White Mythology

by WD Clarke

  A few other departments had followed Dr. Ed’s lead in courting private sector monies. The Fertility Clinic was a good example, as was Physiotherapy. Ophthalmology was a contender, and though the Biotechnology lab in the basement was only just now catching on, it was said to be ‘making great strides’. But the vast bulk of the facility remained neglected, and the hospital was, in turn (so Dr. Ed ‘felt’) thereby neglecting its patients.

  Shooting out of the service elevator at ground zero, Dr. Ed moved rapidly through the Los Alamos post-blast landscape of Emerg. Acoustic ceiling tiles were missing; wires were hanging down; the walls on the north side had been given one coat of a purplish gray two years ago, while the south facing wall retained its original ear-wax beige. The corridor was littered with gurneys, and as he rounded the corner into Admissions, he encountered the usual congestion. Dozens of mothers and fathers, all with children in tow, were packed into the waiting room, all low-priority no-family-doctor influenza broken bone, etc., etc. cases. Dozens more milled about in the foyer, waiting their turn to be seen by the triage nurse before they could be allowed to wait their turn for a randomly multiple number of Medicare hours. Dr. Ed wove his way through them all with the speed, grace, and inexorability of an Yvan Cournoyer or a Guy Lafleur skating across the opposing team’s blue line.

  Dr. Ed paused before entering the revolving door to the outside to look back, having noticed his psychiatric colleague and golfing partner, Bernie Berenstein, looking at a file. Dr. Ed remembered that he had promised, and had forgotten, to take Bernie’s on-call on Monday. That wasn’t like him, forgetting like that. Luckily, nothing had come of it, and today, today was, well, today was another day.

  Today was Wednesday. Wednesday, December 8th, 1993. It was both the anniversary of the Buddha’s enlightenment and a Roman Catholic feast day, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Orgtastic!! had reminded him of these facts with a sound file of his own choosing, sampled and programmed by his ‘son’ several months ago, not long after they had first made contact. The piece was from Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater (not Christopher Hogwood’s commendable, all-digital 1989 release, recorded on period instruments with The Academy of Ancient Music, but the miraculous 1981 recording by Lamberto Gardelli, with the Ladies of The Hungarian Radio and Television Chorus—Dr. Ed knew his music, alright). But ah, ah yes, ‘Inflammatus’:

  Inflammatus et accensus

  per te, Virgo, sim defensus

  in die judicii.

  Be to me, O virgin, nigh

  lest in flames I burn and die

  in his awful judgement day.

  In the old days, in the very old days, a long, long, long time before he was Dr. Ed, Dr. Ed used to fast on Fridays (to mark Our Lord’s Passion) as well as on major feast days such as this. But that was in the old days. These days, he (most certainly) did not.

  6

  Free Will

  Dr. Ed Worked so close to the downtown core that he didn’t need to drive his car to go out for lunch. He didn’t need to—he liked to. And he often did. But who wouldn’t, if they too owned a (red) 1993 Mazda rx-7? The Mazda rx-7 is arguably the best production sports car in the world. After all, if you can’t hear it screaming ‘Drive Me! Now!’ at you, brother, then you should just go get yourself a G-ddamn hearing aid, or go in for some voluntary euthanasia. Cos’ the rx-7 rocks.

  So why wasn’t Dr. Ed driving to lunch?

  6a.) Voluntary Internal Combustion

  (i.) Carpe Diem. These early December days were just too beautiful: sunshine, blue skies, temperatures in the low single digits. Not exactly Indian summer, but pretty well the next best thing, given that November had been unusually Novemberish, with rain on 22 or so of its 30 days. And while today was just like yesterday, which was pretty much like the day before, who knew how long it would last? Carpe Diem. And as Dr. Ed walked briskly eastward along Bagot St., which neatly bisected City Park and led him past some charming red brick century homes, resident blue jays scrapped with non-migrating grackles at the birdfeeders. Both were ignored by the chickadees, who jumped around the branches of the leafless maple, oak and chestnut trees and chirped their optimistic little dittie-dee-dee-dees while gray and black squirrels darted hither & thither, rushing to build up their stores for the long winter ahead. Little meteorological receptors in their brains told them there would be major storms in everyone’s future, while Dr. Ed’s ‘thoughts’ tended to the present (and, to the extent that that ol’ egg-in-his-chest could force itself upon his pragmatic attention, to the past). As he walked east along Bagot St., there was also almost no wind to speak of; what little there was was content just to nuzzle up against the left side of Dr. Ed’s neck, gently, as a lover might.

  (ii.) That awesome rx-7 was being prepared for winter hibernation by Dr. Ed’s handyman, Perry. The wheels were being taken off, the oil changed, the gas tank filled, and then the whole thing was to be put up on blocks, and covered in a white sheet. He could’ve gotten away with driving it a few more weeks with weather like this, but why chance it? Dr. Ed was reduced to driving his clunker, his winter beater, a 1989 Peugeot 405, whose electrics (in particular the heated seats) were always going up the spout. As for Dr. Ed’s wife, she, for the record, drove a ’92 GMC Suburban, year-round.

  (iii.) That dream, that dream.

  6b.) The Enigma of the Unfinished Bowl of Soup

  Dr. Ed was observed arriving at his customary haunt, Buddy’s Lite Bite (est’d. 1973), at his usual time, 12:15, and sat alone at his usual table, where the east-facing wall met the south-facing window. He then duly received, without having to place an order, his usual meal, the Soup’r Sandwich special, which, for him, always featured a toasted (not grilled) Reuben-esque, with horseradish and mustard, no butter. Buddy (his real name) always used genuine (that is, live, not canned or bottled, but sold in litre-sized milk cartons) sauerkraut flown in especially from Tancook Island, Nova Scotia. For Dr. Ed, and Dr. Ed alone, Buddy kept a stash of real Emmenthal cheese, from Basel via Loblaws grocers, with which to smother the hot corned beef of his best customer—Dr. Ed. Buddy did so not because Dr. Ed could tell the difference (he couldn’t), but because of their shared history: they had known each other since that best time of their lives (according to Buddy), Kindergarten and Elementary school. From nap-time on brightly coloured towels to their first double-date, going to the grade six church hockey league sock-hop with the seventh-grader Quigley twins, Bud-n-Ed had been famously, intricately intermeshed, like Velcro. And if their interests and activities had largely separated these two-halves-of-a-whole ever since, oh, about grade eight (Buddy’s path had taken him, at nineteen, to the east coast and into the Navy and onto the frigate HMCS Yukon, where he had earned his chops as short order cook, bon-vivant and ladykiller), they still maintained great affection for one another, as both would—with great jocularity—attest.

  But Buddy would really mean it.

  Buddy was too good-natured, too authentically happy to ever compare himself to his friends. Even when he was down, Buddy was (comparatively speaking) up, and his moments of introspection only descended to ‘wistful’, never towards ‘plaintive’, and certainly never approaching ‘morbid’. As Dr. Ed saw it, however, Buddy needed clinical help, and fast. By Dr. Ed’s estimation, Buddy was by this point in his life aging at twice the rate of his pals. He was alarmingly rotund, nearly spherical—and it did not help matters that he wore his short-sleeve perma-press shirts untucked, so that it looked like he was wearing a tent. He was completely bald on top, but his hair was all shag-carpetty on the sides, with lambchop sideburns to boot, and his skin was, well, funny, full of splotches and unevennesses, cliffs, crags, scree & craters.

  But ask anyone, Digger over there, anyone. Buddy was one funny guy, should’ve been on tv, a real character, so many stories…. Take nine years ago for instance. Now that was a knee-slapper, man-o-man. See, Ed comes into the Lite Bite babe in tow; Buddy hasn’t seen him in what, fifteen, sixteen years? Not since ’67, when the whole gang had pile
d into Buddy’s van and they’d all flown, as high as Sputnik they was, down the highway to Expo, in Montreal.

  What times, eh? Who was that fox Ed was with then? Agnes or somebody, from the island or something. But anyway, now, presto! It’s 19-eighty-whatever and here Ed is again, appearing out of Nowheresville, unannounced, announcing to Buddy that he’s going to marry this new babe he’s got hanging—and I mean hanging—offa-his-arm, and she’s real class, you know what I mean? From the City, and who’da thunk it but would Buddy like to be Ed’s Best Man?

  —Are you, Buddy had said, are you kidding? I mean, Jesus! Darling, did you know that I’ve known Eddy Haskell here since….

  —It’s Dr. Ed now, Dr. Ed’s fiancée had said.

  —How’s his bedside manner these days, anyway?

  —I wouldn’t know. I’m his fiancée.

  —Pleased ta meetcha, I’m Chef Boiardi.

  Chef Boiardi, can you believe that? That Buddy’s a riot, a regular riot, what a maroon.

  When the Phase 1b trials for Alba had been awarded to his department, Dr. Ed had immediately ‘thought’ of Buddy. He would be perfect, Dr. Ed figured, for this drug, for part of its ‘mandate’ was aimed at just such sub-clinical, functional patients as his friend: those who ‘get by’ from day to day, those who experience no major, incapacitating crises, but whose diagnostic profile placed them significantly outside the first standard deviation.

  Dr. Ed’s wife, with that list of hers, was spot on about his ‘feelings’ as regards fat people, though. Dr. Ed couldn’t help the physical revulsion that he ‘felt’; it came from … well, wherever those kinds of things come from. Of course, he never let it show in public, but fat people also moved him to a profound state of pity, for they could be counted among what he considered to be ‘the truly helpless’. They could exercise all they wanted; they could diet, stomach staple and liposuction themselves until they were eviscerated versions of their former beings, but none of that mattered. None of it mattered because it was all so very much short-term; long term change, though, was fundamentally a question of will-power, and—it must be said—fat people (like most people, actually) just did not have any. They did not possess any such magical power because will-power is largely a function of—an epiphenomenon of—brain chemistry. And that’s where Alba came in.

  Dr. Ed’s hypothesis/hunch went further, and one sunny day, when the café was pretty much empty, he had explained it all to Buddy, with that famous tone of voice that he had, that stealthily reassuring, calm-yet-resolute, indefatigable voice, the voice that convinced you that dispassionate reason must be your buckler and shield, your one refuge and your only shepherd in life. Listen up, that voice said: reason must appear to you as a guide star.

  Like most funny men, and like many fat-but-functional people (Dr. Ed had gently said, in a tone as placid as a bowl of evaporated skim milk set down before an eight-week-old kitten), Buddy concealed a deep sadness, sadness hidden somewhere below the surface of those roiling high spirits, sadness concealed beneath all of that excessively pronounced adipose tissue—and, surely, Buddy being a man’s man after all, would agree that no amount of … of therapy (that is, undignified whining and peevish whingeing, as well as the subsequent, expensive and infinite analysis of previous sessions of whingeing & whining) would ever uproot it. It would never be uprooted because, fundamentally, there was nothing to uproot. Buddy’s sadness, as complex and overdetermined as it might seem at first glance, was at least two removes away from its first cause. At one remove away were all of those experiences (storms, floods, heat waves, drought) which had accompanied Buddy’s transition from acorn into massive oak. The important thing, however, was to look at the structure of the oak itself, and to thereby discover what the original acorn had most likely been lacking, what nature had given it a surfeit of, and what lay within the normal range….

  Anyhow, that deep sadness was hindering Buddy from being the Buddy that only Buddy could be. Sure, Buddy had a good little business going with the Lite Bite , but there was something lacking, wasn’t there? There was, and Buddy had tearfully but briefly confessed that which he had always dreamed of, but of which had proved himself forever incapable: of sharing his life with someone, with … his very own Special Lady. And Buddy had always, since he had first gone to sea, longed for a real family to be part of, to be the benevolent patriarch of and breadwinner for. His dreams were populated with the tantalizing images and sounds of an elusive, warmly bustling hearth and home. Oh, how he wanted to be surrounded by children, by cats, by dogs, by laundry and chores, by school projects and report cards, by bruised knees and ‘feelings’, by the first dates and first loves of his first born! Oh, he had wanted it so, so badly—but of course, in the course of time he had given up, knowing that it would or could never come. Whereas in the past his motto (taken from a pop song by the band Trooper—‘I’m here for a good time, not a long time’) had made women come-and-go into-and-out-of his life to the diurnal rhythm of sunset-to-sunrise, now he seemed to have entered a long winter-seeming summer’s night of passively just-being, of emptiness and loneliness, and of all manner of other words, all ending in -esses.

  It hadn’t taken much, in the end, for Dr. Ed to convince Buddy to take part in the Alba clinical trial; Buddy’s personal motivation aside, Buddy was also easily led by those he held in high esteem, and Buddy’s esteem for his old pal Dr. Ed was stratospheric. Buddy had booked an appointment with Nurse Sloggett the very next day; Dr. Ed had instructed her to place Buddy in the ‘third quartile’. And Buddy? He was ‘fan-tastic, just-super, never-happier’. Alba was, he was sure, ‘a for-sure, frigging bloody miracle’. He’d even dropped a few pounds.

  The Reuben sandwich always came with a cup of the daily soup, of course, whichever it happened to be, and while a full bowl was only 95¢ extra, Dr. Ed had never, in the nine years that he had been coming to Buddy’s for lunch, availed himself of this upgrade. Nor had he added a hot or cold beverage for $1.25, a side salad for $1.50, or a home-baked dessert item for $1.75. The reasons for this are straightforward:

  (i.) After his morning coffee(s), it was plain ol’ water the rest of the day for Dr. Ed.

  (ii.) He hated salads of all kinds—well, other than his Irish Catholic mother’s ‘special salad’, the recipe for which was to place a slice or two of tomato on top of a bed of iceberg lettuce, and smother the works in French (or Thousand Island) dressing.

  (iii.) Dr. Ed, whose maternal grandfather was Scottish Presbyterian, had always been keen on thrift and averse to unnecessary self-indulgence.

  But he liked his soup, Dr. Ed did. Boy, did he ever—that is, as much as Dr. Ed liked food, really, at all. Bodily appetites generally just weren’t, he maintained, his thing. He ate sparely, eschewed strong drink, disapproved of his own 2-or-so cup-a-day coffee habit, played no sports, and indulged in marital relations with his wife, when she proved willing, no more than twice per month. He had never smoked. Dr. Ed’s only avowed weakness was the occasional indulgence of his sweet tooth, a regrettable characteristic acquired in childhood, at the knee of his overly-indulgent (and deceitful: the honourably strict pater familias had always been conveniently absent when sweets were distributed) mother.

  Today’s soup was beef barley, one of Dr. Ed’s favourites. As previously stated, Dr. Ed claimed to like the Soup’r Sandwich special at least partly for its inherent variety. But the truth was, the soups never varied all that much. Monday was chicken rice; Tuesday, split pea with ham; Wednesday, beef barley; Thursday (slotted appropriately into the working week, Dr. Ed ‘felt’), comforting french onion; and Friday was fish (for the many Roman Catholics, retirees mostly, who stopped in after the 11:30 mass in the chapel attached to the Cathedral, just up Johnson street, at Clergy) chowder. Although Dr. Ed couldn’t stomach the Church much these days, he still appreciated, to the extent that his attenuated taste buds were capable of appreciating anything, a good fish chowder. A good fish chowder couldn’t be too thick (as New England clam chowder was), t
oo thin (pseudo-British pubs, springing up like purple loosestrife, tended to use powdered milk, margarine instead of butter, and skimp on both the fish and the potatoes), or too weird (forget curried fish chowder, chilli-dilly fish chowder, or fish chowder molé—he’d seen such flagrant blasphemies, and worse, at the chichi kinds of places that his wife liked to frequent on her regular ‘CHARGE IT!’ credit-fuelled excursions to the City). No, a good fish chowder was like Buddy’s fish chowder, milky rather than creamy, but with plenty of body, on account of the copious quantities of haddock and potatoes therein. Simple as pie, Q.E.D.

  The only soup that Dr. Ed did not like was corn chowder, which was Saturday’s. But Dr. Ed never went to Buddy’s on Saturday—never, as in, i.e., ever—and anyway this wasn’t Saturday, or (unfortunately) Friday. Or Thursday (thank G-d, the afternoons of which were devoted to his ‘no-hoper’ patients, mostly residentials from the Psych. Hospital, all of whom were 4th quartile Alba recipients). This was Wednesday. Wednesday, December 8th, 1993. And Wednesday was beef barley, Catholic feast day or not, and beef barley suited Dr. Ed just fine.