White Tiger on Snow Mountain (20 page)

Of course I didn’t walk into the doctor, a female doctor no less, and complain of Theoretical Impotence or Penile Impudence. I asked for help quitting smoking. I had gotten Dr. Chang’s number from a friend who claimed she cured her psoriasis with acupuncture and herbs. Her office was on Canal Street above a bank, on a floor with two dentists. The waiting room was packed with elders and a few matronly women who had brought along snacks, cut carrots, or goldfish crackers in baggies. One had a small boy in tow. I was the sole non-Asian.

The doctor herself was in her early fifties. She had some gray in her black bob and wore glasses and a white lab coat. She said that she could help me with the smoking, but only if I was truly ready to quit. I assured her that I was. I was afraid now for my health. I had symptoms. Such as?

“In bed,” I managed to stammer. “You know.”

She didn’t. “Problems sleeping?” she asked me in fluent but accented English.

“No. Well. Yes. Sure, I always have that. But I meant you know, down there.” I nodded discreetly at my own lower half as if it might overhear us.

“Problems with erections? With your girlfriend?”

“Well, I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“So then no problem, right?” She smiled.

“Ha, yes, but . . .” I lamely explained my “symptoms,” the compulsive finger snapping, the impudence. She gave me a look that said, “Who let this idiot in here?” and proceeded with a thorough exam. She took blood and urine. She checked my heart and blood pressure. She got a pointy needle thing and poked my numb fingers, checking my nerves and reflexes. She boinged my knees with a mallet. A week later I came back to hear the troubling news: There was nothing wrong with me.

“So then I just have to live like this? Forever?”

She frowned, dubiously, but took pity on me. She peered into my eyes, first one, then the other. She considered my tongue. Then she took my pulse, checking each wrist separately.

“Are you sensitive to cold?” she asked.

“Yes. That’s right.” Her office was tropical and I had a sweater on, but I felt a sudden chill.

“Frequent urination? Getting up often at night?”

“Yes!” I was thrilled. This was true. I had been urinating often, getting up several times a night, even planning my daily errands so that I’d be sure to pass a bathroom. One might say, technically, that I pretty much always had to urinate. I actually had to go right then and there in her office; I just chose not to.

“I urinate constantly,” I told her. I hadn’t thought to mention it, naively blaming it on the gallons of coffee I guzzled, because it hadn’t occurred to me that it could be a symptom of anything, that “peeing a lot, being chilly, and snapping your fingers while being less lascivious than usual” could add up to something real—but apparently it did, in China.

“Kidneys,” she decided.

“Kidneys?” Frightened, I clutched my stomach, then remembered my kidneys were in back. “That’s serious. Something’s wrong with my kidneys?” I saw myself on dialysis, shuffling through life in paper slippers.

“No.” she smiled. “Don’t worry. Only Chinese kidney.”

“Chinese kidney,” I repeated, relieved. “That’s different. I don’t need my Chinese kidney. Just cut it out.”

We both had a good laugh at this. “In Chinese medicine,” she told me, “we have something called chi, which is like an energy in the body.”

“It’s like a spiritual life force,” I suggested.

She looked at me doubtfully, then continued. “This chi has two aspects, yin and yang, which we are always trying to bring into balance. Your chi is very out of balance. Maybe from smoking a long time and stress. And other factors maybe?”

I nodded. Other factors. Maybe.

“And now I think quitting smoking also makes you out of balance even more. Takes a long time to make this balance!”

I shrugged sadly. A long time.

She showed me a poster, which looked like a chart of the night sky blanketing the outline of a sleeping man. It traced the meridians of power that crossed the human body, clustered galaxies and orbiting spheres, terminating in points where the
acupuncture needles would hit like stars of pain. These lines, she said, were associated with different organs. My particular constellation of symptoms placed me under the sign of the kidney.

It was both comforting and disturbing to learn that this odd jumble of “symptoms” actually made sense, became legible as it were, when read through another language, the map that a different culture laid over the flesh to explain our experience to ourselves. To me, and to Western civilization as a whole, my story was meaningless gibberish, neurotic noise. But my body whispered in Chinese to Dr. Chang.

She wrote me a prescription for herbs and then had a talk with her assistant, Amy, a stout, middle-aged lady with thick forearms, thick glasses, and a part in her short hair. She led me into another room with massage tables sectored off by sheets hanging from shower rods. Amy spoke almost no English, but using signs and brief exhortations (“All off!”), she had me strip to my underwear and lie on my back. The table was edged into a corner, and I had to turn on a slight angle to fit. “You too tall”—she laughed—although for a Caucasian man I’m average. “Too tall!” She lightly slapped my feet. I giggled. Then she spread a little towel over me and patted my head.

“You so weak,” she clucked. “I have to help you stronger.”

Her first step was to stick needles in my face. One in the forehead, one in each cheek, and one into the cup of each ear. It didn’t hurt exactly. There was a small prick as she worked, quickly and expertly, first poking lightly to find the spot, then flicking the head of the needle with a finger to drive it in. The hardest part was just lying there and thinking: She’s sticking
needles in my face. I shut my eyes and did what I vaguely remembered as yoga breathing, which seemed to help, though of course I knew that yoga wasn’t Chinese. She put more needles in my hands, right in the meat between the thumb and fore-finger, in my forearms, my shins, and especially my feet, a fistful sprouting among my toes. You couldn’t really predict what would hurt. The left hand stung more than the face, but the right hand I didn’t even notice. Then, when she stuck my thigh, I felt a wild surge of pain, but not where the needle had entered. I felt it on the bottom of my foot, in the curve of the sole. Lightning shot up my leg, like someone had jerked an invisible wire running through my body. I twitched uncontrollably and hissed like a severed snake. Amy laughed good-naturedly and patted my head again.

“Sensitive,” she chanted in a teasing lilt.

“What is that point for?” I asked through gritted teeth.

She smiled. “That kidaney.”

I was now pinned to the table like a butterfly, with a dozen needles standing in my skin, but we weren’t done yet, not by a long shot. Amy got out some alligator clips attached to electrical wires and started clamping them to the needles. I felt like a prisoner about to be tortured. I was desperate to confess, but to what? She turned a knob and began ticking up the current.

“Too strong?” she asked. “Is too much?”

How much electricity in the face is too much, really? I’d never pondered the question. It came in pulses, a bristling tingle like heat rash breaking out. When it hit blister stage, I said, “Too strong!” With another chuckle—“you so sensitive”—she dialed it back to bearable, then aimed a heat lamp at me, tucked
in my towel, and left me there, little needles jumping in my skin, flesh flexing of its own accord. If I opened an eye, I could see a silver pin trembling in my cheek. “Relax,” she ordered, and drew the curtain.

Weirdly enough, I did relax. One of those spikes must have fired off some endorphins because I drifted right to sleep. It was a sleep that spread over me like a light blanket, very dark but very thin, stirred by the pulse of the needles and by the staticky Chinese news radio playing in the next room. The current came in waves, building and then receding. It was immensely pleasurable in that way a nap can sometimes be, when the constant little wakings, instead of disturbing, return us to the joy of sinking back to sleep. For a few minutes I forgot where I was. Then one of my face needles popped out.

It must have been in too lightly because it just jumped loose with its wire attached. I could see it from the corner of my eye, hopping around my chin. But I was afraid to move or even lift a hand since my other needles were still buzzing away.

“Hello?” I called softly. “Help?”

All I could see was the curtain, stirring with the heat vent above. I could hear the other patients in their tents, moaning and snoring. Beyond that, the radio and a burble of voices in the waiting room. I searched my mind for its tiny bits of Mandarin.

“
Ni hao ma!
” I called. And louder, “
Ni hao ma!
”

Although it’s used as a greeting, like “bonjour” or “shalom,” the phrase actually means “how are you,” and I was well aware of the absurdity of a white guy lying there and yelling, in a panicked voice: “How are you! How! Are! You!”

I heard some giggles from my neighbors, who added their own calls in rapid Chinese, and a minute later Amy came in.

“The needle came out,” I told her. She laughed and put it back, giving it a little twist that stung.

“You talk Chinese!” she said.

“Just a little.” I recalled the couple of other words I’d learned. “
Bing-lang!
” This was the weird betel nut stuff old Asian guys chewed and spit in purple wads on the ground. I’d tried it once, as a tobacco substitute. She laughed, delighted.

“
Xia xia,
” I said, trying to pronounce the lovely word right, swallowing the soft
shhh,
as she adjusted my current: “Thank you.”

I started going twice a week. Amy gave me acupuncture front and back and usually a great massage. Dr. Chang attached little seeds to my inner ears, like discreet piercings I was supposed to press when I wanted to smoke. I also went to the herb store and showed them what she wrote. Perhaps it said, “Let’s screw with this fool’s head,” because what they gave me looked like a sack of garden trimmings: sticks, fungus, berries, and dried brown leaves that I had to boil into a foul tea. But sure enough, when I showed the note to the old guy behind the counter, he took the cigarette from his lip and said the magic word, “Kidneys.” Smiling wide, he pronounced the bag of scraps he sold me as “Good for man.” He made a virile fist around his burning cigarette and waved it in my face. “Very good for man!”

Phase Two in my stop-smoking program was running. For years, I’d been urged to take up some exercise, but the thought of a gym triggered traumatic wet-towel-snapping locker-room
flashbacks and visions of myself crushed in some mythological torture machine: The Tantalus Maximus. The Sisyphus 5000. The Abdominator. I was too poor and angry for yoga in Manhattan. Running seemed, if not easy, at least simple: If you could walk at all quickly, I figured, you could run. Also it was free. When I’d tried before, however, I had been smoking. Not while I actually ran, perhaps, but I smoked on the way there and back, and ran only in short bursts, as if chasing a bus, passing everyone, then stopping to wheeze and choke a block later. The real joggers eyed me curiously as I tore by, then fell behind, gasping. All of which led me, when I finally quit, to make an amazing discovery: Smoking is actually really fucking bad for your lungs. Or at least for mine, because in a few weeks I had doubled the distance I could run.

I ran two miles, then four, then six, up and down the waterfront. I didn’t go very fast, and at my rate it would be ten years before I could attempt a marathon, but I had caught the habit and I kept going, even as the winter days grew cold and dark. My outfit was a bit odd compared to the high-tech warriors I saw darting along the paths: thrift store polyester pants, a hooded sweatshirt, black socks. When it snowed, I layered on thermals, a hat, and gloves. When my ancient long underwear sagged, I had the brilliant idea to safety pin them to the tops. I even got sciatica from running too much. Amy cured it with one vicious stab in the hip, and I was back, across Houston Street to the West Side Highway and out to the river alone. Just like I wanted.

My other new obsession was Internet sex (Intersext? ISX?), specifically the ads on Craigslist. I was freelancing then and
spent all of my working and most of my nonworking hours immobilized before a screen in my basement apartment, making it rather hard to tell the difference really. And how far that once noble term has fallen: a free lance! Once it was a knight, unbound, ready to fight for fortune or honor, to ride out and meet victory or death. Now a freelance(r) was a pale, impudent non-smoker hunched in his bathrobe, grinding out captions for an organic Brooklyn roof farm’s veggie pics, ad copy for a revolutionary line of wrinkle-free chinos that came in a tube, and rhapsodic bloggings about a new hotel for dogs.

But if not smoking was great for breathing, running, and living in general, it turned out to be terribly unhealthy for writing. It was just as I’d suspected: Writing was antithetical to life as a whole, and my smoking cure had apparently relieved me of both compulsions at once. So I waited, staring into the blankness, and added work to the list of things I was busy not doing.

Then, when a rumor in the building made me fear, erroneously, that I’d have to move, I searched for places on Craigslist. The housing scare passed, but I found myself checking the personals. The ones that seemed sincere, actual people seeking actual happiness, were far too depressing, and at first I mostly enjoyed the silly misworded ones. “I’m the girl next store,” a lady declared. A wise woman insisted on “condemns,” while another’s “testy pussy” had to be licked “just now.” Then there was the plaintive cry: “So moisten, can’t wait!”

Finally, perhaps inevitably, I answered. I estimated of course that at least 60 percent of the ads were spam, drawing traffic to commercial sites. Another 35 percent or so I figured were hookers, pranksters, or men. Of the remaining “real women,” I
assumed most were housebound invalids who had been scarred in terrible acid attacks, since, as far as I knew, pretty much any woman who wanted casual sex with a stranger could find it walking around the block. This left one in a hundred, maybe, who was normal enough, attractive enough, biologically alive and female enough, but harboring some dark secret (she was married, she was kinky, she was a nun lusting for rabbis) and so venturing online to engage in a bit of fantasy, with no intention of actually meeting up.