A Medical Marvel

[copied from dland]

This is what I remember most about having shingles when I was 20. It was during the summer, and while I had it, I was visiting my college boyfriend in Maryland. (His name, curiously enough, was The Phantom. More on that in a moment, or perhaps, never.) Anyway, we were having Sunday dinner at his grandparents' home. I liked his grandmother very much; I couldn't understand a single freakin' word his grandfather said. (I do remember that this Southern gentleman liked to sit on his back porch on summer evenings and shoot cats that happened to stray onto his property.) So I was talking to the nice lady a little bit about my condition, and she was sweet and sympathetic and said, "You know, if the rash goes completely around your body, you die." Well. Good to know.

Shingles, you may or may not know, is a rash that usually appears on your trunk, above the waist, and forms a band on one side of your body. I had it from the center front around to the spine, on one side only. It was nasty itchy, and I had gone to a dermatologist for treatment when I had no idea what it was and he gave me some lotion or something to put on it, after which I hopped a train for the rural wilds of northern Maryland. Anyway, only people who have had chicken pox can get shingles, since it's a variant of the herpes virus that lies dormant in your system for years until something wakes it up, and since you can't get chicken pox twice, you get shingles the second time.

Can you get shingles twice? Apparently it is very rare, but not impossible. Which means that if anyone is getting it twice, you know who it is. Do I have shingles? I won't know until tomorrow, when I go to the doctor. My rash is in some ways characteristic and some ways not, but again, if anyone will get the atypical edition, it will be me. It's just that thinking about the possibility of having shingles put me in mind of The Phantom's Grandma, and one of the most tactless and stupid things that anyone has ever said to me.

So, The Phantom. I have spent that last 33 years not thinking about him at all, mostly because after we broke up (following a three year relationship) he seemed kind of creepy and weird in retrospect. How did I originally hook up with this guy who was so shy as a freshmen that the other guys in the dorm gave him a nickname that stuck, a nickname that indicated how rarely they ever saw him? My roommate and another friend worked somewhat hard to get us together. I don't believe I ever called him by his real name, which his parents and my father found incredibly strange. (My father refused to call him Phantom, although my mother did. The "the" was omitted in direct address.) I was probably the first girl he ever went out with, aside from a fix-up for his senior prom. I'm fairly sure that I was also the first Jewish person he had ever had a prolonged conversation with.

He was an only child in what appeared to be an extremely dysfunctional family. I rarely saw his parents speak to each other; I know they never did anything or went anywhere together. They weren't hostile, not at all, just distant. His father seemed to have no idea what to do with a college-educated son, although The Phantom did share his father's passion for hunting, and they did that together but I think rarely spoke while they were doing it. They lived in a rural area, on an RFD route, surrounded by farms, but they didn't live on a farm, and his father was in construction, I think, or actually demolition. His father always tried to be pleasant and cordial to me, but he may have expected me to sprout horns and drain the blood of Christian children at any moment. There was always an odd air of caution about him.

The grandparents lived closer to town; I think the grandfather had been some sort of master mechanic in his day. Both families lived in very nice houses with lovely amenities of all sorts. The grandmother had a particular fondness for antique marble-topped furniture, as do I, and she had several beautiful pieces. The cat-shooting thing was pretty fucked up, though. He knew he was shooting neighbors' cats; he just didn't care. He didn't like cats, case closed.

It was a strange relationship, no doubt, and I fully expected for some time to marry this guy, at which point I would certainly give up everything that was familiar to me and move to where he lived. He could never have coped with life here. Driving on the highways freaked him out, the congestion of it all and the pace of life here. Still, I thought that was all okay, until circumstances brought me to a point where I needed to evaluate a rather key issue: was this the man I wanted as the father of my children? Put that way, the answer was a simple and extremely resounding No, and there it was. I broke up with him just after Christmas during my senior year in college. At that point, he was out of school for a year and a half, and had used his B.A. in History to score a job as a gopher assistant in a plumbing construction business. I'm not talking about a path leading to becoming a licensed union plumber. He hadn't made that decision yet.

He was about 5'7", weighed about 125 pounds, had shoulder-length brown hair and long sideburns cut straight across the bottom. (Remember, 1974.) He was really a sweet boy, but terribly immature and insecure. Needless to say, when the end came, some mention of my being Jewish was made. How surprised is anybody at all? He just didn't know any other way to cope.

I've looked him up on the Internet a few times but I don't know if I've ever actually found him. His real name is not all that uncommon, apparently. My dearest hope is that he's happily married someplace and has a variety of lovely children and that he's grown up some and is smarter in the real world than his father was, which he had the potential to be. I was never too keen on being on the outs with someone with a large gun collection in his basement.


WATCHING STILL STANDING :: ENTRY #1315