The Weekly Meat

Truth and Courage

Back in elementary school, my friends and I all thought it tremendous fun to pick the winter sidewalks clear of ice for about a half a block, leaving the rest icy so we could dig out our old-school fixed-gear bikes and strap on our hockey helmets, then ride full bore down the clean sidewalks straight onto the end patches of blue ice — at which point we would jump on our brakes, recklessly sending our bodies wherever the bike happened to slide. And stopping wherever, and in whatever manner, they happened to stop.

Even then, I think we realized how slightly crazy and very stupid we were. Yet we were not the least bit frightened. Flecks of blood frozen into the ice only served to remind us how alive we were.

Blood was just part of the culture of youth. My younger brother once threw an instamatic camera at me, cutting open my forehead and ruining my white turtleneck. I took the blood-spattered shirt to school the next day for Show-and-Tell.

Back then, as ever, fear had more to do with the unknown than the known. Cemeteries were scary, haunted houses were not. Being stranded alone in the woods at night was scary, being stranded alone in the woods in the day was not. Losing teeth playing hockey was not scary, older girls were.

But then.

One summer during high school I traveled through the Rockies with my family. The day after we touched down in Denver, I went off hiking by myself near a family friend's place in Summit County. I climbed a mountain and came upon a series of waterfalls. I was able to maneuver behind one and take pictures out through the curtain of water. It was a beautiful place and a spiritual moment. And then in the time it took to blink, I took one bad step.

I fell and I slid. I turned on my side, dug hard into the wet rock, and still I slid, quickly approaching the next waterfall. The edge fell away sharply to more rock, and water. The fall was substantial and would take more than a second. I could feel the thud and crumple of such a landing. Time slowed down. I grabbed backward and looked forward, and my life did not flash before my eyes; rather, in that moment before certain crushing pain and possible death, I saw with supreme clarity the most probable outcome of the fall.

It was grim and filled with pain, traction, long hospital stays, and a wheelchair with a blow tube. It scared my 16-year-old brain possibly even more than death.

Instinctively, I dug sharply and continued to, until I found a hold the depth of a tack.

My legs dangled over the edge of the drop, and to this day I believe that God entered my fingertips for some fifteen seconds, until I had held and pulled myself to safety.

An hour or two later and altitudes lower, and when the blood was washed away, I sat and studied my fingertips. They were raw to the bone and the nails were completely gone. I cried for the first time in years, and for a full hour.

::::::::

I told this waterfall story in a college acting class during a "private moment" exercise designed to let us bear our souls — or, in a word, cry in front of our peers.

I learned that year that acting boils down to two things: truth and courage.

To be nakedly truthful; that is, to allow an audience to see the parts of your soul and yourself about which you are not proud. About which you are uncomfortable. When necessary, to give yourself over completely and allow yourself to dangle precipitously.

I got worked up, but I was not able to touch the memory closely enough, nor open up enough, to cry in that acting class. I was not that good of an actor. But the memory haunts me even now. And I write about it — as I have periodically — as a form of therapy, as a form of further discerning what happened and how it affects me still. I write as a form of truth-telling.

That day in Colorado, as I washed away the blood, and as I poured hydrogen peroxide over the left side of my body, I cried not because of the pain — which I understood — but because I knew for certain that no matter how I explained the incident to those I love, there would be no way they could understand precisely what I had gone through. They had not been there, and I did not have the capacity to make sense of what had happened nor allow myself to share it properly. And so no one could know exactly how close I had come.

Despite the solitary nature of this event, I also believe that had anyone been there, their screams would have broken my concentration for the slightest blink, and god would not have entered my fingertips, and I would have missed my hold and gone over the edge.

It mattered then, because high school was a difficult time for me, and I had felt a need for recklessness and rebellion as a way of dealing with teen angst and depression. And my near fall began a change in my thinking. It introduced reality and powerlessness into the life equation in a way far different from the fantastic teen glorification of suicide and the like. It made me realize too that there was much to the world that was much greater than I.

It matters now because I feel the need as a husband and a father to remember with unflagging precision how desperately I wanted to live at that moment — and how much more I still want to live.

Being Sick

I. For the second time in my life, I have handed over to a lab samples of my blood, urine, and yes, stool.

I returned home last weekend from far away, and it would seem that I did so with something in my small intestine. Not large intestine, mind you — not Maria, Full of Grace — but rather, something evil of a viral, bacterial, or parasitic origin. You don't need the details, but the upshot has not been anything approaching fun.

II. When we're sick, we tend to pine for chicken soup, and the creature comforts of our youth (The Rockford Files, cereal for dinner, say), when a day of missed classes was an adventure and the house ours for the taking. We allow self-indulgence, wallow a bit, try to catch up on sleep.

And then maybe we become worse off. A bad flu, say. We forego basic hygiene, don't check email, and begin to develop a vague sense of wanting our mom, though you know there's no adult equivalent of the comfort mom could provide when you were sick as a child, and you believed her when she said everything would be OK — because then it soon was.

But being really sick (malaria, Dengue fever, etc.) scares the crap out of you. It makes you feel helpless, and transports your emotional core back to past experiences of utter misery, childhood high-fever nightmares, and physical pain. For me, it means June 1990, and my summer of salmonella.

III. Any time food poisoning or local toddler-spread norovirus sets in for more than a day or two, I'm holed up again, alone in a dingy one-star hotel in the garment district of Paris. For more than a week, as the parasites went about their business, I was delirious and dehydrated and went without food for long stretches (days, not hours). I alternately burned and shivered, slept and could not. Looking back on it, it seems far less like salmonella and far more like what a long heroin withdrawal must be. In many ways, it was the most frightening and defining period of my life.

IV. And so I sit in the hopefully brief misery of now, keeping my distance from the kids, while eating their applesauce and toast — my sick somewhere between worse off and salmonella — and starting to finally write a 20-year-old story, while in a petri dish of a Quest Diagnostics lab somewhere, my shit begins to tell this one.

The Fear List

A couple months ago, I ran a list column on Omnivorous cataloging — the excellent brainchild of  www.verygoodtaste.co.uk, who initially published the list with instructions similar to those that follow. I wanted to rip off pay homage to the idea with a different spin. Seeing as how I'm presently in Israel, something on fear seems perhaps in order.

One person's anxious nightmares may be another's perverse pleasure, so I tried to create a list that's not simply filled with belt notches for adrenaline junkies, but a real cross-section of things that make us sweat, or dread, or trigger the fight-or-flight response.

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the fears you've had to face.
3) Cross out your 5 greatest fears (whether you've faced them or not).
4) Add a comment to this post linking to your results.

I’ve faced 35/50 (and not without some kicking and screaming along the way).

1. Been mugged
2. Been in a fire
3. Been punched in the face (only in hockey, which should probably barely count)
4. Shoplifted
5. Been arrested
6. Scuba dived
7. Had surgery
8. Performed onstage
9. Traveled alone in a country of which you do not speak the language
10. Had sex in public (I mean, but not in a risqué on-the-subway sort of way)
11. Skydived
12. Ridden in a helicopter
13. Run with the bulls
14. Been laid off/fired
15. Quit a job
16. Been trampled by a crowd
17. Made an emergency landing
18. Driven 100+ MPH
19. Had food poisoning
20. Witnessed a death
21. Witnessed a birth
22. Been in a place of war or civil unrest
23. Signed a mortgage
24. Been shot at
25. Been lost in the woods
26. Been camping alone
27. Taken your child to the hospital
28. Eaten something while it's still alive
29. Killed a mammal
30. Fired a gun
31. Fired an automatic gun
32. Jumped from a height of more than 10 feet (into water)
33. Been bitten by a mammal
34. Seen a bear in the wild
35. Broken a bone
36. Met an idol
37. Eaten a meal alone in a nice restaurant
38. Ran out of gas in a car
39. Been bullied
40. Taken a test for HIV/AIDS
41. Been to prison (even to visit)
42. Had your house broken into
43. Had a bat/rat in your house
44. Been to a psychotherapist
45. Been in a hospital Intensive Care Unit (as a patient, to work, or to visit)
46. Been on a blind date
47. Been stuck in an elevator
48. Been told by a physician that you have a disease
49. Been caught in a riptide
50. Asked someone to marry you

Hurt

Apropos of nothing (you want justification, get your own blog), a few thoughts on pain:
 

I. One Saturday, when I was seven years old or so, my dad left me alone in the car for a few minutes while he ran into the hardware store. I was in the front seat, and I got instantly curious about the dashboard. I pushed in a black round button. A minute later, the button popped out. Curiouser and curiouser, I saw that I was able to pull the button out of the dashboard. I did, and turned it around in my hand. The other side had incredibly bright, tightly wound orange coils. I touched the tip of my index finger to the coils.

I grew up in a non-smoking household. So, while I thank my parents for my limited exposure to secondhand smoke, I curse them for never mentioning the purpose of a car cigarette lighter. As you might imagine, it's an incredibly goddamn hot thing.

It was years before that fingertip regained its print.

II. I learned the word "torque" in the wee morning hours of February 23, 1980. I had been doing some twilight skiing the night before, and had badly broken my leg. It was what orthopedists (also a new word for this then 11-year-old) would qualify as a typical above-the-boot spiral tib-fib fracture. Essentially, the break was caused by the downward force of my body weight in combination with the fact that while my left knee was turning one way on a horizontal axis, my left ankle was moving the opposite way. The break spiraled up the tibia, and the force of the whole thing caused the smaller fibula to snap.

As the doctors explained, if you take a foot and a half long stick, hold it with one hand on each end and quickly twist your hands in opposite directions until the stick splinters, you get a good sense of how it all works. And, as I learned a few years later while watching some special effects show on TV, if you try the same with several stalks of celery, you can even make it sound like breaking bones!

I was a kid, and being treated in an otherwise excellent hospital, but I was given absolutely nothing for the pain — a fact that is incredible to me now. It's tough to explain to anyone who hasn't experienced it, but I'd have loved even a horse bit to grind my teeth against. Any muscle movement in my leg would twist the break even more. It was medieval and ungodly.

III. About 10 years ago, and just days before my sister's wedding, I managed to shatter my wrist. It was a dandy, involving both forearm bones, and several in the wrist itself, replete with "pulverized" fragments and the like. How I managed to do this at a ski mountain in mid-August isn't really important. What matters is that it was excruciating.

A passerby asked if I was OK, and I told her no, that I just broke my wrist and I'd love a ride down the mountain. I hopped in the back of her car. She asked my name and I told her. Then promptly passed out.

At the hospital, I asked the ER nurse for something for the pain and she cheerily returned with two vicodin. Gritting my teeth, and with an 11-year-old's hell in the back of my mind, I said something to the effect of "Maybe I didn't make myself clear. My wrist is currently somewhere in the vicinity of my fucking elbow. I've got a Blue Cross/Blue Shield card, and I'd like something only the slightest bit less potent than what killed John Belushi." Ah, she understood. She handed me the vicodin and apologized that it was all she was able to give me, but that she'd send the doctor right in. I thanked her and swallowed the vicodin.

The doctor appeared in the doorway a few minutes later. He cheerily asked how I was doing. I simply took my broken left arm in my right and held it out for him to have a look. Without taking a step closer to me, he just kind of made a grunting "Oh." sort of noise, leaned back into the hall, and said, "Could I get 100 of demerol and 30 [unintelligible] in here." He then came into the room and smiled. Through the agony, I tried to smile back.

IV. There exists a 0–10 scale for pain. Ten is pretty much reserved for drug-free birthing, passing kidney stones, burn victims, severe bone fractures, and perhaps, sustained blunt force trauma to the testes. It is both physically, mentally, and emotionally disabling.

The thing about extreme, crushing pain is that the moment it is alleviated, you have no real concept of what you've just felt. Clearly, those pain synapses are there for a reason — and likewise, they can occasionally be overridden for the very same reason: self preservation. Once the demerol hit, it brought the pain of my shattered wrist down to tolerable levels — 6 or 7 — and I could barely imagine what I'd felt only moments before.

I haven't been back to 10 on the scale since the shattered wrist. But playing hockey, I've since cracked ribs, separated my shoulder, torn cartilage, had my shoulder scoped, and broken my fibula. Because I've felt 10 before, I have only the vague sense each time that, though I'm in a world of pain, I'm still far from the top of the scale. I've hit 7s and maybe 8 in the past few years — and sneezing with cracked ribs is a miserable experience I'd wish on few outside those presently "working" or advising in the West Wing — but it's all been relatively manageable.

The human body is incredibly resilient, and amazes me in its ability to absorb tremendous amounts of abuse and slowly heal itself. Despite the amnesiac fog of pain, the mind is slower to heal — and rightly so, I think. Though I can't conceive of what number 10 pain feels like, I have some idea. And I'm not real keen on being there again. Birthing is not an option for me, but it's one of the very few pain projects I'd willingly take on. So, aside from that, I'll still play hockey, but I left behind my thoughts of buying a motorcycle the day I shattered my wrist. Accidents happen during everyday life, and I can roll with that, but there's no need to put myself out there in that sort of way — especially when I have so much other clearly important stuff occupying my mind.

That said, some amount of pain is life affirming. I'm not a masochist or tough guy by any stretch, but the day after a hockey game, when it hurts to get out of the car at the end of my commute to work and I find myself hobbling a bit, it feels good too. When the muscles I'd forgotten about ache, and I've got a welt across a foot or arm, I'm alive in ways that I'm not while sitting and working at my desk.

V. I've said what I can. Here are Trent Reznor's thoughts on the subject, via Johnny Cash.

In Waiting

With the season upon us in which we tend to receive those folksy yearly recap letters from far-flung friends, I thought it might be an appropriate time to post this piece — which could very well have stood as a sobering, non-traditional holiday letter for AKL and me exactly three years ago. You need to know up front that ultimately, things turned out quite well for us, and we couldn't be happier (or more tired). But life reveals itself slowly, and as a time capsule, this seems no less worth putting out there. --BK

My wife AKL and I have been trying unsuccessfully to have children for the past two and a half years. Recently, we had our third miscarriage.

Three times we have been through the unbelievable loss and hurt — I never again want to hear a sound as sad as AKL’s open sobbing through the bathroom door when we lost the first — and then the shift into medical crisis mode, and then the aftermath: weeks or months of emotional fragility.

All the while, we lived in social awkwardness. As our pregnancies were not yet public knowledge, there was no public acknowledgment of our losses. So we kept going to the office, feeling distracted from the same work we hoped would distract us from our far more complex troubles. We wore no armbands, nor dressed in black — nothing outside the norm, but for a handful of hushed, coded conversations and emails. Coworkers and friends may have wondered, but they didn’t pry, and we didn’t offer, assuming most would not have been prepared for our honest answer when they asked us perfunctorily, “How’s it going?”

Our second loss was in July 2004, and we spent a horribly uncomfortable week cringing at every mention of the “DNC” (Democratic National Convention) — in our hometown of Boston, no less — while dealing with our impending “D&C.”

Full disclosure: we’re card-carrying pro-choice Democrats. But when you have a miscarriage, even early in the first trimester, rhetorical, clinical terms like embryo or fetus or viable go out the window, because in your gut what has just happened is that, quite simply, your baby has died.

Throughout, friends and family have tried to be helpful. Though it feels nice to be loved, their attempts at help are generally centered around stories of their friends or acquaintances who went through similar travails to eventually succeed. People who have three boys now and are happy, or some such. While I understand the hopeful message of these tales, because they’re about success, they don’t have much to do with our present situation. And with each loss, we pay a higher emotional price for our hope. Yes, we might wind up being those folks. But we might not. We might be the friends who tried and tried and then, because the trying was killing them, stopped trying on their own and either tried to adopt, or didn’t. We don’t know.

Sometimes I convince myself that one’s ability to have kids must be inversely proportional to one’s desire to have kids. Surely, if we were a couple of 15-year meth addicts, we’d have our own basketball team by now — but we’re not. AKL and I are 33 and 37, respectively (“you still have so much time,” you say); we have a home, steady jobs, a healthy relationship, love to give, and we have wanted children since we got engaged nearly five years ago. We waited two years: until we had gotten married, until we moved out of our little condo, until AKL finished grad school, and then we were ready. But nature doesn’t work according to human timetables. This difficult fact that none of us gets to decide when we might have a baby underscores our biggest struggle: the powerlessness of our situation. There are certain things we can do to help our prospects, but there is far more over which we have absolutely no control.

I thought about waiting to tell our story, to see how it all turns out. Maybe — hopefully — it will have a happy ending (yes, we understand, full of new challenges). But to wait would be to miss the real story, which is about our trying to cope with the agonizing uncertainty of right now.

Because the truth is, we’re having a really difficult time with it. The week or two after each miscarriage was emotionally — and in AKL’s case, physically as well — grueling, but together we muddled through, in crisis mode, on adrenaline, love, bad movies, and comfort food. The lingering psychological aftermath is tougher, as post-trauma, we find ourselves struggling to regain our bearings. And each time, we are forced to re-address the question of why we want children to begin with, and how we feel about ourselves without them.

AKL and I communicate well, but when we do nag or argue, miscarriage is the elephant in the room. When we talk about our cats, we’re really talking about our children. When we talk about our friends or our family or a possible vacation, we’re really talking about children.

It has been a long time since life felt normal. Before monthly planning and hormone spikes took over our sex life. Before the losses and the hospitals and the specialists. Before a nurse handed me a sterile cup and asked me to produce that certain sample (healthcare-subsidized porn at the ready). We’ll never regain the absolute joy of finding out we’re pregnant: the big ultrasound, talking excitedly about names, hearing a heartbeat….

That unfettered innocence is gone, and our story is rooted in the present. The ending is uncertain. We do what we can, but the rest is beyond us. So we sit and fidget with the not knowing. Today first, and then tomorrow, and then the next. Waiting to see where, eventually, it all leads.