Preface: Ghosts

Bootcamp: a date on my calendar, a charge on my credit card. I must prepare. I must destroy that which obscures my identity. I must let my instructor see ME, not the dictated (me), the (me) grafted over ME. I don’t want to be a chode, anymore. And I like writing.

I have seen MYSELF – known MYSELF – in blinks of glory, then, nothing.

“Don’t give a FUCK!” is a slogan I’d really like to adapt. A slogan I’d like to tattoo. I once met a woman who didn’t give a fuck. She was so devoid of a fuck to give, it radiated off her. She tattooed it on other people, tattooed it on the world.

I want that.

Her name was Dr. Greene. She was an endocrinologist.

The grassy sigh of late summer wisped through the windows. We sat in neat desks, in neat rows, making neat, little small talk.

The neat little small talk whispered with two recurring words: bitch and cancer. These words would gestate into a theme, into inspiration.

A fragile old lady floated through the door, snapping our bodies to attention.

She possessed a delicate cartoon quality. She looked like the granny owner of Tweedy Bird. A gray knot of hair hovered over her head, tied with a lavish blue ribbon. At the time, I found this comically cute.

It wasn’t.

It was her idea of a joke.

She beelined across the front of the class, distributing neat stacks of paper to eager hands. “Take one,” she commanded in a booming voice. “Then pass it back.” Her voice contradicted her grannyness. It cracked in a throaty way as if a demon shrieked cranky orders from her belly.

"This is Comparative Endocrinology. If you’re not here for Comparative Endocrinology, leave. Now.”

No one moved.

“Good. My name is Dr. Greene. I am an Endocrinologist. Before we discuss the syllabus, let's briefly go over some housekeeping. As some of you know, I have cancer and will die shortly. Probably before the end of the semester. Should that happen, Dr. Hanson will finish teaching this course.”

Someone made a noise, a murmur. It was a girl named Gracy. Not Grace, Gracy. She may or may not have wanted to become a veterinarian. She loved showing people pictures of her sister’s baby. She loved babies.

“How…” Gracy tried to say, justifying the murmur. “How…that’s so sad…how….”

Dr. Greene gazed at Gracy. Her eyes appeared huge and monstrous behind her glasses. Then she waved her hand and said, “See me after class.”

Gracy never came back.

The semester progressed and I displayed my dazzling mediocrity as a science student. Dr. Greene regarded me merely as a name that got 70s on exams, until one morning in late October.

We were in lab. My lab partner was a chubby girl named Lesley who wore beaded jewelry and was only capable of talking about the MCATs and her future career as an optometrist. I humored her for weeks with head bobs and “uh-huh”s.

Then, I snapped. In a blink of glory.

After cataloguing the med schools she was applying to next year, she aggressively inquired what schools were in my “top five.”

I gazed at her. I hope my eyes appeared huge and monstrous behind my lab goggles.

“I don’t have a top five. I have a top zero.”

“Huh? What? But where are going to apply?”

“Nowhere.”

“Oh. So you’re going to take a year off, work in a lab, get some clinical experience then apply. That’s good for people who don’t have the GPA to apply right out of college. What kind of lab do you want to work –”

“I’m not working in any lab. I’m going to write a novel.”

She laughed. “No, seriously. What do you want to do?”

“Seriously. I want to be a novelist.”

She laughed again. “Then why are you a bio major? Why are you in this lab? Why would you –”

I flipped my hand up as if to stop traffic. “Look. Could you just shut up. You talk every week and I’d rather just do the lab. I want to be a novelist. You don’t understand that. And, in a way, I really don’t understand you. Let’s just concentrate on getting the lab done and cut all the nonsensical bullshit.”

It felt as if the words slipped out of me, like a burp. I immediately wanted to apologize, to justify my soliloquy, to blunt the sharpness of the truth.

But before the urge manifested into language, a cackle erupted behind us. It sounded like a witch flying away on a broom.

Lesley and I turned around. Dr. Greene hunched over our lab bench like a question mark.

“Ha!” she repeated, this time more for showmanship than actual amusement. Then her smile vaporized and she instructed, “Get your samples on the spectrometer.”

That moment haunts me like a ghost. Her witch-like cackle still echoes like a horsewhip. It reverberates in my hollowness, when I act like (me) rather than ME. Though, if that moment were a piece in the “Don’t give a FUCK!” puzzle, its conjoining piece clicked a few weeks later on the morning of The Lecture.

The Lecture was such an artful exemplar of not giving a fuck it warrants the reverence of capitalization.

It was a chilly morning but Dr. Greene came to class. She had cancelled the last three lectures because her health was failing. She died two weeks after The Lecture, but that morning she shined gloriously.

“We have a lot to cover,” she stated, placing her briefcase on the lecturing podium, “And very little time. I will only cover the most important and pertinent topics. You can fill in the other material with the assigned readings.”

We all perked up in our neat desks, in our neat rows, and quieted our neat, little small talk.

Dr. Greene went to the chalkboard and drew the L-shape of a graph, then two lines sloping upward. Both lines began flat then one shot up exponentially while the other line increased gradually then leveled off.

“Can anyone tell me what this graph represents?”

A bevy of nerd hands shot up. They spat obvious answers about hormones and chemicals and transmitters.

Dr. Greene didn’t even bother to say if they were right or wrong. She politely listened to a nerd answer then pointed to another hand. At one point she said, “This isn’t in the textbook. You have to really consider what this graph represents. It requires some inductive thinking.”

More hands shot up with answers less obvious and more absurd. When Dr. Greene heard enough, she informed us, "This graph represents the age which men and women masturbate for the first time."

A silent gasp flooded the room. Shock and fear eclipsed the faces of all those expecting a comfortable morning of note taking and fact regurgitating. Which was everyone.

I’d like to believe I was the least surprised.

The smile I saw so briefly after The Cackle remained plastered on Dr. Greene’s face the entire morning of The Lecture, which covered everything from the proper insertion of female condoms to using anal beads without injury.

At one point, she contemplatively raised a finger and said, “I brought some field equipment. Hold on.”

She went into her briefcase and produced a purple dildo.

An ostentatiously religious guy got up and stormed out.

Someone raised their hand and asked, “Is this going to be on the final?”

“No,” Dr. Greene snapped. “This is too important for the final.”

This woman, I remember thinking, truly does not give a fuck.

And her ghost haunts ME. It haunts every decision I don’t make. Committing to bootcamp is ME pulling a purple dildo out of a briefcase, it’s ME Cackling in the face of (me).