Tale 13

The True Story of Doctor Waring

( When Ray Had a Boil on His Cheek )

Satyrs (male) and Maenads (female) revel ecstatically possessed by Dionysus

their god of wine, fertility, ritual madness, theater, and religious ecstasy[1]

Young Dr. Lorenzo’s nervous apparatus for seeing and hearing ‘things’, as the press said later, was in overdrive. His faculties had been overheated at least from the time he left home under laden boughs of late-blooming apple blossoms. All night long his organs of ‘sight’ and ‘hearing’ and other senses wheeled and hummed, spewing out Jungian unconscious byproducts provoked by God knew what. Prehistoric holy rite after ancient sacred celebration of the incomparable, incomprehensible miracle of being born a human, bounced off the walls of his mind. And now in the mirror, a rioting pack of celebrants led by Poley McClintock pushed forward in a debauched U toward Bill and Betty Ann, so as to force, obviously, as mj felt, a sacred marriage ceremony from them, a hieros gamos. After all, it was ‘apple blossom time again’. That musical arrangement of Waring’s had pined within him the feeling of marriage for two weeks, over and over, so it must have been time to initiate some-body into some kind of special marriage, to change some bystander’s name forever and celebrate that profound change to the hilt.

But: in the mirror on the Blackburn living room wall, a medium-height Dionysus with a chin dimple, clad spiffily like an ancient Greek god, looked over his shoulder and just in time wheeled around and raised a baton and waved and swept the whole cockamamie chorus of cantankerous canticlers back up the risers, rescuing Bill and Betty Ann from having to perform in such an uninhibited way; for the time being, anyway.

...Ha! ha! ha! you and me...

"Now," said Bill, looking at his little blonde wifey-poo. "Now he asked if Ray's ever been sick. Tell mjHAY-haaagh," he let roll a silent shaking Bill laugh for about a whole minute, then went on, at last: "about Doctor Waring operating on Ray Schroeder, forcing him to be operated on!"

"Oh yeah, Bill." She played wise and warm to the notion, a stitch, an earth goddess ready to birth a myth. "Ray had a boil; on his cheek," she said, hatching her epic.

Bill knew: "AH HA HA-haaaagh!" He was delighted with the hilarious epic, and it was barely hatched, let alone free from the shell and walking around.

Mj tittered. It was all still wrong though. If Fred Waring had kept such messed-up help around him year in and year out, what did it say about Fred?

Mj’s ‘grief reaction’ seemed to have progressed nicely already, nonetheless, said mj lorenzo psychotherapy pundits after ‘Tales of Waring’ was released underground; he seemed to have gone from ‘Shock’ and ‘Denial’ to a stage of grief where the young non-hero was already beginning to flirt with ‘Acceptance’ of the tragedy of losing his fairy tale, and even with ‘Resolution’ to go on with his life anyway, all within fifteen minutes.

"And it kept getting bigger," she dramatized, "and bigger."

The boil, mj reminded himself: on the cheek of Ray Schroeder, who was Christian Scientist.

"And Ray," Bill helped, "just kept saying, 'It isn't there' HA HA!"

"And bigger," she said again.

"HA ha ha-hah!" Bill reacted again.

"And the thing—; it was right—:" she pointed to her right cheek. "And the thing got so bad, if you're riding on the bus. And the thing would be draining. It was flowing down his cheek."

"AH ha-aghh Huh heh!" Bill caught his breath and grabbed a sip.

"An': like the pus would be oozing out all over. I mean, y'know; an' –."

"Oh goddam this crazy –," Bill sighed and licked the sweet gin and funny-tasting high-alcohol-content vermouth, working it in.

"Everybody was," she winced, "like this about it 'cause it was disgusting!" She shuddered convincingly.

Mj shuddered too, she was so convincing.

Bill chimed in: "An' Ray kept saying, 'It isn't there.' Eh heh heh hegh!"

"Yohhhhh," mj protested, not sure what to feel about that. He had just graduated from medical school, after all. A boil was a boil was a boil, he would have thought. Was it not?

She resumed. "An' he would go around: like he goes with his notepad, he went around with a wad of Kleenex, going like this," she dabbed her right cheek, "all the time on this thing. Well, finally this thing started turning green!"

"Uh ha yeh," Bill laughed, "heh heh heh, mj, thess a true story, enghh!"

“Really! An' by this time, Fred went to Ray and said,” Betty Ann produced a stern Fred, “‘Now listen: I've had enough of this’!”

“Ah hah ‘I've had enough of thi- –,’” went Bill.

She widened her eyes. “‘This has got to go’!” She was absolutely serious, even still.

Bill embellished for her: "'I can't have somebody turnin' green on my stage', ha ha hegh!" Bill’s face was pink from hilarity and blood pressure.

"So Ray," she said, "in spite of his religion and all," her tone got harsh and her words biting, her lips tight, stern, almost mean, "can not refuse the master's voice: succumbed; and Fred operated on it with a crochet hook!"

Mj let go, finally. "Eh hAH hAH ha! You –." He couldn't finish.

Bill was irretrievable. He laughed so hard the wall shook next to his chair and the tomahawk rattled on the kitchen wall behind Betty Ann’s chair. His grandfather's tomahawk actually shook so much it rattled.

Betty Ann laughed tastefully: "Eh heh heh."

Mj choked. "You should've said," he sobbed, "'a conductor's baton'!!"

She was her usual self again, with her usual feelings and all, and talked to mj now like the friend she usually was, looking straight at him as her everyday self: "No. He did! He got the thing out with a crochet hook! And he vows till now he saved Ray's life by doing that because 'Gangrene had set in'." She twisted that knife again.

Mj joined pandemonium for a minute then went after a mindless tidbit: "Ray didn't complain of pain during the operation?"

"It didn't exist!" Bill was back. "He's a Christian Scientist!"

"Well thass impressive," mj said, not quite the same man he'd been when he walked in.

Bill laughed at it all, like Castaneda's Yaqui Indian friend, don Juan, ‘silently and utterly’.

Ben Franklin could be heard too, the Greek satyr chorus yelling in unison to remind young Dr. Lorenzo he should not laugh too hard:

There's  more  old  drunkards  than  old  doctors.[2]

alleyway in the Pennsylvania Appalachian mountain town

where Fred and Poley played games and went to Boy Scouts together

back in the early 1900s:

Tyrone, Pennsylvania (in November 2018)

(with intense sunrise light just topping the mountain and hitting fall colors)