15.(15-17) Eddie's Life Outside Medical School

Slim Novel 15 - http://adventuresofkimi.blogspot.com - See Homepage

15. At Home
Eddie valued living with his parents. So, first, he did not opt for out of town college like most youth his age and he went to nearby Bronx Hunter College, incidentally saving his parents much money.

After US Army service, he came back home to his parents and his room. Following Professor Edwardes' good advice he did not marry even though the Ryo experience tempted him. He understood that he was not ready and that it would tie him down and limit him. But before leaving Japan, he gave Ryo enough money and set her up in a small sewing business. 

 He applied to a medical school in the Bronx and got accepted also partly due to Professor Edwardes's loaning him Physician's Notebooks to read and which taught him the memory techniques that allowed him to score high on the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) and get top college grades. These made him a top choice and saved much time, effort and the expenses that most applicants must anticipate because of the huge competition and uncertainty that forces multiple medical school applications.

 At home, Eddie's room windows face the walkway into the central court of the apartment building; cool in summer and quiet from outside noise. It is a big room entered from the hall that runs through the family flat and it has its own WC with shower. On entering the room from the hall, one sees his bed in the corner on left. Across the room is his desk, between 2 windows looking out on the inner court. Sunday mornings finds him at his stamp collecting. A silver painted steam radiator looking like an accordion out of the floor is in the corner to left of the desk. A large closet in right near corner had his junk from near 20 years of living. No rug on the floor because his mother is a health bug and rightly thinks rugs promote lung infection and allergies. By his bed pillow, to left, is an Emerson portable radio and, after 1946 a black & white portable TV.

Having used the room as part of t'home for nearly 20 years gives Eddie stability of mind. And having been brought up on the north Bronx streets with his all-male gang gave him social skills and a joie di vivre in women. With his stable parental gender identification (Opposite gender parents), there was no chance he would  become confused about his physically inherited gender status. And later, as gender status became a bad source of confusion in youth, he rejoiced in not being confused and was thankful for his good luck in having such parents and such formative experiences and such stability.

16. A Walk on a Winter's Day

Saturday 7 AM, wintertime. Dropping the Amazing Stories he'd been reading, Eddie puts on a thick black leather jacket and goes out for walk. Must be below zero, he thinks; but in a way usual for a science-educated American, he is thinking Zero-degree C.  However, it is the early 1950s so instead of the today's science-educated way, the C is not Celsius but Centigrade, the more simply defined thermometer-reading based on the freeze point of water as zero and its boil point as 100-degree C in 100 equal gradations. 
   As he goes out the lobby door into his apartment building's courtyard, he notes piled up snow shoveled neatly by the Black Joe super's helper, and glancing at the courtyard trees, now prettily hung with white, he thinks A Winter Wonderland, echoing the song lyric.
The sun shines brightly and it is freezing outside but Eddie feels stimulated because he is young and he just had his Mom's bracingly hot tea with lemon after the bowl of wheat germ and sliced banana she healthily feeds him for breakfast. His boots crunch forward in the fresh snow, and, out on the street, he turns right on East 210th Street and again right on Wayne Ave, thinking, as he always does here, Mad General Anthony Wayne? - Why Mad?
  Eddie's destination is now straight ahead north across the wide east-west Gun Hill Road and then turn left, or west, at the next street block, where Wayne Ave dead-ends at the Woodlawn Cemetery East-West fence. Then, paralleling that fence, he walks along it for one more block, turning right, or north, on Bainbridge Road, and, after walking past the elevated-trains end-of-line Woodlawn Station, he crosses Jerome Avenue and plunges into Van Cortlandt forest.
   He notes fresh animal tracks. A hopping hare here, a feral cat's trace there, and a skunk's trail. He is in the area where Miss Ali first met up with his gang of four on that interesting encountering that swerved his life to where he is now - medical school after the Army and all the experiences that go with it.

Thirty minutes later he is retracing his boot marks in the snow and, at the Woodlawn Station, he takes a different return route, walking back up Gun Hill Road under the Jerome Ave El train tracks from its Woodlawn Station.
   Crossing the street one block east from Jerome, a "Hey, Eddie!" from inside a corner store stops him: It is Santos, a guy he knows from the neighborhood, a PR - the code word for Puerto Rican - who hung out with Eddie's gang.
   Eddie goes in. Santos has, on the table before him, a triple-egg, sunny-side-up with corn beef hash and 4 pancakes topped with melting butter and dripping maple syrup. He is just now putting ketchup on the hash & eggs.
   "Eddie bo! Sit here and have da eats wit' me!"
   Eddie has worked up an appetite. At home, his Mom watches his food carefully for quantity and quality. But when he is like this, being offered breakfast, communist style, he loves it.
   "Thanks, Santos" and he digs in with the fork Santos hands him. Corn beef hash topped with ketchup and taken with the sunny-side yellow and a piece of whole wheat toast in the other hand gives moments of joy even though Eddie realizes it is not healthy. But he rationalizes he is doing it for social reason and it does not cost him money allowing him to think that, at least, he is not paying to shorten his life. And even better, he is helping Santos live longer, healthier by eating off excess food that, without him, Santos would overeat.
   Santos, a roly-poly 20-year-old working as floor cleaner at the Hospital, belches in satisfaction and twirling a toothpick, asks Eddie. "Whuddaya think, me gettin' married?"
   Eddie already knows the details. Santos's coworker, Flor, has a niece in Lima Peru who wants to come to USA and Flor has worked-up Santos on the girl's making a good wife. Eddie guesses the real motive. 
   "Married you can always get, Santos," Eddie says, mentally editing the Tolstoy War and Peace Prince Andrei advice to Pierre into language Santos will get, and he unloads it on the receptive guy.

Santos looks up from his coffee. "T'anks buddy. I won't forget. Some a my Puerto Rican family tole me 'bout Peruvian women's allus tryin' to snare us guys to get into USA. T'anks a mill'on."
   Eddie excuses himself, getting up to leave with the feeling he did a good deed.
   Now it is mid morning with the sun warming, the snow and bringing out kids on Flexible Flyer sleighs, he notes, as he walks past the slope that makes up a bare piece of land they call the Lot near his building. A memory wells up from his not very far-back younger days.
 "Hey, kid!" to a boy standing waiting his turn to try the slope behind five other kids with Flyers. "Here's fifty cents, lemme try your Flyer on the hill?" The kid takes the coin and hands Eddie his red-rails sleigh with shiny light-brown, shellacked-top wood slats that fit a ten-year-old's length and that have Flexible Flyer written lengthwise. Eddie waits his turn and when it comes he runs forward with sleigh in both hands before him and flings himself on top of the sleigh as it crunches into the snow trail and hurtles down the 40-degree slope that runs the length of the block to the next street at the bottom. What a feeling!  Of just being alive! And he thinks as he is sleighing: How Lucky to live in North Bronx by the forest and where you can use a Flexible Flier on the snowy slopes!
  Minutes later he hands the sleigh back to the kid.

He walks into Lapin's corner candy store where, ever since he was five, he had sat around drinking egg cream sodas for 2 cents and handling the comic books and sci fi mags and eating the candies and listening to Phil Lapin expound on the joys of Russian communism.  
   If he liked it so much, Gus the local anti-communist always was saying, How come he came here?
   Now, most of the old gang have disappeared, marrying, moving out to places like Levittown to live in the lookalike separate homes or migrating further to places like California.  
   Eddie is happy to find his boyhood pal, Googie, sitting at the counter sipping an egg cream.
   "Hey, Eddie!  Long time, no pee!" Googie shouts and Eddie thinks He still got the stupid joke.
   "Eddie, bo! You and I the only guys left in dis here place. Ever'one else got out before the Spics. And soon it's gonna rain 'em. Ha! Ha!  Phil Lapin here," he indicates Phil behind the counter, "tells me he's sellin' out to one of 'em and dis candy store is gonna be a Bodega. What in hell is dat?
   "Grocery store," says Phil making an egg cream for Eddie and adding, "You goddamn Jew capitalists are prejudice against the Spanish speaking comrades. Comes a Revolution we gonna get rid a you by Pirate Jenny"
   "Phil, you a goddamn, commie. I gonna report you to Joe McCart'y!" Googie says laughing.  "And boy! If we thought da Spics were bad, I heard da Coons are comin' in, after. My family are movin' to a co-op in Yonkahs. Mom say dey would be afraid for my young sister Rhoda when dose black fuggers take over. I mean a 16-year-old Jewish girl livin' in a buildin' wit' Coons?"
   Eddie does not get involved in racial or political talk. His teaching under Miss Ali and now Professor Edwardes gives a belief in future Science Civilization where all citizens are treated equal and most have blended, physically and culturally so the problems of race and nation do not come up. And religion has withered away.
   Changing the subject, Eddie invites Googie to go to the David Marcus movie theater, the new name for the old Tuxedo, taken from a hero of the new Israel, who killed a lot of Arabs. The Egyptian is playing and Eddie has heard good stuff about it. Googie says OK and its being 10 AM, they make a date to meet on the corner at noon.

17. The Egyptian

Movies in the mid 1950's are 25 cents but the tickets are the same as when Eddie was a kid - finger-size clipped rectangles bought at the seller's box outside the movie entrance under its marquee and handed to an old man in shabby gray uniform inside the door.
   In the rear lobby, Googie indicates the food stand and says "Let's get some."
   They take Pepsi bottled soda, and Franks smeared with tongue-stinging yellow mustard and French fries covered with red tangy tomato ketchup and go to the seats. Googie prefers sitting up front in middle of the center section.
   The Egyptian is the first movie of a double feature, the second being a Bowery Boys. As credits go on screen Eddie sees 20th Century Fox produced by Daryl Zanuck. Eddie has become what is called a Hollywood movie buff.  That is, he knows a lot and has opinions, most of which come from his time with Miss Pris. 
   Daryl Zanuck! he thinks. One of the few Hollywood producers whose movies are distinctive.  You forget who directed Zanuck's movies but are always aware it's a Zanuck product. Historical, cultural, socially relevant; that's a Zanuck!  Like "Suez," I saw as a kid in 1940 about Mr. de Lesseps building the canal; or "Gentleman's Agreement" in 1947, the exposé of antisemitism. 
   As The Egyptian shows on the screen, it gives the story of Ikhnaton, originally the Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh, Amenhotep IV, who for nearly 20 years changed the polytheistic ancient Egyptian religion into a monotheistic worship of the sun's disk Aton, hence his adopting the name Ikhnaton. He wanted to do away with the bad affects of religion by unifying all worship into a scientific idea that we should honor the source of our lives, and the lives and existence of everything on our planet. It is no coincidence that Ikhnaton's dates coincide with Moses. The movie implies that the origin of Judaism was the Children of Israel's stay in Pharaonic Egypt and therefore that Ikhnaton's grand idea was the source of Christianity too. 
   Eddie is caught by the sweep of the movie and the intellectual ideas and the cultural implications. He thinks, Wow! What luck to see this one!
   Later, as they walk home, Googie seems impressed. "Geese, deep stuff. And dat Gene Tierney! Whut a looker!  Wish she was a hooker in da Bronx! Say, is it really true dem Egyptian royalty fucked dair sisters?"

At the entrance to Eddie's building they part. Now that Eddie has had his army experience and is in medical school, he and Googie have drifted apart but Eddie values perhaps this last view of one of his old gang.
  For next, click 15.18 Psychiatry in Medical School