Calypso(26)

“Well, OK,” I said. “Sure…a little.”

“And now can you see that he’s talking to an owl?”

“Owls are a dime a dozen in woodgrain,” Jimmy explained.

“That’s true,” his mother said, and she moved on to her next piece of plywood, in which a turtle considered a mountain. “And this is all just found!” she told me. “I honestly haven’t altered a thing!”

Later, over coffee, we got onto the subject of elderly parents. Janet’s mother is eighty-nine and is in excellent physical and mental health. “Unlike my friend Phil’s mother,” she said. “This was a woman who never missed a church service, who was an absolute pillar of her community. Then she got dementia and became a different person.” She poured me more coffee. “The last time Phil saw her, she leaned over in her wheelchair and at the top of her voice said, ‘Hitler wants my pussy.’”

Jimmy stroked his biblike beard. “They say he was quite the ladies’ man.”

“Who even knew that word was in her vocabulary?” Janet asked. “And how had Hitler told her? He’d been dead for fifty years by that point.”

Being with Janet reminded me of how lucky I am. At ninety-two, my father is in great shape. And should that suddenly change for any reason, he probably won’t linger all that long. I’d like to think I inherited his constitution, but in fact I’m more like my mother. Thus I took it seriously when, at the postshow book signing that night in Omaha, a fellow with a noticeable divot in his face pointed to a dark spot beside my left eye, saying, “I’m no doctor, but am ninety percent sure you have skin cancer.”

Four days later I saw a dermatologist in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The spot, he said, was nothing to worry about. Then he used the word “cancer,” albeit with a “pre-” in front of it—“a little precancerous keratosis.” He hit it with some liquid nitrogen, and by the time I left his office it looked like I had a pencil eraser stuck to my face. The following day on the plane, the eraser burst and precancer juice ran like a fat tear down my cheek.

That was the first of several procedures I wound up having over the course of my tour. Funny, but for years I avoided going to any kind of doctor. If it was an emergency, I could be talked into it, but anything else, especially anything preventative, was out of the question. Then my father forced me to get a colonoscopy, and a whole new world opened up. The paperwork is a drag, of course, so many forms that by the time you’re in the examining room you have to add “carpal tunnel” to your already long list of complaints. As far as the doctors themselves go, though, I’ve had a pretty good run. In the summer of 2014, while on vacation at my family’s beach house on the coast of North Carolina, and again at the insistence of my father, I went in for a physical. “All right, then,” the GP said, after taking my blood pressure and looking into my ears, “what do you say you stand up now and I’ll do your front and back.”

It was such a classy, understated way to say, “After grabbing your balls I’d like to stick my finger up your ass.”

The dermatologist was fun to talk to, as was a nurse who gave me a flu shot while I was passing through O’Hare. The only exception I’ve had so far is a surgeon I saw on the coast of North Carolina a few days after having my physical. Six years earlier, I had noticed a lump on my right side, just at the base of my rib cage. It was, I later learned, a lipoma, meaning a harmless fatty tumor. It continued to grow for the next several months until it was the size and feel of an unshelled hard-boiled egg. I could have lived with it for the rest of my life, but after spending some time along the canals not far from our beach house, I got a better idea. The surgeon I met with didn’t have much in the way of a personality. That’s not to say he was rude, just perfunctory. He took an ultrasound of my fatty tumor and said that he could remove it the following week.

“Terrific,” I said, “because I want to feed it to a snapping turtle.”

“Excuse me?”

“Not just any snapping turtle,” I continued, as if that was what had given him pause. “There’s one very specific turtle I’m planning to feed it to. He has a big growth on his head.”

“It’s against federal law for me to give you anything I’ve removed from your body,” the surgeon said.

“But it’s my tumor,” I reminded him. “I made it.”

“It’s against federal law for me to give you anything I’ve removed from your body.”

“Well, could I maybe have half to feed to this turtle?”

“It’s against federal law for me to give you anything I’ve removed from your body.”

I left with my tumor intact, thinking, Honestly. What has this country come to?



On tour sometimes, just before the question-and-answer part of the evening, I’ll stand at the podium and run my mouth for a while. I told the story about the tumor onstage in El Paso, Texas, and afterward a woman approached my signing table, saying, “I’ll cut that out of you tonight if you like. And I’ll let you keep it.”

I pointed out the long line, and she shrugged. “No problem, I’m a night owl.” She handed me a slip of paper with her number on it. “Just phone me when you’re done.”

The woman looked to be around fifty, Mexican, I reckoned, and as short as a child. “In case you’re wondering, I am a doctor,” she said. “Not a surgeon, but I studied it for a year in med school, and unless your tumor has its own blood supply, removing it should be fairly easy.”