After the section on the Holocaust, my social studies class moved on to art history. One day I walked into class late and found the lights off. My teacher was just about to show slides. Giacometti's sculptures flashed on the wall, their elongated arms simultaneously pointing toward and away from the world, while their long legs held them tall and gracefully but tenuously. Next were de Chirico's paintings, with the shadows from unseen others falling directly across the paths of the visible. I had seen Munch's "The Scream" and had identified it with my own occasional desire to let out a howl, but it was only at that moment, sitting in that darkened classroom, that I understood the figure might not be screaming himself but shielding his ears from and dropping his mouth open in shock at the sound of someone, or something, else's loud, loud lament. Matisse's paintings seemed to be about how simple it was to see the world in a beautiful way. Picasso's were about how complex, how difficult, beauty was.
The poems we read in English class had similar effects on me. My taste was not always sophisticated, but I did read poetry by Keats, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens, which moved me in ways I couldn't understand. It was, in part, the very lack of understanding that was so moving. I would read Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" and feel that something important and necessary was being said here, but the moment I tried to examine the words, dissect the sentences, the meaning receded.
Senior year I applied to and was accepted at Sarah Lawrence College with a generous scholarship. Not sure what to do with my life, I decided to work toward medical school. The day senior class yearbook photos were taken, I purposefully cut school, and I threw away all the subsequent notices warning that unless I attended the makeup shoot, my photo would not appear in the yearbook.
ELEVEN
Cool
CERTAIN PEOPLE GO THROUGH RADICAL OUTWARD changes their freshman year of college. This is especially true at Sarah Lawrence, with an enrollment of only eight hundred and a program decidedly focused on liberal arts. The college is only an hour from Spring Valley, so my mother drove me there. She helped me carry boxes up to my dorm room, said good-bye, and drove away. From across the parking lot outside my window I could hear a Herman's Hermits song blaring out, "Something tells me I'm into something good." I took it as an omen. For days beforehand I'd been a nervous wreck, but suddenly I felt I belonged. It was an unusual, curious feeling.
Sarah Lawrence is something of a satellite of New York City's Lower East Side. Some students dressed entirely in black or sported bizarre haircuts indicating the overzealous use of a razor blade, while others wore, with enviable grace and style, exotic, ruined clothes that looked as if they'd washed up on shore after the Titanic's New Year's Eve party. Everyone cultivated an air of being an outsider, beyond it all, utterly cool. Rather naively, I fell for these appearances instantly, was completely seduced by them. I was shocked to discover that rather than snubbing me, everyone was extraordinarily nice and even interested in me. I was amazed to observe myself so at ease, ready and able to make contact with people. I'd had some friends before college, but they were people I spent time with more than true friends. I would never have considered showing my private self to them. Here, within hours I was having intense discussions about life, art, all the topics I'd been craving for so long.
Yet for all the deep conversations, one's looks still were of paramount importance. Only the aesthetic had changed. In many ways the fashion of cool was every bit as rigorous and unforgiving as the fashion of fitting in had been in high school, only here the rigor depended upon a higher degree of individuality. With amazing predictability—predictability that we the inductees of cool would have scorned had anyone tried to point it out—the freshman class went through its first-semester transformations. I was no exception.
Some of us, after Thanksgiving break, left our embarrassing old chinos and Docksiders at home, and arrived back on campus completely vamped out in retro-punk: dyed magenta hair and green fingernails and long black skirts. Others went for oversized dresses from their grandmothers closets, strange little hats with feathers, pearl necklaces that hung to their navels. Still others went for the sex-toy look: ripped jeans over lace stockings and T-shirts with collars and sleeves tantalizingly torn off. I went with the I-don't-care-I'm-an-artist look, which required that everything I wore come from the Bargain Box, the local thrift store, and cost no more than a dollar-fifty. Extra points went to anything I found lying on the street.
At the heart of this antifashion statement was poetry. Still set on going to medical school, I had signed up for the required science courses, but I had to fill out my schedule with something in the humanities. My mother urged me to take one of the writing workshops the school is well known for, and, deciding that fiction would be too much work, I chose a poetry course. My instructor was a man named John Skoyles, and by the end of the first semester I was hooked.
Reading and writing poetry brought together everything that had ever been important to me. I could still dwell in the realm of the senses, but now I had a discipline, a form for them. Rather than a way to create my own private life and shun the world, the ability to perceive was now a way to enter the world. Language itself, words and images, could be wrought and shaped into vessels for the truth and beauty I had so long hungered for. Most amazing, one could fail, one could make mistake after mistake and learn from each one.
Poetry became a religion for me. I was a fanatic. I'd pull people into a corner and say, without any sense of irony, "You have to hear this, it will change your life." I'd recite anything from Rilke to Ashbery, certain that the deep wonder and awe I felt from these poems would be immediately apparent. I recognized this wonder and awe as intimately connected to the feelings I'd discovered while recovering from chemotherapy sessions, when to simply "be" was reason enough for joy. Now I knew that joy was a kind of fearlessness, a letting go of expectations that the world should be anything other than what it was. And I felt I'd at last discovered the means with which to actively seek out this kind of being, this kind of beauty.
By the end of my freshman year I'd gained a reputation as one of the better poets on campus, which aided the development of my artistic persona. How trivial to actually think about ones appearance. The attire of my fellow scruffy artists told the world to recognize them as geniuses too preoccupied to care about anything as mundane as clothes. But for me, dressing as if I didn't care was an attempt not to care, to show the world I wasn't concerned with what it thought of my face. In my carefully orchestrated shabbiness, I was hoping to beat the world to the finish line by showing that I already knew I was ugly. Still, all the while, I was secretly hoping that in the process some potential lover might accidentally notice I was wearing my private but beautiful heart on my stained and fraying sleeve.
In truth there was little danger of meeting someone who might actually desire me, and not just because of my looks. The female-to-male ratio at school was three to one, and much of the male third of the population was, for varying reasons, unavailable. I was free to develop my eccentric ways and thoughts without any threat to my most basic assumptions about myself, my most intimate definitions of what constituted my personality, however painful those definitions may otherwise have been.
The next summer I was looking forward to a second free-flap operation, but it wasn't to be. My mother had to leave her job at the nursing home, which meant I no longer had medical insurance. And to ease her financial burden, she had decided to sell the house, which required a great deal of repairs and general sorting out. After weeks of filling out forms and spending hours on the telephone on hold, I eventually received Medicaid. I went to see Dr. Baker, and together we decided to postpone surgery until the following summer.
The house was sold early in the fall of my sophomore year. For years our poor old dilapidated house had been nothing but an embarrassment, and I'd underestimated its value as a reliable source of comfort, as a place I could always go. Now, to my surprise, I missed it. I experienced a strange kind of orphanhood, a displ
acement that worked its way into my writing. The word home kept cropping up in my poems. When school vacations came around, I'd often spend them as the guest of friends instead of at my mother's new, smaller apartment.
In sharp contrast to high school, I now possessed a large number of varied and decidedly wonderful friends, whom I valued immeasurably. Through them I discovered what it was to love people. There was an art to it, I discovered, which was not really all that different from the love that is necessary in the making of art. It required the effort of always seeing them for themselves and not as I wished them to be, of always striving to see the truth of them.
My vanity allowed me to be proud of my many different types of friends. I was on equally good terms with politically radical and openly hedonistic people, friends who were concerned deeply with the spiritual and those who could not care less about it. Generally, they didn't mix with each other, and often one would be sincerely surprised to discover that I spent time outside of his or her particular group, though most shared the quality of being on the fringe. To be on the fringe at a school as fringy as Sarah Lawrence was itself an accomplishment, but it was this very quality that I loved most about my friends. They wore their mantles as "outsiders" with pride, whether because of their politics, their sexuality, or anything else that makes a person feel outside of the norm. Their self-definition was the very thing that put me at ease with them. I didn't feel judged. I felt acceptance I had never experienced before and was able to genuinely open myself to the love they offered.
As sophomore year drew to a close, I went to see Dr. Baker about setting up the next operation. I was full of hope, but as it turned out, Dr. Baker had far too much work right then to do the operation himself. He was handing me over to a team of two surgeons at St. Vincent's Hospital, down in Greenwich Village. As I waited in Dr. Baker's office, these two new doctors walked in, examined me, and left. Dr. Baker assured me that they were very capable.
Free-flap operations are six to eight hours long, and I felt that I should be understanding of how much of Dr. Baker's time it would take, that I should just go along and let these strange doctors take over. "I'm still your doctor," he assured me, but I felt completely cowed, as if I didn't have the right to speak up and voice my fears. I wanted to know if this change had anything to do with my being on Medicaid now, but I felt too abashed to ask.
Things went badly right from the start. I went into St. Vincent's in the middle of a heat wave, and the air conditioning in my room, with its permanently shut windows, was broken. I woke up after the operation in a sweat. Still delirious and in intense pain, I pulled off the stiff sheets to see that rather than the normal line of stitches I had expected along my hip, where they'd taken the graft, there was a long row of thirty or forty large metal staples. It looked as if someone had sawed my leg off and then put it back on with an office stapler. That sight upset me, but when I tried to speak, I found they'd given me a tracheotomy, another surprise.
Coming out of eight hours of anesthesia takes a long, unpleasant time. I kept surfacing into consciousness, taking note of one detail, such as the staples, then sinking back down again, only to reemerge a while later with no sense of how much time had passed, where I was, what on earth was happening. I couldn't understand why I had staples in my leg, and I was never coherent enough or conscious long enough to figure it out, to learn that it was simply an experiment in wound closure. I kept hallucinating gruesome scenes in which nurses were attacking me with pliers. My whole body kept shaking, and I found I could not stop crying, even though it did not feel as if I was the one crying: I was watching a movie of someone else lying in a bed, trembling and crying. I felt like a small child. I didn't feel safe.
At some point in the night I found it difficult to breathe. I wrote out a note to the nurse, who said she would tell the doctor. An hour later it was worse; I had to think about every breath. I wrote another note to the nurse, and finally a doctor arrived to draw an arterial blood sample to check my oxygen level. A long time went by. It was still dark, and there didn't seem to be any people around. I was frightened. When the doctor returned and started taking another blood sample, I was only dimly aware of him. I couldn't see very clearly, and his voice sounded muffled as he said hello to another doctor, who walked in and asked, "Didn't you just do a blood gas a little while ago?" I could hear them talking as if through water. "Yeah," he replied congenially, "but I didn't believe anyone's oxygen level could be that low." However unable I was to communicate with the outside world, this comment jolted my inside voice awake. Oh my God, I thought to myself, brain damage-I'm going to have brain damage, I'm going to be brain-dead, and as far as I could tell, no one seemed to care very much.
I lay in bed and focused on someone's hand resting on the end rail of my bed. Several people were having a conversation about what to do with me, but I couldn't concentrate on it. All I could think about was how cinematic this pale hand looked, resting there on its wrist and gracefully, limply, letting its fingers point toward the sheets. Sometimes it would twitch up, even turn its palm upward a little, as a hand would do when its owner was making a point. Then it was lifted up and taken away, and someone stepped up next to me and leaned down to tell me they were going to take me to Intensive Care, that I was going to be put on a respirator.
Now this, I thought, sounds like an excellent idea. Finally I'll be able to breathe. My few belongings were taken out of the bedside cabinet, put into a plastic bag, and plopped on the bed near my feet. The brakes were lifted off the bed's wheels, and off we went, me in a bed pushed by a nurse and a student doctor. The hospital seemed deserted, and we got lost twice, the nurse and student doctor arguing about which hallway to go down, blaming each other like an old married couple. Knowing there was a respirator in my future, I was a bit more relaxed and could see some comic aspects to my predicament.
After I was finally put on the respirator, it was discovered that I had pneumonia. I spent a hellish week in Intensive Care, where the lights were on twenty-four hours a day, the air conditioning was still broken, and every once in a while the alarm on my heart monitor would go off for no apparent reason. It was very loud and always jolted me right off the sheets. I had to wait for someone to come give it a whack, like a malfunctioning television, before it would stop.
The oddest part, though, was that everyone seemed to be speaking very peculiarly to me. I couldn't put my finger on what was so bizarre about their speech (was I on some strange drug?). Finally a male nurse I'd never seen before asked, very slowly and with ovetexaggerared movements of his mouth, "How long did it take you to learn lip reading?" For some inexplicable reason, they thought I was deaf. Later that day a crew of workmen started ripping down a wall a few feet from the foot of my bed in order to fix some pipes. Their jackhammers made my metal bed rails jingle and set my heart monitor off again.
While in the hospital I had been so ill that I hadn't put much effort into thinking about my appearance. My mother had been given the use of an apartment on the Upper East Side for the summer, and afterward I went to stay with her. One whole living room wall was covered with mirrors. I walked into the apartment and almost fainted at the sight of me. The graft had been applied not to just one side of my face but from one ear to the next and was obscenely swollen to the size of a football. A very large piece of pale skin from my hip had been left in, not just a small patch like the last time. This strip was a foot long and four inches wide, and on either side of it were long rows of sutures. If feeling like a freak had been more in my mind than in my face at other times in my life, the visage I saw staring back at me was undeniably repulsive. The feeling was confirmed for me whenever I went out on the street. People would stop in their tracks and stare at me. One afternoon a beggar ran up behind me, demanding money. I stopped and turned around to look at him. He stopped in midsentence, looked at me for a second longer, then politely apologized and handed me a dollar bill before turning away, muttering to himself. My self-esteem reached the bottom of the deep
est, darkest pit.
I was promised a revision operation before going back to school, and I placed all my hope on that. Maybe it wasn't really so bad after all, I tried to tell myself: the swelling would eventually go down and the skin would be taken away. I simply had to accept that and try my best to make use of the time spent waiting, numb any and all desires to look normal. I spent a lot of time sitting alone in the dark kitchen, which had only one small, lightless window, sweating from the heat and giving myself pep talks, diatribes on the truer meaning of life.
One afternoon the phone tang. It was Steven, one of my friends from college. When he asked how I was, I tried to answer, but all that came out was choking tears. "Hang on," he said, "I'm coming to get you." An hour later the bell rang. When I opened the door, I expected to have to go into a long explanation about why I looked the way I did, but before I could start Steven announced we were going dancing that night. Dancing? Was he serious? He was. He had only just come out as a homosexual, and he told me I was the only one he trusted enough to accompany him to the gay clubs. It was important, he said: he was counting on me to support him.
My own sexuality completely on hold, I found myself in a world composed of sex. I felt both safe and amazed by my sudden proximity to dozens of half-naked men suggestively grinding their hips on the dance floor. The club was called The Monster, and the sex here had nothing to do with me. No one took any notice of me—I was without value in this world. It was easy to sublimate my own desire and sustain my feelings of physical worthlessness. I put all my energy into learning to dance. My teachers were some of the great anonymous masters of the mid-eighties dance club scene. I spent my first few visits watching before finally getting up enough nerve to go out on the floor myself. Never in a million years would I have been able to do this in a heterosexual club, but here, what the hell? I learned the balance between letting loose and keeping control, allowing my body to react impulsively to the beat and directing that impulse into a more meditated, skilled movement. It was all about rhythm, about finding the place where the music's rhythm met my own. As I danced I thought how this wasn't all that different from making art. Every once in a while I would think, fleetingly, that this must also be what it was like to act sexually in the world. But mostly I just treated the experience academically.