Ch. 5: The Acupuncturist

      

"Go to hell; see if I care," said the director of the Taiwan Lung Association. How could Johnny have known that the Taiwanese doctor understood English? The doctor had heard him say to his wife that he wanted a second opinion. This doctor wanted to cut his lung out. 

     "I am the head of the Taiwan Lung Association!" he said angrily pointing towards the door of his office. "If you need a second opinion, go, but don't come back. I'm not helping you anymore!"

     "With that attitude, I don't need your help," he shouted back as he took his jacket briskly and headed out. "

     "Do you realize what you just did?" said his wife in the taxi on the way back to their home. "You just gave up the last chance for you to get well. Go ahead; die, see if I care." Johnny knew she really didn't care as much about his health as she did about his money and her own saving face.

"They can cut your lung out, sweetheart, but they aren't touching mine!" Mr. and Mrs. Davinsky didn't talk the rest of the way home. Occasionally Johnny hacked a cough, opened the taxi window, and spit out phlegm onto the street. 

     "You're disgusting!" his wife scowled, her long upper teeth glimmering in the oncoming headlights. 

     "But it's okay for the driver to open the door at every red light and spit bloody betel-nut juice on the street. That’s okay. Right?"

     "It's not blood; it's cinnamon they put in the nut." Being correct was most important to her under any circumstance.

     After they got home, he took out a fold of paper with powder he had gotten from the dispensary of an ear, nose, and throat clinic; a doctor there with a reflector light on his forehead, twelve inch Q-Tips, and a row of humidifiers lined up in his clinic like hairdryers in beauty salons had prescribed it for him.

The virus he had caught from one of his adult English class students. Students didn't have the habit of covering their mouths when they coughed or sneezed in class. If they were on the street, they merely covered one nostril with a pointer finger and blew the snot out of the other. If there was a waste basket nearby, they blew it in there. Sometimes, they didn't have a waste basket; a handkerchief would do. Occasionally they would go to a W.C. and find a toilet or urinal to spit into. 

     One sleepless night, on his way back to bed from the bathroom, he spoke to his wife.

 "Let's go to that acupuncturist your sister was telling you about. Maybe he'll know what to do. My back is killing me."

“You mean Dr. Lam?”

“Yeah, that one.”

      He had been coughing so violently the previous two weeks that he threw his back out. Maybe they'd have to cut his spine out, too, in addition to his lung and kidney. 

     "Maybe he can help you; he's not a Western doctor, though. You said you only trusted American-trained doctors"

     "I don't, ker-choo, care if he comes from the moon. Your sister said, (hack-hack-spit) he was good, right?" Emerson had heard convincing testimonials about acupuncture. In China, women had childbirth with no sedative other than acupuncture and experienced no pain.

     The next morning, they got in a taxi and went to the Chinese Herbal Clinic of Dr. Lam Chat-Hom; no appointment necessary. The clinic was a non-descript storefront on a busy Taipei two-way road, three or four cycles haphazardly parked on the sidewalk outside the clinic entrance, unlit with soot coating metal grate over glass, a weather-damaged hand-painted sign printed on yellowing plastic mold near plant pots that were watered by rainfall alone, exposed electric wiring on the pole near a side ally, a step down and two steps up unevenly walked under the building overhang. The clinic, the front rooms of his residence, entered down a harsh florescent hallway, a dozen mismatched chairs of different sizes and shapes along both sides. One stepped over the outstretched shoeless legs of a motley crew of elderly patients occupying. He was the only foreigner. The air, smelling like vinegar with incense-smoke and medicinal plants thrown in; it was the smell of medicinal gao-liang liquor that shot up the nostrils.

     The doctor came out of one of three exam rooms wearing a white smock, grinned at the different Caucasian face of Johnny, walked past to a smudged gray-steel desk, bent low to say something to a dour middle-aged woman wearing an ancient nurse’s cape taken from a Hemingway novel and returned to the exam room. The nurse turned in her squeaky swivel-chair to a cluttered sliding glass-door cabinet, to a shelf holding curled papers wrapped in rubber-bands and removed a pumpkin-sized white ceramic bottle with darkened cracks. On it, an etching of a bald blue Chinese sage sat holding a peach in one hand and a long staff in the other. She removed the ceramic cap, poured some liquid into a little soda glass, stood and went over toward him and his wife and spoke with her in Taiwanese.

     "Drink this. It is good for you," Xiao-Jiao told her husband. The slightly bent nurse smiled, kowtowed, and went back behind her desk. He drank up. His nose wasn't stuffed any more now that his virus had left his system but his back still ached whenever he bent over. He could smell the kaoliang liquor with some herbal additives thrown into the mix, clearly. 

      Dr. Lam had made a good point about the medicinal cocktail. It warmed him to the point that he forgot he was sitting in a drafty waiting room of an herbal doctor's clinic. He had almost forgotten his bad back, too, that is until he tried to stand up to return the empty glass to the nurse. That's when it hit him; either this Dr. Lam was the real deal with the acupuncture needles or the rest of his life would be regulated to drinking tainted kaoliang and other alcoholic brews, not to mention a few Perkasets and oxymorphines. 

     On his way to the nurse’s desk, her telephone rang; the doctor would like him to enter his examination room on the left. His wife stood up, thanked the nurse profusely, and helped him the twenty or so steps down the pebbled cement-slab hall, wearing slimy artificial leather slippers, with forty-seven oriental eyes upon him; three elderly patients had one eye each to match their missing rotted feet.

     When he seated himself on the aluminum bed cushioned with fitted-linen tatami pads, another full glass of medicinal kaoliang was placed in his hand by the nurse who told his wife standing nearby to wait a moment until the doctor would be with him, but to have him take off his shirt and unbuckle his pants in the meantime. Patients, on their way to the restroom, passed his exam room and paused to stop, look in, and give the thumbs up to this foreign believer of Chinese voodoo.

     Dr. Lam entered, white doctors garb buttoned to the top, a white plastic Wyeth pen shield lining his upper left pocket. "How long have you been in pain?" he asked him in halting but understandable English.

     "Over a month now," his wife answered in Taiwanese.

     "Really," Dr. Lam replied surprised, even though, from the look of his patients in the waiting room, a month of minor pain would have been an endurable interlude for their hunched backs of chronic backaches.  He was lucky, and he knew it.

     "Cigarette?"

     "We can smoke in here?"

     "Sure"

     "Isn't it bad for you?"

     "As long as you live in Taipei you should not stop to smoke." He took out a yellow pack of Long Life cigarettes with the same picture of the large-headed sage with a peach and staff, just like on the jar of medicinal kaoliang. 

     "You mean I shouldn't stop smoking?"

     "No. You should continue," Dr. Lam said as he turned to an aluminum table to take hold of a deep jar filled with blue fluid. The acupuncture needles sat in the jar like combs used to sit in the jar of barber shops back in Brooklyn, to anesthetize the items before they swept through the next customers hair, only these antiseptic needles would soon be pierced through his skin, somewhere. 

     "There is lot of oxygen pollution in Taiwan air, no?" Dr. Lam explained add he took a drag on how cigarette and handed him an ashtray to catch his falling ash.

     "It's very bad the air," he said as he blew out smoke and tapped his cigarette ash into the tray. “The tar in the cigarette covers your lungs and prohibits pollution from attacking you."

     "You mean it acts as a shield coating my lungs?"

     "Exactly," said Dr. Lam, taking a swig of his one supply of medicinal kaoliang from a personal flask in his lower left pocket.

     "That's the first time I've heard that. I like that idea," said Johnny, a lifetime pack-a-day cigarette smoker. 

     "Show me where it hurts." He pointed to his lower back. The doctor gave a look.

     By that point, his back pain was the last thing on his mind. He was feeling the effects of his third glass of kaoliang and enjoying his cigarette. His wife excused herself and returned to the waiting room to let the boys inside have their fun. She heard laughter and loud talking coming through the doorway. Dr. Feel-good was making him feel good and he hadn't pricked one needle into him. 

     In the next fifteen minutes, twenty needles were twisted and snapped into his prostrated body: in his ear lobe, shoulder blades, neck, leg, and even the back where the pain originated. Then, the doctor rolled over a silver machine on wheels and flipped on a few switches. Next, he took twenty wire attachments from the side of the machine and, with alligator clips, clamped them to the open ends of the twenty acupuncture needles. Emerson felt no pain.

 Dr. Lam offered him another cigarette and held out a match so he could light it from his reclining position, an ashtray placed on a chair to the right of his exam table.  Through the hole in the exam table he put his head and down through it smoked his cigarette. Then it happened;

The machine was turned on. A trilling vibration shot through there needles into his body followed by pulsing ticks of electric stimulant. Trrrrrrril tick tick tick tick tick tick tick, trrrrrrrril tick tick tick tick tick tick…The doctor asked if he could feel it under his skin. He nodded into the hole in the table.

     "Stay here for thirty minutes. You will fewer better." He left a pack of cigarettes on the chair in front of him and left the room, turning off the light for shade. 

     After thirty minutes, Dr. Lam returned, put on the light, removed the alligator clamps from the needles, and told him to sit up on the exam table. He did so with a back that felt better already. It was a miracle! The doctor offered him another glass of a kaoliang and a cigarette and told him to return the following week for another treatment.

     "You will need four treatments because your back is so stiff. You should come here directly next time you have pain. I help you good."

 He followed his wife to the nurse’s desk as she paid. Another patient was called by the doctor into the exam room behind him.

It was 8:00pm by the time they got home. They'd been at the doctor's office seven hours but it was worth it. He could actually dry himself after he showered. The pain was mostly gone. Only a ghost of it prevailed reminding him of where the pain had once been.

     A few weeks after his last treatment from Dr. Lam, Johnny and his wife went to eat at a restaurant a friend had suggested to them. It happened to be a few block from Dr. Lam’s Chinese Herbal Medicine Clinic. It was in a dark night club atmosphere with Taiwanese music playing on a CD jukebox. There was a smoky bar counter with a dozen liquor bottles lined up on a shelf over a frosted black gala mirror. The food was Hakka style. The tables had cloth covers with glass over them so the waitress wouldn’t have to keep changing them when they got soiled.

As they sat and looked over the menu, they heard the intermittent sound of a hard object hitting the counter followed by a tumble of beads. Each time it happened, there was a roar from the crowd of men who gathered around the sound at the bar.

“What is that noise?” He asked craning his neck to look over at the disturbance.

“They’re drinking,” said his wife without taking her eyes off the menu. “We’re ready,” she called out to a waiter who came by with a pad and pen.

“But why are they making so much noise?” He asked again, this time standing to get a better look.

“They’re playing a game,” she said slightly disturbed that her husband was more distracted by them than by her. “They’re playing a drinking game. Now would you pay more attention to what I’m saying?”

“One second, one second. I think I see someone I know over there.”

“You know someone here?”

“Yeah. That man in the white doctor’s jacket looks familiar.” He stood up gingerly to as to not reinjure his bad back and walked slowly over to the bar. There was someone there who he recognized; he just wasn’t sure because that person seemed do out of place. It was clear now to him; Dr. Lam was sitting there on a stool, cigarette hanging from his lip, with a thick black plastic cup in one hand and a glass of whisky on the rocks in the other, surrounded by well-dressed businessmen who yelled with delight at him slamming the over-turned cup down onto the bar counter. He caught a glimpse of Johnny out of the corner of his blood-shot eyes.

“Hey Mr. Davinsky, how did you know I was here?” Dr. Lim called out as the others followed his eyes and looked over at the foreigner in their mitts.”

“You look like you’re having fun, doctor,” said Johnny ironically.

“I am, I am!” Dr. Lim said loudly through the din of the crowd and jukebox music. “Here, sit down,” he said as he stood up from his stool. “Come join us. Cigarette?”

“I’m here with my wife.”

“Oh!” He stood up to where he was pointing and walked toward Mrs. Davinsky.”

“Davinsky tai-tai. Ni hao? Ni ze-ma jr-dao wo zai ji-lee? How did you know I was here?” Xiao-Jiao didn’t know what to say. Dr. Lam wasn’t drunk but too happy.

“I’m going to have dinner now. Thanks for the invitation. Enjoy yourself,” Johnny said in a loud voice with a big smile, winking one eye, and sitting down gingerly to join his wife for dinner.

“Hao. See-you.”

As he walked back to the bar, Xiao-Jiao seemed angry as her husband shook his head in mock disbelief and took a sip of his sofa.

“You think that’s funny? Bu hao yi-se.” Embarrassing.

“Noooo. It’s crazy.”

They sat quietly and listened to the music, happy but pretending to be disturbed so his wife wouldn’t be upset by him again. He got up gingerly, holding the back of the seat for support, and went to the restroom. On his way back he noticed a smell of smoke; not cigarette smoke, but smoke from a fire.

“Do you smell something?” he said as he slowly sat down in his chair.
     “Smell something?” his wife repeated.

“Yes, I smell smoke. Don’t you?” he said nervously as he glanced around the club for the source of the odor.

“It’s prayer money. They’re burning prayer money outside for the holiday.” He knew that the Taiwanese were always throwing drab slips of construction paper they referred to as ‘money’ into round metallic containers.

“No. It’s not that smell. I know what that smell smells like; it’s not that burning smell,” he said now more alarmed and getting no sympathy from his wife.

He glanced around the club again and toward the windows on each side of the corner entrance door. He thought he might see someone lighting something outside. Then, he caught a glace of what it was; he looked up from the windows bottom to the top where a store awning outside had flames billowing from it dropping melted plastic sparks onto the sidewalk below.

“Call the fire department! There’s a fire outside!”

“What?”

“There’s a fire outside! Someone call the fire department!”

 She turned in her chair and saw what he had seen. She stood up immediately, went to the entrance, and stormed outside to the street. There she stood for a good minute or two transfixed as the awning fire exploded raining molten plastic onto the street below.

 She stormed back inside and told the cashier who was oblivious to anything until she alarmed her. Dr. Lim and his businessmen friends remained as they were before, playing games, drinking, and smoking at the bar counter. One man, perhaps two, turned around to see what the commotion was at the front of the club. No one moved out of their seats or left the club except for Johnny whose wife stood him up and took him outside.

     Five minutes later, those outside of the club could hear the quiet fire alarms on the tiny red trucks coming up the street. Dr. Lam remained inside and had a taste of his own medicine.

   Xiao-Jiao was becoming impossible to live with. Instead of taking care of the house or getting a job, she insisted on working with him in the school plans. This was good and bad. She did Mandarin-Taiwanese, interfacing and collected tuition. She took care of advertising and paid off the local police who came to inspect the school. He complained about his home always being a mess. He still loved Xiao-Jiao, at that time, but the ice was getting thin. She would hang up on his friends that called him saying that he was too busy with the bushiban.

   “Why is that black BMW stopping on the wrong side of the street?”     

      He sat at the table near the bushiban during a break and looked out through the window. Another two cars were coming from both directions and hemming the BMW in on the sidewalk. He picked up his can of soda when he noticed the driver in the black car open his window and toss a black object out.  The object landed on the ground in the din of traffic past and slid past some parked scooters coming to a rest under a cement planters placed by restaurant owner so scooters would kept clear.

      Two men in plain clothes emerged briskly from a car, one of them carrying a baseball bat. The other closed the door with his hip,  a pistol pointing downward; “A pistol for sure,” Emerson thought. Some customers in the restaurant gathered around the window looking out.

The man with the bat scampered over and pounded it on the BMW windshield. From the other car came two men. “It’s a shakedown,” he thought. The diners in the restaurant turned their heads pretending not to notice. After a few more knocks and hand gestures, the driver opened the door and was helped out, hands crossed behind his head. From the other door, a man was pushed to the ground, face down, gun removed from his pocket. The kneeling plainclothesman turned, emptied the gun, and dropped it a few feet away. 

      The danger over, staff and diners went back to their business. Johnny Emerson finished his sandwich as two men face down on the street were cuffed, stood up, and brought to a patrol car that had just arrived on the scene. He then went back to the bushiban.

He shook the incident out of his mind as he taught the evening class. At nine o’clock, he stopped for cigarettes. Was that a pistol he saw still under the flower pot, he wondered? No one around, he dropped his lighter and stooped to get it; there tit was. The gun! Turning to check if anyone was there, he snatched the gun and put it in his pants pocket, mounting his bike, he drove home.

When he arrived home, his wife was watching TV, the baby was crying, and the house was a mess. Dispensing his habit of removing and hanging his jacket, he went straight to the bathroom. This alerted his wife who stood to follow. He scrawled and shook his head as he locked the bathroom door. He stood on the toilet seat, removed the dropped ceiling tile, and put the pistol in. His wife was knocking.

“Are you okay?”

“I had to go fast.”

“Are you dirty?”

“I’ll be right out.”

“Did you dirty your pants?”

“Yes, I cleaned it up.”

“You have a banana now?”

“I’m okay.”

 She returned to the sofa. The pistol felt good; he sold his Brooklyn revolver to a pawn shop before they moved back; citizens do not own guns. He caressed the new baby. He had become a pretty good shot at the range after the burglary. He looked carefully. It was not an American model or even a Black Beauty from China. He fingered it. He checked the chamber; there were six bullets loaded! His wife entered his mind. He had never killed but there’s a first time.