by Nick Tosches
The healthiest-looking and best-preserved person I knew at the time was my dentist. I asked her who her doctor was, and she told me it was Yanoff. I went to see him. I later came to suspect that I did so only to hear the worst, which would have given me full license to drink myself to death forthwith. He took a good long look at me, told me it was not what I thought, drew some blood, and—I was impressed that a physician would be so caring as to do this—called the next afternoon, which was a Saturday, to report that the results of the blood tests, on which he had placed a rush, revealed that I had diabetes. The woman with whom I was living at the time told him that I was not there, that I was drinking at a nearby bar. “Tell him not to drink beer,” he said. She came to the bar with this message. I turned to my drinking buddy Hoboken Jerry, who lately had been given to spewing blood but refused to see a doctor and lived not too much longer.
“You believe this?” I said. “The doctor just told me to drink Scotch instead of beer.”
“I want the name of your doctor,” he said.
Having just met me, Yanoff had no way of knowing how much of a binge drunkard I was. I went back to see him again, and then again. Sometimes I wondered why. Maybe there remained in me, even at my darkest, a grain of hope that if I did what I could to lengthen my wretched existence, there might be a day when light would come. Then there were times when I thought it was only the Valium prescriptions that kept me coming back. Only after he was gone did I appreciate the fact that it was he who kept me coming back.
“How do you feel?” he asked me one day.
“The words ‘I don’t give a fuck if I live or die’ keep rising to my throat. I don’t really mean them. I don’t want to die. So I don’t say them. But they keep rising in me, like a part of me really doesn’t care about a single fucking thing in this world.”
I saw that he was smiling benignly, as if I had made him happy for me and thereby for himself. I didn’t get it.
“That’s great,” he said. “You’re free. It means you’re free.”
What I had felt to be something fatally bad within me I now felt to be something very good. It was an illumination. In a few minutes he had performed, off-the-cuff, greater good than psychiatry could or would perform over a lifetime.
He was like that rock in the sea off the coast of that Sicilian island. He cured. Body, mind, and soul. He cured. Like the jagged black rock called Faraglione, he could not be replaced. Only after he was gone did I fully realize this, and my sense of loss was great.
But the new guy, the new croaker, his buddy, was not bad either. On his desk as I sat with him in his office this day was the copy of Olivier Ameisen’s book and the letter I had sent him.
We talked about the baclofen I sorely wanted after reading Olivier’s book, corresponding with him, and speaking with him.
“One man’s opinion,” he said of the efficacy that Olivier claimed for baclofen.
As is your own, I thought.
He told me that the American Medical Association placed what is called a “black box” around baclofen. This, he explained, was a sort of warning regarding certain medications with potentially severe withdrawal symptoms or otherwise adverse drug reactions, which the AMA referred to as ADRs.
While he had me there, he wasn’t going to let me go without a complete physical. In the examination room, he asked the usual questions. How frequently did I wake up at night to urinate? How were things in the erectile department? Was I coughing up much phlegm lately?
“Yeah. I figure it’s good to get it out.”
“What color.”
“Oh, it depends on the day.”
And so on. He examined the inside of my mouth pretty thoroughly. Then out it came, that penlight. I watched his eyes narrow and his brows rise.
“Any change in vision?”
“If anything, it’s getting better.”
He muttered something. It was as if he were asking himself a question that he expected another part of himself to answer. Did he say it just to hear himself say it?
“Have you seen Dr. Chang lately?”
Dr. Chang was the eye specialist whom I saw every year or so for retinopathy examinations.
“No.”
He put his little penlight back in his pocket and said no more weird words, seemingly satisfied with having passed the buck to Chang and thus got himself off the hook.
My pulse was a bit fast, he said, but my blood pressure and blood oxygen level were perfect. He put his stethoscope to my front and my back. I lay down on the table. He pressed, poked, palpated my lower abdomen, my upper abdomen.
“What’s that?” he said. “Does that hurt?”
“What? I don’t feel anything.”
He took my hand in his and placed it to my lower left belly, where sure enough one of my guts was protruding hard under my skin like a fat dead snake in rigor mortis.
“Has it been like that all the time?” he asked. “You haven’t felt it before?”
To tell the truth, I had felt some occasional cramping and stiffening there, but it had always passed. The same occurred, with more intensity and more frequency, in my lower legs. But I was not in the mood to tell the truth. Whatever it was, it would go away, and I didn’t want any further tests. I rolled sideways, my upper knee raised, and he finger-fucked his way to my prostate. The nurse came in. She gave me an electrocardiogram, drew blood, and wheeled out the spirometer. I was untrusting of this new spirometer, which factored various data into its breath-capacity readings: age, height, weight, and how much you smoked. Why should my lung power be measured differently from that of a twenty-year-old? Shouldn’t the spirometer’s results be independent and indicative of how much I smoked, rather than being influenced, one way or the other, by this information beforehand? My antagonism to the device made me blow the required three times to the absolute fullest of my wind power, as I was supposed to. She took me into another room for a chest X-ray.
When I was called back into the doctor’s office, he told me that the electrocardiogram and lung capacity readings were fine. The X-ray hung over the light box on the wall to his left.
“You broke a few ribs, I see,” he said. He had been saying the same thing every time he looked at my chest X-rays for the past two years, ever since I had cracked three ribs falling down drunk one night. It was always as if he were noticing the healed cracks for the first time. This is one of the things that made me leery of these guys. They seemed never to remember anything about you that wasn’t in your medical file, and even then only if the record lay open before them like a cheat sheet. There was no human or personal element. You were not a lost mortal creature with a life with which you had entrusted them, but only a mess of test results from an impersonal, unknown industrial-suburban laboratory with which they had a sweetheart deal. If you told them your wife passed away, they would probably ask you how she was when they next saw you, if they could remember that you had ever had a wife.
And so I was thankful for those cracked ribs, which served as a constant reminder that most of these guys neither knew, cared, nor remembered anything about you no matter how many years they saw you.
“Yeah,” I said, looking at the familiar marks from the cracked ribs that showed on the X-ray. “That was awhile back.”
He asked me if I needed prescriptions for Valium and dandruff shampoo.
“I think I’m doing all right with the dandruff shampoo,” I told him. Then I added aggressively: “What about the baclofen? Are you giving me the baclofen?”
“Reluctantly,” he said.
Yeah, I thought, the same way I’m paying that eight-and-a-half-yard bill on the way out.
“Call me next week for the test results.”
He had sent the baclofen prescription electronically to my pharmacy, he told me. Modern times. The prescription had already been filled by the time I walked to the E train and got back downtown. In the bag with the baclofen there was also a container of anti-dandruff shampoo.
A few days later I
saw my endocrinologist. I had also sent him a copy of Olivier’s book and a letter. I wanted two sources, my internist and him, for all my prescriptions. I liked to remain stocked up.
Much to my surprise, the endocrinologist declined to give me a prescription. He spoke of unknown possible side effects. He said he did not trust a drug for which it was claimed that there were no known side effects. “Even aspirin has side effects,” he said. He was doing this, he said, because he cared for me.
The aspirin reference. The caring about my fate. My own words were being used to deny me what I wanted. The business about concern over possible side effects was what really got me. What about the fucking ADRs of booze, including death not only from the shit itself but also often from the withdrawal from it? Where the hell was the AMA’s little fucking black box there? You would think that medical doctors, who collectively have a higher rate of addiction and suicide than any other profession, would better understand these things. But it did not pay to think. As the old Hippocratic writings tell us: what drugs do not cure, the knife will. Yeah. The knife of suicide.
Fuck these doctors. Fuck them all. With Yanoff gone, Olivier on my side, and Paeon in the air I breathed, the rest of these arrogant venal frauds could go to hell. Prescriptions could be had more honestly and cheaply from Chinatown croakers, or from the Hindoo who had a storefront practice just a few blocks from me.
I walked out onto Fifth Avenue and spit on the sidewalk. I didn’t look to see what color my phlegm was. It’s the thought that counts.
I turned east, walked down Madison to Lobel’s, the best butcher in New York, to get a nice slab of kurobuta pork and a great big dry-aged steak. Besides the Valium, the proximity to Lobel’s was the only other reason to throw money at this schmuck. A good butcher was harder to find than a good doctor, and far greater and more valuable as a healer and a man.
A bit farther south on Madison, at the Christian Louboutin boutique, I blew seven hundred bucks on a pair of black leather pumps with red-lacquered soles. The stiletto heels were even higher than those of the Jimmy Choo black snakeskins.
As I walked to the Lexington Avenue subway line with my bag of swine and beef in one hand and the bag of high heels in the other, I felt myself in possession of goods of true medicinal value.
PALM SUNDAY, WHEN THE GRASS MOON WOULD RISE FULL, was nearing. Two days later, Mars, the bringer of war, would enter into conjunction with Mercury, the messenger, in retrograde, with folly of all communication, all sense, moving backwards. We were under the force of the warrior.
I believed in none of the astrological bullshit presented by any of this. But I was enamored of the mythic poetry inherent in the idea of the sky of these nights belonging to the bringer of war. I slept well under that sky. I was beginning to notice, however, that the grand rebirths of my mornings were more fleeting, and less grand, the longer I went without communion with the flesh and blood of those life-giving goddesses whose dew rose not only with the coming grass moon but with every moon.
Lorna was all right, she told me when I called her, and she sounded all right. We met for breakfast on a morning when the chill at last seemed gone from the air. It was good to see her. Looking at her, I could not help but think of her long slender limbs stretched bare and on that Saint Andrew’s cross, the lashes striking her through the transparency of the vinyl raincoat as the panties in her mouth gagged the screams of her pleasure and pain. Her juices dripping to the floor.
I asked her if she had gone to the meeting on Sullivan Street that morning. I purposefully took off my shades and laid them on the table.
“Christ, I haven’t been to a meeting since that night I was with you.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
The waitress came and we ordered. In declining coffee, I managed to get in my line about never drinking coffee when denied the freedom to enjoy a smoke with it. Useless words, but if I had a credo by which I lived, this was it, and I was going to affirm it whenever the opportunity arose.
“I don’t know if it’s good or bad. How about you? Have you been hitting the rooms lately?”
I shook my head in the negative. I said that I just hadn’t felt like it lately. I wasn’t going to say what part of me believed: that I had got all I was ever going to get out of A.A. when I got her. I told her that I had no desire to drink, however. I told her about the baclofen that I had been taking now for several days.
“A pill that cures addiction?” She followed her words with a little laugh of disbelief.
I told her about Dr. Ameisen’s discovery, about the ways it had been suppressed.
“Rimbaud said morality is a disease of the brain,” I said. “I think he was right on the money. Of course, a lot of people disagree. But I don’t think anybody disagrees that alcoholism is a disease of the brain. I think that’s a given. Baclofen alters the brain chemistry so that the underlying causes of addiction are eradicated. I forget the science, all the scientific words. But it’s all there in black and white, for anyone who can understand it. The thing is, it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that it works. The science just explains how and why. Some guy who won the Nobel Prize for medicine came right out and said it. He said, ‘Dr. Ameisen has discovered the cure for addiction.’ The thing is, there’s no money in it for the pharmaceutical companies because its patent has expired. But companies like Novartis are trying to play with the molecules so they can come up with something like it that they can patent.”
“So you’re cured?”
Again she followed her words with a little laugh—no, not really a laugh this time, but a wry, mischievous smile—of disbelief.
“I have no fucking idea,” I said. “I just started taking the shit.” I put a forkful of eggs in my mouth, chewed, swallowed, took a drink of water. “We’ll see.”
She took out one of those handheld-device gizmos, asked me the name of Ameisen’s book and how to spell his name, then put the gizmo back in her bag.
“How about you?” I asked. “Have you felt like drinking lately.”
“No,” she said. Now there was a different sort of smile on her face, an almost plain and happy smile.
“And how do you feel otherwise?”
I hesitated following my question with another, the question that seemed naturally to follow it. And she hesitated in her acknowledgment of understanding what I meant, even without that unsaid second question being asked. So I went ahead and asked it:
“How about the spooks?”
She looked into my eyes. Who knows what they looked like. Who knows what she saw. But she looked into them quite easily.
“They’re still there,” she said. “But”—she knocked on wood—“they seem to be receding into the shadows.”
She fell silent for a few moments, and I took care not to break that silence.
“That night.”
Then she fell silent again, and again I let the silence be. It was a silence so heavy that what little noise there was in the restaurant on this quiet morning seemed to fall into silence as well.
“I don’t know how to say this,” she said. “I don’t know how to say this without it sounding melodramatic. Without it sounding stupid.”
I took a sip of water. I looked at her lowered eyes with my own, waiting for those eyes to rise, to meet whatever it was to see, or whatever it was that she might see, in mine.
“You took something out of me,” she said. Then, as her eyes rose, more words followed quickly: “I mean that in a good way.” Then the words slowed again, to a normal if slightly halting pace. “You took something out of me that needed to be taken out. It was like some bad thing inside me, some kind of growth, some kind of disease that needed to be removed. I don’t know if you got all of it. I don’t think you did. But you got some of it. You got a lot of it. I could feel it. I can still feel it. Something was taken away and something was given back. Something bad was cut out, or let out, and something good was let in. I really don’t know how to describe it. I really
don’t.”
She began to eat again. A good sign, I figured. I finished what was on the plate. She drank some coffee.
“Don’t dwell on it,” I said. “Don’t try too hard to figure it out. The way you describe it, it makes sense to me. I don’t know exactly what you feel. That’s something nobody can ever do, get inside somebody else and feel exactly what they feel. But you sound like you feel a lot better than you did. You seem like you feel a lot better than you did. It’s probably better not to even question it.”
She nodded slowly in agreement. I couldn’t tell if it was truly a nod of agreement or merely the simulacrum of one. I smiled at her. She smiled back, and there was no doubt that at least this was real.
“So,” she said, “when you went to the doctor to get those little magic pills, that Booze-o-Fix or whatever it is, did he say anything about your eyes?”
“He mumbled something and moved on to my prostate.” I did not want her to fear my eyes. That is why I had removed my shades. But I did not want to lead her back to the eyes of her father, either. For her to see my eyes as beautiful without even a thought of her father—and this was what I really wanted—was to want far too much.
“Do you want to get together tonight?” she asked.
How could she think I would not? How could she think I would not have asked her before we rose from this breakfast table? How could she not know that she was irresistible to me? Why would she even ask?
I got a cappuccino to go, lit up in the street, walked her to work, kissed her good-bye, squeezed her hand, and told her I’d see her later. Before entering the building, she turned and smiled to me. It made me feel good.
I passed a new store, on Hudson Street, a sort of day care resort for yuppie mutts called Biscuits & Bath. It offered grooming, transportation, natural foods, puppy kindergarten, classes in basic manners, exercise programs, and socialization services. This neighborhood really was fucking going to hell. It was getting embarrassing just to live around here.
I stopped by the joint on Reade Street, finishing my coffee and tossing the cup into the trash on my way. It was good, the coffee. It was really good. But there was no denying that the Eucharistic euphoria wasn’t there. It was good to know that it would be there again tomorrow. My night with Lorna would see to that.