06/08/2018
TROPICAL INFECTION
By popular demand, I now tell the long-overdue tale of how I got my first tropical infection that nearly cost me my leg.
I was living in Key West last winter. I went because Hurricane Irma had just flattened my favorite city and I wanted to help pick up the pieces and restore it to its former glory. I also went because I was recently homeless myself, and it is my natural tendency to build houses for other people whenever this happens to me. What better place to be homeless and helpful than a tropical paradise?
When the debris had mostly been shipped north for other places to deal with and the houses had mostly been restored to their former stabile glory, the carpentry work dried up and I found myself working at a little convenience store on Duval St. called Shorty’s and living in a drug abuse recovery-focused shelter on the other end of the island called the Neece Center.
The Neece center charged $85 per week, which sounds like a lot for a homeless shelter, but is in fact the cheapest rent in all of Key West. They also drug test on a daily basis. I sucked it up and stopped drinking and smoking pot so I could enjoy their services. Despite being a serious alcoholic for most of my adult life, I’ve always had the willpower to put it down whenever I need to.
I did well in the program. I got healthy. Two weeks in, I stopped testing positive for THC. I lost weight and got a tan. I tolerated the job and saved some money. After a month, the Neece Center moved me to the larger, better facility with real beds, art on the walls, and greater freedom.
Halloween happens in the middle of Fantasy Fest in Key West, a week-long costumed tourist bar crawl. I sold the teeming crowd in the blocked-off main street the cheapest beer they could find, supporting the inebriation of thousands of masked men and women while keeping my own collar straight and my own thinking clear. I thought, I’ve got this.
Then, the first week of November, I tested positive for THC. I hadn’t smoked anything in over two months. They didn’t want to hear it. They gave me fifteen minutes to collect my things and vacate the property or they would call the police.
I slept in my car in a grocery store parking lot. I didn’t drink or smoke anything. I was sure it was all just some misunderstanding that I’d be able to easily rectify.
In the morning, I made an appointment and met with the program director. Father Tom was a kind and wise man, in fact a bishop of the Agape branch of the Catholic church, and he listened and believed me, but told me his hands were tied by the rules of the program. He said if I could wait two weeks, he’d readmit me and I could start the program from scratch. He also directed me to the other shelter on the next island north, a place called COTS on Stock Island, an open-air facility that didn’t really care about alcohol or drug use.
I met with my employer, a sadistic harridan of a woman named Annie. I told her my situation, and that, as I no longer had stable housing, I could not be depended upon to work my next shifts. She understood and told me my job would be waiting for me whenever I was able to work it.
Then I bought a big jug of rum and tore into it as I tried to find COTS.
I couldn’t find it.
What I found instead was a coffin propped up against a telephone pole at a prominent intersection in the priciest corner of the island. It had a sign indicating that its previous owners were done with their Halloween prop, and that it was free to a good home. It was about three AM on a Wednesday night and my back hurt from sleeping in my car.
I parked a block away and left my shoes and wallet locked in the car and hid my keys in the wheel well. I polished off the last of my jug of rum and responsibly deposited the empty vessel in somebody’s recycling bin. I walked to the coffin, laid it flat on the sidewalk, opened the lid, crawled inside, and shut myself up for the night.
I was awakened some indeterminable time later to boots kicking the coffin and shouts demanding that I come out. I dislike rude awakenings. Given the circumstance, I played the vampire.
I threw the lid open and burst up into the air, claws extended, fangs bared, and eyes flashing wild.
Three guns from three directions were already drawn to greet me.
Key West law enforcement is notoriously belligerent toward homelessness. While they would never bat an eye at a publicly drunken tourist, they will throw the book at a penniless person leaning with intent to fall. They know how their bread is buttered, and it ain’t on the underside.
But, I know my rights and I wasn’t about to jeopardize my squeaky-clean criminal background for their bourgeois bias.
They wanted to know my name. I told them my name was Butt Soup. They put me in cuffs and flattened me against the curb with guns to my head and backup coming. They patted me down and demanded ID. I said I had none. They wanted an address. I told them I’d been living in this here coffin my whole life. They told me to kill the bu****it. I told them I didn’t know what hole that they crawled out of, but that where I come from, you don’t challenge a man’s integrity without solid evidence to contest the claim.
That left a welt on the back of my head.
I woke up alone in a windowless drunk tank. I was the only one there. There was a glass of water and a piece of bread and a bowl of some sort of food-like paste next to the thin plastic pad they’d deposited me on. I was wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt and I was shoeless. It was cold in that cell and they didn’t give me a blanket.
I stood facing the door. After some hours, an officer came in to breathalyze me. My blood alcohol was .4, which is generally the point where people drop unconscious and/or dead. He asked if I would comply. I wouldn’t. He shut the door and told me to drink some water and eat some food.
I didn’t.
This went on for three days. The delirium of lingering so close to death’s door by starvation and dehydration was a kind of spiritual awakening for me. When I saw through the veil of physical reality into the hollow cells of empty air-filled passages that mediate the ether, I gave my usual prayer to the almighty: You leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone. While you’re at it, please look after my cat from time to time. I realize that this is a little like entering someone’s house and hoping they don’t notice you. I think there’s a word for that.
After three days, the authorities realized that their ostensible duty to public safety was going to result in a human rights violation fiasco, and they released one Butt Soup from custody without pressing charges. The sunlight hurt my eyes and the asphalt burned my feet and I had no idea where I was when I dropped to my knees and kissed the free earth.
I had three days of starvation delirium sweat staining my flimsy shorts and shirt, and nothing else to my name. No shoes. No money. No clue where I was. My instinct was to run off into the mangroves and leave this sorry excuse for civilization behind. I’ve gone feral before. The iguanas look at you with less judgment than your average city-dwelling civilian.
I obviously didn’t do that, or I wouldn’t be typing about it – no computers in the bush. Instead, I slipped out of sight of the station and found an alley with a water spigot. Property owners don’t leave the k***s on spigots any more for fear that someone like me will come along and steal their water. Instead, there’s just a square peg sticking up that you need to attach to a special tool. Alternately, you can manipulate the peg between a couple rocks if your hands are strong. I got a couple rocks.
The water filled me and blew heavy fog from my brain. I could feel it surging into my fingers and toes. I started to notice the direction of the sun, the time of day, and the birds and squirrels watching me from the trees. Spigot sputtering, I gasped for air after a healthy draught and the air had flavor. For all that three days in a windowless cage had tried to kill me, ten seconds of water had made me come alive.
Sated, I scrubbed at my face and hands until the water running off me didn’t stain the pavement. I still wouldn’t be able to become very clean or to smell very benign. Shoeless, I wasn’t fit to enter civilized places anyway under Florida state law.
In hindsight, I probably should have folded myself some sort of origami shoes out of cardboard and newspaper. Not knowing where I was, I didn’t know how badly I’d need them. Instead, I reasoned that these islands are never very large, and that I could just travel in one direction until I found the main highway, US-1, and follow it south until I returned to Key West and my car if I still had a car.
That was the other thing. My car could easily be sitting in an impound lot for all I knew, my keys rattled off to the wayside, my identification and title locked inside. I might have only the soiled shirt on my back.
I had to make plans for that contingency. Maybe this was my wake-up call. Maybe the car and the shelter and the job weren’t the life for me. (Yeah, maybe the rum didn’t help, either.) Maybe it was time for the mangroves after all. I had to accept that if there was no car waiting for me.
I walked. I found the highway and several islands later, I found Key West, right where I left it. I even found my car, right where I left it. That was all good news. Along the way, however I collected several shards of glass, clumps of grit, and slivers of shrapnel in exchange for a few former pieces of foot-flesh. The storm-battered roads were not kind to me.
You should take care of your feet. As body parts go, they rarely get the nurture they deserve, and we only seem to notice them when they aren’t working right. They’re a little like our janitors or our bus drivers that way, people you rarely remember to thank or tip but probably should. Pay a little extra for the good socks. Stop to take pebbles out when you find them down there. If you love someone and they work hard, after a long day consider taking their shoes off for them and soaking their feet in hot water while you rub the arches, the heels, and the toes.
I had my car and my wallet back. It was time to turn my attention to the ones that carried me there.
After a quick change, I immediately drove myself to a pharmacy to collect saline, peroxide, bandages, and antibiotic ointment. Also, vodka. Obviously vodka. I got a few cans of chicken broth as a chaser, not because that makes any culinary sense, but because broth is the best thing for you if you’ve been injured.
Medically, I took my time and did everything right. I pulled all of the things that weren’t supposed to be there out of me. I used saline to rinse out the deep gouges. I used peroxide for the scrapes and rinsed that off with saline to further dislodge whatever sand and grit bubbled out. I spread the ointment on the sterile gauze and wrapped my feet well, then put on clean socks and shoes overtop. I had a cane in my car and no shame in using it at my age.
I found COTS finally, and parked my car by the guys waiting to get in. (“You have a CAR? Daaamn. . . “) I introduced myself, passed the bottle, and got the drill. We’d line up, sign a form, and be marched through showers, and only after showering would we be given food and bedding. That was supposed to prevent fleas and keep the stink of excrement to a minimum.
We polished off the bottle and shuffled along the chain-link entry serpentine. When it was my turn, I begged them not to make me take off my bandages. But rules were rules and everyone had to go through naked. I could see the black mold creeping through the cracks of the outside wall of the bathing facility and I tried not to think about how much cleaner Auschwitz’s gas chambers probably were.
The inside of the showering facility was worse. Years of use and neglect had worn the fixtures down to jagged pipes jutting from the walls seeping water constantly. The concrete floors were a maze of matted micro-ecosystems battling for dominance. I didn’t think it possible after the jailhouse rot, but I emerged filthier than I entered.
They didn’t have any fresh bandages for me. They didn’t have anything antibiotic. My old bandages and socks were soaked and muddy from the process, so I just left my feet out in the open air and trusted nature to do its thing. For good or for ill.
I stayed at COTS a few days. My feet seemed to get better. I got to know my fellows-in-need. They were all out of their minds on drugs and alcohol, and/or reeling from the psychological toll of being a part of a culture ruled by such, and nobody was very happy. We were talking about this in a circle before intake one day, passing the bottle, when a joint made its way around to me.
I held it between my fingers and said to myself, wait a minute. I haven’t smoked pot in over two months. If I have a clean drug screen, I might be able to do something about this whole drug problem, and I can go back to the Neece Center and prove them wrong. I passed the joint without hitting it.
I lay awake that night, plotting. Two authorities had recently derailed my otherwise florid lifestyle, and I was wary of an unknown third. As a tactician, I prefer precautions and preemptive strikes to punishments and revenge. I’d rather avoid a situation than have to remedy it. Yet here I was.
At COTS, a fiberglass hemicircular enclosure keeps the rain off of two rows of fifty plastic mats identical to the ones in jail (apparently they shop at the same place), which are spaced two inches from one another and elevated two feet from the bare earth by a plywood shelf reinforced by hastily nailed pine studboard. Picture a picnic table with a lawn umbrella after thirty years of weather and neglect, and you get the gist. Within, fifty men of a variety of races, ages, and levels of intoxication rest in varying degrees of comfort. Nearby is a similar facility for women, though that one is sparsely populated for some reason.
In an ideal world, an ideal plan could come together as a result of an ideal night’s sleep and reflection. In the real world, you work with what you’ve got. Here is the best I could do for what I had to work with.
At five thirty AM, the flood lights clicked on in the facility and the men and women were lured out of their slumber by a serving line of coffee and oatmeal, which also served to create the momentum to usher them out of the facility, which they were also required to vacate by six AM. “Behold the Great Egress,” as the sideshow exit signs used to say. I was the first one out. Even starving, I am too superstitious to accept food from a place I do not wish to be detained by. That’s how the fairy folk trap you in the fairy tales, and that’s how the mundane world steers you into a real life rut.
I went to the Monroe County Library, a wonderful facility only partially destroyed by Irma, and proudly availing the drier portions of its collection to the reading public. Their collection included a phone book, which I used to locate the island’s only private toxicologist, Rodrigo Hernandez. Over the phone, he agreed to let me buy him breakfast at the Jamaican diner next door to his office.
Rigo seemed relieved that he could do something for me after I told him my story. This was not entirely out of the spirit of altruism, but also from that old cliché regarding free lunches, or breakfasts in this case. After breakfast, we adjourned next door, where he received and analyzed my blood, urine, and saliva as per my requests. Out of curiosity, he ran several unrelated tests, and seemed genuinely fascinated by my chemical composition. They say money makes the world go round, but I find humor greases the wheels.
I left with credentials certifying my chemical activities of the past few months. Whatever else they said, they proved my innocence of at least one crime.
My next meeting was with Father Tom. I was meeting with him, not on my own behalf, but for the interest of initiating an Alcoholics Anonymous fellowship at COTS. I described to Tom the conditions at that facility, and he confided in me that, until some years prior, his organization had in fact been sponsoring COTS, and had had to pull out because of its inability to maintain a good neighbor policy, in addition to an ongoing criminal investigation for standard of living violations. Tom said he’d love to extend his ministry to these people clearly in need, but that he’d already accepted failure despite his best efforts.
He was in the middle of his own sentence expressing his misgivings in the matter when something occurred to him and he picked up the phone to call the Neece Center to request that they re-admit me. He didn’t want to see me get mired in that same trap he’d escaped. The Neece center on the other line said to send me over right away.
I had the unnecessary proof of my innocence burning a hole on the top of my clipboard. I’d bought Rigo breakfast and had him analyze my bodily fluids for nothing more than the entertainment value. I slipped a copy of my diagnostic report onto Tom’s desk on my way out. Whether or not he got a rise out of seeing it, I’ll never know.
The Neece center was happy to have me back and properly abashed to discover that their admissions process did not detect the drugs they were prepared to accept as being in my system. Nobody at that shelter could clean the bathrooms like I could.
Shorty’s Market was gracious enough to put me back on the schedule with no questions asked. Nobody else could climb the walk-in cooler and fetch the hundred pound metal clothing racks from the top without a ladder like I could.
Life returned to normal for two days. Then, my left leg seized up while I was at work and I had to hop on one leg for the last four hours of my shift, unable to bend my knee.
This was the other shoe whose descent I’d anticipated; the third and highest authority to arrest my progress: Mother Nature Herself.
Overnight, my calf muscle swelled up to the size and shape of a cantaloupe. I felt my skin stretch and snap and I knew I’d have stretch marks for years as surely if I, like Zeus did Dionysus, had carried a baby in my calf.
My entrapment in world mythology was not to stop there.
In an act I cannot account for other than through precognition, I happened to have a block of cicatrized text inscribed on that calf ten years prior. On the winter solstice every year for three years in my twenties, I carved the vertical, then the horizontal, then the diagonal lines of the following passage from the Buddhist Prophesy of Maitreya:
THEY WILL
MANAGE TO
CROSS THE
OCEAN OF
BECOMING
In the fuller text, the prophesy states that the incarnated teacher in question will use meditation, trance, and reverie such that Gods, men, and other beings "will lose their doubts, and the torrents of their cravings will be cut off: free from all misery they will manage to cross the ocean of becoming; and, as a result of Maitreya's teachings, they will lead a holy life. No longer will they regard anything as their own, they will have no possession, no gold or silver, no home, no relatives! But they will lead the holy life of chastity under Maitreya's guidance. They will have torn the net of the passions, they will manage to enter into trances, and theirs will be an abundance of joy and happiness, for they will lead a holy life under Maitreya's guidance."
The Ocean of Becoming was a metaphor for evolution for me at the time of its inscription on my person. At the time, I was a student of genetics. I believe the message has only become stronger with time, and I am humbled by the wisdom of my former self.
In the morning, the font of my inscription had doubled at best and quadrupled at worst. The prophesy blew up like a billboard. The muscle underneath looked like it was straining to contain an explosion.
I called in sick to work and asked the Neece center staff what to do. The overseer in question was covering for the house director, who had himself called in sick to work that day. I said I hoped there wasn’t a case of elephantiasis going around. He told me to hang tight and hope it got better tomorrow.
When it didn’t, I hopped on my good leg out to my car and drove myself to the local emergency room, which, as fate would have it, was on the same island as and quite nearby the police station which had detained me some days prior. Small islands. The hospital was still under reconstruction, and it took a goodly while to be seen. I was surprised not to be offered a wheelchair and too proud to ask for one.
At the hospital, they always ask you to rate your pain on a scale of one to ten, ten being the worst pain imaginable. I can think of no stupider way to assess agony. My imagination is not a normal place. A gunshot wound would be a one to me on such a scale. I told them through clenched teeth that my leg felt like about a five. Maybe it would feel as bad as it did if my leg were shot five times.
Of course, when they actually saw it, they offered me morphine, and of course, I had to refuse. The ability to produce a clean cup of urine had lately become a matter of life and death.
What could the best doctoring the Florida Keys had to offer do? They could draw a circle around the infected area in purple magic marker, write me a prescription for antibiotics that were otherwise free to the public, and tell me to drink water and keep it elevated. Since I’d managed to get myself in the front door of my own accord, I was encouraged to depart the same way.
I collected my medicine and set up at the Neece center for a week. I rigged up a bamboo scaffolding to my bunk bed (nobody thought to offer me a bottom bunk – that takes paperwork) to help me get up and down and to keep the leg above the level of my heart at all times. I only got down to use the bathroom and to eat. I finished reading everything Kurt Vonnegut has ever written and reread the Sirens of Titan.
At the beginning of the week, my leg looked like a pink bowling ball with a fiery Buddhist quote on it. By the end of the week, it was a burgundy bowling ball with a black Buddhist quote.
The doctor had told me that, prior to the days of antibiotics, the procedure would have been to amputate the leg below the knee to prevent the spread of infection. I think a finely carved prosthetic oaken hoof would suit my character fine. Looking down at it after a week’s bedrest, I was still wondering whether it was time to find the right tree and start whittling.
I went back to work.
Parking is prohibitively expensive on that side of the island, so I rode a bike with one leg, strapping my good foot to the pedal with a bungee cord so I could pull as well as push. Working, I had to explain to a hundred people a day that I was not a ballerina in training, but that I had to keep my leg elevated despite working on my feet.
I managed.
Speaking of managing, the calf muscle’s volume took a pendular reversal. Its tissue died and absorbed back into my body. I didn’t realize it was possible to see my fibula and achiles’ tendon in such detail without dissection. The stretch-marked skin was withered, blackened from internal bloodstain, and folded. The text turned white and where it poked out of the folds, I could make out,
THEY WILL
MANAGE
It’s all I could do. An old-timer once told me that back in his day, crippled folk didn’t know any better, so they went on limping just as fast as everyone else walked. I took it to heart. I kept the calf bandaged. Nobody needed to see that. I put some drumsticks in the bandage (oblivious until now of the pun) and tied them up to the ankle and the knee, letting me balance a bit without toppling. I bought a physical therapist breakfast, and she showed me how I could grow the muscle back by manually moving it for an hour each day until it could move itself. I did that.
Three months later, I was homeless and on the other end of the country, pedaling a makeshift shopping cart/bicycle through the postapocalyptic wasteland of modern Los Angeles County. The calf was still under wraps, and I’d made a contraption out of a stop sign post and some trampoline springs to facilitate motion, which given the circumstances reminded everyone of Mad Max. The muscle under the wraps looked like Medusa’s head stuffed in a condom.
Three months after that, I find myself needing no sort of bandaging for concealment or bracing for function. The leg looks like the other one, except for the scars and now the zebra-stripe stretch marks. I like the effect.
