Mental

by Jaime Lowe

  As much as there was to do before the real line chefs showed up at four, Fredo made time for lunch. He relished this task, cooking for four—Cunyato didn’t sit with us for reasons unknown, but Fredo made a plate for him and set it aside. For lunch, Fredo sautéed pasta with a roasted yellow pepper–based sauce . . . parm, bread, and mineral water. Fredo may speak often and obsessively of sex, but he’s clearly in it for the food. When he talked about ingredients and flavor and freshness, there was a sense of gravitas, a balletic grace to the way Fredo combined ingredients, his arms floating in free form, dropping fresh-cut herbs and spices over iron skillets. Some chefs look tight and hurried when they cook; Fredo looked like he was doing an interpretive dance, moving with the food and the heat.

  When I asked exactly how he made this hot, delicious mess on our plates, he said, “When I talk of food, I talk of love and I cannot talk of love with you so I will not tell you what I made today. I cannot.” He said this like I had violated him. I had underestimated the power of someone cooking specifically for you, tailoring a menu to suit you and only you. Our lunch was intimate. At the end of the day, I gave Fredo my apron and he said, “Keep it, just in case you want to come back.” I said I did, that I loved my first lesson in chopping. “Ah good, well then I can’t be that awful if you want to come back. Whenever you want, stop by.”

  I came back the next day.

  “So”—Fredo started many sentences with the word so and followed it with a dramatic pause—“you want to chop again?” Fredo positioned me next to six different crates of mushrooms, each one requiring a damp washcloth cleanse and individual rubbings to get rid of dirt. I cleaned and cut porcini, crimini, shiitake, chanterelle, oyster, and enoki for the garnish. I sautéed each of them in garlic-infused oil, white wine, red pepper, and chopped parsley until a metal tray was filled and one of the specials was done. I didn’t slice my finger and I didn’t set my hand on fire. It was a good day so far; I was progressing from stock maker to mushroom lady. Fredo introduced me to my favorite task yet, pitting olives. I looooooooooved pitting olives. I would pound each olive with a mallet until it split and remove the pit. With each thud, Fredo would jump slightly.

  “Easy, easy. This isn’t your ex-boyfriend.”

  I liked the meat grinder too; it satisfied the Sweeney Todd in me, the way the raw, marbled flesh of wild boar shoulder oozed out of the metal grinder; it just looked cool and I liked wearing the plastic medical gloves and sticking my hand in the ground raw flesh. Making the duck ravioli fillings required grinding and mashing and elaborate hand mixing with ricotta cheese. I was starting to really get into the kitchen. I didn’t know what to expect and now I never wanted to leave. That afternoon, the owner, nicknamed Toto or Tony by all the neighborhood regulars, stopped by the kitchen after the market in his paint-splattered work boots.

  “Eh, Tony, this is Yaime,” Fredo said.

  I thanked him for letting me chop in his kitchen.

  “Yaime, it’s my pleasure.” Antonio had a kind of singsong melodic way of speaking. It was almost operatic, like every syllable was infused emotion. Toto treated me like family, like a daughter. I shelled fava beans; made a bean dish whose name translates to “jumps like a flying bird”; cooked ravioli, aka “little purses filled with cheese”; I cut more carrots and celery and onion in more ways than I thought possible . . . big chunks for stock, diced for seafood salad, thinly sliced for the rabbit, shredded, and medium cut. Fredo still thought my knife skills were lacking. “You are going to slice your finger off. I know it. Not like this. Like this.” Fredo and I ate lunch together—pancetta and fava beans over penne with ricotta salata, pea soup; on very good days we’d split a chocolate hazelnut torte. Sometimes I’d stop in on my way to work and have an espresso. I’d eat at Noodle Pudding for dinner with friends and I’d be treated like a princess—Fredo bringing out special olive oil and small bites, Marcelo filling our wineglasses and Anthony (Toto’s son) with the tiramisu.

  I’d ask Fredo how he was each morning. “Depressed,” he’d answer, then lift up his hands and look around, like it was obvious. He always answered either “depressed” or even “suicidal,” in spite of his generally good mood. He complained about his family life (“Nico decided to dump a jar of cinnamon in the living room, then took off his diaper and paraded around with it, then he thought it was a good idea to stay up till midnight!”). Then would rescind everything: “No, no, no, I love my wife and my kids, they are the best thing in my life.” I once mentioned being unsure of motherhood or family and he said dismissively, “Well, you are going to miss out on the best thing this world has to offer.” I took Fredo’s near-constant chatter about sex and cheating and attraction to be more of a front than a reality. He would flirt with a broom if a broom had an ass.

  Lithium allowed me to function, but during this breakdown, breakup, or whatever was happening, Noodle Pudding saved me. The food, the people, the wine, and having a place to go cannot be underrated in the realm of treatment. In The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben writes about how forests act as a family, pooling resources and protecting each other, sending messages and nutrients through an elaborate roots system. Noodle Pudding was like that—a forest made of pasta. I lived alone, Randy (a regular who lived upstairs) lived alone, Fredo seemed alone in this world, alone in his kitchen. There were times when the isolation felt awful. But at Noodle Pudding, we were alone together. Noodle Pudding was my friend; it sometimes felt like I was dating the whole restaurant. I chopped for about a year until Marcelo and Fredo opened AlMar, a different Italian restaurant, in DUMBO. And when ESPN moved to Bristol, Connecticut, I lost my night job. I started waitressing at AlMar and was the world’s worst waitress (according to Marcelo). I stressed out customers by overapologizing and by empathizing with them when their orders were late. I’d explain over and over again how sorry I was that it was taking hours for a cloud egg sandwich—something that looked cool but took a while to execute, hence the massive delays. I had anxiety attacks over anything that went wrong (dishes piling up, slow orders, mistaken orders, no orders, wrong change).

  It didn’t matter; I quit to cover the Women’s World Cup in Germany for ESPN.com. I spent the month in Germany crisscrossing the country via train, haunted by the night rides, feeling the ghosts of relatives from generations previous who had taken very different train rides to gas chambers. Most of the tournament sites were in German suburbs or industrial towns. On the trains, outside the cities, I felt like a curio. I’d been to exotic places but this was different. I talked with Germans who had heard of Jews but never met one. There was extreme care with every conversation, as if these strangers were observing a museum exhibition—a Jew. Most of the people I met in Berlin and Hamburg were friends and friends of friends and expats. I went to the Schlagermove parade—picture a city vomiting 1970s kitsch for an entire weekend—and thought, This is manic, how is this normal? I went to an abandoned waterfront building occupied by anarchists who lived with pit bulls in sweaters under squatters’-rights laws. I met a fellow journalist, Jack from Melbourne, and we lived in the bubble of the World Cup. I offered him a piece of chocolate at the opening ceremonies in the press seats and we followed each other around, reporting our stories in tandem. Between matches, we’d sit close at beer gardens on the Spree in Berlin or walk among the street paintings of JR or BLO or Os Gemeos. It was the first time I dated someone I could talk to about writing and journalism, someone who was smart. On our last night, we watched the final in Frankfurt and took the last train to Berlin, huddling in the cold train car. We slept on my friend’s couch, clutching each other for a few final hours. He was staying on to study German and I offered to stay longer. The offer was met with hesitation, and I had by now learned to keep moving. I had a flight to catch back to Los Angeles. I would be house-sitting for my aunt Carrie for a month. Jack and I FaceTimed—he in Berlin, me sun-drenched in front of magenta bougainvillea. I spent the month swimming and running stairs and trying to
write. My writing was thinly masked fiction and bad. I felt far from magazines and worried that I’d never work again. But I didn’t know what else to do, and I was running out of money.

  Matt, in a fit of generosity, took David and me to Japan to see the town he once taught in. We rode trains south to parts of the country that looked like Japanese mountain paintings—like screen prints Opa had in his study, jagged new crags of rock reaching for the moody sky, sliced with small inconsequential lines where a train might be. We were that train, rolling on the edge of rock and over cold waters. When we got to Nakamura, we rode bikes to a bridge and we jumped off that bridge, plunging into cold river waters; we ate the hottest, fattiest ramen on the hottest, fattiest day, sweating chilies and pork into the night. We sang karaoke with judo instructors and traded sake shots. I stayed in Asia longer (nothing to do again). I visited friends in Beijing, danced at one of the best hip-hop parties I’ve been to with a playlist of early 1990s tracks that would make Bobbito jealous. I traipsed around without a real game plan. I got stuck in industrial China (thirty-six hours in Jinan!) with no money or credit cards or ability to say “bank” in Chinese. I ate unidentified skewered chewy objects. I stayed at an elephant sanctuary north of Chiang Mai volunteering to help the vet treat wounds, and to feed and wash the giant pachyderms. I practiced Muay Thai with a tiny Thai Rastafarian and had a near-death experience on a scooter in the middle lane of a freeway during a monsoon. I stayed in Asia, e-mailing Jack half hoping he would meet me there. He didn’t.

  I returned to the States with no job and no direction and no real home. I thought I might move to Los Angeles, I thought I might go back to New York, I didn’t know where to go. I went to a Robyn concert at the Hollywood Bowl with a friend and felt her sing directly to me through her crop-top sheep-looking sweater and platform sneakers. “Dancing on My Own,” “Call Your Girlfriend,” “With Every Heartbeat” radiated heart and love and strength. She was femme and fierce and obsessed and didn’t give a fuck. I had heard her before but felt her now. She came into me and somehow guided me back to my New York perch feeling independent and hopeful, still miserable in the day-to-day but compelled to return to my life. On the eve of my thirty-fifth birthday, I went to a matte-gray testing center with standing cubicles to take a standardized test for a city job. It was the last day I was eligible to apply to the New York Police Department, which an elderly black cop had convinced me might be a good idea when I was at the Occupy protests (I had gone to them in Oakland, New York, and San Francisco). He stood calmly next to one in downtown Brooklyn; his rationale was to try to do good from within. He showed me his gun and said, “I’ve never discharged a bullet. It’s a stable paycheck and you can try and do right by the community.” I took the test and got a near-perfect score—I wondered if I was a natural fit or if the bar was too low. I thought about applying to nursing schools (Oma on her deathbed said I should be a nurse, so maybe?). I applied to grad schools and I applied to every job I might qualify for. I went home for New Year’s, spending the actual eve with my mom and cousins, all of us in some state of feral funk. My mom kept trying to go to bed (I explained to her you can’t invite people over for New Year’s and go to bed at ten p.m.), and my cousins and I kept spontaneously bursting into tears. One ran out the door entirely, opting for a sob on the curb. There was no rationale to it, just general malaise. We needed a family massive cry fest. One glimmer of sweetness was that Jack e-mailed me to wish me a Happy New Year, and I was grateful that he remembered. It had been a better year with him in it. I decided to return to New York, and within a week I read a blog post on Ol’ Dirty Bastard that enraged me. It was something I had reported in my book (I had painstakingly published his FBI file after several FOIA requests on ODB and Wu-Tang Clan were sent to me) and I was pissed it was repurposed on the blog by a writer I really respected and liked. I wrote an angry letter—the only one I’ve ever written in spite of my “aggressive” tendencies—and got the most polite, delightful response from the writer, H. It was an unexpected reply; his posts were usually biting and aggressive and cut to the bone. We realized we both boxed at Gleason’s and when he said, “Hey, let’s get a drink someday.” I responded with, “How’s Monday?” By the time we met for our second date, I had accepted a job offer to become the executive editor at an in-flight magazine and we were swooning. Job and dating were in sync as if they had never been off-kilter. In fact, after we ate dinner, we walked back to my apartment for “tea” and when the conversation paused, I said, “I think we should kiss now.” And that was it. I lunged across my small navy sofa and haven’t looked back. (Aggressive worked for me in this particular instance.) The first six months of our dating was like pure ecstasy, not unlike a manic episode. I barely slept, was running on fumes and glowed. Life was good for a couple of years. I would get my blood levels taken but not as often as I was supposed to; Dr. Schwartz would scold me but I saw no reason to worry. I was working; I finally had a boyfriend who I loved and who loved me back (novel accomplishments). Life was really good; lithium levels were fine if not a little high. Dr. Schwartz reduced my dose from 900 milligrams to 750 milligrams.

  Then in 2014, I saw my primary physician, Dr. Matthew Lane, for a routine checkup. He sent me to the nearest emergency room. He was alarmed at my combination of high creatinine levels (which Dr. Schwartz had already been monitoring), damaged kidneys, and heart-attack-level blood pressure (185/130). At Mount Sinai Hospital, I sat in the emergency room next to an elderly Orthodox man who yelled through curtains in pain. H sat next to me on my gurney. The room was packed with people in much more immediate and real pain than I. Within days, I was told I should phase out lithium and start another medication, or face dialysis and a kidney transplant in ten years.

  Suddenly, those pink pills, the ones that had saved me, were hurting me.

  I realized I didn’t know what they did in the first place, that I had never thought to ask where lithium was from and how it ended up coursing through my blood and shaping my brain.

  PART 3 — THE TRANSITION

  CHAPTER 19

  THE BIG BANG, THE THIRD ELEMENT EMERGES, HOSTS ALIEN LIFE . . . MAYBE?

  I TOOK THE train to the emergency room. It was faster than an ambulance. I felt eviscerated, thunderstruck. I knew lithium would not be forever. Dr. Schwartz and I had been aware of higher-than-normal creatinine levels. But I chose to ignore the implications of those test results, thinking they might level off or be insignificant long term. I did not think about lithium one way or the other. It was not something special. I took it for granted. It was just like Dr. DeAntonio had initially said: if I were a diabetic, I’d need insulin. Just a medication. That it was a salt always in my body, changing my chemistry, guiding my personality toward a more rational state, never really fazed me. It was a medication that had always been there for me, invisibly. But now that my kidneys were eroding, I felt differently. Dr. Schwartz consulted Dr. John Mann, an expert in bipolar disorder at Columbia, and he referred me to Dr. Maria DeVita, a nephrologist practicing at Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side. Dr. DeVita talked fast and listened intently; she didn’t miss anything. She issued more tests to confirm what was already clear.

  The test results indicated that my kidneys were working about half as well as they should—at 48 percent function. Dr. DeVita told me that if I were to switch medications to preserve the kidney function I had left, “the time to strike was now.” I had to choose between my kidneys or risking my sanity. It didn’t feel like an obvious choice; just two bad options. Switching meds might mean the return of cornrowed, Eminem-obsessed Jamya and many seasonal gourds. It had taken a lot of work to recover from the damage of the last episode. Yet dialysis felt so extreme, something out of a Mad Max sequel—tubing up and cleansing my blood until I got a stranger’s kidney quilted into my insides. I didn’t know what to do. When I had anxious days, H helped me through with his preternatural calm. Some mornings, I would ask him to lie full body weight on top of me, a th
under jacket. I spoke with nephrologists who had all seen manic relapses and been terrified by the results; I spoke with psychiatrists who watched patients stand by lithium and try to function after kidney transplants, and who felt a psychic relapse might be worth the risk—each doctor fearing the disease she didn’t know. I was living in Crown Heights at the time and walked by a dialysis center on Dean Street whenever I made my way toward downtown Brooklyn. I tried to picture lying on a gurney three times a week for four hours at a stretch, feeling depleted, sick. Not manic. But sick all the time. Not boxing, not standing on my head or riding the subway to my annual visit to the Cyclone and a Nathan’s hot dog. Just sick, dominated by treatment. If I could avoid it, shouldn’t I at least try? I thought.

  I watched the videotape that Mike made on Valentine’s eve again. I saw the wild hair, swirled eyes, and heard my gnarled, gravelly voice. I thought about how I felt on that night, ruling the world, performing, recruiting, revolution in the air. I thought about the energy, that magnet at my core. If I gave up the lithium and took another med and that med didn’t work, would that be me again? I could not return to her. I wasn’t sure I would survive it, that my parents would survive another episode. I worried that H would never make it through. I was not ready to let go of the medication that had worked for more than twenty years.

  I needed to know more about lithium before I let it go. So I set off on a spirit quest and scientific quest, an expedition to understand the third element.