A Sliver of Connection in a Sea of Contempt
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Try staying calm and sanguine about humanity after going through an hour lying prone and exposed while a radiographer conducts an ultrasound complete with color commentary. Maintaining closed eyes to keep from trying to read clues about your health in said technician’s facial expressions is futile when she’s filling the air with gasps and expressions every first-day student should have drilled out of their repertoire when dealing with patients: Lumps! God, that’s really hard! Can’t you feel that? I just don’t even know where to look at all! It’s all messed up in there, like is that around a lymph node??!?Maintaining hope and silence becomes an ever more distant possibility, when it seems your insides are personally disgusting this person and intruding upon her comfort, as if you’d purposely arranged your cellular structure to ruin her day.
I drove home from that horrible encounter in total silence, except for the altered repetition in my head of a line from Charles Bukowski’s “The Crunch”: “we ‘are not good to each other.’” When these sorts of things happen between one woman and another—and happen they do all too frequently in my experience—you’re left with a bruised disbelief at the realization that someone who, because she also has to undergo the same procedures, should understand the fear and utter loneliness they involve, and yet instead of acting with compassion and discretion, assumes the role of the popular girl letting the social outcast know, with no aim other than the hurt, how little she’s worth.
It’s fitting that Bukowski was in my head, then. The poem his line comes from feels like an exception to the rest of his work, much of which boils down to cynical free-verse commentary about booze; belligerence; and the women he’s slept with, considered sleeping with, or dismissed as not up to par or not worth it after all. And it also feels as if the US healthcare system’s approach to women has taken its cue from Bukowski’s assumptions about and approach to the ladies. It’s not only that miscarrying patients are now being left to bleed out in hospital parking lots; that logical extreme is just representative of the continuing dismissal of legitimate concerns and the casual paternalism with which women’s questions and thoughts are often met.1 Silly girl, the physician (male or female doesn’t matter) seems to be thinking, just don’t talk about what you don’t know, and don’t waste my day. At best, we might be interesting subjects for observation, still studied not in the interest of improving our health or reassuring us or making our lives more bearable or comfortable, but as mute specimens with no legitimate ability or desire to respond to or think about what’s being said about them and their bodies. We’re to feel neither one way nor the other, and to simply accept the fact that we’re present as surfaces to host the incontestable speculations of experts. My suspicion may be correct, that technicians and other nonphysicians are passing on to the patient the derision they suffer at the hands of doctors—but again, we’re back to the puzzlement at where empathy and compassion got derailed in there.
There are (at least) three versions of Bukowski’s “The Crunch”; the one included in Love Is a Dog from Hell is more cohesive than the other two, but doesn’t include some of the lines I love from the original version, published that same year, especially “Marx be damned / the sin is not the totality of certain systems.” What I was repeating in my head while driving home, then, was an elision of those lines with one lower down, so that I had “Marx be damned / the sin is not the totality of certain systems … // people are just not good to each other.”2
Why Marx got included in my railing, I think, is because we do need a new healthcare system, along with something like real democratic governance that responds in meaningful ways to the actual needs of people and the earth and on and on… But those systems won’t come about until we recognize the fundamental, unquestionable need to be good to each other. That’s a load of Sesame Street philosophizing, but there’s no other bedrock that would convince anyone of power or importance to cede some profit in order that everyone could eat, or see a doctor, or live in comfort and safety, or get the same quality of education received by oligarchs’ children. With the second (and realistic) best of trying only to enforce decency via professional standards, you get the passive taunts of an underpaid, overworked, and probably underappreciated rad tech waving her wand day in, day out over the bodies of people lucky enough to afford health insurance, and, she may suspect, all sorts of luxuries and opportunities she doesn’t get to enjoy.
***
The Dog from Hell version of Bukowski’s poem ends like this:
there must be a way.
surely there must be a way that we have not yet
thought of.
who put this brain inside of me?
it cries
it demands
it says that there is a chance.
it will not say
“no.”3
For a poet who so often presented himself sneering, and sometimes as an outright bully, it seems completely out of place, this determination not to give up—this recognition that the way humans think about and act toward each other is not the best we can hope for, or what we should hope for; that there can be a future different from the present we inhabit. If someone so invested in celebrating a hardboiled life without ideals can ease up for a moment and lament the unloving nature of our world—well, it’s a slight opening. A very slight one, but still.
The thing is, that demand for a way that ended the second version of “The Crunch” didn’t make it into the third, which left us instead with a child being murdered while the ocean goes about its business as usual. The frail dream of version two might have come to feel too sentimental in the twenty-plus years that passed between it and version three; I’ll wager that disappointment was only one factor at play there. After all, in Dog from Hell’s “462–0614,” Bukowski admitted to answering every phone call he got:
I don’t write out of knowledge.
when the phone rings
I too would like to hear words
that might ease
some of [the anguish that drives people to call him]
that’s why my number’s
listed.”4
Did people stop calling? Did it cease to matter that they did, or none of this and more (or less)? Maybe no one calls my radiographer, or calls with the right motivation. Whatever her reasons—maybe just out of complete, innocent cluelessness—she was not good to me the other day, and the same goes for much of the establishment that provides her with the professional model to follow.
I don’t know yet whether I’m done for a while with this round of anxiety and investigation, but my god, it would be easier to handle if I didn’t feel despised in the process. Until I can afford a level of care that at least puts on a professional and tight-lipped smile, I think I’m going to have to find my goodness outside of anything medical, and try not to let my own defensive sneer take hold.
1. For example, yes, perimenopause is a real thing! And no, you don’t need to conduct a pregnancy test and add $300 for it to the bill, because I know how biology and reproduction work and therefore know that the only life I’m carrying around inside me is my own.↩
2. Find all three versions at “The Crunch” (circa 1977),” Bukowski Database, https://bukowskiforum.com/database/works/the-crunch-3029/. I also appreciate the lines in the second version that I’ve omitted: “Christianity be damned, / the sin is not the killing of a God.” True, but none of that gets included in my repetition to self, maybe because of my nitpicky academicism that says Bukowski skipped a few steps in the original sin-to-atonement trail.↩
3. I’m quoting from the print version; there’s a typo in the online version (“though of” instead of “thought of”). See Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems 1974–1977 (Black Sparrow Press, 1997), 164.↩
4. Bukowski, “462–0614,” in Love Is a Dog from Hell, 112.↩