Fools Rush In

The surf is charging, 10'+ and clean. It keeps me up all night, and before dawn I wax and rewax my board, waiting for enough sun to light my way down to the beach. A friend joins me on the short walk, helpfully armed with a video camera and ready to capture the swell of the season. Past the first beach, a lovely, light offshore blowing spray off the backs of the waves, low tide incoming slowly, perfect for my favorite break. Macaws squawk and drop almond shells from high above as a troop of colorados chitter and chomp on sweet orange jobo fruit. The final push along a narrow trail, watching out for the sharp spined plants jabbing in from both sides, checking that the rustling in the underbrush is the usual anole or skink hunting bugs and not some more worrisome reptile. A slow scramble over the small tree that fell in the night, careful not to ding the board, my 6'6" Christensen "Charger," lovingly crafted for a day like this.

The path opens to the playa. The waves are as I dreamed, hollow and double overhead. Two guys beat me there, and one of them drops into a monster that shacks him into one of the cleanest tubes I can remember seeing here. It’s like a surf magazine brought to life.

Eyes locked on my target, I surge forward, maybe 100 steps from the water, about to leap from the sandy path to the beach.

At which point, I kick the shit out of my left foot and toes on a hefty rock, half submerged at the mouth of the path.

There’s the usual, one second delay as the pain travels from point of contact to point of consciousness and recognition. The usual doubling up into standing fetal position, shaking lightly, trying to compress my body back into itself, some atavistic way of coping with all those fiery neurons sending their dread signals to my core. Hopping on the good foot, sort of the equivalent of blowing on a burn, some other mechanism to dilute the insoluble.

Finally, looking at it, to see what your mind already knows. The blood, the smashed nails, the joint twisted askew. The middle toe’s phalanx is dislocated, of course, blood bubbling from below the eponychium (cuticle); the big toe’s nail plate is split down to the lunula, and the hyponychium is pulled back like a burst blister. It’s a fucking mess.

For about fifteen minutes I can’t do much more than sob softly to myself. My friend has the decency to say nothing, although in retrospect she should have filmed it for later laughs. I know I have to set the toe, but grabbing it and pulling it is a start and stop affair. Grab, gingerly, but no pull. Deep breath. Do it. There’s a mild hope it will offer some panacea, but it doesn’t. It hurts more, and honestly I don’t know if I did it correctly, but at least it looks straighter than before. I huddle there again, cursing the gods, or at least my clumsy haste. After the initial, unbearable rush, the pain settles into simple agony. I look again at the waves; they’re getting better every second as the tide fills in. My window is now.

I gather up my board and rash guard that I had dropped immediately after impact, check quickly for any further damages and find none, no insult to injury. Must be a sign. Despite initial appearances to the contrary, I announce my intention: I’m paddling out regardless. Again, my friend says nothing, just watches and readies the camera as I limp to the water’s edge, study the horizon for a lull in the sets, and leap into the roiling surf.

It doesn’t feel any better in the water, but the paddle allows me to focus on other things, like the set I hadn’t seen trying to push me into the rocks that come into play anytime the surf is above 6’. There’s that familiar moment when adrenaline treats time as its bitch, and bends it to the task at hand. The body gives you the chance to survive; you just can’t miss a step. Duck diving, holding the board like a lover as the wave tries to tear it away, pushing through to the other side.

Once in the lineup, I show the guys my foot, like a newly acquired excuse for any kookery in the session. Chuckles all around, plus some reservations about me chumming the water with all that blood. Not to worry, I only want to get one or two, and then I’ll go in for some ice and treatment. A solid set comes into view, lighting up the indicator rocks on the point, prompting the usual realignment of the pack, the jockeying for position. I select the third wave, out of deference to the two guys there before me, and also because I rarely take the first waves in a heavy set, given that if I screw up on the drop or anywhere outside of where I’d like to end my ride, I’ll have several more waves waiting to pound me back into the impact zone. No bueno.

In the instant of catching the wave, there’s no pain, no distraction from the mission, which is dead simple: make the drop. Since I’m a regular footed surfer, my right foot is my back foot, and after I negotiate the plummet from crest to trough, I lean on it to make the bottom turn which sets up the ride. The fins carve the surface and set my line. Now the front foot, the wounded one, must work. It can’t. Can’t press on it hard enough to snap the nose back to the desired trajectory, in this case down. I’m pitched, thrown out from the lip and back onto the flats, and then hammered. Down, down, to the bottom, resisting the natural urge to fight my way back up. You just have to chill. Couldn’t move the mountain of water on top anyway, and the water, turbulent and aerated as the wave cycles past, lends no purchase to the fine art of surfacing. Don’t fight, don’t waste energy. Let go, lie limp and be shaken until it releases, like some dog with a chew toy who eventually gets bored and drops it. The pressure will ease eventually, and hopefully you’ll have enough air inside to get back up to the surface, to gulp a fresh breath and locate the board now dragging you shoreward along the wave train (appropriately known as “tombstoning”) into further hardship. Pull it back to you, and reposition quickly for the next wave that, inevitably, is just about to smash on your head.

Even though I know now what will happen, I paddle out to do it again. This time I take a more modest route, not trying to go top to bottom on the wave, but wanting just to outrace the section and then cruise. It’s still a thrill, and allows me to avoid the ignominy of paddling in when there’s a wave to surf instead. It wants to take me to the rocks, and, accepting defeat, I turn to the beach instead of going up and over the back for more punishment. The last gasp of the wave explodes behind me and I drop to my stomach, buoyed by the foam and force to the beach. It’s a tricky exit, a steeply angled slope that has a deep trench right at the shorebreak. The wave reforms and wants to drive you into the sand or suck you back out to sea. Time it right, get tossed onto the actual beach, and you’ve still got problems as ostrich egg sized rocks pin ball around, cracking ankles and shins. Or in this case, my toes again.

I stagger up the beach, my suffering limned in the camera. There will be no more surf today, or the next. Or for a week or so after. I’ll be limping, and the change to my gait will set off a cascade of tendon and muscle ailments from ankle to hip. All over a busted toe or two, breaks that you can’t do a thing about except grin and bear. Hardly a warrior’s injury. Instead, another lesson in patience. Keep the ultimate goal in mind, but keep your eyes on the path.

The Tooth of the Matter

I always thought I had pretty good teeth. As a little kid, I never had cavities. I brushed, flossed, and didn’t eat sweets (I’m all about salt, not sugar). What a shock, then, when I went in one day as a 13 year old and was told I had eight cavities consuming my molars. My dentist, Dr. Otis Beck, Sr. was on his last legs, literally tottering into the room, filling what were probably the last fillings he ever filled with the leading technology of the time, the amalgam filling. I was bummed, but, I also thought it was sort of cool, a bunch of silver in my mouth (I actually thought they were real silver, and thus making my teeth, and me, more valuable), protosuburban gangsta style, and never really thought about them again. I never needed braces, and my wisdom teeth came in fine, so I missed out on those rites of passage with a mixture of pride and jealousy (if you didn’t have braces, they seemed a lot cooler than if you did have them). When I go to a new dentist, they always marvel at their form and my full complement of 32, an unusual sight in a world in which appendixes, adenoids, tonsils, and wisdom teeth are plucked from us at the first sign of trouble.

In my late twenties, I started having some troubling health issues. Specifically, I was twitching. You know the type of twitch you may get under your eye, or on your lip, just a bit of a pulsing sensation? Like that, only everywhere. It would hit random places on my body--behind my knee, on my shoulder, bicep, chin, anywhere. It traveled. And it was visible; I could say, hey, look at my quadricep, and the muscle would be contracting markedly. A nice party trick, but less cool if you can’t control it and don’t know why it’s happening. Eventually, I went to doctors of the Western variety. They poked and prodded, and even stuck me with amplified needles, searching for sounds, and further, for noise between the pulses, which could indicate something truly awful, like MS. After a few weeks of this, they came back with a diagnosis: “Benign Irregular Fasciculation.” Translated, that’s, Harmless Random Twitching. Seriously? I went through all that for them to tell me, in doctor jargon, the same thing I had told them? The salient distinction, of course, was that I didn’t think it was benign. You don’t twitch without a reason, but since it didn’t fit in any of their boxes of illness, it was benign, obviously.

I turned to the East. Dr. Fu Zhang stuck me some more, acupuncture of the large needle variety, with electric diodes attached, to further release my muscles. I can’t say it helped, but he at least offered an idea: my liver was fucked up. “But I’m not drinking,” I said. He nodded and said, basically, that the liver can be fucked up from plenty of things other than drinking. He blamed stress, and told me to think about changing jobs. At the time I was involved with a broker dealer affair, sort of my own boiler room, and it was easily the most stressful thing I’d ever dealt with. Curiously, when I was in Costa Rica, before I started my many projects there, I didn’t twitch. Or, I didn’t twitch as much. So stress seemed a reasonable diagnosis. He suggested I get some teas to help calm me down.

The greatest herb store in NYC was just around the corner from my apartment, Angelica’s Herbs on 9th and 1st Ave (sadly, now gone or relocated, I don’t know which). Angelica herself was this very serious, taciturn woman who doled out her herbs with a modicum of communication and patience for any questions. Just take the tea like I told you, and don’t call me in the morning. Fine. Please give me something to relax. She did, and warned that it might also make me depressed, so she gave me another tea to help with that. A few weeks of this and I was still twitching, although a bit less. I came back to Angelica and she offered to do a health consultation for $50. Now, since Angelica looked like 40 year old, but was actually 107 and wrinkle free, I figured she knew some secrets. Let’s do this.

She took me into the back room and stared into my eyes until I became uncomfortable. Then she looked inside my mouth. That was it. She delivered her diagnosis: “You are not like most of the people who come to see me. You are very strong, great vitality. The only problem is inside your mouth. You have to get the mercury out of your teeth.” Seriously? Mercury? What are you talking about? “Your fillings. They are filled with mercury.” I thanked her politely and left thinking she was a complete kook. Surely my teeth were fine and mercury free.

Luckily, the internet had been invented by then, so I did some searching. Lo and behold, type in “mercury amalgam filling” and everything that jumps up speaks of toxicity. I wasn’t necessarily sold on the conspiracy theories surrounding it, but I did take note of the fact that they’d been banned in Norway and other sensible societies. Maybe there was something to it. As I looked further I could feel my teeth sweating, these little fillings slowly leaching toxic Hg into my body, setting me up for horrible diseases which would make the twitching seem like tickling.

I had to get the bastards out of there.

The dentist she recommended was in some UWS apt that doubled as a medical facility. The first thing Dr. Daniel Sanders did after checking in my mouth and telling me that my fillings were well past their life span, was inform me that the only reason he was removing them was because of that fact, and not because of some alleged mercury concern. In fact, if we didn’t agree on that, he couldn’t do the work. Why? Well, because the ADA would disbar his ass if he went around promulgating such nonsense. I swear he winked when he explained this. Fine, I get it. The ADA doesn’t want actual dentists confirming the conspiracy theorist accusations for fear of massive lawsuits, which pretty much proves the conspiracy. I was pissed, but I agreed. Just get them out. He smiled, and got to work.

Removal is a chore. You have to vacuum up the mercury as you take it out, or else you’ll ingest it and then you’ve got an even bigger problem. This is uncomfortable, to say the least, choking on tubes while a guy takes a hammer and chisel to your mouth. Then, you have to see what’s actually going on under there. In my case, the fissures in the old fillings had allowed bacteria to do its thing, which meant more cavities. Decay all over the place. What I assumed would be a relatively simple affair turned into 3 months of twice weekly appointments, in which he cleaned out the decay, made impressions, and finally installed the new crowns. When he asked what material I wanted, I didn’t hesitate, I went for gold. Sure, porcelain looked more like teeth, but gold lasts damn near forever, 50 years or more. I was never going through this hell again.

Dr. Sanders did good work, or so I thought. He had great jewelers and they carved sweet crowns that almost justified the astronomical price for that summer of pain. I even read a few chapters of his self-published book, a mystery novel centered on the Torah. Let’s just say it wasn’t as good as Chaim Potok’s “The Chosen.” But whatever, I liked his style. He even relented when I went gold with one of my more forward facing molars, giving my smile considerably more of a gangsta lean. Fuck it, I had a hip hop label on the side, why not?

For a time, I enjoyed my fillings. My teeth didn’t hurt anymore (a low grade pain I had gotten used to, apparently), and my twitching was becoming less and less pronounced. Then one day, as I was flossing assiduously to protect my new grill, a filling popped out. Luckily, I didn’t swallow it, and spit it out into my hand. They’re a lot heavier than they look, gleaming on the top side and a dull grey on the bottom. And not much good in your hand.

I called Sanders but he had split town. Gone to Israel, presumably to write more mysteries. His replacement, Dr. Scholnick, was an affable guy, a wine lover and curious about finding some natural cleaning products in the jungles of Costa. He gave my teeth the once over and declared that Sanders had fucked up royally. “Yeah, these are great fillings, but the walls of your teeth are too thin to support them. The fillings don’t have enough purchase. He did inlays and he should have done onlays. This is going to keep happening.” Terrific. Scholnick had designs on doing new work then and there, but I opted for a wait and see approach. Just stick it back in. Oh, and please use some non toxic adhesive. Not that they make that, but, you know, try and find some. He did, and I returned to see him, as predicted, to get the fugitive fillings put back in. Finally, after about 10 visits at $300 a pop, he brought me into the adjacent room to show me his new toy. “This baby makes a crown on the spot. It’s all computers and lasers! It’s great!” He had this little box which could take a die sized piece of porcelain polymer and carve it into a computer matched fitting in about an hour. Price? $1500. Two visits later, I capitulated. Anything to stop this bullshit. Computers verified the topography of my tooth and sent the data to the machine, which churned out my new crown in the promised hour. He popped it in, sanded it to a satisfactory bite tolerance and sent me on my way. It sure seems solid, and you can’t even tell that it’s fake, since he matched the color to my other chompers. Score one for technology.

All well and good. Unfortunately, I’m not in NYC much these days, and I still floss. The other day, I popped out another one. Given that I wasn’t going to be around a US dentist for another few months, I had to go to town, to the one dentist there. Rolando. I know him from the surf, charging it on the bigger days with his tall frame and surprisingly smooth style. I also watched him invite a much bigger guy to the beach after a disagreement. The guy declined. Apparently Rolando is on some kung fu shit and can fuck you up quickly. My kind of dentist.

He did nice work, and by nice I mean he ground the hell out of my teeth and the filling for an hour, cleaning out more decay, before finally deciding the two could get back together again. He agreed the fillings were beautifully useless, but he didn’t have a laser box in the next room, his bed was there instead. He numbed me from my jaw to my chest and sealed me back up with a solid dose of cement. I didn’t bother asking for something non toxic. I’m far less healthy now, and frankly, I just want the shit to stay in. I don’t twitch much anymore. The yoga helps. When I do yoga. When I don’t, and the stress mounts as it always does, a little twitch resurfaces, under my eye or in my forearm. I breathe. I think happy thoughts. I think of the Man Upstairs, and that he’s tapping me lightly, telling me to ease up, calm down, and take a closer look at what I’m into that could be the root of this. I try not to ignore him.

I try to smile.

Victor, Victorious

To give a product my stamp of approval, it needs to have three things: Simplicity of form, efficiency in function, and a kick ass logo. The Victor rat trap embodies these criteria perfectly. It's made from simple materials--a small footprint of light wood with a neat metal loop bent back over a coil, and fixed into place by a thin bar positioned delicately against the bait holder. The lightest touch of the bait, and the trap springs into action with lethal efficacy. In fact, if the Victor has a flaw, it's that setting the trap is a highly treacherous affair, which you're aware of if you've ever had the need to play with one. One false move and you've broken your finger and forgotten all about the rat you were trying to kill. But, I can't dock it points just because it has a steep learning curve; so do motorcycles, guns, and alcohol, among other things.

Form, check. Function, check. Logo? Triple check. Bloody brilliant. A blocky, capital "V" which cleverly incorporates the silhouette of a cute little rat's head inside it; they even put in two little dots for eyes and cut outs for ears so you wouldn't miss it. Naturally, the head looks toward the bottom, or inside, of the letter; the bottom of the V defines the rat's nose, much as, in real life, the rat looks to the inside of the trap, nosing his way toward doom. Finally, the V is, of course, in red, symbolizing the blood of the rat about to be spilled, and the grim raison d'être of this killing machine.

Despite all these wonderful attributes, many folks with vermin issues choose not to go with the Victor. I suspect the degree of difficulty in setting the trap is the main impediment, but then again, some people just don't want to be bothered with the issue at all. They call an exterminator, who usually puts out some poison and then comes back later when the client complains of an awful smell emanating from the walls where the rat, after eating the poison, has gone off to die. If that wasn't bad enough, since vermin live amongst us, eating our food, poison is obviously a poor choice, unless you're a fan of adding toxins to your quarters. I am not. Glue traps are an option, because they're easy to set and your dog (usually) won't eat them and die. They have a huge drawback, however: when you wake up in the morning to find Mr. Rat stuck in place, you still have to kill him. This is not an easy proposition. Rats, at least the ones in your house, are not the big, evil looking guys you see trundling through trash bins and scurrying into city sewers. They're actually pretty damn cute. So now you have to deliver a death blow to something that your kid might want to keep as a pet. No bueno.

Here in the jungle, rats aren't really much of an issue, as the hawks, snakes, and countless other predators keep them in check. But recently, one enterprising little bastard found his way into my kitchen, and availed himself nightly to the mounds of fruits and vegetables we keep on the counters. Find a few delicious avocados, loaves of bread, juicy tomatoes and other glorious foodstuffs nibbled on every morning, and thoughts of murder percolate rapidly. We'd even seen the little guy during the day, when he was bold enough to venture out for brunch, but chasing him down proved impossible. He was basically taunting us. I put up with this for a week or so, and then discovered he was also gnawing on the insides of my cabinets and drawers, doing permanent damage. Time to bring out the big guns.

It took 3 days. He didn't like potato scented with coconut oil as much as anything else in range, and apparently Gouda wasn't on the menu as well. But a little bit of actual coconut? Irresistible.

You can't argue with the results. Beautiful. The loser is the rat, and the victor is us.