His mother’s condition got worse. His oldest brother called him from the hospital and said “You better get here right away.” He went into the principal’s office and said “I have to leave immediately — could you send someone to cover for me?” “I’ve no one,” the principal said. “Stay for another period. Then Diamant will be free and he can cover for you.” “I can’t stay another two minutes. My mother’s dying — that’s what that emergency call was about.” “You have to stay. I have no one to cover. We had ten regulars call in absent today and could only get four substitutes.” “You cover for me.” “Me? I don’t cover for teachers no matter what the emergency. I run this school. I have to look after ten things at once.” “Then the girl I appointed to take over my lesson while I’m in here will cover for me.” “I’ll have you fired,” the principal said. “You’re crazy,” Don said and went back to his room, said to the class: “Listen, you’re to be on your best behavior for the rest of the period. My mother’s dying and I have to see her in the hospital and the principal can’t get anyone to take over the class. Please don’t be rowdy or do anything to embarrass me or yourselves. Please, if I ever asked for anything, it’s to be better behaved than you ever were in my class, do you understand? Now finish the assignment and then do schoolwork, homework or sit quietly and read or just think. But damnit, be considerate and mature,” and he left the room. He wasn’t three steps past the door when he heard something smash against his blackboard and then a window break and the class cheer.
When he was a boy his father insisted that all his children kiss him when he got home from work and kiss him when they went to sleep and kiss him first thing when they saw him in the morning. “I kissed my father every day of my life till the day he died and I expect the same treatment from my kids.”
His sister one night scratched his face and pulled his hair and ripped the shirt off his back because she said each of the boys in the family got more things bought for them than the girl.
He met his wife at a party on New Year’s Eve. She was sitting on a couch, looked sick. He sat down next to her and said “Excuse me, but you don’t look well, is there anything I can do?” She said “You can get me two aspirins if you don’t mind,” and he brought them back with a glass of water. She said “That was very nice of you. I didn’t ask for water — not because I forgot — I like to swallow my aspirins whole — but you thought of it for me. If it wouldn’t also be a bother, and because I trust you now and think you have a good pragmatic head for such things, could you walk me to the bathroom and hold my waist from behind while I throw up? I usually do it so violently that I throw my shoulders out of joint.”
His father was a pharmacist and everyone called him Doc. Don had three best friends over the years whose fathers were pharmacists and all their acquaintances and customers called them Doc. Don’s father was the only one of the four who brought most of his pharmaceutical samples home, leaving very little closet space for anyone else in the apartment. After he died, Don’s mother asked Don to sort the good samples from the bad, but he just put them all into about a dozen big plastic garbage bags and threw them out.
He met a woman in England when he was in college, corresponded with her during the school year and the following summer hitchhiked with her from her home in South Africa to Cairo. It took them four months. They were in love when they started out and hated each other by the time they reached the Sudan. He saw her off at the Cairo airport and her next to last words to him were “What did I ever see in you I wonder?” His last words to her were “If we’d time I’d remind you, but as for me I used to love the way you looked, acted and talked and that you answered and so intelligently and lengthily a letter of mine every other week and that you thought there was nothing better in life for you to do than become a hospital nurse and that you once sent me a nine by twelve inch photo of yourself in a skimpy swimsuit and that you hailed from Estcourt, Natal, and summered when I wintered and that when we lived in our native countries we never saw the same stars.” “Is that true about the stars I wonder?” and she went up the ramp to the plane. He was broke and the American embassy wouldn’t loan him money so he called his folks collect for the fare home.
His sister was Gretel to his Hansel in a summer camp play. He wanted a girl closer in age to him to play the part but the drama counselor said their being brother and sister would make the play more realistic and endearing to the audience. The camp photographer took pictures of the performance and till his sister died his mother loved to bring them out and show them to the women friends he’d ask over for dinner or drinks.
He was playing ring-a-levio one night on his block. A girl named Mary, who lived on the next block, was hiding in the same brownstone walkway with him. They were kneeling close together, their shoulders and arms touched. She had on a short skirt and when she looked over the walkway wall to see if the person who was “it” was anywhere near them, he looked up between her legs, hoping to see her vagina or maybe some hair if she had any there yet but only saw the ends of her buttocks sticking out of her panties. Later, as a prisoner, it seemed his underpants were wet. He felt down inside them, thinking he might have made. His penis and the pants around it were sticky. He got scared for a second, then remembered the dirty part of a book he’d recently read and something some boy had said, and thought Holy Christ, for the first time in my life I’ve spermed.
“Touch me again and I’ll call the cops,” a woman friend said to him. She got dressed, left his apartment and he never spoke to her after that till he bumped into her in a museum garden a few years later. She said hello and smiled, then must have remembered what he did that night and walked past him into the museum. He started after her, wanted to ask what it was he did that night — he’d completely forgotten or had blocked it out — so he could apologize again or for the first time. “I don’t care how bad it was, I want to know,” he wanted to say, but the museum was crowded and he couldn’t find her. That evening he wanted to call her and apologize for whatever he’d done that time years ago, but her name wasn’t in the phonebook. He knew a couple of people who might know her or how to find her, but then thought it’s all right, you can have a few harmless enemies in this world and still sleep well and live through a normal day every day. In time you’ll straighten it out with her, if it was that important.
For the last two months, when he brushed his hair on the right side, his head hurt. He went to a doctor, something he hadn’t done in about a dozen years, and pointed to the spot. The doctor felt it, looked into his eyes with a penlight, took his blood pressure and said “I know you must be worried it’s brain cancer or some form of brain damage or anything resembling those, but that you’re definitely on your way out of this beautiful world, but it’s not so. You’re healthier than you almost should be for your age; when you’re approaching fifty you should begin conducting yourself as if you are. You must have hit your head hard two months back and it hasn’t healed fully.” He was relieved when he left her office, didn’t feel any pain the next day when he brushed his hair or pressed down on that spot, but has felt the same pain and even worse every day since for the last two weeks. He was worried about it again but more worried what a neurologist might do to try to find the reason behind the pain, so for the time being he’d avoid brushing that part of his head and pretend to believe the pain would ultimately go away.