Remembrance of Things Past: 'Legs LaRue'

It was the last gasp of the 60s (1968) and I had just returned from a brief sojourn in the US Air Force. Having mustered out at a base in Arizona, I returned to the San Francisco Bay Area where I was born, with its pacific calmness and balmy weather that I was so accustomed to. The Bay Area, but in particular the Berkeley neighborhoods clustered around the UC campus, was a very exciting place to be for someone who was 22 and just starting out on life’s path, after escaping the Vietnam meatgrinder. The heated contention over the Vietnam war was starting to create mass ‘political casualty’ situations across the nation, concurrent with a marked increase in body bags returning from the chaotic combat taking place in Southeast Asia. The ‘hippie’ movement, with its flower children, peace movement, and its experimentation with substance use was in full bloom, with the epicenter fixed at the Haight-Ashbury crossroads in The City. On the Berkeley campus, Mario Savio and the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement had already morphed into a generalised Vietnam resistance that violently threatened the entire American establishment. Protestors were storming the city-erected barricades in their strident demonstrations against the ongoing war effort (a status quo that soon forced me to carry a military surplus gasmask under the seat of my VW beetle on my way to work each day).

Berkeley in particular, as a college town with a long tradition of avant cultural liberalism, was a heady mix of stimulation and excitement for younger individuals and it seemed as if there was always some new and unusual event to be found on virtually every street corner of the ville. Since I had been trained in the medical technology specialty in the Air Force, it was a natural thing for me to continue working in related areas as a civilian and I very quickly found employment at Oakland’s ‘Pill Hill’, functioning as a respiratory therapist. Providence Hospital, sharing that off-Telegraph Avenue site with Merritt and Peralta Hospitals, had earlier established itself as the central focus for most of the important clinical and hospital-based medical practice to be found in Oakland’s Alameda County. Merritt, additionally, had a two-year nursing diploma program, so that training program, plus the resident teaching hospital facilities of Highland General Hospital (the Alameda County Medical Center), private Herrick Hospital in Berkeley, and the Navy’s Brookside Naval Hospital facility, resulted in a major concentration of thriving medical practices, all centered in the San Francisco East Bay area.

Providence Hospital, operated by the ‘Little Sisters of Mercy’ as part of several others on the US west coast run by that same Catholic group, was at that time just starting a very active new pulmonary medicine department, having brought on as the new Pulmonary Medical Director one Mitchell P. Tarkoff, a post fellowship MD who had the ambition of making Providence the principal epicenter of all pulmonary medical practice in that part of the state. Tarkoff, the son of a Russian emigrant family, was quite tall (6 feet 4?) and I was later vastly amused to learn that while an undergraduate, he had been faced with choosing to either go into medicine and be a doctor or accept a basketball scholarship and aim for a professional sports career. I suppose fortunately for me that he chose medicine over pro hoops.

When I originally took a job at Providence I worked as an orderly, pending the opening of the new pulmonary medicine department, but was assured of the fact that as soon as Tarkoff opened his practice, I and several other former military medics would be brought on board as respiratory therapists. In late 69, while waiting for this to happen, I briefly left Berkeley to return to Minot, North Dakota, the site of another Air Force base where I had been stationed, to push bedpans for the Lutheran Church’s Trinity Hospital in Minot. I was still undecided where exactly I wanted to live and work at the time, and since I had enjoyed Minot and its unique blend of German and Scandinavian 19th century immigrants, I thought that perhaps North Dakota might be worth taking another look at. After a few months there, however, word came to me of the formal opening of Providence’s pulmonary unit, so I loaded all my meager possessions back up into my 1967 VW convertible and risked the icy winter roads that lay between Minot and Berkeley for a return to the Bay Area. Arriving back in Berkeley, I soon found a flat on Cedar Street, not far from the original site of Peet’s Coffees and Spices (Walnut Square).

My colleagues and fellow workers in Tarkoff’s new pulmonary medicine wing at Providence were as different in both their origins and backgrounds as I was, although all of them shared our common tie of being former military corpsmen. Since military medics’ skills typically far exceeded those of their civilian counterparts in that period, any former medic was accepted almost without question as meeting the requirements for work in a wide range of medical positions, extending from practical nursing to laboratory and pharmacy technician positions. In our case, by virtue of our collective critical care expertise patching up traumatised bodies and sewing back on legs and arms of combat soldiers, we were naturals at the newly emerging specialty of what was at that time called ‘Inhalation Therapy’ (IT shortly thereafter became ‘Respiratory Therapy’, which is what that career field is called today).

The bulk of our duties consisted of what we laughingly called ‘passing gas’, or pushing IPPB (Intermittent Positive Pressure Breathing) machines around from bedside to bedside, so that inpatient sufferers from chronic obstructive and restrictive lung disease (read: smokers, miners, and former shipyard asbestos workers) could inhale bronchodilating medications that would reduce the exhausting burden of breathing normally. We also took care of the pulmonary treatment of critical care patients (i.e. those who were post-op, or suffering from critical trauma-related injuries that required being kept on respirators). At the time, the benefits of providing bronchodilating medications to restricted airways (via oxygen under positive pressure, up to about 40 PSIG or so) were thought to be substantial, although later decades of evaluation revealed that benefits of so-called ‘IPPB Therapy’ were grossly overrated and served principally in the early 70s more as a clever new ‘cash cow’ for hospitals and clinics to generate operating revenues from.

The IPPB machines themselves were actually quite interesting devices, for all their somewhat dubious claims of efficacious health benefits, and were produced by two large pulmonary equipment manufacturing corporations known respectively as the Puritan Bennett and Forest Bird respiratory products companies. In the latter case, Bird respirators were called ‘Birds’ and the Puritan-Bennett products were referred commonly as ‘Bennett valves’. So work for us consisted largely of ‘pushing Birds and Bennetts’, at least as we described the work activity in our specific occupational patois.

Among our group of ex-corpsmen were several former Army medics who quickly became my fast friends, three of which (named Steve Hartline, Travis Felts, and Rick Rabinowitz) had been brought up in Mexico along the Pacific Coast by fathers who were retired there after careers as US military doctors in WWII. All three of these buddies were quite colorful and unusual in that they had experienced the casual lack of gender constraints that characterised the Mexican coastal lifestyle, south of Baja. As Caucasian Americans who had almost become Mexican in their attitudes and outlooks through childhoods spent in the tiny fishing village resort of Ajijic (located on the north shore of Lake Chapala in Jalisco, Mexico, at about 5,000 feet altitude), Steve, Travis and Rick had grown up together and were for all practical purposes brothers.

It’s important here to emphasize the fact that as expatriate Americans raised in the distinctly chauvinistic, male dominated Mexican Roman Catholic culture, Steve, Travis and Rick were, by cultural exposure from their earliest years onwards, almost by nature and basic regard very typically surrogate Latinos. Their regard for women and womanhood therefore heavily reflected Latin-American male attitudes towards women. Women, as they understood it, were to be regarded either as playthings and toys for personal amusement and gratification of men or as bearers and keepers of progeny. Of women, there were two general types of the female of the species only (so they perceived things, at any rate): virgins and non-virgins. Virgins were highly regarded by Latin-Americans because according to the precepts of the Roman Catholic Church, they would only willingly trade their virginity for ritualized status as legitimate wives and future mothers. The other group (non-virgin, unmarried women) were regarded as personal gratification devices largely, and in Mexico such women were generally held in somewhat low regard as ‘easy women’. Of course it was every Latin-American male’s fantasy to score as many of these ‘easy women’ as possible, before making that eventual ultimate sacrifice of bestowing legitimacy upon some especially favored (virginal) Catholic woman (and then continuing the fun and games—business as usual--with any number of willing lovers, mistresses, and enamoratas on the side).

As such, and formidably imbued with these inherent and distinctly Latino biases as they were, Steve, Travis and Rick got out of the service and came to the San Francisco Bay Area almost as if their journeys had been fortuously preordained by fate, since the late 60s and early 70s were a time of radical new sexuality, emerging sexual exploration, social discovery, and youthful hedonism of a type and quality never before been engaged in by youthful American offspring of the earlier ‘Playboy Era’ (the 50s).

At any rate, there we all were, lower echelon youthful hospital professionals just starting to regain a grip on civilian life once again, empowered by a burgeoning new youth culture movement and submerged within a heady environment of Vietnam protest, psychosocial experimentation, and sexual freedom. And we were also surrounded by nurses every day, almost all of them cute, young, spirited, adventurous, and as full of raging hormones as were we. To say it was a catalytic situation would be to considerably understate things, since in addition to be in the close daily presence of many dozens of gorgeous nurses, the dictates of style ascendant at that time mandated abbreviated, form-fitting nursing uniforms that favored short, tight skirts and emphasised long youthful legs. But all this is simply a preamble, naturally enough, and a sort of contextual setting for understanding what follows.

Enter ‘Legs LaRue’ and a particularly beautacious bevy of young nurses that worked at Herrick Hospital. As previously remarked, my three Mexican raised companeros at Providence Hospital wasted no time in scouting out the nurse population working in the East Bay area hospitals, attending social gatherings and partying down with any and all who were willing (most were). In particular, since we all lived in Berkeley and very close to the campus, the newly established hemodialysis unit at Herrick Hospital came to the attention of Rick, Steve and Travis, who had met several of the dialysis nurses employed there at parties.

Although I was, and always have been fairly constrained and of formal comportment myself, having Steve, Rick and Travis around was a considerable experiential catharsis for me, since their outrageously macho attitudes towards the women encouraged me to break out of my self-imposed shyness a bit and relax my normally uptight regards for the proprieties of normative gender interactions. I had been, you see, brought up by a fairly proper, slightly stuffy, upper middle class family to observe the conventions of courtesy, politeness, and consideration when it came to ‘the fair sex’…all qualities that are guaranteed to get a guy absolutely NOWHERE with young women who seem to favor the insouciant poses and postures of the ‘bad boy with attitude’ over the ‘well-mannered nice boy’ any day. I was, in other words, a bore with a few brains, whereas Steve, Travis and Rick were dangerous hombres enough to excite the fantasies of any young woman within visual range.

Travis, in particular, was quite a studsman, having come from a family that was originally from the American deep south, with dark good looks and all the charisma of the Clark Gable-ised Rhett Butler prototype. In Mexico, his natural southern social smoothness had been further enhanced by the influence of his Latino surroundings to the point where he had become the practical surrogate of a character combining elements of both James Dean and a Latino-ised Charleton Heston. The result of this was, naturally enough, that he invariably had a regular harem of devoted female fans hanging on his every word, who just couldn’t get enough of him. Almost all of these lady friends were nurses, of course, and several of them were Herrick hemodialysis nurses, since Travis at that time was working as a hemodialysis technician at that facility (the rest of us worked as pulmonary techs, across town at Prov).

Since I had returned to Berkeley in late winter of 69 (from my brief return stint in North Dakota), I soon learned of a shared ski-cabin arrangement organized by some of the Herrick people and was invited to join as a share-partner. Although an absolutely lousy downhill skier (my forte was cross-country) despite frequent trips to Idaho’s Sun Valley ski resort throughout childhood, I enjoyed most forms of outdoor sports and skiing tied in nicely to my interests in traditional mountaineering. Several weekend ski-trips ensued and I noticed that Travis often seemed to have several female friends in tow simultaneously on these regular trips to the Sierras, apparently not following or constrained by the normal pattern of one guy accompanying only one girl on such occasions.

So there I was on one particular weekend, just arrived from the Bay Area at the Bear Valley cabin site in my VW bug and entering the place late at night to find most of the available beds taken and all of the rooms pretty much filled with other hospital skiers. Bumping around in the dark, trying to find an unclaimed place to crash, the shielded beam of my flashlight sudden caught the blurry outlines of three people sleeping in the same bed, the head in the middle without question belonging to my buddy Travis and the other two definitely being female. Although still half asleep, Travis spotted me and waved, acknowledging my arrival with a gesture toward an empty mattress across the room and mumbling something about a ‘Carole’ on his left and a ‘Laurie’ on his right. Yep. Our Laurie. At the time, of course, I had never previously met Laurie, so the name didn’t register with me at all, but I did notice that the next day Travis seemed have his hands full trying to keep both women simultaneously amused, entertained, preoccupied, and having fun. He was clearly stretched to the max, given his duplicated social obligations and I was most bemused, for this was a new one on me (a guy who had always had trouble trying to attract the attention of a single women, let alone two or more simultaneously!).

That particular weekend turned out to be great fun and on Saturday afternoon, Travis managed to send the two women off to ski together, enabling him to join me for a few long runs down the ski trails. Naturally I asked him about the two women he had with him and my grudging admiration for his reputation as an effortless chick magnet probably showed quite clearly when I brought the subject up.

Pulling out a long doobie (Michoacan Gold, I was assured) and slowly taking a big fragrant puff after it was lit, Travis mentioned something about getting his schedule mixed up and inadvertently inviting two nurses from the dialysis unit to join him for skiing at the cabin that particular weekend. Of course, Travis being Travis, and the cabin being absolutely chock-a-block full of recumbent bodies when they arrived, with no spare beds, managed to squeeze both women into a single full-size bed (they knew each other already from different shifts at the dialysis unit), flanking him, thence descending into sound sleep as the snow fell outside. Then, offering the huge pencil of weed he had pulled out of his ski parka to me, he grinned and said something like: “Hey, why don’t you take one of them off my hands, since you didn’t bring anyone with you?” The grin that accompanied this utterance is difficult to put into adequately descriptive words, but it served as a hallmark of his and contributed enormously to that boyish air of totally sincere, blue-eyed innocence that was so much a part of Travis’ irresistible charm.

As we perched there on the hillside, with the weed began to run its figurative fingers through my brain, I contemplated all this while watching the snowflakes increase their leisurely drifting laterally through the pines at the side of the ski-run. I flashed back to the two sleeping female heads that had been arrayed on pillows on each side of Travis the previous night; even in the briefness of that momentary encounter, it had not been lost on me that they were both startlingly good looking brunettes. Hmmmm. More envy. The idea percolated along with the cannabis resin and I agreed to drop by Herrick the following week on the pretense of meeting Trav there for a beer after work. Meanwhile, Travis winked, grabbed his poles, left the remnant butt of the doobie in my hands and pushed off down the last steep section of the chute, the fluidity of his smooth motion clearly enhanced by the fact that he was now totally merged with his skis and schussing on pure endorphins as much as by careful and deliberate parallel maneuvering.

Flicking the last bit of roach from my hands (it’s not easy to smoke a roach wearing ski-gloves, you understand), I also pushed off and tried to catch Travis, who was on the verge of breaking out from his turns into a full-fledged supersonic run at the sound barrier, straight down. Naturally enough, we were both pretty much blasted by the weed at this point and everything went by with dreamlike fluidity as we barreled down that slope…until, that is, Trav suddenly caught a snow hummock with one ski, went flying into the air and collapsed into a churning typhoon-like windmill blur of snow and skis. The moment I saw him crash, my own personal grass-induced reveries were suddenly dispersed with equally instant suddenness and in less than a few more seconds we were both piled up at the bottom of the run, a mortal wreck comprised of two bodies, several skis, poles, and other debris all stuck at odd angles in a snowbank.

Seeing this calamitous denouement, a local Ski Patroller who had witnessed the horrific crash suddenly appeared at our feet and asked (with an obvious trace of derision apparent in his superciliously superior and insinuative tone) “Hey…are you two OK?” I well remember that all we could manage was this incredibly goofy collective grin, framed by snow and accompanied by a nod. Seeing this, the Ski Patroller sort of snorted and skied away, leaving us to pick ourselves up and attempt to regain some of our irretrievably lost dignity. Somehow we both managed to make it through the rest of the weekend without sustaining further carnage and everyone got home safely, despite the abundance of high quality s**t from southern climes that we had smoked. Travis had resumed chaperoning duty of his two nurse friends and I had managed to find other partners to ski with on the final day. Thinking back about that crash today, I am convinced we survived unscathed for the same reason drunks often survive catastrophic car crashes: we were both totally and completely relaxed at the point of impact.

Next week, as planned, I hopped on my motorcycle after work at Providence and dropped in at Herrick to check out the proposed ‘action’. Despite its having been exactly 40 years ago, I will never forget that entrance into the Herrick Hospital Dialysis Unit’s nursing station. All I recall flashing through my brain for a few seconds after entering the unit’s double-door was the sight of this dazzlingly world-class set of legs directly ahead, facing away from me and focused on a Rolodex patient chart rack. Yes, it was a boggling vision for a feverishly anticipatory lad to confront, but I swear those legs started somewhere high up in the clouds and continued all the way down to the floor. As I stood there gaping like a deer caught in a car’s headlights, Travis sauntered into the nurses’ station and approached, saying something like “Chris, you’ve met Laurie...?” as he gestured towards the legs that filled my gaze. The legs turned around and at the top of all those legs was this absolutely engaging, lovely smile, framed by brunette strands and topped by a nurse’s cap with a crimson red band on it.

That, my friends, colleagues, and fellow pilgrims in life is the true story of how my acquaintance with ‘Legs LaRue’ began, at least within my admittedly somewhat narrow frame of experience. I will very readily admit up front that I am just as shallow, just as prone to the superficialities of my gender, with critical reflective thinking capabilities just as capable of being rendered dysfunctional by hormonal surges as the next person of the XY persuasion. It strikes me that I must also, I suppose, heartily appologise in advance to any reading this who may think this shared personal story is in the least bit demeaning, dismissive, or trivializing to the memory of someone we all love dearly (each in our own way), for that is as far from my true intent as possible. It remains the unvarnished true story of my own introduction to my own wonderful Laurie, who would thereafter remain one of the most important and valued friends of my entire life.

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[Postscript: You’ll all be relieved, I’m sure, to know that after a certain period of time I managed to get somewhat beyond those lovely bicyclist/skier/runner legs and discovered the truer, deeper, and far more lasting values that Laurie embodied in the fully actualized living of her life. As things turned out, it was a classic case of a formidable brain harnessed to a lovely and spirited woman’s body: truly the best of all possible combinations to find anywhere on God’s green Earth!]

[Postscript 2: Sadly, a number of years later, and after a lifetime of further adventures in life, I was deeply saddened to learn that Laurie, a life-long friend, had been diagnosed with Stage 4D breast cancer while carrying on a normal occupational calling as an acute care RN. Although she fought it bravely (much like a personal Hawaiian heroine of mine and premier hawaiian 'waterwoman', Rell Kapoliokaehukai Sunn), the disease progressed rapidly and beautiful, wonderful and unique Laurie passed on from this sad world we inhabit to whatever lies out there in the Great Unknown Beyond!