“Don’t you ever talk to him like that ever again!” I snapped, making no effort to hide my fury. She appeared stunned that I had turned on her for what she saw as rising to my defense.
“You have no idea what he has been through,” I said angrily. “No one—no one—has any right to criticize him.”
I took a deep breath. “If anyone owes anyone an apology, it’s me! To him!”
* * *
—
Naarden was wrong. Lightning struck twice; I failed the glucose tolerance test. In addition to epilepsy, I had reactive hypoglycemia. When I ate anything sweet, my blood sugar rose and then crashed. He sent me a letter with the details, saying that the test suggested I was pre-diabetic.
I traveled to an appointment with Haase, my Philadelphia neurologist, who reviewed the results. He told me that the sugar crashes could be serving as a trigger for seizures, just like lack of sleep or alcohol. Haase instructed me to change my diet—I could no longer eat or drink anything sweetened.
I took the news in stride; choosing between syrup and seizures was easy. In fact, discovering this second medical problem excited me. Maybe this would be key to improved control.
That night at a rehearsal for Pippin, I told friends about the finding. They asked if I was upset and were reassured when I said no. Later that evening, a student who walked the campus selling Dunkin’ Donuts arrived in the theater. Absentmindedly, I purchased a cream-filled donut and brought it toward my mouth.
“Kurt, no!” screamed Jocelyn Roberts, the Pippin choreographer and Carl’s new girlfriend. “Don’t eat that!”
I looked at the donut. Sugar. I had been so close to taking a bite, and I really wanted it. A cast member took it out of my hand and walked away eating the sweet snack.
For decades, I would crave that cream-filled donut.
* * *
—
Pippin was a big success. On the last night, after the crowds left, I jumped off a chair and screamed, “Fuck you, Swarthmore!” The celebratory reception of the musical boosted my prominence on campus. Swarthmore could never again label me as nonfunctional.
The number of seizures lessened throughout the second semester, but they never stopped. Around that time, I experienced the nighttime convulsion that led to my being buried in snow. After my rescue, which led to my screaming on the staircase as I stared at my injured hands, Franz turned up and brought me to my bedroom. My clothes were caked with ice and frozen urine, and I was trembling from the cold. Franz took off my pants, put me to bed, and covered me with a quilt. The next day, I woke on my bedroom floor. The room smelled from the urine that had melted overnight. Harry dropped by later, and the two of us followed my trail in the snow, eventually finding my books and glasses at the spot where I had dug myself out.
A month later, I informed Carl and Franz I would not be living with them our senior year. Their relief was obvious. Harry and I planned to room together, but an official at the housing office refused to allow it; Harry would be a resident assistant, and so could not room with another student. Speaking only to me, she said I had guilt-tripped Harry into offering to share a double with me. When I told Harry about her comments, he exploded. I told him it didn’t matter; I had experienced worse. Besides, I would just take a single on his hallway and, except at bedtime, would leave my door wide open whenever I was inside. I would be fine.
* * *
—
As the end of junior year approached, Carl, Franz, and an assortment of their new friends planned a picnic. I wasn’t invited—no surprise. Even though I would not be living with them anymore, I believed the damage I’d caused to our friendship was irreparable.
The day of the event, the crowd gathered in our suite, then headed out. I was on my bed, reading a book. Carl returned and appeared in my doorway.
“Are you coming?” he asked.
I was confused. “To what?”
“To the picnic.”
“I wasn’t invited.”
“Of course you were invited,” Carl protested.
I laid the book on my chest. “Carl. I wasn’t invited.”
He sighed, then paused.
“Okay,” he said. “You’re right. You weren’t invited. Now I’m inviting you. Will you come?”
I smiled and sat up. “Absolutely.”
And that was it. There was no further discussion about our troubled year, no recriminations. Apparently, my decision to move out had been effective. From that moment on, my friendship with Carl and Franz was restored. We remain close to this day.
* * *
—
Although I still experienced convulsions every two weeks or so, I managed to load up on classes in my senior year. By taking one extra credit each semester, I reached my four-year goal of graduating with my class.
Carl invited me back to Sixteen Feet and reappointed me administrator. I joined the college newspaper to write pieces mostly about mismanagement of the college. To my astonishment, my best sources were school officials who knew I had kept quiet about what they had done to me.
As graduation neared, I visited the registrar. She was aware of my health problems, and I asked if I could attach a letter to my transcript explaining what had occurred. That way, if anyone ever reviewed my grades, the correspondence would clarify how sick I had been throughout college. She dug up my records and returned to the counter.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“What?”
“Why do you need a letter?”
“Well, to explain—”
“Kurt,” she interrupted, “don’t you know? You’re graduating with academic distinction.”
* * *
—
I ran to the office of Professor Al Bloom, who had advised me in my freshman year to ignore my grades and focus on understanding what I was taught. I excitedly told him the news.
“Not a surprise,” he said. “I always tell students, if you just worry about learning the material, the grades will come.”
I gave him an enormous hug.
* * *
—
Two days before graduation, I visited Gil Stott, an associate provost with the reputation as one of the kindest people in the administration. He knew nothing about what had happened to me.
I recounted the story of my dismissal, the legal violations, the fight to return. My family had been robbed of a semester of tuition, I said. The school’s assertions about my inability to survive Swarthmore had been proven false: I was prominent in my class, graduating with distinction. I had made an impact, despite seizures. I had been thrown out on the basis of lies, discrimination, and ignorance. I wanted our money back.
Stott looked sympathetic. “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing that can be done about that,” he said.
“Okay,” I replied. “But I need to make this clear.”
I stood, ready to walk out on this point. “No matter what happens in the future, no matter what I become, I will never return here. I will, however, contribute ten dollars a year by deducting it from what Swarthmore owes me. Which means I’ll be long dead before the school gets a dime.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Stott said. “And I’m sorry this happened to you.”
I choked up. Stott, uninvolved in my dismissal, was the only person at Swarthmore to have ever apologized.
“Thank you,” I whispered before leaving the room.
* * *
—
A light sprinkle fell on the morning of graduation. The school announced that, for the first time in its history, ceremonies would move from the beautiful outdoor amphitheater to the ugly, hot gymnasium.
The rain stopped an hour before the scheduled time, but the school refused to reverse its position. Our class would break the more-than-a-century-old tradition. To me, this was another example of administrati
ve incompetence, fortified by arrogance, and it triggered my focused rage.
As students lined up outside the gymnasium, I called for revolt. “Don’t walk in!” I yelled. “If we don’t go, they can’t have graduation. Demand we have it at the amphitheater. Don’t let us be the ones who end the record.”
Someone objected, worried we might get in trouble.
“What are they going to do?” I asked. “Throw us out?”
My rabble rousing won some converts, and soon the new president, David Fraser, faced a potential uprising. He marched the class to the amphitheater, telling us to gather in front of the stage.
“So you understand, you don’t graduate when you’re handed your diploma,” he informed the group. “It’s when the president announces that you are graduates.”
With that, Fraser uttered the magic words. “Congratulations,” he said. “You are all graduates of Swarthmore College.”
Now, he said, the class needed to return to the gymnasium, where families and friends waited. When the time came to receive our diplomas, we lined up as we had practiced doing the day before.
The moment arrived when I was the next to be called. I stood beside Janet Dickerson, who was there to direct each student onto the stage.
I heard my name, and before I took a step, I looked her in the eye.
“I told you I’d make it,” I said.
She shook my hand. “Congratulations,” she replied.
* Little blocked a friendly doctor from sharing information with the health center, even if I instructed the physician to keep it secret. The center maintained a relationship with me since they were technically responsible for all students, despite the restrictions on me. The stringent federal medical privacy rules that exist now were not yet in place, and even under those, doctors can share information without patient authorization.
An audio letter from
FRANZ PAASCHE, 1986
It’s hard enough to excel at Swarthmore, but it’s virtually inconceivable that someone could graduate with distinction while having so many seizures over a period of years. Somehow, you just had a tremendous will to continue your life and to continue to strive to do all the things you wanted.
It’s funny how something that was so painful could at the same time lead to such rich emotional fulfillment and friendship. I guess that’s something that I’ve known about you. I don’t know, I guess I’ve told you that, because you’ve experienced such agony, I think you’re also much more able to have joy. The depths and the heights go together.
That’s how I think about the whole experience. I never use the word “epilepsy.” In describing what you have to someone else, I guess I use epilepsy, but when I think about you I never think of you as “an epileptic”; I never have and I don’t think I ever will. I think of you as Kurt, who has this problem that came on suddenly and unfairly and that I’m sure you will conquer someday. “Epilepsy” just sounds so clinical and distant. What you have is very personal, and separate, and part of us.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Brightly colored pins dotted a map of the United States on my bedroom wall. Each represented a form of transportation: red for subways and trains, green for buses, and yellow for taxis. The results weren’t encouraging. The main cities where I could work at a newspaper were Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, and maybe Philadelphia. Yet getting hired in those locations, I thought, was possible only for journalists who cut their teeth in small towns, places where I would have to drive.
It was the summer of 1983. I shared a small house with three others in an Arlington, Virginia, neighborhood built after World War II. I had been hired for a three-month unpaid internship at the Washington Monthly, a small political magazine housed at a brownstone in Adams Morgan, the center of Washington’s Hispanic immigrant community. Fortunately, I could forgo a salary; the remaining savings from my telemarketing days could cover a few months of expenses.
My choice of the Monthly was part of a plan I had pursued for more than a year. To obtain a reporting job after graduation, I would need a collection of news or magazine articles I wrote in the past; the best chance for getting into print would have been through a summer newspaper internship after my junior year, but no publication hired me. I’d also applied to be a volunteer at Chicago Lawyer magazine that summer. The year before, while living with Carl in Chicago, I made contacts who could introduce me to staff at the magazine. During spring break of my junior year, I traveled to Chicago for summer job interviews and met with the editor, Rob Warden, but he rejected me as well. I thanked him for his time and, as I headed toward the door, saw a pile of advertisements on the typesetting machine. Somebody had to click away at the keyboard for hours so the ads could be printed in the magazine.
Necessity gave me an idea, one that I knew might backfire. But if I’d learned anything from fighting Swarthmore, it was the value of pushing boundaries by taking risks.
I accepted an unpaid summer job at a nonprofit in the same building as Chicago Lawyer. Without realizing that I might inflict the same damage as I had on Carl the previous summer, I persuaded my friend Harry—who by then knew how to handle my seizures—to try his luck in Chicago and share an apartment with me. Fortunately my health stayed mostly steady, with only four or five convulsions during those two and a half months.
Every weekday, I headed to work at the nonprofit. During lunch, when Warden wasn’t around, I took the elevator downstairs to the magazine’s office. I introduced myself to the managing editor and offered to typeset ads if he taught me how to use the machine. He never asked if I worked there, and within twenty minutes, I was banging away at the keyboard. I started arriving at the magazine early in the morning, leaving for my real job at 9:00 A.M., returning at lunch, heading back upstairs at 1:00 P.M., then typesetting after 5:00 P.M. until the office closed.
I soon learned that working late in a city posed risks that had been unknown to me at school. One night, I woke up after a grand mal seizure when someone kicked me in the stomach. I heard voices, laughter, and taunts. A group of teenagers was beating me, enjoying the chance to terrify a defenseless person. I tried to see where I was. Pavement, in a lighted area. I heard a train. An “L” station. The teens stopped tormenting me when the train pulled in, perhaps fearing they would be caught. I stood, stumbled onto the train, and dropped into a seat. Later, an “L” employee woke me, possibly at the end of the line, and I took a taxi home. In the immediate aftermath, I felt nothing about the event; I just wanted to push it out of my mind, to ignore my vulnerability that the assault revealed. I finally discussed the attack many months later, and then only with a counselor. I at first waved it off as insignificant, just a consequence of living in a city. Only after he pressed me did my true feelings—of violation, weakness, fear, embarrassment—finally emerge.
Weeks passed at Chicago Lawyer with no one ever asking who I was or why I was there. The managing editor—assuming I had been hired as an intern—assigned me a story as a reward for my typesetting work. I reported and wrote a lengthy article. The night the editors were closing that issue of the magazine, Warden reviewed each story after they had been laid out for printing. He studied mine, remembered who I was, then looked toward the typesetter where I sat entering last-minute ads.
“Kurt! I told you that you couldn’t work here!” he shouted.
I shrugged. “Yeah, I know. I decided to ignore you.”
Warden shook his head. “Goddamn it. That means you wrote this as a freelancer and not an intern. We have to pay you.”
I smiled at him.
Pause. “Okay,” he said. “Now you’re an intern. And I’m giving you a new assignment. And this one doesn’t pay.”
“Fine by me.” I chuckled.
As I’d hoped, my Chicago Lawyer articles helped me land the Washington Monthly internship after college. The magazine seemed a promising career launching pad: The founder, C
harlie Peters, hired inexperienced young editors, most of whom went on to major publications such as The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The New Republic. I thought that if I worked hard at my internship, I’d have a chance of being hired as an editor, giving me entrée to a newspaper in a city with mass transit.
Just as at Chicago Lawyer, boring chores at the Monthly had been ignored. Letters and packages sat in piles in a makeshift mailroom, and I saw an opportunity. I arrived early every day and stayed late, opening letters, tossing out junk, and taking anything that looked useful to the editors. I fetched coffee and became something of an errand boy. I stayed at the office as much as I could, fearful of missing an opportunity for real work.
One day, I got my break. A friend of Peters had written an article about a politically connected bank, but editors found it weak. One of them, Jonathan Rowe, asked if I could beef up the story with additional reporting. I jumped on the assignment, digging through records at the Library of Congress and conducting phone interviews. Eventually, I returned to Rowe with my conclusion: The piece had missed a bigger story about banking regulation. Rowe asked if I would be willing to do the rewrite, and I eagerly agreed. My version had little relation to the original story, and Rowe thought I should have the byline.
A few days later, I arrived at the office and heard a loud argument upstairs. Tim Noah, another Monthly editor, explained that Peters’s friend was angry and still wanted the byline.
“That’s fine,” I said. I would rather have the editors think they owed me a favor than just add another article to my clips.
Rowe edited the piece, asking me to stay nearby in case he had questions. Eventually, he switched to working on a small accompanying piece—known as a sidebar—that he had written. He removed his byline and typed in mine.
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