“I knew something was wrong when they took away our water bottles”
“Admiral Gravestone in his cups unable to read the tea leaves..coming off a blitz in the inner city schools, a trench coat groomed transferee discovering Gravestone’s hip pocket..among the crushing body to body straphangers, on the surface line Franklin Avenue shuttle reeling toward the Eastern Parkway station in its Southbound four station route...
II
The Admiral grabbing the pickpocket’s wrist, the caper unlike Hitch’s “Lady
vanishes”...the shuttle choo chooing... Botanic Garden and Prospect Park six decades of BMT
data based ridership the four stops honed without any derelictions, the 2010 winding
down into those raging hours of disenfranchisement...unable to discern reality’s
cosmetics ..a pop culture and egg nog landscape for what it really is about..
III
“Lemme go sir .I promise on my mother’s honor, I’ll never do it again.”
The Admiral held the miscreant’s wrist........this con never stole a ream of
computer paper ”Oh no sir, I never cheated on big tests either.”...
Why shouldn’t he pay the price for his encroaching intent? Every wino finds
their own level, don’t they? monsieur ?”
How else will he reform?. He needed the cat of nine tails spanking...
The folly of having leniency ride the rails.
Kubrick’s “Clockwork orange” the tedious reality scene of growing up amidst
the public housing environs of Lancaster Gate Hyde Park Paddington Victoria
Station the Old Vic.......
Gads not a ideal nor a lofty engagement of humanity Despair dominating
the mother and father Madonna scenario of the ancients.
How else can these stagnant booties be rehabilitated into what their purpose on earth once
was, their cosmos reopening, welcoming them back into the womb.
Being and becoming, people peoples.......
IV
“Eh what Kathy?”....Kathy Black, the new Chancellor, coming off her newspaper on line
media heroics....... her motto being “inch by inch it’s a cinch, by the yard it’s very hard”
sending her own two kids to boarding schools in the Nutmeg(Conn.)
The whole nine yards, monsieur.
V
The Franklin Avenue shuttle chug chugging along.... Admiral and his victim ..ipso facto prisoner But a victim in his mind set
Sidney Potier and Tony Curtis as the handcuffed “The defiant ones”
Madeleine Carroll in cuffs to Robert Donat “The 39 Steps” as they prowled the Scottish Moors for the killer of mister Atom, the counter espionage agent with total recall...
murdered on the West End London stage...........
But here Admiral Gravestone coming off a high in the inner city schools had captured a naive hood who thought the “easy rider” a raison d’etre of Peter Sellers ’“Pink Pantherr.”
The identities of the Admiral and his thug, playing out their needs on the Franklin
Avenue shuttle time table “in perpetua” for over six decades.
VI
Sure it wasn’t the “Education of Hyman Kaplan’ playing out...an immigrant student would never play out his inner need of assimilating the nefarious mores of a digital on
line I pod denizen crazed gone extraterrestrial.
Living in his own galaxy...is that too far from a two decade NFL quarterback .. C.Fauvre
playing out his hangups..
Like the pickpocket... he was into his fantasy...
Staying too long on the stage...”.Past yer prime ,big fellow.”
“Isn’t that the question dear Brutus?”
VII
The shuttle ripping along its track.., Admiral Gravestone and his assailant, their
hands unto each other.... the Botanic Garden platform cop sizing them up...his
lips snarling, his eyes capturing mortals clinging to each other ,waiting for their stop,
seated passengers departure..
“Gimme gimme another chance, sir,”said the thief.”It’s only a petty crime...I’m a good kid,”
said the crook out of class, caught in the act...hands down felony
“I should turn you in,” said the Admiral.”thinking of Lillian Roth’s “I’ll cry
tomorrow”: the heartache in growing up among the haves and have nots in the
age of entitlement. a callous indifference to finding yourself, Chief... .
VIII
He thought of his older brother trying to beat the system in San Diego. A naval officer on two weeks reserve duty, he met up with George Brent, an actor out at Warners, who was a Naval pilot. The second banana telling him the movie industry was but a fantasy.“The money was good” but his reality was Phantom jets.
The older brother into his fantasy ,homeward bound...a mistress liberating his appetite from the constancy of boredom’s rut... back to the routine of civies , he pulled off the
San Diego freeway.....
“If it wasn’t for the basketball coach at Tilden, I would have made the varsity,”
he said, into an obscenity. “He wanted to put me on the junior varsity. There’s no place
on the varsity . You’re a heaver, out for yourself.”..
“A star in yoir imagination but not on mine. We need team players..that’s the nature of
the game. The bottom line,”said the coach 4 decades earlier ,the high school student never
forgetting the hurt, his voice rising..
Sam Levinson his “Habla el Espanol” failing him, when he caught him cheating.....but a Richmond Hill High aunt persuaded Sam to pass him with. a “D”. .
”I hate the bastard.” never having read “I’ll cry tomorrow”
IX
On the Franklin Avenue shuttle the crushing humans oblivious to each other... the Admiral felt the sweaty hands of the pickpocket...to be or not to be, the shuttle swirling around the sixty year old route in the city that never sleeps.
Let you out on the streets again, picking pockets at bus stops...corner of 13th Avenue and 49 the corner of Pershing middle school, the surveillance cameras koed because of the blizzard,
“ No I can’t buy into that option, stud,” said Admiral Gravestone, living up to his name.
“So I won’t become a spaced out astronaut or computer enginner,”said the street smarts. Like Jean de Valjean, caught with his pants down for stealing a loaf of bread, the Frederic March Victor Hugo caper.... treading the Parisian sewers, Charles Laughton into his booted labyrinth..
X
As the shuttle pulled into its Prospect Park station, the Admiral let his good nature dominate the fierce cutthroat scene...sado masochism, drug dealers, porno you name it.....
The Admiral sweated out the wasted lives of so many.” Turn your life around, kid,”said the inner
school maestro .pretending he was Spencer Tracy as Father Flanagan reading the riot ract
to Mickey Rooney in Dore Schary’s “Boys Town”
XI
“Was it all a dream?” the Admiral asked . ”Do I look any worse for riding
the Franklin Avenue staggering shuttle.?”
His bride to be shrugged her shoulders.”I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about buddy but at least you’re not boring.
“Pick up the tab for the grub. You’re no longer Hugh Heffner in his prime
You’re into the pursuit of yourself”.
The Big Apple during the blizzard of December 2 6-27, 2010 the 6th worst storm in the
the City’s history... “Bloomy” taking the heat.......December 31,2010.
Revisited, Boro Park Rehab April 29- August 2 2010 ninth fl oor....a reunion of Midwood Abraham Lincoln Jefferson New Utrecht High Schools Pershing Jr.High six decades later.
August 7,2011
12 weeks in Boro Park Rehab
12 weeks in Boro Park Rehab, sharing space with their divine presence. Diagnosing cancer arthritis skin maladies diseases kidney dialysis fract8ured bones .August 9, 2011.
Speaker after speaker in all their cardiac information highway specialization spelled out the latest thinking from the genius of their cardiovascular disease networking…it wasn’t just Sweden, Holland, Florida, John Hopkins, Massachusetts General Hospital, the clinic in Cleveland, the New England Journal of Medicine, UCLA’s cardiac lab, Chicago’s Michael Reese, Washington University, St. Louis, Medical College of Virginia, University of Rome, “La Sapienza”.
It was the assimilation of the data, the computer software, hardware, the programming of the strengths, the weaknesses of cardiovascular culture…as it unfolds into a cosmos unto the world of medicine beyond any MD, PHD, could imagine a decade ago.
Captions like Angiography core Laboratory, Interventional cardiology, Electrophysiology and pacing put to shame the predilection for human imperfection in the likes of the cardiovascular scenarios as they continue to evolve in light of 21st century technologies. Without stopping the beating heart, without the need for a heart-lung machine, repairing valves thru a tiny incision, a minimal invasiveness Transmyocardial…, Revascularization using the laser for angina chest pain relief, carotid endarterectomy, arteries around the neck….aneurysm surgery.
Weakness of bureaucratic reviews, the limitations of cost accounting regimes, hospitalizations of 3500 Dollars a day for semi-private rooms, Medicare’s formula of reimbursement dispensing, the vital organ support system, artificial heart…the inadequacy of the historic system of health care, dominating the data as it streams like New Year streamers into E-mails, cell phones, internet passwords, that the billion dollar lipador, or E.C. Lilly foundation, American Heart Association cholesterol exercise eating the fruits and vegetables: scenarios the worshippers worship.
The stuffings for the good life as we saw millions of light years ago. UCLA’s Medical school still in the blueprint stages. Statins lipator zocor milligrams, calorie % equations to fats and saturated fats, still some forty years down the road.
Red flags like cheese omelets, frozen malteds, cheese burgers, french fries were still the norm for an imperfect life style, the aristocrats in their molecular bio and bioengineering labs coping with enzymes, viruses, the human immune system, proteins off cells, combating the viruses, the virus in its infectious disease zones, knowing how to evade the immune system.
Aortas but a tip of the iceberg as heart disease, dying hearts, calcifying arteries were almost ubiquitous in their assaults on blood vessels source of oxygen. Vein grafting risky, precluding heart disease, lowering cholesterol…exercising thirty minutes a day, eating right, watching……
“I want to be a MD” said the lithe prim Russian youngster from apartment 3B” . “My mother is studying to become a doctor”, she said. And what do you want to be?” asked Major Fenton’s good wife. “A gynecologist?”
“No, an MD for the moment,” she said in her Ukrainian state of mind. Responsive to the realities of a teaching medical center environment.
Little did she know of Professor Don C. Wiley, the 57 year old Harvard molecular biologist heading up his infectious diseases lab: high resolution X-ray crystallography of viral fusion, the immune system overwrought, waging war on influenza HIV-1 Ebola herpes virus.
Leaping off the bridge connecting Memphis with Arkansas, he being programmed for the Nobel Prize, his body found 300 some miles downstream, Louisiana, five weeks later, 12/22/01…….
Standing in the doorway, the cardiovascular system in her hands, the crossword puzzle penciled in, scrawled if you will of a seven eight year old holding her breathe…..” what is this worked across number 41?” she asked, not crossing the hearth, Major Fenton and his good wife studying the 6 spaces…… “What’s that word going down?” asked the good wife. “You sure you got it right?” she asked Lady Fenton a variation of her mother, yet identifying with her momma, and the intellectual economic capitol of medicine men with a capital M….”right?…….Major Fenton, right!”
II
Tendering their water bottles, stethoscopes hanging around their necks, some carrying clipboards, their energy seemed to be exponential to the third power, a big chemistry playing out in the Schreiber auditorium, their analytical and clinical experiences interacting with the specialists on the dais, the projectionist in the rear programming the slides, the professors clicking the baton like they were Stowkies playing out the Fantasia break through, the Dobey sound surreal, the listeners in one with the prowess on the dais, the baton’s Red nose, smashing the heart muscle’s squashing thrusting pulse…..
O sure you could say anything at all about the big leadership among these pros, their role models, their sticktoitiveness, determination and grit; they had all paid their dues..
Major Fenton wanted to tell the girl from apartment 3B, about peer pressure, land mines placed in your way, enemies around you wearing masks of conviviality, bringing you down to their level…but you were stone deaf to their entreaties…it was a hard world, tough as molasses and spelling bees.
Competitive, demanding concentration from the “get go” as they say…every human on the planet needing a support system for life’s obstacle course…the white jacketed Dr. Kildaires cardiologist apprentices, choosing seats where they could yawn, leaning against the wall, catching up on their r 3, 60 hours schedule of rounds, studying the heart’s pathology, the thick paged tome placed on a concrete wall, guarding the hospital’s manicured hedges.
Major Fenton had seen their type of camaraderie on the UCLA winning Rose bowl team, the Air Force Academy officer corps, the masterminds at Yale and Dean Lou Pollock’s Law School, his Yale roommate Professor Arvo Van Alstyne’s UCLA con law classes, defending Carl Chessman red lite bandit……whenever the subconscious mind at first apprehensive had solidified its confidence, moving down the information, dominating the algorims, the calculus, calibrating.
The girl and her mother not daring to hum ole blue eyes “Strangers on a train”…that was like an ET from another planet….an unrealistic distraction, a diversion from Sigmund Freud’s pleasure principle – Satchmo’s “Take the A Train”…..
It was hard nosed, cracking the pathology tomes, fighting your level of exhaustion, not knowing what your staying power was until it was tested…putting out of your mind the fear of failure….remember 3 days on, 3 days off.
“Hmmmm six spaces….First letter a P…..third letter an e…..meaning open….hmmmm….Lady Fenton you’re the resident authority for crossword puzzles…what do you think it could be?”
“Gads perchance what’s the good word, Lady Fenton? Open the blocked artery, reinforce artery walls with advanced stenting as soon as possible.”
“Pliant,” she said, her own technique of craft and recollection into thirty years. Her yesterdays the surcease from boredom….here the board room was into the fast lane, the reality of cardiovascular disease in and around cyberspace…
No Florence Nightingale, Madame Curie, Anna Freud, Helen Keller, Sister Teresa….could go about rescuing the world. Humans had more than enough to lick. Didn’t Major Fenton’s own boss at the Bedford Stuy high school say “You’re your own worst enemy. Yoselheimer it’s a genocide you’re teaching…Your brother is no idealist, either…consolidating his gains, climbing into the upper classes of capital gains, tax shelters, windfalls, …Genocide, castrating these kids, without telling’em the street scene is all a myth.
They’re living a lie. And so are you, Yosel…your brother, the surgeon. Buying sturgeon whitefish for Sunday brunches on ole’blue eyes legal eagle’s estate. “You’re toast”, said the principal, slamming the door.
III
48 hours into the future, a 70 year old retired high school teacher, playing out his post retirement as a member of the San Diego Chargers ground crew collapsed at the two minute warning mark, the Chargers hoping to decapitate the Oakland Raiders, their skull & bones on their helmets….the 70 year olds collapse but another statistic….into the data base of survival of the fittest…putting these players thru the bone crushing, body breaking mill…a man collapses, the game halted…viewers around the globe, stymied in their own unaccomplished accomplishments…a team of medicos applying CPR, resuscitation, pressing his rib cage, blood pressure monitoring, oxygen tanks reeled into his mouth, taking his pulse, giving the 70 year old man a chance at surviving another day, a moment to pursue himself…monitoring his vital signs…
The caring people put a board underneath his fallen body, carrying him off the sidelines, the scenario ready to begin again its tireless metaphor into the survival of the fittest, humanity’s heartbeat beating again and again. One man’s heartbeat quenched, the cosmos of pro football, the world Waited Saturday, December 15, 2001, the gig taking a breather in more ways than a 70 year old’s heart attack could ever attest to
The wheel of fate determined by a heartbeat….from oblivion, the “immortality “
IV
The MD, PHD, FACC, director of Electrophysiology and Pacing was oblivious to the pacing at the San Diego Charger-Raider football game’s own pacing…..His own data base of yearning to become one of the Faustian leading men in cardiac resynchronization therapy…..”Ask yourself why go to medical school in the first place? After all the years…of suffering, a blood bath for yourself…masochism?”
“But by asking, it begs the question of your own intelligence. Not to give up the paper chase, the pursuit, even when your exhausted, tired beyond anything you ever imagined. For myself, I got lucky, the fellowships. And today my role is not cardiology but kinesiology, bio engineering…….,” :his sense of humor at the way his career caromed thru the financial aid syndrome, the cardiologists, residents and interns, laughing at his light touch, identifying with his wit and humor, in an otherwise grisly demonstration of man’s heartbeat.., the cardiac institute’s thrust, refuting man’s last final breathe, up sparking his heartbeat, their modus operandi, the frog-like beat of a burp on the graphics.
They set the bar for a wholesome life style, treating heart disease, combating the victim’s own paucity of knowledge, how his ticker resonates in the emotional and numbers game of life’s tedious routines.
Didn’t the rehab of treadmills, bicycles, wheeling in motion, pumping the iron refute the causality of stats, their hard nosed determinism…The Washington cemetery of gravestones, family plots, mausoleums, Lasting proof, evidence of the transitoriness of the heartbeat’s travailing rhythms…its intersections with the oxygen carrying blood vessels, lungs, brain hemispheres, with its concomitant brain cells. Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, tumors, viruses lying in wait…for the first sign of a failing, the immune system, in generic disarray, Don C. Wiley, John L. Loeb Professor, Biochemistry & Biophysics, Structural Molecular Biology, Harvard, leaping off that Memphis Bridge that 16th night, November, 2001…….
Where else on the face of this Earth could their be a calling….which honors, perpetuates The life, 7 span, each day may be the last, Time passing, pathogenic & free radical damage of electrons, damage to tissues, heart disease, but genes, chromosomes 4,25 may compress sick time toward one’s life’s end.
Didn’t Roberto Campi, an internist in Novella Roma, living among the hi rise apartment houses on Via Nome fana, the trolley car passing the military barracks thru the piazzas, the Via Venito, the University of Rome medical school…Ben Hur, Marc Antony, Caesar, “ete Brute”, was here, the trolley passing above the catacombs, the sewers of the ancient city….
“Campi was here” …his wife, two Pinocchio boys, their governess, Bianco George, their neighbor. On the same floor, companion to Senora Campi while her internist H was cracking his books at the Rome University medical school, working out the protocols of his cardiac study: placebos & the real Mussolini stuffings of Italian life pills….walking exercising while devouring the rich oiled spaghetti, lasagna, Mediterranean fuzoila, pasta, the heavy calorie doughed white crusted loafs….all that starch hmmmmm at the Campi three hour siesta….
“Don’t do as I do, do as I say,” was his motto posted above the broadband computer access into the information highway of cardiovascular disease, and the turf he cycled on, walked amidst the Coliseum, the ancient ghetto, the delis with their spiced meats….Kosher you ask?
The good doctor did his best, scrutinizing the recipes Bianco George or the maid would prepare for his family….Fresh fruit – oranges, grapefruit, whole wheat grain cereals….”Fiber fiber” he’d press at the table, the family waiting for his return from his stance at the school….No mention of stents, the variation on the metal clasps for gushing artery blood that had been clogged over years of unconscionable eating on the run…those 3 hour siestas….
Risk stratification? Stupification being hooked by cancer sticks…human carnage in face of the evidence…all the trials, all the placebos…conclusive results…Indefatigable proof…incontrovertible evidence lent into the ovens..ad infinito….
Humans not “buying” antimenus: they enjoyed gasping to their last, they would go out, their self indulgence unalterable ego trip opposed to pacemakers, defibrillators, crippled from being all used up from too much living, smoking so many packs a day…doctor’s ritual like a Saturday matinee in the yesterday of our youth….
Plague and lesions, even with ultra sound…MRI’s thrown to the wastelands, abandoned for the sake of vanity, continuing the self destructive journeys from making 4 day hospital stays an uncommon common practice into the 21st century…Paradoxically seeking help, cures four and a half hours under the knife, yet rejecting any bedside relief until it’s too late for the last and final breathe.
Educating the masses be damned! They go their own way…Wasting away by their own waste.
Gads, perchance, Major Fenton what’s the good word?”
V
The auditorium lights went up, coffee break…Major Fenton the erstwhile double by pass patient, three months of Medicare rehab..an hour a day bicycling, wheeling, treadmill walking, 50 dumbbell repetitions…showering down, Turkish toweling, sitting in row X,……raising his right elbow from the chair’s arm…’Dr. Marvin C. Kochman and wife’ .
Thirty minutes away from Marvin’s reality scene at the Midwood movie theater’s balcony, he taking over the theater, converting it to his optomological base of operations, Tearing out the balcony seats where Major Fenton, a scrub at the local high school had weekly designs on the sophtic high school cheerleaders…..millions of memories ago, a half a century earlier….
“You get the drift,” was the Marvin’s utterance, as he peered thru his x-ray eye detector into your pupils, retinas corneas irises….” Look at my right ear…Look at my left…straight ahead,” impeccably dressed in his pin stripes, his graying wavy black hair combed into a leading man contour…finding himself a home in the Midwood theater balcony where he always belonged…the silver screen, a “Woody Allen” witness.
Formerly in white concrete quarters of a Quentin road medical building, his learning curve was up. “Started in a basement on Ocean Avenue,” he said, without any Julie Stein boasting. Hadn’t he come a long way without employing a jazz band, or a Music Corporation of America talent agency, or the UCLA eye hospital, part of the university’s medical landscape…..
He scribbled a few words of diagnostic wisdom…a middle aged man stepping into the room, Marvin speaking, the alter ego taking notes…the optometrist had the popcorn concession in the balcony…
“I’m retiring,” said the Marvin.”73 joining a gulf club scoring my age, but I’ll keep a hand in. Once a week on Fridays. My name out front,” he said, his tall tough like Cassius body, giving way to well groomed suited lady ophthalmologist who verified her mentor’s calibrated prescription…..
“My daughter is in London, leading a jazz band,” he said with a touch of exasperation.” Harvard law school like my wife…but she wanted to go her own way,” he said. “My son my son,” the same Brian Aherne flick that was exhibited some six seven decades earlier, Julie Stein structuring his optic training for organizing actors as an agent, then evolving back into his medical school training as an opthalmological genius….. ‘Julius & Doris Stein’s eyes’, off the LeConte Westwood boulevard entrance, University of California, Los Angeles’.
Major Fenton leaned on the armpost, remembering the flair Dr. Marvin had for his eye practice, the whole gamut of treatment, The laser healing of his hemorrhaging eyes, the Quentin Road facility…the board names of his associates following his credits….a larger than life flair, a man with the big gesture, those blue pin stripes “get my drift” tongue,
A Jack L. Warner without the stogie, seeing his soul in action was indeed more than a hemorrhaging eye patient could bargain for.
The Major had seen the doctor drive his son to a dermatologist named Morton. He had caught the drift about his daughter returning to the states, her passion for scribbling lyrics in California, associating with the likes of Grammies, lady crooners and all that encompasses..the poetry of Joni Mitchell, for instance.
Sure Marvin and his wife knew the way of the world. Didn’t Julie Stein and his Doris, their Pacific Coast counterpart know it too…dance music for Freud’s and Fred Astaire’s pleasure principle, then revolving back unto the opthalmalogical reality scene.
Who could argue with that? Didn’t the HMO’s penetrate a billion trillion-dollar enterprise? The state of Oregon Giving up their fight. A triple heart transplant going the way of cost accounting. The insurance company backing down in face of the HMO’s refusal to accept the risk of three quarters of a million coverage: if the surgery goes bad, the odds insurmountable for the patient’s recovery…even with Oregon’s poor law drafted for such cases, the dollar outlays were too exorbitant, the surgery too chancy.
Why monitor such risks argued the HMO, pulling the plug out from under the dying human, the team of cardiovascular surgeons anesthesiologists assistant doctors nurses left in the lurch.…
Alleviating human suffering and misery demanded a high price, too high for most of us, observers of the medical recovery syndrome. The participants taken aback at the costs, dying a little bit, their level of frustration peaking, then subduing at the reality of the miniscule role they were playing.
The doctor and his good wife had a marketing wizard, an advertising pro comparable to Molly Bloom’s husband out of Joyce’s Ulysses’, prowling the Brooklyn streets for ads…Allan N. in his jovial excursion into FM radio, selling the wares of his numero uno client, Dr. Marvin…word of mouth, the print media, the air waves, space transponders, satellite dishes…Why not? And they came.
The rainbow coalition, the religious people, the seniors filling the seats of the Midwood balcony for what was once a double feature…the Dr. Marvin “Rhett Butler”, his self servicing splendor, rewarded handsomely, for playing out his inner needs…in the balcony…among the apparitions & spooks of fantasies long since gone, the happy hunting ground & internet web sites for movie buffs. “George Washington slept here”, starring Jack Benny…
“Y’get my drift?”.
VI
Eleven million potential customers in the big Apple alone…why not give it a shot with an advertising blitz that would shake up, the yawning of the interns “whattaya gonna do over the Holidays?” Conversations among the audience scripted in their lily clean white jackets coffee cups in hand. “Philadelphia. Y’ever been there?” “Beautiful city.”
Aggressive gratifications in a very competitive business….Healthy so they could spend time with their grandchildren…live longer healthier lives…save the Seniors more than $1700 a year…that’s what it’s all about….so why not look into it,” sounded the politico sincerity, airwaves giving way to a “sound & fury” mythology…” We started out in a basement on Ocean Avenue,” said the wunderkid into his pin stripes, speckled gray black wavy hair. Contoured into a pompadour popular on the Avenue 50 years ago…
“If you want the administration press six. If you want Rosalind, press two….,” the musica of the classical radio station resounding…” Regards from the maestro himself,” the Major’s guttural tones in to the classics….
But could you tell the blue collar crowd, the Major’s Super undo his wits, phoning the good wife asking for a loan of six bucks until the next morning at eleven, the fourth time within the year, the super played out his role, asking for a small touch…he had chutzpah but during the Holiday season, the patrician saw fit to lean back and unScroogelike part with the six…lucky lottos, a New Jersey threesome 007…
VII
God bless Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit, John, the cancer stick in his right paw, waiting on the sixer…into minions while the big game passes over him, the 7 year old Ukrainian girl a flight upstairs into her cardiovascular system language, vocabulary building when she realizes her promise,….if she can avoid, bypass the pitfalls of temptation, poor role models, lousy advice…hook unto the soul of her mother…not rebelling, putting aside her dreams….
Starting out in life, she wasn’t yet attuned…”the ratio of the good cholesterol, the HDL, to the bad cholesterol, the LDL was evenly split, you don’t need unsaturated fat because of the bad cholesterol…but you need it for the good cholesterol, the HDL….and in the saturated fat you need the HDL, the good cholesterol to outweigh the bad cholesterol, the LDL…again it’s the ratio between the good and the bad that counts….”
All she wanted was a six-letter word that fits within the cardiovascular system…
Meanwhile hundred year old legal eagle named Philip Levey was celebrating his 100th birthday party at the Harmony club a few blocks from the symposium…Standing tallish like the “Duke” Wayne leading man he was.” Thank you all for coming…it isn’t often we lawyers on hitting ten decades can share the moment with his closest friends and my family…my daughter, her husband, my grandchildren, great grandchildren. How do I ascribe the secret for my longevity…Albert Einstein School of Medicine claims 300 years ago in the Rhineland, my ancestors married within the family, the longevity gene carried over from generation to generation, first second cousins…Didn’t Einstein say “I
do” with his cousin?
Rolling up his sleeve, “see those punctures, my vaccination. A blood test for announcing my genetic longevity…Lottie, my companion….herself going on 94 can attest to my staying powers….4 decades she cared for me…loved me…my companion forever….I was productive for so long until 9/11 and those bastards…the smoke & ground zero is too much for me to go down to Chambers Street, the reality scene too much for my respiratory system. My breathing…I think I already said too much. I must sit down…thank you all for coming….”
Sounds impressive imagined the very young Ukranian girl waiting on a Thesaurus for finding the six letter word, beginning with P, the third letter e…”What does longevity mean?”….
“A toast,” cried some lawyer from among the guests. “To a productive long life”.
“Another hundred years,” claimed a wishful thinker, Philip mumbled “Twenty minutes a day, stretching exercise,” making a bicep, offering it…to anyone in the room for a feel…a free feel, imagined the seven year old girl from the Ukraine.
VIII
The public library honoring Phil L…at central library, a book in his name….” A tribute in my honor,” he said to himself, opening up his mail…” a book in my name at the central branch no less…from the good Major Fenton and his frau..ten decades on how I remember the forty years since we first broke the ice…it was in my office on 42nd Street upaways from the central branch on Fifth Avenue, those two lions guarding the entrances…and he walks to a wall unit where he maintains his treasure trove for clients to be , and old retainers.
“He asks me you know what I mean the cardiovascular surgeon…he says do I prefer the stent in the wall of the left ventricle or the right? Lissen’ amigo buddy boy I’m a hundred years old, Labor Day…forgive me if I belabor the point…but does it pay…that’s the question…all my life those ten decades, at every critical point we asked – does it pay…A crown on the lower side molar? Does it pay? A root canal job…does it pay? Dentures? Does it pay? Now you ask a stent the left wall – the right ventricle wall…..does it pay? Jackson…you’re the man! Precision imaging, noninvasive balloon angioplasty…reinforce the artery walls with stenting…what do I know?..a bursar ship’s salesman, night school at Fordham law…Wormser with his phonographic hearing aid…you got the brief? Y’think I need a haircut…a little off the top, the sideburns shorter…Put some color in the bald spot…My companion of 4 decades says it makes a difference….a sexy legal eagle…better for the retainer, she convinced the Gestapo to let her husband go free…women know what makes us men tick. All I got is longevity gene, Sonny.”
IX
“As I was saying,” said the final speaker, his wand red..flagging the squashing gulping throbbing heart, the cue moving between the aorta, the right and left walls of the beating pulsating squishing heart…like the beat of a frog, gulp gulping…” We can clear the clogged blockages thru advanced profile..12,12/01,…Flat panel imaging you can’t beat it!”
The joint was humming, the speaker’s chemistry, splicing with the audience of cardiac surgeons, residents, interns, education committee profs…beepers cell pones intermittently cueing their taskmasters…all in all they were alive like a fans at ninth inning rally, the speaker’s sense of humor, the absurdity of the life…the trauma of living as measured against the beat beat beat, the vulnerability of all of us…trying to gauge our life force against the grid and grind of daily expectations…..
“I’m a specialist,” he was saying, little did he know about the Argentine shakedown, the recession, the government’s collapse, rioting and looting in Buenos Aires, the International forces taking over in Afghanistan after twenty years of war, famine: humans carrying flame throwers, grenade launchers, rifles putting on the dog in the Capitol city of Kabul….the disparity between the haves and have nots growing almost every moment of a minute, changing the color of their turbans.
X
….the Dow Jones Averages on the New York stock exchange shot up a point and a quarter that day. The bulls were running and the bears were hibernating. Where did it all lead to anyhow? Leaky hearts? Clogged arteries? Ulcers? High blood pressure?
Philip Levey, a big apple legal eagle with offices on Fifth Avenue, knocked his desk twice. “Thank God, my clients have been good to me. I’ve been able to spend a few minutes stretching with a band every day. It keeps my muscles in tone,” he said, letting his friend touch his sixteen-inch right bicep. “Make a fist,” he said.
The phone rang, “Excuse me, I’m on three lines”, said the lawyer.
The friend peered into the face of the New Jersey born legal salesman extraordinaire. Those bluish gray eyes seemed indestructible…like the trunk of a tree that had seen many seeds sprout, take root, and others blown away. The layers of rings around those eyes testified to the tug of war that goes on in the feeling and thinking of 5th Avenue lawyers & corporate directors like Philip Levey.
My wife calls three or four times a day. She’s very attentive,” he said, hanging the receiver up. He took out of his desk drawer some New York Times clippings. “My daughter just got engaged. She’s a Vassar graduate. Her fiancé interning, but he wants to specialize in urology and that’s another 4 years. So you see, I have to keep my muscles in tone.”
The friend fidgeted in his chair alongside the desk, hearing a clicking. “The noise you hear is from my four phone boxes. You don’t have to worry. Our conversation isn’t being monitored,” he said.
But the friend cared little about preserving his dialogue. He cared more about the struggle of a Fifth Avenue lawyer and the rhythms that pulsated thru his life. “Should a human marry for love or money, Philip?” asked the friend.
The human named Philip Levey, slim in his conservative single breasted blue suit, blue tie, tip of his white handkerchief showing from his lapel , hesitated. Although a rapid talker, one idea giving rise to the other, he tossed off a gesture with his right hand, turning his once wavy blonde hair head…
“I’ve give that question a lot of thought lately. My wife wanted my daughter to marry a rich boy. I think love is far more important. Yes, far more important,” he said, throwing a gesture with his right hand.
The friend know feeling was equally as strong as thinking in fact to feel is no less than to think. As humans tend to grow older, they sometimes feel less.
“My father was a real estate man. Lakewood, New Jersey,” he said. “A Lincolnesque type of man I remember the bank president putting his arm on my shoulder when I was around twelve. “Phil when you grow up, I hope you’ll be as honest as your father”…When the president passed on, they read his will and found he left ten thousand dollars to my father. That’s how much he was respected.”
The friend sat back, waiting. “Yes those were my best years,” said the legal eagle.” The high school years I think are the best. No real troubles. Of course you do worry about your future. But it was worth worrying in Lakewood. I used to take long walks thru the woods.”
“How’d you get started in law, Philip?”
“I had gone to Columbia. Majored in business administration. I used to wait after the classes to talk to the professors. Asked them questions about their lectures. But they would always frown, pick up their attaché cases and walk away. It was very anti-democratic.
I started selling ship supplies to captains and pursers until one day I met a friend who told me he was going to Fordham law school. I thought I would try it out for one year. But I liked it so much, I stayed for four. The professors always answered my questions. Very democratic. I remember Professor Wormser. He was an international authority in his field. He may have compensated for his deafness. He had a big box on his lecture desk. There were no hearing aids. He’d ask me questions way ahead of the assigned cases. He never caught me unprepared,” he said, smiling happily over past briefs.
“Once I got into the law, I found I liked it. I got three lawyers working for me> The oldest has been with me for over twenty years. He was with a large firm. Had three children. But when he asked for a twenty-dollar raise, they refused. I gave him the raise and he came to work for me,” he said.
The strong right hand reached out to touch some folders and blue covered complaints lying on the desk. “I’ve handled over ten thousand cases,”: he said.” I’ve seen clients come and go. Sometimes my first impressions have been wrong But generally I’m pretty good in sizing up humans. If I thought the man or woman was in need of psychiatric treatment or needed help other than legal, would subsequently discover He or she had a nervous breakdown or been a patient in some mental hospital.”
“What do you think about Ernest Hemingway saying it’s impossible for humans to perpetuate themselves thru Economics?” asked the friend.
Again the strong right arm gestured, the head turned. “I believe it,” he said, speaking warmly and showing no outward sign of regret. “Many use the corporate form to perpetuate their legacy, their family, their children. Others use wills. Personally, I think it’s better to give your gifts now rather than later. You never know when the donees may exit, pass on. If they die first what good is the paper…They die with the will, don’t they. Speaking for myself, I like to give now,” he said, standing up from his desk…
“You think it’s your vanity?” asked the friend.
“I'm sure it is. But what of it? My ego is satisfied and the justification lies in the happiness of my friends.” “Here”, he said handing the friend two small packages. “Perfume for your sweetheart. Cuff links for you.”
Philip Levey’s strong right hand grasped the office doorknob, opening the door.
The friend saw a female client sitting on the black leather couch in the anteroom. She seemed troubled, her face a medley of scars, none of which in the beginning were physical…
He walked to the elevator as so many thousands of others had done before him. Day after day quickly passed and what did a human being have to show for it.
An accumulation of vapid desires? Or those nonaging blue grayish eyes of Philip Levey’s, circled three fold by the tug of war between feeling & thinking?*
XI
…. “Yes I said”….
“Yes I will”
“You get the drift?”
“Yes”
XII
*9/06/01, Philip Levey’s, 100th birthday party, given by his daughter & son in law, Harmony Club, 4 E. 62 , New York City, five days before ground zero…….
**12/29/01, New York Times, ‘head of Downstate. Teaching hospital demoted, 18 more deaths on his watch, heart surgery program shut down 3 days, rethinking “consultation”, part-time 10 hours, $200,000 per annum.
Speaker after speaker in all their cardiac information highway specialization spelled out the latest thinking from the genius of their cardiovascular disease networking…it wasn’t just Sweden, Holland, Florida, John Hopkins, Massachusetts General Hospital, the clinic in Cleveland, the New England Journal of Medicine, UCLA’s cardiac lab, Chicago’s Michael Reese, Washington University, St. Louis, Medical College of Virginia, University of Rome, “La Sapienza”.
It was the assimilation of the data, the computer software, hardware, the programming of the strengths, the weaknesses of cardiovascular culture…as it unfolds into a cosmos unto the world of medicine beyond any MD, PHD, could imagine a decade ago.
Captions like Angiography core Laboratory, Interventional cardiology, Electrophysiology and pacing put to shame the predilection for human imperfection in the likes of the cardiovascular scenarios as they continue to evolve in light of 21st century technologies. Without stopping the beating heart, without the need for a heart-lung machine, repairing valves thru a tiny incision, a minimal invasiveness Transmyocardial…, Revascularization using the laser for angina chest pain relief, carotid endarterectomy, arteries around the neck….aneurysm surgery.
Weakness of bureaucratic reviews, the limitations of cost accounting regimes, hospitalizations of 3500 Dollars a day for semi-private rooms, Medicare’s formula of reimbursement dispensing, the vital organ support system, artificial heart…the inadequacy of the historic system of health care, dominating the data as it streams like New Year streamers into E-mails, cell phones, internet passwords, that the billion dollar lipador, or E.C. Lilly foundation, American Heart Association cholesterol exercise eating the fruits and vegetables: scenarios the worshippers worship.
The stuffings for the good life as we saw millions of light years ago. UCLA’s Medical school still in the blueprint stages. Statins lipator zocor milligrams, calorie % equations to fats and saturated fats, still some forty years down the road.
Red flags like cheese omelets, frozen malteds, cheese burgers, french fries were still the norm for an imperfect life style, the aristocrats in their molecular bio and bioengineering labs coping with enzymes, viruses, the human immune system, proteins off cells, combating the viruses, the virus in its infectious disease zones, knowing how to evade the immune system.
Aortas but a tip of the iceberg as heart disease, dying hearts, calcifying arteries were almost ubiquitous in their assaults on blood vessels source of oxygen. Vein grafting risky, precluding heart disease, lowering cholesterol…exercising thirty minutes a day, eating right, watching……
“I want to be a MD” said the lithe prim Russian youngster from apartment 3B” . “My mother is studying to become a doctor”, she said. And what do you want to be?” asked Major Fenton’s good wife. “A gynecologist?”
“No, an MD for the moment,” she said in her Ukrainian state of mind. Responsive to the realities of a teaching medical center environment.
Little did she know of Professor Don C. Wiley, the 57 year old Harvard molecular biologist heading up his infectious diseases lab: high resolution X-ray crystallography of viral fusion, the immune system overwrought, waging war on influenza HIV-1 Ebola herpes virus.
Leaping off the bridge connecting Memphis with Arkansas, he being programmed for the Nobel Prize, his body found 300 some miles downstream, Louisiana, five weeks later, 12/22/01…….
Standing in the doorway, the cardiovascular system in her hands, the crossword puzzle penciled in, scrawled if you will of a seven eight year old holding her breathe…..” what is this worked across number 41?” she asked, not crossing the hearth, Major Fenton and his good wife studying the 6 spaces…… “What’s that word going down?” asked the good wife. “You sure you got it right?” she asked Lady Fenton a variation of her mother, yet identifying with her momma, and the intellectual economic capitol of medicine men with a capital M….”right?…….Major Fenton, right!”
II
Tendering their water bottles, stethoscopes hanging around their necks, some carrying clipboards, their energy seemed to be exponential to the third power, a big chemistry playing out in the Schreiber auditorium, their analytical and clinical experiences interacting with the specialists on the dais, the projectionist in the rear programming the slides, the professors clicking the baton like they were Stowkies playing out the Fantasia break through, the Dobey sound surreal, the listeners in one with the prowess on the dais, the baton’s Red nose, smashing the heart muscle’s squashing thrusting pulse…..
O sure you could say anything at all about the big leadership among these pros, their role models, their sticktoitiveness, determination and grit; they had all paid their dues..
Major Fenton wanted to tell the girl from apartment 3B, about peer pressure, land mines placed in your way, enemies around you wearing masks of conviviality, bringing you down to their level…but you were stone deaf to their entreaties…it was a hard world, tough as molasses and spelling bees.
Competitive, demanding concentration from the “get go” as they say…every human on the planet needing a support system for life’s obstacle course…the white jacketed Dr. Kildaires cardiologist apprentices, choosing seats where they could yawn, leaning against the wall, catching up on their r 3, 60 hours schedule of rounds, studying the heart’s pathology, the thick paged tome placed on a concrete wall, guarding the hospital’s manicured hedges.
Major Fenton had seen their type of camaraderie on the UCLA winning Rose bowl team, the Air Force Academy officer corps, the masterminds at Yale and Dean Lou Pollock’s Law School, his Yale roommate Professor Arvo Van Alstyne’s UCLA con law classes, defending Carl Chessman red lite bandit……whenever the subconscious mind at first apprehensive had solidified its confidence, moving down the information, dominating the algorims, the calculus, calibrating.
The girl and her mother not daring to hum ole blue eyes “Strangers on a train”…that was like an ET from another planet….an unrealistic distraction, a diversion from Sigmund Freud’s pleasure principle – Satchmo’s “Take the A Train”…..
It was hard nosed, cracking the pathology tomes, fighting your level of exhaustion, not knowing what your staying power was until it was tested…putting out of your mind the fear of failure….remember 3 days on, 3 days off.
“Hmmmm six spaces….First letter a P…..third letter an e…..meaning open….hmmmm….Lady Fenton you’re the resident authority for crossword puzzles…what do you think it could be?”
“Gads perchance what’s the good word, Lady Fenton? Open the blocked artery, reinforce artery walls with advanced stenting as soon as possible.”
“Pliant,” she said, her own technique of craft and recollection into thirty years. Her yesterdays the surcease from boredom….here the board room was into the fast lane, the reality of cardiovascular disease in and around cyberspace…
No Florence Nightingale, Madame Curie, Anna Freud, Helen Keller, Sister Teresa….could go about rescuing the world. Humans had more than enough to lick. Didn’t Major Fenton’s own boss at the Bedford Stuy high school say “You’re your own worst enemy. Yoselheimer it’s a genocide you’re teaching…Your brother is no idealist, either…consolidating his gains, climbing into the upper classes of capital gains, tax shelters, windfalls, …Genocide, castrating these kids, without telling’em the street scene is all a myth.
They’re living a lie. And so are you, Yosel…your brother, the surgeon. Buying sturgeon whitefish for Sunday brunches on ole’blue eyes legal eagle’s estate. “You’re toast”, said the principal, slamming the door.
III
48 hours into the future, a 70 year old retired high school teacher, playing out his post retirement as a member of the San Diego Chargers ground crew collapsed at the two minute warning mark, the Chargers hoping to decapitate the Oakland Raiders, their skull & bones on their helmets….the 70 year olds collapse but another statistic….into the data base of survival of the fittest…putting these players thru the bone crushing, body breaking mill…a man collapses, the game halted…viewers around the globe, stymied in their own unaccomplished accomplishments…a team of medicos applying CPR, resuscitation, pressing his rib cage, blood pressure monitoring, oxygen tanks reeled into his mouth, taking his pulse, giving the 70 year old man a chance at surviving another day, a moment to pursue himself…monitoring his vital signs…
The caring people put a board underneath his fallen body, carrying him off the sidelines, the scenario ready to begin again its tireless metaphor into the survival of the fittest, humanity’s heartbeat beating again and again. One man’s heartbeat quenched, the cosmos of pro football, the world Waited Saturday, December 15, 2001, the gig taking a breather in more ways than a 70 year old’s heart attack could ever attest to
The wheel of fate determined by a heartbeat….from oblivion, the “immortality “
IV
The MD, PHD, FACC, director of Electrophysiology and Pacing was oblivious to the pacing at the San Diego Charger-Raider football game’s own pacing…..His own data base of yearning to become one of the Faustian leading men in cardiac resynchronization therapy…..”Ask yourself why go to medical school in the first place? After all the years…of suffering, a blood bath for yourself…masochism?”
“But by asking, it begs the question of your own intelligence. Not to give up the paper chase, the pursuit, even when your exhausted, tired beyond anything you ever imagined. For myself, I got lucky, the fellowships. And today my role is not cardiology but kinesiology, bio engineering…….,” :his sense of humor at the way his career caromed thru the financial aid syndrome, the cardiologists, residents and interns, laughing at his light touch, identifying with his wit and humor, in an otherwise grisly demonstration of man’s heartbeat.., the cardiac institute’s thrust, refuting man’s last final breathe, up sparking his heartbeat, their modus operandi, the frog-like beat of a burp on the graphics.
They set the bar for a wholesome life style, treating heart disease, combating the victim’s own paucity of knowledge, how his ticker resonates in the emotional and numbers game of life’s tedious routines.
Didn’t the rehab of treadmills, bicycles, wheeling in motion, pumping the iron refute the causality of stats, their hard nosed determinism…The Washington cemetery of gravestones, family plots, mausoleums, Lasting proof, evidence of the transitoriness of the heartbeat’s travailing rhythms…its intersections with the oxygen carrying blood vessels, lungs, brain hemispheres, with its concomitant brain cells. Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, tumors, viruses lying in wait…for the first sign of a failing, the immune system, in generic disarray, Don C. Wiley, John L. Loeb Professor, Biochemistry & Biophysics, Structural Molecular Biology, Harvard, leaping off that Memphis Bridge that 16th night, November, 2001…….
Where else on the face of this Earth could their be a calling….which honors, perpetuates The life, 7 span, each day may be the last, Time passing, pathogenic & free radical damage of electrons, damage to tissues, heart disease, but genes, chromosomes 4,25 may compress sick time toward one’s life’s end.
Didn’t Roberto Campi, an internist in Novella Roma, living among the hi rise apartment houses on Via Nome fana, the trolley car passing the military barracks thru the piazzas, the Via Venito, the University of Rome medical school…Ben Hur, Marc Antony, Caesar, “ete Brute”, was here, the trolley passing above the catacombs, the sewers of the ancient city….
“Campi was here” …his wife, two Pinocchio boys, their governess, Bianco George, their neighbor. On the same floor, companion to Senora Campi while her internist H was cracking his books at the Rome University medical school, working out the protocols of his cardiac study: placebos & the real Mussolini stuffings of Italian life pills….walking exercising while devouring the rich oiled spaghetti, lasagna, Mediterranean fuzoila, pasta, the heavy calorie doughed white crusted loafs….all that starch hmmmmm at the Campi three hour siesta….
“Don’t do as I do, do as I say,” was his motto posted above the broadband computer access into the information highway of cardiovascular disease, and the turf he cycled on, walked amidst the Coliseum, the ancient ghetto, the delis with their spiced meats….Kosher you ask?
The good doctor did his best, scrutinizing the recipes Bianco George or the maid would prepare for his family….Fresh fruit – oranges, grapefruit, whole wheat grain cereals….”Fiber fiber” he’d press at the table, the family waiting for his return from his stance at the school….No mention of stents, the variation on the metal clasps for gushing artery blood that had been clogged over years of unconscionable eating on the run…those 3 hour siestas….
Risk stratification? Stupification being hooked by cancer sticks…human carnage in face of the evidence…all the trials, all the placebos…conclusive results…Indefatigable proof…incontrovertible evidence lent into the ovens..ad infinito….
Humans not “buying” antimenus: they enjoyed gasping to their last, they would go out, their self indulgence unalterable ego trip opposed to pacemakers, defibrillators, crippled from being all used up from too much living, smoking so many packs a day…doctor’s ritual like a Saturday matinee in the yesterday of our youth….
Plague and lesions, even with ultra sound…MRI’s thrown to the wastelands, abandoned for the sake of vanity, continuing the self destructive journeys from making 4 day hospital stays an uncommon common practice into the 21st century…Paradoxically seeking help, cures four and a half hours under the knife, yet rejecting any bedside relief until it’s too late for the last and final breathe.
Educating the masses be damned! They go their own way…Wasting away by their own waste.
Gads, perchance, Major Fenton what’s the good word?”
V
The auditorium lights went up, coffee break…Major Fenton the erstwhile double by pass patient, three months of Medicare rehab..an hour a day bicycling, wheeling, treadmill walking, 50 dumbbell repetitions…showering down, Turkish toweling, sitting in row X,……raising his right elbow from the chair’s arm…’Dr. Marvin C. Kochman and wife’ .
Thirty minutes away from Marvin’s reality scene at the Midwood movie theater’s balcony, he taking over the theater, converting it to his optomological base of operations, Tearing out the balcony seats where Major Fenton, a scrub at the local high school had weekly designs on the sophtic high school cheerleaders…..millions of memories ago, a half a century earlier….
“You get the drift,” was the Marvin’s utterance, as he peered thru his x-ray eye detector into your pupils, retinas corneas irises….” Look at my right ear…Look at my left…straight ahead,” impeccably dressed in his pin stripes, his graying wavy black hair combed into a leading man contour…finding himself a home in the Midwood theater balcony where he always belonged…the silver screen, a “Woody Allen” witness.
Formerly in white concrete quarters of a Quentin road medical building, his learning curve was up. “Started in a basement on Ocean Avenue,” he said, without any Julie Stein boasting. Hadn’t he come a long way without employing a jazz band, or a Music Corporation of America talent agency, or the UCLA eye hospital, part of the university’s medical landscape…..
He scribbled a few words of diagnostic wisdom…a middle aged man stepping into the room, Marvin speaking, the alter ego taking notes…the optometrist had the popcorn concession in the balcony…
“I’m retiring,” said the Marvin.”73 joining a gulf club scoring my age, but I’ll keep a hand in. Once a week on Fridays. My name out front,” he said, his tall tough like Cassius body, giving way to well groomed suited lady ophthalmologist who verified her mentor’s calibrated prescription…..
“My daughter is in London, leading a jazz band,” he said with a touch of exasperation.” Harvard law school like my wife…but she wanted to go her own way,” he said. “My son my son,” the same Brian Aherne flick that was exhibited some six seven decades earlier, Julie Stein structuring his optic training for organizing actors as an agent, then evolving back into his medical school training as an opthalmological genius….. ‘Julius & Doris Stein’s eyes’, off the LeConte Westwood boulevard entrance, University of California, Los Angeles’.
Major Fenton leaned on the armpost, remembering the flair Dr. Marvin had for his eye practice, the whole gamut of treatment, The laser healing of his hemorrhaging eyes, the Quentin Road facility…the board names of his associates following his credits….a larger than life flair, a man with the big gesture, those blue pin stripes “get my drift” tongue,
A Jack L. Warner without the stogie, seeing his soul in action was indeed more than a hemorrhaging eye patient could bargain for.
The Major had seen the doctor drive his son to a dermatologist named Morton. He had caught the drift about his daughter returning to the states, her passion for scribbling lyrics in California, associating with the likes of Grammies, lady crooners and all that encompasses..the poetry of Joni Mitchell, for instance.
Sure Marvin and his wife knew the way of the world. Didn’t Julie Stein and his Doris, their Pacific Coast counterpart know it too…dance music for Freud’s and Fred Astaire’s pleasure principle, then revolving back unto the opthalmalogical reality scene.
Who could argue with that? Didn’t the HMO’s penetrate a billion trillion-dollar enterprise? The state of Oregon Giving up their fight. A triple heart transplant going the way of cost accounting. The insurance company backing down in face of the HMO’s refusal to accept the risk of three quarters of a million coverage: if the surgery goes bad, the odds insurmountable for the patient’s recovery…even with Oregon’s poor law drafted for such cases, the dollar outlays were too exorbitant, the surgery too chancy.
Why monitor such risks argued the HMO, pulling the plug out from under the dying human, the team of cardiovascular surgeons anesthesiologists assistant doctors nurses left in the lurch.…
Alleviating human suffering and misery demanded a high price, too high for most of us, observers of the medical recovery syndrome. The participants taken aback at the costs, dying a little bit, their level of frustration peaking, then subduing at the reality of the miniscule role they were playing.
The doctor and his good wife had a marketing wizard, an advertising pro comparable to Molly Bloom’s husband out of Joyce’s Ulysses’, prowling the Brooklyn streets for ads…Allan N. in his jovial excursion into FM radio, selling the wares of his numero uno client, Dr. Marvin…word of mouth, the print media, the air waves, space transponders, satellite dishes…Why not? And they came.
The rainbow coalition, the religious people, the seniors filling the seats of the Midwood balcony for what was once a double feature…the Dr. Marvin “Rhett Butler”, his self servicing splendor, rewarded handsomely, for playing out his inner needs…in the balcony…among the apparitions & spooks of fantasies long since gone, the happy hunting ground & internet web sites for movie buffs. “George Washington slept here”, starring Jack Benny…
“Y’get my drift?”.
VI
Eleven million potential customers in the big Apple alone…why not give it a shot with an advertising blitz that would shake up, the yawning of the interns “whattaya gonna do over the Holidays?” Conversations among the audience scripted in their lily clean white jackets coffee cups in hand. “Philadelphia. Y’ever been there?” “Beautiful city.”
Aggressive gratifications in a very competitive business….Healthy so they could spend time with their grandchildren…live longer healthier lives…save the Seniors more than $1700 a year…that’s what it’s all about….so why not look into it,” sounded the politico sincerity, airwaves giving way to a “sound & fury” mythology…” We started out in a basement on Ocean Avenue,” said the wunderkid into his pin stripes, speckled gray black wavy hair. Contoured into a pompadour popular on the Avenue 50 years ago…
“If you want the administration press six. If you want Rosalind, press two….,” the musica of the classical radio station resounding…” Regards from the maestro himself,” the Major’s guttural tones in to the classics….
But could you tell the blue collar crowd, the Major’s Super undo his wits, phoning the good wife asking for a loan of six bucks until the next morning at eleven, the fourth time within the year, the super played out his role, asking for a small touch…he had chutzpah but during the Holiday season, the patrician saw fit to lean back and unScroogelike part with the six…lucky lottos, a New Jersey threesome 007…
VII
God bless Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit, John, the cancer stick in his right paw, waiting on the sixer…into minions while the big game passes over him, the 7 year old Ukrainian girl a flight upstairs into her cardiovascular system language, vocabulary building when she realizes her promise,….if she can avoid, bypass the pitfalls of temptation, poor role models, lousy advice…hook unto the soul of her mother…not rebelling, putting aside her dreams….
Starting out in life, she wasn’t yet attuned…”the ratio of the good cholesterol, the HDL, to the bad cholesterol, the LDL was evenly split, you don’t need unsaturated fat because of the bad cholesterol…but you need it for the good cholesterol, the HDL….and in the saturated fat you need the HDL, the good cholesterol to outweigh the bad cholesterol, the LDL…again it’s the ratio between the good and the bad that counts….”
All she wanted was a six-letter word that fits within the cardiovascular system…
Meanwhile hundred year old legal eagle named Philip Levey was celebrating his 100th birthday party at the Harmony club a few blocks from the symposium…Standing tallish like the “Duke” Wayne leading man he was.” Thank you all for coming…it isn’t often we lawyers on hitting ten decades can share the moment with his closest friends and my family…my daughter, her husband, my grandchildren, great grandchildren. How do I ascribe the secret for my longevity…Albert Einstein School of Medicine claims 300 years ago in the Rhineland, my ancestors married within the family, the longevity gene carried over from generation to generation, first second cousins…Didn’t Einstein say “I
do” with his cousin?
Rolling up his sleeve, “see those punctures, my vaccination. A blood test for announcing my genetic longevity…Lottie, my companion….herself going on 94 can attest to my staying powers….4 decades she cared for me…loved me…my companion forever….I was productive for so long until 9/11 and those bastards…the smoke & ground zero is too much for me to go down to Chambers Street, the reality scene too much for my respiratory system. My breathing…I think I already said too much. I must sit down…thank you all for coming….”
Sounds impressive imagined the very young Ukranian girl waiting on a Thesaurus for finding the six letter word, beginning with P, the third letter e…”What does longevity mean?”….
“A toast,” cried some lawyer from among the guests. “To a productive long life”.
“Another hundred years,” claimed a wishful thinker, Philip mumbled “Twenty minutes a day, stretching exercise,” making a bicep, offering it…to anyone in the room for a feel…a free feel, imagined the seven year old girl from the Ukraine.
VIII
The public library honoring Phil L…at central library, a book in his name….” A tribute in my honor,” he said to himself, opening up his mail…” a book in my name at the central branch no less…from the good Major Fenton and his frau..ten decades on how I remember the forty years since we first broke the ice…it was in my office on 42nd Street upaways from the central branch on Fifth Avenue, those two lions guarding the entrances…and he walks to a wall unit where he maintains his treasure trove for clients to be , and old retainers.
“He asks me you know what I mean the cardiovascular surgeon…he says do I prefer the stent in the wall of the left ventricle or the right? Lissen’ amigo buddy boy I’m a hundred years old, Labor Day…forgive me if I belabor the point…but does it pay…that’s the question…all my life those ten decades, at every critical point we asked – does it pay…A crown on the lower side molar? Does it pay? A root canal job…does it pay? Dentures? Does it pay? Now you ask a stent the left wall – the right ventricle wall…..does it pay? Jackson…you’re the man! Precision imaging, noninvasive balloon angioplasty…reinforce the artery walls with stenting…what do I know?..a bursar ship’s salesman, night school at Fordham law…Wormser with his phonographic hearing aid…you got the brief? Y’think I need a haircut…a little off the top, the sideburns shorter…Put some color in the bald spot…My companion of 4 decades says it makes a difference….a sexy legal eagle…better for the retainer, she convinced the Gestapo to let her husband go free…women know what makes us men tick. All I got is longevity gene, Sonny.”
IX
“As I was saying,” said the final speaker, his wand red..flagging the squashing gulping throbbing heart, the cue moving between the aorta, the right and left walls of the beating pulsating squishing heart…like the beat of a frog, gulp gulping…” We can clear the clogged blockages thru advanced profile..12,12/01,…Flat panel imaging you can’t beat it!”
The joint was humming, the speaker’s chemistry, splicing with the audience of cardiac surgeons, residents, interns, education committee profs…beepers cell pones intermittently cueing their taskmasters…all in all they were alive like a fans at ninth inning rally, the speaker’s sense of humor, the absurdity of the life…the trauma of living as measured against the beat beat beat, the vulnerability of all of us…trying to gauge our life force against the grid and grind of daily expectations…..
“I’m a specialist,” he was saying, little did he know about the Argentine shakedown, the recession, the government’s collapse, rioting and looting in Buenos Aires, the International forces taking over in Afghanistan after twenty years of war, famine: humans carrying flame throwers, grenade launchers, rifles putting on the dog in the Capitol city of Kabul….the disparity between the haves and have nots growing almost every moment of a minute, changing the color of their turbans.
X
….the Dow Jones Averages on the New York stock exchange shot up a point and a quarter that day. The bulls were running and the bears were hibernating. Where did it all lead to anyhow? Leaky hearts? Clogged arteries? Ulcers? High blood pressure?
Philip Levey, a big apple legal eagle with offices on Fifth Avenue, knocked his desk twice. “Thank God, my clients have been good to me. I’ve been able to spend a few minutes stretching with a band every day. It keeps my muscles in tone,” he said, letting his friend touch his sixteen-inch right bicep. “Make a fist,” he said.
The phone rang, “Excuse me, I’m on three lines”, said the lawyer.
The friend peered into the face of the New Jersey born legal salesman extraordinaire. Those bluish gray eyes seemed indestructible…like the trunk of a tree that had seen many seeds sprout, take root, and others blown away. The layers of rings around those eyes testified to the tug of war that goes on in the feeling and thinking of 5th Avenue lawyers & corporate directors like Philip Levey.
My wife calls three or four times a day. She’s very attentive,” he said, hanging the receiver up. He took out of his desk drawer some New York Times clippings. “My daughter just got engaged. She’s a Vassar graduate. Her fiancé interning, but he wants to specialize in urology and that’s another 4 years. So you see, I have to keep my muscles in tone.”
The friend fidgeted in his chair alongside the desk, hearing a clicking. “The noise you hear is from my four phone boxes. You don’t have to worry. Our conversation isn’t being monitored,” he said.
But the friend cared little about preserving his dialogue. He cared more about the struggle of a Fifth Avenue lawyer and the rhythms that pulsated thru his life. “Should a human marry for love or money, Philip?” asked the friend.
The human named Philip Levey, slim in his conservative single breasted blue suit, blue tie, tip of his white handkerchief showing from his lapel , hesitated. Although a rapid talker, one idea giving rise to the other, he tossed off a gesture with his right hand, turning his once wavy blonde hair head…
“I’ve give that question a lot of thought lately. My wife wanted my daughter to marry a rich boy. I think love is far more important. Yes, far more important,” he said, throwing a gesture with his right hand.
The friend know feeling was equally as strong as thinking in fact to feel is no less than to think. As humans tend to grow older, they sometimes feel less.
“My father was a real estate man. Lakewood, New Jersey,” he said. “A Lincolnesque type of man I remember the bank president putting his arm on my shoulder when I was around twelve. “Phil when you grow up, I hope you’ll be as honest as your father”…When the president passed on, they read his will and found he left ten thousand dollars to my father. That’s how much he was respected.”
The friend sat back, waiting. “Yes those were my best years,” said the legal eagle.” The high school years I think are the best. No real troubles. Of course you do worry about your future. But it was worth worrying in Lakewood. I used to take long walks thru the woods.”
“How’d you get started in law, Philip?”
“I had gone to Columbia. Majored in business administration. I used to wait after the classes to talk to the professors. Asked them questions about their lectures. But they would always frown, pick up their attaché cases and walk away. It was very anti-democratic.
I started selling ship supplies to captains and pursers until one day I met a friend who told me he was going to Fordham law school. I thought I would try it out for one year. But I liked it so much, I stayed for four. The professors always answered my questions. Very democratic. I remember Professor Wormser. He was an international authority in his field. He may have compensated for his deafness. He had a big box on his lecture desk. There were no hearing aids. He’d ask me questions way ahead of the assigned cases. He never caught me unprepared,” he said, smiling happily over past briefs.
“Once I got into the law, I found I liked it. I got three lawyers working for me> The oldest has been with me for over twenty years. He was with a large firm. Had three children. But when he asked for a twenty-dollar raise, they refused. I gave him the raise and he came to work for me,” he said.
The strong right hand reached out to touch some folders and blue covered complaints lying on the desk. “I’ve handled over ten thousand cases,”: he said.” I’ve seen clients come and go. Sometimes my first impressions have been wrong But generally I’m pretty good in sizing up humans. If I thought the man or woman was in need of psychiatric treatment or needed help other than legal, would subsequently discover He or she had a nervous breakdown or been a patient in some mental hospital.”
“What do you think about Ernest Hemingway saying it’s impossible for humans to perpetuate themselves thru Economics?” asked the friend.
Again the strong right arm gestured, the head turned. “I believe it,” he said, speaking warmly and showing no outward sign of regret. “Many use the corporate form to perpetuate their legacy, their family, their children. Others use wills. Personally, I think it’s better to give your gifts now rather than later. You never know when the donees may exit, pass on. If they die first what good is the paper…They die with the will, don’t they. Speaking for myself, I like to give now,” he said, standing up from his desk…
“You think it’s your vanity?” asked the friend.
“I'm sure it is. But what of it? My ego is satisfied and the justification lies in the happiness of my friends.” “Here”, he said handing the friend two small packages. “Perfume for your sweetheart. Cuff links for you.”
Philip Levey’s strong right hand grasped the office doorknob, opening the door.
The friend saw a female client sitting on the black leather couch in the anteroom. She seemed troubled, her face a medley of scars, none of which in the beginning were physical…
He walked to the elevator as so many thousands of others had done before him. Day after day quickly passed and what did a human being have to show for it.
An accumulation of vapid desires? Or those nonaging blue grayish eyes of Philip Levey’s, circled three fold by the tug of war between feeling & thinking?*
XI
…. “Yes I said”….
“Yes I will”
“You get the drift?”
“Yes”
XII
*9/06/01, Philip Levey’s, 100th birthday party, given by his daughter & son in law, Harmony Club, 4 E. 62 , New York City, five days before ground zero…….
**12/29/01, New York Times, ‘head of Downstate. Teaching hospital demoted, 18 more deaths on his watch, heart surgery program shut down 3 days, rethinking “consultation”, part-time 10 hours, $200,000 per annum.
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