Photo Gallery Minuses Mean Nothing (Maybe More) by Kathryn Merrifield

Amid all of the Facebook 10^th anniversary slideshows, we’re all getting eyefuls of what the social media channel believes to be the most important – via the most-liked – photos we have posted since you, me and all of my Facebook friends, denote as representative of or online presence on this platform.  Essentially, it’s a membership CV, and just another way to get in touch with people you either know or don’t know.

So, last night in a post snowstorm and Polar Vortex cabin fever, I picked up a friend to get to a movie.  She mentions the above Facebook slideshow ordeal, as I will now call it, and says, “You know, (her husband henceforth called JOHN), John said - don’t take this the wrong way - but you know all of the stuff on Facebook?  I have to say, and I have to agree with him, that you don’t post anything about Luke.”

Luke is my son, the oldest among my three children.  He’s was the breach baby in-utero, the child born with a bilateral inguinal hernia that our crappy pediatrician did not detect until he was five weeks old, and was repaired via outpatient surgery after probably enduring the pain of it since birth. 

Said pediatrician blamed the new parents, by the way.

Luke is the nine-month old baby sent to a routine pediatric cardiologist exam when the doctor on duty at the pediatric practice (not the crappy doctor, but one of the only good pediatricians at the office, I would discover) detected a heart murmur.  The nine-month old baby that I sat feeding when I told my husband that our son needed heart surgery to correct a coarctation of the aorta.  The husband who laughed at the idea that the baby’s heart needed to be repaired, because he could not emotionally deal with it.  That the pulses in his son’s extremities were too low for this boy to be the perfection we thought him to be.  That the blood was squeezed off, and though it pushed hard through his heart, there was a kink in the hose, essentially, that would have to be cut out.  That Baby – tiny little human entrusted to she-who-knows-nothing, would have to wait until he was older, even though I was pregnant with my daughter at the time.

Luke is my eldest son, the one who got through this heart surgery at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, supposedly the best in the country, but who’s chest tube (that tube meant to drain the leaking fluids post surgery – the fluids that are supposed to stop leaking, but didn’t, because the student at this teaching facility under surgeon Ralph Macca, fucked up and ligated a thoracic duct that could drown my seventeen-month old baby, if they didn’t replace the tube that kept getting stopped up with the debris from his insides) would not stop draining.  He’s the one who I learned to fight for regardless of the highbrow yet profoundly stupid hospital staff who didn’t know that the chest tube overflowed into his bed because it was clogged.

He’s the tiny little boy that I never though I would be entitled to mother, who I stood by, very seven months pregnant, for more days than any of us thought would be required of this.  And, the one I fought for when not one person in that hospital seemed to give a shit about something I knew was wrong, but no one would tell just tell me that it was. 

Perhaps they thought I was fragile.

That the fact that the chest tube was getting clogged, that it would have to be replaced while my seventeen-month old baby was held down by five people, awake, because it was too soon for him to be safely anesthetized, who I heard scream and cry, while his dad worried that I would pass out – his dad, who made me angry because I realized then that he did not know me very well. 

“Some parents just can’t stay,” a nurse told me.  Some parents wouldn’t be able to take seeing their kids like that.  This, I was told by one nurse who held back her tears.

Luke was one of the only complications in an otherwise fairly straightforward surgery to remove a kink in a hose.

Yet, in order to correct this complication, to fuse the broken and leaking duct, Luke would have to drink fatty milk – Half-n-Half – so that when the surgeon went in to patch the ends back together, he could better seen the fluid that would turn milky white because of the milk, and quickly identify the culprit, leaking duct.  This fact of eating before anesthesia (potentially, lethal) infuriated the anesthesiologist, who then had to find a good vein while Luke was awake and screaming instead of gassed asleep.  Antesthesiologist poked and prodded amid my son’s screaming and crying.

They fixed it, the duct.  Two surgeries later.  A lot of morphine and whatever else they gave him.  We got him home to blueberry pancakes and the flapping he had already started just before the procedures.  Two months prior to such surgery, he had started talking and walking – at fifteen months to be exact – on the inside of late.

After that surgery that left a wide scar under his left arm and another scar from the hole the shitty surgeon dug through (it looks like a bullet-hole scar), Luke needed two more surgical procedures, one to insert tubes into his ears and take down his adenoids.  He woke screaming most nights to sleep apnea.  Then there was another to reinsert the tubes in his ears.  His repetitive ear infections compromised his hearing, which compromised his speech.  This speech thing we discovered at age three when his pre-school teacher noted his delays and crying fits, recommending that we have him evaluated, and that started into the discovery portion of who Luke is and what is part of him now.

My baby boy Leo was just born when the evaluation period began.  He was approximately three months old.  So, if you’re counting,t hat would make three kids. 

Achoo!  And, look.  Pregnant again. 

Yes, I wanted and planned for all of them.

My dad died while I was pregnant with Leo, just before the Luke evaluations.  The road was rough and I felt pretty much alone along the way, planning by instinct and super-mother strength, what to do next, thinking that I could somehow fix all these things with him.  Life teaching me that I could very much not do that.  All I can do is love him and do my best to help him also love him.

Most of the time, I feel like I completely suck at this job.  I don’t enter that world correctly.  I don’t understand its walls.

Yet, my marriage suffered despite it.  My family is still at arms-length, judging my hyper-reactiveness, then my disengagement, then my everything, then my super-heroine-uber-molecular-hyper-focus to get the help I and they need.  Like any one else in the world knows what’s best for me and my son.  Nope.

Luke’s father prohibited me writing about it though he knows that I’m a writer and this is one way I cope and synthesize information into a proper emotional response.  It’s like the parts you can’t see of a chair that hold it together.

Paul said that it would only hurt Luke for me to make a big deal about it.  Then there are the reactions too, that I would be somehow whining or exploiting Luke’s difficulties, for my own gain. 

If you know me.  I’m not a whiner.  Even when it’s cold and I hate it, I try not to.

So, here’s what I say to social media in terms of representative photographic equality:  algorithms are not human.  Not even close.  An algorithm will never be able to read the human emotion that holds close my priorities and the depth of love that scares me because it can be just that fierce that I can scare myself.

And, no algorithm will tell you how much I love my son.

He is the first person to show me, Little Miss Perfectionist, that trying is worth everything.

Traffic Court Commerce by Kathryn Merrifield

Two traffic court appearances in two weeks: two totally different experiences.

Harrison Town Court with Judge Lust was bedlam – the water pipes had burst in the basement, the courtroom was packed with a line out one of its double doors to the entrance.  Those scheduled to contest tickets sat through a hearing between a landlord and tenant who did not pay her rent on time - the landlord also wanted her out for petty annoyances.  The next trial was between a woman who illegally sublet her home for the third time and who finally agreed to a guilty plea because it would cost her over $80,000 less to do so.  She had to go through the drama of not accepting a guilty plea, movie tables from their snug spots against the high judge bench, and trying, stubborn, Italian woman to wiggle her way out of guilt by pleading not-guilty.  She reminded me of my grandmother but was not a very good actress, claiming she knew nothing about her prior offenses or the law that prohibited subletting. 

Ultimately, because of the chaotic situation with the broken basement bathrooms, a woman took all of us with no prior traffic offenses into the lobby still filled with people blankly waiting, told us that we could agree to pay the $175 fee (mine was less because the offense occurred before sometime in September when the DMV add-on fee increased) without accruing the 2-3 points against our records.  We lined up to pay and that was done.

My second experience, just Tuesday, was in the Eastchester Town Court.  I reported to a woman on the other side of a counter window, was asked if my name was listed on the sheet hung by a tack on a cork board to my left, and was told to take a seat in one of the floor-mounted chairs inside the courtroom of thirty or so seated people.  Proceedings began on time at ten am sharp, the prosecutor explained to us in detail, a system that he has used for years for reducing the points penalty for violations, how to respond per already organized (by violation) piles of paper which his male assistant wearing a golg shirt too small for him, dutifully handed him.  He wasted no time and we were out of there by 11:30, after paying the fines.  I was lucky enough to live in the stack of no previous violations.  The prosecutor was so organized and clear when he called my name to query as to whether or not I would accept his plea that I said, “Thank you, yes.”

Thank you for allowing me to both witness and participate in the business of running a town.  It’s people like me who don’t to the efficacy or not, of the inner legal workings of the justice system as commerce.  It felt a bit more like bartering over goods.

Going forward, there will be no response to screaming children in the back seat of the van I drive for them (not me but perhaps us) or the honking at me and my California stickers affixed on either side of the back window by the driver behind me insisting, loudly, that I need to make a right turn on red even if I failed to get a clear view of the sign, always posted in my blind spot, and perhaps yours too.  I will also not fail to see a stop sign at a t-intersection during a crisis, even though there are far more legitimate places for posting proper traffic signage that would facilitate the safety and cohesion of driving patterns among New Yorkers everywhere.

Booby Lift by Kathryn Merrifield

A friend of mine asked me what my best day at work was.

I told her, well, I have a lot of best days.  Mostly because I work a lot because I love to work.  Compared to life, it’s the easy stuff.  Measured goals and that kind of thing.  Having children taught me that everything else is the easy stuff.  People told me just that at one point.  I didn’t believe them, but I do now.

Enough whining.  I never liked parental whining, but I also don't like the parenting alone thing either. Where it used to take a village, now it takes money.

That’s a little morose, so forget that, and let's get back to laughing at something that pokes fun and my neatly contained late twenties self where I rewind to my most embarrassing work moment, that moment where you realize, “Gee, you’re not as pretty and desperate as all of these Hollywood girls.  And, really.  Who cares?”

Embarrassment, I have found, is that thing that makes me human when I don’t want to be.  That thing that needs you to be flawed, when you don’t want to be.  But, when you need to be.  Because your head needs a real Linda Blair 180, or needs to be birthed out of your stupidity or your ego that sent it down the wrong-ass path.

Whoooops!

This is what happens when the only rudder you’ve got is what your parents gave you in he spare time of no spare time (see no village, above).

That is not whining.  That is the truth.

So, what we have is a grueling several months under the discretion of, essentially, Kevin Spacey as a bald woman with a disease that rendered her hairless, who represented the top talent in the United States of America in the myopia of Hollywood.  Not the highest-grossing talent, but the top.  For sure.  She shall remain nameless.  I signed a contract that bound me to secrecy.  And, even though I was beaten to a pulp using borderline torture methods via entertainment industry bootcamp, I am loyal.  And, I have a soft spot in my heart for her.  That place was a pressure cooker.  More pressure cooker than a cooker that could induce real humidity with a well-placed lid, and the promised... pressurization that makes good rice but not so good people.

I survived just under a full year before the agent found a real agent recruit – essentially a JD working in the mailroom that had thick enough skin and connections that could somehow show promise or connections to dear Agent who would abuse her outright while she endured and kept her eye on the prize.

Even Dear Agent, who addressed those training-to-be artist-representatives, told her minions, “You have to love it.”  Her way of saying, "Get out if you don't."

I didn’t.  Mostly, because I wasn’t much of a party girl.  I just was not there yet.  I wanted a family.  Kids.  A life that extended beyond living in the bubble of THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY. If you live in it, in LA, you know what I’m talking about.  Because there is nothing else.  People even forget about the beach and the ocean is pretty huge.

Myopia about as interesting to a writer as a being an author reading a book about a writer.  That’s like watching paint dry.  Or, like watching in real time, a real, mosquito-catching, target practice, spider web get made with eight tiny arms and legs.

Riveting?  Definitely not.  Reading a bout the entertainment industry except in reference and history is just dull.  No way around that.  Non-fiction about fiction.  Kill me.

So, my embarrassment occurred around a bit of a turning point.  I met Scott Lobdell, the writer for many, many of the X-Men comics published by Marvel.  When we met, I was finally off of high-powered talent agent’s desk and onto packaging – working with producers on ICM talent-centric packages for television.  Tom was new, and when Tom (my gay, Irish, actor boss) was new, he found many new clients.  When word gets out, that’s what happens.

So, in the time of Bryan Singer and the dawn of Marvel motion picture franchising, I made a friend in Scott Lobdell, mostly because he knew I was mostly a writer and he was a writer, and we were both starting out in a world that we knew nothing about and too much about.  He wanted to be a producer and ultimately got a deal that did not pan out.

As for me, my exit from ICM came one night, dressed in my favorite BCBG, fitted, short-sleeved sweater with the neutral stripes and pencil cut skirt and heals. 

When the doors of an elevator opened up to let me and Scott out – me, his stand-in date for his wife, Laura, who was ensconced in her art masters degree in New York and could not attend.  Me, going to a premiere that I was invited to because Scott had producer friends who had access to such things.  Me, who would have rather go to sleep early.

And, quite honestly, Scott was a little strange.  And, because I can be a little strange too with my broad range of tastes and peculiar fascination with super heroes and two brothers who made me a no bullshit girl, we got along quite well.  I found a friend in sea of the smoke screen.  Me, the girl from La Canada, dressed professionally, stood waiting for an elevator.

Scott asked me, “What’s that on the floor?”

I looked down to the garage, beige carpeted floor, and said, matter-of-fact, “That’s my bra pad.”

A white little teardrop of a pad on the floor defied any legitimate lie.  And, why bother?

It was funny.  And, it was mine.

And, that’s when I knew I’d never make it.  I could not lie to a client about my bra pad lying on the floor.  I supposed it could have been worse.  But, that was pretty bad for a twenty-something young woman, boarding a lift with an imbalanced lift.

It was the first step in a series of coming-into-oneself lessons.

And, learning what bra to buy and not.