Throwing Up in America

I stumbled down Flower Avenue in Venice Beach and knocked on my neighbor’s door. If I was going to die, out here would be better than my little apartment.

I had just broken up with a guy in Malibu. Ending a relationship with a rich guy is doubly depressing because it’s like you’re breaking up and getting laid off.

Anyway, I found out he was ‘poly’ after sleeping with him to the sounds of the waves at Malibu like a Joni Mitchell song.

As I left, I asked him when he bought the new Beamer, and he said it was for his main squeeze, Angelica. 

Driving down PCH, I knew I’d never be anyone’s number one. And I felt slimy for fucking him. I could smell my own agenda.

So I took pills. Nothing pharmaceutical; I took a handful of Saint John’s Wort, a serotonin precursor you buy at Whole Foods. It’s basically what you take for depression when your friends diagnose you. 

My tongue began to spasm, a strange feeling. I tried to text my friend and couldn’t figure out my phone. I Googled. Serotonin syndrome —can be fatal. A full-blown anxiety attack mortified me. Well, it wortified me. Sorry. Little joke there. 

I was O.D.ing on hippy shit.

I had read all sorts of esoterica like the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Teilhard de Chardin’s “We’re spiritual beings having a human experience.” and Ram Das’s “Don’t worry about death; death is perfectly safe.” —stuff that’s supposed to make you think I for one can’t wait to die! But it turns out I was not at all ready to die.

Boise answered his door.

“Boise, I need your help. Can I please try to throw up in your bathroom? I think I’m overdosing.” Boise’s a cute TV commercial actor and a bit of a hippy. He had been having sex with one of the organizers of Burning Man, a lady named Honeybee --not her real name, I probably don’t need to tell you.

Honeybee walked me to the toilet, no stranger to overdoses and puking. I kneeled. 

“Oh yeah, finger in the throat!” she said. I had a vomit coach. I puked a little. 

 “Awesome.” Honeybee buzzed. 

Boise hovered near us, all post-coitally gracious in his hemp bathrobe. Kingly, the way men can get after sex. 

He had told me he’d been in a post-divorce, lots-of-sex phase of his life. 

“I’m so sorry to interrupt you guys.” 

 “Oh, right, Van, you’re apologizing for allowing me to love on you and take care of you? P-shaw.” I love hippies.

Boise called the poison hotline, and they decided I needed to go to the ER. 

 “I hate my life, Boise.” I blurted out between anxiety attacks as we drove his red Smart car down Lincoln Ave to the Marina Del Rey E.R.

In the waiting area, I walked in loops around the chairs so that my blood didn’t stop, so I didn’t stop. A pig-tailed girl on her grandfather’s lap tried to fist-bump me with each pass. I gave her a feeble little bump each time I circled. She giggled. 

Please call my name; please call my name. 

A lady in her 70s stumbled in, bleeding from her eye. Her ambivalent, punked-out son looked resentful that the woman who gave him life needed him. 

Shit. Eye bleeding is terrible. In a triage situation, I’m sure eye-bleeding comes before muttering and walking in circles. 

I considered faking passing out to get the blasé staff to wake up.

I’m finally ushered into a small examining room to wait an hour. Boise asked me if he could leave to get french fries at the only place nearby, McDonald’s, which might have been my gift to him that night, as he usually ate only wheatgrass and hemp —and now this Honeybee. 

The janitor came in to empty the trash. She had the name “Anthony” tattooed on her brown neck in lacy font. She looked up from the trash bag to me, tears plopping onto my paper robe. 

 “What’s wrong wit you?” she asked.

I told her I was afraid I was going to die.

She held my gaze for a long beat.

“You ain’t gonna die. I see ’em come in here sometimes, and I just know some of them, they on they way out, but you? You got too much life in you. He ain’t ready for you yet.” She pointed skyward. 

 If it had been a movie, the next scene would be me returning to the hospital with flowers for the janitor. The receptionist would say, “Macy? With the tattoo? She died years ago!” 

The pretty, blonde doctor finally came in and tested me.

 “You’re ok. Vitals normal. You can go,” she said.

 “I am not ok!” I was bouncing between anxiety and a strange hilarity. 

 “Not until you give Boise here your phone number. I’m kidding. You don’t have to.” I was awkwardly trying to help Boise in his post-divorce, fucking phase.

The doctor blushed and left. She was more than a little harried.

 Finally, with a session of some magical diarrhea, I began to feel ok. Riding home, I felt I was hovering above life in a meta space, grateful to be alive. I could see things. 

“Boise, the only people at the ER with any healing mojo were you, the trash woman, and the little fist-bump girl. The doctors and nurses couldn’t have any authentic, curative presence. They were just reacting. Boise, our attention is a gift. I mean, it has real healing power in it”. 

“Yep”

“Thank you again. So sorry to coitus interruptus your tantric sex session with Bumblebee-I-mean-Honeybee. What can I do to repay you for this night?” 

Boise thought for a second. 

“Love your life, Van.”

“Deal.” 

Back at home, I sat and wrote the moral of this story as a Facebook post to my friends: 

We are all brilliant f*cking sparks of life. 

And we are. And I vowed to do whatever it took to get happy.