STREETVIBES Page 12
The Effects of Poverty on the Body Michael Henson is author of Ransack, A Small Room with Trouble on My Mind, The Tao of Longing, and Crow Call. This column is part of a monthly series on poverty and addiction. A friend —I won’t say his name and I’ll not give you everything I know about him— is a disabled diesel mechanic with a wild sense of humor and a bone-deep knowledge of Appalachian culture. He used to make good money as a mechanic, but that was before he tore his rotator cuff and before the eight operations that never fixed it. So he makes a little side money doing odd jobs, mostly advising his son who does the muscle part of it, but he’ll probably never work a full-time job again. To further complicate things, he is overweight by a couple hundred pounds and suffers from diabetes, congestive obstructive pulmonary disorder, and sleep apnea so bad that he had to have a hole cut into his esophagus to insert a breathing tube. When he coughs, he holds a handkerchief to his throat. He has a shelf of medications and a life organized around visits to various doctors. Not all the doctor visits are his own. His wife suffers from unexplained and undiagnosed seizures. I forget the seven or so other diseases she copes with. Their youngest daughter was lead poisoned when she was small. As a result, she has a learning disability and a speech defect. My friend’s fear is that, when she some day conceives a child, her bones will
release the stored lead into the blood of her unborn child. His oldest daughter appears generally healthy which would be a great relief if she had a better gift for choosing men. Her first child may be learning disabled, but it’s too early to tell for sure. He has one other daughter who is obese, but otherwise healthy. His son has had multiple surgeries for a deformity of his urinary tract. He also suffers from a learning disability — he can absorb information, but he cannot read it or write it. He passed his GED through a verbal test. Husband and wife tease, fight, complain, and fuss with one another, but when she has one of her seizures —when her eyes roll up, her lids flutter, her body stiffens like a board— my friend talks her down very patiently, lovingly. His face radiates sweetness and compassion, like a biker Bodhisattva. It is a beautiful thing to watch. It is a terrible thing to watch. It must be a terrible thing to live with, for my friend talks regularly of driving whatever patched-up car he has this month into a wall to end the stress. He says he is too loyal to wife and family to ever do it —and I hope that’s true. Instead, about once a month, he buys a fifth of liquor and gets apocalyptically drunk.
It changes nothing, of course, and he wakes up with a hangover on top of the same old pain, the same old round of pills, the same old wait for the next seizure, the same difficulties with children and grandchildren. Something has gone terribly wrong with this family, who do not seem to have deserved it at all. Something has struck them like a Biblical curse and it is a miracle —a sweet miracle— that they maintain any scrap or shred of dignity. But they do have dignity. Not the dignity some would call dignity, for their clothes and cars and furniture are all pretty shabby by Martha Stewart standards. But they have something within —my friend would not want to talk about special gifts and such, so perhaps I should leave it alone— but they have a gift for dignity not all families manage. * Should my friend skip the monthly binge? Of course, you say. Of course, I say. But how do we sell him such a notion? I think we have a pretty tough job ahead of us. You can only sell this sobriety business where you can sell it, and I don’t think he’s going to buy. You can call it denial or you can call it resistance, but from where he sits, sobriety is the least of his needs
and drinking is the least of his worries. From where he sits, in a patched-up folding chair on the sidewalk of an inner-city neighborhood with the pollution and the dope boys and the noise and the prostitutes all around him and the pain in his feet and the needs of his wife and children and grandchildren ever before him, sobriety doesn’t offer much. If he never drank again, that would be a good thing —from my point of view. But from his point of view, little would change. The jobs with the good, diesel mechanic pay were gone seven surgeries ago. He’ll still have the diabetes, his feet will still be slowly dying, and he’ll still have a plug in his throat. And so on, with the rest of his list. And so on, with the needs of his family. From my point of view, the drinking just complicates all these conditions. From his point of view, the drinking —his once-a-month allout blowout— keeps him from driving that patched-up car into a wall. It’s cheaper than therapy, and quicker than the twelve steps. Something could happen, I suppose. Something could make him realize the harm his drinking does him. But for now, from his point of view, poverty and disease are as much harm as he can face.
Bertas Art Corner
Thank you to Xavier University’s Department of Athletics for their generous donation of soap, shampoo, and hair products. Erector Set, Cincinnati, Ohio