Four years ago, in Miami, I once found Carolyn in her office popping a handful of pills from a bottle marked ARSENIC 100x. I thought she was trying to kill herself and very nobly knocked the pills out of her hand. Annoyed, she explained to me that the pills were a homeopathic preparation Like cures like. I asked what she was trying to cure and she answered with a laundry list of ear infections, stomach aches, allergies, liver dysfunction, and more.
“You seem so healthy,” I told her, shocked.
“I am,” she said “It’s age. Everything starts falling apart. Once you hit thirty there’s always something wrong. And it’s always cancer.”
Now I’m twenty-nine, and I come down with cancer or worse at least once a month Cramps are no longer innocent cramps, they’re pelvic inflammatory disease, an ectopic pregnancy, or ovarian cancer. A mild pain in my arm is not a tendon inflamed from a day of typing but the first sign of multiple sclerosis On New Year’s Day I wake up with a throbbing, probably infected, probably cancerous right sinus. I haven’t gone out on New Year’s Eve since before the turn of the nineties so it couldn’t be a hangover symptom. Having a library at home the size of a small public school’s is not always an asset; in the hundreds of books is a small but deadly collection of medical titles I can browse at the first sign of dysfunction or degeneration and drive myself into a panic attack. I already have every entry for dementia, memory loss, and neurological disorders bookmarked, along with every entry for PID and multiple sclerosis I spend New Year’s Day researching the sinus An unglamorous cavity. I ignore the allergies and simple viruses and skip to the good stuff. I learn it’s unlikely to be cancer, the incidence of cancer in the sinus is 1 in 1,253,987. Most likely it’s an incurable infection that is the first sign of AIDS.
Echinacea does not help the cancerous, AIDS-ridden sinus, neither does goldenseal, megadoses of vitamin C, small sweet Bi Yan Pian pills, Belladonna 60x, self-induced acupressure, or a dairy-free diet. So on January fifth, I go to Dr Elaine Houseman, who I’ve been seeing on and off since my early twenties Elaine Houseman: medical doctor, licensed acupuncturist, homeopath, certified Bach Flower Remedy practitioner, chiropractor
Elaine will not give me a blood test because I’ve been tested every six months for the past two years—more often than I’ve had sex But she does agree to give me a physical She begins by taking my pulse in six different spots. Then she listens to my lungs with a stethoscope and examines the color of my tongue She puts a sugar cube, and then a wheat berry, and then a soybean under my tongue and tests my resistance as she pushes against my arm She reads the irises of my eyes and announces a verdict
“You’ve got a rotten tooth,” she tells me. “You need to get a root canal or get it pulled ”
“A root canal and my sinus?” I think that whatever I have, it’s spreading
“No,” Elaine explains, “the sinus infection is caused by an infected molar.”
“What?”
“An infected tooth, a molar How else can I put it? Number one, upper right rear, directly under the sinus cavity. Fix the tooth, you’ll fix the sinus. The pain, it comes and goes, right?”
“Yes,” I admit.
“It’s worse at night, right?”
“Yes ”
“It’s the tooth.”
I ask if there’s any way to avoid the dentist. Acupuncture? Herbs? Channeling?
“Look,” says Elaine. “Fix the tooth, then we’ll see. Sometimes the easy way is the best way.”
No one I know has a good dentist, not even Elaine. At twenty-nine I do not know a single person stable enough to have a good dentist The people I know, they can tell you the best tattooist, the best coke dealer, the best Korean barbecue, and not one of them has a dentist. At twenty-nine I have the humbling experience of having to ask my mother for a dentist. I’m further humiliated when my mother offers to pay for the root canal I appreciate this, this is very kind of you, but Mother, I’m twenty-nine years old. I work for a big corporation with a full-page ad in this week’s Book Review. Color! The ad is full color! Believe me, I can afford a little dental work
My mother’s dentist is on Park Avenue, near Dr Snyder’s office. At Wilson Books I had worked with Nancy Rivington, heiress to to the Rivington Frozen Fried Fish fortune. Nancy once told me about taking her children to the Bronx Zoo and finding out to her horror that it was Free Day, the monthly concession to the city’s poor when the zoo drops the eight-dollar entrance fee. Nancy told me more stories about the poor people she had seen—their eating habits, their gestures, their lifestyles, their language—than she did about the animals. This is how I feel on the Upper East Side, going to the dentist on Park Avenue—like I’ve been let in the zoo for Free Day
The dentist, a man frighteningly close to my own age to be so wealthy and talented, tells me yes, he can save the tooth Save The Tooth Like this is a telethon; if we all work hard and give what we can, we can Save The Tooth. I ask Dr Moneybags what I can expect to pay to Save The Tooth About fifteen hundred for the root canal, he says nonchalantly, and about another fifteen hundred for the crown. Then there’s also the post. And the core. And a followup visit
“You have got to be fucking kidding,” I say The doctor looks apprehensive, faced with the prospect of someone who would mention money, even think about money, when he’s taking the high road and thinking about nothing but Saving The Tooth. I think for a second about three grand—a used car, a year’s worth of new clothes, more than one month’s salary—and I think about the small white tile in the rear of my mouth. I’ve never felt a lot of attachment for it I’m not in love with it I tell him I don’t want it.
“Well, no one likes a root canal,” he says. “But we can—”
“No, I mean the tooth I don’t want it. Can you pull it?”
“We can perform an extraction, but that’s not cheap either “ He’s glib. I am so off his radar now.
“How much?”
“A surgical extraction, that’s about three hundred More, with anesthesia,”
“You have got to be kidding me. You want three hundred bucks to pull a fucking tooth?”
The doctor asks me to leave. I walk out without paying the bill for the exam and don’t start to cry until I’m in the elevator. The other passengers back away, like crying is contagious. Like it’s Free Day at the zoo
Truth be told, if my heart was in it I could Save The Tooth. My father was born into a wealthy family Then Michael went to Columbia, undergrad through Ph D., then he bought the four-story brownstone on Twelfth Street, where we lived until he died, then he started GV, a money pit that didn’t even break even until ten years ago, then he got sick, and went through years of expensive, ultimately worthless treatments before he died Health insurance, life insurance—these were for the middle class So a lot was already gone.
After my father died, Evelyn sold the house on Twelfth Street at a loss—it was the recession—and got a good deal on the more valuable property on Commerce Street, where we moved afterward. With three tenants she actually managed to make a small profit from the place, even though two of the three tenants are rent-stabilized, meaning Evelyn can only charge them about half the market rate. She decided to keep GV going, and then expand it, at the price of at least another million over the years, and I doubt the profit it’s turned over the past few years has made even a dent in the tremendous loss it ran for the first twenty She decided to send me to private school, ten thousand a year We had to eat, and eat well. I needed babysitters virtually every day, with Evelyn busy down at the money pit; we needed clothes, good clothes, we needed health insurance, we needed books A nice chunk of what Michael left was put aside for me to have on my eighteenth birthday—a college fund, a starting-out-in-the-world fund, a do-something-with-your-life fund
I did something, all right. I dropped out of college after less than a year and then blew through three hundred thousand dollars in four years.
Dropping out of college was one of the easiest decisions I ever made Starting college was one of the stupidest In the fall when I was sixteen Mayor Koch’s million-dollar campaign to eradicate graffiti had left the city colorless I loved that graffiti. I especially loved the numbers 2 and 3 trains, their flat exteriors perfect canvases for epics. Not just Tito Loves Kate thrown up with a paint pen, but a brilliant illumination of Tito and Kate meeting in the Wyckoff Projects, their first kiss in Times Square, and, finally, painting trains together at Coney Island The city wasn’t the same without it. So I applied, and was accepted, to a college in Rhode Island. The admissions board didn’t have the time to plow through the St. Liz’s purple prose, I just flashed my SAT, ERB, and I.Q scores and they let me in
So the fall when I was seventeen I packed up my favorite clothes and favorite books and shipped them up to Providence, where I would meet them after a trip on Amtrak I had never left home before and my mother had taken the subway to college, so neither of us knew about the little ritual of parents driving their children to campus on the first day of school. My roommate’s parents thought I was an orphan and tried to take me out to dinner. The roommate herself seemed nice enough while her parents were around, a smiling razor-nosed WASP with matching white everything But as soon as her parents left she lit a cigarette and turned to me with a smirk, checking out my ripped jeans and Ramones T-shirt
“I don’t know what kind of fucking financial-aid-charity shit brought you here,” she said, “but listen to this: This half of the room is mine. Everything in this half of the room is mine. If you touch my shit, if you look at my shit, if you so much as think about anything that belongs to me, I’ll fucking kill you ”
I was surprised, to say the least, but I had a few inches on her and I wasn’t scared. I stepped into her side of the room, which incidentally included both the window and the door, and picked up a neatly packed white plastic bin of Georgette Klinger acne care products and threw it to the wall directly above her head Little tubes of pimple cream and toner toppled down and she cowered, but then she remembered she was supposed to be tough and straightened back up, ready to speak I didn’t give her a chance “If you ever talk to me again,” I said effectively, if not brilliantly, “I’ll kill you.”
I found my way to the housing office, cut the long line of complainants and told the woman at the counter that my roommate had threatened me with death. I got a single room, she got an obligatory string of sessions with the student counselor, and I never saw her again I think her name was Georgia
So college began. The scenery was beautiful, leaves changing to crimson and gold and sweeps of bright green grass rolling over the New England knobs and hills. The classes were dull and the students were duller I was ear deep in people my own age who had never been fucked, never been drunk, never read Sophocles or even Hemingway. In Introduction to Philosophy we pondered whether the teacher’s desk was real or a dream—and what if we were all, really, pawns in someone else’s dream? Since we had no options, I asked the teacher, couldn’t we safely put all our money on the bet that we were in fact real? Wasn’t that a chance worth taking without much discussion? I got a C, my lowest grade that term I had read most of the books I was supposed to be reading and I had a lot of time on my hands, in college. I saw two of my father’s books in the campus shop, requirements for a Philosophy of Literature class, and I felt very smug about the fact that I had read them as a child—even if I hadn’t necessarily understood them After a few weeks of Intro to This and Intro to That I gave up and stopped going to class altogether. I spent a lot of time in my room, reading Kathy Acker and Henry Miller, which didn’t help my attitude, and within two months I had found a better place to spend my time than a classroom when I felt like going out The Cadillac. The Cadillac was a dingy, dark little bar on the edge of the college side of Providence, with a short wooden bar and two filthy tables and a jukebox with Elvis and Sinatra and Tom Jones and Johnny Cash My first trip to The Cadillac was a mistake. A girl I knew from the city was going to art school on the other side of town and we made plans to meet in Providence for a drink I didn’t know my way around and ended up at The Cadillac instead of The Porsche, the college hangout where she was waiting. By two o’clock in the morning I was drunk and happy—I had found my new home in Providence
I was the only college student who hung out at The Cadillac, and one of only a few women Jim Barruci, owner and bartender, had worked at the Plant for twenty years before he inherited The Cadillac from his father. I don’t know what they made or did at the Plant, but most of the men from The Cadillac worked at the Plant, or at the Docks I never found out because no one at The Cadillac wanted to talk about work It was rare that anyone wanted to talk at all. When the men at the bar did want to talk it was about the past—women, fights, cops, and youth. Lenny, the barback, busboy, and porter, was the only man at The Cadillac who never worked at the Plant or the Docks. All his life he worked at The Cadillac, starting as a teenager for Jim’s grandfather, then for Jim’s father, and now for Jim. Lenny lived in an apartment upstairs from the bar and ate all his meals in the Main Street Diner, a real chrome dining car, down the block. Lenny was a little touched. Every time Lenny saw me he gave me all the pennies in his pocket, saved up for days, because college was expensive, and he didn’t want me to do without.
I didn’t last a year. I turned eighteen and came into my do-something-with-your-life fund, and the magnetic attraction of being young, rich, and single in New York was too strong My last night in Providence I went to The Cadillac and at the end of the night I told the men at the bar I wouldn’t be coming back I didn’t expect them to say much, and they didn’t.
The next day I was walking across campus to get more packing tape when I saw Lenny, huffing and puffing and almost running in the direction of my dorm.
“Mary,” Lenny called out. “Mary I’m so glad I found you. These snobby motherfuckers, they didn’t even want to let me onto the campus. I had to tell ‘em I was your father just to get in the gate Anyways, me and Jim and everyone, we chipped in and we got you this For your big trip back to the Rotten Apple.” Behind him he pulled a small suitcase, the kind with ball-bearing wheels and a telescoping pull-handle It was cherry red and brand new, tags still on, with zippers and pockets and buckles and straps on each side
“Oh, Lenny,” I said. “Oh, Lenny, I love it.” From the smile on my face he knew I was telling the truth and he smiled too. We smiled at each other for another minute and then he said, “Well, bye now,” and turned and walked away, back to The Cadillac. I wanted to tell him, I wish it was true, that he was my father, but I didn’t, and I still have the little red suitcase that probably cost them all of thirty dollars
Evelyn was bitterly disappointed when I left school. It had been a big deal for my mother to go to Brooklyn College and when she transferred to Columbia, her parents had never heard of it—that’s how stratospherically education catapulted her out of her class. Without Columbia she would probably be an English teacher at PS 321 today But the upper-middle-class bookish life that college gave to her, I was born into. I thought, at eighteen, that I knew enough about books and school Since the day in 1982 when Veronica asked to copy my French homework I had been taking steps into the visceral world my class and education were meant to protect me from. At fourteen I won my first fight in Tompkins Square Park, at fifteen I lost my virginity in Washington Square Park, and at sixteen I had my first real love affair, with a man twice my age who I met, ironically, at the GV office
John Gale was a well-known writer with two novels and a collection of short stories in print. I was coming into the office, I think to get some cash from Evelyn. He was leaving, going for drinks with a cute female editor He was publishing a story in GV that month. Being the editor’s daughter, I was treated like royalty at the GV office; pampered, schmoozed, resented behind my back. I hated going there.
We met in the hallway and the editor introduced me to John. I knew who he was, even though I hadn’t read any of his books. I made a funny little joke about the subway, and they both laughed A real laugh, not a pandering-to-the-boss’s-daughter laugh. That was that. I thought John was the handsomest man I had ever seen I went home and read Evelyn’s first edition of American Sweetheart, John’s first novel, written when he was ten years older than I was then. The narrator, previously a foreign correspondent for The New York Times in the Middle East, is trying to settle down in London with a new wife, a real English Lady, and a new job as columnist for the London Times. The wife-Lady wants horses and children, he wants some action. They have affairs. They get divorced. It’s a typical autobiographical first novel, except that it’s good
I met him again a few days later at a cafe on Prince Street Fate I was cutting school and reading Crime and Punishment I had, literally, outgrown most of my punk rock gear, growing from five-three to five-six in two years I kept my nose ring and kept dyeing my hair but had lost patience with all those buckles and zippers. John walked in and sat down a few tables away. Our eyes met. He said hello Fate.
“Don’t you work at GV?” he asked.
“No, I’m Evelyn’s daughter.” We reintroduced ourselves.
“Did you hear the news?” he asked.
“What?”
“We’re going to war. Against Iraq ”
He moved to the table next to mine and we talked about the war for a while, and about the book I was reading. We didn’t talk about ourselves. He asked if I wanted to go to a movie with him at the new Angelika theater in NoHo. I said I could go on Friday, and we made plans to meet then. To John’s credit, he had no idea when we met that I was only sixteen. But when I told him, in the lobby of the Angelika, it didn’t bother him too much
John was a drunk, although I didn’t know it at the time I was too young to see the difference between a teenager and a thirty-two-year-old drinking themselves into oblivion every night. The difference is, at thirty-two, it’s not a phase and it’s not experimentation. It’s being a drunk. I didn’t know this then, and in my mind we were a regular happy couple. In the first half of the day I would go to school and he would write At five o’clock we would meet at our favorite East Village bar and start with beer and How was your day, move on to whiskey and I think I love you, I really think I could fall in love with you, more whiskey and How could you say that, I thought you loved me, more whiskey and making up, sloppy hugs and kisses and off to pass out after a bit of impotent fumbling in bed. I thought it was heaven. When John told me he was moving to New Hampshire, and was seeing a swanky editor behind my back and trying to lure her to New Hampshire with him, I was shocked. Unhealthy? Us? This was paradise! He told me to call him if I ever needed anything. We would always be friends, he said I cried myself to sleep for a week, told my mother I had a cold (which she somehow believed) and never called him. After three weeks he started calling from New Hampshire, drunk, and telling me how much he missed me. Then I got a new boyfriend, an SVA student who lived in Brooklyn, and I stopped taking his calls.
So I didn’t need college to introduce me to sophisticated, heartbreaking men, to introduce me to literature, to show me the bohemian universe of intellectual chat and cigarettes and booze, like Evelyn had. The original plan when I left school was, I was going to be a writer. It was probably the influence of all that Henry Miller and Kathy Acker. I thought anyone could do it I wouldn’t be an academic writer like my parents, but a real writer, like John, the tough stuff—fiction This was a nice framework to hang my debauched life on; anything and everything went, all under the guise of material Up on coke for forty-eight hours? Great for a short story. One night stand with a junkie? I had to do it—that just might be the perfect novella. I did, in the course of five years, manage to complete one-quarter of a novel (which I threw in the trash the day I ran out of money and started my job at Carl’s) and one decent short story, which after a year of rejections was finally published in a not-so-shabby literary journal headquartered in Vermont. The story was about a girl in an affair with an older man. As soon as the autobiographical little ditty came out, I saw how truly awful it was and felt hideous with shame, like I had pissed in my pants The only consolation was that I had published it under a pen name, Maria Woods, and so no one would know it was mine I never used my real name when I sent my stories out. I didn’t want any special consideration for coming from the Forrest family I wanted to sink or swim on my own industry and my own merits, and I fell quickly to the bottom of the pond.
There’s no point in regret One morning I woke up and I was twenty-four, I had forty two thousand, five hundred, and fifty-five dollars in the bank, I was hungover, and I felt like crap. I felt about ninety With Veronica’s help I made a fake resume and sent it around. The only skill or useful knowledge I had was that I knew a lot about books, and so I mostly applied at bookstores and publishers. Within two weeks I had a job working for Carl. After a year or so I became restless and moved to publishing, imagine every combination and variation on the words editor and assistant and you’ll know what I went through. Once you’ve been around the block a few times, maybe around the whole Island of Manhattan once or twice, it is very difficult to take an interdepartmental memo seriously. Then Carl offered me the job in Miami, and for the first time I made enough money to support myself without skimming off the trust fund. I moved to Miami, I moved back to New York, it was three months before I could work again, and now the nest egg is less than what I make in a year.
It’s all I have left of my father And I’m not giving up three grand of it to Save The Tooth.