Chasing a Light Beam – Chapter 1: “Ben Bob”
BEN BOB
Travelers, there is no path, paths are made by walking.
-Antonio Machado
He sat with his left foot propped on an overstuffed leather ottoman, protecting his injured heel, the one the orthopod described as a “severely comminuted calcaneus fracture”. It had not seemed to him that a broken heel was any worse than a broken arm, and the arm he broke on the sixth-grade playground had healed just fine. Shattered heels don’t do that, he’d been told, and he would be disabled. And so he was.
He held a small tape recorder in his right hand, and in his left, a crystal cocktail glass filled with colorless Chopin vodka, accessorized by two green Italian olives stuffed with capers. He thought he preferred the Polish potato vodka to Russian grain-based liquor, but he was realistic enough to know that he probably couldn’t tell which was which in a blind comparison.
Alone in the sun-room of his home, he saw through the floor-to-ceiling windows a thunderstorm approaching from the southwest, an almost daily summer occurrence in Louisiana, and one which thrilled him for reasons he could not explain. The darker and more foreboding the clouds, the more boisterous the thunder, the more prolific the lightning, the greater was his anticipation. Yet strangely, the storm itself would not stir him. It was the approach that set him off.
He was sixty, and from the front, appeared to have a healthy head of brown hair, sprinkled with a few highlights of white. From the rear, though, he had a circular pattern of baldness that would, were it centered on the top, resemble a friar. He wasn’t much overweight, but he was soft. He’d never been very muscular, and his chest in particular had always been underdeveloped, a characteristic that he thought had limited his appeal to girls when he was young, but which seemed less of a drawback once he became a successful surgeon.
His fingers gave no clue of their deftness, nor any hint of where they had been, with a slightly puffy appearance and chronically chewed nails. The backs of his hands had tiny islands of irregular brown markings, the kind his mother called “liver spots”, and in fact, looking at his hands now was like looking at his mother’s hands a quarter century earlier, except that neither of hers ever would have been wrapped around a martini.
It began to rain and he realized that this storm was mainly wet, rather than exciting. He turned his attention back to the recorder.
What was it my father once told me? Well, one of his favorites was, “Columbus took a chance, and look where he is today.” A pithy quote from ol’ Dad seems the right thing to start off the story of a man’s problem. Maybe it’s supposed to give a clue about what kind of man you’re dealing with. Well, I’m Benjamin Robert Boyle, M.D., most often referred to as “Dr. Ben Bob” here in Lafayette, Louisiana, the only place I’ve lived where people use your title, followed by your given name. I’m going to try to explain my problem, not because I think it’s all that important or special, but because it just seems like the right thing to do. Maybe it’s your problem, too, and you don’t even know it. Maybe you’re young enough and smart enough to do something about it. It might not seem to you that there is a problem, even after you hear about the whole thing, but the universe doesn’t care. The universe just does what it does, no matter what you think.
He stopped speaking, glanced at the slowly revolving ceiling fan, and rubbed the emerging black and gray whiskers on the most prominent area of his chin, the area that always seemed to provide some tactile feedback since he had switched from razor to electric shaver. He knew he was under way.
Daddy came from east Tennessee, same as Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general who was “fustest with the mostest men”, and founder of the Ku Klux Klan. I guess nobody should be surprised that when we lived in central Florida, back when there were still small towns in central Florida, Daddy was a member of the KKK. One of my earliest memories is a field several miles outside of town on a summer night, probably in 1949 or ‘50. We were in the “dark green Ford”. Daddy had turned it off the asphalt road onto a rutted farm trail, and stopped it when we reached fifty or so parked cars. Men in white sheets greeted him as “Brother Benjamin”. He called some of them by name, but he didn’t get out. We watched as a big wooden cross, impaled in an empty cornfield, was set ablaze, surrounded by the sheet-clad men. It was like a barbecue with a Halloween theme.
It was funny that we were there, because sometime just prior to that night I had accompanied Daddy on a delivery in his ‘49 Chevy pickup truck with “Ben Boyle’s Service Station” stenciled on each door. Daddy always said “service station”; his hair would rise whenever someone referred to his business as a “filling station” or “gas station”, which I gathered were sub-par enterprises run by jack-legs. He was delivering a car battery from his service station to a black family in the country, and I played with their kids while he drank homemade lemonade with them. Just like I’d say a drugstore cowboy was “all hat and no cattle”, I think Daddy’s KKK thing was all card and no sheet. Don’t get me wrong: he wasn’t for mixing of the races at all. He hated Martin Luther King — he showed me “J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI picture” of MLK taking money from the “Communists” — and his mouth had no trouble forming the n-word. But considering the times, he was a very moral man. He didn’t drink, smoke, or chase women; he just didn’t want his daughter to marry a nigger. Sometimes I think it is merciful that he died suddenly at fifty-six, because rappers and hip-hop would have killed him for sure, but in a much more protracted, painful way.
He paused, brought the cocktail to his lips, and sipped the clear liquid, which a few moments earlier had flowed from a freezer-bound frost-covered half-gallon bottle into the stemmed glass. It was almost tasteless, but charged with sensation. Just after he swallowed, there welled up in the back of his throat a warm, tingling experience that stopped short of burning. It was, he thought, a characteristic of good vodka, requiring no vermouth for smoothness. There would be only one sip for now, as this was a libation that demanded pace, if the task at hand were to be completed. He pushed the rewind button of the machine, listened to the trailing end of his recorded words, and began again.
I really don’t know that much about Daddy, so I’m missing an important chunk of information about myself. I know his family was bad to have heart attacks; both his parents and five of his eleven siblings were dead before I was born. Most of the ones who remained lived in our little town, and I saw them all the time, but I don’t recall being told any of the usual stories about “your daddy did this”, or “your daddy did that”.
If I learned anything from Daddy, it came not so much from what he said as from what he did. He worked. And he lived in a black-and-white, right-and-wrong world. He couldn’t help it. He was the product of a father who sired six girls and six boys, the next to last of whom was Benjamin. Grandpa Buck Boyle, from what I’m told, came by his name honest. He demanded and took responsibility for all family decisions; the “buck” stopped with him. He went to town in the Spring and the Fall to buy clothes and shoes for all twelve kids, and they wore them, no matter the fit or fashion. I can’t swear it’s a fact, but I was told that a bullwhip was sometimes involved in Grandpa Buck’s form of discipline.
A pause after the “bullwhip” thing seemed appropriate, but quickly he began again.
Daddy’s goal was to be his own boss. He really didn’t know that much about cars, but the service station was his opportunity to be in charge of his destiny, and he learned what he needed to know to make it work. His business was his own, but the land and the building belonged to a rich Yankee carpetbagger, and it was sold out from under him when he was fifty-one.
Daddy had no savings and he’d never even thought about a retirement scheme. He had belittled the status of salaried employees his whole adult life, and now, there he was, working for Sears, selling appliances. Daddy had always hated Sears. Local folks worked there, but the headquarters was in Chicago, and Yankees ran it. His cousin had sold washing machines for Sears his whole adult life, and Daddy had always referred to him, if at all, as a fool. Soon after Daddy got a job there, he learned that some “fool” working in the Sears “filling station” version of Daddy’s old job had just retired at age 60. His Sears stock options were worth over a million dollars, back when “The Millionaire” was a weekly TV show, because a million dollars could take care of anything.
Daddy’s first heart attack came at fifty-five. There weren’t any cardiologists in the town; his family doctor ordered walking as part of the rehab. Daddy was not one to waste time, so he took up golf, in spite of a lifelong hatred of the game. He always said that the only real sports were football and baseball, and only sissies played golf. “God” was probably laughing when Daddy’s second heart attack, and his death, came on the fourteenth tee. I inherited the scorecard, along with his Sears golf clubs. He had scribbled “7″ for his score on the par-four thirteenth. There were no pars on the card. Like Grandpa Buck, he was a man frequently in error, but seldom in doubt; he never knew that things are not at all what they seem, and probably wouldn’t have cared.
That era in Ben Bob’s life was long ago, as he had already lived four years longer than Ben, Sr. After the funeral, he had cried uncontrollably. Rather than sorrow for a lost father, it was a selfish lament that he would never hear words of admiration from the donor of half his DNA. It was a sentiment worthy of the consolation of the cocktail, but the glass remained on the table, as there was no emotion left to quell.
Daddy didn’t live long enough to know me as a doctor, but he saw me once as a medical student. It was during the Viet Nam war, and like most of my classmates, I had long hair, spherical John Lennon glasses, flowered shirts, and bell-bottom pants. I was sporting a particularly obnoxious Fu Manchu moustache the day he called to say he was passing through town. He asked me to meet him at a truck stop. When I got there, he looked me over, not having seen me in two years, and said, “Well, Ben Bob, I guess you’re a hippie now.” To him, “hippie” was at the bottom of the food chain. He thought that almost anyone younger than him, with views other than those rooted in east Tennessee culture and honed by World War II, was probably a “hippie”. He had been in the Battle of the Bulge; I heard about it so many times that I thought I had been there, too.
I remember when the cross-Florida barge canal project was abandoned because of the effect it would have on the wild Ocklawaha River. It was cancelled not in small part because of environment-minded protesters. The canal would have passed near his home, and when I visited him, he took me to the site. He looked around and said, “Here’s what the hippies wanted to save.” We were on the edge of a beautiful river marsh full of first-growth cypress trees, eagle nests, flora and fauna of all description, and, in the middle of it all, the Ocklawaha, a Seminole word meaning “winding water”. He spoke. “The hippies said it would hurt the environment, but hell, there ain’t no environment here. It’s a swamp.”
He died shortly after the truck stop encounter; it was the last time I spoke with him. So I guess if I’m going to come up with some semi-quote that my father left with me, I’ll have to make one up. Something like, “There ain’t no environment in a swamp, you hippie.” Daddy wasn’t always right, and after the age of nine, I wasn’t around him all that much to notice. He never even told me the “facts of life”. But he taught me by example to work for what I wanted, and there was plenty of environment in that.
The electronic ring of the telephone interrupted. There should be a name other than “ring” for the high-tech noise, Ben thought, because a true ring was the less impersonal tone made by the telephones that his mother had sold at her dreaded Southern Bell job in the ‘50’s, when Nana was dying and PawPaw was crying. He ignored the sound, since it was from the wire-based phone, and he never answered it. The calls were always from tele-marketers and politicians. Anyone with a valid reason to contact him had the number of his cell phone, which sang a few bars of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” when someone called. He would have rid himself of the wired instrument altogether, but the security company required a landline for monitoring his home. “I’m paying to keep something I don’t want, because without it, I can’t get something that I do want,” he observed to no one. “There’s a lesson in there somewhere.”
He took a sip of the vodka, waiting as it went down for the unmistakable tingle that assured there was more to it than the taste. It was only a small sip, but even that was more than his job had allowed for almost 30 years, when only the off-call times permitted imbibing. Since his injury three years before, he had been able to drink whenever he chose, and he knew that if he did not remain disciplined, he would not finish the task at hand.
He had never really wanted to be a doctor. The antiseptic smells of doctors’ offices and hospitals had always made him queasy, and he had usually fainted when blood was drawn from his arm. What he did want was Bonnie Baker, and her father was a doctor. To impress her, he had decided to become a doctor, too. Sometimes you have to pay for something you don’t want to get something that you do.
