I ended up in the hospital for a week with severe pneumonia in first grade. When they released me, they gave me a diagnosis of asthma. I remember getting it after the lengthy hospital stay. The year was 1980, when I was six years old. I don’t really remember what it’s like not being an asthmatic. I can’t recall many days without sucking on an inhaler, being unable to smell a lot of the time, allergic to the earth.
My teacher, who I’m quite sure was fucking my dad, visited me in the hospital. She showed me great care and concern. She tickled the tops of my hands and called me “Frankie,” instead of “Francis.” Grandma arrived later in the day with a giant bag from Zayre. She opened it up and dumped it on my hospital bed. Star Wars guys, and a plethora of random monsters and alien action figures. One figure, a green reptile looking toy had a removable glow-in-the-dark brain. Thinking back, I wonder if Dad told people I was dying. His greatest con of ever. Pay attention to me! Give everything to me! Give me sympathy and care! My son is near death, love me!
Three times a day a nurse strapped my ankles to the end of the bed and hung me upside down. I didn’t fight it. I looked around the lonely room. The yellow wallpaper blooming with faded flowers. The nurse didn’t say why she hung me upside down, only slapped my chest and back like a boat propellor ripping through water. Kung-fu action hands rapidly chopping until my brain felt like it was going to burst from the blood rushing to my head. They did it to drain the mucus out of me. Nowadays, if I’m ever in the hospital, I ask if they still do that. And they say, “not really because of all the new medications.” That they “only do it in severe cases.” It makes me feel old, like I lived in Medieval times, treated with chanting monks, crucifixes, rose petals and magic rocks. A time when a potato shaped man wearing a pillow hat arrives by horse to avenge his true love, demanding satisfaction with my demise under a gargoyle carved headboard.
After I survived my hospital stay, I had to take a pill for a while, a capsule with different colored pellets inside. I hated swallowing pills, so Dad broke open the capsule and tried to hide the pellets by mixing them inside a peanut butter sandwich. He thought himself smart, I’m sure, but the sandwich tasted vile, rancid. I couldn’t trade lunch snacks with other kids because mine was stuffed with clown-colored pellets. I often threw it away and went hungry. I always ended up sick again. Next time he tried mixing it in apple sauce, but I hated apple sauce. He tried mixing it in pudding, jelly, and candy. His tricks didn’t stand a chance. “You eat your lunch?” he’d ask. “Yes,” I’d reply, then I’d be sick again, but he liked me being sick. If I ended up in the hospital, it allowed him to be an emotional vampire. He could control the gameboard of life. My tiny body, fading in mountains of mucus was the perfect vehicle for him to get attention he so desperately craved.
In those days, I was a constant fixture in the emergency rooms. There were no at-home nebulizers, so I had to go for breathing treatments. Hour-long treatments with a mask over my face. A doctor listened to my lungs every few hours. Half the time I had to stay overnight. They pumped my veins with different drugs; nurses cared for me with kind and motherly words and touching. Until an enormous and angry nurse tossed me on my stomach and gave me a rub down because I had been in bed for too long. She savagely massaged my young back, then tossed me over like a wrestler. Her pinched Russian-mama face looked down at me with eyes missing the lids, dark and lifeless. She made the sign of the cross and stared at me before shoving the blankets under my neck with fat hands. She returned the next day and savaged me again. I never fought it. I never said a thing. I never cried. I never asked for my grandmother, my dad, a friend. I let them poke me, stick me, jam medications down my throat. I never fought them. I sat there looking up at them, half dumb and completely numb. I showed my propensity for not caring at an early age. I wasn’t afraid of needles. I didn’t care about being left alone so Dad could go home and take a shower and a nap. I simply existed by habit. I trusted without knowing how to trust. I laughed without understanding why we laugh. It’s why later in life I could inflict pain without care. It’s why I hide behind a poker face whenever I walk into a room full of people.
I sat there staring at walls, waiting on something but nothing. My best friends at the hospital, characters in Columbo and Hogan’s Heroes reruns. My parents were other people’s parents who stayed with their children. I lived through their balloon smiles when Mom hugged her daughter. My heart grew three sizes when Dad gave his weakening son packs of baseball cards to turn a frown into a glowing disco ball of excitement. I watched Moms and Dads happily walk their children down the hallway and out the front doors. Whenever the parents saw me alone, they smiled at me, I waved at them, then returned to the television shows where my friends existed. I talked to them, told them secrets, and helped them solve crimes.
One ER visit, in the room next to me, two twisted and contorted burn victims were half covered by bloody blankets in beds. I could see them through a giant glass window. I was scared but said nothing. Dad and the doctor told me it was a fire drill, and that they were dummies. I understand back then why they told me that, I was seven at the time. Later, when I was a teen, I realized they were not dummies, but burn victims, more than likely dead. I remember their skin lifeless in the charred, red, and haunted. Their faces twisted, sad to be dead, terrified of dying. To this day I still dream of them on occasion. In the dream I’m a child again, and they look at me, hoping I can save them. “Help us, Frankie,” they say. “Help us. Don’t let us die. It hurts. The pain is full of sadness.”
The skin on the chin is gone, only red fleshy pulp and the entirety of their bottom teeth showing under the bright hospital lamps. “Help us, Frankie. We don’t want to die. Please help us.” I wake up sweating, afraid, I always take a hit off my inhaler. I tell myself I need it because their fears knocked out of me. Somewhere in the world they rest inside coffins six feet under, and because I couldn’t help them, I roam the earth taking rips from an inhaler. Every single time I do, I see their faces. One with eyes wide open staring up at the ceiling. Pain so unimaginable there’s nothing else one can do but stare into the abyss waiting for a moment, a brief second, when the ravenous pain turns into relief. A concentration only reached by the chosen few that’re connected to the universe. A palm wide open underneath the thorn-wrapped heart of crazy wisdom turning one feeling into another before the agony of madness sets in.
Nowadays, most people have an easier time controlling asthma, including myself. It’s not the coffin nail it once was. I have an at-home duo neb (a steroid and albuterol) machine I use. I take allergy meds, and I have a pocket albuterol inhaler. I don’t understand any other way of living. Most days I’m okay if I use the medication when needed. I’ve had asthma since 1980. I don’t know how to live without it. It’s a part of my body, as much as my spine, arm, nose. I’m only reminded of being an asthmatic if I catch bronchitis or pneumonia, and I’m sucking wind, trapped in bubbles of mucus. Rolling in the dismal retreat of memories.
Today, most of them are dead and walking by my bed, looking down at my aging body. Browsing my bookcases, watching me sneeze into chunks of toilet paper. Judging how I walk the lonely path to the bathroom. Jealous that I’ve made it this far when everything was meant to break me. But they know as well as I do that one day I’ll roam among them. Careful in my limits to be an erotic part of a growing ghost body. It’s the fever dream that I love, and why I imagine they visit me, still haunt me, love me. My life isn’t real. Maybe I’m someone else’s confused excuse for a dream. Existence, a thought strung out in an opium den. Noodles Aaronson sucking off the pipe, dreaming of the unreal me, a controlled reality of the self, evaporating in spirals of smoke. His eyes piercing through the screen above. Abrupt and hysterical laughter held by the tender fingers. Que Pasa, buttercup.
