A friend is in town for medical tests. We had a pasta lunch in the complex where he’s being probed and scanned. He said he hadn’t seen so many doctors since he was quarantined for tuberculosis as a child in the 1950s.
I said, “Sounds terrible.”
“It was wonderful,” he said. “You can’t imagine.”
But I could, even though TB had been vanquished by the time I was a child. The week before the start of fifth grade I developed a cough so severe my mother took me to the doctor. He diagnosed pneumonia and had me admitted to the hospital. It was nothing, my parents assured me. But it didn’t seem like nothing. A priest came every morning and gave me communion. The nurses gave me shots in the bum, an indignity that I had until then dismissed as an urban myth. I watched the whole Munich Olympics through the plastic walls of an oxygen tent.
When I went into the hospital, everyone thought of me as a robust, athletic kid. When I got out, I was the 10-year-old Me-Decade equivalent of a Proustian consumptive. I still couldn’t breathe. To be sure, breathing in our house was a challenge in the best of circumstances. My parents chain-smoked—Dutch Masters Presidents for Dad, Viceroys for Mom. Since middle-class families seldom went out in those days, there was no chance for me to go anyplace where the air might have been purer—a strip joint, perhaps, or a pool hall.
Tests had shown asthma and allergies to pretty much everything, but especially cats and dust. We had a cat named Bruce*. Our house was one of those 1960s split-level colonials—with dust-catching wall-to-wall carpeting and cheap baseboard heating registers that blew a simoom of lip-blistering, eye-irritating, scurf-raising air from room to room. Since my parents were not going to panic or resort to desperate measures—like getting rid of Bruce, say, or not smoking in my bedroom—we came up with stopgaps. A humidifier stood next to my bed. It ran at such a high setting that algae grew on the ceiling. Nearby was a pint-sized plastic tub of Vicks VapoRub, a kind of mentholated napalm which could be scooped into the machine a tablespoon at a time, sweetening the air, or smeared directly onto one’s chest and neck, after which it could be deeply inhaled out of one’s cupped palms. I had piles of cough drops and gums in fruit and herb flavors, and bottles of red expectorants and pink and green elixirs. What I didn’t have was the breath to go to school for more than a couple of days at a time.
That was also the year my 65-year-old grandfather retired from the leather tannery where he had worked since the Harding administration. He took care of me. Half the time he would tell me stories. Half the time we would watch Three Stooges reruns on Channel 38, during which I could get through a box of cinnamon-frosted Pop-Tarts. (“He doesn’t appear to be wasting away,” one of my mother’s crueler friends remarked.) I went through every single sports biography in the public library, from Robert B. Jackson’s Thirty-one and Six: The Story of Denny McLain to Tom Cohen’s Roger Crozier: Daredevil Goalie—a decade-old account of the Detroit Red Wings great’s struggle with ulcers.
This may sound like a sad and solitary exile from the education I ought to have been getting. It wasn’t. There was not, at your typical American suburban public grammar school in the 1970s, much of an education to be had. Mine was an accidental kind of home schooling, and it vaulted me ahead of my friends, for better and for worse. Reading prose written by adults, even if they were only hockey reporters, interrogating my self-taught but extremely well-read and patient grandfather about the politics and culture of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s—this was so much more advanced, intellectually, than what teachers were allowing my 10-year-old friends to do that, by the time I stopped being sick, a couple of years later, the library had become indispensable. Solitude had made me a different person.
Not without some social cost. Kids were tacking towards adulthood and re-sorting themselves into cliques along lines I was not able to understand. Fifth grade was the year all my friends mastered basketball, a sport from which I’ve never been able to draw the slightest enjoyment, as either a player or spectator. By the following year, when my friends started having dance parties with girls, I had been stuck in a different class and was not there to join them. I never did learn to do the Bump. It may have been a price worth paying.
* A pseudonym, of course. Given the way security questions are used in e-commerce, there is today no piece of information more private than the Name of Your First Pet.
