Life Is Short (No Pun Intended)

by Jennifer Arnold

  One day, while walking across Washington Square Park from Hudson dormitory to mine, I was hit in the cheek by a small object. At first, I thought it was an acorn from an angry squirrel. I looked around and found a penny on the pavement. Then, from the not-so-distant open-air patio of the second floor of the Loeb Student Center, right across the street from the park, I heard the word “midget” being shouted in what would presumably be my direction. My suspicions were confirmed when another bit of change was tossed at me. To me, it looked like eight young men were leaning over the railing. Correction—eight ignorant classmates at NYU were sitting atop the building I went to every evening for dinner. So, even though I was outnumbered eight to one, I could not let this one go. Instead of picking a fight that would undoubtedly end with my getting a bloodied face or worse, I used my head to address my bullies. I approached two police officers patrolling nearby and explained that a gaggle of fools was making derogatory comments. I told the officers that I had been assaulted and feared I was in danger of bodily harm; and that I was being harassed; and that I would like them to be arrested. The eight students were taken into custody and removed from the building. I never pressed charges, and I was never confronted by any of them again. Sadly, that was just one of many instances in which one or more people saw fit to harass or insult me.

  For the most part, these experiences were fleeting. I would hear a comment, a whisper, the word “midget” shouted from across the street or down the block, and I wouldn’t think anything of it. I wouldn’t let it bother me for more than a few minutes. However, it turned out that the subconscious, cumulative effect of hearing these comments, being bullied, being excluded, and being made to feel inferior culminated in a single swift action to end it all.

  I had been in college for about a year. It was the fall of 1993 and I was returning to NYU as a sophomore with an established group of friends. Unfortunately, I also returned to just as much ignorance as I had left the summer before. I continued to hear comments and whispers, and watched as people pointed and laughed at me. I tried my best to ignore the negativity hurled my way. I was doing better scholastically and kept reminding myself I had a promising future. But I couldn’t shake the feelings of loneliness and despair.

  From my vantage point, my classmates seemed to have it all together. In fact, my emotional turmoil and struggle with my self-image made it seem like even the avant-garde film school students were better adjusted than I was. I was socially active, but did not feel socially connected. I really wanted a girlfriend, a Ms. Right or even a Ms. Right Now.

  I would go out to the bars frequently in a failed attempt to find a companion. My friends and I would play pool and drink pints of Guinness at Dempsey’s, a local watering hole in the East Village. I would always arrive home alone and often fairly intoxicated. Even then, I might extend the party a little bit longer in the dorm and inevitably wake up feeling miserable.

  It wasn’t just a hangover. My depression and self-loathing were finally coming on strong. I was really feeling defined by my stature, and I felt inferior to the people I lived with, studied with, and partied with. I found myself wondering if their friendship and kindness were acts of charity or sympathy. Subconsciously, I had bought into the “worthless” label.

  One night, all these feelings finally pushed me to the brink. I lived on the third floor of the dormitory, my room facing the Fourth Street side of the building. Outside my window was the ledge, a two-foot embellishment all the way around the building between the second and third floors. It was dark in my room, my roommate was out for the night, and most of my friends had company for the evening or were partying down the hall.

  I decided I was tired of hearing the word “midget.” I was tired of being in a group and yet somehow excluded. I was tired of the stares, the pointing, and the laughing, and I was tired of being alone. I wanted a companion, a girlfriend, someone to fool around with. I wanted comrades who didn’t make me wonder whether they were sincere when they said they were my friends. I opened the window, and I stepped out onto the ledge.

  It was a good thirty feet down to the street. There was a small tree on either side of my window and a few cars parked at the curb. It was cold, there was a slight breeze, and the streets were barren. I could hear the music from other dorm rooms and kids laughing and having fun. Taxis sped by and police sirens blared in the distance. I stood up and leaned against the wall next to the window. I looked down to the place where I might die.

  Many thoughts were going through my head. At first, I wondered what would happen if I hit the tree or the car, or I just didn’t die. I thought about how embarrassing it would be if I failed at taking my life. I chuckled for a moment, and then I thought a little more about what I was doing. I remember thinking my mom would be pissed and my dad disappointed. I thought a bit more about how I’d miss my brothers. And then I realized that I had a lot more to live for than fleeting relationships and being accepted by a few people I hardly knew. I began to realize that I’d miss it, life. And I took a step back from the ledge.

  No sooner had I done that than a friend of mine came to the window. He offered me some company and had a couple of beers and cigarettes in tow. He came out onto the ledge, we sat down, and we had our beer. I didn’t bother to explain why I was out on the ledge, and he didn’t ask. But I’m fairly certain he knew.

  • • •

  IT’S FAR EASIER to explain what it was that led me out onto that ledge than it is to theorize about what it was that caused me to climb back in the window. What I concluded is that I was (and still am) fighting off the negative labels that were (and still are) imposed on me.

  Although I ultimately decided to climb back through the window, it wasn’t until years later that I asked myself what it was that made the difference in that moment. It had to do with self-worth. Despite the cruelty of a world where everyone is categorized, aggregated, and labeled for convenience, if nothing else, my family, my parents, and my brothers had constantly reinforced my value and built up my self-image. However, their influence and support had not been enough to completely drown out the negative self-image and labels that emerged during my adolescence. And clearly, it wasn’t enough to keep me from climbing out onto the ledge. But their voices were enough, in that critical moment, to help me conclude that despite the attractiveness of the idea of ending the pain in a single leap, it was not worth giving up the new day and the hope that things would get better.

  • • •

  MY MOTHER KNEW that I was “different,” but to her I was not different in a negative way; to her I was different because I was interesting and uniquely gifted. Whenever we discussed my stature or the challenges presented by my height, she would remind me, “There was a reason you were made this way.”

  “There was a reason you were made this way” remains my mantra. From a spiritual perspective, this translates to “God doesn’t make mistakes.” I can’t help thinking how much happier vulnerable school-age people would be if their teachers and coaches and others in mentoring positions, by both word and deed, reinforced the idea that it’s not only okay to be different, it’s awesome and admirable and courageous and heroic. It’s your differentness that is your destiny and your happiness, and your differentness is what makes the world more interesting.

  • • •

  THINGS GOT BETTER after that night on the ledge. Now that I had decided to live, I worked harder at doing things that made me feel good. I even got a girlfriend, my first real relationship. She was average size, which made it even more interesting. She was a fellow student at NYU, although she was a class or two behind me. She was from Pennsylvania, but she lived across the hall from me in the dorm.

  We went out for almost two years. We even lived together for a little while in her nine-by-nineteen basement studio apartment in a prewar building in the East Village. It shared a backyard with the Alpha chapter of the Hell’s Angels, and with the boiler room directly underneath the studio, the “hell” part took on even more relevance.
The black and white checkered floor was warped from all the steam. I still kept my campus housing to have a place to study and keep my books.

  This was my first legitimate relationship, and my girlfriend and I had a really good time. We would go to the movies, out to dinner, or hang out with friends. She was a bit of a musician, and she was learning how to play guitar while I enjoyed listening. We were both sci-fi geeks and would stay up watching Star Trek: Next Generation or Deep Space Nine; or sometimes the lighter fare of Northern Exposure. We’d wander the open-air art fairs in Washington Square, go to parties, concerts, and bars, eat at inexpensive restaurants, and study, of course. It was a really fun time.

  When things started to fall apart, I still thought having a relationship was better than not being in a relationship. Maybe I was worried that she was my only shot. Even when I got wind that she had cheated on me and I felt that kind of devastation, I wasn’t ready to call the whole thing off. My insecurity made me willing to accept things I shouldn’t have. Despite having worked on my confidence, I still lacked the feeling of self-worth that would allow me to believe I could be loved. Ultimately, it’s all timing, and when that relationship finally ran its course, it meant there was room for someone else.

  In the spring of 1996, I graduated from New York University with a bachelor of arts in biology and a minor in chemistry. The ceremony was held in Washington Square Park in the pouring rain. The only people under cover from the elements were the speakers, Steven Spielberg, Robert De Niro, and the wife of the late Jackie Robinson, along with NYU professors and administration, who were sitting on the protected stage. The sea of students took up any open space around the park’s central fountain, a stone’s throw from the famous Washington Square Arch. My family was somewhere in the crowd beyond the sea of sloppy wet purple mortarboards and gowns, also known as the graduating class of 1996. After graduation, we all sloshed through Washington Square looking for each other, then headed out to lunch before I returned to do the “better” things saved for the graduates themselves.

  That summer, after NYU and before any other plans materialized, such as applying to medical school as I intended to do, Dr. Kopits offered me an internship with him. It was a huge honor. He only chose one student a year to shadow him. I moved to Baltimore for the summer. I lived at the Pierre House, the convent that had been converted into housing for family members of children having surgeries. My parents had both stayed there multiple times when I had surgery. But this was my first time as a guest. I didn’t even have to pay the ten-dollars-a-night room and board.

  I spent twelve weeks in Baltimore, working extremely long but fulfilling hours. I got up at 6:00 or 7:00 every morning and reported to Dr. Kopits by 8:00 a.m. On surgical days, our start time in the hospital was as early as 6:00 a.m. He allowed me to do just about everything. I was present with the patients during office visits; I went into the OR and assisted the surgical team by holding retractors or suction hoses; I even helped with a hip reconstruction, the very same procedure that I had undergone with Dr. Kopits, but this time I was on the better side of the surgical drape.

  It was both surreal and funny. My insight, having been the patient as many times as I had, was amazing. As I stood by Dr. Kopits’s side, I remembered my times going into the operating room as a patient and being put under with the anesthesia mask. Now, I was watching my patients falling asleep and turning into rag dolls on the table. Dr. Kopits allowed me to help plan the surgery, from X-ray to execution, which was nothing short of amazing. I was working with patients during clinical evaluations. Dr. Kopits and I would talk about what we were going to do as we looked at the X-rays, MRIs, and all the other imaging pinned to the light board, and we’d go through our plan. It was educational and lots of fun.

  While I was in Baltimore, I started seeing someone, a Little Person who was volunteering at the hospital in Dr. Kopits’s unit, Two North. Like me, she was also a former patient of his. She was on the floor volunteering, and I was participating in rounds with Dr. Kopits, visiting the patients who were on the floor for surgery or PT. I asked her out for a drink, and we hit it off. Her name was Charla. Even though we both knew this was a summer fling, she was really great and certainly helped me realize that my relationship in New York was over.

  A “matchmaker” named Diane, who worked with Dr. Kopits as his long-time nurse practitioner and right-hand man, had another woman in mind for me. She told me about her when I was in the office after rounds. She was very excited. “I have someone I think will be perfect for you,” she said gleefully. “There is this really cute girl down in Miami named Jennifer. She is wickedly smart and she is going to Johns Hopkins Medical School in the fall. She has blond hair and blue eyes, is cute as a button, and you will totally love her.”

  With that, she took me over to the photo wall where Dr. Kopits had hundreds of pictures of his patients. She proudly pointed Jennifer out on the wall. Diane was right. She really was a strikingly beautiful young woman. I didn’t realize that she was the Jen I had met in the hospital when I was ten.

  I wasn’t in the mindset to do much with Diane’s match for me. At that point, Jen wouldn’t even be in Baltimore until I had already gone back to New York, where I was still semiliving with my girlfriend. Did I really want to talk to this girl who lived in Florida, soon to be studying in Maryland, when I lived in New York? It just didn’t seem feasible. I was twenty-one and not really thinking about anything long distance or long-term.

  What I didn’t know was that Diane had told Jen about me the year before when she had been Dr. Kopits’s summer intern. Oddly, Jennifer had been offered and accepted the very same internship the year before. I loved it when I finally heard the story. “There is this guy named Bill,” Diane had told her. “He is up in New York going to NYU. He is smart, cute, and funny, and he is working over at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories right now. He might be going to med school in a couple of years. You’d love him.” Jen said no, she was too busy. Her friends were in Florida, where she was going to the University of Miami, and she had to focus on getting into medical school. She had blown it off.

  So, I finished up my internship, returned to New York, and began looking for a job after I decided I didn’t want to go to medical school after all. I didn’t think I was smart enough, but I probably had a couple of other issues, too. I wanted to make money, start enjoying my life, and get away from academics. But Jen was now on my radar.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Jen

  Miami or Bust!

  MY FIRST DAY AT the University of Miami was stormy—literally. Freshman orientation was supposed to be Monday, August 24, 1992, but it was canceled suddenly and dramatically. Instead of picking up our class schedules and meeting our hall mates, we were dodging Hurricane Andrew, the most fearsome storm to hit South Florida in nearly three decades. It crashed into Miami with winds whipping up to two hundred miles an hour. The Category 5 storm, one of only four to ever make landfall in the United States, blew apart buildings, flattened houses, and obliterated the power grid, ripping power lines right off the poles and blowing up transformers. Twenty-six people lost their lives and more than 250,000 were left homeless. Fires burned around the city, but fire departments were helpless, as the storm surge had put thousands of miles of roads and highways underwater. Not only was freshman orientation canceled, but the whole university was shut down in a state of emergency and the administration was desperately trying to evacuate all sixteen thousand students. Many of the residence halls were official hurricane shelters, so students on or arriving on campus were being moved to these residence halls for the night. There were even local residents in the Coral Gables area coming to the residence halls for shelter.

  Because it was going to be my first day of college and because I was so excited, that Sunday morning before orientation, I convinced my parents to keep driving south from Orlando to Miami despite the fact that the Florida Turnpike had a steady flow of traffic moving in the opposite direction.

  Once we got
to the campus, it was clear that the hurricane was headed our way. The college staff invited parents and students to stay, but because my dad had to work the next day, he wanted to head back. Of course, I wanted to stay. No matter where weather forecasters project a hurricane’s landfall, they aren’t always right, and there was no chance that I was going to miss my freshman orientation activities if Andrew happened to hit farther north, sparing Miami.

  My parents spent the afternoon moving me in and then reluctantly departed. After they left, the resident assistants (RAs) of my dorm, Mahoney Residential College, called a meeting to discuss the hurricane plan, as it did indeed look as if the eye of the hurricane was making a beeline for Miami. We were asked to fill our tubs with water and move anything we didn’t want to get wet four feet off the floor. Everybody who was on a high floor or at the ends of the building was moved to lower and more centralized rooms, should the ends or upper floors of the building collapse. Looking back on it now, I can remember how scary it was to have my first night away from home at college in a terrifying Category 5 hurricane. At the time, however, I think I was just in survival mode once again, ready to take on whatever came my way.

  It took my parents eight hours instead of the typical four to get home. By the time they got there and realized that Andrew was indeed headed directly toward me, my mother was furious at their decision to leave. But it was too late to change anything now.

  Conditions on campus deteriorated as the night wore on. At about 3:00 a.m., we were all evacuated from our rooms to the halls to weather the storm, and we sat in the dark except for our flashlights until dawn. The entire residence hall, seven floors of concrete, shook four times in the severe winds. We were not allowed to open the doors to our rooms because the rooms had the old-school Florida crank windows, so they weren’t airtight, and we might be sucked out if a window had broken and we didn’t know it. When the actual eye went over us and the winds suddenly calmed, we were allowed to enter the RA’s room to use the toilet, so thirty of us used the toilet in twenty minutes, without the ability to flush—not pleasant! One of my fellow incoming freshmen was a girl whose father was a professor at the university. She had chosen to stay in the dorm while her family stayed in their home in Kendall, about fifteen miles south of us. We listened to some of the radio reports that Kendall was being hammered, and she essentially cried much of the night. I had spoken to my parents before we lost power, but now that talking to them was not an option, I imagined how very worried they must be at home. There were no cell phones in the early nineties, and no electricity meant no phones.