Waking Up on the Other Side

 

A heart attack at age forty three at least resolved one mystery. My health began declining when I moved three years before to Syracuse, New York. Sleeplessness, stomach pains, esophageal spasms — these baffled the physicians. They ruled out heart disease for want of any risk factors: six foot and 160 pounds since high school, low cholesterol and blood pressure, always active, no family history, and a low-stress teaching job. I felt debilitated, old, but the stomach tests all came back normal. Discomfort at middle age for me became routine.

       It began a little after four, September 24, as I lay napping on the sofa. The pains seemed unremarkable — I’d felt them before. Richard, my partner of several years, snored undisturbed beside me. We’d spent the morning cleaning house: a quiet Sunday. Potent secrets enter my life that way, disguised in the mundane.

 

       I never thought about a heart attack, even as the throbbing waxed and waned through dinner. My stomach always got worse after a meal, and so I retreated to the living room, hoping it would calm down. My sons turned on TV as a distraction. “America’s Funniest Home Videos” came on, a program I hate, but had no energy to oppose. (Later I would make jokes about that show almost killing me.) The boys said laughter would do me good. Instead, it set off deeper spasms. Richard, now nervous, kept watching me. I asked him to rub my shoulders. He was tender, eager to please. Confused and cold, I began trembling. I had crossed some frontier; I recognized a climax and wondered whether to give in, relax, let go, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear my sons remembering me this way, quaking uncontrollably. I asked them to go to their rooms. I couldn’t bear the thought of Richard left behind, suspended in time. I began to cry. Despite the chilling in my extremities and the burning in my abdomen, I cried for my three teenage boys doing homework upstairs and for Richard, who could do little more than wait.

       It was a decision, not an inevitable step, to call an ambulance. I told myself to find a path through this discomfort, to somehow get beyond it. Richard made the call and then held me. I continued to shiver. At its height, each pain forced out a moan. The sound emerged from far away, and I could hear my own strange voice, apologizing. In the long minutes until the medics arrived, my only wish was to faint, to wake up on the other side.

 

       At the hospital, I was shocked and relieved to find out I was having a heart attack. Finally my declining health had an explanation. I joked with the intern, with nurse after nurse, and with the physician on call, as each one asked the same questions: name, age, complaint, and pain on a scale from one to ten. I couldn’t imagine worse and answered, “Ten.” All their ministrations seemed droll to me. I imagined them doing group therapy to work on communication skills. When the cardiologist arrived, only to ask the same questions, I laughed. “Do you guys ever talk to each other?” I asked.

       As the doctor opened my leg and worked the probe up to my heart, I concentrated on the video monitor. The image it showed of my insides made no sense to me. Through my head ran lines from a song, one that says, “seems such a waste of time,” and rhymes Hackensack with “never went back” — useful nonsense when the doctor asked me to hold perfectly still. He would then expand the balloon in an artery, sending the pain off the scale, and I would hear Billy Joel singing “heart attack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack.”

       Afterward, I did not feel better. The doctor explained that not only had my arteries blocked in three places, but my heart had suffered at least one earlier attack. In time new main routes had expanded along the existing capillaries. This news sent me hunting through my past. Suddenly my discomfort of recent years seemed simple, like a coat buttoned wrong. An incident when shoveling snow three years before — rushed and angry with no teenage help at hand — came back clearly. I ended up doubled over on my bed, telling the boys not to worry. The clues seemed so obvious now. I had, however, been active, cycling to work and taking canoe trips (including — now I thought of it — one spell when I had to stop paddling and wait on the shore for the spasms to pass). Rethinking my history was not as straightforward as I expected, but gave me some mental knitting to do in my hospital room.

 

       The intensive care unit, where life teeters on edge, is of all places the most banal. An incision bursting is just another way to wet the bed. Sleeplessness and bad dreams respond to simple remedies: a back rub, fresh sheets. Lights on means daytime, lights off, night, as arbitrary as a parent enforcing nap time. Food always smells better than it looks yet remains inedible despite coaxing. All this I observed distractedly.

       The nurses and phlebotomists spoke to me from what seemed like a far remove, coming into sight briefly to “check the site” of the surgery or bleed my arm into brightly colored vacuum tubes. The cardiologist, at a distance, would survey my body, talk in low tones to someone, and disappear from view. I felt as if my head sat deep in a long white cone, like the one a vet put on the neighbor’s dog after surgery, to stop it from scratching the wounds.

       My sons would come with Richard and fidget in the monotony. On the phone with my parents, my lips formed familiar phrases. My mind played its inane sound track, replacing the frantic rhythms of “-ack-ack-ack” with something more serene: an ironic, easy-listening song with the band They Might Be Giants repeating, “I’m having a heart attack, I’m having a heart attack . . .”

       Then the nurse taught me a new trick: turning on my side to pee into a graduated bottle. No more bed pans! My sister always said life turns on a dime. I committed the error of peeing from my left side and could feel my body’s weight collapsing my lung. Just then a student walked in, having ignored the No Visitors signs and breezed past the nurses station. As she talked on about minutiae (my replacement in class) and youthful abstractions (the fragility of life), I found I could no longer breathe. A fit of coughing came on. Hearing the rattle in my breath, she stared, as if noticing me for the first time, then excused her self and left. I coughed pointlessly, flat on my back. Exhausted by the convulsions, I pled with the nurse. She was adamant: sitting up would only reopen the incision. When the cardiologist arrived, he looked pained, pondering with one finger tapping his lips. Then, as the nurse murmured objections, he raised his hand part way, permitting me to operate the electric bed, until he signaled stop. (Perhaps this was why the nurses, mistaking my closed eyes for sleep, called him Wild Bill among themselves?) Sitting halfway, I could cough “productively” — the nurse’s term. She gave me another measuring cup, and I spent that night by turns filling it up with phlegm and readjusting the rubbery respirator mask.

       On the third day, Wild Bill came in, sat primly in my bed, and explained. Against poor odds the angioplasty might hold the arteries open, but a scar-tissue heart will never pump as well.

       He said I came close to dying.

       I said I regretted not fainting, felt cheated of my escape.

       He disagreed: Staying conscious kept me alive.

       At that we paused.

       Then he admitted he feared losing a patient so young.

       Oh, I wasn’t going to die, I assured him. My sons weren’t quite ready to be on their own. I still had to finish my dissertation. Besides, I was taking Richard to Spain next year, in fulfillment of a lifelong dream. I thought desire alone could unblock my path.

 

       When I interviewed for a job in Syracuse, the local press was covering a fraternity prank: Kill-A-Fag tee-shirts. The dean tried to reassure me. “I couldn’t have lived in New York for seventeen years without recognizing the contributions gays make to the arts.” I mistook this for support and accepted the job, a step that proved near fatal.

       The school had other gay and lesbian employees, none of them out at work, but that fact seemed unimportant. I couldn’t believe how strange the place felt. When I went to his office the dean would remark on my dress or state of grooming. His compliments unnerved me. One of his lieutenants could not see me without petting my balding head. What did I do, I asked myself, to encourage this?

       Soon the incidents escalated. After I voiced dissent in a faculty meeting, a department chair planted herself in the door to my office at eight the next day, trapping me there for a quarter hour while she berated me for flamboyant behavior. When I stood my ground, she became enraged. The following summer, hearing a plan to assign me a different office, a senior professor started a whispering campaign to keep the querulous upstart in his place. Unaware, I returned to campus, only to face the dean’s scolding for this latest load of “political baggage.”

       I blamed myself and resolved to attend better to social matters. Yet my offers to take co-workers for lunch went often ignored and never reciprocated. After agreeing to come for dinner, a professor might simply not show up, without calling to explain. I could perceive no collusion here, no planning or conscious intent. People just seemed to find me an annoyance. The constant slights and subtle put-downs left me hurt, and the blow-ups left me feeling frightened.

       At home I noticed my stomach churning, my heart always pounding, keeping me up all night. At work I kept too busy. I sat on the campus boards that brought in domestic partner benefits and that guided the campaign to “value diversity.” These successes helped me ignore the harshness of my own school. Falling into ill health, I never considered stress, and the doctors remained in the dark. Then came the heart attack.

       Upon returning to work, triple bypass surgery and months of physical therapy behind me, I first noticed feeling nervous in the office. The doctor put me on anti-depressants and sent me for counseling “to readjust.” Then another incident: After I declined to host a guest speaker, a department chair began sending hostile messages by electronic mail, sometimes several a day. He accused me of carrying on a double life, neglecting my work, and harming my students. He threatened to expose me, saying he could fill a newspaper with all the facts he had on me. I denied these allegations, politely in spite of my agitation. Still the messages kept arriving. When I finally complained, the dean set up a meeting “to talk about my future in the school.” Over lunch at the faculty club, he recounted the history of what he called my “social problem,” upbraiding me for three long hours, until I had to go to class.

       Teaching was always a relief. In the classroom the administrators left me alone. That day the topic was stereotyping, and the students, working in groups, produced a list of traits for Latinos, Blacks, and the rest. When they read their list for gay men, my mind reeled. Gay men are weaklings. Hum, so that’s why people yelled at me. Gay men are vain; people made comments on my personal grooming. Over dressed: they remarked on my clothes. Sexually unthreatening: women touching my head. Interior decorators: my new office. Gay men lead double lives, molest children, and are vulnerable to threats of exposure — the students had listed my social problem. I felt stupid. How had I missed it?

       I went looking for help. The sexual harassment officer could do nothing. She advised me to keep a file. The social worker from the employee assistance program did no better. She suggested I find other work. A gay psychologist proposed stress management training. Finally I went to the cardiologist. While I told him my story, he eyed me keenly and then took notes. “This case has always bothered me,” he said. Oh, he’d had many patients complain of stress, but this time the diagnosis was clear. Wild Bill, true to his nickname, offered to help me fight the university.

       I was lucky. I found a new job, in a gay supportive department in Chicago. With my sons off to work or college, I moved to Andersonville, my north shore neighborhood. Still, I know I’m naive. When vandals broke into our New Hampshire house — shattering windows, scattering our clothes, smashing in the TV set and microwave, slashing tires, stealing our small worthless treasures — and on their way out carved Die Fag in the sofa seat, I felt afraid. Instead of going to the next town meeting, I stayed home, intimidated.

       Contrary to every expectation, pushing fifty is the happiest time of my life. Start with being alive. I love exercising every day. Even my low-fat diet is a challenging game I enjoy. It makes me proud. When people guess I’m thirty five, it makes me chuckle. Getting older feels so rich — I earned every year. The magnificent scars down my chest and leg, on my groin and palm, and across my soul bear witness. Sometimes when I walk beneath the Chicago skyline, sit in my favorite coffee shop, or rollerblade along the lakefront, I feel the mystery of my identity well up, that calm, majestic joy.