Hyper-chondriac (24 page)

I entered an old Spanish-style home and was greeted by my Reiki-ist. Claire was in her late twenties, had curly red hair and a giant hoop through her pierced nose. Every time I looked at Claire's nose ring, it just reminded me how dry my nose currently was. In the haste to get out of my house, I'd forgotten to Q-tip my baby rash ointment up each nostril. And the dry Santa Ana winds were now punishing my septum for the forgetfulness.

There was incense burning, wind chimes chiming, candles flickering; the calmness seemed pompous.

“Do you need to use the bathroom?”

I didn't but maybe she'd have some Vaseline or hair conditioner I could shove up my nostrils for some relief. Some Chap-Stick might even do the trick.

“Yes, please.”

I went into the bathroom but there wasn't much of anything, except soap. I needed some shaving cream, sunscreen, anything that would be even minutely moister than my nostrils. I would've even considered toothpaste; however, this was a minimalist guest bathroom and I believe there's no reason for my nose to ever smell better than my mouth. I should have just asked if she had some Vaseline-like substance in another bathroom. Surely someone with a pierced nostril would understand dry nose issues. I'm sure that probably-not-gold-plated hoop dangling above her upper lip has irritated the surrounding skin at least once. Maybe some water would do for me in the meantime. But what if that just dried me out more? I had to take the chance. I stuck my nose in the sink and tried to get the faucet directly above my left nostril, in hopes of flooding the dryness out. Unfortunately, all I did was get several gallons of water all over my sweatshirt and make my nose drippy and dry.

“Are you okay in there?” Claire asked.

“Yeah…just washing my face!”

“All right. Let me know if you need anything.”

“Um…I could use a sweatshirt…if you have an extra one…I think I got mine wet.”

She must've wondered what the hell I was doing in there.

“I may have an oversize one that'll fit.”

“Okay. Thanks!”

Four minutes later my nose was still dry and I was lying flat on my stomach on a massage table while wearing a gray Minnie Mouse sweatshirt that belonged to Claire's mother. I'm an idiot.

“I don't remember what you told me on the phone. Have you ever had Reiki before?”

Dammit, was my nose dry!

“Technically no. I tried Distance Reiki once but it didn't work out.”

“Well, this will.”

Claire rubbed her hands together furiously, as if she were trying to start a fire, then placed them very, very lightly on the back of my head. After a minute or two, her hands inched down toward my neck for another couple of minutes, then on to my upper back, mid-back, hamstrings…you get the idea.

Exactly what was happening to me, I didn't know. Claire explained that, unlike spiritual healing, where the healer sends out the energy, in Reiki it is the recipient who draws the necessary energy from the person touching them. So instead of her hands sucking out my bad energy, the burden was on me to take good energy out of her. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to steal somebody's energy. Did I have to trick it into coming near the surface of Claire's skin so I could just drag it into my pores? And even if I was adept at taking energy, what if I took the bad kind by mistake? Or what if this was another scam and she was sucking all the good energy out of me to sell to someone else? Bottom line: despite all the flowery language, as I lay there it just felt like Claire was a really lazy person who was supposed to massage me but didn't feel like it.

Halfway through our session, I flipped over onto my back and she started touching the front half of me. Shit, was my nose dry! I should have just asked her for some cream. Any kind of cream! Every woman has cream in her pocketbook, let alone her home. Why didn't I ask for some cream?! Bread of Shame! Bread of Shame! My dried-out nostrils would inevitably teach me some sort of important life lesson. I just didn't know what yet.

All of a sudden there was a lot of commotion. At first I thought Claire was being robbed—but not of her energy, of more tangible items, like a laptop. Then I realized it was her roommate coming home. With a dog. A very frisky dog. A very frisky dog that kept scurrying back and forth down the hardwood hallway with his very long nails. We were almost done. Why couldn't the roommate have come home just fifteen minutes later? I'm sure her car could've used a wash—unless she, too, was frustrated at the lack of popular consonants with which to build a bracelet. Throughout the disturbance, Claire was oblivious and kept touching me. She was now down to my belly button. I had forgotten to tell her that I can't tolerate my belly button being touched. It feels like a dead spot on my body, kind of like some dead nerves on the side of my neck that I have to avoid while shaving. No one gets to touch my belly button! Not even Nancy. I should have just put scaffolding over it or glued a dime onto it for protection. But neither of us had said a word for the past thirty-five minutes and I didn't want to break the silence. I'd let the scampering dog do that.

What was the dog running from anyway? He had just come from outside so he should be zonked out on a fluffy dog pillow somewhere. And why not clip the dog's nails? Or take him somewhere to get them clipped if you're too nervous that you're going to hit a blood vessel doing it yourself? The noise was starting to grate on me. Now I fully understood the term “home office.”

Rip. Rip. Rip. Now what? Her roommate was ripping up junk mail or the statements for bills that had just been paid. Or just being obnoxious. Or all three of those things. Scamper, scamper, scamper. Rip, rip, rip. At least invest in a shredder! In comparison, the motorized mincing would be soothing, which ripping never is. Unless one is the person doing the ripping.

Miraculously the ripping and scampering simultaneously stopped and peace was restored. Until three seconds later when I was startled by some loud grinding. Jesus Christ! Blender drinks! Couldn't this wait three more minutes? Does anyone REALLY need a frozen margarita at one in the afternoon? As the last of the ice cubes were crushed by the whirring metal blades, Claire removed her hands from me. My time was up.

“How do you feel?”

I had hoped that all the noises hadn't distracted me from sucking out the maximum of Claire's positive energy.

“Relaxed, I guess.”

I did feel relaxed; however, I had been lying down for the past fifty minutes. If Nancy had blown on my toes for an hour, I'm not sure the results would've been any different.

“Now, take your time getting off the table. And you might experience an even deeper sense of relaxation tomorrow.”

“Okay. Did you find anything odd inside me during the session?”

“Actually, when I put my hands over your heart chakra, I got a little frightened at first.”

“Really?”

“I think there's a problem with acceptance in your heart.”

What?! My heart accepts stuff! I got married, I have friends, I really get along with the mailman…. But if she's right, maybe this “acceptance” issue comes back to religion and that whole Jewish conundrum with my rabbi. And how fate had treated my mother. I wondered if everything came back to God.

“And anger. There's anger in your heart, too.”

Duh.

Now, here's the weird thing. While I was still in the privacy of her spare-bedroom/massage table/home-office room with the door shut, I asked her if her dog had beagle and dachshund in it.

“Oh my God! It's a beagle-dachshund mix! How did you know?”

“I don't know.”

I really didn't know how I knew. I'm terrible at guessing stuff. I can't even get
one
lottery number right. Maybe all of her touching had released something in me that allowed me to see through walls, or at least guess dog breeds based on how their paws sounded on hardwood. Or maybe Matrika/Reiki Pete was onto something when he said I had actual voices running through my head that could be some form of ESP. Maybe I was a dick for getting my money back from PayPal.

On the way home I stopped for gas. As soon as I got out to start pumping, I noticed that I was getting a few stares. At first I thought that word had spread quickly about my dog breed predicting abilities. Then I looked down and realized I was still wearing a snug Minnie Mouse sweatshirt.

 

I felt calm enough to not take my Zoloft that afternoon. It was the first time I had ever intentionally skipped a day. I guess I was just getting sick of all the excuses and wanted desperately to taper down to 50 mg. The remainder of the evening and the following day I was extremely light-headed and dizzy. Was it the aftermath of the Reiki? Was it because I had neglected my magic pill the previous day? Was it the Santa Ana winds again? Or, when I smashed up my weekly Ayurvedic coconut with a hammer in my driveway, had I inadvertently eaten some asphalt? In any event, I didn't feel well. I probably should've taken my pill.

The next week, Claire called to see if I wanted to set up another appointment. I decided not to. Those frenetic scraping dog claws combined with the potential of her roommate getting involved with an even more annoying hobby, like indoor bowling, didn't make me want to shell out another $60. Besides, Nancy's energy was just as good as hers. From then on I'd just suck some out of her while we were spooning. However, upon learning of my plan, Nancy preferred that I leave her good energy alone—although I had dibs on the bad stuff.

“He seems nice. Sure.”

Nancy and I had just adopted a dog from a shelter. We'd been looking for months but could never agree on one. She wanted something she could bring to work inside her pocketbook and I wanted to retain my heterosexuality.

We chose Toto, as he was then called, because of his composure. Although chaos reigned as he was engulfed by a slew of aggressively barking canines and screaming kids with argumentative parents, our soon-to-be pet remained unflappable. He was the calmest dog I had ever seen—so calm, in fact, that I wondered if he was medicated. It was hard to believe he was just three months old. If he was this composed as a puppy, it boded well for his future demeanor. And perhaps mine.

Studies have shown that pet owners live longer. Prisoners and hospital patients have lowered their blood pressure, cholesterol and triglyceride levels in the company of animals; heart attack victims have a better survival rate; Alzheimer's patients have a decrease in mood disorders; seizure sufferers report that their dogs can sense the onset of a convulsion before they can. And a service dog can prevent a Parkinson's patient from falling by touching his owner's feet when they're frozen in place. If dogs could do all that, then helping me slow down seemed a reasonable expectation.

Although my family always had dogs while I was growing up, they were as unsocialized and volatile as the human inhabitants who fed them. Besides almost killing that cable guy, Rufus had nearly come to blows with many of our neighbors. Whenever a friend came over, Wally had to be held and then dragged into a distant area of the house to ensure the friend's safety. Sydney's personality was as unpredictable as his sudden death from a staph infection. Were the dogs crazy or did we make them crazy? Nature or nurture? Regardless, I was elated to have my first pet that probably wouldn't hurt anyone.

The name had to go. First of all, he looked nothing like Toto. Dorothy's Toto was a cairn terrier and our new dog was an Irish terrier–border terrier mix whose rumpled, scraggly hair always gave the appearance that he had just woken up. (He also looks nothing like Benji, so please stop saying that when you see me walking him. I'm serious. IMDb “Benji” and I'm sure you'll agree. I'm considering downloading a picture of Benji and keeping it in my wallet so when strangers definitively say, “Hey, it's Benji!” I can pull out the evidence and retort, “No, it's
not.
My dog is tall, angular and wirehaired while Benji is short, squat and fluffy and has larger, floppy ears. In fact, my mutt looks very much like a live-action version of the tramp from
Lady and the Tramp
and nobody would compare the tramp to Benji. Now go take a class in visual memorization!”) In any event, I would
not
be saying the word “Toto” aloud in my home, unless I was asked who sang that shitty song “Rosanna.” Despite his gentle manner, for some reason Nancy and I wound up naming him after Kenyon Martin, one of the fiercest, most combustible players in the NBA.

 

Although we'd been living in the same house for five years, since we drove everywhere, we didn't really know any of our neighbors, but this didn't stop me from holding phantom grudges against them based on the subtleties of facial expressions I witnessed from my car. The shaved-headed motherfucker was a conceited asshole; the pretty lady with the ugly attitude was a bitch; the guy with the Mercedes jeep was a Nazi. However, walking Kenyon up and down the block three or four times a day forced me into face-to-face encounters with people whom I'd never seen without a car window separating us. It turned out the shaved-headed motherfucker was a gregarious landscape artist and as die-hard a basketball fan as I was; the pretty lady with the ugly attitude owned a goat milk ice cream company and did volunteer environmental work; and the guy with the Mercedes Nazi jeep was a famous movie poster designer who gave us a $100 bottle of wine for the holidays. All of my pent-up animosity was fictitious and had no grounding in reality. One might think that any dog would have united me with our neighbors; however, there are plenty of people who walk dogs on our street that nobody wants to talk to. A lot of it inevitably has to do with Kenyon's personality.

Unlike me, Kenyon accepted things for what they were. Since we crate-trained him, at the end of each day we'd usher him into a cage. Naturally, he would have preferred sleeping in our bed or even on the floor next to the window, but he entered without protest. When walking on a leash and spotting another dog, he'd get excited but never attempt to pull. He knew we'd get there eventually. And he was even judicious when eating. I'd been accustomed to seeing a dog attack food, much as I did, as if every meal were a race. Kenyon took his time and delicately savored each bite, rarely finishing what was in his bowl. Even though he'd only been on the planet for thirteen weeks, he quickly became my role model.

Like the dogs that can sense seizures, Kenyon was magically able to anticipate my moods and actions. On our first drive alone together, he sat perched in the passenger seat and, without the added height of Nancy's lap, was way too small to actually see anything over the window or dashboard. Within five minutes, a car cut in front of me without signaling. Before I could even react to the other driver, the mutt scratched me with his tiny paw, as if he were requesting my composure. I had no choice but to accede to his wish. I didn't want to upset him. Unlike my laminated cards, mantras and pills, Kenyon would be affected by my actions. Not that Nancy wasn't, but she had the power to get out of the car at a red light and walk away. Kenyon was stuck with me.

I was remarkably calmer whenever Kenyon was by my side—which became pretty much all the time. Within a week I had folded up the crate and he was sleeping in bed with us. The rhythmic beating of his tiny terrier heart induced deeper and more restful nights. If I couldn't get off the Zoloft with the help of his wirehaired presence, I'd never be able to. I was in love. And so was Nancy. The combination of Ayurveda, Kenyon and the strong possibility of her show ending finally started to de-stress her. The cumulative amounts of anxiety in our house reached their lowest levels since we'd moved in.

I developed a new mantra that helped me not to overreact: “What Would Kenyon Do?” Yeah, it sounds pretty lame but it's a great litmus test. When I got angry because a business call wasn't returned, I'd think aloud, “What Would Kenyon Do?” Easy. He'd lie in the sun and shut his eyes. When a cell phone went off in the movie theater, I'd wonder, “What Would Kenyon Do?” Simple. He'd listen to the semi-melodic tone and flash his pointy smile. When I was about to yell at someone who'd stolen the parking spot I'd been waiting for, I'd ponder, “What Would Kenyon Do?” He'd wag his tail at the people in the car. (Which I pretend to do but don't actually wiggle my ass.)

I never felt better in my life. I was finally able to anticipate the day I'd have the following conversation with Dr. Tamm.

“Hi, I feel fantastic.”

“So you're ready?”

“Absolutely!”

“Good. You'll go down to 50 mg for a couple of weeks and, if all goes well, drop down to one pill every other day and then cut out the Zoloft completely.”

I hoped never to enter my pharmacy again unless I was looking for batteries or sunscreen.

 

The following morning, the phone rang and derailed my fantasy. It was my sister calling from Florida. My father was in the emergency room. My only surprise was that it hadn't happened sooner. Rather than my mother being in an assisted-living facility or nursing home, my father had the unenviable job of lifting her up with his seventy-three-year-old back and transferring her broken body to the commode—every hour and a half. Every day. After all the constant awkward lifting, my father's back went out. Now they were both immobile and Debbie had too much on her plate.

I needed to fly down to Sarasota to run errands for my father and help out my mother. Unfortunately, that meant traveling without Kenyon. Despite his mere twenty-one pounds, his giraffelike legs were too tall for him to fit under the seat of an airplane. And he wasn't going cargo. He's an animal, not a piece of luggage.

We reluctantly dropped Kenyon off at a friend's house. Then, on the way to the airport, I wanted to go back and pick him up, eat the plane tickets and drive cross-country to Florida with Nancy and him. But she didn't want to be in a car with me unnecessarily for six days. I would have to do without my wiry mentor for a while. Fortunately, I had a backup plan. And, where I was going, I'd need one.