In the facedown position it felt as if all my weight was supported on the chinstrap. I could do nothing about it, not even move so much as a fraction of an inch.
To hold my spine straight, I was fitted with Crutchfield tongs. Small holes were drilled in my skull, and the “tongs”—small screws with eyelets—were inserted. To these were fastened cables that ran over pulleys to attached weights. IVs were run into my arms, a nasogastric tube was shoved down my nose, and a catheter was rammed up my dick.
I would remain thus crucified for six weeks.
None of this apparatus worked perfectly. Quite often the needles pulled out of my arms during the rotation of the bed. One of the screws wrenched out of my skull in the dead of night, leaving all the weight supported by the other side, until the doctor in charge, furious with the incompetence of his interns, was summoned to replace it. The pain was extraordinary. As he twisted the screw back in, Dr. Malone could see my agony but could do nothing to relieve it. His anger and frustration were plain to see. The next night he came back to visit me. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “my heart really goes out to you . . . twenty-one years old and probably paralyzed for life.”
Tears ran down my face. I was touched that this fifty-five- or sixty-year-old doctor was letting the professional mask slip and being candid with me. Only later did his words sink in. I thought, Hey, wait a minute! The man clearly felt nothing could be done for me.
I ought to add that the screws were periodically removed so that the holes could be sterilized. There was no way to anesthetize this. Fifteen years later I show my girlfriends the holes behind and above my temples, which still itch like crazy.
They kept me loaded to the gills with morphine or Demerol, and the days and nights ran together with none of the psychological relief that comes from a real sleeping-and-walking cycle. For me, I was unusually calm, or so I thought. The nurses remembered me, later on, as pretty feisty. “You’re the type that survives, though.”
The idea, implicit in Dr. Malone’s pity, that I wouldn’t get better, seemed incredible to me. I had always gotten out of jams. If nothing else worked, my father, always the Man in Charge, fixed things. If I was in really deep trouble, he put in a word here or a word there. But my parents, who had stayed for a week right after the accident, did not return during the rest of my six weeks in intensive care. Money was the reason given, but maybe this abandonment, which has haunted me ever since, had more to do with hopelessness: this was one situation that David Callahan couldn’t fix.
Spiritual help was available in the person of a priest who made daily visits. By the time he got to me, I learned from the nurses, he had read the last rites and given extreme unction to about twenty people, which made him hollow-eyed and depressed-looking. He could have been something out of The Exorcist. Jesus, I thought, bring me a Hare Krishna priest instead.
Lying there, I remembered the priest who showed up at the deathbed of Foley’s father. A cancer had spread from his mouth throughout his whole body, but Ed Foley never lost his Irish wit and ready sense of humor. I was there when The Dalles hospital chaplain came in, very solemn, and asked in a low, courteous tone, “Ed, would you like to speak with me at all?” Ed’s mouth was too swollen for speech but he had a pencil and pad at his bedside. He scribbled a short note, tore the page off and gave it to the priest, who read it, nodded graciously, and walked gently out of the room.
Later, when Ed had drifted off into one of his little morphine naps, Foley and I were tidying up the room. I happened to pick up the note. It read, simply, “Hit the pike.”
Even nailed to the wheel, wondering if I’d ever walk again, I tried to flirt with the nurses. There was a pair of cute little twins among the volunteers. But it wasn’t enough that they were pretty and had big tits, they also had to turn out to be evangelical Christians! Once, one of them gently laid her hands on me “to release the demons from your spinal cord.” I simultaneously prayed for the release of the demons in the buttons on her blouse.
In later years I came to understand that this was a fact of paralyzed life: I attract a lot of Christians. I look vulnerable, I’m in no position to refuse spiritual help, therefore I must be ready to accept Jesus. Recently a man approached me as I was taking the air in Pioneer Square, the center of downtown Portland. “Can I cure you?” he asked eagerly. “Jesus will help me cure you if you have enough faith.”
I thought fast. “Gee,” I said, “mind if I wait just a few months? I just got this wheelchair and it cost me five grand.”
At Harbor General I was in the care of Dr. Wiles, an intern who resembled Columbo in a rumpled lab coat. Probably not yet out of his twenties, he was already slightly stooped over as if with the weight of his responsibilities. He was always hovering around me, checking the IVs, looking for bedsores, giving the nurses hell if they screwed up any of the apparatus. We became friendly, but he was determinedly professional and I couldn’t get much out of him.
I couldn’t get used to the lack of sensation. I felt nothing but my head and shoulderblades pressing on the hard slab beneath my back, or, on the other side, the top of my chest and my chin hitting the strap. I felt like a floating head.
The general din of the unit helped to distract me from the pain and panic that kept trying to surface. When not listening to the last screams of some person who had been crushed by a bus, or drifting in the haze of chemicals and spinal shock, my mind wandered in the past, seeking out childhood images.
The sunny summer sky outside the unit’s lone window triggered memories of other Julys. It was customary in The Dalles for kids between the ages of eight and fourteen to get up before dawn in late summer and tramp the country lanes to pick fruit in the cherry orchards that covered the slopes of the Columbia Gorge just west of town. My brother Kit and I, along with several other boys, would already be hard at work when the eerie golden light of the summer dawn filtered through the trees.
The soft, powdery furrows of dirt underneath the trees went on forever. These orchards were truly vast—most of the cocktail cherries in the world came from them and the Bing cherry was named here, for a pioneer grower’s Chinese foreman—but we boys, doing the first hard work of our lives, would have cared less about that, had we known. We felt very put upon to be out there slaving away.
The groves echoed with Spanish, shouted or sung. The colorfully dressed Mexican harvest workers seemed very exotic to me, singing their songs in the morning and stabbing each other in the sunset. I tended not to buy into the town’s attitude toward them, which was one of extreme prejudice. Much as the townspeople hated and distrusted the Mexicans, though, their deepest loathing was reserved for the “white trash” transient pickers. Something must be horribly wrong with Americans who would work a job like that, went the logic. On another level, it was dispiriting to us kids to watch these experts outpick us at the rate of about four hundred buckets a minute.
I clearly remember my first bucket of cherries. It hadn’t occurred to me that the fruit would rot if you didn’t also pick the stem. So I just scooped the cherries off the tree, using my fingers like a rake, and had a bucketful in no time. I presented it to the orchardist, who made the rounds in an old army jeep. He took one look at the bucket, grabbed it away from me, dumped the cherries into the dirt and did a wild fandango on them, frothing with rage. I thought, Gee, that’s a drag, if I have to pull the cherries by the stem it’s going to take five times as long to fill the bucket.
Of course we ate about as many cherries as we picked, the inevitable result being massive cases of the trots. Our friend Ernest was tending to this problem when my brother Kip and I tipped the outhouse over with him inside. The contents of the tank spilled all over him, and he chased us down the hill, brown and angry.
Tricks like that were necessary to break up the monotony. By the time noon came and we could pull out our meager sandwiches, it felt like we’d been there for forty years. I would have taken a lot of those hours in trade for the ones I was
passing now, after three weeks strapped to the wheel, with three more to go.
Every night on the intensive care ward, and for some reason always in the dead of night, I spiked a mysterious raging, potentially fatal fever. And every night Wiles, who seemed never to sleep, covered me with an electric “ice blanket.” To the accompaniment of terrible spasms, my temperature was bludgeoned back down. They never diagnosed this fever.
Sometimes it seemed as if there was no color in the days and nights. Whites, grays, blacks. White coats, white sheets.
One night I woke up and, for a few seconds, didn’t remember anything about the accident or where I was. I tried to move and when I found I couldn’t, I felt an overwhelming panic, as would someone who had been buried alive or entombed in cement with barely enough room to flare his nostrils. And when I began to remember, the panic only got worse. Up to now, I had tried to be a tough guy, to hold in all the stress. But suddenly my inhibitions were broken down. I was finally shattered by all the strain, all the time I couldn’t feel my goddamn legs, these tongs in my head, the lights of the ICU that never went off. It was more important that I move my legs than that the world survive.
I just told God, “I’m having a break, now. I’m going to stand up. I’m going to take five minutes. Just five minutes to run down and get some coffee, cross my legs, relax, take a deep breath. Somebody told me I had to stay here. That was last month! I can’t even go out and have a cigarette. I’m not that stable to begin with! I want relief! I want a drink!”
But the only answer I got was silence. I began to scream my fucking lungs out: “GODDAMN IT HELP ME MOTHERFUCK SOMEBODY HELP ME. . . .”
And there was somebody working that night, a big, black Aunt Jemima sort of woman. And she came over and she put her arms around me and rocked me like a baby. I screamed and screamed, and she just said, “Ah, there, honey, there, there.” She just calmed me back down with her strength. It came through her skin. The strength of her skin. And I went back to sleep.
I always feared that this would happen again. I remembered Sister Joseph of Mary, back in The Dalles, who loved to talk about the martyrs. She loved to describe their torture in detail. An orgasmic look came over her face as she told how spears were shoved into their orfices, how hot stones were laid on them, how they were riddled with arrows or torn limb from limb, always turning to Christ in extremis so that their agony was, at the last, transformed into ecstasy. I couldn’t imagine such certainty. I wasn’t even sure who I was, let alone God. I often felt totally alone in the world, as if I were from a different planet. I didn’t know then that this was a typical feeling of adoptees.
Often in intensive care I thought about my birth mother. I hated her for having given me up. You shit, you bitch, you were probably a thirteen-year-old who got knocked up in the back of a drive-in. But part of me felt worshipful toward this mysterious being, about whom I knew less than I did about the Mother of God.
A similar ambivalence governed my feelings about my family and tinged my already morbid thoughts of the future. The last thing I wanted was to be “a burden” to them. On the other hand, why weren’t they here when I needed them?
I was usually kept naked. Too often, it seemed as if there were a couple of dozen Chinese medical students standing there, all shiny. Female medical students. “Uh, this is a twenty-one-year-old quadriplegic, with a complete cervical-six lesion, uh . . .” And they’d be looking with the sheets off, probing my genitals, shuffling my papers, tightening my screws, checking the wristband to make sure I was not an imposter trying to fake my way into quadriplegia.
People who acted like I was a human being were scarce. I made friends with Mrs. Leiberman, a middle-aged Jewish nurse’s aide who brushed my teeth, gave me extra alcohol rubs, and became my champion against the nurses, with whom, as a person of inferior hospital status, she was at war anyway. We shared a loathing for the X-ray technicians, who always barged in and elbowed her aside without acknowledging her existence (or mine) to position their grotesque machine and ram their cold plates under my neck. Anybody who could walk got out when these demons appeared. The doctors were keeping close tabs on my vertebrae as they slowly aligned themselves under traction. Since my spinal cord had to be monitored daily, I got enough X radiation to grow a second head.
After four weeks an occupational therapist showed up, proudly displaying a device he had made for me. It was a mouth stick, with a kind of rubber fixture on one end. I was supposed to bite onto the rubber end and turn pages with it. This would make me an independent person all over again, back to normal, in control of my life. At the time I could do nothing for myself, and I was enthusiastic about the idea. My arms and hands were so swollen from hanging down that Dr. Wiles was afraid my rings—I had been wearing three of the silly things at the time of the accident—would cut off circulation and I’d lose three of my fingers. He put wristbands on so that my arms could be hoisted up into the sleepwalking position and so that the fingers might deflate; due to spinal shock the fingers stayed as fat as a pack of bad franks, however. Finally Wiles got a jeweler’s saw and cut the rings off.
At the beginning of the swing shift, in late afternoon, I was given a high-calorie drink, something like a malted, to gain weight. I could drink this myself, through a straw, but dinner had to be spoon-fed. The aide would tilt the circle bed up a little for a better angle, and then she’d sit there chatting with her buddy across the desk in some unknown language while absently shoveling peas into my mouth. To get the boring job over with, she’d go faster and faster until, chew as fast as I might, I could no longer keep up. I’d start to spray the food back out: “Good God, you stupid cunt, you want me to fuckin’ choke to death? Slow down!”
The big event of my day came in the evening, when the circle electric bed would be wheeled over to the window so that I could watch the sunset. As night fell, thoughts of hopelessness began to well up. I prayed. I made my promises. I remembered all the promises to God and the pacts with the Devil made by characters in literature to escape horrible fates. And here I was. I said, “God, I just can’t be paralyzed. Things always work out for John Callahan. Ed Foley comes to bail me out when I’m caught driving drunk. My dad gets things ‘squared away.’ There’s got to be some way out of this. John Callahan is not one of the ones who ends up paralyzed.”
I nerved myself up to ask Wiles. “Do you think I’m making any progress? What kind of progress can I expect?”
“It’s really hard to say for certain at this time.”
I sensed through Wiles’s carefully even, flat tone that the curtain had already fallen for me.
At night I distracted myself with erotic thoughts about Marisa, the night-duty nurse whom I occasionally talked into giving me extra pain shots. At night she and her colleagues turned some of the lights out, a bit of relief from the bright white walls, white ceiling, white uniforms, and white lab coats. White became the very color of pain itself for me and turned me into a night-dweller forever afterward. Down the dark corridor a desk lamp at the nurses’ station highlighted the curve of Marisa’s cheek and suggested her voluptuous body. Often in intensive care the ghosts of old girlfriends visited my drifting mind to point accusing fingers at old wrongs. I had been a failure in all my relationships, I knew. Perhaps what I longed for was contained in this fleeting night image of Marisa: an unattainable woman, wrapped in shadows.
One night, unable to sleep, I convinced her to wheel me out into the corridor for a smoke. Marisa lit the cigarette for me in her own mouth and held it to my lips. I took a long, luxurious draw and waited for the relief. But something went wrong. The cigarette reacted with my central nervous system, and the sentient part of my body—from the nipples up—was consumed in fiery pain. It was perfect aversion therapy. If I ever find out what really happened, I’ll sell the information to the Schick Centers for the Control of Smoking. At the time, I felt overwhelming panic, as I had when I just had to move, but, of course, couldn’t. Angel Marisa calmed me, eventually.
&nb
sp; Was this the way things were going to be? Better ignorance than that kind of knowledge, better hope than truth. After five weeks in intensive care I still hadn’t asked anybody how I was pissing or shitting.
All this time I existed in a social milieu of people so badly mangled they were playing “musical respirators.” I especially remember one woman who had been run over by a truck and who had a brain injury. They were just waiting for her to die. She managed to pull her catheter out and whip it around in a circle, spraying us all with pee before giving up the ghost. Terminal stabbing cases, gunshot wounds. . . . I used to wake up and look out the window at the dawn and think, “Gee, what a glorious day to be hovering between life and death.”
One afternoon in my third week of intensive care a woman had come into the room, crossed to the corner by the window where I was strapped to the circle bed, said “Hi, I am Annu,” and sat down. A lovely blonde Swedish or Norwegian woman in her early thirties who resembled (in retrospect) Daryl Hannah, Annu wore a pretty blue summer dress. She had deep blue pools for eyes, and spoke with a strong accent when she spoke at all. I liked her immediately and found myself pouring my heart out to her. Often her side of our conversations was limited to, “So what else?”
Annu came every day, including weekends and days off. She would sit on the floor if I was facedown, so that we were always face to face.
“Hi, John. How are you?”
“Ah, fucked. I’m doing badly today. One of the goddamn nurses spilled peas all down my neck. I had a fight with the head nurse when I tried to get an alcohol rub. I’m uncomfortable. I don’t even know how I piss. It’s driving me crazy! I want out of this place!”
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