The White Album (22 page)

February in the last extant stable society
.
A few days ago I went to lunch in Beverly Hills
.
At the next table were an agent and a director who should have been, at that moment, on his way to a location to begin a new picture
.
I knew what he was supposed to be doing because this picture had been talked about around town: six million dollars above the line
.
There was two million for one actor
.
There was a million and a quarter for another actor
.
The director was in for $800,000
.
The property had cost more than half a million; the first-draft screenplay $200,000, the second draft a little less
.
A third writer had been brought in, at $6,000 a week
.
Among the three writers were two Academy Awards and one New York Film Critics Award
.
The director had an Academy Award for his last picture but one
.

And now the director was sitting at lunch in Beverly Hills and he wanted out
.
The script was not right
.
Only 38 pages worked, the director said
.
The financing was shaky
.
“They’re in breach, we all recognize your right to pull out,” the agent said carefully
.
The agent represented many of the principals, and did not want the director to pull out
.
On the other hand he also represented the director, and the director seemed unhappy
.
It was difficult to ascertain what anyone involved did want, except for the action to continue
.
“You pull out,” the agent said, “it dies right here, not that I want to influence your decision
.
”
The director picked up the bottle of Margaux they were drinking and examined the label
.

“Nice little red,” the agent said
.

“Very nice
.
”

I left as the Sanka was being served
.
No decision had been reached
.
Many people have been talking these past few days about this aborted picture, always with a note of regret
.
It had been a very creative deal and they had run with it as far as they could run and they had had some fan and now the fan was over, as it also would have been had they made the picture
.

1973

three, four, sometimes
five times a month, I spend the day in bed with a migraine headache, insensible to the world around me
.
Almost every day of every month, between these attacks, I feel the sudden irrational irritation and the flush of blood into the cerebral arteries which tell me that migraine is on its way, and I take certain drugs to avert its arrival
.
If I did not take the drugs, I would be able to function perhaps one day in four
.
The physiological error called migraine is, in brief, central to the given of my life
.
When I was 15, 16, even 25, I used to think that I could rid myself of this error by simply denying it, character over chemistry
.
“Do you have headaches
sometimes? frequently? never?
⁹⁹
the application forms would demand
.
“Check one
.
”
Wary of the trap, wanting whatever it was that the successful circumnavigation of that particular form could bring (a job, a scholarship, the respect of mankind and the grace of God), I would check one
.
“Sometimes”
I would lie
.
That in fact I spent one or two days a week almost unconscious with pain seemed a shameful secret, evidence not merely of some chemical inferiority but of all my bad attitudes, unpleasant tempers, wrongthink
.

For I had no brain tumor, no eyestrain, no high blood pressure, nothing wrong with me at all: I simply had migraine headaches, and migraine headaches were, as everyone who did not have them knew, imaginary
.
I fought migraine then, ignored the warnings it sent, went to school and later to work in spite of it, sat through lectures in Middle English and presentations to advertisers with involuntary tears running down the right side of my face, threw up in washrooms, stumbled home by instinct, emptied ice trays onto my bed and tried to freeze the pain in my right temple, wished only for a neurosurgeon who would do a lobotomy on house call, and cursed my imagination
.

It was a long time before I began thinking mechanistically enough to accept migraine for what it was: something with which I would be living, the way some people live with diabetes
.

Migraine is something more than the fancy of a neurotic imagination
.
It is an essentially hereditary complex of symptoms, the most frequen
tly
noted but by no means the most unpleasant of which is a vascular headache of blinding severity, suffered by a surprising number of women, a fair number of men (Thomas Jefferson had migraine, and so did Ulysses S
.
Grant, the day he accepted Lee’s surrender), and by some unfortunate children as young as two years old
.
(I had my first when I was eight
.
It came on during a fire drill at the Columbia School in Colorado Springs, Colorado
.
I was taken first home and then to the infirmary at Peterson Field, where my father was stationed
.
The Air Corps doctor prescribed an enema
.
) Almost anything can trigger a specific attack of migraine: stress, allergy, fatigue, an abrupt change in barometric pressure, a contretemps over a parking ticket
.
A flashing light
.
A fire drill
.
One inherits, of course, only the predisposition
.
In other words I spent yesterday in bed with a headache not merely because of my bad attitudes, unpleasant tempers and wrongthink, but because both my grandmothers had migraine, my father has migraine and my mother has migraine
.

No one knows precisely what it is that is inherited
.
The chemistry of migraine, however, seems to have some connection with the nerve hormone named serotonin, which is naturally present in the brain
.
The amount of serotonin in the blood falls sharply at the onset of migraine, and one migraine drug, methysergide, or Sansert, seems to have some effect on serotonin
.
Methysergide is a derivative of lysergic acid (in fact Sandoz Pharmaceuticals first synthesized LSD-25 while looking for a migraine cure), and its use is hemmed about with so many contraindications and side effects that most doctors prescribe it only in the most incapacitating cases
.
Methysergide, when it is prescribed, is taken daily, as a preventive; another preventive which works for some people is old-fashioned ergotamine tartrate, which helps to constrict the swelling blood vessels during the “aura,” the period which in most cases precedes the actual headache
.

Once an attack is under way, however, no drug touches it
.
Migraine gives some people mild hallucinations, temporarily blinds others, shows up not only as a headache but as a gastrointestinal disturbance, a painful sensitivity to all sensory stimuli, an abrupt overpowering fatigue, a strokelike aphasia, and a crippling inability to make even the most routine connections
.
When I am
in a migraine aura (for some people the aura lasts fifteen minutes, for others several hours), I will drive through red lights, lose the house keys, spill whatever I am holding, lose the ability to focus my eyes or frame coherent sentences, and generally give the appearance of being on drugs, or drunk
.
The actual headache, when it comes, brings with it chills, sweating, nausea, a debility that seems to stretch the very limits of endurance
.
That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing
.

My husband also has migraine, which is unfortunate for him but fortunate for me: perhaps nothing so tends to prolong an attack as the accusing eye of someone who has never had a headache
.
“Why not take a couple of aspirin,” the unafflicted will say from the doorway, or “I’d have a headache, too, spending a beautiful day like this inside with all the shades drawn
.
”
All of us who have migraine suffer not only from the attacks themselves but from this common conviction that we are perversely refusing to cure ourselves by taking a couple of aspirin, that we are making ourselves sick, that we “bring it on ourselves
.
”
And in the most immediate sense, the sense of why we have a headache this Tuesday and not last Thursday, of course we often do
.
There certainly is what doctors call a “migraine personality,” and that personality tends to be ambitious, inward, intolerant of error, rather rigidly organized, perfectionist
.
“You don’t look like a migraine personality,” a doctor once said to me
.
“Your hair’s messy
.
But I suppose you’re a compulsive housekeeper
.
”
Actually my house is kept even more negligently than my hair, but the doctor was right nonetheless: perfectionism can also take the form of spending most of a week writing and rewriting and not writing a single paragraph
.

But not all perfectionists have migraine, and not all migrainous people have migraine personalities
.
We do not escape heredity
.
I have tried in most of the available ways to escape my own migrainous heredity (at one point I learned to give myself two daily injections of histamine with a hypodermic needle, even though the needle so frightened me that I had to close my eyes when I did it), but I still have migraine
.
And I have learned now to live with it, learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it, when it does come, as more friend than lodger
.
We have reached a certain understanding, my migraine and I
.
It never comes when I am in real trouble
.
Tell me that my house
is burned down, my husband has left me, that there is gunfight-ing in the streets and panic in the banks, and I will not respond by getting a headache
.
It comes instead when I am fighting not an open but a guerrilla war with my own life, during weeks of small household confusions, lost laundry, unhappy help, canceled appointments, on days when the telephone rings too much and I get no work done and the wind is coming up
.
On days like that my friend comes uninvited
.

And once it comes, now that I am wise in its ways, I no longer fight it
.
I Ue down and let it happen
.
At first every small apprehension is magnified, every anxiety a pounding terror
.
Then the pain comes, and I concentrate only on that
.
Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed yoga, the concentration on the pain
.
For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties
.
The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact
.
There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria
.
I open the windows and feel the air, eat gratefully, sleep well
.
I notice the particular nature of a flower in a glass on the stair landing
.
I count my blessings
.

1968

where are we
heading,
they asked in all the television and radio studios
.
They asked it in New York and Los Angeles and they asked it in Boston and Washington and they asked it in Dallas and Houston and Chicago and San Francisco
.
Sometimes they made eye contact as they asked it
.
Sometimes they closed their eyes as they asked it
.
Quite often they wondered not just where we were heading but where we were heading “as Americans,
^,,
or “as concerned Americans,” or “as American women,” or, on one occasion, “as the American guy and the American woman
.
”
I never learned the answer, nor did the answer matter, for one of the eerie and liberating aspects of broadcast discourse is that nothing one says will alter in the slightest either the form or the length of the conversation
.
Our voices in the studios were those of manic actors assigned to do three-minute, four-minute, seven-minute improvs
.
Our faces on the monitors were those of concerned Americans
.
On my way to one of those studios in Boston I had seen the magnolias bursting white down Marlborough Street
.
On my way to another in Dallas I had watched the highway lights blazing and dimming pink against the big dawn sky
.
Outside one studio in Houston the afternoon heat was sinking into the deep primeval green of the place and outside the next, that night in Chicago, snow fell and glittered in the lights along the lake
.
Outside all these studios America lay in all its exhilaratingly volatile weather and eccentricity and specificity, but inside the studios we shed the specific and rocketed on to the general, for they were The Interviewers and I was The Author and the single question we seemed able to address together was
where are we heading
.