Captain Hook
The Dark Lady isn’t encouraging: no one wants to hear about your kidney stones.
But it’s a funny story, I say, filled with pathos, historical intrigue, heroism.
It’s thirty-year-old nonsense, she says, but I’ve seen her naked, so I’m not about to listen to anything she has to say. Hear this: Captain Cook took my adolescence and filled it with spikes.
I was about fifteen years old. Yes, spikes. Are you hooked? You will be. Sixteen, I was sixteen, it was September of 1982 and in a couple of weeks, I’d start writing poetry, anyhow. Mom and dad never bought proper children’s books, so starting as early as I could read, which was pretty early, I read Cancer Ward and Inside the Third Reich and dozens of crappy mysteries by Desmond Bagley and Alistair Maclean—the old man loved that guy so much that one day, he picked up his biography of Captain Cook. I was hooked.
The creaking, stinking ship, the wretched rations, the barrels of sauerkraut, the lashings, the rum, the heroic first officer, the doomed cabin boy: who wouldn’t love this stuff? But most of all, I loved scurvy. Loose teeth, fingernails, spots and spongy gums, suppurating wounds: brain poison to someone like me. In the space of one afternoon I became convinced I would die in eighteenth century agony, so I rode my bike to K-Mart—we still had K-Mart in those days—and I bought two big tubs of vitamin C. Each bottle held five hundred pills, each pill was one thousand milligrams, and they were chewable. I was hooked.
In three weeks they were all gone.
In three weeks and one night, I was standing on my bed screaming: something was killing me, stabbing me in the back with little knives, bands, waves, a tide, an entire stormy pacific ocean of pain. My Dad, for once, didn’t skip a beat and we were in the car doing a hundred miles an hour down Shelbourne Street. He had that car wound up all the way, engine screaming, running every red light from McKenzie to the Royal Jubilee Hospital with me hopping around the front seat like an idiot, yelling my nuts off. One, two, three waiting rooms and they knew everything. Radiolucent kidney stones made out of crystalized vitamin C, apparently a first for medical science, the last relict of the high seas: my doctors were hooked.
I had to repeat that damn story once, twice, a hundred times, Captain Cook was leaning over the Endeavor’s side, moaning and groaning and puking into the the clear blue waters. He’d be winding his watch, polishing a telescope and suddenly, bam! Spikes. The doctors loved it but something had to be done. The stones, they said would dissolve all on their own, I wouldn’t even have to pass them, but something would have to be done. That something was morphine. And I was hooked.
*Carl James Grindley grew up on an island off the West Coast of Canada, and studied in the US and Europe. He is a founding editor of The South Bronx Review.
