What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (18 page)

After this first big, childhood-ending heartbreak, I dove headfirst into my relationship with my college boyfriend, Vito, hastily filling the hole left by my father. Over the years when my dad and I weren’t speaking, I would write long, multipage rants to my father, furious that he wasn’t fighting for me, that he wasn’t coming to get me. He would respond with simple cards that only read “I love you,” which did a great job of rendering those words almost meaningless. Five years later, I would lose Vito in
the same
“Sure I love you but sometimes shit happens”
way I lost my father, and my belief that true love doesn’t last was reinforced nicely.

The therapist did not think I had let go of any of that yet.

Eventually, just before Christmas, I went out to coffee with Ben, who wanted to talk about what was obviously still between us. I started crying immediately upon seeing him, and told him that the lovey Madrid e-mail had just come from the Ambien and, perhaps, from depression and fear. I was working on the depression and fear thing, but I did not want to get back together. I told him I wrote lots of e-mails to lots of people.

It was not cool. That would come back to bite me in the ass.

N
ot unrelated to my decision with Ben, I was also back in contact with the now single Father Juan. Let’s remember that Juan lived a continent away, which, as per my issues previously discussed, worked
great
for me. After some friendly “no hard feelings” e-mails about our awkward time in Buenos Aires, he had invited me to meet him on a trip to Peru he would be taking solo, just after New Year’s Eve, where he proposed we climb up to Machu Picchu together. But Father Juan was hard to read, and I feared he was inviting me as a friend, which I feared would lead to massive disappointment and depression on top of a very, very tall cliff. Or maybe we’d finally have sex and fall in love. The possibilities were extreme.

I was trying to decide whether or not to join Juan in Peru when I went on Ferris’s New Year’s trip to the Dominican Republic. It was two months into the strike, and about thirty people (many of them striking writers) rented three properties on the sand, nestled prettily between a windsurfer beach and what turned out to be a brothel filled with teenaged Dominican prostitutes serving elderly Russians. A lovely family of five ran our bed-and-breakfast, and the family’s sixteen-year-old daughter seemed interested in starting a little side business that involved procuring one of my thirty- and fortysomething male friends for her own use. Apparently lots of girls in town had these much older international “boyfriends,” who brought their wallets to visit a few times a year.

We did not stay on the right side of the island. We learned this one day when we were taken to the other side of the island by one of the girls in our group, a hilarious fourth-generation Palm Beach aristocrat who was weirder than the rest of her family, and so hung out with us. She put the thirty of us on a bus and drove to the other side of the island to visit her sister’s “property,” or what might more rightly be described as her sister’s landgrab.

Her sister and her husband had just led a coalition of American investors to buy a twenty-two-hundred-acre plot of Dominican land that included a resort, a five-star golf course, hundreds of acres of virgin jungle, and miles of beach that had been on a Best Beaches in the World list. They bought this piece of property from the government of the Dominican Republic because the president decided selling one of his country’s ecological jewels was worth
the money. Their vision for the green, perfect place on the white-sand beach was “updated Athenian village.” A
New Yorker
article on the project explained this as a place “in which four-star restaurants and art galleries could share street space with locally-run fish shacks and pool halls.” Moby and Charlie Rose were also investors. There was going to be an “artists’ colony.”

Needless to say, the property was spectacular. And while we felt much like, well, colonizers who had stolen the land of the natives, we had a lovely day golfing and being fed picnics on linen-covered tabletops that truckloads of help quickly set up on the spotless sand. Then we came back to our low-rent side of the island, where the beaches were developed, covered in trash, and inhabited by, mostly, Dominican hookers, navy guys visiting brothels, and Russian guys visiting brothels.

I spent a few days debating what I should do once the trip was over—go with some friends to Cuba, or jump on a plane for Peru and Father Juan. It turned out I would do neither. On the morning of December 31, a group of us piled into a car to go climb some nearby waterfalls. My friend Will was driving. He pulled over, I stepped out of the car, he didn’t know I had stepped out, and then he decided to repark because he always parks twice because he’s got what could be called OCD or, at the very least, an extreme case of “worrywart.” Anyway, he reparked on top of my foot.

“Back up back up back up!
” I screamed.

Mercifully, he stopped before the car rolled all the way over me, which would have crushed my ankle and leg and
perhaps severed a major artery that was about half an inch from where my injury was, and which the doctors later explained might have caused me to bleed to death. So, we luckily avoided all of that, but when he backed up, my bare foot was still smashed into the broken asphalt.
Degloved
is the word the doctors used to describe what happened, which meant I basically tore off the flesh on the bottom of my heel, down to the bone. I degloved my foot.

As soon as the wheel rolled off me, I took a brief look. People later described what my foot looked like as “a shark bite.” The next time I would get up the nerve to look at my right foot would be about four weeks later. In that moment, I just lay back in the car and started to cry. One friend got in next to me, and held my bleeding foot out the car window.

“It’s okay, it’s really not that bad,” he assured me.

Two little Dominican girls walked by, glanced at my foot, and screamed.

An hour’s drive and two small-town health clinics later, I ended up having surgery to put the bottom of my foot back on. Mercifully, my husband, Hope, was by my side, as always. And she had lived in South America for two years, so spoke fluent Spanish. So she could translate as I wept and screamed things like, “No, God, they have to stop, please tell them to stop!” as the nurses tried, over and over again, to get an IV into my vein. The twentieth time was the charm.

IV finally in, I lay in pre-op in the Dominican hospital, listening to the waves crashing and the local baseball game outside the open window. I asked Hope what was
going to happen if I needed a blood transfusion here, on the same island as
Haiti.
That sounded like a bad idea.

“Well, what blood type are you? Maybe I could give blood,” Hope suggested helpfully.

“Hm,” I said dubiously. “I don’t know about that.”

“Are you saying you feel safer getting blood from the country with one of the highest HIV rates in the world than you feel getting blood from me?” she demanded. I shrugged. She started laughing. We then spent some time wondering which of the thirty close friends currently on the island had blood that one might be willing to inject into one’s own body.

“Will’s girlfriend is pretty young,” I said. “Less time out there filthing up. Maybe her.”

Luckily, I did not need a blood transfusion, just forty or so stitches inside and out, and a warning from the doctor that the skin was so mangled that I might still need a skin graft when I got home. Mysteriously, my rusty Spanish turned into fluent Spanish under anesthesia, and so orderlies, nurses, and amused assorted workers were gathered around my hospital bed when I woke up apparently telling absolutely filthy jokes in fast, easy Spanish. Will filmed it. He also has footage of my foot bleeding in the street, and some photos taken later that night of him, in a car, looking sheepish as he pretended to drive over a life-size cardboard cutout of Hervé Villechaize that inexplicably came with us on all of these New Year’s trips.

The doctors wanted to keep me overnight, but it was New Year’s Eve, and the thought of a night in the hospital
alone, or with a sad friend I’d made miss out on a party, was too much to bear. And so Hope, always my savior, catered to my pathological need for fun and broke me out of the hospital for a New Year’s Eve on many painkillers. She threw a gold shirt on me, and my fantastic friends took turns carrying me around, making me feel like a crippled, drugged-out princess. Lindsay Lohan might get that every night, but it was pretty special for me.

For our New Year’s party, we took over an open-air restaurant where we made a couple of new Finnish friends: the host of
Finnish Idol
, with the Seacrest frosted tips and waxed chest and all, and his friend Levi, a professional online poker player who was traveling around the world indefinitely. Rachel Dratch was on the trip with us, and they were especially excited about “Debbie Downer.” I wish you could hear two blond Finns try to do that bit.

My friends decorated my cast, nestling a champagne bottle top on my big toe, and danced on tables around me, sprinkling glitter on my drugged-out head. There was the annual celebratory strip down to the gold man bikini by my friend Thomas. Nice boys carried me to the bathroom, and nice girls gave me attention and champagne, and the sixteen-year-old girl from our B and B dirty-danced with one of my thirty-five-year-old friends. Ferris danced with his Parisian girlfriend, whom he had flown in for the occasion, and my secret crushes continued not to lead to midnight kisses. I finally gave in to the events of the day and went home around one, as the party raged on.

T
he next couple of days were a haze of intense heat and excruciating pain next to an ocean I couldn’t get into. I finally called my doctor stepdad, and found out the “painkillers” I had been given were really just extra-strength Tylenol. Hope then spent her day driving around the island like a trouper to find me the good stuff, and then I happily propped my foot up on a lounge chair poolside, and hung my head and arms over the side of the pool into the cool water. I read
Eat Pray Love
, which caused me intense stress due to how much I both hated the narrator for her self-involved, self-inflicted misery in the middle of a pretty amazing life, and deeply related to her, due to my tendency to be self-involved and inflict misery on myself in the middle of my pretty amazing life.

On our last night in the D.R., we had a bonfire on the beach, and the Finns were invited. I was getting pretty good on my crutches, and, if I may be so bold, the poker player noticed. Much like the lion might notice the limping ibex. Meanwhile, the ibex noticed the lion right back.
Boy, being a limping ibex sure is exhausting. Maybe getting devoured wouldn’t be so bad.
Now that I was not recovering from general anesthesia, I could focus on what was important: Levi was a six-foot-four, white-blond, blue-eyed Viking. He was a rainbow of pastels, sort of the color of an infant’s bedroom, but in a hot way. He looked squeaky-clean, like he would smell like a cool, northern, ocean wind.

My future Finnish lover sat down next to me, and we talked about our lives. He apparently won enough online
poker that he just lived all over the world, in hotels, on a constant vacation. He had been in the Caribbean for months, and was considering where to go next. I waxed poetic about Argentina for a while, like always, and then he carried me down to the sand for the bonfire, fetched me a drink, and hauled an enormous log over so I could elevate my cast. And there we sat for eight more hours.

Our bonfire turned into a talent show under the stars. There was a lot of talent around that fire, and so the show was fairly amazing. People sang, and joked, and danced, and Levi and I snuggled close, my cast propped up on the log. When it came time for Levi’s talent, he sang an old Finnish folk song about a fairy in a northern wood. He sang it beautifully, and, if my decision had not already been made the first or second time he carried me into the bathroom like I was a tiny kitten, it was certainly made once he started singing about Nordic Sprites.

The party ended abruptly when our fourteen- and sixteen-year-old Dominican host girls joined the bonfire. At first they were lovely audience members. But then they wanted to show us their talent.
Adorable!
The sisters got a guy with a guitar to play an acoustic version of some booty song, and did a dance for us that one normally only sees on an elevated stage, with a pole. It was when the teenagers were on all fours with their backs arched that everyone decided it was time to break the party up.

But Levi and I stayed by the fire for a few more hours, watching the constellations move across the sky. Eventually sand started getting in awkward places, and so he carried me upstairs, and appointed himself in a way that
would have made his pillaging ancestors proud, and which I wholeheartedly felt I deserved. The most revolting, rewarding, Viking-esque highlight occurred at the end of our time together, when Levi’s Thor-size special moment exploded out of him with such velocity and pizzazz that it ended up all over the headboard, and the curtains, and the walls, and, finally, on my Viking’s own pink face. If you’ve ever watched those news shows where they go into a hotel room with a black light to show that the room is covered floor to ceiling in bodily fluids, and you’ve wondered how that could have possibly happened, I can tell you: there was a Viking in that room.