Randolph Crow remembered his boy Martin as an excited ten-year-old, leaping out of bed Saturday morning and hurrying to the local library two miles away, before returning arms loaded with books on moths and roaches. His bedroom was transformed into a museum of mounted bugs.
An obsession that, Martin’s old man noted with some relief, was replaced with a love of chemistry in his teen years.
At an age when one should be sullen and moody, Martin had the bright-eyed look of a curious toddler, treating the world like a big playground, his bedroom now a laboratory of powders and test tubes.
“Maybe the kid will win the noble prize,” his pappy joked.
Randolph Crow himself, unlike his very English son, was a native of New York, and if you passed him on the street, you’d peg him for a longshoreman or a taxi driver. Silver-haired, six foot five with a considerable beer gut and never without a fat cigar, he was something of a volcano, frightening to most people.
But he could never get volatile with Martin. The kid was too guileless, too earnest, and perhaps too weird for any traditional discipline.
And now, aged seventeen, Martin announced his change of vocation.
“Seeing grandmother get the cancer cut from her gut inspired me,” he said in that wondrous way of his. “I want to be a doctor.”
“Great, great,” said the old man, surveying his son over the top of his newspaper. “You’ll be curing cancer as Dr Crow.”
“Oh no,” Martin replied, “Cancer is too stressful. That’s life and death on your hands. No, I want to be a dermatologist and cut loose cysts, warts, blackheads, that kind of thing.”
The TV, which at that point had been muted and unwatched, was now seized by Martin, and in no time at all, he had set it to play a video showing a closeup of a bulging blackhead poking out of moulting, wrinkled skin. Gloved hands wielding a pair of tweezers tugged at this dark pebble.
Mr Crow fought against his breakfast rising from his stomach, but Martin sighed contentedly as the blackhead popped loose from the patient’s body. The lad proceeded to lovingly caress the image of the gaping hole left in the skin.
More images of gooey lumps and bumps being cut and ripped loose followed as Martin, his feet up in the air and his chin resting on his palms, watched the succession in his merry way, saying “If I can do this for a job, I’ll be very happy. Losing the lumps, it’s almost like a baptism.”
Mr Crow, knowing he couldn’t begin to understand his son, forced a smile and said, “Good for you, kid. Good for you.”
