Note: I am coming up fast on surgery to remove my pesky uterus. This surgery will occur nearly three years to the day of my last surgery. Here is the tale of that time:

I’m lying beside Carol in her big bed in her historic house in Old Town, Chicago. I’m convinced that Carol is one of Marge Simpson’s missing sisters. She’s flat on her back, chain-smoking, alternately offering me her thoughts on Legally Blonde, which we are watching, and telling me various sexual acts her boyfriend likes to perform on her.

“But you know,” she says in a voice that suggests she had her first cigarette at age six, “I don’t need a man to have an orgasm.” She pauses. “I don’t need a vibrator either. I can just think about it and it happens. It’s a Scorpio thing.”

The next night, I climb into Carol’s bed again. This time we watch Legally Blonde II. She’s chain-smoking, telling me about her boyfriend’s other girlfriend, the angry Japanese millionairess. This is our fourth night together and any pretense of formality is gone. Carol wears a t-shirt and her big girl underpants and nothing else. At some point, I glance over and, though I cannot figure out how she managed this feat, I swear that the underpants are suddenly missing and that Carol is clutching the remote between her thighs.

I tell myself no, this can’t be right. It must be the drugs I’ve taken. I’m hallucinating. I’m paranoid. This isn’t happening. I cannot really be here in this room with this woman on the cusp of her sixty-third birthday, listening to her prattle gravelly about her libido gone wild.

Less than a week before arriving at Carol’s so-called bed and breakfast, I stood in line at Quack’s in Hyde Park, asking the guy behind the glass case if I might purchase an empty cake box.

“What do you need the box for?” he asks, eyeing me suspiciously.

I gesture to the periwinkle cane in my left hand and tell him the short version of the story. “There’s a surgeon in Chicago who’s going to fix my foot in exchange for a chocolate cake,” I say. “I need something to carry it in.”

The guy says it’ll cost one dollar. Then, as he heads to the back to retrieve the box, he snorts, “That’s never going to happen again in your lifetime,” as if it makes perfect sense that it’s happening to me a first time.

My foot had been killing me for three years. It started in the summer of 2002. Because I could not afford insurance and because I come from a long line of blue-collar martyrs suspicious of doctors, I ignored the pain for a year and a half. The pain intensified.

Based on my limited income, I obtain a card from the city that entitles me to discount services at the poor people clinic. At the clinic, they want an x-ray but don’t have an x-ray machine. They send me to Brack ER.

The ER doctor looks at my foot. I tell him I think it’s fractured. He shakes his head like I’m just another stupid googler with too many big ideas. “Gout,” he pronounces, authoritatively.

wikipedia

At home I google gout, which turns out to be an affliction mostly suffered by fat middle-aged men who regularly snack on livers and kidneys and who guzzle red wine by the bottle. Think Falstaff. I’ve been sober for five years at this point, didn’t drink wine to begin with, and haven’t had red meat in twenty-two years. I am the opposite of the gout archetype.

“Gout,” concurs the nurse practitioner when I returned to the clinic for a follow up. She tells me cherries alleviate gout pain. Over the course of the summer I will eat so many cherries that I will perceive lessened pain in my foot, likely because I am so busy running off to shit every five minutes that I have little time to contemplate my foot.

USDA

But the gout tests they run come back negative. “Joint pain,” announces the nurse practitioner, changing her tune. Joint pain -- as if my dogs couldn’t have told me this. I limp away. The pain increases.

Late spring 2005, my teenage son accidentally runs over my foot with a shopping cart. The foot swells larger still and turns black. I will have to see a specialist, insurance or not.

The podiatrist looks at the x-ray and nods his head. “Hallux ridigus,” he says, sounding like an email heading for cheap Viagra. He outlines options—maybe he can put in a plate, maybe he can fuse the bones, maybe he can shave off some of the prominent bone spur.

not spike’s foot but close

Or maybe he can do nothing. He says we’re looking at around six thousand bucks, way beyond my reach. The doctor gives me some inserts for my shoes. I go straight to the Birkenstock store to find something with adjustable straps to accommodate the inserts. Like a little kid excited at the prospect of sharing bad news, part of me is secretly elated at having an Officially Diagnosed Affliction. I repeatedly drop hints that a tragedy has befallen me, baiting the teen salesgirl to ask me what’s wrong so I might heap upon her some cathartic tale of foot woe as if I am a Dosteovsky character with a major secret to unload.

Teen Salesgirl is slow to take the bait. I harangue her until, at last, exasperated, she unenthusiastically asks, “What’s wrong with your foot?”

I open my mouth to speak but am pre-empted by the jingle of the bell on the glass door as another customer pushes in. She is my age, tan, fit, grinning, decked in matching running clothes. She has precisely one leg. The other leg is not a smooth, nude, Barbie-esque prosthetic. It is one of those Terminator titanium deals, cool gray metal stick leg. This woman isn’t fucking around. She probably runs marathons every other day.

I look at the salesgirl. I look at the stick leg. I mutter, “Nothing.” I leave. Why must these people steal my thunder?

At home I take lavender baths and cry and sit on the toilet and hold my foot and thank it for all the years of good service. I buy a cane and procure a handicapped parking tag.

Fast forward through a series of bizarre events culminating in a miracle: a friend of some friends, a dashing Ukrainian, practices podiatry in the City of Wind. He will operate for free if I will pay for his assistant and some other minor expenses. My friend, Chris, throws a Foot the Bill party to cover these costs.

To save money, I surf around for B&B’s and spot Carol’s listing. I call her. "Eighty bucks a night," she says. "Deal," I say.

I arrange for my friend, Michael, to come up from St. Louis to help me through surgery and recovery. “How do you two know each other?” Carol rasps, blowing smoke in our direction as we sit in her kitchen.

“Well, actually we have a son together,” I explain.

“Oh,” she barks. “Then you won’t mind sleeping together.”

We haven’t slept together in a dozen years and, even if we were going to start again—which we aren’t—Carol’s house is hardly the setting for a romantic reunion. So she shows Michael to the so-called loft – a casket sized crawl space at the top of a ladder. I receive the one and only guest room—her long gone grown son’s bedroom, still filled with the toys and trophies of his youth.

I have local anesthesia, rather than general, to save more money but the rope I envisioned when I heard them mention needing to use a tourniquet turns out to be a high tech blood pressure cuff type thing. The doctor’s assistant, a Ukrainian version of Uncle Fester, puts an IV in my arm and drips something in to twilight me long enough to not feel the Eiffel Tower sized needle they shove in my foot to numb it. I come to to the sound of a saw, but am loopy enough to believe this a pleasant noise, a honeybee buzzing about a flower, not a razor sharp instrument slicing into my flesh.

Back at Carol’s, Michael is my human shield for a couple of days while I adjust to the pain. Then his brother Danny, an actor with a recurring role in a Fox show called Prison Break, comes by to whisk him off to the train station. Carol likes this—a near-celebrity in her own home.

Alone with Carol and her smoke, generic Vicodin amassing in my veins, I begin to have less fun. With Michael gone, she commences the girl talk, the ongoing saga of her hungry horny man, her magical powers of self-stimulation.

monks’ bones

I am now what you will become echoes in my mind between her hoarse coughed lines. I quit the pain pills. I pack my bags. Another friend drives up from St. Louis and rescues me, taking me to stay with her aunt, who happens to be a nun. I hobble into the convent, haven of celibacy and self-control. I exhale.

Spike Gillespie insists that you come to Burlesque the Vote at Antone’s on Friday, October 3. She blogs regularly for LaunchPad Coworking and at www.spikeg.com. She is also head mistress for the Dick Monologues. You can email her at spike@spikeg.com to reserve seats for the November12th show.