Obviously, if I’d known he was Ninja I would’ve stayed home. Or at least dressed in something all-black and while rapidly moving my lips and speaking in broken English, insulted the power of his Cobra Strike Fist.
But he’d somehow intimidated a friend in to misrepresenting him. “Or, go see Dr. Hsu, he’s great!”. So off I trek to Chinatown after work because every few years I manage to get some mystery physical ailment. Few years ago it was “Fire-ribs”. Every time I breathed deeply it felt like I’d swallowed a bag of plastic cocktail swords. Before that, “Tingly-knee”. Weird, tingling sensations in my knee.
Both times I’d get MRI’s, x-rays, acupuncture, massage, nuclear bone scan, physical therapy. Even did psychic healing for the rib thing. Nothing. Everyone confounded. Then a year or two later, presto—mystery ailment gone.
This time its “Lava-wrist”. Wrist feels like there’s an intermittent flow of hot magma scorching through the veins. Have already been to two docs, x-rays, some kind of prescription only anti-inflammatories that were so strong they singed my eyebrows. The works. No tendonitis, no carpel tunnel, no clue.
And the added bonus side effect is the only thing that really causes it to throb and glow red is working out. And the double bonus side effect is since I’m not lifting at the gym, the pain is somehow lessened when I pick up Oreo Cookie Bars. You know, cookie-batter spread in to a pan then cut in to plank-size squares so instead of saying “Jesus, I just ate like four dozen cookies…”, you can say “Hmm, think I’ll just grab an Oreo Bar…” which is topped with like, entire Oreo cookies. Not even sprinkles, no they just like jam the whole cookie in to the batter like “What—you gonna send it back?”.
So yeah, my wrist feels better when I don’t get up at 6:30am to lift groan-producing weights over my head but instead hoist a delicate 9oz, 3400 calorie cookie bar in to my pie-hole. And the wrist somehow also accommodates doing curls with a refreshing little 14oz frozen mochachino. For breakfast. Must be the ice in the drink.
So yeah, now not only am I off the gym, but of course I’m getting oh, how do you say in your language, chunky? And when did the word chunky become even close to being some kind of cute way of saying “Two more Oreo bars away from dating Kirsty Alley?”. Be honest. At best, chunky is the out of shape, ugly cousin of hunky. Ever hear someone say “Oooh, he’s a chunk…I mean, hunk”. I didn’t think so.
Which is why I found myself walking a labyrinth of Chinatown backstreets until after an endless elevator ride I was in doctor Hzu’s (pronounced “Zhu” but they cleverly hide the z behind the capital H to throw you off the trail) office. He spoke basically no English and now that I think back, the only words I barely recognized sounded something like “Confucius say soon you cry like little boy on Ritalin”.
So I’m naked. On this guy’s table. In Chinatown. And he starts in on me. Immediately, I can tell he’s doing deep tissue work, like myfascial release. Which is kinda like a jackhammer inside each nerve fiber trying to eject itself through your skin. Its not uncommon to leave a myfascial session and have bruises and welts appear the next morning.
Twenty minutes in and I’m wiling to pay him to stop. At one point I give an honest to goodness little “squeak” of actual pain. Its like this total admission of surrender—I’m tapping out. And he laughs. Which I take as a sign that he likes me. Applauds my ability to acknoledge the battle I wage over my pain. But probably means, “Oh, you think that hurt…?”.
Two hours later and I’m bathed in sweat and soaked in fear. I feel like I missed a payment to loan sharks and they just baseball batted me senseless. My hands even hurt. He did this thing with his knuckles over the back of my hand that made my fingers twitch involuntarily.
At his desk, I bend down and get a pen in my mouth since my hands no longer function and scribble out a check. The elevator door opens downstairs, I hobble to the front doors of the office building/slaughterhouse and clank. The doors are locked. Really, honest to god this-is-an-office-building-and-its-closed-after-hours locked.
Mild panic. But seated just outside, next to the glass door on a folding metal chair is some old Chinese guy. He’s wearing one of those blue cotton Communist hats that look good on no one, even if they’re made “By every man, for every man”. But seeing it does get me to thinking, if us Americans get all our cheap mass-produced goods manufactured in China, who makes their stuff?
I whack the door and Communist guy turns and looks at me, unsmiling. Thank god. I motion to the door with my ear, the only non-bruised piece of cartilage I have left and shout “The door—its locked!”. He looks at me, shakes his head and returns to his culturally time honored practice of looking across the street. Inside my head I hear something like an elevator announcement ‘Panic level now rising”.
Forget back to Dr. Hsu’s office. I realize now his resting pulse never topped 68 despite the fact he was prepping me like a Sunday buffet dish and its clear he’s some kind of Asian Hannibal Lecter and I refuse to end up in his lo-mein.
I hear something downstairs, and find some guy in his office, the desks of which I kid you not have stacks of paper like, four feet high. Ernest Hemingway didn't generate as much paper as this guy. And he’s wiping down his desk. With an old pair of underwear (TRUE FACT NOT INCLUDED FOR GRATUITOUS FICTIONALIZED EFFECTS). I swear. I can even see that like, bands of red and blue thread in the waistband.
The guy refuses to unlock the door. Starts yelling at me, “Where your from, where you from!?”. Remember, doctor lockjaw upstairs has already squeezed all the blood out of my body so I had to pump my mouth a few times before actual words came out and when they did it sounded like “Doctorwhoimeanzoodoctorwhozoo”.
Underwear-wiper angrily picks up his phone, dials a number that rolls over to a recorded message and starts yelling in Chinese. My passing knowledge of provincial Mandarin serves me well and I make out the sentence, “He is bruised but alive. Come quickly for make eating on him doctor…”.
And I manage to scamper up the stairs, just as some old man (Do Chinese males come in any other version btw? Are they like already 68 years old when they’re born or what?) and I whimper and he pulls out some kind of oversize key ring that has just about every metal key ever produced and the next thing I know I’m limping down the street sucking cool air, looking like one of those trailer park felons from COPS.
By the way what is it with those wacky Floridians you put ‘em in a trailer park and its like BAM they have to run out, knock over the nearest 7-11 then try to outrun the police in a wife-beater and torn shorts. “Bad boys, bad boys, what ‘cha gone do…”.
Its day four after my escape from Ninja-ville. I’m sure doctor Lecter Hzu is happily plying his trade on other unsuspecting clients. The bruises are almost gone. My wife took photos, laughing the whole time, to add to my weird ailments topped by weirder treatments file.
Oh, my wrist hurts like hell still. But in a way, not the same kind of pain. This pain is somehow tolerable. Not different, just hmmm, familiar. Like when you’re in a bad relationship but you know it could be worse and sure, every once in a while you think about leaving them but who knows how much worse it could be and why risk it? And besides, I have almost full range of movement again with my fingers, so why mess with a good thing.
But oddly, every once in awhile the phone rings, and the caller i.d., just reads “unknown caller”. And I have this weird urge to grab the phone shout in to the receiver fru twristed wrips “Wru have insulted Eagle Claw Scrhool and nrow you pay….eiahh!!”.
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