SHAMAN

I was laying on the floor the aches would not disappear, my legs, my throat, my ears, my muscles, my head everything within me was hurting boils, steam from every pore, coldness immersed in all of my flesh, my eyes bloodshot, I rested no sleep, spent my cries fully, exasperated but too young to understand the nature of my pains. It just hurt all over, on the floor, next to the bed where my parents laid listening to every agonizing cry, and the rush of endless pain upon me, sautéed onions heated on top of newspaper on me belly, pure onion juice to swallow, lime drops on my eyes, a penny on my forehead. I was cured.

Dad had taken me to every doctor in the city, we lived in Bogota, the capitol, the capitol of any country surely ought have the finest doctors. But with his dying child by the hand, Dad covered the entire city in search of a cure for his agonizing son. Everywhere he went the doctors could see that there was something very wrong with me, I was close to death, they had all been able to make that diagnosis; they did not need to tell my father that but they told him anyway. It was a way of proving that they were experts in their field, “Your son is dying.” I did not really hear what they were saying but the look that father gave me was long in grief and slung a heavy burden; I knew that I was the one sick, I had to guess that they were not telling him that he was going to die. But while the doctors were impressive at diagnosing death, inevitable death, impeding death, death of the kind that orphans a father, they were unable to prescribe a cure for inevitable death. There is something vindicating in that, a doctor can only cure what is incurable, what is not curable will kill you that is not the doctors fault.

But my father was not a doctor, he was the Manager of Operations for Phillips of Colombia. He could buy solutions, he had a panel of experts to solve his problems; only mine was not a problem that he could bring to the Executive Committee and expect a solution. Dad took me home where I continued to religiously pray with my pains, wild thundering screams announcing the precise location of every ache, almost saying “Here is where you can not cure Father? Here is where your son is dying.” Dad would lay next to me and try to comfort me, to give me inspiration to say that it was all temporary, but if it was so temporary, and not so serious why were we going to all those experts? Even a Psychiatrist; my dad took me to a Shrink, dad thought that if the medical doctors could not find what was wrong with me that there had to be something wrong with my brain. And there was something wrong with my brain, a brain is not suppose to feel pain! A brain doesn’t even have pain sensors, you see when you are thinking you can not feel pain! That is why all the great thinkers are so indifferent and so insensitive and so utopia! My brain was hemorrhaging pain, if the insensitive scientists are not just making an excuse for themselves, and there are indeed no pain sensors in the brain well I did not know it, and I did not know it because I could not think it and I could not think it because I was suffering in pain!

Am in this room, very nice place, red blue pillows, a couch, a couple of armchairs, lots of light coming in thought skylights, shiny wooden floor, and there are lots of children’s books, lots of colors, funny faces, cartoons, everything a sort of distorted form of reality, one reality was orange, another was apricot, some realities never made it beyond crayons, but all of them were playing with me, trying to get my attention, trying to get me to come out, to reach to them and touch them and give them life and perhaps I would become real while reaching the enticing process. I picked up a rabbit, a large stuffed rabbit and I started to toss it around, against the couch he flew, against the wall, then I sat with him and we chatted a bit, I told him about the time that I wanted to have sex with a cat; hey, I was a little kid I did not know then that it wasn’t ok to have sex with cats. It’s true, I even told the cat that I wanted to have sex with it, the cat just walked away from me like if I hadn’t said anything, I haven’t liked cats since. Anyway pretty soon I get tired of talking to Rabbit, he was not like a great conversationalists, he just kept ON this goofy smile as if everything that I said was funny and it wasn’t, so I got kind of disenchanted with the enchanting Rabbit, so feeling the hardwood floor with my skeleton motivated me to place Rabbit underneath my Butt and he was a much nicer seat cushion than he was a Rabbit or a friend.

A nice lady came through the door, smiling a lot like Rabbit, oh no another seat cushion; the lady had an old haircut style by today’s standards, but back then I was about eight so she had an excuse. She wore a lot of makeup which made her look pretty but she might have been pretty underneath the makeup too. My parents briefly entered the room but only so as to let me know that she was somehow with them and that she was ok, then they left us alone. I suddenly felt as if I was being watched from before, as if the entire time that I had been playing with Rabbit this lady had been observing me, and my parents too, they were watching. It was a weird feeling but I did not let the lady know that that was what I was feeling, somehow I did not want to make her feel uncomfortable.

She took out a couple of puzzles, one was of a boat in a large Ocean. The puzzles were all very big in comparison to a kid, but the pieces were few, so one large puzzle was only seven or twelve pieces broken. The lady, after telling me that I was a nice boy, shuffled the puzzle and told me to put it back together again. I tried to puzzle the Ocean together, and the ship, but to be fair to me, Bogota was in the middle of the Andes mountains, Bogota was surrounded with these earth beasts rising magnificently over a basin, and in this basin was Bogota; above sea level eight-thousand-six-hundred feet plus of flatness and still surrounded by ascending Andean mountains; Colombians did not know what to do with these mountains so on top of one they placed a cross, on top of another they placed the Virgin Mary, and on the Third, Mt. Monserrate, they placed a Church with Christ Lord bleeding in a glass case. Colombians, sinners and sickly, pilgrimage up the mountain to visit the agonizing Christ in the glass cage, and he makes them walk again and talk again and listen again, and forgives them again. The place was littered with useless crutches, braces, blind canes, etc…The priest in charged of the place did not bother to remove the litter but they did remove the coins that were left behind. But Dad and I never took that climb probably because my growing pains would not have survived it; I could not reach Christ our healer and savior. But what I was telling you is that I had not seen the ocean, much less a ship that could carry all those people, so putting the Ocean and Boat puzzle together was not possible, lack of a real frame of reference. The nice lady proposed that I look at the picture on the box for comparison, the box was smaller than the puzzle, the pieces did not come out of the box put together, the lady of course did not hear any of my thoughts, I merely suggested that I did not know what to do with the pieces, I just let them lay there. The Shrink Lady then takes the pieces and starts putting the puzzle together all the while asking for my assistance. I only touch the pieces, and she smiles like she is happy that I did that, unfortunately instead of seeing this as positive reinforcement I am puzzled “Why is she so happy?” “Why is she enjoying putting the pieces in the puzzle so much?” …. .”Am I missing the fun here because this is hurting my brain.”

Anyway she got another puzzle; a fish, that is all that was there a fish, we did not eat fish at home, we ate meat, my Dad loved meat and so we ate a lot of meat. I remember when we would go to our farm, and there the farm hands would kill themselves a cow, and then we would barbecue the whole thing over a fire, everyone taking turns turning the wheel that made the cow rotate over the fire; and when it was done we ate the tastiest meat imaginable. Fish, I had fish once, in a restaurant downtown near the presidential palace, the fish was dead and golden gold-like, and the whole head and tail was present on my plate. I did not think much of it, nor found it tasty either, it seemed strange to eat something that had more bones in it than meat, I had to cough out a few spines, and the eye would stare at me, and the head looked decapitated or fake, and I just did not like fish. I never complained about the fish but I still think that it is wrong to bring such a thing that far and high inland. Asphyxiated fish just don’t keep. But even that experience was not enough to help me put together a puzzled fish.

Nice lady put all the puzzles together herself and left me to watch them as barriers to my understanding. Then a few minutes later both her and my parents walked into the room and I felt something uneasy about the whole affair, maybe they had caught me talking to my invisible friends, anyway the nice lady told me again what a nice boy I was and then told my parents the same thing which I sort of took as a claim for normalcy. No more puzzles.

The pains continued, the doctors continued to not know what they did not know, one made a valiant attempt to find a cause by telling dad that I was suffering growing pains, I was growing faster than my anatomy could cultivate, your kid is outgrowing himself, or more precisely unusual, “your son has a procrustean body.” Dad would not say anything bad to the doctors, he would just reply “Thank you Doctor. Thank you very much Doctor.” Your son is going to die. “Thank you Doctor.” But as soon as we left the hospital dad would go off, telling me how stupid those doctors were, how they did not know anything, how they and the entire medical establishment were just a bunch of know nothings that were just out to make money, and didn’t care who they hurt in the process. And Dad has stories to prove his point, plenty of friends had gone to their death soon after visiting Hospitals and Doctors.

But one of those know nothings told Dad that he could cure my brain, ear and throat aches by taking my tonsils out, Dad agreed. At least he was trying something. I went into the hospital, where they promised me a lot of Jell-O and ice cream after the operation. I did not like ice cream, I did not like sweets, I did not like Jell-O never have liked anything with sugar. My father would buy us sugar canes, the real thing, and we would lick and bite the cane but I only did it to please dad. Now as for Jell-O, I did not like the texture, it felt like plastic, it was indeed a polymer of some kind, Jell-O progenitor to plastic. But everyone around me was so happy that I was going to get to eat ice cream and Jell-O, why some of the nurses were envious, “Oh you are so lucky you are going to get lots of Jell-O.” I got out of the operating room, tonsils gone. Doctor says that the tonsils don’t really do anything, oh they are suppose to guard against inconsequential infections perhaps, but tonsils don’t really do much of anything. The things really look big for something that doesn’t do anything and there are two of them. Yeah here is God saying: “Let there be two tonsils because one of nothing is not enough.” But I get out of that operating room and they place me in a room with a guy that has been shot across the chest, still talking, he tries to explain to me what happened to him, but I am to busy swallowing all the blood that the tonsils do not need, and still feeling all the other pains only now I felt even worse. Good idea Dad.

I went home, and get this not once during my recovery in the hospital did they offer me or give an ounce of Jell-O, maybe they were billing my parents for it, “a thousand pounds of Jell-O were fed to your kid on such and such a date.” I don’t know why but I never got any! And when I got home I was so sick of Jell-O that when mom offer it to me I kept on telling her that I had eaten so much of it at the hospital that I never wanted any ever! I think about it, that may well be why Mom never questioned the hospital bill. A bunch of crooks. But with my tonsils out the pains persisted, even the growing pains persisted, tonsils don’t only do nothing they cure nothing when you get rid of them, makes sense to me now, if they doctors say that tonsils don’t do anything, then the net effect of removing them equals nothing, except for the bill of course. A bunch of crooks.

But the tonsils are there for a reason, god does not play dice with your tonsils, they are there to guard against evil spirits that want to possess your body. Tonsils are metaphysical body parts, glands that act to defend your soul. Of course the doctors could not know this because spirits can not be measured; so within weeks of having my tonsils removed, the guardians of my soul, the mean spirit of a dentist took possession of my body. And no, the pain did not go away it just kept on getting worse and worse as would be logically expected once you get possessed by a dentist. Sreecks! But no cavities.

It was after realizing that I was not going to get better that Dad begun to experiment with alternative medicines. Homoeopathy was the first option, it looked like a drug, safely close enough to credited medicine, but it wasn’t a drug or a traditional cure. Traditional medicine is antagonistic towards the ailment. Doctors treat cancer or AIDS by attacking your body and suspecting that it will take longer for you to die than it will take to kill all other rotten things inside of you, you will survive but not because your doctor wasn’t trying to kill you. Homoeopathy is not antagonistic towards what ails you it is more like what ails you, similia similibus curantur, someone in Germany had deduced the cure to all ills via this strange digesting of infinitesimally small quantities of what ever is ailing the body, shaken in water solutions in just such a way, minimized to insignificance, and then digested in the form of mostly tasteless pills, take a million of them and they can not kill you. They are non toxic, they are natural, these pills cure everything, stress, diarrhea, chronic fatigue, malaria, toxic shock syndrome, whatever that is; and all it is, all these tiny pills are, is just the smallest constituency of the cause of your illness. Maybe the illness tries to match the tiny size of its smallest constituency, an illness trying to be like less of itself never goes away but it most certainly stops expressing a host death wish. You take the homeopathic pills and walla you are cured. Why it works, who knows. The quackery did not work on me.

Then we tried the herbs, I drank a lot of teas from China, I used to like Tea in Ming China, but Colombia hosts the best chocolate in the world and the best cafe in the world, I adored my hot chocolate con queso. But not tea, and when the tea medication did not work Dad switched me to mushrooms, not sacred mushrooms, big Portabella mushrooms, maybe not portabella either, but big liquefied fungi, and drink it me would. Lots of nice smelling herbs from India and from the Amazon, you could just see peasants, numbering in the hundreds, picking these plants one by one just so they could be delivered to Bogota to save me. Lots of herbs made it into my nasal passages and down my throat. Oh Dad was sure that there was a plant to be found that would cure my ills, I had not the heart to tell him that it wasn’t on earth.

But Dad was no quitter on the quest to save his son my dad did it all. Finally he just searched deep inside of himself and became a Shaman. Dad did not have time for the slow process of scientific discovery, his son was dying fast, the silly stuffed Rabbit had the potential to outlive me, so Dad gazed at me with tender concerns over his feverish little boy, and he placed a penny on my forehead and these sizzling onions on top of a newspaper laid upon me exposed belly; and fed me some onion juice, not from concentrate, adding a few drops of lime to my eyes, ouch! And cured me. I have never been really ill since, and I still like onions. And ever since those days, Dad has been curing ills as the Shaman that he became because he could not wait for Science.