Day 67, Doctors and Dentists and Popcorn, Oh MY!

Beware the humble popped kernel--whether coated in the most nefarious of chemicals, caramel, or salted butter, that seemingly innocuous treat can end up costing you. Turns out everyone knew this except me: One of those crispy popcorn skins gets beneath your teeth and eludes flossing. . .next thing you know you've got an abscess, your face blows up like a Republican election campaign, and you're shelling out big bucks to have the thing surgically removed.

Next time you're at your local multi-plex, shudder and look away from the popcorn. Or do as I did and have a separate emergency fund that you can tap into just for dental emergencies--of course my fund was in a money market account labelled "Savings For Trip to Europe", but that means nothing. Just girlish dreaming.

Sigh.

However, today is my first normal day since it all began, in the gruesome distant past, on Ooctober 28th. I still have a small hard lump o' pain on my lower east side (dentally), and I am still on mega-penicillin, but I feel normal! I will be going to the gym and the library to work! I will be going to my favorite market in the city--in North America, perhaps--the West Side Market on 110th Street, to eat their free samples and buy salad, lunch, and slivers of chocolate.

Then I'll march up the rain-sodden streets to the NYPL, Morningside Branch, for a look around at their videos. It's all terribly high-minded in there, with Kieslowski and Fellini and Truffaut videos being relieved by the occasional BBC production of a Hardy novel. I've always suspected that there are some professors who scurry up Broadway looking over their shoulders, guiltily aware of the copy of Fast Times at Ridgemont High they have in their leather satchels.

Today is a normal day, and I am so pleased about it. I will work in lovely Butler library overlooking Kim Mead and White's beautifully designed campus, meant to re-create an Italian piazza. I will snap on my iPod and listen to George Clinton's "Atomic Dog". I will exercise long and hard--I've missed it. Amazing how difficult to do that when in searing unfeasible unremitting crazy-making pain.

As far as the BBP goes, I went to my new doctor yesterday. Her offices are on a shabby stretch of 58th street, where the buildings are so tall that daylight never seems to reach the street and pedestrian faces are always in shadow, like E. Hopper paintings. When you step into the building, however, all is mahogany and velvet chairs, with a wolfishly grinning doorman directing you to the office.

I liked that. I love the feeling of finding a little oasis of civility in the dark loud hustling city.

It was an incredibly thorough first visit: I filled in many forms as to my own and family's medical history, my desires for the visit. . .I peed in a cup and then was weighed and measured (I AM 5'3"!! I always thought I was lying, that I was an inch shorter!), before the doctor came in. Then I spent a while alone, banging my heels together on that padded metal table.

Getting more nervous and ashamed of myself by the minute.

After a while I began to say the serenity prayer, but couldn't do it properly. I kept interrupting it with my own impatience.

God, Grant me the Serenity where the hell is she I'm freezing here

To Accept the things I cannot change, Oh god I'm a mess and I don't know where I'll start. . .

The Courage to change the things I can Should I lie about how long since I've seen a doctor??

And the Wisdom to know the difference. I don't want to know if I'm sick--I feel fine and I don't want to know if anything's wrong--ignorance is bliss is bliss is bliss knowledge is popcorn in my gums--



Then the Doctor walked in. She is blonde, with chin length hair and pale skin. She looks a little weary, very kind, and as if she has a dry sense of humor. And she spent an unbelievable amount of time with me. When was the last time you first visited a doctor and she looked over your histoy and talked to you for 45 minutes?

So now I'm set up. With a gynocologist and a cardiologist. With blood tests on Monday and a mammogram on the 28th. All this testing is frightening. . .but this is the stuff everybody faces. I don't get a free pass just because I want one, or because I'm a lush, or because I'm scared.

Life on Life's terms, once again. It feels okay.

Be Brave Project, Day 33: A Busy Day for Liquor Stores

It's impossible not to add to the 9/11 media onslaught: Last year the anniversary seemed to glide ghostlike by me, I felt only lightly brushed by tatters of fear and nervousness and memory. Twelve months ago I was less than a month sober and consequently a bit stunned; plus, I am fortunate enough not to have known anyone who had died that day. I'm sure people talked about it in the rooms of AA, but I simply do not remember.

This week the anniversary has loomed large, and it's been both interesting and unsurprising to hear the alcoholic's take on the day. One woman, Alice, has commemorated each year by holing up in her apartment and getting drunk while the name roll call has taken place--Alice is dark haired, smoky voiced, and from the outer boroughs, where many of the restaurants' employees and building operators and staff worked. She knows many people who died that morning. This is Alice's first year sober, and she went down to the liquor store on the ground floor of the building last week to talk to the owner, a guy who sold her a lot of booze over the last 15 years. "I quit, Tom. I'm in AA. And I'm scared about next Thursday, so please don't sell me anything." He hugged her, and said he wouldn't ever again, he was happy for her--and that he wanted to quit smoking but couldn't do it. Could she help?

Alice is still scared about this anniversary today, but as she keeps saying, "The people I know wouldn't like the fact that I was commemorating them by taking the day off to drink."

Christine was in the WTC that day. Christine is ash blonde with white skin that's so unwrinkled it's almost egglike; to me she looks more like an Upper East Sider, but she attends West Side meetings so I give her the benefit of the doubt. She was shaking as she spoke at the Women's meeting yesterday, she was shaking with rage. "All of my security in life was taken that day. I'd worked so hard to put it together, and in one day it was gone." She fought her way back uptown and, of course, into a liquor store. She bought a bottle of vodka and, with grim humor, a bottle of champagne. The clerk told her that she was mixing drinks, but she shoved them in her bag and went home to her high-rise studio, where she could see plumes of smoke rising from the south.

That night is when Christine turned to alcohol full-time. For the next three years she went back to that liquor store daily (unusual, because lushes usually will walk miles to get to a store where people don't know them). She drank, literally, until her bones began to soften and her teeth to loosen. She was attacking her own infrastructure.

Right now it is 9.17 in the morning, on another sunny early-autumn day. Wall Street is already reeling, Columbia University is on a deceptively casual alert, mid-town is as usual bluffing it out and pretending things are business as usual--but every siren is a moment for pause. Inwood's retreating to a safe pretense of suburbia, Dumbo's hipsters, who were still in high-school, look across the East River at a city that--to them--looks normal.

Be Brave Project, Day 22: Capital One, it's the Sock Drawer for You.

I don't like not quite knowing where I'll be living in five weeks, and I obviously don't enjoy the sustained effort it costs for me to dig myself out of the swamp of vodka and financial insecurity beneath which I was buried for most of the new millennium.

Turning around and facing the grotesquely self-sabotaging behaviors caused by addiction is not only frightening, but wearying: You feel as if you're stumbling up a down escalator all of the damn time, while next to you your friends and family glide serenely along, effortlessly moving up and forward, forward and up. My world got smaller and bleaker, while friends got married or arranged book deals; purchased houses--wisely at the time when a ham sandwich could get a mortgage--or decided to row across the Atlantic for charity; had children or leapt into exciting career changes.

A great deal of time at AA meetings is spent discussing the dangers of over-reacting when we are feeling "less than." (I know, these recovery phrases make you want to cover your ears and hum show tunes loudly, but as I mentioned, we are weary. Somehow it helps to speak in a sort of emotional shorthand, although you feel as if you're in an afternoon re-run of a crap Lifetime film.)

It's all a bit confusing, and ironic, and circular: Lushes drink when they feel inferior, and feel inferior because they've run away from life. Lushes drink because they feel resentful, but are perpetuating the behavior that created the disparity which causes resentment. Lushes isolate so they can drink, but drink because they're so cut off. But most of all, Lushes drink because they are lushes. And yet once you've put the bottle down for a bit, you do find that avoiding resentments and comparisons and anger and fatigue and isolation does quiet down the drink signals, and telling other people about it really does help to shut the signals off.

So the AA meetings exist, otherwise we'd be wandering the streets grabbing the lapels of innocent civilians and telling them our trivial stories of grudges and woe. Like I'm about to do here:

In my sustained effort to improve my credit and re-join the more responsible members of the human race, I bit the bullet and called Capital One yesterday evening. There actually wasn't as much fear/bullet biting involved in the call, because I have never missed a payment with them since I got the card (hot damn, Elusive D.!), and I have never made any previous requests. So I wanted them to drop my APR from 15.65%, and possibly give me a credit increase.

Fifteen minutes later I hung up the phone almost shaking with anger. I'd been spoken to like a child, told that having the low limit and the high APR was "good for me, and for my credit", and that as a Capital One customer I was "like a child in school asking for a good grade before the work has been done." Well, I asked, biting my words out so I wouldn't tell the woman what I thought of her demeaning customer service technique, what can I do in order to qualify for these improvements in the future? "I can't give a time frame. Files are pulled randomly." Well, fuck you very much, Darling.

Her advice was that I should start using the card, a lot, and then eventually Capital One would decide to award me for my good behavior. They clearly are using the oil crisis to push buying gas with credit, as she kept telling me that it's soo easy to just swipe the card at the pump. Twice I said, "I'm a New Yorker. No car." Oh, she piped in, I could do a balance transfer at a low APR. As if every other card on the planet doesn't have a low balance transfer. But how helpful of her to point out that how I can improve credit is by shifting debt around! Thanks ever so! Happily, I currently have very little credit card debt, having spent the last few years paying it off. I suppose the Capital One Customer Service Manager would have suggesting running up debt in order to transfer it.

I thanked her for 'the interesting information you've given me'.

She thanked me for calling and wished me a good night.

We hung up in mutual loathing. It really was one of those conversations where you realize --Oh, she doesn't like me at all.

So I went to the kitchen, removed the pitcher o' pesto from the refrigerator (anyone who doesn't have a fridge and freezer filled with pesto this time of year should really get off their ass and to a farmer's market pronto). I put water on to boil, pulled out my whole-grain penne pasta, and began slicing tomatoes. The entire time I was banging pans and muttering to myself about assholes who have no goddamn business dealing with the public. . .what the fuck is on my credit information there that she feels she can talk to me like that?. . .I've screwed up my life and will never ever be able to make it. . .the stock market's in the tank, the Be Brave Project has done nothing for me, nothing, it's just removed me from my protective cocoon. . .

As the water neared boiling, I went to the hallway to check the mail. One envelope wouldn't bend: It was thick and contained something plastic--always intriguing. Back in my apartment I threw the rest of the mail to the floor and tore the thick envelope open--

It was an Oxford Health insurance card!

I Have Health Insurance! Thank you, "Healthy New York"!

Scorecard:

Be Brave Project: 2 (Health insurance and Taxes)

Capital One: 0 (That card's going to be eating socks for the next few months.)

Be Brave Project: Day 17. Dreams and Schemes and Flying Machines

Just woke up from a dream I repeatedly have. . . I am flying home from Europe, and the plane makes a series of straining, popping noises as it takes off. Passengers and the flight attendant make jokes about it the danger, but I am terrified. Next to me is an American businessman who doesn't like Europe and wants to go home. Behind me is an old female friend.

As the flight continues the plane doesn't rise above the old city--it flies low and weightily over narrow streets and between buildings, with wings tilting to avoid tearing off against their facades, then suddenly the plane's nose turns up and we head straight straight straight towards the sky at a dizzying speed, and I'm pressed back in my seat by the force--then, as the plane seems to level off and begin to fly normally thousands of feet above the ground, there is a sudden tumble and rush as it plummets, as the views from the window are smeared blurs, possibly our final view. As the plane falls toward the narrow city streets, the pilot (who is a woman) attempts a landing--but the wheels don't come out. We're moving faster and faster, the plane is level but heading for the ground, the city road beneath us. . .enormous sparks fly up when the undercarriage scrapes the ground. . .we bounce. . .

And the dream ends.

Forgot to mention that for some reason, lately, Carson Kressley of the cancelled show Queer Eye is the flight attendant. This dream is obviously a control dream, a wanting to escape fantasy of fear. . .and I think that the woman who pilots the plane is actually me. (It must be admitted that there have been versions of the dream in which I am outside of the airplane, straddling the cockpit--Dream interpreters need not apply.)

I think the dream was, this time, a response to my having qualified for the first time at my Home group AA meeting. It's a fairly unnerving and exposing thing to do--I don't really want people to know my boring-ass story. Unlike many women in the rooms, I wasn't raped. I wasn't sexually abused. I didn't try to commit suicide or cut myself, though I did think about the latter. I just. . .drank. And learned how to drink some more. And, like some George once sang-- (Foreman or Thorogood or Bush, or for all I know, all three Georges)--I drank alone.

So that was my brave act for the day. Telling my story and then sitting with the feelings and regrets that brought up. "We learn not to regret the past", they keep telling me.

I think that the Be Brave Project might help me get there, but right now I'm feeling impatient and underslept. So if someone gives me that line about learning not to regret the past, my answer right now would be: "Oh Yes? When?"