Hyper-chondriac (8 page)

“Sorry.”

“Don't apologize to me. Apologize to your body.”

“Sorry, body.”

“Why do you rush through your meals like this?”

The truth was, one of the main symptoms of hyper-chondria is never living in the moment. I was always at least one step ahead of whatever I was doing. Unlike my brother and parents, I had no use for nostalgia. The only place I wanted to be was the future. The only trouble was, by the time I got there, it wasn't the future anymore. Patience isn't a side effect of my affliction. Unless I'm waiting to heal.

“I rush through everything, I guess.”

I couldn't even leave any food in my refrigerator. Nothing. I've even tasted baking soda from the Arm & Hammer box. Actually, the only reason I even needed a fridge was for ice. If I went shopping, whether for a can of soup or $75 worth of groceries for the week, it would all be gone before I went to sleep. All of it. I couldn't control myself. My method of dealing was simple: whenever I was hungry I'd go out and get only enough food for a single meal.

I'd learned to eat quickly from my dad. On the rare occasions that I saw him with food, his goal was speed—most likely because his chewing was constantly interrupted by my mother shouting from her bedroom, needing help.

“I want you to try something for me. For a week.” Irene took a sip of her juice for emphasis. “You can finish your meal here at whatever speed you'd like, but the
second
you leave this diner, I want you to chew every bite forty times.”

“Forty times?”

“It just seems like a lot because right now you're chewing everything two or three times, if that. Do you want me to show you photos of the stomachs and intestines of people who under-chew their food?” I still wonder what her reaction would have been had I answered with an enthusiastic “YES! Show me those pictures! Pleeeeeeaaaase?!” Then when she did, I'd stare at them awestruck. “This is soooooo cool! You mean if I keep doing what I'm doing I can have organs like that? Yippee!!!” But I remained silent and let her finish her tirade.

“It's not pretty.”

I decided I had nothing to lose. I would make an effort to chew everything extremely thoroughly, as if each and every morsel I thrust into my mouth was a stick of gum—which isn't the best analogy, since I'm incapable of not stuffing the entire pack into my mouth within minutes, even if it contains eighteen pieces. Everything would be chewed forty times and I would be instantly cured. And if my body ever required an autopsy, the coroner would marvel at my pristine inner organs.

 

I returned home to my empty refrigerator that night and began my new life-enhancing procedure. I ordered in some chicken curry from a local Thai place and turned off the ringer on my phone. This was the night that I would finally taste my food.

I hunkered down above my steaming dinner in Styrofoam. The plastic fork secured a small piece of the curry-soaked chicken which I released into the comfort of my mouth. “Chewing is good,” I said to myself. “You're doing an excellent thing for your body. In fact, if stomachs could write, I'd probably get a thank-you card.” I chewed for what felt like an hour and had only reached the number seventeen. Yet despite all my efforts and powerful saliva enzymes, the chicken wasn't even fully ground up yet. Even all this chewing wasn't nearly enough. I caught my breath and continued on for what seemed like another hour, until I finally reached the magic number. I stared down at my food, of which 98 percent remained. And I was sad.

Food had always been a source of joy and comfort for me. It took my mind off troubles, it nourished my body, it gave me a popular hobby I could share with others. Now food kind of sucked. All food. I tried a piece of the potato in the potato compartment and got up to the number thirty before I said “Fuck it” and devoured the remainder of the meal in less time than it had taken to down the first two bites. I would start this new chewing system tomorrow. Baby steps.

 

I walked around Manhattan miserable. I didn't want to have to work so hard for my meals. If I could have carried a blender in my pocket and lived on smoothies I would have, but to my chagrin the smoothie had yet to captivate America.

Overnight, eating was transformed from big fun into a big pain.

But I had to stick to this chewing thing for at least a week, as I promised Irene. One thing I'm good at is following rules from medical professionals. When a dentist recently informed me that I needed to spend four minutes brushing my teeth (two for top, two for bottom), I bought a timer and have diligently continued the process to this day. But chewing was way harder than oral hygiene.

Whenever I had offers from friends to go out to dinner, I declined. I didn't want to let them see me suffer. Or to catch me tapping my foot to count my chews. Eating at home—without witnesses—was painful enough. Each time the fork left my mouth I'd sit on my hands until my chewing regimen had been completed to make sure I didn't shovel an additional bite down my throat. Often, I'd stare at my meal while I was immersed in a morsel and blink very fast so my plate would look empty for part of the time. I was going insane. Chewing was so torturous, I even considered going food shopping and leaving edibles in my refrigerator for a change, since eating everything in it under these rules would take forever and possibly crack my mandible.

At the end of the seven-day experiment, I called Irene and told her how much better I felt. Then I canceled all future appointments with her. Charging $300 for information she could have written on a fortune cookie was wrong. I was on my own now. I could decide how many times things would be chewed. I was again the master of my mouth. I had the power. Maybe I'd chew a cracker twenty-six times but a knish nineteen times. I'd chew a mustard sandwich five times but a burned waffle thirty-nine and a half times. Or to show off, I'd chew a piece of dried apple forty-seven times. I would mix it up as I saw fit. But I would try to slow down.

However, it would be another two bodybuilding competitions, hundreds of doctors' visits, 15,000 partially chewed meals and tens of thousands of unnecessary self-induced moments of tension over the next decade before I really made a concerted effort to get better.

Nancy and I had been married for a little over seven blissful months. On any given day, I was calmer than at any other point in my life. My mind and body no longer sabotaged each other like in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, I wasn't getting sick or raising my voice or pointing my fists at strangers, and driving was something I actually looked forward to.

Until the third week of that seventh month when that guy in the Honda cut me off and gave me the finger and I threatened to kill him.

It was apparent that 50 mg of Zoloft would not solve my problem. And 100 wouldn't either. And I'm guessing neither would 150. The trouble is, I'd never know exactly
when
my serotonin would fail to be blocked and sneak back into a nerve cell and I'd be back to square one, having to up my dose yet again. Before I reached the maximum 200 mg, I needed to hurry up and find something that would calm me down naturally.

“I'm getting off the Zoloft,” I announced to Nancy.

“Today?”

“No. But I can't keep relying on it. Now that I know how a normal human is supposed to feel and behave, I need to wean myself off this crap and deal with my hyperness without drugs.”

“Just make sure you talk to your dermatologist before you do anything. It seems wrong to wean on your own.”

“I can wean on my own.”

“Please don't. You're not a doctor.”

“Neither is a dermatologist, really.”

“He's still more of a doctor than you are.”

“I don't want to be at the mercy of Pfizer a day longer than I have to. What if a hurricane hits Los Angeles and we're stranded in the middle of nowhere and I don't have my medication?”

“Everyone would be stressed, so you wouldn't really stick out
that
much.”

“Well, I'm gonna find Zoloft alternatives that I don't have to swallow.”

“As long as you don't yell at me when I drive, I'm totally supportive of anything you do.”

 

“Don't sweat the smawl stuff…and it's awwwwlllllll smawlllll stuff!” Since Richard Carlson wrote that fateful phrase back in 1997, that sentence has pretty much annulled every problem for my older sister, Debbie. Whether you've just spilled pudding on a shoe, or a shark has eaten the left hemisphere of your brain, my sister consistently applies that magical series of words to put things into perspective.

Debbie has three unruly teenage kids, a husband with myriad health problems and 90 percent of the calls she gets are from people who are dying. She's a hospice nurse in Florida and often our conversations will be interrupted by call-waiting. When she clicks back to me, I'm told the person on the other line was a twelve-year-old boy with leukemia or a nine-year-old girl who has a disease so rare they haven't even named it yet and by the time they do, she'll most likely be dead.

It was Debbie's idea for my parents to move to Florida. This way they could get an affordable one-level house and have the safety net of one of their children nearby. Debbie continues to take on more responsibility, which to me is a recipe for more anxiety. But she seems to manage.

My sister found a house in the newspaper on a Tuesday and told my father about it on a Wednesday; he flew down to Florida on a Thursday, put in a bid for it and flew home on Friday. By Saturday he knew that his entire life was being transferred to Sarasota. Incidentally, in spite of all his fears, my father finds the prospect of bouncing around in a metal tube at 30,000 feet soothing.

Debbie's home is coated in inspirational sayings, which, I must say, is fairly unusual for Jews. As a group, we're not huge consumers of calligraphy and probably fall in the lower percentiles of pithy sayings in loud, garish frames per capita. But perhaps Debbie isn't all that Jewish anymore, anyway.

Twenty-four years ago, my sister married Von, a Protestant whose family wasn't so keen on getting involved with any Jews. One would have thought that if someone disliked this chunk of the Judeo-Christian sect so much, then maybe Long Island wasn't the place to live. In any event, her wedding consisted of his family on one side of the ballroom floor and ours on the other. The only mingling was when people spilled things.

The kicker came many years later when Debbie and Von's eldest son, Doug, was sent to the local Catholic high school. Needless to say, my parents weren't all too pleased with some of the curriculum.

“Grandma, so
you
actually believe in God?!” Doug asked.

“Of course we believe in God,” my mother replied.

“But how could you if you killed Jesus?!”

Because
God
told us to kill Jesus, ya silly goose!

If Debbie could handle the stresses of taking care of my parents, forty hospice patients, three kids (at least one of whom had stumbled into anti-Semitism) and a husband whose failing eyes were making it impossible to drive, then I would give her method a try. My life was a picnic compared to hers.

I'm usually vehemently opposed to inspirational words. I find them cheesy. I particularly detest that Robert Fulghum crap:
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.
Oh,
really,
Robert? You learned how to make pasta in kindergarten? You learned how to drive a car in kindergarten? You learned how to pour a Black and Tan in kindergarten? I think you're a bit of an exaggerator, Robert.

I headed down to Barnes & Noble with a notebook and pencil to scour Anger Management–type books for some memorable quotes. I'm against spending money on books that I'll only need for six or seven words. However, I'm very pro–book buying. I promised myself I'd purchase the new Churchill biography and a fresh Thomas Guide for Nancy on the way out.

While I was weaving around and over squatters seated in aisles reading shit for free, my goal was to refrain from “accidentally” kicking them while gathering as many powerful sentences as I could that would fit on two sides of a small credit-card-sized piece of paper in eight-point Helvetica.

 

Look forward to difficulties.

 

Ooh. That was a good one. Plus, it was only four words, so it wouldn't take up much space.

 

Don't let your mind be a bad bouncer that lets every emotion into your brain.

 

I liked that one, too. I needed to have my mind cordon off every feeling behind my velvet ropes and let only the coolest and hippest emotions into “Club Brain.” Unfortunately, I have this big dumb bouncer standing guard who had to cheat to get a combined 550 on his SATs.
³
In fact, my bouncer is such an idiot that any emotion with a lame fake ID or a nice smile who he thinks might fuck him at the end of the night, or who lies and claims to be an old friend of my cerebellum, is whisked right in. I've tried to fire my bouncer numerous times but he refuses to leave.

 

Give up the idea that things will be the way you expect.

 

Sure. That makes the card, too. I could always kick this quote off later if something better came along.

After selecting some more collections of anti-anger words, I went home, typed and printed them out, cutting the paper into the same dimensions as my Wells Fargo debit card. I then glued both parts together so I had a two-sided rectangle that would fit in my wallet. The only thing left to do was get it laminated.

 

When I gave the Kinko's clerk my inspiration cheat sheet, he glanced down at the first few quotes, then back up at me, and emitted a subtle, condescending eye-roll. Hold on a second: You're thirty-two years old and working at
Kinko's,
you don't even have a “manager” badge on and you're judging me?! Maybe he thought I was in some cult or a Christian Scientist or something. Actually, I couldn't be any farther away from Christian Science, which forbids all contact with doctors, whereas my address book had more physicians than friends. I've always found it odd that an entire group of people could be talked out of ever seeing an entirely different group of people. Did Christian Scientists even bother to get medical insurance or were they that confident about being able to heal themselves? And if they got into a car accident,
then
could they go to the doctor or would they just have to pray until all the scars and orbital bones healed?

As I was about to simultaneously give the Kinko's klown $1.20 for my lamination fee and a glare for being a dick, I felt the warmth of the plastic against my hand and I looked down and saw this:

 

Anger is exaggerating the consequences.

 

This is a major hurdle for me. The most innocuous of incidents is quickly heightened. A minor, inconsequential event is soon transformed into a full-length feature, which is always, unfortunately, of the horror genre.

Here's what I mean. I'm about to walk into a hardware store. A guy is standing outside in the doorway. He's definitely in the way. Being that I weigh close to 180 pounds, am wearing a loud-patterned shirt and am about a foot away from him
and
in his sight line, it's unlikely that he doesn't see me. Now, the stranger's two choices are to move out of the way so I can go inside and buy some pliers, or not move at all—because maybe, just maybe he has glaucoma and his guide dog just broke free and ran down the street toward the soft pretzel vendor. But instead he sees my walking torso approach and does the unthinkable. He moves approximately
an eighth of an inch
! Now, this effort is absolutely useless to me. An eighth of an inch does me no good at all. But the message is being sent: “Here! I made an effort; this is all the space you deserve! I'm wayyyy more important than you. Go ahead and struggle to squeeze by, asshole!” This guy REALLY doesn't give a shit about my life. In fact, he'd probably ruin every aspect of it if he had the time.

Now, here's where the filmmaking kicks in. Within seconds, I have constructed a series of scenes in my head where I elbow Captain Stationary in the ribs, then kick him in the groin. And while he's writhing in agony on the cold sidewalk, I hold a pair of steak knives
exactly an eighth of an inch
from his eyes. I proceed to his ear area where I yank one off, coat it with honey Dijon mustard and feed it to a nearby squirrel (who will attempt to store it in his cheeks for the entire winter but can't 'cause it's just too goddamn delicious).

But there's plenty of movie left. I stuff the guy into a phone booth as the walls move in until each of the four is
exactly an eighth of an inch
from the other. “Yeah, y'know something…you were right, sir. An eighth of an inch is plenty of room to navigate through.” I immediately flick a switch and each of the walls moves in so they're one-sixteenth of an inch away from one another and the man's torso is squeezed so tightly his body turns beet red and he looks like a giant Twizzler which I feed to the squirrel's friend who didn't get any ear.

Yes, anger can be full of exaggeration. Irrational? Of course it's irrational. But these are the dots that my brain connects in a millisecond.

Thankfully, I didn't cast the Kinko's guy in my latest homage to
Reservoir Dogs.
Instead, I looked up from my freshly laminated card, smiled and walked out of the copy place with my head held high. I had already gotten my $1.20 worth.

 

As I drove home I propped the laminated anti-anger card onto the dashboard of my car to remind me that road rage was unwarranted and irrational.

After I had driven all of three blocks, a guy in a charcoal gray Hummer cut in front of me without using his blinker. You'd think people who can afford a $62,000 car have jobs where they're required to retain information on a daily basis and that remembering to use a blinker would be easy for them. Just as I was about to mouth one of my favorite catchphrases, “Asshole!” to him—or her…actually, I couldn't see who was driving since most Hummers seem to come with dark tinted glass as a mandatory option—I resisted. Instead, I consulted my laminated card and reread the first quote again:

 

Anger is exaggerating the consequences.

 

There was no reason for anger right now. My car hadn't been hit, and I would probably never see the Hummer man or woman again. Besides, my father had always told me that it's better to have crazy drivers in front of you, since they're pretty much harmless that way. In back of you, anything can happen. To this day, if I see somebody swerving, I slow down, let him pass and let other people worry. I concluded that there was nothing to be angry about. Everything was fine.

 

When I got home I was so excited about my anger-free future that I bragged to Nancy.

“I didn't glare at the guy at Kinko's who rolled his eyes at me and I totally ignored this Hummer that cut me off on the way home!”

I waited for at least a modicum of praise but none came.