It’s unclear what exactly brings it on. Sometimes the culprit is an oncoming winter cold. Other times it’s work-related stress. Whatever the catalyst, the result is a rash known as dishydrosis, an appearance of tiny blisters on my hands and fingers. These water-filled tyrants itch and fester for about a week before retreating and disappearing completely on their own.
On a recent trip to my parents’ home, a small outbreak erupted on my hands. My ever-alert mother was the first to notice it while giving me her routine once-over; a kiss followed by a scrutinizing glance. She looks me over much like a grocer inspects fruit and vegetables before setting them out for display. Sometimes there’s a second silent glance toward my wife which seems to say, “What have you done to him now?” Mom’s examination always ends with the same assessment: “Have you lost weight?” Of course I haven’t. I’ve weighed the same for ten years. I surmise that I must simply appear smaller because of my parents’ ever-increasing girth; girth that comes from a steady diet of foods cooked in lard, butter, or lard and butter.
When my mom sees my troubled hands, I’m forced to spend the next ten minutes hiding them while trying to convince her that the situation is under control. One by one, I dismiss her assertions that my dishydrosis is hives, leprosy or any number of obscure flesh-eating viruses she and her Mahjong buddies at the retirement community have heard about, read about or concocted. For some reason, when mothers get together they presume their years of child-raising experience equates to having a medical degree.
After I’ve sufficiently rejected all of my mom’s paranoid diagnoses, it’s my dad’s turn to chime in. Years of living with my mom, a woman who questions nothing and believes everything he says, has infused him with an air of infallibility. This allows him to opine wildly and offer solutions to ‘whatever ails ya.’ When he sees my hands, he boasts that he has ‘just the thing’ for my ‘problem,’ a cream that he uses whenever he’s hit with a rogue rash.
I protest that my affliction is neither rogue nor in need of anything more than a dab of hydrocortisone, but my dad is already on his way to his medicine cabinet. There’s a bounce in his step, and if he were a dog, his tail would be wagging and his mouth would be agape bearing that chipper canine smile. When he returns, he hands me the tube proudly declaring that he got it from a Mexican ‘Pharmacia,’ only he pronounces it with a hard ‘k’, so it sounds like he’s mispronouncing the word ‘Formica.’
This is indicative of my parents’ ongoing problem with the Spanish language. Not only do they mispronounce any foreign word, they also confuse the language of Spanish with the culture of Mexican. When my mom hears someone speaking Spanish, she’ll often comment, usually in hushed tones with a discreet lip-paralysis that rivals a ventriloquist, that the person is speaking ‘Mexican.’ My wife has tried to correct her on this on a number of occasions, saying, “Mom, he’s speaking Spanish. He is of Mexican descent.” This only confuses the issue for my poor mother. Later in the same conversation, when my mom inquires about one of my wife’s friends, she asks, “Say, how’s your Spanish friend?” This is offensive on a number of levels. First, Mom’s missed my wife’s earlier point entirely. Secondly, it presumes that my wife has but one friend of any given minority group. My wife, the constant educator, tries her best when she says, “You mean, Maria, my Mexican friend?” This invariably leads to an apology from my mom that she ‘never knows what those people want to be called.’
The inherent racism in these comments is hard to digest, but my wife and I have learned to just let them pass. It is truly a case of being unable to teach old dogs new tricks. So, we endure every visit with stories about ‘Spanish people vandalizing the neighborhood,’ ‘negroes dominating college and pro sports,’ and how ‘those Indians are a pleasant group of people when they’re not drunk or bitching about keeping our freeways off of their land.’ My dad can’t help but add, “Some pretty girls though, with that there darker skin and them there brown eyes.”
Since moving to Phoenix ten years ago, my parents now get nearly all of their medication, prescription and otherwise, from Mexico. It’s not that they don’t have good medical insurance, because they do. They simply do their ‘doctoring,’ as they put it, in Mexico because ‘it’s cheaper down there.’ They think nothing of spending $100 in gas and a wasting an entire day to save the forty dollars an American prescription would have cost. Yes, I know, it’s incredibly short-sighted, but my parents’ frugality is well-founded. It must stem from the Depression-era mindset of their childhood. It’s the only thing I can link to their incredible stinginess. To use one of my dad’s jokes on him: “He’s so tight, if you put a quarter up his ass he’d shit you out two dimes and a nickel.”
As children, we all wore hand-me-downs. In fact, I think that some of my pants were once worn by my dad when he was my age. Generic equivalents of America’s favorite cereals, cookies, snacks and sodas filled our cupboards. We were recycling long before the rest of the world, though it probably was a different kind of recycling. When we were toddlers, my siblings and I were forced to share a bath. When we were old enough to exhibit a bit more modesty, we were allowed to take separate baths, yet all three of us still used the same bath water. Huge fights erupted as we each clamored to use the bath first, because, lets face it, I wasn’t the only one peeing in the water.
Probably the preeminent example of my parents’ thriftiness happened when I was eleven years old. Mom and dad needed a babysitter to care for my brother, sister and me while they took a two-week vacation to Hawaii. Unable to bribe a grandparent, relative or even a kindly neighbor, mom and dad put an ad in the local newspaper hoping to find some willing sucker to watch their three kids in exchange for room, board and a hundred twenty dollars. Sure it was the 1982, but that breaks down to roughly nine dollars a day. That’s not even three dollars per kid, per day. So, I have two questions: What kind of person agrees to work for that price? And what kind of parent thinks that that person is a suitable caregiver for their children?
I’m not saying it didn’t all work out, but the experience was truly traumatizing. And I don’t say that to be dramatic. I say it because I remember absolutely nothing of this woman who lived in our house and presumably cared, fed and shuttled us around for two weeks. I can only retell this story because it was recalled to me by my younger sister who remembers all of it. She was nine, I was eleven, so I’ve completely blocked out those two weeks of my life. Intensive therapy might bring that time into greater clarity, but I’m not so sure I want to know what happened.
I begrudgingly rubbed dad’s Mexican cream into my hands despite the fact that the worst of my symptoms had subsided and recovery was well underway. It was unclear what was in this cream as the metallic tube was labeled only in Spanish, but Dad extolled the product’s benefits. “I don’t know what’s in it, but any time I have a rash or an itch, I put some of that on there and I’m as good as new.” It made me wonder how many rashes this guy suffers from and if any of it is hereditary.
I begrudgingly rubbed dad’s Mexican cream into my hands despite the fact that the worst of my symptoms had subsided and recovery was well underway. It was unclear what was in this cream as the metallic tube was labeled only in Spanish, but Dad extolled the product’s benefits. “I don’t know what’s in it, but any time I have a rash or an itch, I put some of that on there and I’m as good as new.” It made me wonder how many rashes this guy suffers from and if any of it is hereditary.
As I replaced the cap, the sales pitch continued, “There’s absolutely no odor to the stuff and it doesn’t stain your clothes and it cleans up really easily.” What’s this guy’s deal, I wondered. Okay, you like your Mexican Magic Cream. I’m applying it. You can end your Amway sales pitch now. But it continued. “It works on athlete’s foot, ringworm or any other fungus that might sprout up. I even put it on bug bites.” “Holy shit,” I think to myself, “You’re a fucking itchy
mess, aren’t you, Dad?”
Then, as if I need further motivation, my mom chimes in. “A lot of that stuff we get in Mexico works just as good as anything we could get here. Makes you wonder why it’s so much cheaper over there.” I can’t resist any longer. “It’s because most of those medications are either counterfeit or expired,” I blurt. This gives my dad something to ponder. There’s a long, pregnant pause. “Well, I wouldn’t doubt it,” my dad declares. “I wouldn’t doubt it.” Repeating the same phrase is my dad’s way of emphasizing his points. I of course had no proof of my previous statement other than what I had overheard in other family discussions, but I was hoping my dad would buy it. He is after all, a guy who loves nothing more than to spout erroneous misinformation. He’s perfected it into an art form.
Imagine any hoax email you’ve ever gotten in your inbox. Well, since my parents don’t have internet access, they hear these hoax stories from friends of theirs who do have email access yet aren’t smart enough to know that they’re scams. My dad then perpetuates these stories, only when he re-tells them, he owns the origin of the myth. For instance, remember after 9/11 there was a bogus email circulating that warned of terrorists planning attacks in shopping malls in Los Angeles? Well, my dad relayed that story to us as if it was firsthand information. “Say, now I don’t want to scare you kids, but we have a neighbor out here that has a daughter about your kid’s age. She was dating one of them there Middle-eastern fellas, and she overheard him and his buddies talking about setting off a bomb in a shopping mall over there in Los Angeles.”
I didn’t even know how to respond. If it was an email, I could just delete it, or reply with a disingenuous, “Thanks for the heads up.” But here it was coming to me face-to-face, and I felt compelled to respond. Now, I have no doubt that this story was presented to my dad much the same way, but by making it a firsthand account I suppose he felt it added credence to his warning.
All I could muster was some lame excuse that my wife and I do all of our holiday shopping online and therefore he and my mom shouldn’t be worried. This excuse seemed to neutralize my dad since he had not yet heard a story of how ‘those A-rabs’ could launch an attack over ‘that there internet.’
Despite his shortcomings, my dad is a fairly generous guy. He always wants to take care and provide for his kids the best way he knows how. But as we’ve gotten older, he’s begun clinging to increasingly tangential methods of pleasing us. As he watches me rub his ointment into my hand and says, “Whether that works or not, why don’t you keep that? I can always get more in Mexico.” I’ve learned to just accept these gifts and be grateful for his generosity. In a closet in my home, there’s an ever-growing pile of dad’s ‘gifts.’ Among the clutter is at least two pair of shoes, some rat poison, a gopher trap, a digital camera that he received for test-driving a car, a coat emblazoned with the name of a local seed corn company, and a painting of The Last Supper. Come to think of it, it’s less a closet and more a Salvation Army repository.
The next morning as we all sat down to the breakfast table, my dad inquired about the results of his miracle potion. “That stuff clear up your rash,” he asked, cocksure that he’d introduced me to a twenty-first century magic bullet. “Well, it didn’t clear it up, but it’s better, I guess.” My delivery had the subtext of: “My rash was already getting better, dumbass, but since it’s so important to you, I’ll give you your little victory.” My dad slammed the table with his fist in glee, “What the hell did I tell ya? That shit just plain works!”
As the rest of us spent the next five minutes mopping up spilled juice and coffee, my dad sat back proudly, scraped another pat of butter onto his cinnamon roll and smiled out the window, secure in the knowledge that he is the Ponce de Leon of his time, having successfully discovered the Fountain of Histamine Blockers.
Curious if he’d done any due diligence at all, I asked my dad if he knew what his magic ointment was typically prescribed for. He looked at me like a prosecution witness stares down a particularly wily defense attorney. “Itches and rashes,” he says, a bit put off. “What the hell do you think?” I had to stifle a smile, “Yes,” I think to myself, “that’s exactly how they advertise this stuff on TV: lots of colorful graphics, energetic music and an energetic baritone announcer claiming, “For itches and rashes!”
It’s clear to me now that my dad had just been sold a bill of goods, and somewhere in Nogales was a Mexican pharmacist counting the money collected from thousands of English-only speaking ‘patients,’ gullible enough to not only believe his diagnoses, but to buy his ‘prescriptions.’ The pharmacist assuredly uses his profits to fund his own children’s education, probably at a private American high school somewhere in the Phoenix area. I smile again as I realize that my parents are unwittingly contributing to an illegal immigration problem they so vehemently protest.
A couple of days later, when we returned home from Phoenix, my dishydrosis now nearly gone, I see the tube of ointment lying next to my computer. The Spanish words imprinted on the tube were mocking me, and suddenly it dawned on me. I had no idea what the hell I had been putting on my hands.
Curious, I logged onto a Spanish-to-English translation website and typed in the ‘indicationes,’ – which, despite my negligible grasp on Spanish, I at least knew meant ‘indications.’ I hit ‘enter’ and saw the transcribed words appear in English: “For treatment of vaginal yeast infections.”
Yes, it seems my dad’s vagina is giving him a lot of problems. Maybe he should pay a visit to his médico de vagina, or, at the very least, brush up on his Mexican so those Spanish people don’t continue to take advantage of him the next time he visits the Formica.
Yes, it seems my dad’s vagina is giving him a lot of problems. Maybe he should pay a visit to his médico de vagina, or, at the very least, brush up on his Mexican so those Spanish people don’t continue to take advantage of him the next time he visits the Formica.
