My first thought is: Martha is exaggerating because that’s what Martha does. There’s no way she chopped off the tip of her finger.
Yoonsun and I look down, and there on the counter is a little piece of Martha’s finger. It looks like a little piece of parsnip. In fact, I might have asked if she’s sure that it’s her finger and not parsnip except for the fact that we’re not having parsnips and also because her remaining finger is gushing blood. Yoonsun looks like she might faint.
To her credit, Martha behaves like a trouper. Within moments I have her finger tightly wrapped in paper towels and ice, her fingertip is deposited in a plastic baggie for possible surgical reattachment, and we are out the door, racing to the emergency room. Never at any point do I say to her, “Your hand is going to fall off and I’m going to have to cut your meat for you for the rest of your life!”
Now, as I lie on my back in the kitchen waiting for the ambulance, Martha calls the neighbors, who agree to watch our kids while I die. The kids are still in the living room, oblivious.
Within a few minutes, I hear the ambulance siren, and then the heavy steps of first responders clomping through my home. I allow my eyes to open enough to see a couple of paramedics peering down at me. One of them cannot be older than nineteen and looks like a meth head. I’m concerned he might get a little trigger-happy with the defibrillator.
The other guy looks okay. He’s older and has a reassuring mustache. I didn’t realize it until that moment, but when it comes to policemen, firefighters, and EMTs, I equate facial hair with competence. The two paramedics regard me the way I might a bird with a broken wing—concerned, but only a little.
“How we doin’?” the one with the mustache asks, in that a-little-too-loud voice people use when they are addressing the old and infirm. His use of the first-person “we” bugs me since he is obviously fine and I am obviously in the throes of a cerebral meltdown. Plus, what does he expect me to say—fine? Do I look fine?
“Fine,” I say.
They’ve set up a gurney in the hallway, but they can’t wheel it to me because it won’t fit in our kitchen.
“Can we walk to the gurney?” the mustache asks.
“No,” I say. I am immobile. The intensity of the experience has not lessened at all in the fifteen minutes or so since it began. I cannot walk; I do not even trust myself to crawl.
“Okay,” the lead paramedic says. “We’re going to help you to the gurney.”
What I don’t realize is that by “help” they mean they are going to grab my arms and literally drag me across the hardwood floor. This is really embarrassing, I think, and the embarrassment is nearly as painful as the tumor. I am also concerned with how the kids will react; now that there are actual medical personnel in the house, they have abandoned whatever they were doing to watch. Will they be traumatized to see their father helpless, trawled across the floor like a fishing net? If anything, they think it’s funny.
When the EMTs get me to the gurney, they count three, and then lift me up, strap me in, and wheel me through my house toward the front door. I cannot help narrating my journey to myself: This is the last time I’m going to see this ceiling, the last time I will pass through this door frame, the last time I will go down these steps.
“Bye!” I call to the kids. “I love you!” These are the last words I will ever speak to them. They do not answer because SpongeBob is on.
Outside the air is warm. I scoop it into my chest, knowing it is the last time I will ever breathe fresh spring air. Martha walks me to the ambulance, then follows us to the hospital in her car.
It’s my first time riding in an ambulance. Under other circumstances, I would be excited because my childlike enthusiasm for emergency vehicles has never fully gone away. The paramedics make small talk with each other during the trip: the Yankees, the weather, gossip about other paramedics. Their chatter irritates me because they do not seem to regard my situation with the gravity that it merits. Occasionally the senior EMT yells, “We doin’ all right?” at me. I give him the thumbs up. We’re doing great.
At the hospital, they wheel me through the emergency bay and leave me in a small room cluttered with beeping machines. Martha joins me a few minutes later. A no-nonsense nurse arrives to take my vitals: normal.
After a short wait, the doctor comes in. He’s about my age, which provokes in me an immediate distrust. Doctors should always be older than me, although he has no mustache, which is reassuring. EMTs should have mustaches, but not doctors. He asks a few questions about my medical history. No epilepsy, no head injuries, no neurological problems. After his battery of questions, it seems to me that he must have ruled out any mundane explanations for what I have. Therefore it’s got to be something exotic. Probably something he’s only read about it in medical textbooks and never actually seen before.
“I see this all the time,” he says.
“You do?”
“Yes. It’s very common. You have vertigo.”
Vertigo? I didn’t think vertigo was a real thing. I thought it was a made-up movie disease or, at most, a fear of heights (which is actually called “acrophobia”). And I certainly didn’t think vertigo was “common.” How common can something be if I didn’t even think it was real? Does this mean leprechauns are also common?
He tells us that vertigo is usually caused by an inner ear disorder but could be related to a viral infection or migraines or a tumor in the ear or the result of taking certain medications or dehydration or being in an earthquake (after being in an earthquake, survivors often feel the ground moving underneath their feet for days or weeks afterward). In other words, they don’t know what causes it.
“Could it be a brain tumor?” asks Martha. I detect a somewhat hopeful tone to her question, not because I think she wants me to have a brain tumor, but because she wants to be right.
“It’s possible,” says the doctor. “But unlikely.”
“So you don’t know what causes it?” I ask.
He kind of shrugs. No. He doesn’t know. He prescribes a medication called “Antivert,” possibly the least cleverly named drug ever. All drugs should have names as straightforward as this one. For herpes: “Antiherp.” For chicken pox: “Antichicken.”
I take two of the pills and when he checks back in with me about half an hour later, the symptoms have subsided enough that he lets me go home. He reassures me that I shouldn’t be worried about vertigo unless it happens again.
“It’s already happened twice,” I tell him.
“Oh.” He considers this. “Well then, if it keeps happening.”
The next few days are terrifying. I’m afraid to drive, afraid to move, afraid to do anything that might trigger another episode. If they don’t know what causes it, how am I supposed to know how to prevent it? The Antivert doesn’t work prophylactically, so taking it as a precaution won’t do any good. I just have to wait and see if it happens again. Which, of course, it does.
Another attack hits when we are watching TV a few nights later. Even though the doctor has assured me vertigo is no big deal, when it comes, it’s just as scary as before. It feels like the planet is trying to throw me overboard. But Martha is now unfazed. “Can you get my Antivert?” I moan from the floor, which I have rolled onto because the couch is no longer horizontal enough.
“Can you wait for the commercial?” she asks.
Over the next few weeks, though, the vertigo lessens in frequency and duration, until it disappears altogether. Perhaps I am not dying after all. This is potentially very good news since dying will seriously undermine my efforts to live forever.
I keep the Antivert with me at all times just in case, but after not having any more attacks for a few months, my thoughts about the medication turn from “this could save my life” to “will this get me high?” (Answer: no.)
After a while, it’s like the whole thing never happened. Until the following spring, when it happens again. And the spring after that. My best guess is that my vertigo is related to
seasonal allergies, which are most pronounced in the springtime. The allergies probably swell something in my inner ear, which causes the problem. In other words, as unsettling as it is, it’s actually no big deal. Vertigo constituted my first legitimate adult health scare. Since then, there have been a few others. I have included a short table to inform readers about each.
Symptoms
What I Thought I Had
What I Actually Had
Mickey Mouse—shaped rash across my torso
Scabies
Poison ivy
Lump near my testicles about the size of a gherkin pickle
Testicular cancer
Small hernia
Painful, swollen elbow
Elbow Cancer
Bursitis
Blood in my stool
Colon cancer
Beets for dinner
I did have one other health scare when I was much younger, although it wasn’t the sort of thing you could take a pill for…
CHAPTER 16
fag
Monday morning, tenth grade. I’m changing in the locker room after gym class. Beside me is Dale, a kid I get along with okay. I can’t say Dale and I are friends exactly because he’s a burnout and I’m a fag, two different categories within our high school’s impermeable caste system.
Burnouts can be male or female. They are the kids who take elective automotive repair class instead of geometry. Preferred bands: Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. They wear flannel shirts and sneak cigarettes in the bathroom between classes. They bowl. Their hair is long and shaggy. The boys wear work boots and wallet chains. The girls sling tassel-fringed purses on long leather straps. Administratively speaking, burnouts are not “on the college track.”
Fags are defined as any guy who does anything creative: if you play an instrument, perform in the school play, draw anything by choice, write anything not assigned to you, or decline to wear acid-washed jeans, you are a fag. Being labeled a fag does not necessarily imply that you are homosexual, just as being Pakistani does not necessarily mean that you’re a terrorist. But in certain circles, then as now, one implies the other.
It’s New Jersey in the eighties, I’m in high school, and I hate my life.
But Dale’s okay. A skinny kid with glasses and thin straw-colored hair, he looks like John Denver crossed with Kermit the Frog. As I said, we’re friendly enough, and I don’t think twice before turning to him and making the following joke:
“So, Dale, did’ja get laid this weekend?”
It’s not a question I would seriously ask him. It’s not the kind of question I would seriously ask anybody. Also, I already know the answer. Of course he didn’t get laid. He’s like me, scrawny and unloved. Guys like us don’t get to do that stuff. We don’t even get to touch boobs yet. That was the point—an acknowledgment that he and I are different from all the hooting bonobo monkeys surrounding us in the locker room, all those hairy, muscular guys slathering themselves in underarm deodorant. Those guys are probably having sex with dozens of girls. Hundreds maybe. In big teenage sex orgies. My question was meant to be a self-deprecating admission of our own sad boyishness among these men.
So I am surprised when he answers, “Yeah.”
Yeah? What does he mean “yeah”? That’s not the correct answer. The correct answer is “No.”
I mean, the answer can’t be anything but no. There’s just no way. Because if Dale is having sex, that means there’s no reason I shouldn’t be having sex, and I am not. I’m better looking than Dale. I’m smarter than Dale. I have an obviously brighter future than Dale. In fact, the only reason I am even friendly with Dale is that I believe myself to be his superior. If he is actually getting it on with somebody then I will have to reevaluate not only my opinion about Dale, but my opinion of myself, an opinion that has already suffered a steady, leaky deflation since puberty began, and which cannot stand to have too much more air taken from it. Therefore, I am forced to conclude that Dale is lying.
“Who is she?” I ask.
“You don’t know her.” Evasion. He is so full of it.
“I might know her.”
“Nah. She lives in Manville.”
Manville is the next town over, named for the big Johns Manville plant that used to make asbestos, but which now sits abandoned because people no longer enjoy asbestos.
“What’s her name? I know a lot of people there.” This isn’t true. I don’t know anybody who lives in Manville because the only people who live in Manville are burnouts. It is the burnout capital of central New Jersey.
“You don’t know her, okay?”
“Maybe I do.”
“You don’t.” His voice pitches up. He’s beginning to get mad.
“If I don’t know her then what difference will it make if you tell me her name?” He stares at me. I press. “See what I mean? If I don’t know her then just tell me her name and I’ll let it go. All I’m saying is I know a lot of people in Manville so there’s a fairly good chance that I do know her.”
“Just let it go, okay?” he says.
I am aware that other people are starting to pay attention to our conversation. But I don’t care because I know I am on unassailable moral high ground. For some reason, Dale’s sexual experiences, real or imagined, have suddenly taken on an outsize importance to my own life, a life that until a few seconds ago had never much considered Dale at all.
But if I can prove Dale to be a liar, or better, if I can humiliate him in front of my peers, perhaps my own social standing will rise. From there it will be only a short step from the bottom rung of the social ladder to the next-to-bottom rung. If I maintain this rate, within a couple of decades I could actually be popular!
So no, I am not going to “let it go,” Dale. I will never let it go.
I continue asking for her name, needling him in front of the other guys. Dale grows furious. His shoulders rise up and his head darts from side to side as the other guys come closer. He looks like a mongoose cornered by a snake. He tells me to shut up. But I can’t. This attention I’m getting, attention I usually dread, is empowering. I can tell the other guys are enjoying the spectacle, too. They like seeing Dale squirm. I find myself in the unfamiliar role of tormentor and discover to my surprise that I like it. “Is she a ghost? Are you having sex with a ghost, Dale?”
My plan is working. The guys are on my side. They laugh. They like me. These guys are great. Probably they’ll want to start hanging out with me. And if they want to hang out, that will mean the girls will be hanging out with us, too. The popular girls, some of whom I bet are on the Pill, which is so awesome it hurts.
Then things start to go bad. Dale stops cooperating with my torment. Instead of accepting my continued ridicule as a gentleman should, he suddenly launches his arms out at me, pushing me in the chest. I stagger backward a step or two. The guys go, “Oooooh.”
A physical provocation. I am completely unprepared for this. Oh, dear. The fact that I just thought the words “Oh, dear” should be ample demonstration of just how unprepared I am for things to get violent. Guys about to fight never think, Oh, dear. They think, Bring it on, bitch!
I’m startled. Why would Dale push me? Doesn’t he see how well this is going for me?
He pushes me again. My eyes flick to the gym teacher’s office in the center of the room, a glass cage with windows on all four sides like a prison guard’s station. It is empty, which is unfortunate. I was hoping our gym teacher was in there because gym teachers really thrive on blowing whistles and breaking things up.
“I told you to LET IT GO!” he shouts at me, pushing me one more time. I am backed up against the lockers now. I hold my palms outward toward him, a peace offering. “Hey c’mon,” I say stupidly. “Hey.”
Dale is on the balls of his feet, energized. His fists clench and unclench. Somebody starts chanting “Fight. Fight. Fight.” Oh dear, oh dear. Somebody else picks it up and in a moment they are all chanting: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Shut
up! I want to yell at my classmates, my demented bloodthirsty classmates. They should all be in juvy, every single one of them.
Dale’s face is flushed, his ratty mongoose head bobbing on the end of his neck. What will I do if he takes a swing at me? My mind quickly devises the optimal strategy: I will fall down. Whether he connects with his punch or not is irrelevant. If I see a fist coming in my direction, I will take a dive. That should stop any further punches, although it does open me up to kicking. I glance down. Yes, he has already changed from his sneakers to his work boots, most likely steel-toed because steel-toed work boots are an important component of the burnout uniform.
He’s going to hit me and then kick me and I am going to end up in a wheelchair. But he does not. Instead he says, “Meet me in the parking lot after school,” in a tough voice so that he sounds like Fonzie mixed with John Denver crossed with Kermit the Frog.
“Oooooooh!” Mocking laughs all around.
This is terrible. He wants to have a fight. Like, a fight fight. Like in those teen movies where kids with pompadours stab each other. I can’t fight Dale. I don’t know how to fight. I don’t know how to throw a punch. I don’t even know the right way to make a fist. Thumb inside the knuckles or outside? My only other fight occurred a few years before at our neighborhood bus stop. Eric and I fought a boy for saying something cruel about our sister, Susan. Two against one. He beat us both.
I wish my dad had taught me how to fight before he died, except that I’m pretty sure he didn’t know how to fight, either, even though he grew up in Brooklyn and his dad was a cop. Why didn’t my grandfather teach my dad how to fight so my dad could teach me? What is wrong with the men in my family?
Dale is a burnout and burnouts all know how to fight.
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