Leggy Blonde: A Memoir (14 page)

I could not win! He wanted me to cook, and then knocked me for doing the best job I could. He wanted me to look good, but commented on overspending on dresses. He seemed to find fault with everything about me—especially my mother’s history with drinking.

•  •  •

My parents were ensconced in Williams Island in Florida, and keen to sell the Kenilworth apartment. I wasn’t as eager as they were since I was still living there. The real estate agent was our friend and neighbor Linda Stein, a funny, talky New Yorker through and through. Before
she became a broker, she was the manager of the Ramones and a downtown fixture in the ’80s rock scene when Blondie, Patti Smith, the Talking Heads, and the Ramones played gigs at the legendary club CBGB. Years later, Linda was tragically murdered by her assistant. Her body was found in her apartment on Fifth Avenue. This past year, one of her daughters died at forty years old of brain cancer. I just don’t understand the senseless tragedies that befall us. When I see others experience such irreversible pain and suffering, I become ill with emotional pain.

Linda used her key, and would walk potential buyers through the apartment day and night. David Copperfield and Claudia Schiffer and Rod Stewart came through. It was surreal to be sitting on the couch in my pajamas, look up, and see Linda with a famous actor or singer. I prayed they wouldn’t buy the apartment and throw me out on the curb.

My parents needed the money from the sale. My father was a bit neurotic about getting that done, and called from Florida a lot to check on Linda’s progress. Mom’s anxieties flared up in Florida, too. She didn’t do well with the change of scenery. She loved old-world architecture and elegance. Miami was colorful and brash and new. It wasn’t to her taste at all. She missed her friends, her haunts, her block. She missed her children. Plus, she was getting older. She’d always taken such care and pride in her beauty. To move to a young city like Miami where every girl in the street had giant fake boobs and a savage tan and flaunted herself in a bikini only underscored Mom’s middle age.

She took a hard turn for the worse with her alcoholism. I saw the incremental changes in her. When I flew down to Florida or they came up to the city, I was constantly searching for her stashes. I found bottles of wine under her mattress, in the closets, under towels.
It used to be that her personality would change only when she was drunk. But she seemed mentally off all the time now. Was she drunk around the clock? How could anyone be sure? She drank in secret.

I had a bad feeling that something was fundamentally off about her. She was zoned out. It was like she didn’t know where she was half the time. Mom was occasionally violent, too, throwing things and punches.

“I’m scared,” I told Dad. “Something is wrong with her.”

He couldn’t see it. But he was with her all the time. The change for him was gradual. I’d see her every two months, and registered a dramatic difference.

Upset and worried about her, I turned to Ricky for an ear and a hug. It was like he put up his palm and said, “Talk to the hand.” He did not want to hear about it. I was afraid that alcoholism was also a sign of weakness in his book. Having an alcoholic mother just made me even more unsuitable. So Ricky was no help, and Dad was in deep denial about the severity of the problem.

During one of their visits to New York, I thought my mom was out of control. She stumbled around, her speech slurred. She stared at me like she didn’t know me. I found her in the kitchen drinking, and took away her glass. Before, she’d deny the problem or tell me off. But this time, she didn’t acknowledge me at all. Silently, zombielike, she just reached for another glass. It was eerie.

I called my doctor and described the symptoms.

“She needs to detox,” he said. “Bring her to Lenox Hill tonight.”

Dad was against it. He still loathed hospitals and doctors. But I begged him to do it, so we put Mom in the VIP wing at Lenox Hill for detox. I slept at the hospital every night. They gave her drugs that made her hallucinate. She kept trying to leave the hospital, but she
did not know what city she was in. Miami? New York? I wasn’t sure she knew she was in a hospital. One thing we were sure about: she didn’t want to be there. She persistently tried to escape, and had to be tied to the bed. She became violent. Having to see that was traumatizing. It was a turning point. We had to deal with this. No more denial.

They did a CT scan on her brain. It showed that she’d had a series of ministrokes. Possibly, her drinking masked the effects. Probably, her alcoholism caused them. There was nothing we could do about them now. She went on a drug regimen to prevent future brain attacks. I was absolutely despondent. My mother had been having strokes, and no one knew. How on earth had that happened?

The doctors gave us another diagnosis. Mom had irreversible brain shrinkage. The condition was called “wet brain,” or Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. It was caused by a severe deficiency of thiamine due to alcoholism and alcohol-related poor nutrition. The vitamin deficiencies wrecked her metabolism and that, in turn, caused atrophy of the brain.

“We usually see it in homeless people without access to health care,” said the doctor. Her symptoms—confusion, difficulty speaking and focusing, forgetfulness, among other things—fit the diagnosis. All this time, we thought she was just wasted.

“If she’d had thiamine injections a while ago, we might’ve been able to reverse it,” said the doctor. “But with the strokes and progression, vitamin treatments won’t do much good.”

“She won’t get better?” I asked.

“No. But she will get worse if she keeps drinking.”

I had no idea how to help her, besides locking her up.

My father was getting tired of all this. He still thought of her alcoholism as a self-inflicted problem that just wouldn’t go away. He was
anti–mainstream medicine. He looked at Mom full of drugs, tied to the bed, and blamed the doctors for making her worse. He was also low on cash. After two weeks, the bill was over fifty thousand dollars and he was livid about that. He insisted we get her out of the hospital and off the detox drugs. “She’s my wife,” he said. I acquiesced. They went back to Florida.

I was scared. My mother was increasingly out of reach mentally. This disease was bigger than our ability to help. I didn’t feel I could talk to Ricky about it. I chalked up his lack of support as the one flaw in our otherwise perfect relationship. To make up for it, I doubled down on cooking, cleaning, and cheering him on. I felt grateful that he loved me.

What an idiot. I should have told him to fuck off.

Dad checked in with me often. Acceptance that she was really sick sank in. “Your mom,” he said one day, “her mind is just . . . going. She doesn’t know where she is. She puts things in the wrong place. She forgets things. But she doesn’t know she’s being forgetful.” The symptoms were like those of an Alzheimer’s patient.

Dad and I begged her to stop drinking or to agree to go to long-term rehab, like Phoenix House in Arizona. Mom refused to do either. “I’m old enough to make my own decisions. You can’t make me.”

“Your brain is deteriorating,” I said.

“I don’t care,” she said.

To Dad, I said, “She doesn’t understand what she’s doing to herself.” How could she? She was mentally diminished. She’d had multiple strokes. Her brain was shrinking.

Dad wasn’t the most effective policeman. Despite her zoning out, she was still driving. She had use of her credit cards. She came and went as she pleased. He searched for her wine stash and would get rid of it, but she’d just replace it the next day. She was forgetful,
but always remembered where the wine store was. Alcoholics are extremely crafty. They can move mountains to get their hands on a bottle.

I was overwhelmed with school, Ricky, and Mom. I simply had to unload some of my emotions. I decided to talk to Ricky about it, hoping I was wrong about his attitude. “She sat by my bed for months, and took me to millions of doctors over the years,” I said one night after dinner. “I feel like I’m not doing enough for her now that she needs me. We’ve switched places. I get how helpless and vulnerable she must have felt after my accident. It’s worse to be in the chair than in the bed. I can’t stand by and watch with a smile on my face. I don’t know how she did it.”

I don’t remember exactly what he said. I do remember what I heard—that my mother, my angel, was just a weakling undeserving of his consideration. And I do remember what I said next:

“It’s over.”

“What?”

“And fuck you.” This time, I walked out.

A week later, I went back. I was an addict, just like Mom. He was an asshole chauvinist throwback, and I couldn’t get enough. We broke up and got back together several times over the coming months. Sexual attraction (coupled with codependency) could make a person act in her own worst interests and be thrilled about it.

Linda Stein finally managed to sell the Kenilworth apartment (for $5 million). I had to move out. I found a one-bedroom rental at 401 East Sixty-sixth Street and Second Avenue. Mediterraneo, a popular Italian restaurant, was right on the corner. I had a lot of dinners there with friends, and still go with my family.

Living alone in a much smaller place, I found myself asking the big questions. I’d devoted much of the year to my conversion. But
when I was in crisis over the one human being I truly worshipped—my mom—I found no comfort in religion or prayer. I’d made a switch to Judaism, in part, to be with the man I loved. But he didn’t love me back enough because of the accident, which had been, arguably, an act of God.

I’d been searching for meaning during a hard time. Something felt missing in my heart I thought only faith could fill. But my family, for better or worse, was my true religion. We had our own history, traditions, and laws. I wasn’t so sure about God. But I was devoted to my parents. Despite his religious nature, Ricky had no charity in his heart for my mother, a sick woman. I started to hate myself for wanting him at all. In one fell swoop, I gave up my boyfriend and my religion, and made a concerted effort to find faith in myself.

A
t my charity functions and interviews, people have a lot of questions about my prosthesis and life as an amputee. I always thought I should really write my own FAQ to answer all of the lingering questions out there. Here goes:

How Much Does Your Leg Cost?

My current legs—one for flats and one for heels—cost $30,000 each. Believe it or not, that’s midrange. Prosthetic limbs can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $150,000, depending on the material, use, and style. This is why I do so much work for One Step Ahead and Challenged Athletes Foundation, both of which raise money to pay for prosthetics for children and athletes. As I know only too well, kids need at least two sets a year while they’re growing. Insurance will cover only their most basic needs or will pay for one prosthetic
a year, or even only one per lifetime, depending on the policy.

Insurance certainly doesn’t cover cosmetics—meaning legs with realistic “skin” and “toes”—or limbs for specific purposes, like running or swimming. I campaign for children and adults who lost their limbs due to diseases or accidents, or for those who were born limbless. They deserve a fighting chance and to not be held back by their loss. Just as reconstructive surgery after mastectomies is paid for by insurance, artificial limbs for sports or aesthetics should be paid for by insurance companies. (For more information about One Step Ahead, please go to
www.onestepaheadfoundation.wordpress.com
and CAF at
www.challengedathletes.org
.)

How Often Do Adults Have to Replace Their Prosthetics?

A good one can last for years. Though with steady improvements in technology and technique, I’ve been known to upgrade to a better leg even if the old one is in good working order. I’ve had my current legs, made by Eric Schaffer of A Step Ahead Prosthetics in Hicksville, Long Island, for five years. Not only are his legs beautiful, they’re very comfortable. With repairs, I could wear them for a decade or more. (A Step Ahead can be found at
www.astepaheadonline.com.)

How Do You Put It On?

First I roll a custom-made silicone sleeve, like a thick condom, over my stump, a.k.a. my residual limb. And by the way, most amputees hate the word “stump.” It just sounds bad. The sleeve has a pin at the bottom, pointing down. Then I put my leg with the silicone sleeve
into the socket at the top of the prosthesis. The pin clicks into a hole in the prosthesis, and it is locked in place. There is no way you could pull the leg off me. You could drag me around the apartment by the leg, and it would not come off. To take it off, I press a release button (well hidden) that unlocks the pin, remove the leg, and unroll the sleeve. It takes maybe ten seconds to put on, two seconds to take off. Only the people I trust the most in the world know where the button’s located. If I were in an accident and the paramedics wanted to get it off, they would have a hard time finding that button.

What Does the Leg Feel Like?

It feels like soft rubber to the touch. In terms of how it feels to wear it, it’s heaven. It feels like a comfortable padded boot. I can put it on as easily as a pair of glasses and walk without pain, wear skirts, wedges, flip-flops, and look like I have two normal legs. It’s a miracle. I’m grateful every day, every step, for the technology that affords me a normal life as well as the artistry that goes into making these beautiful, functional prosthetics. I’m grateful for the whole leg I have, and for my amazing “bionic” leg.

Mechanically, How Does It Work? Does the Leg Have Joints and Springs?

The components in the leg give me bounce, like a ligament does in a real leg. My traction comes from the knee. The “ankle” isn’t a flexible joint, but it bends slightly and shifts back and forth (but not side to side), making it possible for me to take a normal step.

My smooth gait also comes from years of practice. If only I’d
practiced as much on the piano as I do walking with my prosthesis! I’d be playing in Carnegie Hall by now. It’s also because I have a comfortable fit. Before I had my second amputation and had to endure the abrasions, I limped a lot. The equivalent would be wearing too-small shoes and walking with blisters. When I had the surgery, and the abrasions were gone, it was like throwing out the blister-inducing shoes, slipping on a pair of slippers, and walking on a cloud.