by Amy Dresner
Elizabeth doesn’t have a job. She is supported by her father and the various rich Persian men she dates. She isn’t a hooker, per se, but let’s just say she sees sex as a bartering technique. One night, she comes home late, and I say—with my usual finesse—“Did you fuck him?” She answers, in all seriousness, “Why would I sleep with him? He didn’t buy me anything.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Just when I thought community labor couldn’t get any worse, I get the chance to do it on my period, in the pouring rain: eight hours sweeping up wet trash while doubled over with cramps. However, I’m starting to pick up on my lesson’s theme: “Look, Amy! It could always be worse.” And of course, now, sweeping in the sun, cramp-free, will seem like goddamn paradise!
We pull up to a 7-Eleven to take our ten-minute morning break. There are two black homeless guys duking it out over “turf” out front. They’re both drinking something out of paper bags.
“You stay on your fucking side, man,” says the first guy. “Don’t move, brother! Stay on your fucking turf.”
“Fuck you, man. I was here first,” the other guy says and wobbles to his feet.
I squeak past them to go inside and use the bathroom. On my way back out, I spot a guy who’s obviously a tweaker: gaunt face, gray skin, manic gesticulation.
Just as I get to the door, the guy points to me. “Stay right there! You’re my lucky charm!”
“I’m nobody’s lucky charm, dude. Not even my own…”
“Don’t say that,” he says, rifling through a stack of about fifty lottery scratchers. You don’t know. You never know. The universe is always conspiring. And the government. I could win the lottery. So could you. Blue cats. Easy number nine…”
I smile. I see Esteban, the crew boss, signaling me outside.
As I walk out of the 7-Eleven, one of the black guys is mumbling something, and then he suddenly keels over and starts seizing.
Seizures are far more terrifying to witness than they are to have, actually. Luckily, it has been a few years since I’ve had a bad one.
It was the second morning since I’d been out of the psych ward. My phone rang, and it was my mother calling from the Philippines, where she was doing business. I looked at my clock. It wasn’t morning. It was actually two-thirty in the afternoon. And it was probably the fourth day since they had changed my seizure meds in the nut ward.
“Why are you still in bed?” she asked.
I had no idea. Actually I had no idea about anything.
“What medications are you on, sweetie?” she asked.
“Hmmmm… What? I don’t knowwww,” I trailed off.
“Okay… baby. You sound sleepy. Are you okay?”
A long silence. “Huh?… I’m sorry. What did you say?”
She got off the phone, alarmed, and called my father, who immediately called me.
“Ames, what did you take last night?” he demanded.
“Nothing… Just the regular stuff,” I answered softly.
“Uh-huh… Call 911. You’re gonna die!!”
“I can’t find the phone,” I said spacily, unaware that I was actually holding it. “And I’m naked.”
“Put a fucking robe on and go knock on your neighbor’s door. I’ll stay on the phone with you.”
“Okay,” I said.
The last thing I remember was knocking on my neighbor’s door. When I came to, I was in the ER—for the third time in a month. I quickly recognized my classic post-seizure headache—only this time there was a lot of pain concentrated in one specific spot on the back of my head. I touched it with my hand, and it felt wet and sticky. I probed around a bit more with my fingers and I felt knots: a few hard knots in a row.
“Please don’t touch your stitches,” the nurse said.
Stitches?
“Where am I?” I asked her.
“You’re in the ER.”
Turned out my neighbor hadn’t been home, and as I was walking back to my apartment, I had a massive seizure, fell backward, and split my head open. I dropped out of the conversation with my dad midsentence, and he figured something horrible had happened and called 911 from Oregon.
My father was still on the phone when the paramedics arrived. They told him that I’d lost a lot of blood but that I probably wouldn’t need a blood transfusion. My father asked them if I was conscious, and they said yes. Well, my eyes might have been open, but I certainly wasn’t home. I don’t remember a single moment of this. My landlord saw them carrying me out on a stretcher, blood pouring down my face.
I was so disoriented in the ER and in so much pain that I just started freaking out. After a few threats of sedation or restraint, I calmed down and was taken upstairs to another floor of the hospital to my own room. I kept screaming about the pain, so they shot me full of morphine, and I drifted off into my own private Idaho.
I don’t like morphine. All it did was make me sleep (a lot) and have me hallucinating that the security guard had put my “valuables” in the hospital safe. That was it. Boring. It didn’t make me crafty or horny, and I certainly didn’t feel that awesome warm cocoon of happy that junkies die for. Yeah, I will never be a heroin addict.
I had a pretty severe concussion from the fall, and it made me incredibly stupid for a while, but everybody agreed it was “probably temporary.” Right. “Probably temporary” didn’t change the fact that I didn’t know who the president was, couldn’t spell, and could barely count. I constantly repeated myself, and my short-term memory was nonexistent. I also had a shaved spot on my head from where they had stitched my scalp closed. The rest of my hair was in bloody dreadlocks, making me look like a devout Rastafarian with a head wound. They told me they couldn’t do an EEG until the “hair doctor,” an old Jewish man from Beverly Hills who makes room calls, came and combed out the bloody rat’s nest. And because I had a “fall,” I was on “fall alert,” which meant that every time I got out of bed to pee or brush my teeth, this incredibly annoying alarm went off and a nurse rushed into my room to make sure that I hadn’t just collapsed into a pile by the side of the bed.
“I’m not ninety-six years old. I didn’t have a ‘fall.’ I had a fucking ‘seizure.’ Big difference. Can’t you turn that damn thing off?”
“I know it’s a bit bothersome, but it is hospital policy,” the overly chipper nurse said. “Sorry!”
The doctor overseeing my case was actually a nephrologist (kidney doc) by trade. He had a very dry manner and didn’t seem to like me at all. He sent a neurologist in to see me during the early days of my recovery. I don’t remember much of that meeting except that she had a strange accent and absolutely no sense of humor. The next time I saw my treating nephrologist, he said, “I have to find you another neurologist because you scared off the first one.”
“What do you mean? What did I say?” I asked, perplexed.
“Well, I don’t know. I wasn’t in the room,” he answered.
I couldn’t believe it. Neurologists deal with people with fucked-up brains for a living. You’d think she’d be used to it. Plus, I just had a seizure, a concussion, and a bunch of morphine. What did she expect?
Two days later, in walked neurologist number two.
“I guess I scared the first doctor away,” I said to her. “You’re up.”
“Yeah, well, I always get the rejects,” she quipped back, not missing a beat.
She and I would get along just fine.
The old me would have been freaking out about my new bald patch and the strange shag haircut given to me by the ER. But I had a bigger concern now: I was stupid. When I wasn’t busy being puzzled and awed by Court TV, I was asking the same question nine times in a row.
On the upside, I was grateful I hadn’t bled into my brain, fractured my skull, or broken my neck. I could have easily ended up drooling while wheeling myself around in a chair. My priorities had changed in a flash. The week prior, I had been praying that some boy I liked would text me, and this week, I just wanted to be able to spell my na
me again.
The phone rang. It was my father. He called every day.
“The fact that you can surround the problem—that you know you can’t remember stuff or that you’re repeating yourself—is a good sign,” he said. “It would be a bad sign if you didn’t realize you were doing this stuff.”
“Oh… so the fact that I know I’m brain-damaged makes it better? It makes it worse. I’d rather not know. If I didn’t know, I wouldn’t care.”
“It means it’s temporary, Ames. It’s not brain damage. It’s a concussion.”
He then read me the description of concussion from the Internet—periodically interrupted by me saying, “Totally!” “Yeah!” and “Exactly!”
Not one person came to visit me during my stay. Every night, I got down on my knees (once I persuaded the nurses to turn off that stupid “fall alarm”) and prayed.
I didn’t really believe in God, but I had never felt this lost or alone in my life. If there was a time to find this fucking “connection” they spoke of in AA, it was now. Knees on a cold floor, ass hanging out of a green gown, IVs everywhere, I looked for “God”—whoever or whatever that was—in a way I never had before. “It’s just you and me, dude,” I said to the ceiling. “Be with me. Help me through this. Please don’t let me be brain-damaged.” I took a deep breath and bowed my head to clasped hands.
Every day, my nephrologist doctor would come into my room and ask me to spell “world” backward or count back from one hundred in threes, which, to be fair, is kind of difficult normally. I’d start and then… nothing. Just a terrifying void. My mind was literally blank.
The hospital kept me for eight days and then sent me home. Whereas before, nothing had been enough, now, everything was bountiful. When you could have ended up dead or retarded, the fact that you are walking while eating a muffin on a beautiful sunny day with a head (mostly) full of hair is a miracle. I hoped but seriously doubted that this blissful state of gratitude would last.
Because of my seizure, my driver’s license was revoked for a full year. My father suggested I come up to Oregon for a few weeks to chill out and recover and take a break from bumming rides from friends or cabbing it everywhere. I agreed.
My dad lives in Ashland, where they hold the annual Shakespeare Festival. It’s a small town, about thirty minutes from Medford, Oregon, populated mostly by hippies, ex-L.A. industry types, and hippies.
While I was there, I woke up at seven thirty every morning to go have coffee at this tiny local café. I ordered my iced soy latte and overheard the baristas talk about how certain shoes had “some leather” and that “wasn’t cool.” I rolled my eyes, brazenly pushing my fox fur coat out of the way to dig into my leather purse and pay for my overpriced organic locally grown whatever.
My father had printed out a list of all the AA meetings in Ashland, and every morning at nine a.m., I went to the same one. Ashland is a small place, and the AA community there is seriously tiny. This particular meeting had between eight and fifteen people and was held in a toasty church library. I’d been there years before, when I’d come up to visit after another brutal relapse. Hmm… back again years later, and still a newcomer. Awesome.
These meetings were very different from the hip/slick/cool L.A. ones. They were populated by crunchy New Agers and weird dudes with stupid crocheted hats. There were lots of lesbians—or maybe all the women just looked like lesbians. All of the women had weird names like Aries and Sunshine and Cookie, and nobody shaved.
Ashland was not a place where I blended in. With my heavy black eyeliner, fur coats, sarcasm, and chain-smoking, I was a far cry from the local chakra-worshipping, purple-wearing vegans. Crystal shops and acupuncture clinics, bead stores and bad art galleries populated the tiny streets of the main square. I hated it. I went to the local tennis club every day and tried to put some muscle on my emaciated frame. A friend of my father’s who had known me from previous visits saw me and said, “Eat a fucking sandwich, will ya?” I was not amused. Interesting how, when you’re fat, nobody says, “Hey, you might cool it on the chow.” But when you’re skinny, everybody feels completely free to jump in to tell you to eat up.
I went to the local co-op—the health food store—to pick up some snacks, and I saw a woman from the meeting. She was eating kale and tofu and drinking kombucha. Perfect. She bowed her head over her praying hands and whispered, “My blessings to you.” I smiled back stiffly.
My father and I are very close, but we are similar—probably too similar. Also, when I fall apart, he alternates between unfaltering “You will get through this” support and angry “Knock off this bullshit, and get it together already” frustration.
One night we were watching Factotum, the semi-autobiographical movie about the famous alcoholic, womanizing author and poet Charles Bukowski, and we got into a seething debate about what differentiates art from personal expression. It’s a typical family argument—at least in my family.
“You aren’t expressing shit, Ames. And you certainly aren’t making any art. You’re just in reaction to everything. You think you’re a fucking social revolutionary because you say shocking things. You’re not espousing any tenets. You just say whatever you feel like saying at the moment. That doesn’t make you revolutionary. It just makes you inappropriate and undisciplined.”
“Wow! Harsh! Well, I think ‘speaking your truth’ is revolutionary.”
“What is your truth, Ames? Just anything outrageous? Shocking everybody?”
“I think that saying the thing that everybody is thinking and nobody dares say is revolutionary,” I said. “I don’t edit myself for fear of what other people may think. That takes courage. You know, George Orwell said, ‘In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.’”
“Uh-huh. But you don’t even write anything down, Ames. You just lose a lot of friends. You fucking burn bridges while you’re still on them! And AA is not a stage for you to do your act. You even told me that they think you’re fucking crazy.”
“I don’t deny that I have an impulse control problem. Cut me some slack, will you? I just cracked my head open, and I’m newly sober again.”
My composure was starting to go. My eyes began to well up. I was going to lose it, and it was not going to be pretty. I knew there was truth to what he was saying. His delivery, however, left something to be desired. No surprise. We always served it up to each other with savage directness.
I began to walk out of the room.
“If you’re going to bed, say good night,” he said.
“Good night,” I grumbled. I stomped into my room and slammed the door and began hysterically crying. Thirty-seven years old, going on twelve. Pathetic.
On the drive to my morning meeting, I broke the uncomfortable silence between us.
“Look, I don’t know what it’s like to be you, Papa. And you don’t know what it’s like to be me. And you’re doing the best that you can. And I’m certainly doing the best that I can. And I’m going to have compassion for you. And it’d be great if you had compassion for me. And know that I love you, okay?”
“And I love you,” my father said back.
“Aren’t you amazed that I didn’t yell at you last night?” I asked.
“What? You want the Nobel Peace Prize for not saying ‘fuck you’ to your father?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Do you know what your body would be like if you worked out?” Elizabeth, my new sober living roommate, says to me one morning.
“That sounds like a veiled compliment if I’ve ever heard one.”
She’s naked on her bed, in some weird acrobatic pose, putting lotion all over her body. She stops and looks over at me, examining me.
“You’re actually really pretty. You just need a makeover and new clothes. Let’s go shopping!”
“You just don’t get my homeless rocker look.”
“Oh, I get it. But you just look like you’ve been heartbroken your whole life.”
“Well… th
at’s not entirely untrue.”
Elizabeth and I get along fine. I make fun of her, and she laughs. At night, she reads aloud from that stupid book The Rules, her paperback bible.
“Dude, I can’t hear that shit. Please,” I beg her.
“‘Rule number three: Don’t stare at men or talk too much. Don’t feel you have to be entertaining or have interesting conversation all the time. On the date itself, be quiet and reserved.’”
“So basically I should have a personality transplant.”
She laughs.
“I have to go to sleep,” I tell her. “I work early tomorrow. Some of us need to make money. And, oh, yeah…if you open that book again tonight, I will beat you with it.”
I go back to see Dr. Fedoseev, the rude Russian psychiatrist. I bring a Russian-speaking friend from AA, hoping that her ability to wax poetic in the native tongue will buy me some bonus points—as my vague resemblance to an eighties Soviet prostitute wasn’t cutting it.
The office is manned by curt, doughy, middle-aged women wearing too much makeup. I scan the selection of the local Russki papers that might as well be hieroglyphics to me. An extremely depressed black guy in a hoodie, clutching his shoes to his chest, sits down next to me.
They call my name, and my friend and I go into Mrs. Putin’s office.
“Which one of you is Amy?” she asks.
“I am,” I say, surprised.
“Well, how would I know? You haven’t been in since last June.”
This is going to go well. I shoot a sideways glance to my friend, and she begins to speak to the good doctor in Russian. The following is all translated.
“I’m here because you weren’t very nice to my friend the last time.”
