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important things to worry about right now instead of this toxic nonsense? What did the doctor say about this? You have about another five minutes until Castro wipes us off the face of the earth, so start talking.” The air-raid sirens had revved up again, and the noise was getting on everybody’s nerves.
    Pop was shouting to make himself heard over the piercing wail. “You know I don’t believe in doctors. What do they know? You think a doctor is smart enough to know that I’m sanpaku? You know what your wonderful doctors do? They give you some pills that make you sicker than when you walked in the door. Then they give you more pills to counteract the first pills, and when those don’t work, they start shooting you full of things like cortisone that rot your insides, and then you die. Look what happened to my brother Ruby. He’s dead now, thanks to the brilliant doctors and their goddamn medicine. And while the doctors make money, and the drug companies make money, and the insurance people make money, you have the privilege of dying as they take your last dime.”
    Doctors were always a big source of contention between my parents. Mom thought they were gods who had created germ-free modern living, and Pop thought they were nothing but ignorant devils. Ever since I could remember, Pop kept his medicine cabinet filled with thick brown bottles of homeopathic medicine, which he imported from England, with strange-sounding names like Allium cepa and Rhus tox. The moment anyone got sick, Pop pulled out his enormous Materia Medica, the diagnostic bible of homeopathy, and began prescribing tiny, sweet white pills. I don’t know where or when he learned to diagnose and prescribe homeopathy, but as far back as I can remember, this was his preferred method of treatment.
    At the time, it was nearly impossible to get homeopathic medicine in this country. Usually when his shipment of pills arrived by freighter months after he’d ordered it, it was immediately impounded by customs. Pop would then receive a call from some customs agent requesting that he come down to talk to them. I remember our frequent trips to the Miami docks to try to claim his packages. After a lengthy interrogation by officials from customs and often the Food and Drug Administration, the bottles were usually destroyed, and my father was warned that he could serve jail time for importing unregulated pharmaceuticals into this country. But he would just order them again and again until some sleepy customs agent handed him the package and waved him through.
    However, when I was sick, I wanted to be treated by a real doctor in a white coat with a cold silver stethoscope around his neck—not by my father, in a pair of madras shorts, opening a brown bottle, shaking out some small white tablets, and saying, “Here, put these under your tongue.” All the kids at school went to doctors to get shots, pills, and lollipops. What I really wanted was a penicillin injection like everyone else.
    When the oral polio vaccine was first being tested, Pop was convinced that it was part of a government-sponsored medical experiment on unsuspecting American children. “They are putting the polio virus into your body. Anything can go wrong,” he said. “You could become paralyzed or even die. Don’t go near that stuff. You cannot put that virus in the human body and expect everything to be okay.” He was not entirely crazy. When the Salk vaccine was first being administered, portions of the virus were still live and actually created several hundred new cases of polio. But Mom was not about to risk me losing the use of my legs or becoming a poster child for the iron lung.
    In protest over whether or not I got the vaccine, she threatened to leave him, then actually moved out, into a pink motel romantically perched on a small waterway just a few minutes away, near the University of Miami. Every day Pop drove me over to see her