Seventies young physician fresh out of fancy-schmancy Harvard\/Stanford\/Harvard\/Stanford training blew\u00a0off chief residency and academic career to become the first internist na\u00efve enough to take a position at\u00a0some migrant worker clinic in Alviso east of San Jose.<\/p>\n
Our ramshackle long-neglected prefab building stood between a trailer park,\u00a0taqueria<\/em>, chicken farm and\u00a0Route 237 on a godforsaken patch of baylands.<\/p>\n The good news\u2014and my major perk\u2014was a daily lunch break run on a stunning peninsula that the Audubon\u00a0Society had designated as a sanctuary for blue herons and snowy egrets.<\/p>\n But multiple-choice bad news turned out to be much more significant.<\/p>\n First, the below-sea level neck of land would flood every rainy season. (My youngest daughter, not born at the\u00a0time, still flashes Polaroids of me: bearded, pony-tailed, drenched, bedraggled, ecstatic\u2014to get a rise out of her\u00a0friends. Dad paddling a canoe, rescuing stranded people and livestock. A boom box floating six inches below the\u00a0ceiling of my examining room.)<\/p>\n One spring when jogging I noticed sandbags (or so I thought) washing up onto the shore. I could barely make out \u201cAR Y\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0C RPS\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0OF\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0ENGIN ERS\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0ASBES\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0973\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0.\u201d Whoa! All that effort to become fit had simply exposed my\u00a0lungs\u2014and more so, the chain-smoking illegals, squatters and other poor folk and their kids who actually lived in\u00a0this\u00a0barrio<\/em>\u2014to a megadose of asbestos.<\/p>\n Second, abandoned by the good citizens of San Jose, this strip was essentially zoned below the radar with many\u00a0dwellings without basic services such as water and electricity.<\/p>\n Of course now decades later, as Silicon Valley has extended its tentacles, Alviso has been rehabilitated into primo\u00a0real estate, making many developers rich while the disenfranchised have been driven off.<\/p>\n Between a\u00a0blitzkrieg\u00a0<\/em>Berlitz course (my boss reluctantly agreed to pay a third) and the pigeon-Spanish I picked up\u00a0on the job (memorizing thirty rote phrases did the trick for most common problems), I limped through most days\u00a0without a translator.<\/p>\n On the whole, my clients were rural, monolingual Spanish, Catholic, family-oriented, humble, grateful for the care.\u00a0\u00a0Although their children quickly assimilated to big city ways, the parents were guileless, rarely scamming for drugs\u00a0or abusing the welfare system.<\/p>\n Still occasionally, I overheard an embarrassed patient whisper to a Family Health Worker, \u201c\u00bfDice el Doctor Portugu\u00e9s??\u201d<\/p>\n Several times I flew down to Sinaloa Province for a weekend volunteering, possibly caring for relatives of my patients\u00a0back home.\u00a0\u00a0Before landing in the middle of nowhere, I could see an astonishingly long line of locals who had queued\u00a0up hours before the four-seater puddle jumper finally set down.\u00a0\u00a0Many literally begged for more Valium\u00a0that some\u00a0shortsighted thoughtless idiot health provider like me had previously handed out like M&Ms. We gringos seemed either\u00a0not to consider\u2014or care\u2014that the\u00a0pastillas<\/em>\u00a0would run out after addicting their recipients, usually long before the next\u00a0charity runs south of the border.<\/p>\n Eventually frustration set in. I understood only single-visit preventative (vaccines, etc.) and interventional (surgeons\/dentists)\u00a0therapies that didn’t involve an internist\u2019s pill-pushing skills (or lack of) had more plusses than minuses.<\/p>\n I also began to wonder if maybe, just maybe, there was more to these ventures than met my eye.\u00a0\u00a0Something beyond generosity,\u00a0tax write-offs,\u00a0Dos Equiis XX<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0lagostino<\/em>\u00a0beach parties that motivated the cardiologist to pilot us into Mexico. (Come to think\u00a0of it, \u201cDr. Mary\u201d didn’t seem all that engaged in the nitty-gritty of actual patient care.\u00a0\u00a0Her\u00a0restaurante Espa\u00f1ol<\/em>\u00a0was superb and\u00a0charming, but she faded\u00a0in la cl\u00ednica;\u00a0<\/em>by the end of each session, the Mexican assistants had guided me with my veterinarian\u00a0Spanish to the central hub, moving Mary gently to the periphery.)<\/p>\n Keeping an extra eye open, during my last two tours, I picked up that\u00a0Los Medicos Voladores\u2019<\/em>\u00a0planes were NEVER searched by\u00a0highly deferent customs officials.<\/p>\n I’d heard rumors about drug-running into The States and puzzled over Mary\u2019s down-time\u00a0rendezvous<\/em>\u00a0with unidentified serious\u00a0men in silk Versace shirts, denim pants with leather-laced edging, Panama hats, lots of bling, snake and iguana-skin boots, driving Ram Chargers blasting\u00a0corridos<\/em>\u00a0about\u00a0mi perico, mi gallo y mi chiva<\/em>\/ my parakeet, my rooster, and my goat\u2014slang for\u00a0coke, marijuana, and heroin.<\/p>\n \u2026That final flight home, riding shotgun next to Mary, for some reason I couldn\u2019t get Bob Dylan\u2019s line “to live outside the law you\u00a0must be honest\u201d from\u00a0\u201cAbsolutely Sweet Marie\u201d out of my mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Seventies young physician fresh out of fancy-schmancy Harvard\/Stanford\/Harvard\/Stanford training blew\u00a0off chief residency and academic career to become the first internist na\u00efve enough to take a position at\u00a0some migrant worker clinic in Alviso east of San Jose. Our ramshackle long-neglected prefab building stood between a trailer park,\u00a0taqueria, chicken farm and\u00a0Route 237 on a godforsaken patch of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":14619,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1660,1658,1659,1635,1661],"class_list":["post-14591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-absolutely-sweet-maria","tag-alviso-ca","tag-dylan","tag-gerard-sarnat","tag-sinaloa-province","writer-gerard-sarnat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14591"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14617,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14591\/revisions\/14617"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}