Outcomes

I’m not proud of any of this.

As I write this, it’s National Coming Out Day. That’s not my day, any more than Black Lives Matter is my life. I don’t have any desire to dorksplain the meaning of situations, life circumstances, or events to which I am not party. More important to listen, I suspect, so maybe I’ll post this tomorrow. My closet boasts not a single cheerful rainbow.

There are universal human reasons for closets, though. They’re where we hide like children. They’re where we store the costumery we’re not wearing right now: old fur, misshapen kilts, those sharp-lookin’ boots with one small hole that we haven’t gotten around to repairing and can’t stand to toss just yet. Closets can be oases of transformation where we pull on our superhero togs, but are more often the memory hole where we stuff the things we’d rather forget, from lime-and-banana bowling team jerseys to our sneaking fear that maybe we pushed too hard with Janey, all those years ago, and what if someone finds out? Eventually, all we remember about the baggage of our past, stuffed as it is into the rapid access shame dispensers of our various closets, is that we’d better not crack that door until and unless we’re damn well prepared for the fallout.

Oddly, it’s not my queer wife or my gay daughter — both of whom currently find themselves cheerfully ensnared in relationships with men because, Lovely Reader, their lives are no simpler than yours — who prompted my brief reckoning of this morning. Nor was it the memory of Janey, with whom I believe I was a perfetto gentiluomo, as what choice did I have? I was five years old and, at the early ripening age of 11, she was my first Older Woman. One kiss on the cheek was all it took to cement a lifelong fixation on dark-eyed brunettes. I follow them like a baby duck now (NOTE: that’s a predilection, not a confession).

No. The person who unwittingly kicked me into this confessional moment of owning who I am is an accidental Facebook friend, a man whom I’ve never met and, if I’m to be honest, probably will not meet in this life. Staring down a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s, he gets to watch his powers fade from a tall seat inside the control booth. That has to be a bit like watching yer ol’ home team go from fifty-point favorite to ignominious underdog, then lose its NCAA sanction. As a writer, traveler, and educated man with a crackle-fire brain, he’s perceptive enough to feel every creeping advance of his inexorable disability — and he’s not embarrassed by it. He’s defiant, and I love this unmet man for his iron spine and persistent humor (not “good” humor — would you be cheerful about it? Would any of us?).

Here it comes, then.

I’m not who I was. In the broadest sense, of course, none of us is. Since yesterday, your fingernails have grown or been clipped, retained some garlic juice or garage grease under their edges, perhaps sustained a nailbed bruise that’ll leave ya hangin’ sooner than later. You got a little older, found a new cause, worked out a difficulty with your coworker or, more challengingly, with your household teen. Each one of us changes, in ways tiny and stupendous, through the course of each day. This low-scale dynamism comprises, yet rarely disrupts, our prosaic daily reality. It’s not what I’m writing about here, at all.

This is a confession of my fakery.

A few years ago I imagined myself at the top of my game. I didn’t bother knocking on wood when I said that, either. While grateful for the wonderfully weird life that swirled around me, I was pretty cocky, too. Freelancers earn our suppers, every time out. There is zero security. You put your ass out there and hope it doesn’t get shot off, telling yourself you’re too fast for ’em, anyway. You shoot first and questions aren’t for later; they’re for never. Writing without a contract is motorcycling on a new road, faster than is prudent, with no resources to fall back on but fortune, attitude, and over-clocking your processor.

I don’t do either of those things anymore.

“My name is Jack, and I’m a lapsed motorcyclist.” A few years ago, riding a beautiful, hand-built bike for a feature article in Motorcyclist, I balled up the bike…hard. The details, which are notably unimportant here, are also unflattering.

Since getting smeared across the hood of a Subaru several years ago, I’ve retained a loose wiggle in my spine. It wasn’t my first spinal fracture. Broke the transverse process of my sacroiliac back in the 90s, and my neck (C-4, if it matters) in Iraq. Probably the roadside bomb that flung a 9,800-lb. up-armored HMMWV into momentary knife-edge flight, pushed CSF out of my ear, and made me “blink”(i.e. pass out briefly) for the only time I can remember during that tour. I’ve always described the sensation afterward as “sand in my turret” — there’s a grinding sound in my head at every sideward glance. Over time, it’s gotten better. My neck rarely catches fire up the left side anymore, and that collarbone doesn’t feel dislocated nearly as often (honestly, the plate may be helping), but I’m pretty squishy in the disks. It affects balance and coordination, informing my generally staggery physical demeanor. Then a Subaru sent me high enough into the air that I totaled it with my own ass on the inevitable orbital decay, and busted up my lumbar spine.

So it had been a while since my back respected my intentions, but I wasn’t telling that to the gentlemen building and selling that amazing vee-torque wunderbike. My ossified armature mostly worked okay. I could ride around it, same as accommodating old drum brakes or queer British shifting. Mad skillz, right? See above under “fortune, attitude, and over-clocking your processor.”

I nearly died that day. I don’t mean that like “dodged a bullet” or “wow, that was close!” or “cheated death again.”

I didn’t dodge squat. That day’s bullet struck me square in the chest cavity and I didn’t cheat Death. We wrestled like Jacob and the angel, and I absolutely would have lost that round had it not been for Pretty Wife, a faithful friend, my daughters, and an extraordinary team of highly qualified professionals repeatedly dragging me away from the brink I seemed intent on oozing over.

The details are unimportant here and anyway, after the first trauma surgery, the main threat to my continued opportunity to annoy you was pneumonia, “the old people’s friend.” After surviving life events adding up to five plates, dozens of screws, and two-plus lineal feet of suturing and stapling, it was the ignominy of a glorified chest cold that took me all the way down a dark hallway and showed me that glowing red door on the left.

Didn’t break my back; not that time. I couldn’t tell you why my balance and coordination degraded further after spending three weeks in the ICU, but I don’t ride anymore. Please don’t bother telling me that’s all in my head, because of course it is. I was never that graceful, thoroughbred jock in the first place and if you doubt that for an instant, ask my little brother and my oldest friend how often they horse-laughed at my skateboard ineptitude. For decades, I’ve known that’s where riding emerges: from your head and your heart, and occasionally the scrotum. Hands and feet and chest and such are negotiable. You just gotta believe, set your focus, and practice for a couple dozen years.

On the rebound (photo by Ren Doughty).

The body is not endlessly negotiable, though. Mine looks pretty good now, considering (“considering” meaning “as long as I wear a shirt and long socks”). My recovery has been astonishing — to me, if no one else — and while I may never again get under a bench bar weighing over 300 lbs., I can pass for strong.

Well, after the first few steps, anyway.

“Warm-up” is no longer reserved for dedicated athletic pursuits. I warm up in the morning before I put my feet on the floor. I roller my back before I drive to the store, and stretch for 20 minutes to prepare for Netflix & Chill. The last time I swung my leg over a trusted, familiar motorcycle, it took three tries.

Yeah. I sold that bike. Sold most of ’em, actually. Took me a year or more to decide that and another year to acknowledge, even to friends, that I don’t ride anymore.

That’s not what I’m talking about, either. Embarrassing though it is to give up a life’s passion when I still possess 20 digits that are attached and nominally functional, that’s not what knocked my entire, rather carelessly crafted image into a cocked hat.

See, I’m no Nicky Hayden or Kenny Roberts. I was never destined to go out in an eye blink at the top of my game, or to still be faster than mortal riders after suffering a broken back, ruptured spleen, and a heart attack (I mean, seriously — I’ve only had two of those).

I just write. It’s all I’ve got, and most of what I am, and the gleaming edge of that ability — the friction zone between free association and accurate description that good writers explore like the edge of a sportbike’s traction, the ability to hammer home folded layers of meaning like samurai steel — has retreated beyond my ken. The confidence, instincts, and reflexes to craft something that might just astonish an angry critic on her second reading: that is a territory I remember like the color plate on an old post card. I traveled there once, and it was a great privilege to explore even the tiniest county among its infinite demesnes.

Greater than I knew.

For a couple of years, I’ve been struggling to make my way back there. If — and it remains a solid “if” — I find that land again, I’ll limp across its border station swaddled in the shameful comfort of a station wagon, blue-and-white gimp tag pendulating morosely from its rear-view mirror.

There are more things in Heaven and Earth than Horatio’s philosophy dream’t, but the ICU sees them all. You know and I know that having a sore back makes a man cranky; it doesn’t remove his talent. Losing an organweight or gaining a few grams of titanium may decimate one’s capacity for racquetball or marathoning but in today’s sophisticated medical environment, they hardly condemn a career or kill an ambition.

Just like I imagined you saying above, it’s all in my head.

Hangin’ out, up there in my head, it shares company with multiple TBIs, some family history that I’m loathe to share here, combat-related PTSD, and more than a week on a respirator — much of it heavily sedated and some of that while awake.

Do not ever be awake on a respirator if you can possibly plan around it.

As have most of us, I’ve sustained a few ugly discomforts along my path. Counting up the fractures I could document, I quit caring (and counting) after I hit the mid-thirties — not in age, but in bones. I’ve been hit by a truck, two cars, and a boat (don’t ask). My jaw was smashed by the fist of a large, angry man when I was four years old. I’ve seen the color of my bones. My key fob used to be attached to one of them.

No part of that compares to the horror of being awake for half a week with a pipe jammed through your voicebox into your chest, used a thousand times a day to inflate your lungs and a dozen times a day to vacuum out fistfuls of the phlegm that’s drowning you. If we want to perfect “enhanced interrogation” techniques to terrify America’s enemies, we need look no further than the nearest trauma ward because I’m here to tell ya: waterboarding is for pussies.

More usefully, if we want to understand what happens to the minds of people under Intensive Care, we might well follow the lead of Dr. E. Wesley Ely (if you’ve gotten this far into my own ramblings, let me assure you that this article [see link] is much more useful fodder for your juicy, inquisitive brain).

It’s all mind over matter, right? Without my mind, I don’t matter. Hiding in my house, producing nothing whatever of consequence to the wider world, I’ve endeavored to preserve my cocky image as a hyper-verbal iconoclast despite clear evidence that it’s become a lie as tawdry as politics. There’s no crackle in my fireworks, no focus to my optic. I committed to writing projects, then watched them lapse into paroxysms of blank, uncomprehending panic. These days I organize my thoughts the way ROTC candidates commit land nav: with an incapacity bordering on mental violence to those around me. There are words and I know that I knew them, but I don’t know what they might once have been, or how they fit into what I might be thinking, which was…

…what, again? My syntax contains all the graceful rhythms of a toddler banging on a xylophone, and the mishmash jumble of this blog entry is the longest thing I’ve written in (hmm…lessee…carry the zero…) years.

It’s something, anyway. If I don’t push the limits of rapid research; if I stick to a topic I’ve ruminated over for more than a year; if I rely more on googling well-known history and looking up words and the ugly shame of grammar check; if I don’t bite off more than I can gum; if I stay in my narrowing lane, well…I can write a bit. Like picking nickels off shiny tables with gnarled, arthritic mitts, it’s doable with negotiated technique, patience, and the wistful resignation that I don’t have anything better to do.

Like my unmet friend, I didn’t expect to haz the dumbz. Well, not yet, anyway. Didn’t expect to be, in our President’s compassionate parlance, “low-energy Jack.” Like that Alzheimer’s sufferer, I hoped to live well into my dotage before gently tillering my tired brain toward a well-earned bank of geriatric fog, smiling hazily into the middle distance with grandchildren crawling over my lap blanket like puppies escaped from their whelping basket. I did not expect to see weakness approach with giant, thundering strides, much less feel parts of me fall and spin away into the weightless disconnection of HAL 9000’s memory modules.

Who wants that?

Full disclosure: unlike my unwitting hero, I may claim some diminished function back. Some aspects have improved, albeit slowly. Post-ICU dementia seems to be, like PTSD’s notorious “brain fog,” somewhat repairable or at least negotiable (if you haven’t read the article linked above, go back and read it now).

Exercise helps, and I’ve been exercising to the full extent of my powers since before they pulled the tubes out of my ribs, armpit, shoulder, abdomen, and stomach wall (full disclosure: no exercise happened before they pulled out my respirator and feeding tubes; ’twas a short leash there for a while). As with children, socialization helps, so I try to get out some. When I’m not gratefully tasked out with grocery shopping and gardening and such, I assign myself little projects to re-engage the clutch between my brain and my hands. If it takes me a week to make a bird feeder, so be it. That’s one bird feeder to the good.

And I make coffee, of course. So. Much. Coffee. If the fierce, fizzy joy of finding the fast line through a paragraph won’t come to me on its own, at least I can worship a false idol to it with shaky hands and cardiac arrhythmia.

Working against my baked-in trepidation may help some. I’d be grateful to not feel so fearful about my lack of productivity that it paralyzes my gumption further. Writing for me is bound up with motorcycling in more than subject matter. For at least the transient passages during which I did those things well, I got to feel like a momentary expert. If not a dweller in Odin’s Festhalle, then at least a back bench kid with a shot at getting a date after the real heroes passed out. Now I listen to the pur sang practitioners of either art not with collegiality but with the mandatory, wide-eyed respect required of acolytes.

Nor do I want to back-step from the roguish élan of generations of highwaymen to wobbling tricycle laps, not in any sense. That pride is an obstacle chiefly because it’s not a true pride, is it? It’s just fear, trying to look suave behind a glued-on Clark Gable mustache.

But since, like my friend who is leaving me before we’ve been properly introduced, I can read what the Moving Finger writ before moving on; because I know that not all my tears shall wash out a word of it; that, indeed, all my Piety and Wit already are compromised: because of these unshakable truths, I’ll try to be as brave as he plainly is in mapping a dark and twilit land. In the words of a rueful, rural aphorism, “If ya don’t mind, it don’t matter,” but I need my mind to matter. At least to me and to my loves, among whom you may number.

Onward.

By Jessie Eastland – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59709779