I turned to Beth in the car, and remembered an old refrain of mine. ‘I love this city, but it just doesn’t work.’
All this stuff was bad enough, but I was reminded of the unspoken fear that New York was always teetering on the brink of tragedy.
It had been on an autumn morning – a Tuesday – during the early days of my first marriage that I had been flying back from attending a wedding in Stockholm. A seasoned traveller, I had ignored the safety presentations and simply surreptitiously and superstitiously felt for the lifejacket under the seat. It was a transatlantic flight like any one of the dozens I had taken, and the details of the witchcraft of flight were of no interest. I don’t even remember, now, what film I was watching when, an hour or so off the east coast of the United States, the pilot’s voice came over the intercom.
‘As you’ve probably noticed, the cabin crew have lowered the blinds.’
I hadn’t noticed. This was in the days when it wasn’t worth paying attention to all of the hundreds of forgettable little events that might occur during the course of an eight-hour flight from Stockholm to New York. The sun had been pouring in the port windows of the cabin. Passengers had wanted to sleep, watch their movies.
‘Also, we’ve turned the aircraft around 180 degrees.’
With the blinds closed, this manoeuvre had been executed smoothly. If the blinds had been opened again, we would have seen a world flipped around, with the southerly sun shining in from the starboard side. US airspace had been closed, the pilot told us. As a child of the Cold War and the survivor of hundreds of imagined nuclear holocausts, I had remained unruffled, and flicked through the in-flight magazine; there were any number of groundless fears that might have given rise to our diversion. Maybe I could catch another movie, I had thought. What was the point in worrying? We would be on the ground soon enough.
Then the next piece of information, delivered in the same calm voice of a pilot who had guided 180 tonnes of Airbus over the oceans more times than he would care to remember, gave me pause.
‘Canadian airspace is also closed, so we’ve been instructed to head back to Shannon.’
Shannon, I knew from my work in aviation finance, was the most westerly airport in Europe and like a parking lot for planes. The closest airport, if you have to turn tail and flee the United States. The fears of decades ago resurfaced. Had some sort of contretemps in the Middle East rippled to the Jewish capital of the western world? Or maybe one of the reactors at Indian Point had melted down. Unit 2 was just a few weeks over twenty-seven years old. It was due to enter its ‘period of extended operation’ a little under twelve years after the date of our flight.
A little less than eight hours after flight UA69 had turned around off the east coast, we touched down in the verdant oasis of County Clare. Around one hundred Swedes flipped open their impossibly sleek Ericsson cell phones.
My fears weren’t decades old any more. The date was 11th September 2001, and as we were driven in a coach along the darkening roads that split ancient fields and balanced on the edge of cliffs, my ex-wife’s office was as one with hundreds of thousands of tonnes of toxic dust blowing across Manhattan and the Hudson River.
There was nothing to say. We rode in silence.
Years later, New Yorkers still talked about how the city changed that day. Amid the terrible loss, burned into the city’s consciousness like the falling figure frozen on the screen of the television set in my room in a Clare hotel, there was a coming together that could never lightly be put aside, in the city at least. Two years later, when the August 2003 blackout occurred, it was free of the arson, looting and vandalism that had marked the 1977 outage.
Fast forward to the day I returned home from HJD, and the cargo facilities at JFK airport in Queens were forty years old. Almost two-thirds of those facilities were unfit for modern screening, storage and distribution. Not everything had changed.
I had started frequenting Harry Boland’s in May 2007. I had gotten back to Park Slope late one night following an intimate LCD Soundsystem gig at the old, club-like, Studio B in Greenpoint. I was, I suppose, the ageing hipster of their song ‘Losing My Edge’, made flesh.
I had moderated my home-listening habits away from the jarring tempo changes and unexpected interruptions that I would one day mention to Dawn the recreational therapist, but there was still little opportunity for procuring pleasure from music in my old, loveless apartment. Fortunately, Andy the Barman – who was all about Primus and Alice Donut and jarring tempo changes – would let me bring in mixes to be loaded into the jukebox. I’d cheat a little bit by finishing the CDs with a long, extended track that would stretch out my dollars.
I would sit at the end of the bar, far from the jukie, near the door. New York was a mess. My apartment was a mess. And here I was, with my people. The retired rent boy who miaowed and spat like a cat so he wouldn’t have to chat with the squares, but who in the right mood would discuss the art classes he took to refine his painting skills. The Economist-devouring ex-air force man who was chased down a bottle by the ghosts of abusive priests. The men and women who didn’t care if my facade was crumbling to reveal the toxins in the structure beneath. The last, apocalyptic chords of one of those extended tracks, ‘New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down’, built and climbed the walls.
I didn’t know it yet, but maybe, just maybe, from somewhere out of that unpromising scene, things were eventually going to work out OK. Maybe Beth and I would help each other through, with or without New York.
14
Thanksgiving
The morning after I got home from the Hospital for Joint Diseases, we woke up early, still tired. It was Thanksgiving Day. Family time in the United States, and we had a lot to be thankful for. The prospect of non-hospital food was a relief, and I was ready for a grand feast. Beth’s parents had come to town to celebrate with us, since we couldn’t make it down to South Carolina.
Beth was my new shower helper, and in the tradition of her predecessor Tenko, she was a hard taskmaster. Upon waking up in my own bed for the first time in almost two months, still tired from the cab ride and eating pizza out with Kathy and Ray Monahan, I had been limited to an extra five minutes in bed before my shower.
It passed quickly.
The bathroom wasn’t quite the same as the image I had tried to paint from memory. The walls were dotted with the grab bars that had been sourced by the hospital and installed by Paul’s guy, and a plastic bath seat sat under the shower head. After escorting me to the bathroom and before helping me arrange my body on the chair, Beth insisted that I check out my shrunken frame in the mirror shower as part of ‘normalisation’. I didn’t recognise it at all.
I had already been recommending the stroke diet to people. ‘I lost 35lb!’ I would beam, but my muscle tone was horrible. As my rediscovery of my body had progressed, a sense of judgement had returned. It was a good thing that I couldn’t twist my body for a better view, because my arse looked like it had fallen off. Where my buttocks used to be, there was just a vertical, alien continuation where my back met my thighs. I was glad to move on from that part of the ritual, and, soon, with a minimum of fuss, my ablutions were completed.
The best part was being dried. Shuffling from bed to bath seat, I barely felt like a man, but I felt like a prince when Beth carefully and tenderly dried my body. Heck, for better or worse, I finally felt as well cared for as Sean Connery in You Only Live Twice. Then, drier than I had ever been able to dry myself, before or after, I sat on the edge of the bed again. Dressing myself was my own task.
We had laid out my clothes for the day on the bed before the shower, in such an order that I could dress myself as Sonoko had instructed. They were loose-fitting, because loose clothes were easier to slip in and out of. In fact, everything was loose-fitting now. With each item, I used my right arm to dress my left side first. For the long-sleeve T-shirt, I started by putting my weak arm in its sleeve. After pulling the shirt over the arm and my head, wriggling my
right arm into the other sleeve was no problem. My left hand was able to hold my jeans button steady while the fingers of my right hand manoeuvred the eye over and around it. With a little help with my socks and a pair of trainers, I was ready before our odd little family began to assemble. First to arrive was Sparky, with the other Sparkies – dad, brother and sister-in-law.
As a healthcare professional – a type more venerated than ever in our post-stroke household – and in light of his help when my stroke hit, Sparky got an even warmer welcome than usual. Becoming a doctor in New York is a gruelling task. A fellow denizen of Harry Boland’s bar was training at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. There, six patients were treated per square foot per year, gabbling in an assortment of the eight hundred – eight hundred – languages spoken in New York City. The experiences she would describe recalled nothing so much as the experiences of the cadets pushed through R. Lee Ermey’s sadistic Marine Corps training in the first act of Full Metal Jacket. Except there was more blood at Maimonides, obviously.
Medical school graduates were subjected to sleep deprivation and left to sink or swim. Broken down and rebuilt as doctors. Sparky’s training had seen him pass through the emergency rooms of Maimo, Kings County, St John’s and Long Island College hospitals. In the two years I had known him, he had fallen asleep at the wheel of his car after another multiple-shift marathon more times than he could count. To the admitting doctor who had attended to my stroke, and Sparky who cleaned up afterwards, I was an anomaly of medical science, but I was not special. Though they should be special to us.
Sparky had arrived early, relishing a day off. He had to be early, because he had brought the turkey. He got it set up and headed out to collect more supplies while I was left with the kindergartener’s task of stuffing sweet peppers with goats’ cheese using a blunt spoon. While Sparky was buying the ingredients for the seven-layer dip with which he would celebrate Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, Purim, Easter and birthdays, Paul and his Jen arrived with their ten-year-old Muppet-loving moppet, Jill.
We were particularly fond of Jill. In a complicated world of overwork, blood, shit, vomit and death, she saw Beth and I the way we felt – like a couple of teenagers hopelessly in love. Admittedly, this was partly because everyone over twelve was unimaginably old to Jill. Still, when she would organise the guests at a party, she was always careful to sit us together. Perhaps our placings would be marked by a drawing of a couple in a kilt and a long, white dress. When Beth would forget her gloves after a dinner, Jill would point out that something has been left behind by ‘the girl from Bethandricky’.
For Thanksgiving, Jill came in bearing two new pieces of artwork to celebrate my return from the dead: a welcome home banner and a T-shirt proclaiming, ‘I SROKS’. Appropriately, this was probably how I would have spelled ‘strokes’ at that moment, too. Once these offerings had been presented, we discussed Jill’s recent foot injury and made plans for our hotly anticipated walker-race in the common hallway.
Dinner was another step on the path back to normality. Jen and Paul had brought the sides. Ray and Kathy arrived with the wine. The food was delicious; everyone had left their burning barrels of turkey-frying oil at home. Admittedly, the whole event had been catered and cleared by our friends and family, but still: we had hosted a social event on the first day of the rest of our lives. Despite creeping exhaustion, Beth had been hilarious and charming for at least twelve straight hours after entertaining Kathy and Ray last night, too.
Beth, Geronimo and Seamus and Cyclops, and Ray and Kathy and Jen and Paul and Jill and the Sparkies had all come together for Thanksgiving. It turned out that, three thousand miles from home, you could choose your friends and your family.
Beth – my immediate family – told the assembled company how she had made it through the past two months. ‘He had no idea where he was, or who he was,’ she explained, ‘but he was really funny. I mean, I didn’t want to laugh too much, in case he thought I was laughing at him, but that did make it a lot easier.’
It was nice to hear that, even when I was stripped down to pure id, my girlfriend thought I was funny. Even if she was actually laughing at me a bunch of the time because I was a ridiculous man. Even better, in this reduced state, I had a chance to rebuild myself, maybe even improve myself in some ways.
I’d never claim to be the Messiah, but my fifty-one days and nights in hospital had served much the same purpose as the biblical forty days and nights of the prophets: the stroke ward had isolated me from the temptations, corruptions and softness of comfortable society. Methodist Hospital of the New York Presbyterian Healthcare System, then the New York University Langone Medical Center at the Hospital for Joint Diseases, had acted as places of purgation, or an entry to the Buddha’s threefold way.
The fourth century saint, John the Ascetic, told the story of a hermit who found that the desert was not the best place to achieve contemplation, because of the resulting preoccupation with meeting one’s material needs and the tendency to marvel at one’s own spiritual achievements. Total isolation may inflate the ego, while remaining in society counteracts that tendency. The moral was that solitude may be better achieved in community, where material needs are provided for and the seeker is more humble.
The stroke ward did serve more than just traditional medical needs, in that it provided a place of solitude; that is to say, the philosophical concept of solitude. Not solitude as in being alone, but a state of mind in which I could still hear the voices of society, allowing an opportunity for deep contemplation and self-examination. As in the desert, life had been pared down to the bone. I was dependent on what was made available to me in order to survive. At the same time, I had been within a community in the truest sense. A team of nurses and orderlies had provided for my material needs around the clock. To round it off, you’ve got to be humble when you’re wearing a Texas catheter and someone else has to wipe your arse.
Thanksgiving was a success, but Beth and I were still jet-lagged from the past two months, what with my exile from natural light and her forty-eight-hour days of hospital visits, work and piss-soaked laundry. Regardless, she was able to slowly help me achieve a limited independence. Eventually the administrators at Langone arranged for me to be visited by the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. The first nurse that they provided came round and passed me to start home therapy, even though my blood pressure readings still hadn’t been entirely stabilised.
On 6th December, our alarms started to go off at around 8a.m., interspersed with phone calls. I picked up my phone to switch off the alarm, and on swiping the screen found myself talking to a nice young man who identified himself as Ranjan, the outpatient physical therapist. He was calling to let me know that he had plans to come by for an initial session between 9 and 10.
I discovered that, for some reason, VNS visits were set up like ambushes. For example, I might have received a call along these lines: ‘Hi. It’s your nurse. I’m on the corner. See you in five . . . Reschedule . . . ? Well, we can do it in a couple of months, if you prefer.’
On the day of Ranjan’s first visit, this was how I interpreted his message:
‘Hi. Your nurse here. It’s 8a.m. I assume you can have your strokey ass up and showered and dressed in workout clothes and fed in time for a physical therapy session between 9 and 10a.m.?’
Well, I was pretty desperate to get to the Rusk building in Midtown and get on the outpatient rehabilitation programme, so sure, I could do that. By 10, I had showered myself on my little bath chair, gotten on something loose enough to work out in – which, for my new model skinny ass, could have been anything from the tuxedo I got at 17 to the Brooklyn Industries pants I actually chose to wear, the button of which had been under critical threat one stroke and 35lb ago – brushed my teeth, had a cup of tea, devoured a bowl of Special K, buzzed up someone I assumed was the therapist, and sat through half an hour of Fox 5’s local Good Morning New York show.
Superstorm Sandy was still dominating the n
ews. Also, the guy who played J. Peterman on Seinfeld was promoting Take Your Pet to Work Day. He mentioned that all NY hospitals were allowing dog therapy now. Dawn had certainly brought round cute dogs for Alfonso and me to reject on a regular basis. I was allergic. The Wee Man no doubt thought that they would attack him in his sleep if they could get a hold of his scent, and devour his soul. Dawn would no doubt have trained them to do so happily.
Yep, it was definitely time to find out what had happened to Ranjan.
It turned out that he was alive and answering his phone, and expected to be with me in five-to-ten minutes. This was also standard procedure, and I understood, I really did. The VNS didn’t want their nurses standing around on cold New York corners all day waiting for the lame, crippled and injured to get their shit together while they could be tending to other lame, crippled and injured patients. So the patients waited for them. This cripple, however, had sat through Good Morning New York, and was damned if he was going to continue to sit through the morning chat shows, too.
Thank god, Ranjan finally arrived. He had me show him the exercises I’d been given to do at home. Then we got down to work, and I remembered why I enjoyed physical therapy so much. For the past two and a half weeks, I had been given no benchmarks against which I could measure my progress, other than a vague sense of ‘I couldn’t have done that a couple of weeks ago’ that was pretty easily offset by the feeling of ‘Bloody Hell, my left arm feels vaguely sore/tingly/numb today. I don’t have a clear sense of it feeling like that a month ago.’
Stroke Page 14