“No!” Billie Jean surprised me by her adamance.
The next session, I decided to be absolutely frank about my needs. “I’d like to ask you to find a different way to stretch me because this way makes me very, very uncomfortable. I’m very sensitive to touching certain parts of other people’s bodies because I was sexually abused.”
Billie made a snide face. “That’s what I thought.” She sneered. I looked at her blankly. “Well, I’m not gonna do it any other way because that’s the only way I can do it!”
I canceled all my future appointments with her and found a new physical therapist who didn’t insist on stretching me that way.
Chapter 10
“I have certainly known a few people who found it impossible to work with Billie Jean,” Dr. Mayhew clucked sympathetically. “She is the best, but if she didn’t work out for you, Ms. Minkowitz, that’s the bottom line.”
She was definitely the only doctor who had ever called me Ms. Minkowitz.
In her fifties, voluptuous and pretty, usually looking dark-eyed, serious, and intellectual in a long wool dress, Mayhew was part of a breed of lefty doctors that I thought had vanished decades ago. There was a copy of History of Iberian Feminism on her office shelf, along with Fanshen, the famous book about rural empowerment in a communist Chinese village.
She was one of the few physicians I’d met who was neither bothered nor annoyed by my various needs, mental and physical.
If her physical exam of my arms hurt me, Dr. Mayhew stopped immediately. That was the truly rare part.
Mayhew next sent me to a duo of acupuncturists called the Bans—each of their first names was Ban. They were a man and woman from China, unrelated to each other, who practiced in tandem on patients: the woman would administer the needles, and then the man would give a massage afterward, an uncommon, indeed life-giving massage that he described as a hands-on, medical version of Qigong, the Taoist health and exercise practice.
In the beginning it was hard for me to lie on the acupuncture table because it was too narrow and that made my arms hurt. There was also a “crack,” as in most massage tables, an indentation in the middle where my hands naturally fell, and which was very painful for them to lie in, like being caught in the crotch of a tree. In acupuncture you have to lie still for about twenty minutes once the needles are in you, so it is crucial to pick an initial position that is not painful: I would lie down towards the foot of the table so that my hands narrowly missed the crack, and once I understood the dispositions of all the available tables at the Bans, I always opted for the widest one.
Ban the woman went by her first name, and was soon merrily shooting the shit with me about boyfriends and relationships, while the man, one of the most formal people I have ever met, went by Dr. Sing. Ban promptly started saving the room with the widest table for me. The paper they normally covered it with used to rasp my arms and legs, so Ban would make the table sanitary by covering it with a towel instead. She enjoyed teasing me about my various special needs—“You are like that fable called ‘The Princess and the Pea’”—but always made it clear she was very glad to fulfill them. She made the room very warm in winter, because cold temperatures gave me terrible flare-ups.
I was a little afraid of Dr. Sing—he was so much more reserved than Ban, and I knew that if I had been a practitioner I would never have worn a suit and tie to every massage session like that. I myself would have come in with beaded Jewfro and big tie-dyed T-shirt, with jasmine on my hands. Still, there was considerably more need for negotiation in our sessions together than in my interludes with Ban, because he was working his hands over my entire body. At first I was frightened to tell him how often bits of his tuina massage hurt—I was aware I was outrageously physically sensitive, and it would not have surprised me to learn that at this point at least, before my bodycalmed down a little from the Mega RSI Attack, that I was the most sensitive person on Earth.
I spent our first sessions tortured by the question of when I should tell him his strokes were too hard. Sometimes—Dr. Sing was an angel at therapeutic massage—his touch was exquisitely gentle, and he made my hands feel as though they had been made of cookie dough. (It was the most pleasure I’d experienced with my hands in the entire RSI run so far or possibly since.)
But even Dr. Sing sometimes hurt me. My hands could only be moved a few degrees in most directions without suffering agony, and I would lie on that cotton-towel-covered table agonizing about whether to tell Sing it hurt now or now or now. Because of my supreme sensitivity, part of me wondered whether some hand pain might possibly be required for my healing—how else could my practitioners perform the necessary work?—but Dr. Mayhew had also cautioned me that painful massage could quite likely flare me up for weeks.
I was afraid that if I protested too much there would be no massage strokes left to heal me. So I would lie on the table thinking, “If he does this move more than once I’ll say something”—and then he would do it—“OK if he does this move off more than once from now I will! —” Eventually I would usually stop him. Before that point, though, I would be convulsed with indecision.
Dr. Sing startled me one day by intervening in my private tete a tete with myself about when to speak up. “Complain!” he said. He meant that I should always protest when something he did was painful. I had never been invited to complain before, and I took nerdy, clean-scrubbed Dr. Sing up on it. It was heady.
It was not as easy negotiating the painless purchase of my morning coffee. I’d been going to Sally’s, the tiny yuppified takeout place on Seventh Avenue, and the young women behind the counter were less than thrilled by my mysterious new insistence that my paper cup be pushed to the very edge of the takeout counter.
It may surprise you to learn that I cannot entirely blame them. Having to guard against agony and medical damage from picking up paper cups—paper cups! which had previously been my most helpful servants!—made me feel extremely vulnerable, not to say absolutely powerless. The only way for it not to cause me pain for weeks was if they pushed it to the very edge of the counter.
When I felt powerless, as I may have mentioned, I was capable of making myself extraordinarily unpleasant. I did not know this.
With the young counterwomen and men: “Could you push it to the end?!” (I usually offered no explanation.) “To the end?” They were puzzled. “Yes! To the end! Could you do that for me?!” I’d insist in an intense manner, a combination of pleading and commanding and haranguing.
I could see no good reason why anyone should refuse to push my coffee up to the absolute edge of the counter, or even off the counter (sometimes I asked for that), even if they had no idea whatsoever why I wanted them to.
It made sense to me, in my RSI-haunted brain. Angry that I was suddenly suffering pain all the time, and angry as well that not everyone comprehended this, I had become a militant disability activist overnight, and did not think I should have to explain my needs to anyone. If they pushed the bag with a paper coffee cup in it off the counter, I could catch it; at least that way, I would not have to perform the sometimes painful action of grabbing it off the high counter.
I always did catch it, too, except the one time.
They were really annoyed the time it fell, although I apologized profusely, and our relations had come to a sorry pass by the time, a week later, one young counterwoman refused to push my coffee even to the edge for me.
“I’ll be damned if I do that.”
“But that’s the only way I can get my coffee. I have a disability! I’ve paid for my coffee and this is the only way I can get it! You’re discriminating against me! “
“You get out of this store in less than ten seconds or I’ll make you get out!” She was about seventeen, and looked strong.
“If you did that, I would sue you for so much money so fast, it would make your head spin!”
“Why don’t you come over here and say that?”
“Because I don’t fucking have to come there! If you tou
ch me you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”
“You wouldn’t like it very much either.”
“Go fuck yourself with a chainsaw.”
I finally left, but came back another day toreport her to the owner. “I’ve heard about you,” he said dryly. “We had a staff meeting the other dayjust to discuss you.”
Just to discuss me? “The staff has had many, many questions about how to deal with you.” He did not have a tender response to my question of whether we surely couldn’t work out a way to have the staff hand me my coffee in a manner that did not harm my arms. “Well ...” he snorted.
“But I have a disability! And that woman threatened me. That’s not right!”
“And you said fuck to her.”
I consulted Olive in the end, who suggested I treat my statements of my needs as requests rather than universal commands. “You are asking them to alter their behavior,” she said. “You are, in fact, asking them for some extra work.” I grumbled at this—I had a right to have all my needs met!—but I switched from Sally’s to Ozzie’s, across the street, where I smiled at all the counterpeople when asking, respectfully, for them to push my coffee up, carefully explaining that I had a problem with my arms.
To my surprise, it seemed to work. I had disdained Ozzie’s in the past, thinking of the staff as “hoity-toity,” but they all responded very nicely to my gentle requests for special practices.
At Ozzie’s, I even had to ask a patron each time to open the door for me just to leave the place, because the door was of a weird kind that required a grip that would really hurt my hand. I’d been leery of having to put myself in the hands of customers who were strangers, but startlingly, they were all very willing to open the door for me.
OK. The time has come to explain a few things that I have perhaps kept a bit sub rosa till now, sweet reader. In alchemy there are quite a few things the novitiate must not learn until he or she has reached the preliminary stages of attainment.
Here is at least one of those things, my dear fellow student:
A golem is essentially the Jewish version of a creature called the homunculus, which the alchemists of the Dark Ages and the Middle Agesmade in their little beakers when they wished to create a small personal servant.
Sort of like the “sea monkey” you can buy in a novelty store—just add water, and it grows! (In the homunculus’s case, it was usually stinky cow dung you were supposed to keep adding to make it grow. No lie! Look it up!)
Kabbalah and alchemy have a great deal in common, little reader, and I will now proceed to give you a short lecture on their common origins:
Both arts come out of Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, the two greatest religious heresies in the history of the Western world, which each spawned magical systems for the accrual of power spiritual and personal—(Sucker! Told you I was the daughter of an intellectual!)
If you look into it closely, Kabbalah and alchemy are basically the same thing, reader mine, except that one is Jewish syncretist and the other is, er, syncretist pagan with a faint foam of Christ on top.
My mother had studied both pagan and kabbalistic magic, but she was unaware of a certain problem with homunculi, at least from the point of view of their masters. The issue had not yet been reported in their golem cousins, but this was probably due to scientists' error and should not be taken as arising from any significant difference in golem biology:
There was actually a way for a homunculus to become human if it wanted.
It was not an easy process, and you could not call a homunculus lucky that this path was open to it. This was the one and only way: Undergo “unendurable torment” which felt like being impaled with a sword, and then spontaneously bleeding from the eyes, and having your lungs and liver burnt alive, and then the homunculus would change colors and go through all the stages of evolution in long succession—bacterium, then fish, then amphibian, then mammal specifying into primate—and at last emerge—quivering with pain—human.
Fuck me.
Money was becoming a problem, especially since I had untrammeled myself from Nancy. I don’t know if I have quite communicated to you just how rich she was, cara, springing for fancy restaurant meals I craved but could no longer afford now that I was paying for acupuncture and Dr. Mayhew, who did not take insurance. She’d charmed me to the depths of my soul by ordering in—ordering in!—for both of us from Tempo, the Italian boite on Fifth Avenue whose entrees cost thirty bucks apiece.
With Nancy, at least I’d been getting cared for, in a way.
And in my clingy, gold-threaded short dress, in which I looked fabulous in her living room, I’d also felt like a whore. Standing in Nancy’s lovely parlor staring at myself in the enormous Victorian mirror, waiting for the food to come. A whore for money but a whore for love, also; most of my friends were gone now.
An odd assemblage of neighborhood acquaintances and former students were assisting me with opening and closing my heavy windows now when it got hot or cold, changing my light bulbs, and of course carrying my onions and chickpeas home from the Coop.
I was definitely getting thinner. In a way this was great—I looked even cuter!—but, as I went down three whole pant sizes, I knew it was because of RSI. I had enough money for food, but I did not have the arm strength to cook very much, or to buy very much—even the boring nice people had their limits when it came to carrying—and takeout and restaurants were a hellish experience, like Sisyphus trying to dine with forks that were too heavy and tables that were always too high or low, and plates just two inches too far away.
I had the feeling I was becoming a wraith. I was already at a thin point when I met Nancy, but now, post-Nancy, I bought sixes at H & M and men stared at me openly in the street.
Creepily, people were more attracted to me now that I was wraithlike. Nancy had constantly said how cute it was that I was so small. A male painter I met at Makor and tried to date said it turned him on that I couldn’t do anything with my hands. (I had always been vaguely attracted to men, and this had seemed like a good time to branch out. After all, reader, I really needed people! But after meeting Fred I wasn’t sure. Contrary to everything I had heard about men, he was disturbed and not excited when I said I was mostly a lesbian. There was also the terrible moment, early on our first date, when he’d asked me whether or not I'd be able to manage intercourse despite my arm problems.)
After this, I made a pass at a male Feldenkrais instructor. (Feldenkrais is a "movement therapy" that aims to teach you to use your body in ways that cause less pain.) But after the man's class had proved too painful for me to take more than once, I decided that since he was no longer unavailable due to being my teacher, I ought to pursue him as a boyfriend: Mr. Feldenkrais, who was cute, had previously told me that he'd seen me for years walking around the neighborhood, and I'd always been "fascinating to watch.” Mister was flabbergasted however that I wanted to go out with him: “Aren’t you a lesbian?” “Yes, but not entirely,” I’d said. Apparently, though fascinating to look at I was not at all alluring.
Dating seemed to be going nowhere. It was Ellen and Laura, my boring and saintly new friends, who suggested I develop an internship program. This made immediate sense: relationships with my real friends and even my new acquaintances were becoming increasingly strained by my need for their services.
“I'm sure oodles of people would be willing to work for you for free,” Ellen enthused.
In the end, I opted to pay a very small salary—$6 an hour—along with my complementary tutelage to the intern in writing, journalism and publishing.
I went through quite a flock of interns in two years, reader, two to ten hours a week, for a total of nine gangly young apprentices.
I have felt guilty almost until this moment—perhaps still at this moment, gentle reader—about my employment of the interns. I strongly believed that I had tricked or cheated them out of their work, the way a troll would:
The scenario: troll stands on a bridge. A traveler begins
to cross. Troll says, “Let us have a game between us, traveler! If you guess right, you get my troll’s bag of gold. If I guess right, I eat you!”
Traveler sees no other way to cross the bridge. And wants the troll’s gold. He cries, “I’ll play with you, troll!” Troll says, “Which hand is my coin in?” If the traveler picks left, there is no coin, and “I eat you!” If the traveler picks right, “You get my troll’s bag of gold!” But the bag is at the bottom of the river—the traveler sees it, finally, gleaming there. Traveler leaps in, tries to fish it out, but the treasure bag is made of air, illusion. It is only troll’s gold. The troll leaps into the water and eats the traveler.
For what exactly was I offering Jeff, Bix, Frank, Will, Leah, Lizzie, Edwidge, Marla, and Glen in exchange for carrying my groceries and sometimes typing my query letters to magazines?
Jeff Dixon-Davidson, my first and best intern, got to see me up close and personal as I went about my business writing and producing a show that would run at The Kitchen, a, ahem, prestigious avant-garde arts space.
Some internships, I know, have consisted of less. Jeff typed some of my writing for the performances. He accompanied me to some meetings and helped me produce the show.
He also typed some of my free-lance magazine articles that had been commissioned by editors.
Somehow, I believed this was an unfair arrangement. In my mind, RSI had eaten up whatever writing ability I had had. And I believed it had eaten up my currency, my power to be published and taken seriously.
(Or had my leaving the Voice done that? Either way, my power was gone.)
In The Earthsea Trilogy, Ged, a powerful wizard, tells his young man not to bother going back for the magic staff Ged has left behind in the sand, about to be taken by the tide. (He and his companion have just journeyed into hell and saved the world.) But “leave it,” he says to his buddy. “I spent all wizardry at that dry spring... I am no mage now.”
Growing Up Golem Page 15