Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [47]
At the welcome banquet, dessert was a flan loaded with rum. Max, who’d been sober ten years, was wolfing down the flan till I grabbed his spoon, interrupting the rapid round trips to his mouth.
“Rum, Max.”
“What?”
“The flan is full of rum.”
“Oh.”
The resort had swimming pools and a pure white sandy beach with a main building and numerous outlying bungalows. Each bungalow had a refrigerator with distilled water. Before I was fully awake, I brushed my teeth with tap water. We’d been told not to do that.
“Remember to brush your teeth with the bagged water,” I told Max.
“Of course,” said Max.
Max insisted that I turn over all my cash and identification to him. He would keep it safe in a brown khaki bandolier money belt under his fresh blue paper scrubs. I would get to wear the money belt the second half of the week. I had forgotten how much fun it was to have a roommate.
“I’ll keep a little pocket money,” I said.
“Sure,” said Max. “Just ask me if you need more.”
I walked the beach early in the morning and found a dead dog, legs up, bouncing in the surf. It could have happened anywhere.
On the way to breakfast I saw very well nourished vultures in the trees and nicely dressed laughing kids atop two-hundred-dollar dirt bikes.
Breakfast was fruit and eggs and bacon with waffles from overflowing platters on a giant buffet table or omelets cooked to order. The Reverend Calvin Peters, an Argentinean who made a living shepherding medical missions like ours, got us each to give him a few hundred dollars, which he would exchange for us for Honduran lempiras so we could have some spending money. He said that he could get us the best deal, since he would be exchanging a large amount. He also posted sign-up sheets for shopping trips he would arrange so we could buy local arts and crafts.
Peters was a smooth, soft man with thin arms and legs, silky silver brushed hair, and a small round belly that made him look a little bit pregnant or like a python who had swallowed a baby pig. His wife, who joined our trip with him in Houston, was about twenty-five years old and Barbie-doll bouncy.
We spent most of Sunday setting up the clinic so we could see patients the next morning. The clinic was going to be in a school. A peeling faded wooden sign announced ESCUELA J F KENNEDY. I got a lump in my throat.
Next to the school were weeds that looked like twelve-foot-high asparagus stalks, bearing individual red and yellow fruits the size of candlepin bowling balls. Subfreezing temperatures and the changing seasons give New England foliage a certain seriousness and discipline. I’ve never looked at an oak or maple tree and thought that there might have been a different way to do things. Here, next to the bright colors of the plants, the school’s gray concrete and gray wood trim made it nearly invisible.
Mark Twain said, “Coconut palms look like feather dusters that have been hit by lightning.” I wished I’d said it first.
The school had no plumbing or electricity. There were no windows, just chain-link mesh where windows should have been. For blackboards each room had a square section in the middle of the front wall where the concrete was more smoothed out than the rest of the wall. There was a one-story building and a two-story building, neither very big.
The dentists took the one-story building because it had a porch; they set up three dental chairs and could work in the open with plenty of air and sunlight. There were five dentists and five dental assistants who manned the three chairs in rotation, twisting, pulling, rocking, chiseling, and leveraging rotten teeth. People waiting to see the optometrists and doctors watched people get their teeth pulled while they stood in line.
Kids in the courtyard made impressive human pyramids and played soccer with a crumpled paper-and-tape ball. By the end of day one, they would all have tennis balls.
The optometrists took the upper floor of the two-story