Lately i’ve been thinking of the central question which occupies all of us who seem to be lost: who am i? It’s something which, i think, every great person probably knows, or which every person who would like to have been great, once they reach their end, should know if they want to have accomplished anything at all in their lives. Now i am getting older, i find i need to know who i am, because i never really figured it out; hence, i never finished college and never collected any sort of work history which would qualify me as having ever had a thing like a career. So: who am i?
I have come to the conclusion that this important question boils down to two factors: what makes me who i am, and what is my hidden talent?
So, what makes me who i am? Is it the deaths of loved ones, which forever haunt my ravaged, ragged psyche? Is it that backpacking jaunt around Europe in my twenties? Is it my childhood passion for visual art, now long-since nearly entirely abandoned? Piano lessons, for fuck’s sake? Trips to Kansas with my grandfather to visit his Alzheimer’s-stricken father? What made me?
Was it discovering i’d been born of some woman whom i’d never met? What about when i finally met her, and learned she was a junkie? Does it involve the infant brother my mother killed, or the sister she abandoned to the father’s family?
What made me who i am? Was it my grandparents raising me in the absence of my alcoholic, often homeless father? Or the times he showed up and we rode his yellow ten-speed around before the police arrived to take him away from me again?
Does it have something to do with the period from my late teens to my early twenties, when i expanded my consciousness far beyond the usual, rational psychic horizon with mind-altering chemicals? Is it because i figured out, on long nights with friends, staring into a fire, that the universe is all one thing, and us humans merely a small part of that one single thing?
Is it the terrifying asthma (seemingly a hereditary gift from my father, who suffered from it so greatly it became part of what makes him who he is), or the terrible allergies, these things which caused me to practically grow up in Dayton’s Children’s Hospital, surrounded by doctors with names and specialties i still can’t pronounce?
Is it simply the odd quirk that i consciously avoid using the word “that” wherever possible because i view it as the most superfluous word in the English language?
Was it something terrible, or something wonderful? Is it something equally both?
Does one (the cause) have something to do with the other (the talent)?
When i was in my late teens, i noticed i had a gnashing pain in my left fourth finger. At the time, it took whacking it against, or with, something to make the pain appear. It was like a toothache then. Within a few years, it would be an on-and-off constant pain, triggered by anything from an imperceptible change in g-force to temperature/humidity changes, to tactile pressure. You could feel it, like a hard pea under the skin, although all you could see was a slight mound which you had to stare at to perceive. But the pain… I remember thinking there was no way any woman could feel much more than that during natural childbirth. The pain was sheer; it was literally mind-erasing. Many times i’d end up collapsed on the ground, writhing in powerful agony and curled into a fetal position, grimacing like a victim of some horrible wartime violence. The only pain reliever i’d ever found to have any effect at all was Orudis KT, which was discontinued in the U.S. just a few years after my discovery of it. Just as well; it was negligible at best.
For over twelve years i carried this thing around with me. There was rarely a day without intense pain. Eventually i nearly totally gave up playing the guitar, although i also re-strung a twelve-string guitar with six strings, leaving enough space between the strings so i could play a little bit more comfortably. When i did play, i played Django style, with two fingers, throwing in my fifth finger as a lame substitute for my fourth. I could in fact play nearly anything that way, and when i absolutely had no other choice, i even used that fourth finger.
But the guitar was my greatest love and i had to let it sit for far longer than i wanted, or needed, between playing sessions. That alone did a lot to kill my spirit.
I had to adapt a lot to avoid angering It. Most activities i performed with my left arm at my side, or held up on my belly if too much blood caused throbbing pain. Driving was easy; i’d just hang my left arm out of the window and use my right arm for steering. I lived in Florida for much of this time, and i drove an automatic – no big deal. But i could not endure rapid temperature changes or excessive humidity. I often even stuck my arm out of the shower. Vigorous activity was out of the question.
Often times i thought – very, very seriously, i’m afraid – of cutting my finger completely off. At least the tip. There were in fact many times i was so painfully desperate that the idea seemed absolutely plausible to me. I’d do it myself, if only i could figure out how best to do it, on a practical level. But i’d always back down from it in the end, because i knew damn well i’d be permanently left with one less finger, and most likely a lifetime of phantom pain to show for it regardless.
Early on, i went to see a “sports medicine” specialist, who happened to be the brother of a famous talk-show host. I only went to see him once. His conclusion, lacking any real evidence (i’d only had an x-ray to go on then), was i had tendinitis; his treatment involved putting my whole arm into a stainless steel tub filled with cold water, and plugging the fucker into an electrical outlet. Essentially. It’s called electro-galvanic stimulation. Only i shouldn’t have been stimulating the goddamn thing! This only angered It.
The drive home was… difficult.
From then (sometime around 1992 i believe) until around 2005 or so, i didn’t see any other doctors about it. I knew damn well it was not tendinitis. Eventually i figured i had gout. After all, avoiding certain foods seemed to cause less pain, or to extend the period between “events.”
But at some point, the pain was just too much to be constantly bearing. I finally went and had some good images taken and the verdict was far more accurate. I had a glomus tumor.
So i had the fucker cut straight out of my finger. The pointed, mind-numbing ache i’d felt for a dozen years was replaced for two weeks afterward by the searing pain of rent flesh. But i got over it and finally started playing guitar like a normal goddamned human being again (although i still often find myself favoring my other three fingers). The doctor said glomus tumors often grow back. It is. I can feel it; it feels much the same as it did when i first began to notice that that finger seemed to be slightly more susceptible to pain than any other. Oh well. At some point, i’m sure i’ll have to deal with it again. However, i know better now, and i will deal with it much faster this time around.
Oh yeah, my hidden talent: i can do nearly anything using only one hand. Not incredibly useful, you might think, but it comes in very handy when i have both hands full and need to, for instance, open a two-liter bottle while simultaneously holding it. I can’t think of any way to capitalize on it though, outside of being maybe an astronaut or something (but my eyesight isn’t good enough for that i’m sure, among many other flaws in my character, detriment, and intelligence).
So i guess, until something better comes along, that’s who i am. My one-sentence biography is that i am a guy who stupidly lived for over ten years with the most painful and debilitating tumor a person could ever have, and adjusted as best he could to it, and tolerated it about as much as a human being could, and ultimately overcame it to live a normally-abled life again.
I’m pretty sure whoever reads this will immediately want to get into a pissing match with me over it, whether consciously or not. “That’s like the time I hurt my leg” (not, it is not), or “It couldn’t have been worse than when i broke my arm in half” (i bet it could), or whatever. That was a time. Mine was close to fifteen fucking years of horrible blood-curdling pain. No doubt a great many people have had much, much worse to endure than i. However i am not interested in comparing or contrasting my personal hell with anybody else’s. (So if you even start in with it, be prepared for me to just get up and walk away, or to say something unacceptably impolite about it to your face.)
Everyone has had something happen; everybody goes through shit. This, i’ll warrant, is precisely why we should all be kinder to one another, to think about each other’s stories, to consider how our actions might affect somebody else who perhaps may be going through hard times and not be completely able to cope with things as well. Perfectly good, decent people who may not have even done anything to deserve having to go through things worse than one might be prepared to imagine. So take care, always, to think of other people as not only having to go through the same horrible shit you do, but also having to endure very personal hardships of their own. Everybody has an intimate relationship with some form of personal inner torture, whether physical or mental, or both. Walk softly. And carry a big heart. Perhaps some extra ibuprofen.
(Hopefully something better than this will come along.)
