Nonfiction
I labored to decipher the pidgin English until I at last understood that the King of Nepal wanted me, Dr. Itzhak Kronzon of the Bronx Municipal Hospital, to come to his royal court.
I am back with the ‘who’ of me, the self I left behind through the seasons of my years. The ultimate prize is this reconciliation with the original, unvarnished self.
There is only illness, and there is no way to make that sexy. After several years as a medical device wearer, I know.
Mental anguish can be as unruly as any terminal illness. It can, unfortunately, orchestrate its own end.
For many years I refused to be an exile, claiming that I am an immigrant, someone who chose to move to a new country voluntarily.
Georges, the owner of St. Gabriel’s Funeral Enterprise, is the only fat man in Lascahobas.
‘That’s just how he is, our dear doctor,’ people would say, and by this would they meant that it was this very energy that had sent him to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin as a member of Iceland’s water polo team, and later to escape from occupied Denmark on a leaky old fishing boat…
It didn’t feel wrong because I chose to do it. When I was home from university, I continued in this way, carrying a sharpened coal shovel and leather gloves, or my mother’s .22 Ruger handgun.
New Orleans—my home from the start. I fit better on streets that sag, where live oaks lay low, where rain falls in sheets all afternoon