Living Beyond Rainbows

Chapter One

The Rainbows

I don’t know about you, but sometimes life comes at me so fast that all I have time to do is to react by reflex. After years of feeling as though I’m always swimming against the current, I feel an ominous quiet as I pause to rest my weary body. Suddenly I become aware that I’m being sucked into an eddy, which is pulling me ever closer to the headwaters of a giant waterfall. I know that I’ll soon be going over Niagara Falls without so much as a barrel to protect me.

Without any knowledge of how much power the falls holds and how far the drop will be nor what to expect at the bottom, I ready myself to take the plunge by tucking my head and pointing my toes. Just as I’ve approached most challenges in my life, at a certain moment, I dive head first over the edge of the falls, into the thunderous water. During my descent, I experience an overwhelming feeling of being powerless. I’ve no idea what to expect when I reach the bottom. I’ve made the leap; now I try to relax, just speeding headlong down into the abyss.

I reach the bottom sooner than I expect. Alternately I hold my breath and then gasp for air. My lungs feel like they’re going to explode. I land in a deep pool of cool, clear water. As I swim to the calmer reaches of that pool, I realize that I’ve joined legions of other people in the giant sea of humanity. I stare at all the others, and I blush because they’re all naked. Then Esther Williams swims up to me and invites me to join everyone in a massive display of a synchronized water ballet. I look over to where the water crashes on the rocks, and I see that the bright light is being fractionated into beautiful rainbows by the misty water droplets formed from the pounding water.

I assess my body for the effects of my unscripted plunge and note that for all the rage of the waterfall, I’m relatively unscathed. I’ve only a few minor bruises and cuts, from which I know I can easily heal. It’s now time to coexist with the rest of humanity. I join the rest of humanity in a ballet of naked synchronized swimming.

That’s how I’d summarize my life using my magical thinking.

Chapter Two

Esther

I woke up to start a new day. All of the turmoil of 2006 was finally winding down. I was feeling like I was finally a part of humanity again. I wasn’t just alive, but I was starting to grow strong after nearly dying in intensive care. My first priority was to reestablish some of my obligations, especially those that I had to Esther. She and I visited regularly for years, and then I abruptly stopped seeing her in the nursing home when my energy gave out.

Now again, I am visiting Esther, who is the oldest patient in my practice. I have known her for several years and have watched her on her final road toward eternity. Esther is ninety-five now, and for the last three and a half years, she has lived in a nursing home. She is still alert and friendly, especially with me. Esther has outlived her money. She’s in the best home that the state of Minnesota can pay for.

I usually visit Esther almost every week. After years as my patient, we are also good friends. I am one of only a few people who come to visit her. She is mostly bedridden now. She has a devoted son, Charles, who also visits nearly every day. When he is unable to visit, he calls his mother on the phone, sometimes more than once a day. Esther is a little hard of hearing, and I have to speak loudly to her. I’m usually quite soft-spoken, so it was an effort for me at first. But Esther’s worth it.

I’ve been told many times that as a doctor of chiropractic I shouldn’t even accept cookies as a gift from patients. I think the rules are way too limiting and overly strict, and I like to work and live outside the box. When Charles first called me to ask if I would see his mother professionally in the nursing home, I gladly accepted and mentioned that my fee would have to be forty dollars. I agreed to visit and give Esther a one-hour massage while I hooked her up to a portable Alpha-Stim machine. It was about all I could do for Esther these days. She was getting even frailer each time that I visited her. The Alpha-Stim was supposed to help synchronize her brain waves and reduce stress and anxiety and help with pain management.

Not too long ago, Esther was moved into a different room. Her former room came with roommates, but she kept outliving them. She often knew that they would not last very long when she first met them. Esther seemed to always be in touch with her surroundings. She was polite and regularly complimented her caregivers by name, even those who recently came from Africa. Of course she had a few people on her list that she didn’t like. She never hesitated to tell me about their bad manners.

Together, we decided Tuesdays just after lunch would be a good time for my visits. It was usually pretty slow for me that day, and I could make it to and from the nursing home without much traffic. The fall of 2006 was a sort of rebirth for me. That was the year that I nearly died. I felt eager to climb the steps and enter the door from the stairwell, which had an alarm on it. I had learned long ago how to disarm the door, and I walked past the staff desk. Usually no one was on duty. When there was someone, they were already familiar with my comings and goings.

This time, I had to ask at the nursing station, Where is Esther now?

I got to the new room at the end of the long hall. It was a corner room. I noticed that there was one empty bed and another one with an old woman lying in it. At the far end of the room was Esther’s bed. I was excited to see her because she always knew how to convey to me how valuable my visits were for her. The other woman was only about ten feet away, and she appeared to be in a deep sleep or a coma. I closed the cloth curtain between the roommate and Esther. I went to Esther’s bed and gently touched her arm. She smiled and opened her eyes at the same time.

As usual, she said, It’s good to see you again. The next sentence was, What’s new in your life? and then, How is Teddy? and How is Harold (Art)?" After so many visits, Esther had a lot of her conversation memorized.

This time I had something I was anxious to tell Esther.

I answered, Everyone is fine, thank you. What’s new is that I’ve decided to write a book. I waited to see her reaction.

Her eyes brightened and she asked me in a tone that was matter-of-fact, What’s your book going to be about?

I loudly blurted out, I’m going to write a book about my life, my life story.

As Esther thought about it a little bit, a voice from the comatose woman rang out. She said very authoritatively, Who cares? The voice continued, It’s not worth writing. Nobody will care to read it.

I was stunned. I thought, What a mean old lady! I wanted to pull open the curtain and yell, You won’t be around to read it anyway! I hoped that Esther hadn’t heard her, and I wondered if it was maybe my own subconscious feelings of inability that had created the vocalization.

I don’t think Esther heard the other woman because she soon responded.

She said, I think a book is a good idea. Then she added, Your book is bound to be very interesting.

I was relieved. I’ve always considered myself more of an artist with many talents, and I was easily intimidated by harsh criticism. Esther was the first person to whom I divulged my ambition of writing. Her approval was more important to me than the opinion of an old woman who would not be alive to read the book anyway. It was my conversations with Esther that led me to feel that we all have books within us and how important it is to sit down and actually write things down.

* * *

Backgrounds

Chapter Three

Preliminaries

The first time Esther came to see me was in the fall of 1993. She called me and walked over to my office, which was four blocks away. She was a matronly Norwegian woman, who was slightly plump but fairly agile for her eighty-two years. Another older woman in her building referred her to me. Esther lived at Tree Tops, a senior building that was part of Walker Senior Care. Esther had lived in the neighborhood many years. She was familiar with and unafraid to explore all the amenities. She wore a cheap brown wig, and the first few times at my office, she was reluctant to take it off.

* * *

Nineteen ninety-three was a pivotal year for me. I was only forty-two, but I felt as though I was having an early midlife crisis. Shortly after the New Year, I learned that my mother had breast cancer. My father was a chiropractor of the old school. He honestly believed that chiropractic and his own skills, with the help of God, could overcome all of life’s illnesses. My mother was devoted to him and was very subservient to him, especially when health issues were involved. Dad waited until the tumors in Mom had invaded her abdomen and choked her internally, shutting off her esophagus and preventing food and water from getting into her stomach. At that point, he became so alarmed that he drove her to the Mayo Clinic in hopes of a miracle.

The miracle was never going to happen. All of us children knew that something was wrong at Thanksgiving. There are six of us—three boys, three girls. I am the fourth child and middle boy. We four who lived closest to Mom and Dad sat down that day to discuss our concerns. None of us thought cancer back then. We thought that maybe Mom’s diabetes was to blame for her failing health. If Dad knew anything, and I am sure he knew more than any of us, he wasn’t offering us any answers. We quizzed Mom about her blood sugar levels and her medications, and everything seemed to be in order. We put aside our immediate concerns.

Chapter Four

Summer in Europe

After a few early visits to my office, I asked Esther, Have you traveled very much in your life?

She beamed when she said to me, Well, I’m planning to visit my brother Calvin in Seattle soon.

Years before with her first husband, she moved to California for a short time. She hated it. Her husband didn’t work very much and drank a lot. Esther finally told him that she was moving back to Minnesota, and he could come with her or stay; it didn’t matter for her. He moved back with her, but a few years later, he died of heart problems. With her second husband, she traveled once to Norway and Denmark. Every time she mentioned that trip, she dwelled on the wonderful cheeses and pastries that she sampled there.

She got excited when she spoke and said to me more than once, The cheeses in Denmark are delicious. I bought some cheese and fruit and a big loaf of bread, and Harold and I went to the park and had a real picnic.

* * *

I told Esther about my trip to Europe over the course of several appointments. My trip was in 1970 and lasted all summer—four months. I started in London and hitchhiked my way to Wales and Scotland before crossing the channel and touring continental Europe. I spoke French. I had three years of high school and one year of university French under my belt. I went from Northern France to Belgium, Holland, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Italy, and even Yugoslavia. I took a train from Rome all the way to Auch, France, near Toulouse. From there, I walked to Lavardens and started a four-week archeology dig. I signed up for this work back in Minnesota as a work-study program.

Walking the dirt road, I rounded a bend and saw Lavardens in the distance. The castle was prominent on the horizon, surrounded by fields of sunflowers in bloom, all with their heads pointing to the sun. It was magical. I worked with a lot of French high school and older kids and with a few English and Italians. We worked two weeks at a seventeenth-century castle. A Belgian couple recently purchased it. They wanted it restored enough to have light and sound shows there. The other two weeks were spent at an eleventh-century abbey in the town of Moirax. We were moved from the castle because there were vicious sand fleas in the lower part of the castle, where we slept. We woke up with welts on our bodies from their bites.

Moirax wasn’t much better when it came to pestilence. It was a small town of about sixty inhabitants. We took over the town hall. After the first night, the girls of our group opted to sleep outside in the stable with the boys because they could hear rats gnawing in the floors and walls of the town hall, where they were trying to sleep. We put cantaloupes on the windowsills overnight to ripen, and they would be gnarled garbage by morning after the rats got to them.

I had fun in both of these tiny villages. I was able to speak French fluently, and the people of both villages told me I was the first American they’d seen since World War II. Once, when it was my turn to be on cook duty, I saw all the cornfields surrounding Moirax. I inquired at the grocery store if it was possible to get a few ears of corn. For me, it was August and time to eat sweet corn.

I spoke French to the owner of the store. I said, Bonjour, madame. It will soon be my turn to cook for our group. I was wondering if you could get some corn for me to cook the way I am familiar with in the United States.

The woman owner seemed confused and asked, What kind of corn do you want? She laughed and then continued, The corn grown here is for the pigs and geese, not for people.

I said, I really want some corn to cook for our group.

Then she asked, Do you want mature corn?

Unfamiliar with the different corn stages in French, I answered, Yes.

The next day, I went again to see what she was able to come up with. She assembled twenty ears of last year’s corn, totally dried up and ready for the geese.

I said, No, the kernels should be soft and mushy.

She told me, I cannot get corn like that.

Next, I went directly to the farmer. He was so handsome I almost became tongue-tied. He was blond and blue eyed and extremely virile looking and about thirty years old. I had a few people from our group with me.

I asked, Would it be possible for us to pick about fifteen to twenty ears of corn right from your field?

He repeated, I grow my corn for the pigs and geese.

I told him, Yes, I know.

He agreed to let us into his field and said, You may pick some corn as long as you don’t destroy the field while doing so.

So my Midwest boyhood favorite, corn on the cob in August, was finally going to happen. I cooked the corn in a huge pot of boiling water. Because it was field corn, I added both salt and sugar to the water and boiled it longer than usual. Some of the group really liked it, some thought it was tough and difficult to digest, and a few were neutral. My surprise came the next morning as I was pushing the little local kids in the wheelbarrow; several of the women of the town approached me one by one and asked me for the recipe for the corn. Everyone had heard about it, and they were all anxious to try it. I wonder if they still eat it today, forty years later.

After working in France, I hitchhiked to Spain and Portugal before returning to Paris. From there, I flew back to Minnesota. In Europe, I had my very first encounters with homosexual men.

My European travels opened up my life. I had traveled several different cultures and countries. Often alone, I frequently camped near main roads, and at the end of each ride, I would just lay my sleeping bag down in a field and sleep soundly until dawn. I was a fearless teenager and lived on sardines, cheese, bread, and yogurt. Every new ride was a different experience. Before I reached home again in Minneapolis, I realized that, of course, I was gay.

Chapter Five

Boston Memories, Chiropractic College

One thing Esther and I never talked about was my volunteer work with people who had contracted the AIDS virus. Even when I was going through chiropractic college, I had an uncomfortable feeling that the euphoria of coming out along with the dazzling disco was all going to crash. Before chiropractic college, I spent ’74 and ’75 living in Boston. I moved there after graduating from the University of Minnesota with a degree in International Relations. For several years, I rebelled against the family preoccupation with chiropractic. My father, two uncles, and my brother had all gone into the field. After my return from Europe, I wasn’t sure that a gay chiropractor would even be accepted into the profession.

Two years in Boston allowed me to have space to sow my wild oats and to contemplate my career future. I sowed enough oats to form a new subsidiary to Quaker. Once, in the free VD clinic in Boston, I was given a questionnaire to fill out. I needed to answer it before they would give me a shot of penicillin for gonorrhea. I stumbled over the question of How many different sexual partners have you had in the last year?

I was amazed that anyone kept track of such things and why it was any of their concern. I had to do some fast calculations. There are 365 days in a year. Half the time, I didn’t want to have sex for a variety of reasons. Other times, however, I sometimes had anonymous sex with three, four, five, or six people in one evening. Before AIDS, we didn’t consider protection. The worst thing to happen would be getting VD, which I got twice in Boston. I was a virile twenty-three-year-old. I put down 190 sexual contacts in the past year to try to be conservative. Fortunately I was given the shot in my buttocks and that was that.

I moved to Boston in the fall of ’73 so that I could be there when my infatuation at that time, Kevin, moved there. We met in Minneapolis, but he said he wanted to live in Boston. He wanted to attend Boston University to study architecture. I moved out there with my two friends, Michael and Glenn. We got an apartment and started mixing into life as Bostonians. About six months later, Kevin flew from Minnesota to join me. He and I moved to a different apartment, which we shared with Alan and Dana. Alan was about as flamboyant as a gay man could be. Dana was a nerdy paralegal. They were a couple because Alan needed financial support, and Dana enjoyed the flattery that Alan gave him.

When Kevin and I finally moved to our own apartment, it was to 82 Commonwealth Avenue. We had a penthouse apartment. There were basically two large rooms with a kitchen, a bathroom, and an entry hall. We barely had furniture except for my king-sized waterbed that was unheated. We sometimes laid naked on the rooftop of the adjoining building, which was one floor lower than our apartment, so we could tan. It was a six-floor walk-up, and we learned fast not to leave without every essential thing. It took a lot of effort to have to go back for anything. It was also infested with cockroaches. They sometimes crawled over our faces at night. That took some getting used to for us. Neither of us had ever seen them before.

There was also a problem with heat in the winter. The Lebanese landlord had the heat on some sort of timer, and the heat went off at midnight and on again at six in the morning. The waterbed got really cold, and the two women living next door to us showed us frozen glasses of water next to their bed. Finally, just a couple of months before I moved back to Minneapolis to go to chiropractic college, the plaster fell off of a large part of the living room ceiling.

My infatuation with Kevin came to an abrupt end when I discovered during a physical argument that he actually got sexually aroused when he was spanked and beaten. It was a sexual turn-on for him and a major turnoff for me. We started going our separate ways after our first year together in Boston. Before that time, we shared many great times. We would pal around a lot, but we had different work schedules and different fantasies. We went to Provincetown in the summers. We also played around sexually with other gay singles and couples. We loved to dress up in our bellbottom pants and platform shoes and go out to dance the night away at The Metro near Fenway Stadium. Our favorite song was Don’t Rock the Boat. Every time it was played, we looked for each other so we could dance together.

I left Boston to go to chiropractic college. My parents drove from Minneapolis with a trailer to pick me up and take me home. It was in the days of deprogramming, and my parents tried their version of that. I think they influenced the minister to give a sermon on the prodigal son the Sunday that we returned from Boston. My mother discovered marijuana in my pant pocket when she was doing the laundry after that trip. Now I was a proven criminal. They banished me to their lake home and told me to contemplate my life. Before long, I found an apartment and a car and my old job and soon started another four years of college.

Chapter Six

Chiropractic as My Vocation

Esther was always so cheerful. It wasn’t contrived but truly genuine. She talked to me about how she met a man in her building and how they became good friends. Esther never mentioned it, but I immediately suspected that her male friend was gay. He worked at the old Schlamps and sold furs. Then he retired and moved to Esther’s building. Those two became pals and did many social things together. Around 1990, he died and was buried in Lakewood Cemetery. Esther talked about it because my house was just across the street from where he was buried. She sometimes went to visit her friend, who was now in the grave.

Esther didn’t care about the sexual inclinations of people. She looked through them and found the kernel of humanity, which constituted good or evil. She didn’t like self-centered, egotistical, selfish people. Even at her age, she was an adventurer, and she was very comfortable having good experiences with well-meaning friends. Esther hated gossip and complained to me that so many of the old ladies in her building spent their days in idle chatter and hearsay. She sometimes joked with them and told them she was visiting her boyfriend when she was really coming to my office. I liked to encourage her with that fantasy.

In many ways, we had something stronger than just a doctor-patient relationship. At first it was sharing close information with each other. Esther was always interested in life. Money wasn’t her priority, and it wasn’t mine either. My