Unwifeable(21)

The next morning, I take my cue that he has no desire to ever see me again—he is extremely cold and quiet—and I leave to meet up with a friend of mine whom I offered to show around the Post newsroom.

I am still a little drunk from the night before, and as I take her around to point out the old newspaper covers on the wall (“look, it’s ‘Headless Body in Topless Bar’?”), everything still seems to sparkle with the go-go-go energy of alcohol and sexual attraction and keeping up with the comedy writer boys. I’ve managed to compartmentalize the morning rejection.

But when my friend leaves to go back to work, I go to the empty bathroom and look at myself in the mirror. What even happened to me? What is happening to me? I feel sick. I lean over the toilet and try to make myself throw up. I can’t, but I do manage to shoot the blood vessels out around my eyes through my half-assed bulimia.

Then I sit on the toilet experiencing a feeling worse than ill. It’s like I can sense something foul and sick rotting in my body. Squatting down on the bathroom floor, I reach into myself and discover it: a disgusting bloody-stringed tampon lodged deep inside. Revolted, I extract it carefully.

Since I don’t remember the sex, I suppose it makes sense. How could I remember I was wearing a tampon? The producer guy had fucked it all the way inside me. I was that drunk.

Vile. Finally, I am sick.

I retch all over the Post bathroom and realize right then and there that I need to turn this ship around. For what it’s worth, I make a promise to God that I will not have sex until I am in a serious relationship again. I just can’t keep doing this.

For years, I will wonder who exactly this bearded comedy guy was that bleak night. I don’t blame the man or even think he did anything wrong. It’s not like that.

There’s a psychological phenomenon called “repetition compulsion theory,” where you keep subconsciously re-creating a traumatic event in your life—for me, getting blackout drunk and having sex—trying to somehow gain control over that which initially wounded you. Animals do this, too. It is the most primitive of reactions. One psychiatrist explained it to me as an attempt to master the original wound with a similar experience. But all it really ends up doing is cementing the trauma until it is part of you.



* * *




AFTER THE TAMPON exorcism at the office that day, I return to my computer and google “New York therapists” and make a few calls until I find a woman who takes my insurance. I make an appointment, and two short weeks later I am in to see a female therapist in her dimly lit West Village apartment.

The therapist is in her fifties, with long gray hair, and she is as tall as I am, which is unusual.

“So, I’ve been having these alcoholic blackouts,” I tell her.

“How many?” she asks.

“Four, five,” I say. “A lot, I guess. I mean, everyone drinks in New York. That’s just how it is.”

“Okay,” she says. “Well, why don’t we start with your family history . . .”

So begins my least favorite part of therapy. The “tell me your story” part. I don’t want to sing for my psychological supper. But I do, as I always do with therapists, so many hopes and expectations placed on this stranger who you are paying to care about you for fifty minutes.

Here is my therapist elevator speech, boiled down.

“I shouldn’t exist,” I begin, ever dramatic, like I’m doing a performance at the Moth.

The fact that I do, I explain, feels like an unforgiving miracle at times, whispering in my ear: Don’t be average. Don’t be normal. Don’t give up.

“My dad never gave up,” I continue. “Because my dad is a hero.”

Then I get to the good part.

“Let me tell you about my dad,” I say, because I think relaying all the historical details will explain me, or make it all add up.

On June 15, 1968, after three weeks in the bush as a marine and an NFG (New Fucking Guy) in Vietnam, my twenty-one-year-old father had his world blown apart when he caught two AK-47 rounds in battle near Khe Sanh. The bullets went through my father’s right eye and the right corner of his mouth, forcing bone and fragments into the prefrontal area of his cerebral cortex, leaving his nose hanging in front of his mouth, his left eye dangling out of its orbit, and his right eye obliterated.

The other men in my father’s unit were instructed not to go back for him. “Stadtmiller’s dead,” they were told. “Move on.” But one fellow marine ignored those orders: Al Fielder, a black man from the South who’d taken a liking to this privileged white college boy, and he searched until he found my father, who was praying at the bottom of a hill, head in his hands, saying, “Please let me die, please let me die, please let me die.”

Because my father was too big to carry, Al instead screamed at him to get him to safety, “You call yourself a fucking marine? You call yourself a man? You fucking pussy! You’re pathetic.” The verbal assault worked. My father crawled up the hill to the waiting helicopter nearby and was flown to the closest medical ship. No one expected my dad to survive the night, let alone the thirteen hours of surgery required to save him.

“Over his lifetime, he’s had more than one hundred and fifty operations,” I tell the therapist as she listens raptly.

What remains of my father is less than 5 percent vision, a patchwork of scars across his sewn-together flesh, a nose built with bone from his left hip, and an unpredictable brain injury that manifests in wild swings of temper.