It started with a wasp

When I was a little girl living on Louisiana Avenue, I stepped on a caterpillar and was rushed to the hospital because I went into shock. Years later, in Atlanta, as a teenager, a bee stung me and my parents, a doctor and a nurse, went into shock that I might go into shock, so my father shot me up with Benadryl and he gave me so much in his panic, that I was slipping almost into a coma, so he in turn shot me up with adrenalyne – so then I went into shock. [Reason No. 94 why medical parents shouldn’t treat their children.]

So while I was at the LaLa on Sunday morning cleaning up the mess inside, a Nicaraguan guy who had passed by the house a week before and needed directions to a job site, stopped again to say thanks for helping him. He said he is a construction worker but doesn’t speak any English so it has been difficult for him here even though he loves New Orleans. So he’s telling me how he is part construction worker and part medicine man when a wasp flies up my shirt and bites me on the stomach. So I screamed and all sorts of ideas about “shock” ran through my mind as he, without missing a beat, kept telling me about his wife who became an evangelical christian and kicked him out of the house while he grabbed the wasp and opened it with a stick and took the insides out and rubbed them on the wasp bite on my stomach, and finally I was like, “hmm, okay, that might work, but I’m in pain here, so I’ve got to go.”

Now Armando is stalking the LaLa. I told him I don’t have time to talk the first time, but while talking to K he rode his bike up and was sitting there and I ignored him BUT I just wanted to shout – look, I know you said you have no friends here and don’t speak English, but shoo, shoo, go away, I can’t help you AND my wasp sting is I think worse than it would have been had the insect’s guts not been rubbed into the bite.

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