Snake America 100
Why has it taken so long to get to 100? A circuitous explanation:
Three years ago last month, Burn reunited at Webster Hall and they were one of my favorite bands so I headed up front to watch them and begin dancing, just a little bit, and someone falls into my right ankle. My foot swells up so I sit on the side of the stage after just the first song and can hear but not watch the rest of the set. I miss a day of work but by the weekend my big foot is back to normal and I walk around on it for two more weeks. I go uptown with my girl for something, I forget what, and to Queens with my friends Fat Rich and Morgan to eat Colombian hot dogs, the kind with potato chips on them. She is an actress and fractured her hip falling offstage during an Actors Theatre of San Francisco production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (role of Honey) before we met. She didn't know it was busted for a month. She says see a doctor in case I was going through the same thing. When I see the doctor she sticks her thumb into my ankle and shin and I don't flinch. She says let's get an X-ray just in case, I bet we don't need it and everything's fine. When the aide sees the X-ray results her jaw drops and she turns white and wheels out the wheelchair for me and I ask what was the story and she says the doctor has to tell you but it's bad. The doctor tells me I snapped my ankle and another bone in my leg, and she's not sure how I've been walking on it for two weeks and that I have a very high pain tolerance. Which makes me feel good. With a splint on my leg I take a cab to Park Slope and get scheduled for surgery, and in June I wake up high off drugs with a screw in my ankle but not so high as to forget my locker number and combo which has my glasses and the clothes I wore to surgery. My dad is on a plane to visit me and cook me dinner but he mostly orders beer and rotisserie chickens on Fresh Direct and gets drunk with the roommates at the apartment he stays in. Dad and I meet my surgeon then get Five Guys and I spend the month working from home with the AC running 24/7. I miss the NHL Draft, which is in Florida that year, outside Miami.
I start physical therapy in July and am back at work again too. The division of the company I work for gets sold to my previous employer and I have to interview for my job, with my old bosses, and it’s a lot to take in. In the fall I start lifting weights again, like I did before surgery, and I watch the Olympic weightlifting world championships on ESPN3 and want to try that. I see the athletes are both strong and flexible, things I'm not and things I know I should be so that this would not happen again. Late December I go to the Apple Store in Grand Central for Christmas presents for my girl and after that I hit the NYSC nearby, which has an Olympic platform. I fool around on the platform and it changes my life. There's not much weight on the barbell, which spins slowly (it should spin fast like a bike wheel) and is knotted and damaged, it's the wrong size (one millimeter too thick) and I'm in sneakers and not in stacked heels. But I can try and describe the feeling of pulling it off the ground and getting under it. Every time I had lifted weights beforehand I sent them up and down the best I could, but never fast. Weight is tough to move from one place to another. Straining and pushing, south to north, very boring. But on the platform the bar moves fast if it moves at all and the lifts are both more precise and cover more area than a squat or a dead. No pushing either since you can't force the angles. The way to do it is to fly the bar through the air with no second thought and at the last possible second -- an amazing life philosophy if there ever was one. After I am done fucking around I notice I am still stiff from surgery. I begin to stretch like the athletes do. Once the calendar changes I stop everything I am doing to work on Olympic lifts.
This was a very bad idea. I am 6'2" and long, an unideal build for the sport and in fact anything involving weights whatsoever. I still gain 40 pounds of muscle, mostly, happily, in my legs. I get heavy enough that I snore in my sleep, and my face gets rounder. On good days I can't see my knees for my quads. My girl is not happy with any of this, but I keep going. I return my 1915- and 1933-cut Levi's to the rotation, having retired them in 2012 when Fat Rich said that if I wanted a girlfriend again I had to stop with baggy jeans since they looked like shit. I wasn't sure that they did but I listen to Fat Rich on principle so I stopped. Now they're not baggy anymore with my big legs. I look like shit in a different way. My beautiful Thom Browne oxfords no longer fit, stretching at the buttons like in that NY Post story from 2009 about the woman fired from her office job for being too attractive. I get a membership to a steroid gym near Times Square to work with a weightlifting coach younger than me who sometimes cancels sessions when he has too much homework. When he does that I feel like the Simpsons episode where Bart's soap-box derby hero is younger than him. Coach reworks my squat and I start Texas Method. I squat three times a week, volume and intensity. When I went to the rack I never thought I could do it and I always did. That never stopped feeling good and I am proud of it still. When I'm not working out I stand up straighter, and my body feels dense and strong and my foot with the screw in it feels as stable and wide as a hand pressing down on a dinner table. The lifts were slow coming but I had beaten the surgery, and it was nice.
There were bad days, though, where my knee didn't bend without noise and my neck did not move and my clavicles were ripped up and my back felt like there was a ball wedged in there. Before I went to bed I would stretch for 15 minutes and for 10 minutes when I woke up and 20 minutes before lifting, now every day, and 10 minutes afterwards, and I would stretch when I could at work. If I didn't stretch I could not move. I was in the gym all the time, much as I could be, and it didn't look like I worked out, which was something. I was no good at the Olympic lifts, which are frustrating even after a lifetime of practice and are harder starting. I felt best alone in the gym. I didn't work out with Coach enough so progress lagged. Some days I would get under the bar and pull at the exact right spot (just over the kneecap) and angle (shoulders over, weight behind, me looking ahead) and it would plop onto my clavicles feeling weightless even though it was loaded ... because starting from the exact right spot means finishing there ... and my eyes would roll back in my head and you could not tell me anything. Weights were real but light and I only pushed the squat and was only squatting to push my lifts. I sent my Thom Browne oxfords to Ina, the consignment store, because we were done. One night, spring or summer, my girl says let's walk through Central Park because it is so nice out and I took the train uptown after work and we do that for a couple hours. The whole time, it was a Thursday, I wanted to be at the gym, no special workout planned but I just burned to be there and felt guilty not lifting. I thought to myself this is not good, I'm in deep, but I was stuck. The high I felt on the two or three instances a week I nailed a lift was so real that I spent a year chasing that, and running away from everything else.
We're in California and her grandfather dies, and she stays there for a month dealing with that. When she gets back, her roommates kick her out of her apartment so it's onto my place. I get my bed frame expanded from a queen to a king since I'm pushing 220 and there's no room on the queen for anything more than the new me now. So after my carpenter (who is great by the way) finishes widening the bed, but before the new mattress arrives, the queen is there on the new frame with its raw-lumber edges exposed and I brush up against it one day in October and a four-inch chunk of wood dives into my left calf, quite deep, stuck like a pen in Jell-O. It's not coming out so I see a general surgeon—not many of those in New York—who chops the wood out of my leg and says stop exercising, and now it's a week later having not stretched and I cannot stand up. Maybe just more stiff than usual, I say, and stretch more, which makes it worse. I am shaped like a hook now and so maybe epsom baths, which don't help, and how about acupuncture every day, Uber the three blocks to acu since it hurts not only to walk but to stand, and acu doesn't help, and so the month wraps up with me on the king size bed working from home like when I broke my ankle at Burn. She says maybe let's see a PT, I know a PT she's saying, this guy who's good and helps my boss, and he worked on the Spiderman play, the one where everyone got injured I ask? She says her boss tried to set her up with him while we were dating(1) but he's a good PT and you need help. I'm in straits and need help bad, so we go. It's a Saturday and he comes in just for me. He uses giant wood blocks on my spine, smashing it into place and really putting me in pain, turning it up, the whole schmear. We get home and order Indian and watch Veep and I do the exercises he had told me to do every hour through the weekend. By Sunday I stand up straight again. I feel good for a day and that's when it really gets bad.
Now it feels like my legs are plugged into the wall. As if the nerves and blood canals you see in medical drawings are reams of lightning going down from my hips through my toes, turned to 10 and thundering every few seconds, putting me in more pain during the course of four days than I've experienced over my quiet privileged life. It hurts very bad, very bad and at all hours and when the pain stops it lands somewhere new in a different way and then it hurts more. I am sleeping on the floor with a pillow against my back and one between my legs, hugging my beautiful white 1970s Vico Magistretti coffee table (for Artemide? I think. Not sure) and unable to stay quiet despite myself, trying hard to keep quiet because she works in the morning and is in school full-time and midterms are coming and who else is taking care of me, and it's a mystery what is happening and why, and my sister and cousins don't live in New York anymore and honestly it is just us in this hell. She texts some friends in my phone for Percocet and Xans the first night of my pain and one person replies and says, 'it's after 11 you can’t get pills now // try me again tomorrow // IDK anyone now it's too late.' I take the codeine left over from Burn and it helps enough to notch two hours of sleep over two nights. This was the week after the election and I didn't take the train the day after, or at all in November, and missed what I know are images people will carry with them for the rest of their lives. At the Park Slope hospital ER, again, it's Wednesday and I still of course can't stand and it feels still like my legs are plugged into the wall but I am used to it now so I am getting around and cracking jokes once the doctors show up. A barrel-chested resident with big forearms wears a cheap polo shirt that has been through the wash many times, with no undershirt underneath, and it is mid-November. He says I look OK and am doing fine and probably just a pinched nerve and he shoots me with morphine which feels good and sends me to my MRI across town that I scheduled on election day. The MRI is in Chelsea and the lightning hasn't stopped and the technician is working on how to make it so I can lie down in the box, which I can't for more than a second without splintering from pain. Two hours of trying, we give up and Uber home, having left without imaging and we still don't know what's behind everything and it's 9 PM now and she's out of ideas and I go on ZocDoc and fall asleep right then, sitting upright on my Eames Compact sofa (original 1960s, black leatherette, incredible piece, for sale if you're interested), wrapped in blankets and propped up by the new pillows we bought for the apartment and not feeling good.
When I wake up I cannot feel my legs or stand or walk to the bathroom and am in the same outfit all week, a canary yellow Oakwood High Class of '44 20th reunion T-shirt (amazing piece, 1960s 50/50 tag) and AS Roma warm-up pants, having not shaved since October and without a fade and past caring. We are back in the Uber to the PT in midtown and I have been losing weight like a sieve. When I fall on her and the driver walking to the car she starts limping. In the Uber the Spiderman PT, raised near L&B Spumoni Gardens but who hasn't eaten there since high school, is on the blower telling us that this time he is just going to relieve the pain. My favorite necklace had fallen out of my pants pocket in the Uber on the way to his office earlier in the week. It's a ball chain with a bullet lighter from Vietnam that says "Death is Tomorrow and Forever is Yesterday," or close to it. I bought it for $20 at the vintage store by the Gimme Coffee in Williamsburg that opened in 2011 but shut down that summer. When you unscrew the bullet point there's a spark wheel and stone, both dull grey from decades of ash. The lighter has no gas and makes only a faint spark but looks so nice. I have never seen anything else like it. I would wear the necklace to my office job under my Thom Browne oxfords and feel like a bad-ass on days when my fade wasn't fresh. Sometimes I would forget and leave it on at the airport and would have to check my bag then do security again. When it started hurting I rubbed the bullet like a rabbit's foot hoping it would take my mind off my pain. I take the loss of the necklace as a bad sign.
I'm at Spiderman's and nothing he is doing to manage the hurt is working and I still can't stand or sit or do anything except concentrate on my ever-growing and severe pain. The night before I made an appointment with a neurologist with curly hair and a Harvard education on the hope he might be of better help to me than Spiderman or the hillbilly in the Uniqlo polo or a third Canada-educated PT who was so bad I won't mention him beyond this descriptor. We are running out of ideas and she calls Harvard on my phone and he says go to Cornell Weill the hospital right away, like now, and Spiderman and his sidekick, big guy, carry me downstairs in an office chair and put me in a cab, the office chair goes in the trunk, and they get in, and the cab can't go right up to the ER, not sure why, but we can't, and Spiderman and his guy pour me back onto the chair and haul me a city block to the ER like I'm a Hasid at a wedding. At the hospital I cannot feel my lower body and wait and wait and she's on the blower, limping still, talking to my family and hers, and the doctors are very smart, and I know right there I am not smart like them and they treat me plainly and this relaxes me and they give me the highest legal dosage of morphine allowable in this country and a shiver goes down my spine the kind I have never felt before and hope to never feel again, the single darkest physical sensation of my life, a black maw of hell at endless depth. She looks me in the eye in a way she has only done a couple times before and says to me, using my name, you have to sit still for this MRI so they can see what's wrong with you. I am still in insane pain since the morphine's raw chill really just lasts two long seconds and I get ready for the tube, MRIs require a series of scans for like half an hour but they see how cooked I am and say we’re just doing the introductory scan which is eight minutes, maybe six. Longest of my life and I get through it and come out. When I sit up it is a feeling I cannot forget, release, a scream from severe welled-up pain, from sitting still through hell and constriction, and no longer having to, an embrace and acknowledgement of that pain too, like my body was crying tears from its pores, sparks going off in every joint and point and a big velvet Broadway curtain unfurling over my front and washing the release down my whole thing, and inside my legs it was like the penultimate scene of 2001, before the room with the old man, with colors and light-speed travel and everything moving. The hospital is crowded even though it's a good one and the nurses and orderlies and doctors turn sideways when they walk past the gurneys in the hall. An hour later the doctors get the scan back and one says to me, not the surgeon, we're operating on you tonight, and by this time it's maybe 9 PM, we left 9 in the morning, no one has eaten, I say I don't want surgery because I just had one and they say it's not an option and it's tonight. I think to myself that I have bad luck. They wheel me in and the doctors tell me they think Spiderman messed me up, and I notice he has been in the mix today, there for me, what with Cornell Weill close to his office, and he walks up to our assembly right then from the adjoining hallway and asks whether he can observe the surgery and a young doctor tells him "absolutely not." The room is so bright and I wake up feeling like my back is clear and hollow, finally. I am still in pain but not the wrong kind anymore. The nurse has my bag of stuff and says your girlfriend went home and your mom will be in the hospital around 6:30 in the morning.
I spend the next month here. My roommate is a retired professor of sculpture at Wayne State University who won a West Village condo through the housing lottery and retired here and is now recovering from elective knee surgery. His kids are over all the time, sometimes with their kids. When he leaves this other guy moves in who grew up down the block from my apartment and his wife feeds him Reese's Cups all afternoon. I do rehab twice a day and am the only patient under 60 and after two weeks I am out of the wheelchair. I learn a few things, like it was a herniation, the size of an acorn, and it brushed against my spinal cord for a week, which is why my legs felt like they were plugged into a generator. I learn that if I waited until Friday to come into the hospital I would not have been walking Saturday or ever again. When the doctor tells me that I say, "piece of cake" and feel like $1,000,000 and smile but no one else smiles. I learn opioids have more horrendous side effects than herniated disks and that the insurance system in this country only works if you spend days on the phone and are very nice to everyone and have a white voice. I learn your laptop will get stolen out of your room, like mine did, and the longer you're in a hospital the less you want to leave and that it is nice to have someone give you a bath, nicer than it is bad to use a walker or be given shots every four hours, and my right bicep is purple from the needles and my left one too. I learn my legs are smaller now than they were ever big before. I learn if you eat white rice peas and carrots and steamed salmon every day the occasional two grape tomatoes and one piece of buffalo mozzarella are delicious to the point of delirium and I learn a lot about college football, like it's the most fun of the big sports due to its talent variation and that its business is a free-for-all on par with the medical industry and between the two it's obvious there are no rules in this country. It's Thanksgiving weekend and I only brought non-fiction and I can't do the news, not this week, so football is on in the room and Wayne State isn't complaining and neither are his kids and it was great to just watch and get a break but I got called out of my room during the last series of OSU-Michigan and missed the whole bad spot and everything else and that was just the kind of year I was having.
Mid-December we are back home and Christmas is in San Diego and I ride a Rascal at the zoo and upon deplaning there is a message from my boss saying he is leaving the company and when I get back in January we are in a new office, in a different part of Chelsea, right across the street from the MRI center, wouldn't you know, and I am transferred to another department. I am on a plant-based vegan diet now, her decision, and she says she will break up with me if I eat even a single Raisinet. I am good with that, it is boring, but I am fine, 20 grams of protein a day, all from vegetables, all green, nothing refined, no sugar, not even coffee. Back home, doing PT, muscles all but gone, work making me come in now and then, taking Lyfts there and back, the fares adding up to the cost of a small car after a couple of months. The first time I leave the house alone for something not work or PT is a Super Bowl party at my friends JD Apps and Sean's place. I sit in the same seat the whole game and it's hard to get up and I need my cane which sucks because there are people there. The Pats come back from 25 down and it is very hard getting home. I call Ina and none of my Thom Browne shirts sold(2) so I pick them up and they fit of course and I have a wardrobe again. She says again she is gone if I work out with weights and between that and the shirts I'm done, I miss my big legs but whatever. She's sleeping in the other room now because she needs her sleep she says and she has homework and is also going to plays a bunch now and is at her friends' more and things begin to get different. I am not sure I am in a relationship anymore even though she lives here but I am not about to ask anything from the girl who saved my life and am too spent for any discussion. I'm swimming now, we both are, often as we can, at the Y down the block, Pig Vomit from Private Parts swimming there too and he doesn't know how to split lanes, but my legs are still not back and when I walk more than a block I need to sit and going to a museum or even the worthless Argentinian place down the street is hard and that spring the experiential candy store by me goes out of business (not sure how they stuck around so long to be honest) and is giving out free candy and I walk there to meet my friend Jay Bil, who knows about it ahead of time, and the walk, all three blocks, is so exhausting and takes so long that they only have gumballs and Necco wafers left by the time we arrive. I can't take part in the Women's March and watch it on my computer and the nerve damage in my legs is so deep that they feel cold all the time and I wear long johns in the spring and summer which is insane, and come August my acupuncturist will have told me no more swimming, because pool water is cold, stay away from cold, hot things only, and within a day of hearing that I'll have walked in to Smith Street and gotten a snake tattooed on my leg because I had been feeling getting a snake for a little bit, and the needle felt good on my shin and I didn't have to worry about chlorine anymore and the list of things I don’t care about is so much longer. My new chiropractor is in the sticks, two hours train each way, there for 15 minutes tops, once a week through this past spring, I listen to the same Tangerine Dream live record there and back and it becomes so I knew the synclavier solos on the second Paris live set by heart. My legs shake for an hour when I get home from the train after work and on Saturdays I stay home and watch Longhorns or read since I need to be off my feet and for a stretch I am not in the office on Fridays and my work was so generous to let me do that.
So hanging out with her friends more during the winter really helped her, sometimes I saw them too but not often, and it's a small apartment, and so in the spring my neurologist—who is the official neurologist of the New York Rangers but never works on the players since they are neurologically healthy enough to not require their attention—gives me the all-clear and I call home after the appointment sitting on church steps in midtown and she says to me on the blower that my surgeon, different guy, told her night of surgery that I had only a 50% chance to walk again and it was super raw and they did not think I was going to have legs again ever and the doctors agreed that I'm probably in a wheelchair for good. This is the first time she can say out loud what the doctors told her and the words rush out. She didn't tell me of course before then, or tell my mom and she didn't tell hers and she didn't tell my sister or her sister. I feel like I've been shoved very hard. That's why I was on that diet and why it wasn't funny when I said "piece of cake" and why all those plays. Poor girl the only one who knew how bad it was. Now things change even more. After a Reiki session a day later she says it's over which feels like the period at the end of a run-on sentence. I don't remember much about this time but by the end of April she moves out, and it is me at home again, surprised it lasted so long, it was hell and why live in hell, how old are we anyways, and I am spent, just so spent, and in May or June I don't remember she is back in the other room for a couple weeks since she has a play opening and exams and all her friends' couches were uncomfortable and she needs her sleep. June, gone for good. July another guy is in the picture. Two very burnt out people going separate ways, one unable to go very far, one going pretty far, months of hell, mercifully done, marriages end over less and we were not married. All of this small potatoes compared to the surgery and it's over, no going back, believe that. And this is it for talking about it.
So it's summer and I'm just watching movies and reading outside and working and my phone is on silent for everybody and trips out of town now and then and getting tattoos and watching the Longhorns, which I get really into, what with rivalry week and Tom Herman and friends in Austin and it's something to talk about, it's just something plucked out of the air and college football is the only sport I haven't worked in or covered in one capacity or another. Also only a dozen-ish games a year so that is nice. In November I fall asleep watching the Horns on a Friday and miss meeting people I wanted to meet but that was the discipline. I go to Austin for a game. January is yoga every day and I am not fat anymore, which is nice. Start of April I feel close if not there. If I had showed up to Cornell Weill on Friday I wouldn't be walking but I showed up Thursday so I can walk and I don't lean against the bar anymore when I am hanging out at the bar. End of April cleared by the chiro in the sticks so no more trains out there. I've been bounding up the 14th Street steps two at once, been years. Mid-May something goes wrong. May is bad. My left leg stops working again, a giant Charlie horse, my hip tears my thigh off and my calf is in a vise. My left calf is being squeezed like a plum and is numb too and I can't walk, and I can't stand or sit without wincing. This is out of nowhere and just happens. Wednesday last week I see another doctor and he sees my latest MRI, taken May 25, 2017, a year ago, and says another disc is herniated. Not the one they operated on but another one. That explains the pain and numbness. He says it's PT again so it's PT again. I am upset. I thought it was over but it is not. Am I going backwards or is it just bad news? All there is to know is the hits keep coming until they don't and so little is up to me. I wonder sometimes when this will disappear from a dot in my rearview to gone. I don't know. You can't choose your bad news, and this is what a setback is. This week the pain is mostly gone again and I'm looking at it like it will be gone next week too. Last year I asked my neurologist why my legs are still so behind and if I should push it more. She explained slowly to me that the nerve damage I suffered was so bad that it's all just waiting. I just think can it please end. Four days in November with a 500-day tail and I have no other tie to that time anymore but what the pain did. Staying busy until all the nerve damage goes away and then it'll be just another hill to climb over.
And that is the long story that I don't like to tell since it's hard to tell without it being a long story and it is not one for polite company or new people(3). They said wait and don't push it, so I haven't pushed it, even though some days I push it. This is why there have not been frequent newsletters for a long time. Since it has been a long time. There is scant space after work and recovery. Even 18 months later. This is why 100 comes out middle 2018 and not 2016. It's why I have been radicalized and carry crystals in my pocket and eat the vegetables first and it's why I quit sugar and Popeye's, which fills me with shame, and it's why I cruise more than I drive. It all has to wait. I am a positive person. I know it is happening but I'm just not sure when.
I never told anyone this but I herniated my spine dragging my queen size mattress out of my apartment to across the street where we put out the garbage because I wanted the new king size mattress in right away so it would be there when she got off of work so there would be more room for two people to sleep on the same bed. That's why this all happened.
And that explains the delay. Back on beat for 101 and I wonder what happens next.
Snake
(1) ???
(2) ???
(3) Good morning to any first-time readers...