The Medicine Burns Read Free Page B

her to take a less active role in the construction of a fence around their property. It was only in the middle of her eighth month that my mother could be convinced to put down her hammer and take on the role of supervisor. She remains proud of the fact that she saw the fence completed in her first two hours of labor pains; it was only then that she allowed my father to rush her to the hospital, with the neighbors in a caravan behind.
    She claims that I was born without hesitancy, which surprises me even to this day. But then, my birth has been so mythologized by her, it seems more likely that this “anxiousness to enter the world” was merely a response to my early complaints at having been born at all. She has admitted, however, that I was an ugly baby, and that it was with horror that she recognized my turned feet.
    The neighbors gathered outside the glass window to watch me, while my mother wept to my father that she was responsible for my deformity.
    She remained inconsolable until my father sought a doctor’s intervention. He assured her of the commonness of my condition, and that modern medicine had led us away from the primitive measures she had endured as a child, and though he doubted I would dance, he consoled her that my childhood would be normal and happy. His authority soothed her, and she was soon able to accept the congratulations from the neighbors who filed in around her bedside.
    So by the time of my circumcision, my neighbors were all fully aware of the fact that I was a child awaiting two surgeries, my penis and later my foot, and certainly they knew that I would wear a cast on my foot long before I wore a pair of baby shoes.
    Did this gift signify her hope for the future when my feet would no longer turn away from each other? My mother chose not to believe so, and from that point forward, she kept a firm distance from Ruth, and almost all the neighbors, as though they each possessed the same potential for ignorant or intentional malice, which she equated.
    Her isolationism might have worked while I was younger, but while my father was unemployed and I was climbing out of my window in the middle of the night, my mother was certain the neighbors were collecting the information, waiting to humiliate her yet again. She suddenly had both of us to attend to, which took some of her attention off me and enabled me to resume a private life which had been prematurely and far too brightly illuminated. After all, I was no more rebellious than my peers, just more committed.
    I discovered a drag club on Miami Beach which flaunted its tacky exoticism. The performers were either overweight or anorexic and desperately untalented. But I could watch them for hours, one after the other making a show of their failures, their alcoholism, and their bad attitudes. One could expect the bouncers to have to remove Lola from the stage; her numbers had the tendency to become an assault on the audience, baiting them to get up on stage and do a better job than she if they thought they could. And she would only leave the stage when the bartender or someone in the audience promised to buy her a drink.
    I marveled at how they lived. As much as I doubted my parents’ values, I assumed that at some point I would be forced to share them. It was these amateur drag shows that made me realize just how vast the world was. The drag queens challenged everything. Not simply gender, but propriety as well. If they sensed they were being laughed at, they laughed along before the joke got too old.
    I planned a party for a weekend when my parents were leaving town. It was my mother’s prescription of a “rest cure” for my father. Though many of the guests had attended my birthday party at the cottage, the spirit of this party was radically different. I chose my parents’ bedroom to act as an orgy room, replacing their reading lights with red bulbs. I moved the stereo from my bedroom into the living room and cleared the