Latex Memories
Latex Memories
It’s funny the way brains work. Out for a walk last week, I saw a used condom on the ground. The image triggered my brain to ask a lot of questions. What exactly happened here? Was the discarded condom a celebration, a sexual spike of the football that screamed, “Hey, look what we did (or, more likely, look what I did)? Was the condom an accident, evidence not of someone’s egotistical marking of territory but rather his careless butterfingered fumble? Maybe it was something else entirely—an artistic expression perhaps? Maybe a political protest? Or how about a defiant ‘fuck you,’ both literal and figurative, to the Man?
You want to hope that condom-related activities would leave people feeling more relaxed. Maybe more zen and peaceful. At the very least, a little more respectful of creativity—and a little less likely to toss a used condom over their shoulder like it’s a banana peel in a Vaudeville bit. This surge of self-righteous hopes got my brain wondering: When was the last time I used a condom? I know exactly when it was. I was at home with my kids.
My daughter was 3, my son was 1. It was a rainy day, and they were restless. My daughter started rummaging through closets, cabinets, and drawers. She made her way to my nightstand where she rifled through pens and notebooks, decks of playing cards, guitar picks, coins for magic tricks, ear plugs, a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces, all before finally exhuming a handful of condoms, just recently expired.
“I want this candy,” she said.
To a three-year-old, a wrapped condom must look like a piece of saltwater taffy or a Werther’s Original. But I set her straight.
“That’s not candy,” I said.
“What is it?”
“It’s a balloon.”
“Really?”
“Yup, a big balloon.”
“How big?”
I shrugged. “Magnum.”
So I unwrapped the condoms, blew ‘em up, tied ‘em off, filled our home with buoyant latex, and we made a day of it. And this condom memory got me thinking about my wife’s brain.
A few years after we married, we drove up to San Jose with her parents to visit her sister and her sister’s husband. Not long after we arrived, my wife’s head started pounding. She’s suffered with migraines her entire life so we assumed that was the deal until she passed out and started convulsing. But probably not the way you’re thinking. It wasn’t an epileptic fit, not something intense or violent. Instead, her face, her neck, her shoulders, her back—basically, one side of her upper body—contracted in a sort of slow motion loop. She couldn’t open her eyes, and she couldn’t talk. When we tried to get her to communicate, she could only babble incoherently. We called an ambulance.
Two EMTs showed up, took one look at her, and one of them asked, “What did she take?”
“Three bites of a breakfast burrito,” I said.
“What drugs did she take?” The other one asked.
“She doesn’t take drugs. She never has.”
He looked at me with pity and then tossed a glance at the other EMT that said, “Get a load of this asshole.” It made me wonder if my new bride had a secret life I was unaware of. An entire narrative of possibilities churned in my imagination. My wife, the drugstore cowgirl. I saw her backstage at a Cheech and Chong show, taking bong rips and eating pork rinds by the fistful. I saw her doing rails of blow to amp herself up so that she could compete in an underground fight club that caters to unfulfilled newlywed wives. I saw her hustling traveling salesmen at motels, harvesting their kidneys to sell on the black market so that she could score her next 8 ball of coke. An active imagination is a double-edged needle.
The blare of the siren cut into my dark fantasies. Suddenly, they had my wife in an ambulance on the way to the ER. We’d only been married a couple of years, and all I could think was, Wow, that was quick. Is there a word for a widow in his twenties?
We got to the hospital and the medical professionals did precious little to ease my anxieties. The first doctor we saw looked at my wife’s chart and said, “Hey, she and I have the same birthday.”
“Oh, how charming. You know what, Eddie Haskell, fuck you. Bring us somebody who has some gray hair and a bedside manner that doesn’t make me want to brandish a gun.”
I didn’t say that exactly, but the subtext was clear. He seemed to get it at first: “We’re going to take really great care of her…” But then he followed that with this: “All the interns are so excited she’s here. Her symptoms are straight out of an episode of House.”
Before I could strangle him, he skipped out of the room to talk shop with the rest of the Doogie Howser understudies. My in-laws and I were left in the room, watching my wife contract, her body writhing and twisting, her face wrenching in pain and discomfort.
It didn't take a lot in the way of mental gymnastics to see something like this, to feel the fear and confusion, and draw the following conclusion: demon possession. Clearly, my wife had merged with some unholy entity, some low-ranking imp or demon who wanted to make light of our young marriage.
Well, the joke was on him. Or it. Or whatever. I’ve always said, This marriage is a life sentence. We’re in this bitch until our hearts stop pumping. So bring it, Satan!
I’m good with languages. I can learn Latin or Sumerian or any archaic demon tongue I need to so that I can say the things a husband needs to say to his wife:
I love you.
Does meatloaf sound good for dinner?
Your spinning head is making the neighbors uncomfortable.
I can buy a Vatican-endorsed water filter that removes all the impurities and unholiness from our ice cube maker.
I grew up in a desert. I can sleep with the heater turned up to 90 or whatever eternal damnation-esque climate necessary to make the blasphemous little turd comfortable.
I can pitch a reality show. Becky, Beelzebub, and Me. It’ll play on TLC. We’ll make millions.
Sacrificial goats? How many does he want? I could even get him organic.
It was like my mind was speaking in tongues. Thankfully, it ceased because my wife’s movements had ceased. The doctors had given her an IV-drip with Ativan, which is useful in managing dystonic reactions. Dystonic reactions is the medical term for demon possession.
It felt a little like a miracle. Becky could talk again, she was sore but not in agony, and it didn’t seem like she was gonna, ya know, die. We just had to wait a certain amount of time to ensure that the dystonia didn’t return.
But it did.
We called for the doctor. A new one this time. We had been in the hospital overnight, so a new team had started their shift. The doctor came in and looked at Becky convulsing. We explained that she got quiet again and her body hit the replay button.
“Hmm,” he said. And then nothing else. He just walked out of the room. Of all the things you want to hear a doctor say, “Hmm” is near the bottom of the list, just above “I have bad news” or “You’re gonna need a lot of penicillin for this. And maybe some self-control.”
The doctors in the ER never did figure it out. They sent us home with some clonazepam, which managed the dystonia until we could see a neurologist. The neurologist did figure it out—paroxysmal nonkinesigenic dyskinesia, a rare, inherited neurological disease that causes involuntary muscle movements. Apparently, my wife’s birth control pills were playing fast and loose with her hormones, which interfered with her dopamine receptors and caused the dystonic reactions.
So, doctor’s orders—no more birth control pills. Hence the condoms in the night stand. That led to its own challenges. Sometimes a woman gets possessed not by demons but by celebration and festivity and a couple of glasses of champagne, which leads to getting possessed by pregnancy.
I hate it when someone says, “Everything happens for a reason.” It feels trite and shallow, and it can be dismissive of people’s real pain and loss. Instead, I like to think that everything is chaos, and it’s on us to figure out ways to rise above the pain. Put another way: when life gives you expired condoms, blow those mother fuckers up and have a blast with your kids.
If you want to laugh and smile more, consider these other All Kinds of Funny stories:
A Spicy Alternative to Antidepressants: a time I went toe-to-toe with another form of evil.
The Canyon Zombie and My Beautiful Wife: a time my wife confronted evil rather than being possessed by it.
Making Friends with Agony: a time I welcomed spirit-crushing agony into my life, like, on purpose.
The Finger: a time I witnessed a sort of anti-miracle.
The Greatest Day in the History of the Internet: a time I made my brother-in-law ponder his own existential suffering.
Unrelated, a narrative podcast I wrote and produced with my kids just broke the 25,000 downloads mark. If you like your adventure with heart and humor, you might enjoy it.
Fair warning: As a visitor to Cobbler’s Gulch, there’s a better than even chance that you will encounter the following: pirates, circus folk, roughnecks, dwarves of various sizes and temperaments, dragon slayers, and a menagerie of monsters including goblins, tuxedo-wearing frogs, screaming scarecrows, witches, and many others that have yet to be properly named. If the above list makes you feel uncomfortable, please know there will also be adventure, whimsy, magic, bold acts of derring-do, and lots and lots and lots of goats. So many goats. Consider yourself warned!
If you're still wondering if this show is for you, know this: The story is a celebration of adventure and fantasy, of fiction and storytelling, of gut-busting laughs and the occasional spooky turn. It's about friendship and turning your flaws into a force with which to be reckoned. It's for kids, yes. Or children if you're puttin' on airs. But it's also for those of us in charge of kids or children, particularly those of us who may have forgotten how much adventure is still out there. We of Cobbler's Gulch hope this story helps you remember. We hope you join us. Either way, we offer you this: never let a goblin get your goat.
Here’s a link to the trailer! Available wherever you get your podcasts!
And if you haven’t picked up my dark crime comedy novella Dig…
When I was a kid in Brooklyn, we used to go to the beach in Coney Island. My brother told me all those blobs moving in and out with the waves at the water line were Coney Island Whitefish. I was an adult before I learned they weren’t fish but used condoms.
"Well, that's not a subject for a lady," my grandmother would be saying, and perhaps she is up there in the stars somewhere. However, of course, because you wrote it, I read it. It just brought to mind a condom I found when I was snorkeling in St. Thomas at an upscale resort. There wasn't much to look at in the water off the beautiful shoreline lined with palm trees and sprinkled with Adirondak chairs. It was very shallow water, but I thought I might see some fish at least. The bottom was rather murky, kind of dusty, not what you usually see off the islands in the Caribbean. So I looked for anything that just moved at all. It was low tide with no current. There was nothing...not a soul in the water or under it. Not even a rusty beer can, or you know, a pirate's golden coin. I thought well, I'll give it a few more minutes...and there it was, something moved. I got closer and backed off as I realized it was a used, dusty looking, condom. Ugh!! I kind of gagged into my mouth snorkel. I was filled with, should I run/swim away...or be kind and remove it so no one else fears it like I did? It took me only a few seconds to turn and swim back to shore. Maybe some guy will find it before a turtle chokes on it. I felt violated. I went to the bar, ordered a drink and drove back home to read a book. Thanks, Norm, for a memory I thought should have been erased by now.
P. S. I'm glad your wife is okay.