“I hope to generate new numbers. I am not a felon and I cannot own handguns. The last thing I want to do is get arrested with a sword or knife in my hand. The law tends to shoot to kill in such scenarios. Most addicts don’t go to college. There was a time when we were respected as princes of the city.”
“Yes, but there are two thousand doctors here in Rochester. That means four kids per doctor. Of that, half are female. That leaves four thousand princes from the city. You are, thus, one prince among four thousand. I, too, am one of those princes. I now pay out counseling money to put kids through college and the ex-wife still wants some squeeze now and then.”
“It’s not an easy fix. I have to give up on the herbs to get myself to a place where I can dispense Demerol to an eighty-year-old woman with cancer and a diaper.”
Sean smiled and said, “You have enough compassion that you just may be able to do it. You will need straight A’s for two years. For that small stretch of time you will have to become a good student. Get used to peeing into a jar to let your investors know you aren’t stealing Grandmother’s Demerol and they might just let you. You could become a nurse. I hope you get those VA benefits. I hope your pop pulls through the cancer. It’s a bittersweet pill to need an inheritance. You will need to stay out of psychiatric jail too. Trust only the ones you truly need.”
James considered Sean’s words for a moment and sipped at his egg drop soup. “I just don’t know where all this is headed. Did you read my blog note on Patty?”
“I read all of them. There were seven notes and one small one written exclusively for me. The one where Jesus was a Buddhist. Then the last one you wrote on Hornbacher’s AA experience. That was well-written and, as I was part of its target audience, I thank you for it. It’s fun to read a magazine written for me in mind.”
“You’re welcome. It is sometimes our best writing when we have a specific audience in mind. I write pathologically. I would write when happy, write when sad. I keep on writing. I can type. I can do data entry for corporate customers and bang out reams of code for computer programming. But my real love is science fiction. I have often felt that the Mayo Foundation is eerily similar to the Foundation books by Isaac Asimov.”
Sean motioned to the waitress. “Can I get some tea?” he asked. She nodded and disappeared. “I remember you prowling junkyards looking for cars to rebuild. Did anything ever come of that?”
“Owned a Mustang for a week, then smashed it. Bad tires in the snow. It was a heap. Very rusty. But I will buy a new one soon. I know where there are a few that the crusher hasn’t eaten yet. I find myself attracted to junkyards as a metaphor for my poverty. So much potential. So much that is just cannibalized. I do hallucinate from time to time. I am getting the guts up to give up the cannabis. Then I will be left to tobacco and coffee. Those are the drugs that have served me well. I made it through the Marines with no pot. I became a tobacco smoker then.”
“Actually, that’s good. You had enough command over your drug habit that you could stop. Most addicts would have just switched over to alcohol and prostitutes and wasted their paychecks. You are at an interesting juncture in your life, James. Most people would have just given up and surrendered to the drugs. You have the best of both worlds. A small drug habit and a good enough educational platform that you can build something really sustainable. You are in a ‘smooth sailing’ mode of thought.”
“I have twenty-six credits at the U of M. The nursing program I have found covers sixty-four credits in five terms. One year and one quarter and I am done. It starts up next fall.”
Sean sipped at the tea that the waitress had just dropped off. “You could do better if you kicked the cannabis.”
James replied, “I know, I just don’t feel like doing it all at once. It feels like I am missing out on some benefit or privilege I have earned. And I am concerned about my father. This may not be the best time to hit him up for college money. We don’t know if the cancer is gone. I don’t feel like making massive life changes while he is still in flux. He may not be out of the woods just yet.”
Sean sipped more tea. He said, “Anne got her MD ticket. She did well. She went to Notre Dame and then Northwestern for medical school. She is at Johns Hopkins doing neurology. That is the new knighthood. She is the high priestess of our modern culture. Doctors get the respect we used to deliver to the witch doctors of our more primitive selves. The medicine man still prevails. There are hunters like me and malingerers like you but always the chief and the medicine man come through.”
“Or medicine woman, as in Anne’s case,” James smiled.
Soon they dissolved into a list of people they had known. A list of old school chums that they knew in school. O’Malleys and Pruits. Van Essens and O’Gormans. Andy and Bill and Monty and Shawn. What was Connie up to? Nice kids, all of them. With James at 44 years and Sean at 43, they knew all of the same people. They kibitzed and laughed and told stories. Some stories were about drugs and others were about family.
At last the pot of tea was emptied and Sean took it as a cosmic signal to go home. “Can I get you a ride to your parents’ place?”
“That will do quite nicely,” said James. He looked out as the wind blew whorls in the dusting of snow they had. It was December 23rd, a Wednesday, and getting to be more and more wintery. They got up, paid the bill, and got their coats on. They left together.
CHAPTER FIVE
Colonel Devers sat in the front seat of the F-16 trainer jet. He was in the seat commonly taken by the student. His driver was Major Hendricks. The major moved the throttle forward and the jet began to move faster and faster down the runway. The major said into his cockpit facemask microphone, “Here is where the rubber meets the road, Colonel. If your helmet can get you to be a better fighter pilot, then we are behind you a thousand percent. But if it gets in the way, then we want your assurance it won’t be pushed on the Air Force like that F-35 boondoggle. We spent five hundred billion on it and it has still got no rearward visibility. The thing is a textbook case of defense contractors trying to sell a weapons system to the armed forces that they don’t want.”
“Get us up to fifteen thousand feet and we will see what we can do.”
Major Hendricks pulled back on the right-hand joystick and the nose of the aircraft began to rise. Soon the entire airplane began to float above the concrete of the runway. The major retracted the landing gear and began to climb. Within ten minutes they were at 15,000 feet altitude. The major said into his microphone, “Here we are, Colonel. Give that fancy toy a try.”
The colonel flipped a switch on a black box full of controls. Three small lights on the box came on and glowed. The central component of the control panel was a video screen framed by 20 buttons. The heads-up display projected flight information onto the forward panel of cockpit Plexiglas. The attitude, altitude, speed, and fuel status was all there, reported with no need to take his eyes off of the forward view.
Colonel Devers remembered being a “shavetail lieutenant” in the Air Force in the mid-1970s. He was as old in the Air Force as the airplane he was riding in. Both had begun their Air Force careers at about the Bicentennial of 1976. He remembered years of training and practice during the Cold War in Europe during the big tank scare of the 1980s. The Soviets had so many tanks in Poland, East Germany, and Romania that the Air Force had created a tank-killer airplane just to deal with the problem.
Here was a new solution. A targeting system linked surgically to the human mind that would grant the power to find and fire at as many targets as the pilot could visualize. He thought, All these cowboys will face a new frontier. The dogfight will be a thing of the past. He tuned in the helmet’s visual panel and lowered it over his eyes. Like a virtual reality visor, the visual panel reported all the aircraft flying in the local area. The colonel noted six military aircraft and two airliners.
Then the colonel began to adjust the helmet. He tightened the straps and screwed in the temple sensors. Soon the visor began to show more d
ata. Ranges of distance appeared next to every blip in the viewscreen. The screen was three-dimensional. Radar was only displayed in one plane. There were modifications that could judge altitude for radar but the screens on which the results were viewed were two-dimensional plates. The visor was three-dimensional and relative to depth.
The colonel adjusted the black box and released the tight straps of the helmet. “Well, if this is any test, Major, the system looks promising. You will have to keep a lid on this. Security is going to be tight. We are a new project so we are going to be talked about. You have to keep your mouth shut. With any help we will give the Saddams of the world something new to worry about.”
The colonel thought to himself, This will make each individual plane the power of an AWACS-equipped strike package. Mate up this helmet to an F-22 radar invisible fighter jet and a modified air-to-air missile system and we will have an unbeatable team.
All he said was, “It works.”
* * *
Gunnery Sergeant Matthew Tanner looked at his stump at the wrist of his right forearm. Damn, he thought. He sat at his computer and typed with his left hand. He filled out resumes and applications. There was less call for a one-handed man. It was hard enough to find a job as a veteran. Harder yet to find one as a disabled vet. He checked his mail at the door and his e-mail at Gmail. He found a job posting looking for a man (or woman) with a combat loss of at least a hand and not more than a forearm. Security clearance desired. That felt Matt Tanner exactly. But then he looked at the fine print. It was run by a pharmaceutical company. Who knows what it’s really about? He downloaded the applications and job criteria.
It’s worth a try, he thought. Ever since he had tried to throw that grenade back at the Afghan soldier and been surprised that the same grenade had gone off in his hand, it puzzled him. It made him a one-handed citizen. With a chestful of medals and a VA disability check, he added a Purple Heart to the list. It meant a new game for him and his family. He hoped for a new job, a new purpose.
He looked again at the computer screen. The job posting said they were looking for somebody with a security clearance. All non-commissioned officers in the Marines had security clearances. At least staff NCOs had such. That meant he was qualified.
* * *
Colonel Devers spoke. “Boyd in a box. A very advanced chess program with a human along for the ride as a sort of ‘safety feature.’ Envision a computer system so advanced it can Immelmann, jink, and parry like no other pilot could. Of course no computer can make value judgements but that is what a two-man crew can do. A game plan replotted every two seconds and made available to its crew. It is a big jump for an electronic weapons officer to make but it has passed all synthetic tests. Even going up against the latest, most advanced MiGs and Sukhois, it has so far done well.
“With strike packages including Ravens, Eagles, and even Raptors it has, so far, done well. Remember a good strike capability relies on a good pilot. The human element is indispensable. The black boxes can reroute weapons in a millisecond. Although the tactical maneuvers require a second to be approved by the human but in the long run, five seconds, it is still a step forward.
“The greater fears from science fiction of inappropriately linked computers and sentient machines are tangible but still not able to reckon the human factors.”
* * *
“Actually, I am testing a new mood stabilizer. It’s not that bad. Mixing it with cannabis may not be what the drug company has in mind but the fluidity of this current med is doing quite well.” James lit a cigarette and put the glass of wine down on the garden table in the backyard of his parents’ house.
“So, how is the chemo going?” He looked at his father in a moment of concern.
“What I have seen in the literature is that three months of oxaliplatin is very similar to six months. There are anecdotal notes but that’s the general consensus.” James’ father withdrew a piece of Nicorette and popped it into his mouth. “You should really give up the tobacco.”
“Yes, this is true, but you employed it for forty years. I have only done half that. It’s not the same as med school where you were so poor you stole lunch from the hospital and fried up breakfast leftovers of oatmeal you had in the morning for your dinner. I live on SSI so I don’t have to do that sort of thing.”
“We were scientists and we knew just how far we could push ourselves and still stay alive. It was a discipline the young pups don’t understand. The luxuries you enjoy are a paradise that we did not have in 1954. So how are your student loans doing?”
“Well enough. I might go back to school. Providing, of course, that folks like you do not impose oatmeal sufferings on us.”
James looked at his father. Here was one of the top men in respiratory medicine. Top of the world. He was taller than James. White hair thinning. Round belly. Gum chewing and an ex-smoker. He got respiratory complaints whenever he flew places in commercial jets. Interstitial lung disease from smoking.
The white hair was a thing of status. Now retired, he occasionally worked part time. He offered up his services to the Mayo Clinic on special cases. A chest consult.
Eighty percent of the Mayo Clinic’s chest section were smokers in 1980. Most had quit tobacco by this time. It was irony to James that these top men in lung disorders would smoke but that was a reflection of a time gone by. They were penniless paupers in their time at med school but now that they were the accepted kings of medicine in the world, they got paid well.
Wallace McGregor was James’ father’s name. The chest consults came in whenever the current chest experts needed “a little white hair in on this case.” That was how they termed his wisdom and the respect it commanded.
* * *
James thought about his time in the Marines just after Desert Storm in ’91. He had been stationed in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia at that time. The mental illness had played a role. If he could just make a connection between the illness and his service years, he could get onto the VA payroll.
The doctors were all saying the case should be approved. With all of the soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, there was a packed house of other, more needy vets. He thought he could get in on that movement.
He had been stationed at a communications center and had gotten his security clearance by accident. He was a truck driver. A chauffeur to troops and VIPs alike. Then one day they found out he could type. All of a sudden he was treated as a VIP and the world opened up for him. He was soon doing data entry and lines of computer code for the communications mission. Scramblers and encoded transmissions all went through him.
When his term of deployment was up, he went back to the States and the trouble started. He began to feel that radio and TV were in a direct conversation with him. He took the psych drugs but his military career was over. The commanding officer he was working for signed the papers for his discharge but the Corps wrote him up for having a personality disorder and not a true mental illness. James suspected it was done as an effort to keep him from getting a medical discharge. He thought it was done as a financial precaution.
Now he had to rectify that dilemma. In the vernacular of the Marines, it was a call to “unfuck the situation.”
He had a good case. He knew it. His first application for benefits went in two years ago. That meant he was due two years of back pay from the VA. That came to at least $72,000. Soon he would be a rich man by his pauper’s standard of existence.
He thought about his favorite actor, Sir John Gielgud. Nobody could turn an eloquent insult the way Gielgud could. If somebody was being a low-brow racist, Gielgud could cut into him with the elegance of a rapier sword.
Someday I will learn how to do that, he thought.
* * *
“So he says to me, ‘The only way you are going to succeed in therapy is if you are willing to take direction. They say in recovery that you have to hit rock bottom before you can give up on an addiction. You have to give up your hold on being in control of your life to make
a new start.’
“So I read a bit out of the Just for Today book and I found myself trying to run my own life and keep control, and that was just the thing the book said was wrong. According to the book, I had to turn my life over to the care of God and trust in my higher power. I felt surrounded so I did the best I could. I tried to surrender but even in that I found myself trying to control my surrender.
“It was really then that I let go completely. I think for me that was really the first step. To admit I was powerless over my addiction and I needed to work the steps again. That’s what brought me to a thorough and relentless personal inventory and a good five-hour step five.”
The man was in his fifties, short hair, average height and weight. He was talking about his control issues in the Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Sean was on the other side of the ring of chairs and tables. Cross talk was forbidden or Sean would have spoken up. Sean’s combination of Buddhism and Christianity provoked him to think of prayer and meditation.
Sean thought of James and his talk of surrender.
Blog Post Ten
Surrender
I don’t mind surrendering to the group or an NA program. Most of the group is court ordered. I am not quite the same as that. My biggest drive is that if I want to be a nurse, and Grandma’s Demerol goes missing, and I am one of Granny’s nurses, they will want me to pee into a jar. I could come up as free from opiate use, but my cannabis habit would show up and the medical career would be done. Have to wait until cannabis is legal for that one. The door is open just a crack now. Cannabis is not legal here in Minnesota yet but with pain patients looking for an alternative to opiates, there is hope for an expansion of the weed to a greater end effect.