Holy Hallelujah!

I got this diabolic pain that shoots down the outside of my left thigh and into my knee. I wrote about it two weeks ago, but I wrote about it as if it were a visiting tourist or at worst had a temporary work visa. I was wrong. It's applying for a Green Card and looking for a path toward citizenship. I've stretched, I've swam, I've chiropracted. I've Abhyanga'd and sports massaged with a guy named Werner whose mother was a Demerol addict and the author of six books. He told me his top five films (#1 was 2001 A Space Odyssey, #3 Casablanca. He's also drawn to rojo, as both Krzysztof Kieslowski's Red and Warren Beatty's Reds made the list). When I got off the table, I was full of hope. When I reached my car, that hope was dashed. My chiropractor, a self-described loner, always knew he was different from the other kids. I saw him right after Passover. He was happy with the brisket, but not the matzo ball soup. He scrunched and crunched me and I left his office on the improve. Two minutes later I was ready to model for Edvard Munch.

The good news is it doesn't hurt when I sit, which makes me wonder if this isn't just the writing Gods, saying "Enough!” Enough distraction. Enough cooking and swimming and shtupping and dinners with your pal Peter where you listen to jazz and fluctuate between how grateful and utterly clueless you both are. Enough exercise and flower arranging and all the other half-assed merriment your cushy screenwriting gig permits you; sit your ass down in that chair and suffer motherfucker! If you suffer in the chair, you won't suffer in the leg and that's why we have done what we've done. (That was just for the piece, I'm actually done beating myself up and calling myself lazy and unserious. I've turned over a new leaf of self-love, and I won't let the creative child within be bullied by parts of me that don't have my best interest at heart. I'm fucking great! My leg just hurts.)

The point of all this is that yesterday I went to see a real doctor, whatever that means. Actually, I hobbled to see him, hunched over like an old yid from the shtetl who only eats herring and schav. The receptionist told me I had seen him in the fall of 2023, which I had absolutely no memory of, but it made sense as I had returned from Italy with a mystery ailment in my left hip. Now, I was back eighteen months later with another left side whodunnit.

I sat there for half an hour, before being summoned to his office, which he shares with a shrink and felt more shrinky than medical (When's the last time you sat in a Barcalounger in your doctor's examination room). He looked at my file, then me and said, "I saw you in 2023. My notes say you were very funny." "I'm even funnier now." He laughed, and we were off and running. The doc was tall and skinny with Harpo Marx hair. All of his sentences finished going up and were either punchlines or set-ups. He was talking about my problem but doing it like we were both wearing bad tuxedos and had microphones in our hands. This happens to me a lot. People sense I'm open to play. I talk to them with a certain bantery rhythm and off they go. If they know I'm a comedy writer, they take it even further, their inner borscht-belter now off leash and sniffing my butt.

I sit on the table and he breaks out the reflex hammer. My right knee is ready for the Rockettes, but by left knee does not respond. He probes my back looking for the source of the anguish, but can't find a culprit. I'm stumping him, but I seem a lot more concerned about this than he does. He's busy cooking up laugh lines, holding up his end of the banter bargain, having a swell time. Finally, he sits back down at his desk and we talk about what's to be done. He suggests physical therapy and an MRI if it doesn't improve in a week.

This does not sound good to me. I haven't sought out western medicine for patience. I got hippies and yogic healers for that shit. I live on the edge of K-Town; I can throw a needle and hit ten acupuncturists. I want action, aggression, relief! I want drugs, and ask about steroids; that's the reason I've come (Because Renee, a woman I met through Substack, but who knows a lot of people I know, and who felt so immediately familiar we both knew we needed to strike a real-life friendship, told me a six day course of oral steroids was the only thing that helped her sciatica, and she had tried everything).

"Yeah, we could try steroids," he says. "Good, let's try ‘em." He quickly checks to see if they interact badly with my heart meds, and when they don't, asks for the name of my pharmacy. Then he asks me the million-dollar question.

"Do you want a muscle relaxer to help you sleep?"

"No. I can't mess with that stuff."

This is my standard answer when I'm offered drugs by a doctor or dentist. I say it because I'm an addict, but I'm clean fifteen years, so, what do I really mean? Do I mean if I take a muscle relaxer all bets are off? That something dormant inside me will be woken up? That this Phoenix life of mine, eighteen years out of the ashes, will go back up in flames. That a muscle-relaxer will set off a chain reaction and in two weeks I'll be downtown, shooting smack in an SRO hotel? Is that really what will happen?

No. That's not what will happen.

But I'll tell you what will happen. I will pick that bottle of pills up at the pharmacy and my mindset will change. It’s all I’ll think about. When am I going to take them and how many? These thoughts will blot out everything else. And I know for a fact, I will not be able to take them as prescribed. If it says take two, I will take four. I won't take them as a patient, I will take them as an addict, that's just the way it is. All last night, I regretted having said “no,” and decided I would call the doc today and tell him I had changed my mind. That's how powerful it is. I don’t even need the pills to be off and running, just the offer of them.

I’m not going to call the doc back. I’m not going to get the pills. I’m not going to get sneaky. I’m going to write about it instead. But don’t get it twisted; it’s not the pre-confession that protects me from the crime. It’s the repeated practice of saying no.

Oh, my fucking God and holy Hallelujah! It feels good to be at a point in my life where the impulse to be okay is stronger than the impulse to not be.