you leave, that slight hug, you feel something you thought not to feel anymore.

You realize, as you go walking with your son through the cold to the truck now completely warm, you still need something from them, your parents, even though you don’t think you’ll ever get it, that there’s nothing to get…and you think, No, even now, there was something, it was small.

…And on the long drive up from their house to the house of the mother of my son, you cough and wish that the wiper fluid wasn’t frozen; you peer through the dirt; you think about the fragments of your life, of any life, and how it isn’t so hard, if you relax into the moment, if you just put it together in your mind.

…These nights without rest.

Not full unconscious, so that I think about what I dream while dreaming it and then I think about what I think, the writer beneath the writer, the narrator wrapped in the narrator, these many near exact duplicate mes layered up on each other.

Always trying to shape, always trying to find the illusion of meaning.
Like a man who prays.

…This trip half over.
Not wasted coughing. The coughing irrelevant to what you’ve felt, what you think.
Not marred by sickness. The sickness just sickness.

…In my hotel room, I’m afraid to take my shirt off, though it is too warm in here, though typically when I am alone inside I like to have my shirt off.

I am afraid to take my shirt off, as though I’ve been invalidated.

And I think of the new Leonard Cohen album, the one I listened to sometimes on the long drive over, and the song, the one in which he builds from something which sounds like vanity to something which is self deprecating, and how as a whole it reads as both, that he knows it is true, his strength, his weakness, that he’s not afraid to speak of them both:
Because in a few songs I’ve spoken of their mysteries/ certain women are kind to my old age/they take me to secret places and undress themselves in ways/then bending over the bed/they cover me up/like a baby who is shivering…

…This hotel, on Christmas Eve, the moon nearly full and rising in the sky not yet dark, how pretty.

Your son not far from you, and you’ll see him tomorrow, in the glee of his gifts, and you’ll see him these next six days, in the light of your presence against his presence, the light you make together, and what you feel, it is good, like joy, like happiness.