Today’s soundtrack: high on diesel and gasoline
Today at 6:02pm: choking down a bitter and foul brew, doctor’s orders



I don’t have health insurance, I have Dr. Ming. I go to see her every time I get messed up. Dr. Ming is a middle-aged Chinese woman with big, patient eyes and a thin line for a mouth that looks like a cartoonist drew it with a pencil. I like her ‘cause she knows her shit and she charges me in increments of ten dollars.

My Dr.-Ming-based health plan has obvious limitations: should I ever need an MRI, I’m pretty much screwed. But I usually go to her with nothing more than minor martial arts injuries, banged-up limbs and whatnot. Last time she fixed my foot using her strong fingers to dial some kind of medical PIN number into my pressure points, then smearing my sole with what looked like paté. This time I’m going to her ‘cause something’s up with my eye.

My right eyelid had started to swell. I thought it might be a bug bite but five days of persistent swelling spoke of something beyond a casual encounter with an insect. It became unsightly; got to the point where I was putting sunglasses on before I left the house. So on the sixth day I scraped up a couple twenties, made my way into Chinatown, found the unmarked doorway and descended into Dr. Ming’s basement lair.

The underground corridors are fluorescent-lit and look like the “Before” half of a time-lapse Mr. Clean commercial. Last place you’d expect to find a doctor. The building’s not all hers, there are a couple shops and businesses down here too, Chinese people behind desks and counters, but I have no idea what they do. Everybody looks like they’re waiting for something.

“Okay,” said Dr. Ming, after briefly examining my eye. Her son and husband were with her in the office, sitting in chairs on opposite sides of the room.

Her son, no older than eight, was holding onto a copy of The Wall Street Journal. Not reading it, but clutching it absently, the way a tyke holds a teddy bear. Part of me thinks he was reading it before I showed up, which would make him a very smart eight-year-old indeed. (Sorry, that last sentence came out like I was writing a British children’s book; I don’t know what happened there.)

“Lie down,” said the Doc, directing me to the examination table. “Close eyes.” I made myself comfortable on the paper sheet--I gotta get me some of these, for the house--and closed my eyes as instructed. “Good boy,” said Dr. Ming. She has a habit of saying this to me, and I always assume that her lack of mastery of the English language prevents her from recognizing how creepy it sounds. Well, what do I care; I’m not here for the ambiance.

“Don’t, open, eyes,” she stressed, dabbing my eyelid with something. After a few seconds of this I felt something making its way between the eyelids and lightly jabbing against my eyeball. I wasn’t sure if it was just my eyelashes being compressed from whatever the Doc had in her hand, or if she was poking me with something bristly. It wasn’t painful, just annoying, so I remained reactionless throughout. “Good boy,” she said again.

Next I felt her apply some kind of salve to my still-closed eye, and instantly thought of that scene in Ray where you see the boy weeping pus after the doctors treated his eyes with lye. It passed quickly and I told myself not to question the Doc’s credentials. I was referred by a good friend and she’s done right by me every time. Relax.

After five minutes and another two or three “Good boy”s I was allowed to open my eyes and sit back up. Coming out of the tiny examination closet and back into the office, I saw the father and son were sharing a private joke, both stifling laughter, and I had the sudden insane conviction they were laughing at me. That, too, passed, and Dr. Ming sat me next to her desk while she took my pulse. Have you ever seen Eastern Medicine Docs do this? They sit ramrod still and check your pulse on both wrists, one at a time.

While she was using her left hand to check my left, her right hand moved across the desk and picked up a pen. She moved it over a white pad of paper. She wrote my name (well, “Ray”) at the top left of the page, then wrote a small, crisp “0” on the top right. Zero? What does that mean? I’m a zero? My pulse isn’t registering? But as I watched, after a short pause she put a “5” to the right of the zero--“05”--then moved the pen to the left and wrote “Aug” followed by the day. That was the damn strangest way I’ve ever seen to write a date; who starts with the zero?

Next, as if possessed, her hand and the pen moved to the far left of the page and she began scribbling a series of Chinese characters, quickly and precisely. Her other hand was still taking my pulse. At the end of her scribbling she had three rows of a dozen characters, neatly aligned. “Okay,” she said, standing and taking the paper over to her husband, who had moved behind the counter by the back wall.

The back wall was lined by a large grid of wooden shelving, floor to ceiling, filled with wooden boxes marked by Chinese characters. The husband took a short stack of paper plates from under the counter and dealt out five of them, like cards. The plates were dirty, as if they’d been used to hold potted plants. I looked over at the kid. He was reading the goddamn Wall Street Journal.

The husband doled a series of herbs onto the plates, dipping into this box and that, constantly referring back to the list. At the end each plate was heaping with identical stacks of roots, twigs and husks. It looked like, if Tarzan was a salad chef. I glanced over at Dr. Ming and tried not to grimace, knowing she was going to insist I make The Tea and drink it.

She was already handing me the 8 1/2 x 11 printout of the recipe, which I remembered all too well. Six cups of water, bring to a boil, simmer for two hours.... The Tea, I should point out, doesn’t just taste like shit; it tastes like what I imagine diarrhea tastes like, the kind that comes out in all the wrong colors.

Her husband began bagging up the ingredients, dumping each plate into a paper bag. The plates went back under the counter.

“You drink every day, for five days,” said Dr. Ming. “Don’t touch eyes. Your hands, dirty. And, five days: No fried food. No duck. No grease,” she said, ticking off foods forbidden because they would retard healing.

And then she said one of the English language’s most unpleasant phrases:

“No coffee.”

How does this woman know what I love most? Last time she forbade me from eating pineapple, for chrissakes. I’ve been eating golden pineapples nearly every morning for roughly the past ten years. That I could cut out for five days if I had to, but coffee?

“No coffee?” I repeated, and if my eye wasn’t fucked-up I would have widened it.

“No coffee,” she asserted. I waited for her to say “Good boy” but all I got was a stern look.