Gotham Girl Interrupted Page 3
Still, in the lead-up to my surgery, no one was agreeing. Apparently, the neurology team had decided to try me on a newer, stronger epilepsy drug, but I needed to stabilize on it before the maxillofacial team could begin the lengthy reconstruction of my face, because if I seized on the table during the operation, I could die. It turns out a sliver of a millimeter in the wrong direction while shaving a bit of bone near the brain might very well disfigure and/or paralyze you. A micron slip of the scalpel around the wrong blood vessel and you could easily wipe out a decade of memories. On the other face-bone side, it was complicated because we were in the “golden time,” which I understood to be a short window of opportunity for operating on faces before super-intense swelling typically sets in. Call me naïve, but I never knew this was a thing. If they didn’t operate soon, it might be another week before they had another opportunity. To each set of doctors, I was like a Jenga tower piled precariously high and set to an egg timer quickly running out of sand.
My face, nervous system, and basic bodily functions were all competing against each other for dominance on the chore chart. Again, I was caught in the middle of two decidedly not great options: (1) wait to stabilize and stay safely alive while risking being terribly disfigured and in the hospital for another two to three weeks, or (2) go for the gold during this “golden time” and risk seizing on the operating table while they put my face back together so that I might be the least deformed version of me in the long term. If you’re anything like me, you are a girl, and underneath all of your emotional depth, you’re still vain as fuck and so you go for option two. Do you really want to live out a super-long life as a poorly constructed Jenga tower?
The only thing you really wish for in a moment like this is to be able to time travel back to the instant right before the seizure. The moment on the street where you sensed things might go sideways and then you actively choose to listen to your gut. You turn back to the safety of home, your apartment with its overabundance of pillows and soft things, the place where you lose everyday items and yet you never lose that inner gut voice. More than anything, you wish you’d listened to it in that specific moment.
According to my girlfriend Holly (who showed up soon after I was brought in to support Ed and who is another, albeit much shorter, Cromwell-ian navigator), there was a great deal of arguing around my bed. You might think it was a clusterfuck of ineptitude, but I’d like to think it was mostly just people acting in good faith. I couldn’t make out all the details, but it resembled one of those scenes from Charlie Brown where the teacher is speaking unintelligibly over the loudspeaker in a sort of mwaw–mwaw–mwaw–mwaw–mwaaaaaaw sound. Apparently, there was also a stretch of time where I would insist on sitting up absolutely straight in the hospital bed because I was in too much pain to recline even slightly. For once, I had ballet-perfect posture, which I never have because I spend most of my days hunched over a computer like an old crone or a mollusk. But there I was, oh-so-properly with my pen and paper, writing out my answers to the various doctor questions.
What I remember most tangibly was meeting Walter. At six foot six, now there was another giant in my life, except this one was the living, breathing incarnation of the late actor Walter Matthau. As the head of the hospital’s maxillofacial surgery program, there was an almost wizard-like quality to him. He was like Gandalf or Albus Dumbledore. He seemed to give off his own curmudgeonly glow. Walter is not a man of many words, but when he does speak, it’s the plain truth without any sugar-coating. There’s a gravitas to everything he says, even when he’s joking. Practicing for more than thirty years now, Walter is a specialist who handles New York City’s worst cases: “the jumpers who lived.”
There was something strangely comforting about Walter, the way he would study me and then the way I would study him back since I couldn’t speak. We were like two orangutans checking each other for nits. I could tell he was a tinkerer, the kind of friend who came over to your house and took your whole car apart piece by piece for hours to identify the mystery problem, fix it, and then put it all back together late that night with infinite patience and specificity. He was the surgical equivalent of the guys from Car Talk. As he examined my jaw with its bones poking out through my face and my right eye rotated back into my head, he looked down at the giant binder of incident notes and said jauntily, “Oh, you’re right in the neighborhood.”
I was loopy on pain meds, which was how I was able to even communicate, but by this time I could nod a small “yes.”
And then he said, “Ah kid, why couldn’t you at least fall in Zabar’s? Don’t you know? Someone wouldda caught ya in that store?” And I laughed out loud, which hurt like a mother, not just physically but also because I usually go to Zabar’s. Christ almighty, I would live in Zabar’s if I could—right next to the cheese section. Still, I’d been trying to do like Suze Orman told me—get the cheap coffee. She owes me a serious latte.
The other doctor who figured into the goings-on was the consulting neurologist, Dr. Delia. I remember less of Delia as my brain was starting to do a funny thing at that point—whether it was the drugs or just straight-up trauma, I may never know—but it was collapsing all the faces of the people around me into only two faces that my brain could process and recognize. Everyone started to look like either my giant BFF Ed or my girlfriend Holly.
Delia—who was completely new on the scene—would be talking to me about my epilepsy, asking questions to which I was writing all the answers out on paper, but in place of Delia’s face I could only see Holly’s.
My brain was face swapping live people’s faces like a social media filter. I was effectively the character from Oliver Sacks’s story The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. This was a trip, since it’s a bit like dissociative misidentification, which you see in mental illness, except that I very rationally understood this person in front of me to be who she was, Delia-the-neurologist. But my eyes didn’t see things that way. They disagreed—to my eyes she was Holly. At one point, Delia leaned in close to me and said, “Tell me about your first seizure.”
And even though I couldn’t speak, because she had Holly’s warm, kind face, I felt so comfortable. I wrote out on my piece of paper, “Now, that’s a story…”
3
The Unbearable Brightness of Being
FADE IN: La-La Land…
No, not the celebrated movie musical. I’m referring more mundanely to the ruthlessly backbiting, cock-measuring place of Los Angeles itself. Anyone, even Carl Sagan’s chipper ghost speaking directly from the bardo, will tell you that La-La Land is full of star stuff: star walks, star sightings, starlets, star makers, star fuckers, star comebacks, star charts, star doctors, star diets, star cleanses, and star dog walkers. You name it. Everywhere you look it’s stars rising, flickering, shooting, falling, flailing, or fizzling. My first seizure there in 2010 only adds to this list of stars.
As I glanced in the rearview mirror, it was clear I was having a Gene Wilder morning. My hair was set to super-crazy static. Brushing it would be a no-go. I searched my dumpster of a mom-car for dry shampoo as the line at the drive-through Starbucks on the Santa Monica–Venice border came to a dead stop. Better, I resolved, to pat down the frizz with product and pretend the mess was 100 percent intended. Lazy French mom-look. That was the only way we were going to make it to the movie premiere on time. The other mothers of Santa Monica may have been all about three-hundred-dollar Brazilian blowouts, but I’d already tried that and ended up looking like that poor, terrifying girl from The Ring. Besides, my world was bigger than my hair, I reasoned. I was a writer, not a performer. People were lucky if I showed up wearing any pants at all.
All brains light up in order to send messages from one cell to the next, but some days, it felt like my brain could power the whole city’s electrical grid. Not literally. It was more like a crackling, energetic feeling in my head. My machine was “on.” I’d have so many thoughts going at once, you could sim
ply plug a USB charger into my ear and light up the town or download a few dozen new plot twists. You could power all the tuna-can Priuses and shiny Teslas on the 405 freeway. I don’t mean to sound like a jerkwad—as if my brain were somehow the answer to the city’s first-world problems. I only mean to say that long before I ever had a grand mal seizure, I was already a pint-sized, livewire lunatic.
I was an odd, skinny, little twerp of a child. Think Don Knotts with features all out of proportion. I had yet to grow into my enormous ears. My eyes and lips were too big for my elfin nose. I also operated at two distinct speeds: child-reading and child-wriggling. When I wasn’t in a corner with my nose buried deep in a picture book, I was dancing. I would spin like a top, kicking, zinging, and gyrating in my pleated plaid skirt and dark blue knee socks.
I was especially demonstrative about my one true preschool love, American folk singer Jim Croce. Indeed, by age four, I was deeply smitten with the much older, much-mustachioed musician. Yes, even as a child I loved the swarthy lads, especially the ones who didn’t eat paste. To this end, you could often find me boogying fitfully in front of the hi-fi in my grandparents’ living room. I was especially down with Croce’s rousing classic “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” In my mind, Jim was the ultimate stud. A poet but not a pretentious sissy, he was emotionally available to my four-year-old heart, yet still a badass.
My fidgeting wren of a mother, who was probably trying hard to behave under the stifling glare of her stoic Norse in-laws, would inhale sharply at my every move and wriggle as if to whisper-yell, “Stop the whirling for God’s sake! You’re going to break something!” By “something,” she meant the collectible plates my grandmother had carefully, prudently mounted on the wall next to her vast collection of commemorative spoons. Though I did not yet have the verbal skills, in my head I thumbed my nose at the whole lot of them and shouted, “Impossible, you boring dummies! I’m bad, bad Leroy Brown! I’m going to break everything!”
That moment wasn’t just the birth of a defiance that would become (ahem) a recurring theme in my life—it was also the first time I became conscious of what I call the electric. The second time, well, I blame free-range parenting. I better tell you what happened.
Once upon a time, there was a perfectly well-meaning hippie couple from San Francisco who suffered from chronic back-to-the-land fantasies of sustainable living. These were brought about by a steady diet of Mother Earth–Nature magazines and TV shows like Little House on the Prairie. Prairie, my ass. That show was shot in an LA suburb and everybody, including my wistfully crunchy parents, knew it. Alas, there we were, in the hinterlands of Northern California, looking at land just outside of Old Shasta, population 432. A once-thriving, now-creepy village, Old Shasta featured a post office, a greasy-spoon diner called Jay-Bird’s that cooked almost exclusively with lard, and the one-and-only Jay’s Market and Gas. All of this was owned by a beakish guy named Jay, who looked like a crook-necked cartoon buzzard. There were loads of trees and cows and horses—along with one extremely accessible, low-to-the-ground, unmarked, highly touchable electric fence. Made all the more inviting by the horse that was behind it.
What most likely saved my life: a pair of fantastically hideous shoes called Buster Browns. These were super thick, rubber-soled children’s shoes that were very fashionable in the mid-1970s. You might as well have been wearing gigantic meatballs on your feet.
I was about ten yards from my parents when it happened. They had ventured eagerly ahead with their redheaded realtor, Janice, who was a churchgoing lady with springy, permed hair who resembled a bright orange toilet brush. As my father gazed out at the pastoral rolling hills that smelled like wet dirt and rotting flowers left sitting too long in the vase, he waxed poetic about things like beekeeping and organic root vegetables while my mother puffed skeptically on a True cigarette, her preferred brand, no doubt pretending she was California’s “healthy” answer to the French. Meanwhile, I was busy dawdling by the horse.
Now, when you’re a squat little runt of a kid, it’s easy to feel like everything in the world is bigger than you, and there’s a tendency to adopt the attitude where you’re either afraid of all of it or afraid of none of it. I was the latter type of kid, and I was fascinated with horses. It’s not just that they are completely beautiful, powerful, instinctive beasts capable of terrifying brute force, sudden strength, and lightning speed; it’s more their faces I fixated on. Their great pooling, anime-style eyes always made them appear to me scared and confused. When I leaned forward, it was actually to convey in well-intentioned kid-speak, “Hey there, mister or missus horse, don’t worry. My parents are completely chill, clueless agricultural poseurs who probably don’t know a stitch about large animal husbandry and I’m pretty certain they won’t make you do anything you’re not super keen on…” and my index finger came to rest on the wire fence.
All of a sudden, SHAZAM! The bolt flew up my finger through my right arm. It was like being unzipped from the inside out…with fire! The current coursed through my kid-body, zigging past my tiny bird ribs, zagging down toward my little hoozie (causing me to pee just a teeny bit) and then it flew down my legs and shot my fully laced up Buster Browns clean off my feet. The next thing I knew, I’d been blown back and was lying flat in the dirt.
My parents turned to look back, their bucolic reverie harshly disrupted. I’m not sure if they were high, or if it was just the 1970s, but this was long before helicopter parenting where they always rush every child to the ER. I sat halfway up on my elbows, probably looking like a drunken midget passed out in the street. “Holy shit!” I would have said if I’d any inkling of the existence of such words.
“What on mother earth are you doing?” My father asked, puzzled. “Why’d you take off your shoes, kiddo?”
“But…err…I–I didn’t take them off,” I stammered in drunk midget-ese as my equally perplexed and exasperated mother struggled to put the dreaded meatballs back on and then brushed the sodden leaves from my hair. As I explained how I was merely talking to the horse when I touched the fence, I saw the jaws of my parents and their churchy realtor drop, aghast. Their eyes widened just like the horse, and the toilet brush declared under her breath, “Lord Jesus!” as they realized I’d electrocuted myself.
“Didn’t you see the sign for that said ELECTRIC FENCE?” they queried, shocked expressions all around, as if I was the one who’d lost my damn mind. This is when I reminded them that I was still only four and couldn’t totally read big words yet.
“What’s eclectric mean again?” I asked my mother who stood frozen in place, her cigarette burnt down to the filter between her lips.
Again, since it was the seventies, no one called 911. I never want to speak ill of people who were probably in their own unique way trying to give me an idyllic childhood, but I think my parents may have actually been the original, self-involved hipsters. From there on out, though, they were careful to relate very pronounced warnings right out of the blue. “If you happen upon an old refrigerator in a junk yard, never climb inside and shut the door.” Or, “If you see a bowl of razors, don’t stick your hand in it.” (Hoo boy. This explains a lot.)
That night I couldn’t sleep. My preschooler mind was whirring like a hummingbird, zipping from bloom to bloom and thought to thought. My head felt like root beer, its insides all fizzy and carbonated. I was coloring well beyond my bedtime with great fury as if the current were still alive on my fingertips. To make up for the midafternoon jolt, my parents bought me an elaborate farm diorama kit at Woolworth’s, the kind where you had to color in all the grass and paper doll farm animals and outbuildings. It was some serious agrarian role-play complete with dangerously pointy farm implements. There was even white split-rail fencing to go around all the animals, which seemed to me ever so much better than the other kind I’d dealt with earlier that day. No wonder that poor horse was terrified, I reasoned.
As I colored, I thought about the day, the hor
se, and the fence. I studied my zapped index finger and recalled the unzipping feeling inside of me. I’d been zapped, and I wondered now if I could make a zap now myself, or if maybe I was electric? I looked down at the chaotic pattern of my coloring, which seemed confused, as though the blades of grass were eddying in slow, swirling, perpetual motion. I couldn’t stop coloring. I pressed the crayon harder to the paper, and I loved the feeling of it, an excitement welling up in me, my own charged particles swarming like fireflies in a jar.
Meanwhile, my father glowered in the doorway. “What are you still doing awake?”
Not looking up, I told him I was working, that farm life was a rough business and hadn’t he seen Little House on the Prairie?
BACK IN LA-LA LAND 2010, at the Starbucks drive-up window, I’d given up on finding the dry shampoo. I clung to my venti drip with 2 percent and inhaled so hard that were it not for the plastic sippy-cup lid, coffee would have spouted straight up my nose and scalded my brain. It was a sole moment of relief, of respite from life as a truly single mother—no boyfriend, no sex, zero personal life.
I was worried about how we were going to make ends meet on my writing. I have very few backup skills, other than writing pithy ad slogans and fart jokes. With zero alimony and very limited child support, our new financial reality was about to be grimly Dickensian. And as anyone will tell you, Hollywood is still a place where the primary interview question remains, “So, how can you contribute to my greatness…or at least get me off right now, today?” I wasn’t out of ideas. I was just well aware of the institutionalized gender nonsense that comes about when a too-nice nerd-girl tries to deliver them.