CORONA VIRUS: ©Jesse Rhines.2020, March-April
I am so lucky! Sitting here with the television news blaring repeated warnings against going outside. I sit here cozy. Unlike those unfortunates out there I have, just by accident, mostly, enough food to last a month. I can strut about my apartment stopping to do dips on the side of my bed, then glute raises in the same spot. Bracing my feet on the “closet” door I bend over the bed and perform two dozen excellent push ups. The doctors say we’ll be here at least a couple of weeks and now the gym is closed. But I can do sit-ups using my half deflated medicine ball. At school I’d see other disabled folks whose transport was accomplished in an electric wheelchair they guided with their chins—and I can do all this with my natural body. I am such a lucky man.
Zampoughi was what popped into my mind while reading about Zamperini, the army officer star of Laura Hilldenbrand’s Unbroken, a book about the Torrance California native and storied WWII Italian-American who was enslaved in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. While Hildenbrand reports Zamperini and others dancing in their prisons at war’s end I doubt they knew of the Zampoughi dance. She did, however, report that life in the prison was comparable to that lived by Blacks enslaved in antebellum America. In Zamperini’s antebellum he was a former Olympic runner while Zampoughi was performed as Lilly’s celebratory dance by standing above her lover post their “war of the sexes” in bed. “Lilly Done the Zampoughi every time I pulled her coattail,” is how author, song writer Melvin Van Peebles reminisced, She “gets up and dancing and everything…Make my heart bust with pride.”
Cloistered at home-as-refuge from the newly discovered Corona Virus, Covid-19, I was a bit of a prisoner, as the President lately says, of war too. I can’t go out but the virus news lures me. I could be a patient and be the center of TV attention. But I have work to do at home: write my book, adjust my royalties, clean up my photos, transfer my videos. But the hospitals and the doctors lure me. Will I go? Will I go out and get the virus? My pre-existing conditions make me a prime candidate for a TV event at the hospital. UNBROKEN is the book I’m reading and compared with the WWII POWs in Japanese prisons I too am stuck in a small place. But can they compare, really? I’m alone. Prisoners had guards all around them. I have food and sometimes receive food from handicapped services. How can I not stay at home to thwart the virus?
Lt. Louis Zamperini had Mutsuhiro Watanabe as nemesis Japanese guard and torturer right there in the prison camp with him. Black slaves had overseers, masters, mistresses, owner’s children and sometimes even their flesh and blood—multiple nemeses right there on the plantation with them who were their torturers from can’t-see-in-the-morning until can’t-see-at-night and twice as bad if they even tweaked a rule. Todays’ Black prisoners got the warden, vile guards and predatory fellow prisoners to avoid, cater to, or contend with inside and poverty, ignorance—and the state outside.
My crib is a mess. 15 years I’ve been in this apartment and never been able to clean it in one session. Cocooned here now for 21 days maybe it’s time I gave it a try. When you think about it this virus may reduce the number of deaths even as more people die from it. Pandemic is bad and good because those who would have died in crashes and murders have been sequestered at home and thereby saved. Rather than reduce the population pandemic allows population to rise faster but focused on the older, sicker—and wiser. It may leave a more youthful, more reckless population.
My landlord, can you believe it, my landlord brought me brandy and food. Well, folks here have seen me dragging about with heart failure for ten years. The landlord damn near cried yelling at me to stay in the crib. “Dr. Rhines,” he said, “of all the people you can’t go out!” When doctors yanked my prostate out soon after I first moved in here office and maintenance workers would nod and speak—not normal in LA—as I strolled behind that walker taking what seemed like half an hour to get down the hall. That was ten years ago now.
But just to stay in here… I get so itchy. A bit of chocolate, some nuts, beer, god damn it, fresh air! It’s now the fourth week inside. Just looking at this living room makes me a little nauseous. Posters, plaques, images from my travels and diplomas attest my interests but this baroque wall covering could use an update. The floor has not been mopped or even swept since my home care work had her car stolen. The police found it some blocks away but it was then impounded and she texted to ask if I might know of a way she could get the money to get it out. No, I said, but not in so many words. And then she got her foot sprained and was laid in for a six-week recovery. I keep looking at the floor. I used to sweep and mop it myself about once a month five or so years ago. But when the official heart failure diagnosis came I couldn’t even push the furniture around to sweep under it. I live in what was once a big-time office building in 1924 but is now renovated loft apartments. The floors are office slick so furniture can move around with fair ease.
It is funny, the things you find sometimes when the furniture gets moved. The other day my care worker and I were fixing to clean up and low and behold she lifted the cover on the little couch and held up my blood pressure cuff. I had been looking for that thing for weeks after I got this funny little jiggle in my whole body and some weird kind of dizziness. I wanted to take my blood pressure but could not find the machine and its cuff. Well, that’s good. Now I have it, just in case I need it again.
Out of applesauce, my preferred topping, I had to soak my graham crackers in Hennessy. It was the only alcohol I had left. I loved the taste of brandy and graham. What is graham anyway? I like rye bread and like rye whiskey when mixed in a Sazerac cocktail. I know that rye is a plant, a grain of some kind. What is graham?
I see on television that my peoples in prison fare badly in the virus period. Their sequester places are far less accommodating than is my one-person loft. Their food is guaranteed so they don’t have that to worry about but the tv shows bunk beds mounted side by side less than one yard apart. In fact, Black Americans are some 80 percent of corona deaths in some locales outside of prison. That’s another reason why I am lucky. I was able to leave the crowded, poverty-stricken areas of my youth and my disability has allowed me to remain untethered to such areas in my encroaching dotage.
At least I can still get dressed to elevator downstairs to get or send the mail. It is a little more complicated now given the ever increasing Corona guidelines. Normally, I’d be cool dressed in terry cloth pj pants and a tee shirt. But now I also don one of the facemarks left from my heart transplant period and gloves I have to wear in sunlight thanks to my diminished immune system but which now protect against my touching mailbox surfaces other tenants or the post persons themselves may have inadvertently dropped Covind-19 on.
This morning, Monday 4/6/2020, I took advantage of expected rain to ride my electric wheelchair to the supermarket. It wasn’t yet 10 a.m. and I suspected the rain would deter other shoppers. There were few people in the Smart and Final store and supplies were limited. Only one bunch of collard greens left and no regular sugar. I had to buy confectioners type. I moved quickly and paid much more than I normally would have because I chose very large versions of almost everything.
As I watch tv news again I must count myself so lucky. Families are in distress. The kids must attend school even as they and their parents occupy their homesteads. Family members get sick and must self-quarantine in some isolated location within the home. Mothers carry meals and leave them outside the family member's place of isolation. I’ve seen middle-class white mothers on tv tearfully leaving meals at the door of an errant room. When and where I grew up my numerous siblings would have had to congregate somewhere else while one of us sequestered in a bedroom.
I miss being at the gym down the street. I remember when it took me almost a half hour it seemed like to walk the block and a half there from my crib. Those were painful days and some missed opportunities. I’ve had a number of personal trainers there. The first I called Scandinavia, but his name was Daniel. He was funny and we got along well together. I haven’t been able to connect with many folks in LA and I was sad when Scandinavia left the gym. He’d been training some big movie star so maybe training that crowd would be more profitable. I recall this other dude, Kenyon, who had some muscle and was real easy going. We talked every now and then and he told me of a different gym where he also worked out. Why two gyms, I wondered, sounded strange and finally wasteful to me. But he said it was closer to his crib and said something about how his wife was somehow involved. Certain times of year my gym was crowded with big muscle folks whom I’d notice, especially the women, and then they’d disappear before I could really chat them up. There had been one woman who worked at the gym who’d kind of indicated interest but my health was too iffy and since I was new there I wasn’t sure of the protocol. But when the Black Panther movie came out the Black sisters and brothers talked about the movie and once when, Kenyon, that muscled dude with the second gym called out to me, Mr. Jesse they called me, I crossed my chest with by arms and bounced my shoulders in a Wakanda salute. Everybody busted out laughing. In DC we lived two blocks from Kenyon Street, NW, so I easily remembered his name.
Weeks later I saw that dude at the gym and he had become very svelte with well defined muscles. He said the other gym was where he tightened his game and then he confided that he’d been sick. Cancer. The group he worked out with at my gym lamented his diagnosis and they’d all seen me limping around or driving in on my electric wheelchair. I soon found out that one of that group had been coping with the continual, never pausing pain of sickle cell. These were all Black dudes but one Latino dude I bonded with told me he’d had spinal marrow transplants since he was a kid. He’d built his body up pretty well, too. We were all extremely upset to learn of Kenyon’s death. I still think of him often.
Today I finally got Nortia Press, publisher of my BLUE SKY FOR BLACK AMERICA, to turn over the $11.13 royalty for 2019. It has been very tense because he wanted to send it Paypal and I dropped PayPal when my account got hacked there. He repeatedly said he’d send it by check but it never arrived. For two days I’ve tried to re-up in PayPal but was rejected until this afternoon when their chat told me to redo my password. I sent Nortia a request for $11.13 and they finally sent it to me but PayPal charged me $.62 cents. Nortia didn’t understand that charge either and sent me an additional $5.
Salsa. The first time my internal defibrillator went off was during a three point turn on the dance floor. I’d had two or three atrial ablations but tonight I saw a Salsero have one on a tv show.
What is “elective” heart surgery for one who has heart failure? A woman’s dad’s elective surgery was put off in favor of Covid-19 pandemic patients and he died days later. Perhaps ablation of a heart arrhythmia might be elective. The salsero, for instance, had to consent to this procedure on the tv show. The the tv doctors had to wait while the patient tossed around pros and cons before he consented. I kind of recall having to do that too, but I actually did not think not consenting was an option. The patient has to choose to die in normal times and Covid-19 exigencies denied that woman’s father that choice.
Choice is a problematic concept today. My friend, Martin, of Malmo, Sweden, finally returned my email telling him I was watching “Modus”, a Swedish crime drama shot in Stockholm. I was surprised he’d never heard of it so I relayed a bit of the plot: Murders of blond women in New York City and in Stockholm brings a NY detective for a long stay in Sweden. Little choice for those murdered blonds. And on “Modus” today is the episode from 2017 where the blond female American President goes missing on a State visit to Stockholm. The brunette female Swedish detective who finds the President confides that one of the President’s male FBI entourage raped her when she worked for the FBI in America. No choice there. “At least,” he slapped her face rather than murdered her, was the President's response. His choice.
PBS tv showed an innovative way of displaying the lack of choice with technology approaching stuff imagined in sci-fi screen programming. Many recent emissions show some distant authority projected before remote inferiors-in-rank as moving holograms that can even answer questions if not fully interact. A Jewish holocaust center has spent a week filming individual survivors answering a range of questions a future viewer might ask years after the survivor’s death. Of course, in America, at least, the choice allowed those once youthful prisoners is exemplified by the film Sophie’s Choice, where a Jewish mother must choose, in a split second, which of her children to keep while the other child the Nazis send to instant death. Makes my skin crawl.
In the late 1980s, the biggest problem I had with the Peoples’ Republic of China was that under Mao minority groups were marginalized. Peoples like Tibetians and Uyghurs were forbidden to speak their traditional languages. That’s also how white Americans treated Native Americans at least until the mid-20th century. As I watch tv news today, those Uyghurs in China, some having violently protested against Han, ethnicity of the Chinese majority, domination are rounded up and placed by the millions in re-education camps. Uyghurs don’t like it but the Chinese Communist (Han) Party mostly denies the detention even happens. I’m pretty sure any of those detainees would be cool with the type of sequestration Covid-19 has encouraged in the USA. There is choice in at least the California version: Stay in the crib or pay a fine and/or potentially infect those you encounter in the streets or once you do return home. April 14, 2020
I am so lucky! Sitting here with the television news blaring repeated warnings against going outside. I sit here cozy. Unlike those unfortunates out there I have, just by accident, mostly, enough food to last a month. I can strut about my apartment stopping to do dips on the side of my bed, then glute raises in the same spot. Bracing my feet on the “closet” door I bend over the bed and perform two dozen excellent push ups. The doctors say we’ll be here at least a couple of weeks and now the gym is closed. But I can do sit-ups using my half deflated medicine ball. At school I’d see other disabled folks whose transport was accomplished in an electric wheelchair they guided with their chins—and I can do all this with my natural body. I am such a lucky man.
Zampoughi was what popped into my mind while reading about Zamperini, the army officer star of Laura Hilldenbrand’s Unbroken, a book about the Torrance California native and storied WWII Italian-American who was enslaved in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. While Hildenbrand reports Zamperini and others dancing in their prisons at war’s end I doubt they knew of the Zampoughi dance. She did, however, report that life in the prison was comparable to that lived by Blacks enslaved in antebellum America. In Zamperini’s antebellum he was a former Olympic runner while Zampoughi was performed as Lilly’s celebratory dance by standing above her lover post their “war of the sexes” in bed. “Lilly Done the Zampoughi every time I pulled her coattail,” is how author, song writer Melvin Van Peebles reminisced, She “gets up and dancing and everything…Make my heart bust with pride.”
Cloistered at home-as-refuge from the newly discovered Corona Virus, Covid-19, I was a bit of a prisoner, as the President lately says, of war too. I can’t go out but the virus news lures me. I could be a patient and be the center of TV attention. But I have work to do at home: write my book, adjust my royalties, clean up my photos, transfer my videos. But the hospitals and the doctors lure me. Will I go? Will I go out and get the virus? My pre-existing conditions make me a prime candidate for a TV event at the hospital. UNBROKEN is the book I’m reading and compared with the WWII POWs in Japanese prisons I too am stuck in a small place. But can they compare, really? I’m alone. Prisoners had guards all around them. I have food and sometimes receive food from handicapped services. How can I not stay at home to thwart the virus?
Lt. Louis Zamperini had Mutsuhiro Watanabe as nemesis Japanese guard and torturer right there in the prison camp with him. Black slaves had overseers, masters, mistresses, owner’s children and sometimes even their flesh and blood—multiple nemeses right there on the plantation with them who were their torturers from can’t-see-in-the-morning until can’t-see-at-night and twice as bad if they even tweaked a rule. Todays’ Black prisoners got the warden, vile guards and predatory fellow prisoners to avoid, cater to, or contend with inside and poverty, ignorance—and the state outside.
My crib is a mess. 15 years I’ve been in this apartment and never been able to clean it in one session. Cocooned here now for 21 days maybe it’s time I gave it a try. When you think about it this virus may reduce the number of deaths even as more people die from it. Pandemic is bad and good because those who would have died in crashes and murders have been sequestered at home and thereby saved. Rather than reduce the population pandemic allows population to rise faster but focused on the older, sicker—and wiser. It may leave a more youthful, more reckless population.
My landlord, can you believe it, my landlord brought me brandy and food. Well, folks here have seen me dragging about with heart failure for ten years. The landlord damn near cried yelling at me to stay in the crib. “Dr. Rhines,” he said, “of all the people you can’t go out!” When doctors yanked my prostate out soon after I first moved in here office and maintenance workers would nod and speak—not normal in LA—as I strolled behind that walker taking what seemed like half an hour to get down the hall. That was ten years ago now.
But just to stay in here… I get so itchy. A bit of chocolate, some nuts, beer, god damn it, fresh air! It’s now the fourth week inside. Just looking at this living room makes me a little nauseous. Posters, plaques, images from my travels and diplomas attest my interests but this baroque wall covering could use an update. The floor has not been mopped or even swept since my home care work had her car stolen. The police found it some blocks away but it was then impounded and she texted to ask if I might know of a way she could get the money to get it out. No, I said, but not in so many words. And then she got her foot sprained and was laid in for a six-week recovery. I keep looking at the floor. I used to sweep and mop it myself about once a month five or so years ago. But when the official heart failure diagnosis came I couldn’t even push the furniture around to sweep under it. I live in what was once a big-time office building in 1924 but is now renovated loft apartments. The floors are office slick so furniture can move around with fair ease.
It is funny, the things you find sometimes when the furniture gets moved. The other day my care worker and I were fixing to clean up and low and behold she lifted the cover on the little couch and held up my blood pressure cuff. I had been looking for that thing for weeks after I got this funny little jiggle in my whole body and some weird kind of dizziness. I wanted to take my blood pressure but could not find the machine and its cuff. Well, that’s good. Now I have it, just in case I need it again.
Out of applesauce, my preferred topping, I had to soak my graham crackers in Hennessy. It was the only alcohol I had left. I loved the taste of brandy and graham. What is graham anyway? I like rye bread and like rye whiskey when mixed in a Sazerac cocktail. I know that rye is a plant, a grain of some kind. What is graham?
I see on television that my peoples in prison fare badly in the virus period. Their sequester places are far less accommodating than is my one-person loft. Their food is guaranteed so they don’t have that to worry about but the tv shows bunk beds mounted side by side less than one yard apart. In fact, Black Americans are some 80 percent of corona deaths in some locales outside of prison. That’s another reason why I am lucky. I was able to leave the crowded, poverty-stricken areas of my youth and my disability has allowed me to remain untethered to such areas in my encroaching dotage.
At least I can still get dressed to elevator downstairs to get or send the mail. It is a little more complicated now given the ever increasing Corona guidelines. Normally, I’d be cool dressed in terry cloth pj pants and a tee shirt. But now I also don one of the facemarks left from my heart transplant period and gloves I have to wear in sunlight thanks to my diminished immune system but which now protect against my touching mailbox surfaces other tenants or the post persons themselves may have inadvertently dropped Covind-19 on.
This morning, Monday 4/6/2020, I took advantage of expected rain to ride my electric wheelchair to the supermarket. It wasn’t yet 10 a.m. and I suspected the rain would deter other shoppers. There were few people in the Smart and Final store and supplies were limited. Only one bunch of collard greens left and no regular sugar. I had to buy confectioners type. I moved quickly and paid much more than I normally would have because I chose very large versions of almost everything.
As I watch tv news again I must count myself so lucky. Families are in distress. The kids must attend school even as they and their parents occupy their homesteads. Family members get sick and must self-quarantine in some isolated location within the home. Mothers carry meals and leave them outside the family member's place of isolation. I’ve seen middle-class white mothers on tv tearfully leaving meals at the door of an errant room. When and where I grew up my numerous siblings would have had to congregate somewhere else while one of us sequestered in a bedroom.
I miss being at the gym down the street. I remember when it took me almost a half hour it seemed like to walk the block and a half there from my crib. Those were painful days and some missed opportunities. I’ve had a number of personal trainers there. The first I called Scandinavia, but his name was Daniel. He was funny and we got along well together. I haven’t been able to connect with many folks in LA and I was sad when Scandinavia left the gym. He’d been training some big movie star so maybe training that crowd would be more profitable. I recall this other dude, Kenyon, who had some muscle and was real easy going. We talked every now and then and he told me of a different gym where he also worked out. Why two gyms, I wondered, sounded strange and finally wasteful to me. But he said it was closer to his crib and said something about how his wife was somehow involved. Certain times of year my gym was crowded with big muscle folks whom I’d notice, especially the women, and then they’d disappear before I could really chat them up. There had been one woman who worked at the gym who’d kind of indicated interest but my health was too iffy and since I was new there I wasn’t sure of the protocol. But when the Black Panther movie came out the Black sisters and brothers talked about the movie and once when, Kenyon, that muscled dude with the second gym called out to me, Mr. Jesse they called me, I crossed my chest with by arms and bounced my shoulders in a Wakanda salute. Everybody busted out laughing. In DC we lived two blocks from Kenyon Street, NW, so I easily remembered his name.
Weeks later I saw that dude at the gym and he had become very svelte with well defined muscles. He said the other gym was where he tightened his game and then he confided that he’d been sick. Cancer. The group he worked out with at my gym lamented his diagnosis and they’d all seen me limping around or driving in on my electric wheelchair. I soon found out that one of that group had been coping with the continual, never pausing pain of sickle cell. These were all Black dudes but one Latino dude I bonded with told me he’d had spinal marrow transplants since he was a kid. He’d built his body up pretty well, too. We were all extremely upset to learn of Kenyon’s death. I still think of him often.
Today I finally got Nortia Press, publisher of my BLUE SKY FOR BLACK AMERICA, to turn over the $11.13 royalty for 2019. It has been very tense because he wanted to send it Paypal and I dropped PayPal when my account got hacked there. He repeatedly said he’d send it by check but it never arrived. For two days I’ve tried to re-up in PayPal but was rejected until this afternoon when their chat told me to redo my password. I sent Nortia a request for $11.13 and they finally sent it to me but PayPal charged me $.62 cents. Nortia didn’t understand that charge either and sent me an additional $5.
Salsa. The first time my internal defibrillator went off was during a three point turn on the dance floor. I’d had two or three atrial ablations but tonight I saw a Salsero have one on a tv show.
What is “elective” heart surgery for one who has heart failure? A woman’s dad’s elective surgery was put off in favor of Covid-19 pandemic patients and he died days later. Perhaps ablation of a heart arrhythmia might be elective. The salsero, for instance, had to consent to this procedure on the tv show. The the tv doctors had to wait while the patient tossed around pros and cons before he consented. I kind of recall having to do that too, but I actually did not think not consenting was an option. The patient has to choose to die in normal times and Covid-19 exigencies denied that woman’s father that choice.
Choice is a problematic concept today. My friend, Martin, of Malmo, Sweden, finally returned my email telling him I was watching “Modus”, a Swedish crime drama shot in Stockholm. I was surprised he’d never heard of it so I relayed a bit of the plot: Murders of blond women in New York City and in Stockholm brings a NY detective for a long stay in Sweden. Little choice for those murdered blonds. And on “Modus” today is the episode from 2017 where the blond female American President goes missing on a State visit to Stockholm. The brunette female Swedish detective who finds the President confides that one of the President’s male FBI entourage raped her when she worked for the FBI in America. No choice there. “At least,” he slapped her face rather than murdered her, was the President's response. His choice.
PBS tv showed an innovative way of displaying the lack of choice with technology approaching stuff imagined in sci-fi screen programming. Many recent emissions show some distant authority projected before remote inferiors-in-rank as moving holograms that can even answer questions if not fully interact. A Jewish holocaust center has spent a week filming individual survivors answering a range of questions a future viewer might ask years after the survivor’s death. Of course, in America, at least, the choice allowed those once youthful prisoners is exemplified by the film Sophie’s Choice, where a Jewish mother must choose, in a split second, which of her children to keep while the other child the Nazis send to instant death. Makes my skin crawl.
In the late 1980s, the biggest problem I had with the Peoples’ Republic of China was that under Mao minority groups were marginalized. Peoples like Tibetians and Uyghurs were forbidden to speak their traditional languages. That’s also how white Americans treated Native Americans at least until the mid-20th century. As I watch tv news today, those Uyghurs in China, some having violently protested against Han, ethnicity of the Chinese majority, domination are rounded up and placed by the millions in re-education camps. Uyghurs don’t like it but the Chinese Communist (Han) Party mostly denies the detention even happens. I’m pretty sure any of those detainees would be cool with the type of sequestration Covid-19 has encouraged in the USA. There is choice in at least the California version: Stay in the crib or pay a fine and/or potentially infect those you encounter in the streets or once you do return home. April 14, 2020