The Moth Presents Occasional Magic

by The Moth Presents Occasional Magic (retail) (epub)

  My parents split up when I was seven years old, and they got joint custody. My mom stayed in the house on Hilltop Lane. My dad moved to an apartment about five minutes away, and then to a little house and another house. He was always five minutes away—if you put a compass needle at my mom’s house and swung it around, it was always the same distance.

  I would go back and forth between them, but I never felt like I was really home in either place.

  It was as if I lived in that space in between.

  I felt like a pinball. At that time my parents were pretty lonely and unhappy, so I’m bouncing back and forth between these two angry bumpers making loud, screeching sounds.

  I left Cincinnati and went to college. I had this split in me. No matter where I lived, there was always one specific, other place I thought I should be.

  So I lived in Manhattan but I looked with these wide eyes over the river at Brooklyn. And then I moved to Brooklyn and I looked back at Manhattan with the exact same expression.

  I had enough therapy to know what was going on. Brooklyn was like my mom—warm and inviting—and Manhattan was like my dad—elusive and bipolar.

  But I couldn’t shake it.

  I went for a run one day—I had moved to the country, was pining for the city—and I got all emotional. I came back to this country house and called my mom.

  We had gotten to be good friends.

  I said, “Mom, I had this breakthrough. I see why I can’t settle down and get a home of my own. There’s a part of me that still feels like the little boy living on Hilltop Lane. And I think that little boy in me thinks that if he gets a home of his own, that means Dad is really not coming back.”

  My dad was definitely not coming back. After I went to college, he came into some money, and he started traveling the world. He was a photographer—a terrific photographer—and he would pack up his equipment and go.

  I often literally did not know where in the world he was.

  I would beg him to tell me his itinerary so I could track him in my mind. But that stopped mattering, because even flying commercial became too restricting for him, and he studied for his pilot’s license and bought a little plane and began flying himself.

  He did try to show up. He came to my brother Jon’s wedding. He was there for the rehearsal dinner and the ceremony.

  But on Sunday morning, when I woke up, I said, “Where’s Dad?”

  Someone said, “He flew out at dawn.”

  He was a charismatic and passionate and awkward guy. But the dark heart of his energy in those years was his fury at my mom. Decades after they divorced, he couldn’t be in the same room with her. He didn’t even want to be in the same city.

  And so he just got farther and farther away and higher and higher up in the sky.

  Until one day, suddenly, he came down.

  In April 2008 my dad was flying from Colorado, where he was living, to Virginia. He was going to stop in Louisville for the night. As he approached the airport in Louisville, something happened with the plane, and it came down quickly through the trees and into this suburban neighborhood and smashed on the ground. It went careening through a yard, across a road, smacked into a retaining wall, and burst into flames.

  A little girl saw it from her front window and called 911.

  They said, “What’s the emergency?”

  And she said, “There’s a plane on fire in my front yard.”

  It took at least five minutes for the fire crew to get there. My dad was trapped in the cockpit, burning. And it took a few more minutes for them to get the fire out and extract him from this tangled and twisted plane.

  When I saw him late that night in the burn unit at the University of Louisville Hospital, his head had swollen to the size of a basketball, and it was all wrapped in gauze. He had second- and third-degree burns over 70 percent of his body. His back was broken.

  If he survived, he would surely be paralyzed.

  I ordinarily hate euphemisms, but the doctors used a very good one. They said we should “prepare for the worst.”

  And the worst thing, for me, was that if my dad died in that moment, he would die with us as strangers.

  For as long as I can remember, I’d had this whiteboard in my mind on which were written three phrases that described my relationship with my dad:

  We couldn’t connect.

  I wasn’t useful to him.

  I didn’t know if he was proud of me.

  Now, he was in a coma, and I was walking around in a daze, splitting my time between wherever I had to be for work and the hospital. I would come see him for about a week at a time and sit by his side for long hours, with the whirring and clicking of all these machines keeping him alive.

  Then he was well enough for them to bring him out of this coma. And one day I was sitting with him. He was unable to speak, but he was awake.

  I thought, Maybe this is going to be like one of those movies where the worst possible thing has this underpinning of light coming up from beneath.

  My mom had come from Cincinnati to Louisville to be with me, and she was in the waiting room. She would never have dared to actually come into the hospital room.

  But I said, “Dad, Mom is out there. Would you like to see her?”

  He nodded his head.

  During this period he was so vulnerable to anyone who had any kind of tenderness for him. He needed to have them in his life.

  About a month later, he was high on morphine and my mom was on the phone with one of us.

  He asked for the phone, and he said, “Joanne, I know things got a little helter-skelter between us. But if things don’t work out with Sidney”—that was her husband of twenty-four years—“I still want to make it work.”

  Then this really strange thing happened.

  I want to remind you of the geography. My dad was living in Colorado, and he was flying to Virginia, and he crashed in Louisville. So after a couple of months in critical care at the University of Louisville, it made sense to transfer him to Cincinnati, about ninety miles away, because he had so many friends and family there.

  So we made that move for him, and he was in critical care at the University of Cincinnati for many more months. Then it made sense to move him to a rehab hospital.

  The rehab hospital in Cincinnati was five minutes from my mom’s house—the exact same distance away as all those apartments and houses where he lived in those first years after their divorce. So in the summer of 2008, my week came up where I could leave work and go be with my dad. I flew to Cincinnati, and I went to my mom’s house on Hilltop Lane. I dropped my bags, and I went to see my dad.

  That week it was like, one by one, the circumstances and my relationship with my dad took an eraser to those phrases on that whiteboard.

  I never felt I could connect with him. It used to be that it was like a miracle to get my dad on the line for two minutes at a time. But now we were talking all day, and we talked about real things. He told me about studying with Ansel Adams, and we talked about Judaism. He was the wise old man with stories, but I was right there with him, asking him questions and arguing with him when I disagreed.

  I never felt useful to my dad, but I was so obviously useful. I was critical. I was interfacing with the nurses and the doctors about his care, which was constant. When he was able to have something down his throat for the first time, I went and got him ice chips every hour from the machine. Then he was hot, and I went and got a fan and put it together for him. I shaved him.

  When I was shaving him, I said, “Dad, do you remember when I was little, you used to ask me to cut your ear hairs?”

  He had these funny little scissors, and he would have me cut his ear hairs. And I did that again for him in his hospital room.

  I never knew if my dad was proud of me, but it just so happened that that week, after months of negotiation with a Harvard psychiatr
ist who I wanted to write about, we finally agreed on terms for me to get access to this very unusual study. I got the assignment to write a cover story for The Atlantic.

  I took the call in the room next to my dad’s, and I came back and told him. He wanted to know how much I was going to get paid. I told him the number, and he was a little impressed.

  Later that day my brother Jon was on the phone, on speakerphone, and he said, “What do you think of our boy Josh?”

  And my dad said, “He’s not a boy. He’s all man.”

  We’d have these long days together, and then at the end of the day he was tired, he was ready to sleep. And it was just so natural to say good-bye and “I’ll see you tomorrow,” and I would drive up the hill to Hilltop Lane and go home to my mom’s house.

  My mom would have dinner waiting for me, and we would talk about the day. She wanted to know how my dad was, and she wanted to know how it felt for me. I would go sleep in my childhood bed and wake up and go do it again.

  For once in my life, I felt like maybe I was still a pinball, but I was nestled in this flipper. Everything was okay—both my parents were holding me, and I was holding them.

  I felt like I could finally shoot out into the world.

  The last day was nothing like the rest of the week. I’d had these long, languorous days with my dad and plenty of time, but now we were rushed because I had a plane to catch.

  And somehow, even though he was profoundly vulnerable in his body, I wasn’t thinking about his body that week, because he was so present in his mind. At one point in the week, somebody came into the room for a little bit to visit, and it was a guy my dad didn’t like.

  When he left, my dad said, “Somebody crack a window in here.”

  But this last day the nurses were cleaning him and changing his bedding, and they had him tipped him over on his side. His flesh was hanging off him, and it was so pink and raw—it was like a cut of meat you would see at the butcher.

  I was standing at the door. I had to go.

  But I was so full of longing for my dad.

  I had been so good all week, but I just broke down, and I became a little boy again, and I started to cry.

  With some effort my dad turned his head around to face me, and he said, “Josh, why are you crying?”

  I said, “I don’t want to go.”

  He said, “You can come back.”

  And I think I know what he meant. I think he meant I could book another flight, and I could come back to see him. But in the years since—the hard years, while he was still alive and especially since he died, three years later—that phrase has come to mean so much more to me.

  It’s come to mean you can go back to the places you’re hurt and get a little better.

  And you can come back to the people in your memory and spend a little bit more time with them.

  And as I think about that week with my dad, I can’t help it.

  I would give anything to go back.

  * * *

  JOSHUA WOLF SHENK is the author of Lincoln’s Melancholy and Powers of Two. His essays have appeared in Harper’s, GQ, The Atlantic, Riverteeth, and the New York Times. He is editor-in-chief of the Believer, executive and artistic director of the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute, and a founding adviser to The Moth.

  This story was told on June 24, 2015, at the Players Club in New York City. The theme of the evening was Tangled and Twisted. Director: Catherine Burns.

  When I auditioned for the university dance department, I quickly realized one of these things is not like the other.

  All the girls there were tall and lean in their black tights, black leotards, and perfect little buns (with no flyways). And there I was, short, muscular, tan tights, bright leotard, and hair just in a ponytail with curly flyways everywhere.

  As the audition proceeded, all the girls did their pieces, which were important, meaningful pieces of modern dance.

  And then I got up there and did my audition piece, which was a jazz dance to Huey Lewis and the News’ “Hip to Be Square.”

  At the end of it, the head of the department looked at me and said, “Wow. We’ve never had one like you before.”

  And I thought to myself, Wow. He’s not referring to my music choice. He’s talking about my arm.

  You see, I have a prosthetic arm. I’ve always had a prosthetic arm—I was born with part of my left arm missing, and I got my first prosthetic arm when I was three months old. So I’ve always worn it.

  And I was under this delusion that it was normal, because I went to school in a cocoon, essentially. I was with the same kids from kindergarten through twelfth grade, so everybody knew me. No one ever really thought about Mary’s having a prosthetic arm.

  So when I was at this audition and this man said this to me, I realized, Oh, my gosh. This is how the rest of the world sees me.

  At the time of the audition I actually couldn’t even wear my prosthetic arm, because I had been injured about a year before, dancing in high school with my rap group, B-PIE (Bourgeois Posse in Effect).

  I was not wearing a prosthesis, which seems like it would have been a big deal. But because I was in this cocoon, I was embraced, and it wasn’t a big deal. To have this man say this to me, it really rocked me back. And I realized I didn’t want people to judge me on that. I wanted them to get to know me. So I decided that summer, before I started the University of Michigan, that I was going to go back to wearing a prosthetic arm.

  My parents went through the process with me, and I got a lovely arm from a French doctor that was hand-painted by French artists. They even put in little freckles just to make sure that the arm was Irish to go with the girl. And all that for the bargain basement price of twenty thousand dollars.

  But when I got to school, I looked normal. Nobody would see me and right away notice anything different. This was great. It was greatly aided by the fact that I wore long sleeves all the time.

  The only trick of it was not letting my roommates know. It’s a little difficult to not have people find out when you live with them, because when you have a prosthesis, you cannot wear it twenty-four hours a day. You must take it off and let your skin breathe, otherwise your skin will break down and bleed and all sorts of bad things happen.

  So the way that I got around my roommates’ finding out is that every night I would climb into my bed, pull my covers up tight to my neck, and slip my prosthetic arm off underneath the covers. And then when the sun came up and my eyes opened, the arm went right back on, and I would come out of bed. I did this the whole time, four years. I got through college, and very few people found out. It was great.

  Then I moved to Chicago, and I was dancing and living my young professional life. I met a fella, and we decided to get hitched. Like any good bride-to-be, I focused on the most important thing: the dress.

  I went dress shopping with my mother, and I quickly discovered which dress was the dress, because when I walked out of the fitting room, my mother started to cry. The only problem with the dress was that it was strapless. This was a little concerning to me, and I didn’t think I could actually wear it.

  But my mother said, “You know what? I’m going to get really long gloves made.”

  And that’s what she did. She had super-long gloves made that matched the trim of my dress. On the morning of my wedding, they were laid out there in my mother’s bedroom as I was getting all ready to be the bride.

  I looked at those gloves.

  And I decided not to wear them.

  I thought, I am about to spend the day with my family, my friends, with a hundred fifty people who love me. Why should I care?

  But then I got to the church. I stood right at the back, and as I looked down, I quickly grabbed my veil from behind me and covered my arm. Even on my wedding day, I had to fight to look normal.

  But life continued. My husband and I moved to New York,
and I was acting and performing and doing great and getting jobs, and for the most part nobody knew.

  Sometimes they would find out after the fact, and I’d be like, Well, you already hired me. Too bad, so sad. You don’t want to be that guy who fires me.

  In one particular instance, I was working with a company that is called an integrated company, which means they have able-bodied and disabled actors working together. I was the lead in this play. We were doing a lovely new Off-Broadway play, and the New York Times came to review it. Fantastic! The Times comes, and they love the play. Their only criticism was that it was unfortunate that the lead was played by…an able-bodied actress.

  This was my coup de grâce. I had arrived. The New York Times just called me able-bodied! Who was gonna refute them? Not me.

  I felt like the king of the world in this moment.

  I thought, Now I have proof that everyone sees me as normal.

  But then I became a mom. Boy, oh, boy, did this open up a whole new can of worms. Because as I was expecting my child, I had all the crazy thoughts that you have during your pregnancy, through the long ten months (it’s not nine, that’s a lie—it’s ten months).

  You think, Will the baby have my eyes? Will the baby have my mother’s great legs? All these things that you really hope your baby will possess.

  But then I got to add in things like, Will my baby be embarrassed by me? Will my baby not know what to tell his friends? Will he wish he had another mother?

  So I decided, before I had my son, that I was going to appear normal to him, too. And I brought the baby home and was taking care of this little five-pound, ten-ounce guy and trying to do all these things with my prosthesis on.

  And it was challenging.

  Changing a little baby in a diaper is hard enough, but to have a six-inch piece of metal hanging at the end of your arm that doesn’t rotate or do anything to assist you in changing this squirming baby…Now, I was muddling through, doing everything that I could to look like what moms look like. Two hands, kid, don’t worry about it. It’s all covered!