I coughed for a month. I coughed until subway cars and restaurants emptied. I coughed until the parents of my charges came running into the room to find me doubled over, one finger aloft, wait, wait, wait. I coughed until one mother, regal, Indian, slippered and pashmina'd, came running with her two Thai maids, bearing a succession of silver trays. They gave me a shallow bowl of cough syrup, a glass of water, a mug of honey-lemon tea. "Swallow," they said. "Sip." I put the empty vessels on the trays and they carried them away.

I coughed on several occasions until a kind of incidental puke shot out of me, discreetly, into sinks and gutters all over the city. I'd given up my resistance to opiates and their side effects and chugged narco-syrup to no avail. I could puke from coughing or I could puke from cough syrup. I continued to cough and continued to puke but did it numbly, dumbly.

At night I fell into thick sleep, drifted dreamless through empty white rooms. Someone was always coughing in another room down the hall. It was me, Rebecca would tell me the next morning, coughing through the night. It was me, the neighbors told me when I saw them in the lobby, maybe I should see a doctor. I told them about the doctor, the syrup, the puking. They nodded and murmured. I apologized for the noise.

I coughed until I became religious. I went out and got drunk. The next morning Rebecca told me I'd come home spouting uncharacteristic beliefs. "You kept saying God had given you the cough to make you pay for your sins," she told me. "And then you went into your room and prayed a lot."

I coughed until something inside of me gave way. I coughed until I bruised, broke, cracked, strained, sprained, separated, dislocated or floated a rib, or pulled the muscles or cracked the cartilage in between. It was hard to tell. They all had one symptom, stabbing pain, and one treatment, control stabbing pain until healed. Do not bind ribs, do not suppress cough, do not breathe shallowly, or fluid could collect in lungs and cause pneumonia. Watch for signs of punctured lung.

I begged my parents for my father's dental-surgery Vicodin. I hoarded and nibbled at it, metering it out. The pain would ease, go from searing to stabbing to sharp to just there. The Vicodin would wear off and it would come back all at once. It was like a broken heart. I wished all broken hearts felt this way, so direct, a knife in the ribs, instead of an ether that comes and goes with different songs and skies.

While my rib ached, I imagined different things. I imagined that I was a soldier, keeping my wound a secret so as not to be separated from my men. I'd finger it privately, consider the sticky blood on my fingertips, wipe it on my fatigues. My rib was only the most pronounced discomfort in a battle-battered body. There were also my ill-fitting boots (stonily yanked from the feet of a Nazi I'd killed myself on patrol), my frostbitten fingertips and the shrapnel that remained lodged beneath the skin of my shoulder. (I'd been hit during the jump on D-Day.) I kept my suffering even from the squad medic, refusing to leave my brothers in arms.

I imagined I was some figure of heroic solitude, a survivor of a plane crash or climbing accident, hauling my injured self over mountain passes, left for dead but possessed of a will to survive. I imagined I was an athlete of Jordan-esque caliber, playing through the pain. I was bleeding through my sock, my fever was a hundred and four, after the game I'd be rushed to the hospital for intravenous hydration.

I imagined the revolution had come and I had been shot by the army we rebels were about to overthrow. The wound was fatal but I had a few minutes to live. The last thing I saw was the flag of the fallen empire burning in the street. I died happy.

I imagined I was Eve and she was first, and I was lonely and naked in a garden paradise, and the pain in my rib was God fashioning me a companion who'd spring fully-formed from the marrow near my heart, and we'd have a damn good time until he bit into that fateful fruit.

Labels: Adam and Eve, broken heart, cough, flights of fancy brought on by the delerium of extended illness and drugs used to treat, pain, rib, Vicodin, vomit

I'd been coughing for a week when I gave in and went to the doctor. As I opened the door to the office I began an operatic coughing fit. By the time I approached the reception desk, the doctor's numerous assistants were peering curiously around the glass divider. Just as I stepped up to the window the grand finale welled up from the depths of my chest and I barked out a few more notes.

"Jesus Christ," said the receptionist.

"I'm here to see the doctor," I croaked.

I waited on an outdated gray leather sofa and averted my eyes from a truly hideous piece of art, inclining my head instead toward the flatscreen television, which was showing CNN. I probably haven't seen CNN in eight years or so, not since my college housemates and I fell asleep waiting for the Bush-Gore election returns that never came. Horrible stuff, CNN. They were conveying so many kinds of horrifying information in so many ways at once that I could feel my will to live on this earth slipping away. The visuals were of some kind of natural disaster, the talking head kept repeating the word, "bomb," and the ticker on the bottom was spinning a lurid tale of violent crimes perpetrated on the young and innocent. Into this evil world I spewed more evil, one viral gust at a time.

I sat, waiting and coughing, until an elderly woman came out of the exam room. She walked right up to me and watched me cough while she put on her turban, fur hat and sunglasses.

"Do you have bronchitis?" she asked slowly. "Because I do."

"I-cough-think-cough-maybe I-cough cough do," I said.

"Well, it's just terrible, isn't it?" said the old woman, drawing her fur tightly around her shoulders.

Just then, doctor called me in to his office to take all kinds of notes on me. In giving my medical history I realized I was actually an incredibly healthy person. Everything works just great except for my lungs, which have always been prone to lengthy bouts of coughing. I had to answer a lot of probing questions, though.

"Do you smoke?"

"Ah, no. But sometimes I am in smoky rooms."

"I see. Do you drink?"

"Yes."

"Significantly?"

"Do I drink significantly?"

"Is your drinking significant?"

"Drinking is significant to me, yes."

"Do you drink in a significant way?"

"No, I would say that I drink in an insignificant way."

Satisfied, the doctor continued on. "Are you taking any drugs regularly?"

"What do mean by regularly?"

"Do you take any medications?"

"Do I take them?"

"Are you on any medications?"

"No."

The stress of having to answer all these questions brought on a coughing fit. The doctor looked at me kindly.

"That's quite a cough you've got there," he said.

"I know," I said proudly. "I'd be awfully grateful if you could give me some powerful drugs that would get rid of it."

"Well, we'll see," said the doctor. "Let's poke you and stick you and take some pictures."

He took me in the exam room and listened to my chest. "You've got a whole symphony in there," he said cheerfully. "All kinds of noises."

"Is that bad?"

"Let's take a picture."

The nurse took some x-rays and several vials of blood. I went back to the gray couch, then back into the office, where I was diagnosed with a combination of bronchitis, tracheitis and laryngitis and prescribed a narcotic cough syrup.

"You don't drive, do you?"

"Nope."

"Good, 'cause this'll knock you right out."

"Sounds great," I said. "Will it make it go away?"

The doctor frowned. "You should be feeling better in a few days, but I'll give you two refills just in case."

I took my prescription across the street to the pharmacy and collected a bottle marked "Hycodan/hydrocodone."

"Hydrocodone," I murmured. "I know that stuff."

Wikipedia revealed that the good doctor had prescribed me liquid Vicodin. Sweet! I had been really depressed from being sick and coughing all the time, not to mention the dark days of winter and the pain of being alive. Now I had a bottle of liquid Vicodin to ease the pain. It was covered in stickers. "Intensifies the effects of alcohol," they said. "May be habit-forming." "Avoid heavy machinery."

I looked it up on the internet. Side effects included: Blurred vision, constipation, dizziness, drowsiness, dry mouth, euphoria, excitement, nausea, vomiting. Most of those sounded unpleasant, but I'll risk a lot for a little euphoria and excitement. There were was nothing to look forward to among the withdrawal symptoms of feeling unwell or unhappy, anxious or irritable, dizzy, confused, or agitated and suffering from nausea, unusual skin sensations, mood swings, headache, trouble sleeping, and sweating. How would I know if I was in withdrawal or I was just myself? Maybe the unusual skin sensations would sound the appropriate warning.

It seemed I was about to embark on my own little flirtation with opiate addiction. Never been much for that particular flavor of fucked-up myself--I very often do vomit or become drowsy, not my favorite sensations. I much prefer the delusion that I can see the essence of all things or I am a dictator to I am drowsy and will soon vomit. However, compared to round the clock convulsive coughing, euphoria followed by drowsiness followed by hopefully not vomiting sounded appealing.

My first day on the stuff was great. I couldn't tell if I was no longer coughing or was now too drugged to care, but it didn't matter because I fell asleep before I could really think about it. The next day I had to work for many hours and hesitated to take the soporific narco-syrup lest it render me useless. But after coughing into the echochamber ceiling of the public library where I meet my first two students and drawing glares from all the geriatric library regulars, I ducked into the vestibule and swigged. I quieted down somewhat and went on with the day. I couldn't help but notice that with my midday nip of narco-syrup came an instantaneous feeling of relief and a soothing--if somewhat artificial--sense that everything was just fine right now, and always would be.

Two hours later, it was raining. It was cold. I was coughing. I was sleepy. I was not so much euphoric, or even excited. Perhaps I was already developing a tolerance and no high would be like the first. I made it to the final townhouse of the evening and starting coughing in earnest. I had reserved the last dose for this very eventuality and down the hatch it went in a torrent of Red #3, deforming future babies, breeding future cancer, but hopefully suppressing, for the moment, my dreaded cough.

By some miracle, the last student of the day had improved her SAT scores by 100 points in each section, despite my cancelling our last two sessions due to convalescence. This demoralized me. They were better off without me. I wasn't even good at my day job. But before I could get too upset, I felt the familiar tug of the opiates gently removing these worries from my mind, the way you would extract an object from a sleeping child's fingers. That was the real trick of the whole hydrocodone family, I remembered. Not the brief euphoria but the slow, almost imperceptible removal of pain. Funny drug, those painkillers--more about what they absent rather than what they add.

"How'd you do it?" I smiled sweetly at my student.

"I just tried," she scowled.

"Well, that's good," I said. "Try when you take the real test and you'll really be on to something."

I noticed that it was a lot easier to deal with moody teenagers from within a pleasant opiate haze, though it was harder to stay awake. I assigned the kid some problems to do and asked her mom for some green tea so I didn't nod out on her dining room table. The hydrocodone was reaching some critical mass in my body. I was beginning to drift away on a syrupy red sea.

And then, just like that, the sea grew angry. My boat began listing, then tossing in the waves. I felt a familiar and telltale burning between my ribs, the stirrings of violent nausea.

Despite my demented escapades, I've never thrown up in a client's house, and this is the shred of dignity I cling to when I'm looking for reassurance that I'm only a recreational moron. How ironic that the substance currently endangering my untarnished record was the one drug I'd ever actually been prescribed.

"I'm really sick." I told the kid. "Tell your mom we're done." I quickly calculated a ten-minute refund and counted out the exact change. I called a taxi and waited by the door.

"I'm so sorry you're not feeling well," said the mom. "While I have you, do you think she should do a summer internship?"

The very words, "summer internship" almost yanked my stomach inside out. I've always found the custom of monied youth working for free while following around middle-aged people in suits in preparation for their own long slogs up the corporate ladder to be nauseating on many levels, but I took a deep breath and said, "A summer internship, yes, that could be good. A summer internship, yes. I highly recommend it."

The cab arrived and I concentrated on not vomiting in it. This was difficult, as it was suffused with the scent of a thousand air fresheners. Coupled with the usual swerving and heavy braking, the sharp odor contributed to the delusion that I was starring in my own private reality show called, "Who Wants to Throw the Fuck Up Right Now?"

I called someone who could help with this terrible problem. I called my mommy. "Deep breaths," she said. "Deep breaths."

I got to my corner and paid the man whose addiction to air fresheners was far worse than my burgeoning dependence on narcotic cough syrup. I stepped out of the taxi and promptly projectile-vomited all over the tree outside my apartment building. It wasn't the first time that had happened, but it was the first time it was neon yellow. Hydrocodone, I read online, metabolizes into morphine in the body. Apparently, Red #3 turns into Yellow #5.

I trudged inside and flung myself onto the couch, where Rebecca kindly brought me tea and toast.

"It turned on me!" I moaned. "My narco-syrup turned on me! It was prescription!"

"Did you take the amount you were supposed to?" Rebecca asked suspiciously.

"I did! I swear!"

"Well, you're just going to have to take less of it."

"But I want to take more of it!"

"I know you do, buddy," said my kind friend. "I know you do."

I went to bed that night without any liquid Vicodin syrup and coughed through the whole night. When I woke up I realized I'd pulled something in my neck, coughing in my sleep. A nice dose of painkilling hydrocodone would have helped with that, but I was too afraid to take it. New York has so comparatively few plants and trees and it wouldn't be fair to cover them all with neon yellow vomit.

Soon, at least, there was a distraction. My personal physician called to announce that she'd gotten engaged. I screamed appropriately and then wept a little for good measure. It was nice to feel another emotion enter my world of uncontrollable coughing and self-sedation. Joy! Celebration! The embarking upon of a future by two young people in love! Most important, the chance to get wasted on a beach and make some bad decisions!

I called Rebecca to share the news that our personal physician was engaged. "She and I are really not having the same kind of week," I remarked.

"No," Rebecca agreed. "You're not getting married. You threw up on the tree."

Labels: cough, engagements, hydrocodone, internships, opiates, taxis, vomit

It is not given to everyone to take a bath in the multitude; to enjoy the crowd is an art . . . That man who can easily wed the crowd knows a feverish enjoyment which will be eternally denied to the egoist, shut up like a trunk, and to the lazy man, imprisoned like a mollusc. The poet adopts as his own all the professions, all the joy and all the miseries with which circumstance confronts him. What men call love is very meagre, very restricted and very feeble, compared to this ineffable orgy, to this holy prostitution of the soul that abandons itself entirely, poetry and charity included, to the unexpected arrival, to the passing stranger.


I

The platform was crowded, the crush was increasing. There was some kind of delay, but it hadn't been acknowledged, and when the train came wheezing into the station at half speed, the crowd surged. The train was already packed, save for one nearly empty car.

In the summer you know that it's a hot car, no A/C. My dad taught me that, riding the Long Island Rail Road together. "Hot car, hot car, hot car," he'd mutter, and herd me with his shirtsleeved arms, papa duck-like, into the crowd already thick at the door of the next car. He'd nudge me down the aisles, quacking, "not-near-the-bathroom, not-near-the-bathroom," till we settled in our seats under the blasting vents and smoothed our feathers.

But when you see the empty car in winter you hope somehow the other thousand people on the train just didn't notice it. Maybe somewhere downtown part of the platform was blocked off. Maybe a giant church group just emptied out at the last stop. Maybe the people inside were inflatable and just deflated.

No such luck. In the middle of the car was a splatter of fresh vomit, covering a wide radius. A comical splatter, like a logo on Nickelodean. I thought of that show where slime fell on people, orange goop, proto-reality TV. Vile liquids pouring from above the shape of things to come.

Some people shrugged and sat down at the edges. It's cold and flu season, maybe they couldn't even smell it. Not me. I battled against the crowd, back to the platform. I didn't want to ride with the vomit. I have limits.

II

Again, the empty car on the overcrowded train, but not as empty. I had forgotten about the vomit. I got on. It smelled like a horse paddock, minus the hay. I sensed a general avoidance of a certain area of the car. Looking around, I couldn't place it. The car was a refuge of the insane and deformed. Babblers, droolers, mutterers, the morbidly obese and the absolute wrinkliest human being I'd ever seen. Religious ideas about foot-washing skittered through my mind. Whose feet would I wash first, if I were as kind as Jesus? In this car, Jesus wouldn't know who to pick.

Then I saw him. A bum, a hobo really. A derelict right out of portraiture. Silvery stubble, crumpled hat. And on the floor beneath him, a puddle of his own animal-smelling urine. He sat right in it with his hobo dignity, nodding out drunk but sitting up straight.

III

Rafi makes his rounds, selling his papers. I've seen him for years, first on the F, then on the L. He always says the same thing. "Selling papers isn't the best job in the world but it's an honest living. All I have to look forward to tonight is a hot meal and a place to sleep. If I don't sell these papers I don't eat tonight, so ladies and gentlemen if you can find it in your heart to give me some money, I would be very grateful. I hope you get home safely tonight and God bless you."

From the marks on his arms and the boniness of his body, I think what Rafi looks forward to at night is shooting up, but who am I to judge? I give him money, only sometimes. Everyone gets a personal compliment, very heartfelt. I always get "beautiful eyes," even when I'm wearing sunglasses.

Usually he picks his way nimbly through the car, talking all the time. "Thank you, beautiful," "God bless you, my friend," "Excuse me sir," "Excuse me, miss," "Beautiful smile, mami." In the dozens of times I've heard Rafi do his schtick I don't think I've heard him say anything he hasn't said a thousand times before.

Tonight, though, he stops in front of a young woman a few seats away from me.

"I don't like ugly people," he tells her. "Ugly people are angry at everyone. Always in a bad mood."

She doesn't respond, but kind of half-nods, half-smiles, the way you do.

"Tonight, after I'm done here, I'm gonna go to JFK. I'm gonna get on a plane. I've got a ticket and I'm gonna fly away from here, to my own apartment, and when I get there, I'm gonna do whatever I want!"

"All right," says the girl.

Rafi hitches up his pants triumphantly, flashes his broken grin, looks over his shoulder in that rodential way of the addicts of blissing drugs both fairly innocuous and slowly ruinous and leaps into the next car.

IV

A shameful thing that happened involving begging:

One night I was running late, came bursting up the stairs at 6th Avenue and 14th full speed. I kicked over the McDonald's cup of an elderly beggar working the corner silently, sitting in meditation on a milk crate. His change scattered all over the street. It was dark, it was cold. I looked at down all the coins, then up at the clock on the bank, and rather than help him pick up the change I threw a five-dollar bill in the empty cup and ran on. The few minutes it would have taken to gather his day's work were hardly worth it to me, monetarily speaking. Cruel world.

V

A couple, so in love. There are many couples in love on the trains, but this couple is so in love. They have their arms around each other and they are talking and laughing and kissing. She lays her head on his shoulder and closes her eyes, he strokes her fingers, and then, just as lovingly, the part of her purse they're resting on. I am reminded of that part of Franny and Zooey where the guy Franny's making out with kisses the collar of her coat because he can't differentiate between the girl he loves and the things she owns. The girl opens her eyes and they kiss and start talking again. Everything they say leads them to laugh or kiss softly. It's not showy or gross or annoying, just beautiful.

VI

Rush hour, and I am trying not to panic. Maybe it's some kind of reptilian-brain past-life Jew thing, but I really don't like being smushed into train cars. It's different than a mosh pit--more brutal somehow. Despite the trancelike state of people under the spell of music, despite the aggressive release of a violent and sexual energy, despite the palpable smell of hormones, the mosh pit is more orderly than this. It surges this way and that, like seaweed in an invisible tide. If you fall you are caught. If you go limp you are carried along. If you spread your feet and stand firm you are (marginally) safe. Everyone is looking in the same direction, moving to the same music.

The subway is not like that. It's not a tide. It's more like peristalsis, gorging and disgorging, swallowing up and spitting out. But in rush hour it's always bloated, and the eyes of its human food are empty. In the mosh pit if I am crushed it is by the writhing, flinging bodies of the ecstatic. If I am kicked or printed with a slick of someone else's sweat it is the transfer of a wild energy. Here the woolen coats and nylon bags press tighter and tighter, with no hope of a downbeat to send them in another direction. Such a joyless and grudging group hug.

I turn my iPod up, up, up and dance minutely in my non-place on the train, imagining the dead-eyed commuters to be a mosh pit instead. Miraculously, the seat in front of me opens up, and the tightening plunge at the next stop forces me into it. Next to me is a woman my age and she, I can see, is really on the brink of panic. "One more stop," she breathes quietly. "One more stop."

The crowd spits a little boy practically into my lap. He's small, four or five, and his chin rests on top of my bag, which rests on my knees. His curious face occupies the space the New Yorker would, if there were room to extract it and open it, which there is not.

"Hey," I say to the kid.

"P!" he shouts, pointing above my head. "P! P!"

I twist my neck slowly to look at the advertisement. There is no "P" in it, but I want to be encouraging.

"Yes!" I say. " 'P' is one of the letters!"

"P!" he shouts again.

"P!" I reply.

It's quiet for a minute.

"What's dat?" He's pulling my sunglasses.

"These are sunglasses," I tell him.

He puts them on. They cover his whole head. He looks like a tiny jazz musician. He preens, swiveling his head back and forth, up at his mom. He takes them off and puts them back on my face, then starts poking at his own reflection.

"Hey!" he says. "Hey, hey, hey, hey!"

"That's you," I say. "Do you see?"

"Don't touch the lenses," sighs the mom from above, so far above. Even seated, I am not down quite at his level, but I see how disparate are the kid and adult worlds. Kids live in the undergrowth. The adults are the forest canopy, looming.

The kid stops poking and makes funny faces at his reflection in my shades. We get to my stop and I burrow through the crowd in a crouch to get off the train. I suck in a giant breath of stale, subway platform air. I try to see if the kid's tired mom got my seat, but the train is too packed and as it trundles north all I make out is the strange geometry of reluctantly tangled limbs.

Labels: beggars, bodily fluids, crowds, mosh pit, subway, vomit