Month: April 2021

The Sound of Metal

It’s been twenty-four years since Christopher Reeve, aka Superman, fell off his horse competing at an equestrian event and broke his neck. Why was a good Democrat like him jumping around in such a patrician sport? I love to watch fancy horses and riders ballet through their Olympic paces on TV but come on! Superman?

After an understandably gloomy recovery, wheelchair-bound Superman rose to become an effective advocate for disability rights and a staunch promoter of research for spinal cord injuries. When he appeared at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC) in 2004, I asked my friend, Marca Bristo, herself a world-famous disability rights advocate, if she was going to see him.

Marca broke her neck when she was a twenty-year-old nursing student, spent a year recovering in what was the first year of RIC’s existence, and learned how to live and love in a heavy metal wheelchair. We were avid moviegoers, but she hesitated in honoring Christopher Reeve. Not because he was no longer a movie star, of course, but because she didn’t fully support his work in regenerative research. To Marca life was all about acceptance. Reeve plunged headlong (pardon the pun) into seeking a cure for spinal cord injuries.

He lobbied for embryonic stem cell therapy to heal the spine, took synthetic drugs to heal the spine, exercised to heal the spine. He founded one of the leading spinal cord research centers in the world. Knowing his injury would lead to an early death, he was on the inside track running toward the regenerative finish line.

I understand the frenzy to find a cure. I thought I was going to die before I found a solution for my chronic pain. The search alone turned pain to suffering. And I understand the reluctance in facing an incurable malady. For ten years my outsides announced I’m an alcoholic out loud in AA meetings, while my insides waged war against the world.

I didn’t drink but I didn’t want to be a sober alcoholic, didn’t want to say I was an alcoholic and sure as hell didn’t want to know other sober alcoholics. I looked for relief in self-help books, exercise, talk-therapy, anti-depressants, sex, food and spiritual retreats. I’ve always known there was no cure for alcoholism, but subterranean stubbornness kept me on the prowl for anything other than acceptance of that truth. I banged my head against a steel drum until the sound of metal made me so sick I finally cried uncle. 

Like walk, eat and love,“accept” needs to be put it in motion. Everyday I actively accept what I can’t change. If I let acceptance lie fallow, uneasiness simmers below the surface. Eventually defiance boils over and I find myself throwing tantrums in Walgreen’s because the clerk is too slow or obsessing over a bag of potato chips. 

I accept this. 

It is what it is.

This is what Marca Bristo wished for Christopher Reeve. 

  • Christopher Reeve 1952-2004
  • Marca Bristo 1953-2019

Witness to Writing’s Healing Power

I have no idea when I first started going to the movies. Lists of movies from the 1950s always include ones I can tick off. I know I saw some in theaters, some on TV. 

My father loved thinking-man westerns, film noir and dramas. My mother knew all about the latest movies from reading reviews in the New York Times. They never went to movies together, but they discussed movies, fought about them, of course, as they did everything.

He started taking me to the movies with him when I was about ten. I instinctively knew to supress my yearning to see Elvis or Davy Crockett movies. In order to be included in the moviegoing, I’d feign more sophisticated preferences—Alexander the Great with Richard Burton, Anastasia with Ingrid Bergman, Giant with Rock Hudson. He never admitted to liking musicals or comedies like Anything Goes or Pajama Game. But he hummed songs from the musical Pal Joey as if he’d seen it and expressed careful admiration for its stars, Rita Heyworth and Kim Novak. 

One of the movies I’d be forbidden to see by today’s standards is The Searchers. John Wayne and his cowboys ride off in search of female relatives abducted by Indians. When they find them, the women are all dead. It’s the first time I heard the word “rape”. When I asked what that meant, my father had no answer. Faced with the unknowing, I sensed an ancestral knowing, a subconscious knowing churned up from the genetic code. I listened to these cross-generational gut reactions and the fear I heard settled quietly in my lower back. 

In 1959 my father took me to Witness for the Prosecution. An avid reader of Agatha Christie, he knew the story. I hadn’t paid attention to the chatter about the acclaimed movie starring Charles Laughton, Marlene Deitrich and Tyrone Powell. As we entered the Deerpath Theater in Lake Forest, my father casually offered a wager.

  • Lake Forest Illinois 1950s

“If you guess who did it in the first five minutes, I’ll give you fifty cents.”

“Ok, but I don’t even know what it’s about.” I balked.

“That’s the point.”

I watched each second tick by on my Timex, and at the five-minute mark I leaned over to my father.

“He did it.” I whispered.

“We’ll see.” He said.

I was electrified for the rest of the movie. He did, indeed, do it. I won. My father was so pleased he let me drive home.

Desperation to please my father dominated my secret life. I wanted to be a reason he’d stay home with us. The fear, the anxiety, the straining to decode adult silences landed like hot lava in the tangled ganglia of my lower back where it lay dormant for forty years.

That’s the last movie we saw together. My parents split up soon after. In my fifties, the secrets smoldering in my lower back suddenly fired up. The secrets turned to truths through writing. And the writing put out the fire.

Call My Name

Call My Name

My name evoked unwelcomed curiosity in the John-and-Mary 1950s.

“Say in a loud voice ’It’s from Shakespeare,’” my mother Agnes demanded of me as soon as I could talk.

When strangers asked the inevitable, “Where did that name come from?” Agnes greeted the question as an accusation. She silently goaded me into defending my name with a withering look meant for the questioner but sent my way. She hated talking about it or anything else having to do with her children.

Catholic clergy intimated my name wasn’t written in the Book of Life, and the gates of heaven might be closed to me. “Hmm, Regan. That’s not a saint’s name.” They’d muse aloud. “Is that your middle name?”

In King Lear, Regan is the king’s middle daughter. She’s a power-hungry evil sister who tries to flatter her father into giving her the family fortune, then drives him out into a raging storm. In the end, Regan’s jealous older sister poisons her.

Six months out of a psych ward in 1971, I picked up the besteseller The Exorcist at the Main Street Drug Store in Belmar, New Jersey, and headed to the diner. Sipping on a coke, I opened the book while waiting for my grilled cheese. An hour later I was in my Volkswagen Bus in the diner parking lot, bewitched by the story.

The book’s demon-possessed twelve year-old protagonist? Regan. Exorcist Regan’s name came from King Lear. In the book, Regan’s mother was an actress who frequently entertained her director, Burke Dennings, with too many martinis. My father, whose last name was, of course, Burke, loved too many martinis. Exorcist Regan lived with her mother in Georgetown. My family had lived in Georgetown.

I finished the book and serpentined down the road in second gear to my mother’s house. The dizzying story of Regan’s demon possession plundered my recovering nervous system. I blasted through the front door and slammed The Exorcist down on the coffee table. 

“Who’s this author? How do you know him? Why didn’t you warn me about this? How could you let me read this?”

Though an avid reader, Agnes was oblivious to the summer blockbuster. She speculated that author William Peter Blatty was one of the hordes of anonymous acquaintances who’d attended parties at our Georgetown home when I was a toddler.

Years later, a friend ran into Blatty at a political event and asked if he’d named Regan after me. Blatty’s reply: “Absolutely! That name always haunted me. Who would name their little baby after one of Shakespeare’s most craven females?”

When The Exorcist became a movie in 1973, my then-husband started calling me “Babe.” The movie uncloaked such evil that he was afraid to even say Regan. The Exorcist was the first horror movie to be nominated for an Academy Award for best picture. For years afterwards whenever I met someone new, I’d get, “The Exorcist, right?” Right. 

What’s worse: having the name of an evil literary character and horror film freak?

Or, not having a saint’s name? 

Microaggression and Blackbirds

Long ago someone told me pigeons are flying rats and I’ve never bothered to think differently. Pigeons have discovered the bird feeder on my balcony. I shoo them away but they lurk on the ledges of the building across the street and return when they think the coast is clear. A single red-winged black bird, one-fifth the size of a pigeon, will scare a pigeon away from its breakfast on my windowsill.

Red-winged blackbirds can be aggressive in defending their nests this time of year.

Red-winged blackbirds nest in Chicago parks. The males chase intruders — other males, crows, raptors, and people. I wandered down Michigan Avenue the other day to check on the migrating flock that sets up housekeeping every year in Lake Shore Park. Though I readily observe one or two red-wings at my window, there’s nothing like watching a flock dive-bombing unsuspecting dog walkers who pass under their nests.

On the way, I clutched my bag as I passed the Louis Vuitton store. I funneled myself between the ever-present queue around the store and the narrowing sidewalk. Lines formed outside Louis Vuitton and other high-end stores when Covid Shutdown rules required a limited number of people inside. And for the umpteenth time this year I noticed my silent microaggressive thoughts on Black people. Where do these people get the money for four thousand dollar purses? 

Covid Shutdown coincided with the proliferation of online free programs about white privilege, implicit bias and microaggression. For the first time in my old life I’ve been made aware that my whiteness affords me privileges such as crossing paths with a policeman without fear, a privilege Black people don’t have. I’ve discovered that fear of Black men is an implicit bias that governs where I live, eat, shop and travel. Microaggression is a bit trickier to face. Awareness of clutching my bag as I silently scorn Black people lined up at Louis Vuitton is a start. 

On a recent anti-racist zoom program, I learned about workers in the “informal” or survival economy. These are the bucket boys. The handymen. The loose cigarette sellers.The sex workers. The retail money-launderers. Until recently I thought of informal workers as criminals, and not as resilient, courageous, burdened and traumatized spirits of the survival economy. 

A dapper old pensioner sits in a busy park near my building. I know he’s often short on rent, the way you know these things about the neighborhood. He palms a bill in the hand of every passing informal worker: the Streetwise peddlers, the panhandlers, the street people. He’s the only person I know who still carries cash. I used to think he was not only foolish with his money but that he actually hurt people by providing cash for booze and cigarettes. I now think of him as the buddha, the christ, the manifestation of noble kindness. 

I’m receptive to changing my thinking about people.

But not about those pigeons.

___________________________

‘Nature’s A–holes’ Are Back: Red-Winged Blackbirds Attacking People Along The River As Nesting Season Gets Underway