Last October my bicycle and I vied for the same point in space as a young man and his van. That didn't work so well. The van escaped unscathed; I suffered a “slight” separation of my left shoulder. It started whining immediately, then followed up by howling like a whipped puppy for weeks.
Later that month I lay on my back waiting for an MRI of my shoulder, waiting to be inserted into the machine like a pizza into a brick oven. There I would be required to lie still for thirty or more minutes. No scratching an itchy nose, no stretching a cramped muscle.
Because I'd had two MRI'S in the past--both to diagnose knee injuries--I was unprepared for the panic that assaulted me when the conveyor belt began to move. In 1982 two, armed, young men held up the supermarket where I worked. Fear assailed me then, but not panic. And I had some control of that fear. I had virtually no control as I moved headfirst toward the maw of the MRI machine.
I sat up as though spring-loaded, fueled by fear of entombment. My heart threatened to rip away from its moorings, my lungs to burst through my chest. The conveyor belt stopped.
For ten minutes, the two young women administering the test counseled me, obviously having faced this situation before. I was embarrassed by my newly-discovered claustrophobia, embarrassed that I'd acted frightened in front of two very pretty women. That's probably a sexist attitude, but eventually it helped me to lie back down and ride into the bowels of the machine.
There I was assailed by sounds of intermittent pounding, like elves hammering on the outside of a drainpipe. After perhaps fifteen minutes, my fear-meter--heart rate and breathing-- returned to near normal readings as I silently chanted “These people are here to help me. Nothing bad is going to happen.”
Mid-afternoon Christmas Eve, my sister Laurel and her ex Herb picked up my wife Gloria and me from our home in central Phoenix. Usually when I'm in a car, I'm driving, not a passenger. And riding in the back seat is definitely a rarity. Even so, I never expected a claustrophobicly-induced panic attack.
The doors of Herb's car shut with a solid, new-car thump. As he backed it out of the driveway, the terror from my MRI experience poured into my mind like water flooding a basement. I worried that I might not be able to unlock the car door in case of an emergency. I drive a 1993 Corolla with old fashioned pull up/push down door knobs. New cars always seem to have more complicated locking systems.
Three blocks down the road I nearly screamed, “I've got to get out of here.” My inner child was floundering in a flood of panic without a sump pump to drain it. I imagined myself diving out of the car, rolling to the curb, and running home as fast as my bum knees would allow.
Herb turned the car off McDowell Road onto I-10, causing my panic to hit its zenith. I felt like a death row inmate being escorted down a corridor by two prison guards heading for the death house.
I took deep breaths and tried to follow my family's conversation, even throwing in a few lame comments. I used my cellphone to snap a photo of Laurel as she leaned between the front seats to talk to us, then took a photo of Red Mountain in the distance. As with my time in the MRI tube, eventually I was able to calm down, to “get a grip.”
Gloria and I decided to celebrate New Years Eve 2010 by going to an ASU women's basketball game. I'd followed the Sun Devils in the Arizona Republic and watched an occasional game on television, but had never been to one.
To avoid parking hassles we rode the two-year-old light rail from Phoenix to Tempe, and got off just a few blocks from Wells Fargo Arena. Seated at mid-court, we watched the Sun Devils win 49-46. Oregon missed a potential game winning shot at the buzzer.
On the ride home, cold air whooshed into the car at each stop as the doors slid opened to swallow or disgorge passengers. Law enforcement officers from Tempe, Phoenix, and the Department of Homeland Security bounced in and out of the train ready to pounce on holiday revelers who reveled too much.
As we left Tempe and entered Phoenix, I tried to recreate my panic attacks, a decidedly bizarre impulse. I have no idea what put that bug up my butt, but there it was.
At first I could dredge up only a pale reflection of my previous demons. That was puzzling since I'd realized all along that lack of control was the driving force behind my panic attacks, and I certainly had even less control of a train that must weigh hundreds of tons.
Against all reason, I worked diligently to recreate that nightmarish, wild child panic. As I began to succeed, my fear rose. Eventually I asked myself, “Do you really want to do this?” I decided that past a certain, indefinable point, doing something stupid edges into insanity. I stopped.
So, what does this have to do with writing? After all, this blog is supposed to be about writing.
John P. Marquand wrote a novel called Women and Thomas Harrow. The protagonist was a writer who forced himself to go to a party or some such event despite not wanting to go. He did it because, after all, he was a writer. And it was an experience.
Henry James said something to the effect that a writer was a person upon whom no experience was wasted.
Draw on your experiences.
(Does anyone know the exact Henry James quote? I poked around the internet without any luck.)
Addendum: February 10, 2011
A Henry James quote from my friend Wes: Experience is never limited, and it is never complete: it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.
