Revertigo

by Floyd Skloot

  Terrace Books, a trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press, takes its name from the Memorial Union Terrace, located at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Since its inception in 1907, the Wisconsin Union has provided a venue for students, faculty, staff, and alumni to debate art, music, politics, and the issues of the day. It is a place where theater, music, drama, literature, dance, outdoor activities, and major speakers are made available to the campus and the community. To learn more about the Union, visit www.union.wisc.edu.

  * * *

  FLOYD SKLOOT

  Terrace Books

  A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press

  Terrace Books

  A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press

  1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor

  Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059

  uwpress.wisc.edu

  3 Henrietta Street

  London WC2E 8LU, England

  eurospanbookstore.com

  Copyright © 2014 by Floyd Skloot

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Skloot, Floyd, author.

  Revertigo: an off-kilter memoir / Floyd Skloot.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-299-29950-7 (cloth: alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-299-29953-8 (e-book)

  1. Skloot, Floyd. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography.

  3. Authors, American—21st century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3569.K577Z46 2014

  818´.54—dc23

  [B]

  2013028359

  FOR BEVERLY

  His dizzy brain spun fast,

  And down he sunk.

  George Gordon, Lord Byron,

  from Don Juan, Canto II, 110

  Contents

  * * *

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  PART ONE: O WONDROUS TRANSFORMATION!

  1 Some Things Nearly So, Others Nearly Not: The King and I and Me

  2 Senior Speech

  3 Beep Beep

  PART TWO: ON AND OFF THE PAGE

  4 Playing the Cock

  5 The Bottom Shelf: On Novels I Keep Trying and Failing to Read

  6 The Top Shelf: On Books I Need Beside Me

  7 Something to Marvel At: Discovering Jules Verne at Sixty

  PART THREE: A SPINNING WORLD

  8 The Side Effect of Side Effects

  9 Revertigo

  10 Sway Me Smooth: Soundtrack for an MRI of the Brain

  11 Anniversary Fever

  PART FOUR: CARTWHEELS ON THE MOON

  12 Elliptical Journey

  13 To Land’s End and Back: A 1,512-Mile Drive Around Southern England

  14 The Famous Recipe

  Acknowledgments

  * * *

  Chapters of Revertigo: An Off-Kilter Memoir originally appeared in the following publications, sometimes in different versions. I thank the editors for their support of my work:

  Boulevard: “Anniversary Fever,” “Beep Beep,” “Revertigo,” and “To Land’s End and Back: A 1,512-Mile Drive Around Southern England”

  Colorado Review: “The Famous Recipe”

  Ecotone: “Sway Me Smooth: Soundtrack for an MRI of the Brain”

  Harvard Review: “Playing the Cock”

  Post Road: “Elliptical Journey”

  Prairie Schooner: “Something to Marvel At: Discovering Jules Verne at Sixty”

  The Seneca Review: “The Side Effect of Side Effects”

  The Sewanee Review: “The Bottom Shelf: On Novels I Keep Trying and Failing to Read” and “The Top Shelf: On Books I Need Beside Me”

  Southwest Review: “Senior Speech” and “Some Things Nearly So, Others Nearly Not: The King and I and Me”

  “The Famous Recipe” was reprinted in Best Food Writing 2011. “Senior Speech” was cited as a Notable Essay of 2009 in The Best American Essays 2010 and for Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize XXXIV, 2010. “The Bottom Shelf: On Novels I Keep Trying and Failing to Read” was cited as a Notable Essay of 2010 in The Best American Essays 2011. “Something to Marvel At: Discovering Jules Verne at Sixty” was cited as Notable Nonrequired Reading of 2010 in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011. “Revertigo” was cited as a Notable Essay of 2011 in The Best American Essays 2012. “Sway Me Smooth: Soundtrack for an MRI of the Brain” was cited for Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize XXXVI, 2012.

  In the six years it took to write Revertigo: An Off-Kilter Memoir, my wife, Beverly Hallberg, helped keep me balanced. When that wasn’t enough, she held me still in a spinning world. She also read drafts of each chapter, and thought things through with me. My daughter, Rebecca Skloot, inspired me—and millions of readers—with her brilliant work, insight, courage, and passion for truth. I’m grateful to Kerry and Nigel Arkell for their gustatory bravery, Dr. Doug Beers for decades of masterful medical care, Andrew Blauner for his good faith, George Core for the walking stick, Joan Katz for my mother’s recipe, Guohui Liu for releasing the wind, and Hilda Raz for the flying advice.

  Revertigo

  * * *

  * * *

  PROLOGUE

  On Ross Island, across the Willamette from our home at river mile fourteen, there’s a great blue heron rookery in the upper limbs of some cottonwood trees. Beverly and I love to watch these enormous birds, some of them four feet tall and weighing nearly eight pounds, as they gather at their nests, circling and landing or taking off from the slenderest branches.

  It seems astounding to me that creatures so hulking can maintain their places up there as the wind blows, as the rains fall. When I see them at their most eloquently poised, when everything they’re holding onto is swaying and swirling, I usually lose my balance, which is why I make sure to sit while watching them.

  At the center of Revertigo: An Off-Kilter Memoir is an attack of unrelenting vertigo that began—out of nowhere—on the morning of March 27, 2009, and ended on the evening of August 12, 2009, as suddenly as it had begun. Those 138 days seemed so anomalous, such a weird and isolated period in my life.

  As I began writing about it, I realized it would make no sense—or rather that it would seem to make too much apparent sense—if I told the story in a traditionally structured, conventional memoir. When you’re not in perfect balance, when body and world are askew, everything familiar is transformed. There’s a destabilizing of the self and its encounter with the world, a whirling of space and time. Nothing is ever still. Topsy-turvy rules. To capture what it felt like to be unceasingly vertiginous would require a matching off-kilterness of form, a structure that was tenuous, shifting, unpredictable.

  I also realized that, for the previous three years, I’d already been writing this book. My work was exploring balance and its loss, how the forces of uncertainty and sudden change and displacement had shaped me since childhood, as it shapes many of us, by repeatedly knocking me awry, requiring me to react and adapt fast, urgently realign my hopes and plans, even my perceptions. It seemed as though my life, and my writing about my life, had been preparing me for just such a time of radical off-kilterness. I kept waiting for the book to orient itself in the usual way, only to find that disorientation was its dominant mode.

  Looked at as a weird and isolated period in my life, the 138 days of vertigo were one thing, with a beginning and end, and I needed to take that look. But I
came to understand that there was more to the story. For instance, there was something inaccurate in the whole notion of beginning and end as having finite form. I realized that the shape of this book needed to be open, not linear, and not static.

  I wasn’t going to have a problem. It had been almost eight months since my vertigo had vanished, and I was walking fine. No cane, no stumbling or grabbing onto stationary objects for balance, no neck-and-shoulder-locked gait. Very little swooning. Swooning only occurred when—as happens to many people—I did something like look up at the clouds while walking. Yes, I was back to almost normal. Except there were maybe a few oddities, such as getting light-headed when I merely thought about riding on Portland’s aerial tram, swaying as it rises five hundred feet during its three-minute trip from the south waterfront up to Oregon Health and Science University’s main campus. Or when I saw a still photograph of lions veering in pursuit of a zebra. Or that one time when a lightbulb flickered. Odd, okay, but truly I was back in balance. Recovered. No longer vertiginous.

  So it never crossed my mind to worry about going to look at riverfront condo units that were set for auction in early April. Beverly and I had decided to sell our home, abandon stairs and roof maintenance and yard work and tree trimming, all the things I’d be unable to do again if vertigo recurred. Simplify, keep level.

  The first building we were looking at was a thirty-one-story, elliptical-shaped glass tower looming 325 feet above the Willamette River. This was going to be great. And it was, as we got off the elevator on the twenty-seventh floor and entered the unit being used as a temporary auction office. Then I encountered the view and began reeling, trying to brace myself against a desk, a kitchen island, an interior wall. I seemed more like a drunk than a prospective buyer.

  It took us a subsequent month to determine that I was all right, that I could be comfortable and stable, only up to the sixth floor of a condo. And provided I didn’t go outside on the balcony. And as long as I held on to something when I stood against the interior glass walls and looked down. So now we live on the sixth floor of a twenty-one-story building at the river’s edge, and I can sit by the window and watch boats, even speedboats, race by. I can watch herons. I’m postvertigo, except when I’m not, for three years, ten months, and twenty-four days.

  If I can’t even be sure that my apparently self-contained episode of vertigo has truly ended, then I don’t want to write a memoir about it that embodies traditional notions of balance, flow, imposed logic, closure. And if the apparently self-contained episode helps me understand that vertiginousness has always been a central part of my life, and that I was writing about it even before the attack happened, preparing for it, then I want this book to reflect just such narrative and structural fluidity, underscoring that where you find yourself is always contingent. I want the reader to join, through the book’s formal arrangement, in the process of finding and losing and refinding balance.

  Revertigo: An Off-Kilter Memoir follows a loose chronological sequence from adolescence (the first chapter takes place shortly before my thirteenth birthday) to the onset of senior citizenship (the last chapters take place as I reached sixty-five). Part One, “O Wondrous Transformation!,” is concerned with the volatile forces that shaped and reshaped me as I first sought to claim some sort of stable identity. Mine was not a world of fixed principles, firm beliefs, trustworthy foundations. It was a mercurial, eruptive, shape-shifting place, theatrical and often melodramatic, full of sudden harm, changes of fortune, changes of character. I never felt firmly grounded to the earth or connected to those around me, who so often seemed to morph into someone else. I was the son of a faux aristocrat and a chicken butcher. I learned about love through musical comedy lyrics, didn’t sound the way I wanted to, was a boy who didn’t care about cars. It was fitting that my adolescence was spent on a sandy island. In Part One, I do everything I can to find my role in a play whose story and structure make no sense to me, and learn to express myself with some kind of integrity.

  Part Two, “On and Off the Page,” follows my immersion in—okay, my obsession with—literature. With reading and acting and writing, with finding myself within the pages of books, with the way literature infuses my daily life, so that a walk in the woods becomes a chapter in a Jules Verne novel. But even there, in an obvious quest for understanding, meaning, coherence (if I read enough, I will learn how the world works, how it holds together), things keep changing on me. My sense of myself as expressed in what I read, or in what I discover as I write, is full of surprise turns for me, revelations and contradictions. I often find my response to books is off-kilter, far from canonical opinion, far from what I expected. Though it doesn’t contain all the answers, literature—and the real-life love story I’m living with Beverly—has come to serve as my balance pole. If that balance pole occasionally throws me off balance, I feel I’m better off for that.

  Part Three, “A Spinning World,” deals with the attack of vertigo. It also deals with learning to live with the long-term, life-changing illness that came before and continues after the attack of vertigo. With trying to make sense of it and take control of how I manage my health. The book’s final section, “Cartwheels on the Moon,” deals with a trio of tenuous, postvertigo-but-dizzying journeys to real places, Spain and England, and to a place known only in my mother’s unhinged fantasies, somewhere near the junction of France, Italy, Russia, and Long Beach, New York.

  And this prologue is actually an epilogue.

  Part One

  O WONDROUS TRANSFORMATION!

  * * *

  But, O Wondrous Transformation!

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  from The Song of Hiawatha

  1

  * * *

  SOME THINGS NEARLY SO, OTHERS NEARLY NOT

  The King and I and Me

  Is a puzzlement!

  Mildred was a deeply disturbing King. Tall and full bodied, with cascading curly blonde hair, she wore cat’s-eye glasses, vivid crimson lipstick, and a cubist smile. She ordered people around, then giggled at herself. Her autocratic fists-on-hips stance looked unsettlingly come-hither, even when she donned her bald headpiece. She came across like Phil Silvers being played by Lucille Ball.

  I knew Mildred as Mrs. Levine, my friend Richard’s mother, a long-lashed and hip-swaying dancer at bar mitzvahs, key player in my mother’s mah-jongg group, giver of ballyhooed dinner parties with her husband, Vance. She specialized in cream cheese and grape jelly sandwiches on pumpernickel hacked into erratic triangles. But she was also the director of our local community theater, and for its spring 1960 production of The King and I, the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical about a Welsh woman who becomes tutor and governess to the king of Siam’s children, Mildred had cast herself as the tyrannical and fickle King Mongkut, Rama IV, husband of twenty-three wives and father of sixty-seven princes and princesses. It was the arrogant potentate’s role made famous by a shaven-headed baritone named Yul Brynner, former circus acrobat and nightclub singer.

  During early rehearsals, Mildred still looked like herself and still behaved like herself, only a little bossier. As the play’s director, she would sit near the aisle of the auditorium’s middle row, head wreathed in smoke from her Lucky Strikes, and issue critiques or instructions. Then she would run up to the stage and, in character as the King, glower and pose between her lines. But she spoke those lines with a dampened soprano rasp, and seemed more petulant than regal, stamping her foot to convey his emphatic style. There was no one to critique her performance and, sometimes, she would berate herself using her Mongkut voice. Once, speaking Anna’s lines instead of her own, then speaking her own instead of Anna’s, she shook her head and burst into tears.

  To a boy nearing thirteen, playing one of Mildred/Mongkut’s sons, this was all elusive and muddling. In the back of the auditorium, doing my homework with the other royal children, I had serious trouble with focus. Morphing Mildred was a lot to keep track of.

  So were my new feelings towa
rd one of the other royal children, red-headed Jacqueline, who was required to hold my hand as we marched onstage together and sit next to me in our classroom scenes. She was also in my English class at school, and I thought she looked much nicer in rehearsal. Or maybe she just looked more tired and therefore more relaxed and open. But there was something about the music we moved to in the play, and about the awareness of attraction that Mildred’s shenanigans were provoking, which combined to waken fresh feelings in me.

  I may have wanted to be home rather than at rehearsal in the synagogue basement, but things there were growing more compelling. Soon Jacqueline began showing up in my dreams. So did Mildred, in varying states of dishevelment. It was as though her appearances as a man had intensified my sense of her as a woman, which in turn had ignited my interest in Jacqueline, who in turn was smiling at me in school.

  When Oscar Hammerstein wrote to his friend Joshua Logan, who had directed the film version of South Pacific, that The King and I “is a very strange play and must be accepted on its own terms,” he was thinking about its groundbreaking shortage of comedy and lack of traditional love story, its exotic historical setting and unfamiliar musical underpinnings, its hero’s death at the end. He didn’t have in mind the King being played by an actress in drag, who awakens an adolescent to feelings for his royal half sister.

  The result of this deception is very strange to tell