Wry Martinis (40 page)

One night recently in Los Angeles, my friend Alison took me to a new place called House of Blues, where in order to get to the bar on the third floor you have to talk your way through more roped-off check-points than you ever did in Cold War Berlin, manned by muscle-boy bouncers wearing telephone-operator headsets (for heaven’s sake). Eventually we achieved the sanctum sanctorum, there to encounter such luminosities as Andrew Dice Clay and Jim Belushi. But it was not to them that my eyes were drawn, for everywhere you turned were beauties—and I mean beauties; hey, it’s L.A.—turned out in the latest Ter et Bantine and Isaac Mizrahi jackets, with microshort skirts. It took a great deal of concentrated effort to pretend to be more interested in Mr. Clay’s repartee than in the three-alarm pin-striped pulchritude sitting on the next couch over. Took imagination, too, to see the Edwardian palimpsest behind that cardiac-arresting modern version. But it was clear enough: The century had come full circle, and I was a long way from Philadelphia.

—
Vogue
, 1994

The first one went off a month after I turned nineteen. I was on the FDR Drive at 106th Street in Manhattan, inching along in traffic when I became aware of a dull pain behind my left eye that within a few minutes turned into a burning sensation. Over the next eleven years, the pattern would repeat itself without variation hundreds of times: the ache, followed by the burning, followed by mounting pressure. Back on the FDR, I soon began to moan out loud and twist in my seat. I remember stomping on the floorboard, massaging my temples. Tears flowed from my left eye. On a scale of one to ten, I’d put the pain at nine. (By comparison, I once had a live cigarette shoved into my eyeball and had to wait fifteen hours to get to a doctor. I’d rank that pain—which was memorable—at six.)

After three-quarters of an hour, the pain suddenly vanished.
What the hell was that about?
I wondered.

It happened again the next day, and again, and again, totaling as many as ten one-hour headaches in a single day, every day for a period lasting anywhere from a couple of days to 6 months. I was diagnosed as having cluster headaches, a variety of vascular headache in which the blood vessels inside the head constrict and then dilate.

At first the doctors I saw pretty much shrugged and prescribed various vasoconstrictive drugs, as well as painkillers. But the relief they provided was minimal. By the time the Percodan or Fiorinal did their work, the headache would have abated, only to return in a few hours, just as the painkiller was wearing off. I could not have been a very stimulating conversationalist during that time of my life.

Frustrated, I turned to alternative medicine, which promised not only relief, but even a cure. I spent two months of mornings in the lab of one
alternative guru while his assistants squirted extracts of corn, dust mites and chocolate under my tongue and logged my reactions. I ended up with my very own allergy serum and a supply of disposable hypodermics. Every Friday morning for weeks I shot myself in the bottom. The headaches got fiercer; the guru got richer.

I had tests: regular X rays, tomographic X rays, electroencephalograms, a CT scan. Friends, relatives and coworkers all had suggestions: a clinic in Switzerland, biofeedback, psychoanalysis, homeopathy, more gurus.

I read deeply on the subject. There was consolation in finding out that some of the great writers had had migraines (if not clusters). Lewis Carroll is said to have gotten the idea for
Alice in Wonderland
during the hallucinatory aura that preceded one of his migraines. Alexander Pope would call for steaming pots of coffee in the middle of the night so that he could inhale the vapors. (I’ll say this for my headaches: I’ve never since wished that I had been born in the romantic past. Give me the latter twentieth century with its abundant pharmacopoeia any day.)

It was my father who, after witnessing a particularly bad spell of my attacks, finally found Dr. Frank Petito, a Manhattan neurologist. I think of him the way some people think of Elvis or Mother Teresa.

Dr. Petito did two things. First he prescribed, in addition to the vasoconstrictors, Elavil (amitriptyline), an antidepressant with sedative effects. I chafed at the notion of being tranquilized until he explained that there was something in Elavil—they didn’t know what, exactly—that blocked headaches. Instead of getting ten a day, Dr. Petito said, I might get only two. Then he told me to stop smoking. “If you quit,” he said, “you probably won’t have these in five years. There’s a higher correspondence between smoking and cluster headaches than there is between smoking and lung cancer.” This was news. “There’s no data yet to support the idea that stopping smoking stops clusters,” he went on, “but I believe it, and several experts agree.” I was left to wonder why none of the half-dozen or so doctors I had been to before had told me this. I guess they were no Frank Petitos.

So I gave up smoking. More or less.

The Elavil worked wonders. Two headaches a day definitely beat ten. But they did remain a fact of life. By then I was working in the White House as a speechwriter, a job that can have its stressful moments. I remember
one day trying to bang out an arrival statement aboard Air Force Two—my drugs were in the cargo hold, an error never again to be repeated—and pleading with then Vice President Bush’s doctor to shoot me up with morphine, or something, so I could finish the speech. The most he would offer was Tylenol with codeine. It was a mark of what an analgesic snob I had become that I spurned his wimpy white tablets.

A few days later, back in Washington, I found myself laid out on an acupuncturist’s table, my skull bristling with 20 needles. (“It won’t do you any harm,” Dr. Petito had said, “but I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that it will do you any good.”) I went through the mandatory ten treatments, each one increasingly painful since they insert needles into the exact same spot.

The headaches never came back. I tease Dr. Petito about Western Med being aced by a Chinese lady with needles, but nice as it would be to think of myself as living proof of a medical breakthrough, the truth is that Dr. Petito was probably as responsible as Dr. Wong. The headaches disappeared almost exactly five years after I more or less stopped smoking. They had lasted eleven years, about a quarter of my life at the time. I don’t miss them much.

—
American Health
, 1994

For Christians, Palm Sunday is an important day, marking the entry of Christ into Jerusalem for the Passover, and the start of the holiest week of the liturgical year. Priest and congregation read aloud the Passion of Saint Matthew, beginning with the betrayal of Judas Iscariot and ending in the laying of Christ in the sepulcher. It is the most dramatic stretch of prose in the English language.

I consider myself a reasonably reconstructed, post-Vatican II Catholic, which is to say that while I suspect Latin is the language He prefers—an AT&T connection, if you will, to the scratchy MCI or Sprint of the new liturgy—my knees don’t jerk in the pews every Sunday when the priest tells me to shake hands with the person next to me.

Now, any Catholic who is not totally tone-deaf knows that the relevant ecclesiastical committees have been hard at work turning the beautiful sinewy prose of the Douai-Reims Bible into Formica-flat American. (The Douai and King James are for practical purposes identical.) Since 1965, we have become accustomed to this. But last Sunday’s rendition of the Passion, taken from the New American Bible, was so lifeless, so devoid of passion that one despairs over the harrowing of the language at the hands of the church’s liturgical bureaucrats.

Consider:

King James Version: “… the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

New American Bible: “… The spirit is willing but nature is weak.”

What—pray—is wrong with the classical metonymy, “flesh”? “Nature” here sounds like ersatz Emerson.

In the King James Version, Jesus begs his Father, “If this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.”

Last Sunday that was reduced to: “If this cannot pass me by without my drinking it, your will be done.”

Bad enough to eliminate one of Christianity’s great metaphors, the cup of sorrow, but to leave the sentence as they have offends basic English usage. “Drinking” what? “This”?

In King James, Peter “smote off the ear” of the high priest’s servant. In the New American Bible, he is “slashed,” making it sound as though he had been mugged.

Jesus rebukes Peter with a phrase that has survived the ages: “All they that take the sword, shall perish with the sword.” That is now: “Those who use the sword are sooner or later destroyed by it.”

“Art Thou the King of the Jews?” demanded Pontius Pilate. “And Jesus said unto him, ‘Thou sayest.’ ”

“As you say.” Jesus’ artful answer to his executioner is thus reduced to a shrug:
Yeah, whatever
.

King James’s scholars tell us that Golgotha, the site of the crucifixion, meant “the place of a skull.” The writers of the New American Bible make it sound like an Aaron Spelling TV show—“Skull Place.” Okay, okay. But why have they gone to such lengths as changing words that even the least sensitive parishioner could not possibly have mistaken in meaning? “Wine mixed with gall” becomes “wine flavored with gall,” as if the other choices were cherry and vanilla. It was the particular charity of a group of wealthy women of Jerusalem to see that the condemned were offered wine mixed with a grain of frankincense to dull the excruciating pain of crucifixion. When Jesus, in His death agony, cried out to his Father, a bystander soaked a sponge in “vinegar … and gave him to drink.” In the New American Bible, he is offered “cheap wine.” Chablis? Thunderbird?

At the moment of death, “Behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose.”

Whatever your religious belief, that is prose to raise the hairs on your arm. Does this do it for you?: “Suddenly the curtain of the sanctuary was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth quaked, boulders split, tombs opened. Many bodies of saints who had fallen asleep were raised.”

The chief priest and pharisees tell Pilate that Jesus was “a deceiver” and beg him to make “the sepulcher sure, sealing the stone and setting a watch.” Here the New American Bible sounds like an FBI report. They ask Pilate to put the tomb “under surveillance.”

All this is deplorable, but not contemptible. But what are we to make of the fact that the two thieves between whom Christ was nailed have suddenly been transformed into “insurgents”? Ronald Knox, the great translator of the New Testament, was satisfied with “thieves”; even the very contemporary Good News New Testament (Fourth Edition) only goes so far as to call them “bandits.” When the modern ear hears “insurgents,” the mind thinks of Vietcong, mujahedin, contras, Shining Path, Kurds, a half-dozen jumbled and bloody acronyms. What’s next?
And they crucified Him between two freedom fighters.…

The new edition of the New American Bible will be out soon. In this version, all references to gender will be expunged. The Son of God will shed all that sexist baggage and emerge as the Child of God. The Sermon on the Mount will no longer offend the National Organization for Women, Greenpeace or the Physicians for Social Responsibility. We will have arrived at the scriptural equivalent of “You can call me Ishmael, if you’re comfortable with that”; of solar panels at the cathedral of Chartres; of Bach’s “Saint Matthew Passion” performed by the Mantovani Strings. It will be accessible to all, and meaningful to no one. To use the old phrase, in the fullness of time they will have my Saviour sounding like a Valley Girl. I am wroth.

—
The Washington Post
, 1987