Taking care of me would be an all-consuming, brutal, twenty-four-hour-a-day job: I needed someone to clean my wound, take me to the restroom, help me get dressed, and bathe me. (Abby, who would be recovering in my guest room, was in similar shape.) There was no one else in the world I trusted to care for me more than my parents. I was incredibly fortunate that Mr. and Mrs. Cojo had willingly dropped their lives in Montreal and were moving in for the next few months to nurse me.
I desperately needed my parents: Weak and near-lifeless, I clung to them, and they were ready to give everything they had to me. But underneath, I was torn. I hadn’t lived under the same roof as my parents since I fled into the night after college in order to save my sanity; and I still had disturbingly vivid flashbacks (and the occasional nightmare) about how my gigantic, artistic spirit—not to mention hair—hadn’t fit into the confines of their small, all-enveloping household.
According to my parents and their Bible, Dr. Spock’s Guide to Completely Smothering and Castrating Your Son, having your children as physically close as possible reduces risks of heart attacks and certain cancers. Growing up, the word privacy was not in my parents’ vocabulary, and they would do anything—including telling white lies—to keep their son in close proximity.
When I was eight years old, my parents moved my family to a new house. “Oh, Steven, wait until you see our new house!” Mrs. Cojo gushed. “You’re going to have your own bedroom.”
“But all my friends are in this area,” I said. At eight, I couldn’t imagine anything worse than being ripped away from my neighborhood and rescinding my title of Most Hotly Sought Out Playdate of Bedford Street.
My mother realized this was going to be harder than she thought and went into full time-share salesman mode. And the bribery began. “Darling! Oy, you’re going to have a room so big it’s practically it’s own wing! It’s just like the Waldorf-Astoria, where we stayed last Passover, remember?”
“How big did you say? Tell me in square feet.”
“Biiiig! You could practically put a skating rink in it,” she laughed. “Oh! And you should see the bay windows!”
Hmmmm. I perked up. She had my attention. “Throw in a television and a Beta machine and it’s a deal,” I said.
The day that we moved in, I galloped up the stairs, frothing at the mouth, I was so eager to see my very own bedroom, my new Shangri-la. I flung the door open and stopped cold. Surely, this must be the linen closet? My head spun around as I took it in—all three hundred square feet of it, highlighted by a crack of a window that looked out to a brick wall. A bed was pushed up against the tissue-thin wall, and directly on the other side of the wall was my parents’ bed, so close that we could almost share an electric blanket. To call that room my own bedroom was laughable: Really it was an alcove attached to my parents’ bedroom with a door thrown in as an afterthought.
I was still hoping that this wasn’t really my room, but I looked down, and there was a box spilling over with my personal possessions: my custom-made tutu and my pogo stick, my Fisher-Price toy oven, and my Batman and Robin underoos.
“MAAAAAAAA!” I screamed. “We’ve got a problem!”
In the years that followed, being able to hear my father clip his toenails and my mother’s full-blast allergy attacks in the middle of the night grew a little too cozy for me. It really became problematic when I hit puberty: Tissue-thin walls don’t lend themselves to choking the kosher chicken. I had to come up with a new silent masturbation technique, a strict discipline with absolutely no body movement, no heavy breathing, and no bedspring squeaks: Sting would later call this tantric love, but he and Trudi never had to worry about his mother breaking down the door brandishing an inhaler, screeching “I heard a noise!? Are you having an asthma attack?”
Despite her cameo appearances in my petit boudoir—maybe even because of it—my mother and I had an otherworldly bond. I adored her delicious, colorful, no-holds-barred personality. But our overwhelming love also led to flared tempers and epic battles of will. Our fights were nothing short of operatic.
Now, all these years later, the fear of that claustrophobic love still haunted me. I was so fortunate that the people voted Greatest Parents of the Year seventeen years and running by the Romanian edition of Parenting magazine had dropped their lives to come utterly devote themselves to me. But I couldn’t help but ask myself if I could cope with this as a grown man. What had happened when I was a kid was an issue forever stuck in my psyche: My therapist calls it the Paper-Thin-Wall-Jailed-Child-Diva Syndrome. And this time, I couldn’t fall back on my teenage shenanigans of screaming, running out, and slamming the door: Instead, I was bedbound, helpless, and unable to escape. I had to confront my issues with my family dead on.
My long-suffering mother was thrilled to play the role of nursemaid, and we quickly fell into a routine. In the morning, my father would bring his famous French toast a La Benny in to me on a tray. My father is quite the gourmet: a great cook and genius at presentation. In another life he would have been Emeril. At my house, every morning was like room service at the Ritz-Carlton. There were lovely linen napkins with napkin holders, fine china, and the morning paper neatly folded next to my breakfast on the tray.
After breakfast, my mother would start nudging me: “We have to go for a walk!” I would avoid it as much as possible: I was weak and I wanted to stay in that bed, the safest place I knew. But she would keep coming back, standing patiently by my bed in her adorable pink and fuschia hooded sweat suit from Target.
I would turn into a child and whine. “I don’t have strength. I can’t breathe.”
And she would say, “Come on, honey. Come on. You have to!”
Only my mother could have gotten me through those walks. It was astonishing how delicate and fragile I was. Just getting ready to go for the walk felt like running a marathon. Putting on sweatpants was work. And then there was climbing the stairs to the front door: I had bought my three story Spanish style house in the Hills as a last-ditch effort to get my rear in shape: I figured running up and down stairs all day long would give me the high, rock hard glutes I’d always dreamed of. It didn’t work. Instead, it just complicated my recovery. Every day, I had to climb those stairs, in order to build my stamina. That’s how I measured my progress, if I could walk up a flight.
At first, I could only go thirty feet before I was completely sapped. My walks with my mother consisted of walking out the front door, barely making it to my next-door neighbor’s, and turning back. The pain was so excruciating, throbbing and constant, that I couldn’t fathom going any farther. But my mother had been drilled by the doctors about how vital it was that I walked: The more you’re in bed, the sicker you get; the more you get out of bed, the faster you recover. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t be the self-indulgent invalid lounging in bed all day. She pushed me, and I begrudgingly listened.
Physically, the walks were healing me; but it was the emotional awakening that was most unexpected. This time with my mother grew sacred. My walls came down and my defensiveness ebbed away. After a lifetime, we were finally talking as adults, a new kind of communication with a different kind of tenor. We talked about where our hearts were, and how in our darkest times, when we didn’t know who what when where or why, we both had incredible faith in something bigger than us, something divine.
It was on these walks that my mother really opened up to me for what felt like the first time: About what her disappointments in life were, the things she’d never wanted to burden her children with. She told me stories about being a child of the Holocaust, and being spit on by other schoolchildren for being a Jew; she talked about her father being sent off to a labor camp while her mother, with two little girls, lived on a diet of bread, water, and fear. She spoke of the challenges of being immigrants in a strange country, and surviving by spending late nights hunched over a sewing machine making dresses for rich women. We talked about survival and we patted each other on the back for making it through this crisis, better t
han we both thought. This situation gave us valuable time that maybe we never would have had otherwise.
My recovery was literally measured step by step. At the beginning of our walks, I huffed and puffed after reaching the next house over; then it was five houses; then the benchmark was ten, and so on. Before the surgery, I was always in such an endless hurry that I never noticed my neighbors. But as my mother and I became fixtures on the street, I began to see my neighborhood with different eyes. All the neighbors would ask how I was feeling, and I felt a kindness, almost like we were being cheered on to the finish line. I had found my Mayberry in the middle of Hollywood, and I rather liked it.
After our walk, I would collapse into my bed. Chef Mr. Cojo would gleefully deliver lunch to me, before I’d even finished digesting breakfast. I’d spend the afternoon in bed, in a painkiller daze, watching soap operas and using my special gift of X-ray Plastic Surgery Vision to while away the time: I could tell exactly how many cc’s of Botox were in each actress’s forehead, how much Restylane was in their nasolabial folds, and who had a newly bobbed nose (or in Hollywood propagandese, a “deviated septum repair”). The only contact I had with the ouside world came twice a week, when I put on my surgical mask and left the house to see the doctor for blood tests and a checkup.
Otherwise, I spent my afternoons on the telephone. I would call Shari, who had returned to Canada, with updates about the Big Shave. “How is the comeback going?” she would crack. “Major growth today,” I’d reply. “I guess there was sunshine.” Or “Bad crop this week.”
Late afternoon was Abby time for me. Abby was sequestered in the other bedroom, going through her own pain. I hadn’t anticipated this. Abby has always been so self-sufficient, constantly cleaning and cooking for everyone else. Now, she was stuck in bed, in a lot of agony, and it was hard for me to see her like this; yet, her spirit was really positive and she rarely complained. I would crawl into her room, cuddle up in her bed, and we would watch television together. It was our version of cocktail hour. I couldn’t stop thanking her for the gift she had given me: I would offer to wash her car for life, give on-the-spot pedicures, shoulder rubs, any purse she wanted. But she kept saying, every day, “All I want is for you to be well.”
The big event of the day was dinner. My parents would spend all day making it, until the smell of beef bouillon permeated the house. My parents were champion choppers: The chopping began in the morning and went on all day. I believe it was the outlet for their fear and anxiety: Chopping, chopping, chopping, whether bell peppers or onions or tomatoes. It reverberated off the walls and interrupted my naps. Mad, loud dicing and slicing.
I looked forward all day to those candlit feasts with Abby and my parents. Those dinners were a beacon of light, the highlight of my day. I would put on a fresh hoodie, brush my hair, spritz some Creed behind my ears. I was going out. This was my night on the town.
At the end of the night, after their two-hour dinner clean-up, my mom would come down to my bedroom to change bandages and clean my surgery wound, and then help me get ready for bed. She was relentless: “Brush your teeth! Take your meds!” She waited patiently while I took care of my lengthy nighttime beauty routine—slathering on moisturizer and various other age-combating lotions. And then we would watch Sex and the City reruns while she rubbed my feet to take away the pain. Carrie Bradshaw was very healing. It was one giant leap for our relationship: We’d really come a long way that we could sit there together watching Samantha offering fellatio techniques to Charlotte and Miranda and not bat an eyelash.
Next door, my father would be calling—“Come to bed already! You’ve had a long day!”—but she would just sit there, massaging my toes and chatting with me. And for everything I did, for all the pushing and fighting to get somewhere in my career, for all the moxie and confidence and being fearless enough to move to a country and city where I knew no one—for all that, when I was in such a vulnerable state, I reverted to being a child again. And I liked it.
But those were in the good moments. And then, there were the steroid moments.
Two weeks into my recovery, I was getting better: I was still extremely weak, but I was more lucid. But then the steroids kicked in. No one had warned me about what happens when you are taking 60 mg of prednisone a day—a staggeringly high quantity—a drug that is often used by transplant patients because it reduces inflammation of the organ and helps prevent rejection. I was on a major drug trip. One side effect of taking that many steroids was that I was starting to gain weight. I was retaining so much water that my stomach was bloated and distended; another was that I had become a crazy person, ping-ponging from moments of euphoria to nervousness to depression to intense, overwhelming anger.
I became the king of the temper tantrum: the slightest things could set me off. My parents were at the receiving end of most of my irrational mood swings: In my steroid fog, somehow it was the most therapeutic, cathartic thing in the world to blame everything on them. Even the most minor irritations could trigger my screaming fits: My mother flinging the bedroom door open without knocking in order to deliver laundry while I was on the edge of my bed waiting for a major climax on my soap (were Jessica and her split personality, Tess, going to agree on a lipstick shade?); my father interrupting my nap with the third turkey-pastrami sandwich snack of the day. If the magazines weren’t stacked in alphabetical order—if Vogue was placed before Harper’s Bazaar—my veins would bulge with fury.
Then came moments when I was really hyper. The drugs gave me so much energy I would push myself too hard. I would walk too fast and come home with my kidney area throbbing and worry: I just damaged my kidney. (During those first few months, that worry eats you alive. Any wrong move, and you convince yourself you’ve damaged the kidney.) I would be hot, my heart would be palpitating, and I couldn’t catch my breath. I was so uncomfortable that I wanted to rip my skin off, scratch myself, pull my hair out.
And other days, I would sink into the lows and that’s when I had to start taking tranquilizers: Valium, Xanax, not to mention Percocet and Vicodin, which I was popping for the pain. Some people hate pills—but I loooooved them. The good ones, like the painkillers and the barbiturates, were my friends. I liked the buzz: Taking pills numbed me. They kept me calm and helped me sleep, even if they only temporarily took the edge off of my wild emotions.
In early February, three weeks after my kidney transplant, the Today show called to ask me to go on the show and talk about my recovery. I should have known better than to try to manage my own television comeback when I barely had my mental faculties and was still crushing Demerol into my cereal. But it didn’t matter anyway, because two days later, they let me go. I was blindsided. On the list of Top 5 Worst Days of My Life, this was near the top.
Before I went in to surgery, I’d told the Today show that I would go on air after the operation to talk about my recovery. There was a handshake; and then came Oprah. If I was guilty of anything, it was being dazzled by Oprah: She was a beacon of light to me. But in my mind, I thought I handled the situation rather well, on a personal level, with no publicists involved. It seemed clear and sensible to me: I would do the Today show first, and then Oprah would show the wider story later.
But politics got involved. I believe the situation became a runaway train with supreme overreaction and a lot of emotion involved. If we had to do it all over again, both sides might act differently. Suffice to say, I was wounded and devastated, and felt the decision was unfair, particularly when Tom Touchet, then executive producer, told me I was “unanimously voted off the show.” Unanimously voted off? Suddenly, I felt like a Dancing with the Stars castoff who couldn’t master the mambo.
The pain and anger were overwhelming. The weeks that followed, as the press ate up the story, were very dark. The sensational headlines hurt: Seeing my name and the word “fired” in the same sentence stung. Enter steroid rage: All the psychological damage was inflamed by the massive quantities of antirejection steroids that I was ingesting e
very day.
I started going ballistic and having meltdowns in my house: I would scream until my throat was hoarse. I was vocal to begin with. Add steroids to that? Not pretty.
Old childhood issues began to resurface. In the Jewish religion, a boy becomes a man at age thirteen. The bar mitzvah is the traditional religious ceremony when a boy is called to the Torah to read and pray with a rabbi. A more modern twist is the afterparty; these are the male version of a sweet sixteen bacchanal, with themes like Star Wars, Disco Fever, or—my own theme—An Adventure in Shanghai. The custom is no gifts: Checks only. Generally, the money is intended to give the boy a start in life, but most boys I knew bought cars with their bar mitzvah money, or six thousand CDs, or invested heavily in Puma and video games. But in my case, my parents took the money to pay for practical matters, like my education and the kosher egg rolls at the party. I had always resented it, ever since I was thirteen, and in the weeks after I was fired, in my steroid rage, I decided to let my parents know.
Hysterical, I would scream at them: “Where is my bar mitzvah money? You stole it! I’m going to have you audited!”
While we were at it I decided to argue with them about other petty childhood issues, uncovering a decades-long resentment that I never knew I had. Why did I have to share a room with my sister until I was eight years old? Why was the house we grew up in so small? When I was screaming, beet red and furious, this all seemed completely rational.
My mother would just stand there and take my acid barrage. And then she would tiptoe off to her bedroom to cry. The nurse we had hired for the first few weeks to supervise my care, who was a godsend, and who really felt for my mother. She would come in after we fought and calm my mother down. “This is normal, it’s not him speaking,” the nurse would tell her. “It’s the steroids.”
“But it still really hurts,” my mother would weep.
Glamour, Interrupted Page 7
