LITMIR.BIZ

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always be clean underwear. Same when I was married for the first time. When my wife left me, my underwear no longer marched from where I dropped it, washed itself in the washing machine, and then marched back, folded itself, and returned to my drawer.

      Nobody answered when I knocked on the door to my wife’s apartment. Suddenly, it occurred to me she was out with another man. I returned to my car in the parking lot and waited for them to come home. I would confront them both, I decided, and tell my wife of my love and she would come back to me and I would have clean underwear again.

      I also decided she could be out with Dick the Bruiser, for all I knew, so I went to my truck and got my tire tool. I waited for several house. My wife and Dick the Bruiser never came home. I went to sleep with my tire tool in my lap. The next day, I found out my wife hadn’t been out with Dick the Bruiser, or anybody else. She had been home visiting her mother.

      I felt like an idiot, having spend the night with a tire tool. I went to the laundromat and washed my underwear.

      Three years later, I married again. We were in a terrible hurry to get it done. I called another friend of mine, Ludlow Porch, and asked if he would find a preacher as quickly as possible.

      “Consider it done,” he said.

      The preacher had a small, thin mustache and talked in a squeaky voice. He looked like a crooked Indian agent off Tales of Wells Fargo. He began the service by opening the Bible and squeaking out, “It says here . . .”

      Three years later, when I divorced my second wife, Ludlow said, “I knew it probably wouldn’t work out anyway.”

      “How did you know that?” I asked.

      “Because I couldn’t find a real preacher for your wedding on that short of notice. The man that married you changes flats at the Texaco station near my house.”

      I would have taken a tire tool to my friend Ludlow Porch, but he is built like Dick the Bruiser.

      My second wife left me when we were living in Chicago. I had no alternative but to attempt to have dates with Northern women. Since I am a native Georgian, I had never been out with Northern women before. There are some distinct differences between Northern women and Southern women.

      Southern women make better cooks than Northern women. Northern women make good cooks only if you like to eat things that still have their eyes, cooked in a big pot with asparagus, which would have been better off left as a house plant.

      Southern women aren’t as mean as Northern women, either. Both bear watching closely, but a Southern woman will forgive you two or three times more than a Northern woman before she will pull a knife on you. Most important, Southern women know how to scrunch better. Scrunch is nothing dirty. It is where, on a cold night, you scrunch up together in order to get cozy and warm. And, Southern women can flat scrunch.

      With this attitude, it is easy to see why I was usually very lonely in Chicago. One night, I found a bar in Chicago with a country music juke box. I had a few beers and watched a guy walk over to the juke box with a handful of quarters.

      My second wife had split and I was far from home, adrift on a lonely sea.

      “Play a love song,” I said to the guy at the juke box.

      I needed it badly. One thing about country music. It has something to say.

      They guy played a song entitled “She Tore Out My Heart and Stomped the Sucker Flat.”

      I left the bar and went home and washed my underwear.

      I was fifteen the first time I found out I had trouble with my heart that didn’t relate to falling in or out of love. A country doctor listened to it beat and was not pleased with what he heard.

      “Hmmmmm,” said the doctor, moving his stethoscope to another position.

      I didn’t know it at the time, but a patient can learn a great deal about his condition simply by listening to the sounds the doctor makes while he conducts his examination.

      “Hmmmmm” means there is something very interesting going on inside you. A policeman makes the same sound when he pulls you over and there is an empty bottle of Gallo Thunderbird wine on the seat next to you.

      “Ahhhhhh” means he just remembered the last time he heard something going on inside you. It was back in medical school the day he was assigned his first cadaver.

      “Oooooh” means that, compared to you, the cadaver was in good health.

      “What is the problem, doctor?” I asked.

      “Heart murmur,” he answered.

      “Nothing to worry about,” he said. “You’ll probably grow right out of it.”

      I didn’t worry about it. I went right along with the normal life of the next demented child. I played sports throughout high school. I went off to college and took up drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. I had other physicals.

      “Hmmmm” is the sound doctors would always make when they listened to my heart.

      The diagnosis was always “heart murmur. Nothing to worry about. You’ll probably outgrow it.”

      I didn’t outgrow it. Came time for me to leave college. It was 1968. Recall the unpleasantness in Vietnam that was raging at the time? The government was insistent I go and take a part. I had another physical.

      “Oooooh,” said the doctor.

      I didn’t have a heart murmur any more. The murmur, or strange sound emanating from my heart, turned out to be something else.

      I was twenty-one. The diagnosis was aortic insufficiency. Doctors can spend hours explaining. I can do it much more quickly.

      In the normal heart, the aortic valve—from which blood leaves the heart and goes out into the rest of the body—contains three leaflets, or cusps, which open when the blood is forced out and then close tightly together so that none of the blood can leak back inside the heart.

      The doctor’s diagnosis was that I had been born with only TWO leaflets in my aortic valve. I was born in 1946, right after the Big War. Perhaps there was a shortage of aortic leaflets.

      Regardless, each time my heart pumped blood out, some of the blood would seep back into my heart, causing the “murmur” sound. On the next beat, my heart would have to pump that much harder.

      “It’s like taking three steps and then falling back two to make one,” the doctor explained.

      I was frightened of course.

      “You can forget the service,” said the doctor. “They’ll never let you in with an aortic insufficiency.”

      I wasn’t frightened after he said that. Better an aortic insufficiency than a bullet from a Russian-made AK-47 right between my eyes, I figured.

      The doctor made it quite clear to me. No big problem at the moment, he said. A young heart can withstand a great deal.

      “But someday,” said the doctor, “someday, you will have to have that valve replaced.”

      Someday. To a young man who has fallen in love in a motel utility room in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, who has practiced-kissed Phi Mu’s, and who has just been given a reprieve from the mud and blood of Vietnam, someday never comes.

      2

       ‘This Might Sting a Little’

      I avoided any big deal concerning the malfunction with my heart for the next fourteen years. The fact I had been diagnosed as having this “aortic insufficiency” caused a problem here and there with life insurance rates, but other than that, it was nothing more than a slight nuisance in the back of my head. Something to worry about only if I didn’t have anything else better to worry about.

      I took up tennis when I was twenty-three and quickly

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