Chapter 13

Patron Saint of Prescription Drugs

WHEN IT CAME to communicating with the natives, I soon discovered that in certain situations it was good to persist in French, and in others it made infinitely more sense to communicate in my mother tongue.

Talking to the woman on the phone to get the gas connected was, for example, a conversation I was willing to have in French. So were dealing with the plumber, chatting to my friendly neighborhood boulanger, and explaining the intricacies of my oh-so-complicated visa situation to the immigration authorities at the préfecture de police. Each one of these daily scenarios was important in its own way, but not drastically so. If I got something wrong, misunderstood a verb, or left the conversation with no idea what had just been said, it wasn’t going to be life threatening. But when it came to my health, I discovered pretty quickly, conversations were best managed entirely in English.

During my first year in Paris it took two visits to a French doctor before I resolved to find an English-speaking one. My first foray into the mystical world of French medicine saw me sitting in a doctor’s office in a state of high confusion while a meek excuse for a medical practitioner timidly examined my elbow despite the fact that I thought I had carefully explained to her that I had a sore throat. My second visit to a French doctor saw me walk away with a prescription as detailed and packed full of recommended drugs as the average French lunch is long. Perhaps because they are all in the employ of drug companies, or perhaps because they figure all medicines are practically free under the universal health care system, doctors in France will prescribe you at least twice as much medicine as you require. And suppositories are a particular favorite among the French, who don’t really feel they have been properly treated unless they come away with an awkward gait and an uncomfortable feeling in the posterior.

Which brings us rather neatly to Dr. J (not his real name), or the Dick Doctor, as he became affectionately known. Dr. J was an English-speaking doctor in a nearby arrondissement. He ran a ridiculously successful practice not far from my apartment. Situated as he was on the outskirts of the Marais, Paris’s heaving gay district, a great deal of the good doctor’s practice was given over to treating the myriad venereal diseases that passed through his waiting room. Dr. J was also known for his brusque bedside manner, especially if you were female or heterosexual. But that was nothing compared to his apparent determination to diagnose every single ailment known to man as some variant of a sexually transmitted disease.

You could go in to see Dr. J with a slight cough and a runny nose, and immediately he would ask when you last had an AIDS test. Make the mistake of wandering into his surgery with what you were certain was a case of the flu, and he would find some way of ascribing your illness to a venereal disease. Syphilis and gonorrhea were perennial favorites, though crabs, genital warts, and AIDS also got a run for their money with Dr. J.

While seeing Dr. J meant I could conduct all health care matters in English, it also meant owning up to myriad sexual habits that I simply didn’t enjoy.

“It’s about my throat,” I would say to him during a winter bout of tonsillitis. “It does this every year. My body gets run down, I push my-self too hard, and my throat is always the first to go. It usually just needs a hit of antibiotics, and it’s fine.”

He would look at me as if I were delusional. As if he and I both knew that my throat wasn’t really the problem and that my real affliction—the one I had come here for him to treat but had not had the gumption to talk about—was really much more sinister and embarrassing.

“Have you been practicing safe sex?” he would ask.

“Um, I guess so,” I would reply, baffled.

“Because you know there is a lot of syphilis going around, and all it takes is one careless incident.”

It was a world of medical euphemisms, a medical examination so loaded with high-camp innuendo, you sometimes felt you were an extra in a Carry On film and that a giggling Barbara Windsor would appear at any moment with her boobs spilling out of a nurse’s uniform.

Experience soon taught me that if I wanted the antibiotics for my throat, it was usually better to just go along with the good doctor and confess to an array of questionable sexual proclivities and their subsequent side effects. That way I would leave his office in ten minutes, triumphantly clutching my prescription and only a pharmacy visit away from the antibiotics that I knew would soothe my raging throat. To this day I have more recorded venereal diseases on paper in that man’s office than most people have had sexual encounters.

As luck would have it, the one time I needed Dr. J’s obvious talent in the arena of venereal diseases would be the one time he wanted nothing to do with me. It happened, ironically enough, at the end of a sustained period of sexual drought.

 

I’D LIKE TO THINK it was by design that I hadn’t had occasion to be naked with a woman for at least three months. I’d like to tell you it was the result of a conscious decision on my part to abstain from sex while I concentrated on more cerebral pursuits. However, it was more than likely just an unfortunate side effect of dumb luck and dumb pick-up lines. It was not, shall we say, for want of trying.

The itching started one night at home, as I was sitting watching the television. I moved to the bathroom to perform a close inspection, out of view from my neighbors, and was horrified to discover that my crotch had become the nesting ground of a vibrant little colony of crabs. Now, it may well defy all accepted scientific belief, but it is with hand-on-heart honesty that I maintain I was not delusional, and that I had not had any sexual contact for months. In the first place, not having sex is not the kind of thing one would willingly boast about. And in the second place, after a three-month humping hiatus, any sexual activity at all would have registered like a beacon in my mind. There was no getting around it. I had the world’s first recorded case of immaculately conceived crabs.

Realizing the joy with which Dr. J would greet this news, I made an appointment and walked gingerly around the corner to see him. As per the rules laid out under Murphy’s Law, it happened to be the week when Dr. J was doing his bit for the education and training of future venereal disease experts, playing host to a student doctor. And going on the meek reception he gave me as I entered Dr. J’s office I concluded he was an undergraduate of that great incubator of international medical practitioners, The Utterly Timid With Absolutely No People Skills School of Medicine.

As I sat in the waiting room, crossing and uncrossing my legs, the young apprentice, awkward in his oversize white coat, kept popping his head out of the examination room to tell me Dr. J would be with me as soon as he had finished imposing an STD upon whichever unwitting soul had come before me. When I finally entered the room, Dr. J shook my hand and urged me to sit down.

“So, what seems to be the problem?” he asked, employing the phrase that doctors the world over must be taught in their first year of medicine. I explained my dilemma, describing the little mites that had taken up residence in my groin and offered to drop my pants to show him.

“No, no, no! That won’t be necessary,” he said, standing and reeling backward across the tiny room. “I’m sure if you think you have crabs, then you probably have crabs.” It didn’t strike me as the most professional assessment, but relieved of the need to drop my pants, I didn’t argue. The student doctor looked on in fear, quivering quietly in the corner, hoping beyond hope that he wouldn’t have to examine my crotch. Identifying morpions, as the French call them, apparently fell outside his training duties.

“But how did I get them? Where did they come from?” I asked with genuine bemusement. Setting aside the pen he had been using to write out a seven-page prescription, Dr. J looked at me with what can only be described as abject pity.

“Well, you usually contract them from physical contact with another person,” he counseled me in a voice with a rising inflection, obviously reserved only for the most stupid of patients. “You probably picked it up in a back room somewhere. It happens all the time.” A back room? Did he mean those fabled blacked-out areas at the back of gay bars where men engage in activity of a decidedly unhygienic nature? Surely not.

“But I haven’t had sex for three months,” I replied. “Nor am I gay, nor have I ever visited a back room. It doesn’t make sense.”

Another look of pity, this time mingled with a rising sense of disbelief. Then from under raised eyebrows: “Well, they didn’t get there by themselves, now did they?”

But that was exactly the point. They bloody well had gotten there by themselves!

“But you don’t seem to understand,” I began. “I haven’t had any sexual contact for three months. I am not delusional. And I have absolutely no reason to lie to you about this. Where did they come from?”

Again, the withering look from under raised eyebrows. “Maybe you just don’t remember having sex with someone,” he replied, dead-pan. “It happens all the time.”

I tried to imagine a life in which sexual encounters were so commonplace that you began to lose track of them. But my experience to date had been so contrary, it simply didn’t compute. I thought about arguing the point, making a stand for the sake of my dignity and rebuffing his patronizing argument, but finally I decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

Exiting the doctor’s office, with my prescription rolled up into a scroll, I made my way to a nearby pharmacy, mistakenly believing the worst of this experience was over. But when I handed the prescription to the pharmacist’s assistant, she glared at the doctor’s unintelligible scribble before handing it back to me.

“Mais c’est quoi ça?” she asked, indicating her complete inability to decipher Dr. J’s handwriting.

“C’est pour les morpions,” I answered under my breath, looking nervously at the long line that was beginning to form behind me.

“Les quois? Je vous entends pas, monsieur,” she said, indicating she hadn’t heard my mumble. You could tell it was taking all the patience she had left after a day spent in small talk with lonely pensioners refilling their incontinence prescriptions.

“Les morpions,” I repeated, this time more emphatically. “Les crabs!”

Suddenly her face lit with recognition. “Ohhhh. Les morpions,” she cried, with altogether more volume than I would have liked. “Eh bien, Pierre!” she hollered across the pharmacy floor to the pharmacist. “Le monsieur là, il a des morpions. Qu’est-ce qu’il faut lui donner?”

I turned a distinct shade of scarlet and concentrated hard on the floor. It wasn’t enough that I had immaculately conceived crabs, or that I had falsely admitted to conceiving them in the engagement of wholly questionable sexual activity, I now had to have my unfortunate condition broadcast around my local pharmacy.

As I turned to leave, morpion-spray in hand, the line of people behind me recoiled imperceptibly, ensuring I had a clear passage back onto the street. And no, Dr. J, in the event you are reading this, there is no pun intended.

As I was relating the story one week later to members of the Posse over drinks at Au Petit Fer à Cheval, we were joined by Johann, a Swedish colleague of James’s. Johann was tall, blond, and like many of his countryfolk, unusually handsome. He was also possessed of a wide-eyed naïveté and an endearing lack of awareness of how strikingly good-looking he was. He had recently moved to Paris from the backwaters of Sweden, taken up residence in the Marais, and through friends of friends he had been given the name and contact details of Dr. J. He too had had occasion to visit the offices of the good doctor—who diagnosed myriad venereal diseases when all he was suffering from was a cold. Entering our conversation as I was midway through my tale, Johann interrupted.

“Are you talking about Dr. J?” he asked. “He’s my doctor too. I went to see him the other week. He’s really friendly, isn’t he?”

“I guess so,” I replied, not entirely sure what he meant.

“Well, in Sweden at least, a doctor would never kiss you on the lips every time you went into his office.”

A sudden silence fell among the group. Glasses of wine stopped in midair on their way to meet lips. A couple of guffaws were stifled. Johann must have divined by the look of shock on my face that Dr. J’s displays of affection were not a practice endorsed by the French Medical Association.

“You mean he doesn’t kiss you when you show up for an appointment?” Johann asked. A shudder of horrible realization seemed to pass through him.

“Um. Not so much,” I replied.

Johann sat back in his seat. A haunted look played on his face.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a pen. On the back of a drinks coaster I scribbled the name of a female doctor I had found in the quartier and slid it across the table to him, giving his arm a supportive squeeze. We were both survivors of Dr. J, after all. Brothers in arms now, I knew his pain. We had to stick together.