Ch 2. How We Began

pages 7-9

This week’s post ends with another section by Jonathan. I’ve been experimenting with finishing the inked pages. Color will take me years to complete. Seriously. (I get overwhelmed by possibilties and there are many, MANY pages ahead). My plan now is to play around with different monochrome values, see how that goes. Bear with me!

The recap: While Jonathan and I were at the artist colony in southern France, Jonathan got a letter from his rheumatologist suggesting he consult with doctors in England who specialize in ankylosing spondylitis, the illness he’s had for nearly 2 decades.

Jonathan

When Lynn and I first crossed paths, I was practically married to my girlfriend of six years. The instant Lynn appeared at my cousin’s birthday party, I was so attracted to her, I made a quick decision, gravely, to not think about her “that way.” It wouldn’t have been good for me.

A year and a half later we were both single and I did start thinking of her that way. Fortunately, I had just started seeing a therapist. Steve Karakashian. At the time, Steve had a dual career as both a psychotherapist in private practice and as a researcher in animal behavior at Rockefeller University, working with chickens. I had a hunch Steve knew things from studying chickens that might not be irrelevant in my case. The intensity of my feelings for her was unnerving. Lynn had a history of short relationships, and I wanted her too much. She was too desirable. I felt doomed to the chopping block. Thinking about anything except Lynn became challenging, to put mildly. If it didn’t work out, no doubt I’d be running around the barnyard without my head for some time.

Steve didn’t seem to think this ending was inevitable.

Life was short. I had a fucking disability. How many chances was I going to get in my lifetime to be with someone like her? Lynn was so much fun, so smart, so supremely sexy and alluring. The competition for women like her had to be unbelievable!

The counter-argument was that I had a lot to offer her in non-physical ways. Cold comfort. If she rejected me, it would be my body she was rejecting. By the time I met Lynn, my spine was frozen from the sacroiliac joint in my pelvis, to the top of my head. When I moved, it looked like I literally had a rod up my ass. Steve would point out that Lynn had some issues of her own, and, if things went the way I feared, it would be a distortion to conclude I had “blown it” with Lynn. His support enabled me to hang in there for the six months while Lynn was on the fence. Then she got off.

We were together, very happily together, laughing and having sex. Our first summer together, we went to France and lived and worked at an artist’s foundation in Vence, a few miles north of Nice. There we met and became close friends with a German couple, Rolf and Madeleine. At the end of December, on the way back home, we stopped in Bath, England, to meet with Dr. Andrei Calin, a rheumatologist and the world’s expert on ankylosing spondylitis. Eventually, I decided to return to Bath the following winter to get both my hips replaced. Lynn offered to accompany me. I was grateful but a little nervous about the implications of accepting such a generous offer. Once again seeking counsel in my sharp-witted, gay, open-minded therapist, I put the concern that I had been mulling over to Steve: Lynn’s offer was so generous — she was proposing to drop everything and spend three weeks with me in Bath — and I didn’t want to take advantage of her. I asked Steve: “If I accept her offer, do you think it means that if it comes to it, eventually, I would eventually have to marry her?” He said, “probably, yes.”

I certainly didn’t expect that answer. I thought Steve had been teed up by my question for some handwaving about autonomy.

The surgery was successful—both hips were replaced in a single five-hour operation. But there was also bad news: the doctors at Bath said current, more up-to-date research, showed that AS did not typically go into remission, ever. After the operation, this fact was driven home to me during the ten days I spent at Bath’s Royal National Hospital for Joint Diseases getting physical therapy with a group of other AS patients. Even those in their fifties and sixties and were still suffering from unabated inflammation, pain, and fatigue.

When we returned to Brooklyn it was the end of March. Slowly, I recovered muscle tone and flexibility. I was grateful for the improvement -- my hip joints themselves were pain free. But the rest of me…. during the spring and summer following the surgery, I tried to ignore how debilitating my body’s remaining arthritis still was: I still had pain -- most maddeningly in my sitz bones. I plunged myself back into rewriting a new screenplay I was working on, and ascribed my growing anxiety to the fact that it wasn’t going well, and to the pressure of knowing that the director, Arthur Penn, was waiting to read it. By August, however, my anxiety was incapacitating, and I entered a severe depression from which I wouldn’t emerge until spring, six months later.

A year-and-a-half after that, we got married.