My perversion

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AND THE WINNER IS ... CONSUELA!

They once said that pneumonia was "the old person's friend." The dummy who thought that up should be consigned to the same dungeon as the one who invented the happy face, or the boor who came up with the name "yuppies" or "baby boomers."

In truth, living with pneumonia is no different than dying slowly -- very slowly -- by drowning.

A couple of years ago, in the middle of my winter in paradise, I came down with what I thought was a terrible cold. I could neither eat nor sleep, but those of us born in the depths of the depression were taught to be stoics. We knew that we could weather any sickness.

Finally, after a week, I went to one of the seven doctors in Puerto Perdido. He said I had a touch of bronchitis.

A week later -- I went back to him, and he said it was still bronchitis, but he said it also might be something in my head, like hypochondria. Did I mention that he is also the town mortician?

For those of you who have never had it, pneumonia has several advantages over other diseases. It's an instant cure for those who sleep too much. Towards the end there, I was averaging 15 or 20 minutes a night.

It also constitutes a good weight-loss program. Weight Watchers might even consider it an alternative to their current exercise/diet schedule. After three weeks, I had shed 25 pounds.

Finally, at the insistence of my friend Raul, I put myself on an airplane to the U.S. Friends there took me straight from the airport to the hospital I do believe it was the most expensive hotel room I've had in my life ($1,500 a night, including all the oxygen you could eat).

I stayed there a week, and can barely remember a resident medico telling me that I was "very, very sick." If a doctor says that, you know it is time to get your house in order, but when the chaplain came to my room and asked how I felt, I resorted to that old vaudeville wheeze, "If I felt any better, they'd have to lay me in the grave."

The reason I bring this all up is that the night before I fled to the north, I went for dinner with Raul's family. It was during that meal that he convinced me that I should do something, because he noticed in contrast to other times, I wasn't eating everything not nailed down. I do have a thing about chilis relleqos --except when I'm dying.

Raul took some photographs of us at that dinner. I now suspect he wanted a visual memory of me before I finally passed over.

This is one he took of his mother, Consuela and me. That's me over there to the left -- ghost-like and specter-thin, eyes glittering like a snake with undulant fever. But what strikes me as we look at it now isn't the near-dead me -- but, rather, Consuela, next to me. She's standing, I'm sitting, and we are about the same height.

If you were to see her in person, you'd see a typical product of one who grew up in a poverty that you and I can only have nightmares about. She was born in the midst of the depression in the poorest state in Mexico. Father disappeared when she was 9. There were seven brothers and sisters, all younger.

The meals, she tells me, were mostly tortillas and salt, but on a good day, there would be some beans, too. Her mother sold tamales door-to-door to eke out a living. In those days -- even though San Sebastian is a seaside village -- women and girls were not allowed to fish. No one knew why; it was just a given of the life here, part of the same tradition as when you met the cacique -- the chief of the village -- you crossed your arms over your chest and bowed.

You can guess her life story: she grew up quickly. At 15, went from being a girl to being a mother. Her husband had -- still has -- a deadly affection for pulque. Nights in the Cantina Gloria used up most of his earnings from working in the peanut fields, so -- like her mother before her -- Consuela sold tamales door-to-door.

Now that her kids have grown up, it's easier --- but she still remembers when they would take the leavings from the maize fields and make dough with it and fry it in lard and eat it. And even though life is more comfortable now, she still goes out and sells tamales. Just in case.

Cameras are funny things. You've certainly seen pictures that you wished they hadn't taken of you. "Who is that goon?" you think. "That's not me," you think.

In the photograph of me and Consuela, I look like Timothy Leary just before he went on his last trip. Consuela, on the other hand, looks like -- how shall I say it? -- as if she was lit by an inner fire. It's not just the contrast between the two of us. Consuela is glowing, filled with a light from nowhere and everywhere.

Her face is limned by more wrinkles than we could count. Her body is ravaged by 60 years of non-stop childbearing and a wretched diet. Her eyes have the smudged look of the moon when there's a heavy mist. They reflect what she has seen over the years -- no father, no money, abusive husband, four children now resting in the graveyard. Yet there is a fire there that I have seen in so few other people, old and young. We might call it the fire of sainthood.

The guy who invented the lobotomy, Egas Moniz, got a Nobel Prize in 1949. Regularly, in Hollywood, they hand out Oscars to those who make movies that turn the human spirit to a joke, that make hitting someone upside the head a virtue.

The Pulitzer Prize goes to America's worst hack writers. Not too long ago -- according to Paul Krassner -- the National Association of Radio Talk Show hosts even presented a Freedom of Speech Award to G. Gordon Liddy. And you know all about those local awards that go to the builders and architects who manage to rape the land most viciously.

I'd like to see a "Survival Prize." It would be awarded annually to someone who, like Consuela, made it against all odds -- without hatred, bitterness, scorn for others. A prize for someone who survived without resorting to drugs or booze, who survived without hurting others, who survived without -- most important of them all -- a heavy dose of self-pity.

I'd like to see Consuela get the first award. I'd like to see it given to her for having survived so nicely -- and in the process, turned saintly. When they hand it to her, I want to be there. To watch her receive the First International Survival Prize. To watch her beatific smile, to hear her gentle thanks.

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