Saturday June 6, 2009 – Good Medicine

snoof · #1 (**permalink**) 06-07-2009, 10:54 AM

3:09 a.m. C.S.T. It was dark. Above the whirring of the floor fan that I can’t sleep without, I became aware of another presence in the bedroom. My wife was out of town so it wasn’t her. Besides, this felt beast-like. I didn’t open my eyes, feigning sleep until I could assess the situation. But anxiety overcame me and my eyes sprung open. Four inches from my face appeared the big head of my dog Skyler. He licked my eye and my nose. It felt good. I was relieved and returned to sleep.

When I came to for real it was 9:00 and I knew that today RK would function as a means of transportation for two important missions rather than a carrier of sheer joy. But missions aren’t bad if Harley’s involved. So I left from:

Austin to South Austin to the back roads to San Marcos to Ranch Road 12 to Fulton Ranch Road to some other roads to Wimberley to Dripping Springs to Hamilton Pool Road to Mansfield Dam to north and west of Austin to Texas Fat Boy’s place to home. 143 miles. Not many miles but missions accomplished.

My eldest next to me brother was riding his bicycle early in the morn, as in o-dark- thirty, Friday a week prior to yesterday. A gentle ride through the neighborhood and through a school’s big parking lot. Not in excess of 10 mph. The next thing he recalls is his wife screaming at his bloodied and bruising face, hands, and arms. He spent all day Friday and until the early afternoon of Saturday in the city’s trauma unit.

His helmet was whompy-jawed with two cracks in it. Apparently he had crashed but remembered nothing of it. Though he’s got a few more appointments with the meds, CAT scans indicated a little blood on his brain, which fortunately cleared, some minor fractures around his right eye, a concussion, maybe some cracked ribs, and some problems with his jaw. Could have been worse they said. It was good he wore a helmet they also said.

I’d spoken with him by phone during the week but needed to see him and his wife on my way out. I arrived, threw a few chants his way and did the naked healing dance with the reddish chicken feathers glued to my ass and wiener. It embarrassed him but he had to admit he was feeling better after I finished this exhausting labor. He will need to sleep sitting up for another five weeks to get the swelling in his head further down, but I feel confident he is well on the way to full recovery. His recovery is aided by his excellent physical condition, the goodness within him, his wonderful, caring wife, and prayers from many.

One down. One to go.

I rode on toward San Marcos taking the back roads where I had the cemetery-sex romps with Sandra, Lora, Teresa, and Vicki back on that December night and morning in 1972. Memories. Sweet. I forced my focus to return to today’s second mission.

On the 22nd of this month I will see the doctor who will set up the colonoscopy and endoscopy that will diagnose my colon and esophageal cancer. I have no intention of undergoing the treatments that I expect the doctors to recommend: irradiation, Drano enemas, electroshock and leeches, to name the least invasive of their so-called medical procedures.

In 1985 after a wonderful night of sexual escapades in the branches of cedar trees, underwater on scuba, and on horseback with the wonderful woman who was to become the second and will be the last Ms. Snoof, I noticed a tender, bruised looking spot on the upper inside thigh of my right leg.

The next day when I asked her if perhaps she had become overly aggressive with her love nibbles in that area she noted the much darker pencil lead-sized spot in the center of the spot. She said she had a friend who had been bitten on the cheek by a brown-recluse spider.

Her friend’s bite had started out looking just like the area contiguous to my nads (as they now hang; back then they resided on higher grounds) and got grotesquely worse until she lost close to a pound of head flesh to the venom of the demon-arachnid. Left untended the bites can result in death.

By the time I got to the doctor who smoked cigarettes while examining me and shook his head uttering “This is bad. Really, really bad.” under his breath, the bruise had become the size of a major league baseball and the really dark area which represented dying tissue was approaching an inch in diameter. Even worse, it hurt so bad I couldn’t touch it.

Which mattered not to Bones. After blowing his nose on the sleeve of his once white, now blood stained doctor coat, he rammed a syringe full of steroids directly into the wound. My eyes teared and I added my urine to the filth on his jacket.

Proud that he had pained me so greatly he declared, “A good job by me if I do say so myself. With the powerful antibiotics I will prescribe and which will tear holes in your gut assuming you don’t vomit them up; visits to me every other day for further injections; and a lot of luck we should be able to save the leg. I give your dick, er, what’s the word they taught us – penis! I give you penis a forty percent chance of survival.”

Fuck him.

I ingested the pills that I did vomit and which gave me grave indigestion while I weighed my options. Saying goodbye to my Mr. Mongo, who had served me so well, was not one of the options.

Limping into work on Monday I consulted Fifika, the Romanian gypsy with a knack for interpreting Internal Revenue Service code and regulations. I hated tax work and Fifika’s assistance kept me from killing myself or boozing even worse than I did. I’d have dissolved the CPA firm years earlier were it not for Fifika.

She told me of an old man, who lived in a gypsy camp just south of Kyle, back in the woods. The man was a healer she said. She wrote me a letter of introduction in a language I’d never seen and drew out directions to get to his place. “But you can only approach him under the cover of darkness. You must not speak. Only give him the letter.”

Should I trust this strange, though well versed in the ways of the IRS, woman? Yes I should. Certainly I should more than the hygienically challenged doctor that was intent on further torturing me while providing no hope for Willie’s salvation.

I trod off into the woods late that summer night still wearing my damn accountant’s uniform of a three-piece navy pinstriped suit, starched white shirt, and red tie. I was feverish and in great pain despite the antibiotics coursing through my system. As I tripped and was slapped by low hanging branches I wondered which was worse: the doctor’s drugs or the spider’s venom?

In spite of my directional inaptitude I stumbled upon the little community of gypsies and the old man’s wagon. I was not welcome and two burly lads would have impaled me with their pitchforks had I not been pitied by a beautiful, young woman with long, dark hair and hall of fame cleavage. She read the gibberish letter, took my hand (much to the dismay of one of the Jethro-like boys who had eyes for my princess gypsy). I understood only something “Papa” as she read the letter to the old man who had one eye clouded over, but otherwise didn’t look a day over a hundred and twelve.

They took me into his wagon where he made a agonizing cut across the palm of my hand with a bone-handled knife. He collected my blood in what looked like a human skull. He stuck his tongue in the blood and then went into deep concentration as though analyzing my life-force.

He then added pinches of herbs and a small yellow squishy substance that resembled the fat from a growth hormone injected chicken. He took the skull outside and heated its contents over the outside fire. He sang some kind of bullshit dirge then covered the skull in a deer hide. While the mixture cooled he began dictating what later proved to be instructions for the use of the potion to the big-breasted beauty.

He poured the cure into an old-timey medicine bottle, capped it and handed it to me along with instructions written in the same strange hand. I thanked him and bowed, not knowing what else to do. When the young woman kissed me on the cheek I knew that I’d be murdered by the jealous Bluto. Instead the woman said something to the two linebacker sized guys and they escorted me directly back to my Blazer.

Driving back, I experienced one of the worst sicknesses of my life. The pain of the spider wound throbbed so badly that it triggered spasms, then cramping of the entire leg. Even with the air-conditioning blowing full blast, my fever kept the inside of the vehicle sweltering. I worried that I’d faint before I got to Buda, much less the city limits of Austin.

But I made it and I drove straight to Fifika’s apartment. I was especially thankful she was single, for not many husbands would have been accepting of a man banging on the door, looking for his wife at 3:00 in the morning – boss or not. Fifika let me in and read the unintelligible instructions. I was nearly unconscious when she stripped me and laid me on her bed. Despite my semi-comatose condition I screamed out of pain when she dabbed the potion directly on the wound. I learned later than she also diluted a drop of the stuff and made me drink it after which I fell sound asleep.

I felt better the next day, but stayed at Fifika’s until Thursday. She then declared me well enough to go home which I did. But not before teaching me to use the medicine the old gypsy had customized for me.

As it turned out, I only lost a golf ball sized chunk of flesh out of my leg. It took a good two months for all hurt in that area to cease and a year before the big hole covered over. And my tallywacker, to this very day, is doing quite well, thank you very much.

I’ve used up all of the potion over the past twenty one years on everything from colds, to allergies, to infections, to minor broken bones, bruises, cuts, and the generally soreness that came from training for and running marathons and riding a bicycle for a hundred or more miles.

I figured I really needed to replenish the miracle stuff for the upcoming cancer battles. So RK and I searched out the old man on the back roads of Kyle. One of the roads to the road to the road to the woods was closed and blocked off. Harley and I skirted it and continued on waiting for the ringing out of the gunshot that would put me down (although I’ve always heard that one feels the impact of a bullet before he hears the sound) or the flashing of cop lights on the patrol car that would whisk me to Hays County lockup, leaving RK alone in the woods.

None of that happened. When the last road ran out of pavement, I hid RK under the shade of huge oaks and walked a couple of miles, amazingly right up to the camp. This time there was no beauty nor her beasts. As I raised my hand to knock on the old man’s (133 years of age by now) wagon door, it opened. He looked the same as last time. He said nothing, handed me a bottle that looked identical to the last one, and then brushed me away with his hand. I thanked him as the door shut.

I hiked back to RK and after securing the precious potion in my saddlebag cooler we rode on to San Marcos. I stopped in the park where the Lion’s Club rents tubes to river floaters. It was good to see them doing a brisk business renting their wares from temporary digs to the scantily clad babes and their Neanderthal boyfriends.

Some asshole arsonist burned down their permanent building along with hundreds of primo inner tubes. Hope they catch the bastard and teach him not to burn things by ironing his scrotum using the cotton or wool setting, whichever is hotter.

After gulping three Diet Cokes – in Texas, the heat is on – I took off west on Ranch Road 12. Thinking quick I made a last second decision and turned onto Fulton Ranch Road that led to the site of a big college bachelor party in my honor back in 1975. Instead of heading to the university ranch I continued on the road until it T’d. I turned left because that’s the direction most of the spit flew after I slapped the deposit I’d put in my palm. I hit another T, took another left and soon entered Wimberley.

At that point I decided to head back to Austin to pay tribute to TexasFatBoy who was celebrating the twentieth anniversary of his 21st birthday. I vaguely remembered where he lived from last year’s ROT/Birthday party at the home he shares with the lovely Trish or the home the lovely Trish shares with him. However that works. He’s the lawyer, I’m not.

In Wimberley I stopped at the Walgreens and found him a nice card. It has executives standing around a conference table wearing executive clothes, only they have the heads of cats rather than human heads. On the table is a litter box with turds and kitty litter. A few stray loaves of kitty shit lie on the table itself. The head cat-headed chief executive is saying something like, “Now whose been thinking outside the box?” or some such shit (heh heh). It really touched me. Hope it does TFB because it was heart-felt.

Ranch Road 12 had really gotten built up as had the next leg of my journey Hamilton Pool Road. Too many businesses, too much traffic, too many people.

Rider Lesson for today: I was aggravated following a slow moving van on 12 from Wimberley to Hamilton Pool Road, unable to pass. I so focused on positioning myself to quickly pass his ass (we were both turning right) as soon as we got on Hamilton Pool Road that I completely ignored the fact that we had the yield sign. I could have gotten plowed by traffic approaching from our left. Look to the left, it was a yield sign I had for God’s sakes. I have to let go of my resentments toward the screwheads on the road. If I would have gotten nailed because I didn’t yield, it would have been my fault. Not the screwhead who was driving too slow. Me. Got it. Forgive self and move on. But remember. I will.

I made it to Texasfatboy’s and he greeted me with a full of gusto hello and a sharp left jab to my jaw. The stars were just clearing from my eyes when I saw Tradrockrat. He was just as welcoming and caught me on the other jaw. What a group of guys. It feels great to be accepted in this group. George and Texas Red from Euless were also there. I got to see them back in April when Vince flew in from the Virgin Islands.

They didn’t slug me but were just as welcoming. So was Trish. It was great talking with the folks. Dan/Trad and I spent some serious time describing the indescribable experience of riding. Although I am loner I’d ride with these people. Actually I have. And actually they are the only folks I’ve intentionally ridden with.

Lobsters, shrimp, corn and potatoes were boiling in the Jacuzzi. The huge wild boar was rotating a good six feet above the massive bonfire. The mermaids performed their synchronized routines flawlessly in the pool.

The fellows that stuck the long sharp needles through various parts of their bodies were OK but I preferred the fire eater.

I had no idea how the illusionist did it, but he removed his left arm with a chainsaw, shoved it up his ass and walked around on its fingers with his legs held out in front of him. He then greeted the guests shaking with his right hand while blood spurted from the stump at his left shoulder. It was the first time he’d performed that illusion he told me. And it will be the only time. I feel honored to have seen it.

And that was just the matinee. I can only imagine what the evening will bring. I won’t know because I left for home. Ms. Snoof was coming back into town and I wanted to see her. After all, she correctly diagnosed the spider bite. Left to my own devices, I would have waited until my leg and penis fell off and then it would have been too late.

Without my leg I wouldn’t be riding that fine motorcycle. And without my penis I’d have never made the Nationals as a tiddly-winking champion.

Even when running errands and performing missions RK makes life good. Good times and a good life.

snoof · #2 (**permalink**) 06-07-2009, 10:56 AM

pix

GzrGldGeo · #3 (**permalink**) 06-08-2009, 03:18 AM

Good to see you yesterday Snoof. I hope to see you again next weekend too.

snoof · #4 (**permalink**) 06-08-2009, 04:02 AM

same here geroge

glad you made it back safe and hope you had a great time

FATboy05 · #5 (**permalink**) 06-08-2009, 05:08 AM

Another Great day in the life of Snoof!! Good thing about the spider bite potion, can't imagine you with missing parts, and holes in the leg :shock: Hope to see you next weekend Howard! Ms.Betty and I will be arriving Thursday, and staying with Trad & Beth