The scarlet...fever.

Yesterday while I was talking to Keith I remembered that, as a small child, I managed to contract scarlet fever, which (and I may be wrong on this one) I'd thought was erradicated from the North American continent. But whatever. I was four, and my sister was still a larva; my mother had gone to Maine (we were living in Hackettstown, NJ at the time) to settle my grandmother Anna's estate after her passing and had brought my sister with her. That left me and my dad, and while my dad was at work I was left in the care of my German godmother, Helga.

A word about Helga. Helga liked many things, among them being severe. Her hair was always pulled back in a wee watertight bun that scarcely permitted her to blink; her food was always dry and brittle, tasted of regret and came with a generous side of European guilt. "Ven I vas a childt, ve had to eat ze filth from ze streets and forage in ze dank forest because it vas vartime. American children are so spoiled. If you are not vanting zat cookie, I vill wrap it up and you vill starve like a rabid beast on ze streets." Of course, since I was four, my attention was almost instantaneously elsewhere; there are a great many shiny things in the world, and Helga had quite a few in her home. I, however, was permitted only in the basement, which, while furnished and possessed of a television, smelled of mothballs and devil-worship. She chided me for holding my fork "like ze peasants" and often lulled me to sleep by telling me about how she'd have to wait in line for seventy-five hours to buy seven pungently rancid chicken heads for "ze putrid broth" for her and her four hundred brothers and sisters. When I was baptized at the age of four, she and her husband Tom were there; Tom had a glass eye which laid dead in his skull, unmoving, piercing my tender young soul with unearthly dread. I remember nothing about their two children save that their daughter had a stuffed unicorn that she teased me with [whore!] and their son had a rubbery Japanese mask of Satan, which my mother donned once and proceeded to terrify me so badly that I urinated down the front of my overalls, prompting me at a tender age to scan the news for bad nursing homes to send her to when she became a burden. {Hahahahaha! Maybe!}

Helga tired of me quickly, and since there were small children across the street, I was sent to frolic with them. The problem: they were diseased little children. When I awoke one morning in my He-Man pajamas completely drenched in my own brine and vomiting a la Linda Blair, my father sensed that something might be amiss. And by "sensed" I mean "my mother screamed at him to get me to the doctor, her shrieks of maternal righteousness interfering with satellite transmissions and causing beluga strandings in Nunavut." He brought me to Helga's wrapped in our nappy brown afghan, and Helga called our doctor, Doctor Chi.

Dr. Chi was, at that time, one of the only Asians in Hackettstown. He always smelled vaguely of bologna, but he was a good doctor and great with children. When Helga called, he told her to "Bring baby now! He so sicka-so!" So she did, wrapped in that nasty brown afghan because the cold most likely would have snuffed me. Dr. Chi prepared a syringe which, even in my state, looked like a harpoon with which he'd impale me. He sensed my apprehension and took the syringe's plunger and began to tap it on my arm. "See, baby? No hurt!" He smiled and, when I wasn't looking, plunged the syringe into my arm all the way through to the other side; I could fairly hear it scraping bone and rending sinew. I was outraged. How dare that coldcut-reeking mothereffer try to trick me! So, I did what any four year old who is delusional and hallucinating would do; namely, I took the harpoon out of his baby-murdering hands as soon as it had left my tender young arm and I flung it onto the floor, where it comically stuck in the ground needle-first and quivered. Dr. Chi looked nonplussed, but Helga was mortified. "I svear, he must haff gone to the insane!" Dr. Chi smiled and shook my hand; we made our peace. However, Helga took me home and fettered me in the basement with only liverwurst on Wonderbread to consume. "Vat vas you thinking? He vas trying to help you! Vy, ven I vas a vee von, I vould haff never throwed a needle at ze doctor!" I wanted to hasten to add that she didn't see doctors as a little girl, since she was living in a weed-choked cavern at the bottom of the sea with all the other hags; that, or her story of wartime Europe, which I thought was malarky. But since she'd already pulled out three of my fingernails with pliers, I thought it best to eat my liverwurst in silence.

I hear that the kid who actually gave me the fever got married a few years ago. Ironically, his mother works (still) at Hackettstown Hospital as one of the lab vampiresses. I attribute my inability to lower my body temperature below 100 degrees to this brush with death; that, and my fear of Asians.

Yay! Done with random memory time!

I remain, as ever,

Dom