Introduction

This is the first chapter in a multiple chapter series. This chapter contains so sex, but is the set up for the other chapter where there will be plenty (I promise), but this is just the back story that will be the background for all of the following stories.

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The summer I turned twenty, during my summer break from UCLA, I got a job working on a drywall crew putting up sheetrock in a new housing development near my parent's house in my home town. We had to work quickly putting up that sheetrock, tape it up with joint compound, sand it, apply another coat of compound, sand that coat and get it all ready for the plasterers. The crew was split into groups—the first hanging the sheetrock with drywall screws, and the second group coming through with the tape and compound. My job was with the first group, and the least skilled job on the crew. It was my task to bring in the sheetrock from off of the palettes dropped off by the building supply company, and sometimes to help hold sheets of the sheet rock if they needed to cut into a particular shape or jut hold it against the wall studs. While low skill, this was a physically demanding job, and although I was in good shape, after my second month my low back began ache even on the days that I wasn't working. I was young, I was strong and I thought I was nearly invincible.

After I left that job and went back to school my back didn't really bother meanness I was doing particularly heavy squats or deadlifts in the college gym. Running didn't cause me any problems, so I assumed that I needed to improve my lifting form, and when I did get some coaching my back felt better.

After graduating with a bachelors of science in anthropology and a minor in computer science. I got a nice job doing IT support for a small mortgage brokerage company in Los Angeles. I maintained my workout routine, going to the gym five mornings a week and running some of the trains in the hills a few miles from my house on the weekends. I also started training with a local Chinese martial arts teacher three evenings a week (Choy Li Fut—for those that are curious).

My life was pretty good for the next few years. I was making good money, living in a very nice two bedroom apartment in Los Angeles' westside, and as a young, fairly good looking man—six-foot, two-inches, 187 pounds with brown hair and bright green eyes—I did rather well with the young women who came to the city in search of a career in film or television. None of these relationships really lasted any longer than about nine months. Either these ladies would get bored with me, or vice versa, and we would drift apart. Nothing dramatic, nothing spectacular. I also found my regular hang out spots, a key to survival in Los Angeles—bars, restaurants, and cafes I liked to spend time in. Life was very comfortable and very much to my liking.

One day, I was moving some boxes of books in my home office. I had been meaning to re-organize this second bedroom space for a couple of months, and this particular heavy box was destined to live on the shelf in the closet. I bent at the waist, got my hands under the bottom of the box, lifted it with my back, turned my hips to walk toward the closet and lifted the box into the closet shelf. My low back immediately started to hurt, and I knew that I had lifted that box in a very stupid way and had probably wrenched my back.

Unlike other times I'd given myself a little twinge, no amount of stretching, hot baths, or even some lineament or patches that my teacher recommended, along with ibuprofen did much more than slightly dull the pain. Alarmingly for me, I started to have a dull, aching pain in my left buttock that travelled down the back of my left leg to just below my knee.

This pain and discomfort, of course, began to effect my exercise and training routine. I couldn't lift comfortably, and running was excruciating. The worst was that the pain began to effect my sleep. In an attempt to cope I became a more frequent visiter to a late night cafe near my house. I knew this place because it was a convenient place to go on a weekend after some date, or a night at a bar with buddies. When the pain was too bad to allow me to sleep, I would limp into that cafe to pass some time I was tired enough that the pain would not effect my sleep.

One night I came limping in, got my herbal tea (the brand with the bear sleeping in a chair was a favorite), turned to find a seat, and almost ran straight into another regular customer, Gerald, who I knew slightly from his own late night visits to this cafe.

"You seem pretty busted up, Adam," he said. "What happened?"

As I navigated to an open table, I told Gerald all about my troubles for the last couple of weeks, thinking that I was just passing the time. So, I was surprised when after my story, Gerald said, "I'm an acupuncturist, and you should come and see me tomorrow."

He handed me a card with his business address, and we made and arrangements for my appointment the following afternoon. I was excited at the idea of acupuncture, having done several years of Chinese martial arts, I was, I thought, somewhat familiar with its principles.

That next afternoon, laying face down on Gerald's treatment table, I asked him the name and purpose of each of the places that he inserted a needle. Gerald was very open in his responses to my questions on that first visit. He gave me the name of all the points he used, and described all of their purposes.

That first treatment was nearly miraculous. I walked into Gerald's office limping, and nearly bent double from the pain in my low back and left leg. When I got off of the treatment table, I was transformed. I could stand up straight. My leg didn't hurt for the first time in weeks. Despite the result, Gerald, suggested another treatment the day after next.

Two afternoons later, I was again on the treatment table, asking him the same sorts I had during the first treatment. At first, Gerald answered my questions, but he suddenly bent in close to my head and said, " Hey, why don't you go to school and then come back and tell me what the fuck it does."

His suggestion surprised me. It had never occurred to me that I could study acupuncture in the United States. For some reason I thought I would need to go to China, or go through some sort of apprenticeship process here. "Where would I go to do that?" I asked.

"You've been going to a cafe less than ten blocks from one of the best schools in the US," he replied. "It's called the New American University of Chinese Medicine."

That is how, along with the financial crash of 2008's effects on the montage brokerage company I worked for, I how I found myself enrolled in classes at The New American University of Chinese Medicine.

Next chapter—Joy and The Foundations of Chinese Medicine