Life and Art

Stiff Neck

The call is one we’ve been expecting, so when it comes we’re jolted but not surprised. It’s from my wife’s sister, who lives in Arizona. She and her husband are both proudly unvaccinated—predictably enough, since their chief sources of information are Fox News and social media. They’ve believed from the beginning that the coronavirus has been overblown by mainstream media and that doctors are in on it because they somehow get paid more when they record the death of somebody who died in, say, a car accident as having been caused by COVID-19, though how exactly that would work my relatives don’t explain. For them, the vaccines are not about public health so much as personal freedom. My body, my choice, and they’ve made theirs.

And now, the reckoning. For a year and a half they’ve been lucky, but their luck has finally run out. Both have been infected with the virus. On the phone my sister-in-law can’t stop coughing, though she says her own case is relatively mild. Her husband, however, is being put on a ventilator; his chances of survival, according to his doctors, are roughly fifty-fifty. She’s distraught, and the question she wants my wife to help her with isn’t How could we have been so stupid? but rather Why is this happening? and she asks this in all sincerity. The obvious answer is one she can’t or won’t accept—in part, I suspect, because it naturally leads to another question that, even in this excruciating moment, she refuses to entertain: What else have we been wrong about?

I can’t listen. As my wife tries her best to console her sister, I have to leave the room. The events of the last two years—political, cultural, epidemiological—have seriously eroded my ability to sympathize with people who should damn well know better. I ought to be able to summon a more sympathetic response than What on earth did you expect? but often I just can’t. I am fed up and, I admit, no longer my best self. Somehow it has come to this. We are now a nation that has to be specifically warned not to drink bleach. Out of necessity, a feedstore owner in Nevada is refusing to sell ivermectin to anyone who can’t prove they own a horse. Though three different vaccines against the coronavirus have been proven safe and effective for use here in the United States, and though those vaccines are free, people like my wife’s sister and her husband will use up precious oxygen berating their doctors for refusing to treat them as a veterinarian would treat a barnyard animal suffering from a completely unrelated malady. Such lunacy makes common decency difficult to summon and act upon.

When my wife finally hangs up in the next room, I hear her let out a cry of pure exasperation, and for some reason when she does, a memory of my father lurches unbidden from the back of my mind to the front.

When I enter the tavern, he’s seated at the bar, surrounded by his cronies, one of whom notices my entrance and alerts him. Jimmy. Your kid. This is how it’s been since I actually was a kid. After my parents separated, I didn’t see much of him, but every now and then there he’d be, big as life, talking with some guys in front of the pool hall or drinking coffee at the counter of the Palace Diner. Seeing me approach, somebody would nudge him and stage-whisper, Jimmy. Isn’t that your son? But that was then. At the time of this particular memory, I’m probably thirty, a newly minted college professor with a recent PhD, and because my life is elsewhere now, I haven’t seen him in some time. He has an apartment, of course, a place where he goes to crash after last call, where he showers in the morning and again after work before heading to whatever blue-collar dive bar he and his buddies are gracing these days. So this is where I’ve sought him out. On a barstool he is the personification of elegance, and I expect him to execute his signature move: the stool itself will swivel, but so, too, will his head, a beat quicker, allowing him to locate me before the stool and the rest of his body complete their arc. This time, though, something is off. Both stool and man rotate as if welded together.

When he hands me a bottle of the beer he remembers me drinking years earlier, while we worked road construction together, I imitate his hunched, rigid shoulders and say, “So, what’s all this?”

“Nothing,” he assures me. “A stiff neck is all.”

“Since when?” I ask.

He shrugs. “A while.”

I clock the expression on one of his friend’s faces. Fucking Jimmy, it says. What’re you gonna do? So, longer than a while, then.

“It’s no big deal,” he assures me. “I know a guy.”

. . .

Turns out the guy he knows is a horse trainer in nearby Saratoga Springs who has access to dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), an industrial solvent that is easily absorbed into the skin and used, among other things, to reduce inflammation in racehorses. Doctors prescribe medical-grade DMSO to treat bladder inflammation and irritation in humans, as well as joint pain and shingles. But these days DMSO can also be purchased in various strengths in health-food stores. When my father scores his topical-cream version the day after admitting to me that he has a stiff neck, he will not be supervised by a doctor or even, for that matter, the horse trainer. He’s probably been warned not to get it in his eyes if he can help it because, yeah, it’s an industrial solvent. But hey, guess what? The stuff actually works! Almost immediately he can move his neck—not a lot, but still. Okay, there are some side effects. It stinks to high heaven. As advertised, it absorbs right into the skin, and from there it keeps on going. My father can taste it, metallic, on the back of his tongue, and because the taste is even worse than the smell, his appetite is pretty well shot. But so what? He isn’t going to be using it forever, just until the stiff neck goes away, so he considers the trade-off a pretty good one. By the end of the week, he’s his old self, on barstools and off. He considers himself fortunate to know a guy with access to a miracle cure, whereas other people with a stiff neck just have to suffer through it.

You know how this story ends, right? Months later, after a long-deferred trip to the VA hospital, my father will learn that the cause of his stiff neck, which kept returning despite repeated applications of DMSO, is lung cancer. It’s a shame he didn’t come in sooner, he will be told. Too bad he’s wasted precious months treating his lung cancer with horse liniment, which alleviates his discomfort just enough for him to continue working, which even at sixty he still needs to do.

Yes, too bad.

One of the problems with screaming How could you be so stupid? at people who behave stupidly is that we too often think of the question as rhetorical when it isn’t. Though vaccine hesitancy is often seen as purely political, that’s not always the case. It also correlates to lack of health care, which means that when public-health officials urge the unvaccinated to consult their family doctors (on the assumption that they might be more persuasive than government agencies), they’re assuming facts not in evidence. If you can’t afford health insurance, you probably can’t afford a doctor either, and if this is how you’ve been living for the last decade, chances are good that surviving without sound medical advice has become part of your behavioral DNA. Your strategy will be much like my father’s: keep working, save what you can (not much) for the rainy day you know is coming and hope for the best. Maybe you’ll get lucky and know a guy.

So, yes, my father was foolish not to go to a doctor sooner, but it’s not terribly surprising that he didn’t. After he returned from the Second World War, his primary access to health care was the VA hospital, an hour away, in Albany. Road construction in upstate New York was seasonal. Summers, you worked ten-hour days and six-day weeks, so when exactly would you go to the doctor? How would you even know when to schedule an appointment? Winters, when you went on unemployment, you had more time but far less money. You might consult a doctor if you fell seriously ill, but you were unlikely to have a regular physician or get regular checkups. Even if you were injured and in pain, you’d be as likely to turn to somebody on the street to sell you painkillers. (Here again, you’d know a guy.) While unwise, such behavior isn’t stupidity so much as lack of resources, and recognizing this should, at the very least, slow our march to judgment.

Okay, you say, but surely there are some things that anybody should know better than to do. Should people really have to be told not to drink bleach? Shouldn’t you know better than to refuse a free vaccine whose efficacy and safety have been vouched for by infectious-disease experts, and turn instead to a dewormer vouched for by veterinarians? And when you have a stiff neck, shouldn’t you know better than to consult a horse trainer? Maybe, but the irony is that many people who behave foolishly consider themselves to be “in the know,” to be in possession of inside knowledge; access to it, for them, is a point of pride. The lesson that life seemed determined to teach my father on a daily basis was that he didn’t know anyone worth knowing, that he had no strings to pull. Because he had only a high-school education and worked with his hands, America needed him to understand just how unimportant he was in the larger scheme of things. So the possibility that in this particular instance he actually did know somebody worth knowing had to be very rewarding. And to his credit, he didn’t want to hoard his good fortune. Like believers in the kinds of conspiracy theories that my wife’s sister and her husband routinely devour, my father was anxious to spread the word, to make the introduction, to teach others the secret handshake. You know Spring Street, right? The gray duplex at the top of the hill? Knock three times. Tell them Jimmy sent you.

Still, even though you want to spread the word, you don’t tell everybody about your guy. You don’t tell people who drive expensive foreign cars and have summer homes. They have their own guys, legions of them. No, you only tell people like yourself, people you know on sight by how they dress and carry themselves, by where and what they drink, by the calluses on their hands when you shake. The men of your tribe. Which returns me to the day my father admitted to having that stiff neck. There I was, taking him in as he rotated on his barstool, and marveling, as I often did after not seeing him for a while, at how little he and his world changed over time. His buddies all rolling their eyes when he told me not to worry, that he knew a guy. Fucking Jimmy. What’re you gonna do? But he was taking me in, as well, which means he knew—he had to know—from my tweed jacket and button-down oxford shirt and loafers and, yes, from my hands, recently grown soft, that I now belonged to a different tribe altogether.

And yet, how temperamentally alike we were—undaunted by hard work; quick to anger; slow to forgive insults, real or imagined; stubborn beyond belief. We also both delighted in stories, especially lively tales of dimwitted behavior. We both had firsthand, hard-won understanding of foolishness, indeed, idiocy of every stripe. The protagonists of the stories we loved most tended to be guys (some women, too, but mostly guys) who, despite the best of intentions, manage to do the exact wrong thing and at precisely the wrong time, in the kind of setting that guarantees an abundance of witnesses. They aren’t stupid, but you wouldn’t know it to watch them in action, the way they ignore pertinent evidence, miscalculate the odds of success, head due south and then double down when things start—predictably, though they never predict it—to go terribly wrong. What endears these guys to us, I’ve always believed, is that we recognize ourselves in their folly. As a novelist, I have just one requirement: I have to be able to imagine myself doing what my characters do, no matter how foolish, because if I would never do that, then they probably wouldn’t, either.

By way of illustration, here’s a fun fact. Two decades after my father scored his horse liniment, DMSO again appeared on my radar. One Sunday morning in the men’s locker room after a racquetball match, I noticed that my opponent, fresh from the shower, was rubbing a clear liquid onto the shoulder he’d injured a month earlier. The stuff stank to high heaven. “What is that?” I asked, and when he handed me the plastic tube, there it was in big red letters: DMSO. It’s great for any kind of muscle inflammation, my friend assured me. His only reservation was that you could taste it on the back of your tongue.

Later that same year, when I tore my rotator cuff, I visited the store he told me about, the only one around, he said, that sold this stuff. In fact, they stocked not just the clear-liquid DMSO but also a cream that claimed to be “rose scented.” “Lord,” my wife said when I emerged from the shower. “What is that god-awful smell?” My shoulder immediately felt better, though, and that evening, to celebrate, I cooked one of our favorite meals. Unfortunately, the metallic taste on the back of my tongue kind of ruined it.

If you Google DMSO, among the first things you’ll see is a warning that the product should not be used to treat cancer. Apparently, given its popularity, the warning is necessary.