By Cato Jiminez, Kosmo International Bureau

THE BORDER, AZ—Carson drives. This is a
story in of itself, but perhaps for another time, when the dust has settled and
the chollos have
bought out and retired to the chicken-wire suburbs of the Saguaro. For now,
though, he drives.  The mission was
straight forward enough—we needed Cigs. The problem?  The mushrooms, with their strange gonzo juices coursing
through our veins and surrounding our exoskeletons in a fetid aura of hilltop
mysticism. Fake Hollywood backdrops of dust-choked mountains, with their
dull-red arachnid eyes bluring in the distance, threaten a layman's sense of
time-space, but Carson has no time for scientific hypotheses—he guns into
fourth gear, passing a roadside shrine without so much as a moment's
hesitation.

            "Buddha,"
I said, supposedly muttering under my breath, but a strangled exclamation now
has to pass for self-restraint.

            Carson
turns and looks . "What?"

            "Buddha.
You know, Buddha. Siddhartha, whatever, it's you– you, sir, are the 52nd
reincarnation of said enlightened figure."

            "That's
boddhivista, not
Buddha. Besides, I don't subscribe to that, man. Not my sort of racket."

            Never
mind. He'd realize soon enough his reincarnated state, and like a thousand
grams of star dust it'd blast him senseless, unconscious … choking on the floor
in shock as Pablo robbed him clean.

            The
imposing specter of a massive neon cross, the lone advertisement for the Third
Baptist (gringo banditos)
Church of South Tucson looms in the near horizon. I cross myself, and muttering
what I took to be a version of the Hail Mary underneath my breath.

            "Dude,
you're not even Catholic."

            "Never
mind that. You can't be too sure. Religion's like sex—spread your seed, and you
have a better chance of survival. It's straight science."

            "So,
just like roulette?"

            "Roulette
as well."

            "That's
not even a Catholic church!"

            "Pidgin
religion is still religion.
Skim milk is still dairy, still sold in cartons."

            "Pigeons?
I hate those things—goddamn birds. 
You ready?"

            This
was subterfuge on the highest level.

            "I'm
ready as a walrus," I replied, and slammed the door shut.

            Show
Time!

            Bullshitting
(image-setting, in b-school terms) is the most American of arts, and I am the
love child of Danny Ocean and Eva Hesse. Stride, Baby—stride through the dull darkness of
this Hopperian valley. And for Pete's sake, avoid the hypnotic gaze of the
dismembered orb of the Circled K.

            "A
pack of Camels, please."

            The
station was a fluorescent temple of Nothingness, with three exceptions: a
were-lizard clerk, a prostitute, and some drug-addled man who seems incapable
of standing without leaning on the glass counter for support.  Leaning gently, I channel Baryshnikov
while fighting off the urge to start a conversation about, of all things, the
Washington Redskins (great game, huh? Talk about a quarterback coming out of
nowhere. Where'd he play college?… my aunt went there!).

            Sliding
my ID across the table, I look up as angry shock replaces my transient moment
of panic—this  serpentine fucker is
trying to call a bluff!

            "Your
ID's expired," he says, a sly smirk just barely concealing a flickering
tongue that thinks it smells blood.

            But
the sanguinary scent is from an air freshener (99 cents), and this clerk is
unaware that I, Baron of the Cavern, can control time with a mere slight of
hand. I quickly flick my wrist under the counter; The Whore notices.

            "Sir,"
I say, my Ocean genes coming to the surface, "I believe the present year
to be 2007."

            Taking
the ID back, his tentacles reexamine the card. The Wench hits her heels against
the ice-cream freezer in a flamenco beat, and I sorely regret leaving my widow
maker back at the house.

            And
then….

            …he
laughs.

            "Looks
like the customer wins again, Mel," she mocks, yet to move from her roost
of Firecrackers and frozen Snickers.

            "Second
time this month. I can't believe it."

            "Hmm,
losing your touch, Mel."
I mutter insouciantly, but low enough so it falls bellow his serpentine hearing
frequencies. This was getting too dangerous; I could feel my calm facade
breaking under pressure. The two continued to converse in a vacuum lost for
time to talk of past flaws. There is only time for the future—a future of
flavored smokes beneath the moonlit silhouettes of the Great Pyramids of the
Valley.

            I
slowly retreat towards the glass doors, grinning in sheer desperation. I can
almost feel the Lizard clawing for a second chance….The Whore! I turn around
in double-speed, feeling the whiplash shoot up my vertebrae, half-expecting to
see her poised with a Choco-Taco in one hand and a handsaw in the other.

            Instead,
she hasn't moved, and I begin to wonder whether or not she is part of the
décor. It’s too late, though—the door shuts, and I'm walking Spanish, one-two
to the car, one-two one-two…

            A
woman's head leans against the window of the car parked opposite to ours. I
shoot Carson a death stare (how in Jehovah's name did this happen?), but he grins maniacally from ear to
ear; he's lost it too. Collateral damage; these things do happen, I suppose.

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The Graduate: 40 Years Later

By Jim Shoemaker

How do we view our parents, our adult acquaintances, our authority
figures?What do we really think of the expectations that people place on
us?  How do we survive pressure?  Are we as smart as we think we are,
or are we just setting ourselves up to catch the good opportunities before they
sift through to the “lesser mortals”?  These are the questions that I
forced out of my head while I was watching The Graduate, watching the
austere, solemn Benjamin Braddock move to “The Sound of Silence” for the
umpteenth time as the words “Dustin Hoffman” and “Mike Nichols” flashed on the
screen.

“I guess I’m just worried about my future”
– The Graduate’s cultural implications haven’t changed much since 1967:
parents still live vicariously
through their children, mental achievers are still secularly isolated, and we are still assured of our assumptions about adulthood. 
Dustin Hoffman, who was 29 when he acted in this movie, portrays the person who
we are all going to become in one, two, or three years: fresh out of undergrad,
parental expectations abounding, but an overwhelming feeling of confusion that
leads to rash decisions.  Hopefully, none of us will have the temptation
of a Mrs. Robinson, but who knows?  It may do us some good to “get
wild”.  (We can’t determine that through The Graduate because of
the obvious lack of “chemistry” between Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin
Braddock.) 

“You’re trying to seduce me, Mrs. Robinson”
– The frontier of sexuality is as estranged to us “post-pubescents” as it was
to Benjamin Braddock and Elaine Robinson, the daughter of the infamous Mrs.
Robinson.  On top of the pressures placed on Benjamin by his father’s
success, he is also expected to “court” young girls from Los Angeles in order
to “get his life straightened out”; when his respectful nature turns
disagreeable (i.e. when he and Mrs. Robinson begin sleeping together) he gets
reprieved by the same adults who essentially told him to get laid!  Like
most of us who mistake sex for love, Benjamin finds himself at the mercy of
Mrs. Robinson’s will, who tells him to stay away from her daughter
Elaine.  In a clever cinematic twist, Ben’s tastes change, and the
forbidden Elaine becomes the only thing in life that Ben wants, the exact
implement that will straighten him out.

“A kind of compulsion to be rude all the time…you
know?” – We all know exactly how Ben Braddock felt making this
confession to Elaine: slave to the mundane, the façade of contentment, and the
irrepressible desire to make a change.  My impression of this movie has
always been that the script-writing is wonderful, but I had never felt closer
to Ben Braddock and what he was going through; Buck Henry’s script ingeniously
captures how we all feel about our parents and people’s sometimes asinine good
word expectations of us.  Seasoned
with the haunting melodies of Simon and Garfunkel, the lines spoken in The
Graduate remain as wonderfully resonant as they were forty years ago. 

       Ironically enough (because we couldn’t imagine The Graduate without
Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross), the casting for the movie was entirely
different before it began production.  Mike Nichol’s and crew were
originally interested in (I swear I do not jest) Marlon Brando as Benjamin
Braddock and Sissy Spacek as Elaine Robinson, two actors who had already
established themselves as “separate” from the pack (though with Brando, I think
that that’s a matter of opinion).  Thankfully, Hoffman, who was primarily
in theater in Los Angeles, was convinced by co-star/friend Ross to audition for
the movie; his role was obviously not experientially based, because theater
stars are hardly as timid as Ben Braddock needed to be, but Hoffman seemed to
have pulled it off for Mike Nichol’s.  After the movie’s release, he was
even nominated for an Academy Award for “Best Actor in a Leading Role”.

 After Ben Braddock and Mrs. Robinson’s affair is blow wide open, we see the
true mastery of the film, like the second half of Romeo and Juliet, drama vs. comedy, fanatical love vs. lust. 
Mrs. Robinson employs the honest emotion that we wish to see in everyone, and
it turns out that she and her half-aged lover are not so different: they have
both dehumanized each other, and now, Mike Nichol’s makes them pay the
consequences.  The direction of the film from this point onwards is
terrifyingly uncomfortable.  Ben follows Elaine to Berkeley, stalks her
(to put it bluntly), and confronts her with his heartfelt decision to someday
marry her. 

 â€œELAINE!!!  ELAINE!!!  ELAINE!!!”
– The ending of this movie, in the church, is a complex array of emotions for
everyone, the audience, the characters, and the actors.  Ben follows
Elaine to Santa Barbara in an attempt to stop her from getting married to a
college-sweetheart; he finds the church where the ceremony is taking place and
begins to repeatedly beat on the glass of the clerestory, hurdling out
unashamed, gut-wrenching screams: “ELAINE!!!  ELAINE!!!”  In an
instant, Katharine Ross’ acting brilliance shines, and we actually
see Elaine Robinson saying, with only a
gaze, “I love you, Ben!  I love you!”  The church is in chaos, but
the couple eventually escapes on a bus.  “The Sound of Silence” comes
on.  Ben and Elaine are not smiling, not looking at each other.  The
movie is over.

To use an overused phrase, a series of unfortunate events befall Benjamin
Braddock in The Graduate, leading to an eventual, though painful,
evolution from adolescence to…unhappiness?  What are we to take from the
ending of this movie?  Watching it again, I have heard Mike Nichol’s
message more strongly than ever:  The Graduate does not merely
refer to the noun supplanting Benjamin Braddock, nor does it refer to the
setting that affects one who has just “graduated”.  The Graduate
refers to stages of life that most of us experience in some way or another; the
consequences that appear are simply unique to all of us. 

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16-year-old Carlos Martinez sits in
a bright green examination chair in the Topahkal Family Practice Office (1608
Isleta SW) with a massive four-inch gash in his right index finger.  There is a pool of blood beneath his
hand as if someone had spilled Hawaiin Punch over a bed of gauze.  A native of Juarez, Mexico, Carlos was
visiting family in Albuqeuque, when he sliced his finger on a refrigerator that
slipped as he was helping an uncle lift it out of his pickup truck.  The wound required immediate medical
care, as one could peel back the skin as if husking an ear of corn.

            Usually
under these circumstances, Carlos would have to be rushed to an emergency room
at the nearest HMO-financed hospital, his bill running upwards of $1500—exactly
what happened to a friend of his who had a less serious injury.

            “He
probably has a Visa to come for a few days, but he doesn’t have any health care
insurance,” said Dr. Andru Ziwasimon, the head practicioner at the Family
Health Clinic, a part of Kalpulli Izkalli’s Topahkal Health Collaborative.

            Thus,
when wounded, Carlos was brought to Topahkal to see the soft-spoken Dr.
Ziwasimon, who, wearing scrubs for a shirt, Carhart kakis for pants and Teva
flip-flops for shoes looks more like a guitarist than a doctor, and sounds
exactly like Ira Glass, the host for NPR’s “This American Life.”

            “There’s
a certain sickness in our medical system that’s pretty evident.  It doesn’t take much intelligence to
see that. Health Care bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the US—that
seems whacked to me, just wrong. I want to minimize my participation with the
bad parts of medicine,” said Ziwasimon.

            So
in July 2004 he decided to join the Topahkal Casa de Nuestra Medicina (House of
our Medicine) Collaborative.  He
spearheaded the second of three aspects of the collaborative, which started out
in 1996 as Kalpulli Izkalli’s Promotoras Tradicionales Project, a
donation-based indigenous traditional medicine clinic.  Kalpulli Izkalli (Community House of
Light) is a local grassroots non-profit dedicated to the advocacy and improving
of the community’s health condition with an emphasis on traditional healing.

             With the addition of the Family Practice
to the Collaborative came the inclusion of modern mainstream medicine, open to
the public as a walk-in health care resource.  There also is a weekly Ultrasound clinic that is offered for
the reasonable flat rate of $120. 
But this practice was going to be different.

            “The
ER is $300 minimum to just be seen. 
It’s actually $80 to not be seen. 
If you walk into the ER, wait, and leave, you’ll get a bill of $80.  Come here and get health care three
times for that amount of money.  We
don’t want to replicate those mechanisms that harm people,” said Ziwasimon.

            They
exist as a resource for the uninsured. 
The traditional medicine clinic is donation-based, and the Family Health
Clinic charges a flat-rate of $25/visit, plus materials expenses, usually no
more than another $10-$20.  This is
accomplished even after a December 2006 move into their current facility that
caused their monthly rent to jump from $500 to $2200.

            “But
we’ve kept our prices the same, and we’re very proud of that,” said Ziwasimon,
who tends to Carlos’ finger with assistant Catherine Jones, a Tulane medical
student doing a clinical rotation at Topahkal as part of her fourth year of
medical school.

            They
joke with Carlos in Spanish, who masochistically laughs as the doctor instructs
his understudy in the proper techniques of sewing up human flesh.  They all laugh when someone suggests
that Carlos should change his name to Pedro, so he could be like the famed Mets
ace Pedro Martinez, an unlikely proposition considering Carlos’ pitching hand
was recently obliterated.

            The
Health Collaborative relies on volunteers and arrangements with universities in
order to cut costs and keep their overhead reasonably low.  Work-Study programs with UNM and CNM
pre-health students give aspiring doctors and nurses a first-hand look at what
it is like to combine modern and traditional medicine through a holistic
approach.  The idea of Topahkal,
however, attracts volunteers and students from all over the medical field.

            “Andru’s
an inspiring model.  It’s
definitely the kind of place that I want to wind up in after medical
school.  It’s a perfect learning
opportunity for someone who is interested in doing community health work,” said
Jones, who will graduate in May.

            While
the fees at Topahkal save their patients somewhere between 90 and 95% on their
health bills, if someone who can’t afford that last 5 or 10% is need of care,
they are still welcome in the clinic with open arms.

            “There’ll
be a woman in some sort of a domestic violence situation who’ll come in, and
she’ll be so clearly poor that out of the kindness of our hearts we just say
‘m’am, please, this is on us,’ ” said Ziwasimon.  “No one is turned away.”

            Each
patient is given a payment plan at the end of their visit to assist with the
expenses.  Carlos, who is no longer
laughing about being stabbed repeatedly with a needle and is arguing over the
tenth and final stich in his near-repaired finger, will see a bill for $55,
which subsidizes the local anistesia and stiching used in his procedure.

            While
payment for the treatment received in the Family Practice is not optional, if
someone refuses to pay on the payment plan, they are not pursued.  Honesty and fairness is the name of the
game, and even though the common cheapskate can manipulate the system, 97% of
the treatments given by the clinic are paid in full.

            “Most
people that we serve are in the South Valley, and are low-income. But we have
people who come from all over the city—even people with insurance come here
just because they like it,” said Sylvia Ledesma, a healer at Topahkal, and
founder and director of Kalpulli Izkalli and the Promotoras Tradicionales
Project.

            After
a slow first year, the Colaborative has been operating at capacity ever since.
Open six days a week, fifty weeks a year, they tend on average to twenty
patients a day and around 7,000 patients each year, all who receive main-stream
hospital quality care with a personal touch at an extremely fair price.

            “Part
of this place is a financial experiment. 
We’re experimenting with the price you need to charge to actually be
sustainable and healthy, instead of profiteering.  We’re finding the price—the minimum price—that we need to
charge because we have to take care of ourselves too,” said Ziwasimon.

            Catherine,
now alone with Carlos to finish sewing up his finger while Dr. Ziwasimon steps
out of the room to attend to another patient.  She has somehow managed to convince the defiant Carlos to
allow her to insert the final (and deemed necessary) stich. 

            “You
just never know what you’re gonna get in these donated packets,” she said, tearing
open a plastic bag and pulling out a smaller needle than hoped for.  A viscous drop of blood hangs from
Carlos’ finger like droplets off the tip of a melting Jello icecycle. 

            It
is not common at Topahkal to sacrifice financial stability in order to ensure
that patients continue to recieve quality care at a extremely low price when
compared to other clinics and hospitals. 
This fiscal year alone has left Topahkal some $10,000 in debt due to
unforeseen expenses.

            “But
there’s no way that we’re going to let anyone stop us from doing what we love
to do, so if we had to, we would eat that cost,” said Ziwasimon.

            As
He and Jones exit the examination room, Carlos gives a sigh of relief.  His finger is all sewed up—ten stiches
in all—and he is ready to head back home. 
Topahkal will arrange with a clinic in Mexico to remove the stiches in a
few days once the wound is sufficiently healed.  After washing all of the blood from his arm, and wrapping
his finger in a utility band-aid, he hops down from the green chair and is
instructed on the proper forms needed to be filled out before he leaves.

            Now
3:30 in the afternoon, the waiting room is overflowing with people seeking
medical treatment.  Although the
clinic closes at 7:00 p.m., Ziwasimon and his colleagues will be here until
9:30 or later tending to patients. 
Those who cannot be accommodated will have to come back tomorrow.

            One
can be sure, however, that this is where they will return, time and time
again.  For these people whose lack
of medical insurance does not permit them to seek aide at any local hospital,
Topahkal is the only option when they are in need.  Like Carlos, going to the emergency room is not a financial
option—and even if it were, why would someone want to go anywhere other than
Topahkal?

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