—WOODY ALLEN
On the day of our wedding, we recited vows to each other that included these lines from a translation of the Tao Te Ching: “Can you coax your mind from its wandering and keep to the original oneness? Can you step back from your own mind and thus understand all things? Can you deal with the most vital matters by letting events take their course?” And the answer would be no. However, we didn’t realize how no the answer was until the day our son was born.
He Says
I had an overwhelming sense of awe, terror, and dread when our baby son, Ezra, was scooped out of his mother’s gut and taken into an examination room where a doctor with a thick Dutch accent and the bedside manner of Donald Rumsfeld told me that he had no anus.
“No, what? Shut up …” I scrutinize him: Is this doctor serious or is he just seriously fucking with me? Everyone knows the Dutch are known for speed skating, legalized pot, prostitution, and even very tasty Gouda cheese, but comedy? I’m sort of a wiseass myself so I say to him, “Well, he’s just been born, so maybe his anus is really, really tiny and you just can’t see it.” Van Rumsfeld looks at me as if I’d just drunk his last Heineken. He’s not joking. He never jokes. He’s Dutch. I immediately check Ezra’s rear for openings and find the smoothest, most hole-free ass in the history of assholes. I’m stunned, confused, and as usual, I’m angry. “Where’s his hole?! I cannot take him without a hole!” I cry out, as if my son were a pair of Diesel jeans without a zipper.
Annabelle was so delirious from all the C-section drugs that after I told her he had no anus, she was laughing hysterically. She joked to the nurse that she couldn’t believe Jeff Kahn’s son doesn’t have a butthole because “that’s my husband’s favorite part of the body.” Ha, ha, ha, Annabelle’s so witty when she’s hopped on painkillers. OK, it is true everyone knows that I am somewhat obsessed with that end of the body and if given a choice between watching Shakespeare’s King Lear, a great episode of Seinfeld, or Up the Butt Girls 23, I can’t lie and tell you Lear or Seinfeld. It’s nothing I’m proud of. So was this all some kind of karmic payback? Was I being told, “Hey, you like ass so much, Kahn, OK, here—deal with it 24/7. Not so much fun, huh? Next time do yourself a favor and fixate on Shakespearean tragedy, schmuck.”
Less than two hours after the birth, Annabelle and I are in her hospital room listening to Doc Van Dutch inform us that having no anus is the tip of the birth defect iceberg. Little Ezra has what is called VACTERL, an acronym in which the letters V, A, C, T, E, R, and L each stand for one or more birth defects. This can be one, all, or several different combinations of: having no anus; stricture or fusing of the esophagus and trachea; heart problems; kidney abnormalities; vertebral anomalies; and even limb defects, such as not enough toes or fingers. As far as we knew at that point, Ezra was definitely anus free, he had an esophageal stricture (too small to let food into his stomach), holes in his heart, and a possible conjoined or horse-shaped kidney.
I’d love to claim that my response to all this was to be a stoic, brave husband and that I was a beacon of hope, optimism, and stability to my wife, family, and friends, but what I did was weep. I cried because I felt lost, overwhelmed, and ill equipped and unprepared to deal with any of this. I cried because I knew that the life I had been living up to this moment was gone and over forever. And I continued to cry for hours until a hospital administrative liaison was summoned to warn me that if didn’t stop crying, I’d be personally escorted out of the hospital. Finally, my writing partner, who came to the hospital for moral support and is no fan of hysterical, overly emotional males, especially when it is her writing partner, slapped me right across the face. She ordered me to get hold of myself so I could be strong for Annabelle, who was coming down from the postsurgery drugs and quickly beginning to lose it as well. It was definitely not one of my strongest moments. Thank goodness I never had to sail across the world with Magellan, storm the beaches of Normandy, or interview Tom Cruise about Scientology.
In order to survive, our baby needed surgery immediately to make him a feeding tube and a colostomy. My hand was trembling as I filled out surgical consent forms when I heard the nurse tell me, “You’re lucky.” I’m lucky? Hey, screw you, lady, I thought to myself. “You’re getting Big Mac,” she continued. “I’m getting a Big Mac?” “No, Dr. Columbus McAlpin, Big Mac, is going to be your baby’s surgeon. He’s the head of pediatric surgery. The entire hospital parts like the Red Sea in front of him.” At that moment, I saw a short, squat, black doctor in blue scrubs, with a furry beard, advancing down the hallway toward me. Every nurse, doctor, resident, and orderly politely moved out of his path. He had a big smile on his face when he shook my hand and a gentle, assured glint in his eyes. “Hey, I’m Columbus McAlpin.” Perhaps it was the feel of his steady hand or the subtly raspy, jazz trumpeter lilt to his voice, but it was the first time since Ezra exited Annabelle’s womb that I didn’t feel as if the whole world was coming crashing down on top of me. This was the first of many occasions that Big Mac would subside my worries and lift my sagging spirits.
In the neonatal intensive care unit later that night, I find I can’t stop staring at our kid. So that’s my baby down there in that incubator, hooked up to heart and oxygen monitors, wires and IV lines going into and out of his body. A feeding tube protrudes from his tiny stomach, an oversized plastic colostomy bag farcically droops over his little diaper. A black string runs from his mouth down his throat out the feeding tube hole and back into his mouth again. I have no idea what that’s for. Ezra simultaneously looks like a newborn infant and a tired old man. It’s at that moment that a part of me leaves my body, looks back at where I’m standing, and waves good-bye. He says he’s off to Iceland, a land where everyone is either drunk or fucking or both, and would I care to join him? I really wanted to go to Iceland. Beautiful, icy … distant Iceland … But for some reason my feet felt nailed to the floor. I couldn’t move a muscle. No, I didn’t want to stick around and deal with what lay ahead for Annabelle and me and Ezra, but I equally didn’t want to miss it.
Our lives quickly turned into complete shit, literally and figuratively. After three weeks in the hospital, the nurses bundled up tiny Ezra, handed him to us, and wished us luck. Annabelle asked if there was some kind of “no anus” class for new parents like us, and the nurses just laughed. “Anus class, you two are funny.” And then they walked away. We were on our own. From here on out, we’d have to wing it.
When Annabelle was pregnant, we purchased diapers and bottles; now we were faced with colostomy-bag changing and pouring milk through tubes into his stomach every four hours. Modern medicine is often quite miraculous, yet when it comes to colostomy bags, it’s downright medieval. It’s a tortuous device that must have been created during the Spanish Inquisition. I made several frustrated, futile, and foolish attempts to master those fuckers until I had to tell Annabelle that there are some things I was never, beyond a shadow of a doubt, going to learn: the French language, calculus, and how to change a colostomy bag. Fortunately, although Annabelle has never been able to master our home security system, she was quite capable of handling the C-bag changing.
It would be nice to report that Annabelle and I were able to give Ezra the twenty-four-hour focus and attention he needed daily to be kept alive. But we also had to do all that postmodern family stuff, such as both of us having to work and make money to make ends meet. So to help us with the round-the-clock routine of colostomy bags and feeding tubes, there was a never-ending parade of nannies and nurses, day and night, who marched in and out of our lives. Some were helpful. Some were helpless, such as the one who actually said she couldn’t feed Ezra through his feeding tube because it grossed her out too much. One nanny, a tiny Brazilian lady with a really witchy, voodoo vibe about her, drove Annabelle batty because she refused to let her hold Ezra or even let her into the bedroom to kiss him good night when she was taking care of him. But we were afraid to fire the witch because she was the only one at that time who could get hi
m to stop crying long enough to fall asleep.
Eventually, the witch flew away and was replaced by a smiley, patchouli-scented New-Agey nanny who told us, “Everything happens for a reason,” including, I guess, her mysteriously quitting after less than a half a month. She gave way to a born-again night nurse who was certain that God doesn’t give anyone anything they can’t handle. Lovely little sentiments that nevertheless left me feeling cynical, angry, and in dire need of alcohol. If everything in the universe happens for a reason, how do you explain or justify plagues, genocide, or why people think Dane Cook is funny? Seriously. Dane Cook—good-looking guy, not funny at all. And as far as God giving you what you can handle … God, of all omnipotent deities, should know that if I can’t handle my computer crashing, Los Angeles traffic congestion, and restaurants that don’t serve egg white omelets, how in his name could I handle having a child without an anus? The lack of sleep, juggling work, the endless revolving door of nurses and nannies and the mountains of money they were costing us, plus the sheer physical and psychological effort it took to take care of baby Ezra, were really taking a toll on our marriage. There was no sleep, at all, ever. We had been transformed from insecure, neurotic, self-involved, artistic but kindly individuals into snarling, seething, self-involved emotional vampires out for each other’s blood. Annabelle, not exactly a temple of stability to begin with, started to become even more unhinged. First, she sought out anyone who would listen to her. After exhausting her friends, our doctors, neighbors, and passing strangers she met on the street, she turned to the Internet and found a site devoted to kids born with VACTERL. Yes, there is actually a Web site and a monthly newsletter devoted to anusless kids and their parents. She started e-mailing members, hoping to bond over their common experiences and trade tidbits on how best to deal with these birth defects. Not satisfied with online chats, Annabelle sniffed out local parent support groups and begged me to attend one with her. She guaranteed it would change my perspective. She was right; listening to these mothers talk about their babies did change my perspective. Each story was more tragic than the next: babies born with hearts outside their ribs, blind, brain damaged, lungs that could barely breathe. It was otherworldly: a child with lobster hands, a fused-legged mermaid girl, a half boy/half lamb, and a baby born without a head. Without a head—how is that possible? By the time it got around to my turn to speak, all I could say was how my heart went out to all of them and how lucky I now felt that we, in comparison, had it so easy. I mean, can lobster child ever learn to use a fork? Does mermaid girl have to live in water? Does lamb boy grow his own wool? What in the holy hell do you feed a headless baby? We screamed at each other in the parking lot. I told Annabelle I would never go to another one of her support groups, and she shouted back that this just reinforced her feeling that I refused to accept and deal with what had happened to Ezra. I yelled back that I accepted what happened and was dealing with it in my own way by working all day, staying up all night, and not dropping dead.
During these surreal couple of years, we were at the hospital so often it was as if we had stepped through a portal into an alternate reality. In this reality we lived among cheery Disney murals donated by Jeffrey Katzenberg, bald leukemia kids walking around with their chemo drips, and nurses whom we’d see so often that they’d greet us as if we were their old friends from high school. There was no way we could have negotiated this neon-lit medical universe without Dr. McAlpin. He performed four of Ezra’s major surgical procedures. He also did more than a dozen esophageal dilatations. It’s not like Ezra was his only patient. He literally had hundreds if not thousands of kids to tend to. How did he manage to be so omnipresent? How many Big Macs were there? Above all, it was astonishing that he constantly remained the Rock of Gibraltar for so many of us scared and uncertain parents.
Meanwhile, Annabelle and I took turns sleeping next to Ezra’s bed on a tiny hospital cot last used by Papillon on Devil’s Island. We had the pleasure of being awakened every five minutes by nurses taking Ezra’s vitals. But I’ll never forget the sheer and utter euphoria, the absolute joy and jubilation, of seeing a tiny spec of turd swimming in his diaper for the first time.
In those long days and nights in the hospital with Ezra, it seemed as if no matter how much espresso I drank, I would never be fully awake again. Once while walking in the corridor that connects the two Cedars-Sinai towers, I caught a glimpse of myself in a large window. Who was that burned-out guy with bloodshot eyes and an expensive haircut trying to fool into believing he wasn’t scared out of his freakin’ mind? I stared at myself. Was it really me? Was this really our life now? I still loved Annabelle, but everything had changed so much, so quickly and dramatically, I wasn’t sure our marriage would survive. We couldn’t agree on anything. Annabelle wanted to go to support groups, have parties at our house for kids from all over the country who also had VACTERL, and insisted on taking Ezra to every physical therapist in LA. I just wanted to keep working so we could keep paying other people to change his colostomy bags.
Everything that we ever thought was wrong with us, our careers, our relationship, and now our child, started to collide, creating explosions of blame, finger pointing, and score keeping. It was a time of emotional button pushing, and Annabelle and I treated each other to a barrage the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton and would not be seen again until Rosie O’Donnell and Donald Trump. I’m sure a large part of this marital sniping was a release from all the stresses we were under. Because we couldn’t treat the doctors and nurses badly, or take our frustrations out on our friends, family, the people we worked with, or those who worked for us, we were left with just each other. We became each other’s psychological punching bags. It left us both with invisible internal scars just as all of Ezra’s surgeries left external physical ones.
I began to fantasize about what life might be like to be a divorced, single dad of a kid who had a man-made anus. However, fantasizing about divorce and actually getting divorced are two very different things. Like porn and sex. Porn sex might look genuine when it’s free on the Internet, but it doesn’t exist in reality. Every porn video ends the exact same way, with the guy cumming all over the girl’s face and she loves it. She can’t get enough of it! I wonder what percentage of marital sexual couples finish in this manner? None-percent, that’s how many. At least I had enough perspective to realize that. Subsequently, instead of divorcing, Annabelle and I went to therapists, both together and separately. I started downing antidepressants, going to yoga twice a week, and picking up a newfound appreciation for the wines of the Rhône Valley.
In all honesty, it was the most unimaginable and difficult crisis of my life. I was in the thick of “for better or worse;” and although I might have sucked at it, I wasn’t going to quit.
If there’s one thing I can do well, it’s being scrappy. I don’t give up. Whenever I play basketball, I’m this little five-foot-six gnat of energy using quickness and tenacity against much bigger and taller players. I had relied on my never-quit can-do scrappiness in my quest to win Annabelle’s heart for more than five years. As a writer working in Hollywood, I had definitely seen my fair share of rejection and failure, but I stayed in the game, and no matter what happened, good or bad, I kept plugging away. And that’s exactly what I intended to do as a father and a husband.
I tried adopting a noncynical optimism that Ezra was going to be all right. It frustrated me that I could not get Annabelle to put a more upbeat spin on things or stop her from her obsession that Ezra might have a horrible undiagnosed VACTERL-related spinal column condition. Ezra seemed fine to me. He was even showing signs of having remarkable eye-hand coordination and I began to father-fantasize about his bucking the odds of his defects and becoming a professional baseball player. About how he’d one day hold the World Series trophy over his head and say, “This is for my dad. He has been my inspiration ever since I was a little kid, even though he never learned how to change a colostomy bag.” But An
nabelle was adamant about getting Ezra an MRI of his spine, and sure enough, he had that fucking birth defect too and it needed to be repaired as soon as possible. It was a complicated and scary three-and-a-half-hour surgery, but Ezra made it through with flying colors and got his cutest scar to boot. Annabelle’s inquiries and insistence on the MRI had saved him and our family an immeasurable amount of pain and unhappiness. I am eternally grateful to her for being a huge pain in the ass and for making damn sure she got her way when it came to Ezra’s spine.
Unbelievably though, when Ezra turned four, our doctors determined that Ezra possesses not a larger horseshoe-shaped kidney but just one solitary kidney that’s undersized, cystic, and sitting in an exposed position below his rib cage. This meant that Ezra must maintain a low-protein diet, take sodium bicarbonate tablets twice a day to aid in processing toxins, and because his ribs do not protect it, the kid will never be able to join the rodeo, the Marines, or the World Wrestling Federation. (So something good has come of it.) In more disheartening news, the pediatric nephrologist who was monitoring Ezra’s kidney predicted at this time that it would lose its ability to function and begin to fail in his teenage years.
I respectfully chose to disagree. I thought, “Well, how can she be totally sure?” He was so young; maybe it would grow stronger and function more normally as he grew older. Annabelle considered me just another victim of magical thinking. I was only trying to stay as optimistic as possible and to instill that attitude into Ezra whenever I could. Annabelle denies being a pessimist, but she’s absolutely certain that Los Angeles will be hit with an apocalyptic earthquake in the next few years and has stocked her car with every provision imaginable: extra pairs of clothes, shoes, jugs of water, reams of toilet paper, tins of tuna, packages of dried figs, oatmeal bars, several radios, flashlights, an emergency surgical equipment kit, and an inflatable raft. Come the inevitable catastrophe Annabelle’s covered, sadly she’ll have to go it alone, because her car is so crammed that no one else will fit in. I wanted little Ezra to be able to live as normal a life as possible, to feel good about himself and not fear the future, whatever it might hold for him.
You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up Page 10