Muscling Past the Pain to Get to the Other Side
I cracked a permanent molar on the right side of my mouth when I was eight years old. I slipped on an icy sidewalk, landed on my chin, received three stitches and a gold cap. The dentist didn't want to remove the tooth because my head was still long before being fully developed. A cap it was.
For a long time I never thought about it again. I couldn't see it, so why would I care?
By the time I was marching with the Razorback Band in college, the gold had worn thin and my head was much bigger. One afternoon I was chomping down on one of those jumbo-sized Tootsie Rolls® and it pulled the cap completely off. I almost swallowed it. It hurt like hell but I had stuff—you know, college stuff—to do and had developed a twenty-year distrust of doctors of all stripes. I elected to let it be until it drove me crazy with pain and I would finally relent to getting another cap.
I decided to muscle through it.
The result of this was that I had a throbbing headache for the next two years. Given that I drank far too much in college, the blackout drinking was perhaps a response to this nagging tooth. It may have contributed to a few random bar fights and the generally held opinion that I was a really angry young man. Untreated pain can be a catalyst for unrepentant assholery.
My senior year, my girlfriend convinced me to get my tooth fixed. I relented and the headache went away like a roommate crashing on your couch rent-free for a couple of years finally getting the boot. I can tell the story but the memory of the actual pain is long gone. The resulting Denis Leary sort of thumping fury lasted far longer than the toothache. I was always dramatic as a kid but the muscling through this pointless pain had changed my personality slightly into being an avatar for the angry young man, the enraged drunk, the caustic provoker.
Muscling through the pain has a price. The pain finds a way to express itself like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park find a way to terrorize Jeff Goldblum.
The first Christmas visit with my third wife—the one I proposed to after the third date, the one whom my family fell in love with as well, the quirky, funny, devil-may-care pixie whom I was suddenly married but just getting to know—a strange thing happened. Mom took us to the mall (remember the mall? That place of gathering to shop for stuff for purchase? Think Amazon but offline.) and wanted to get her a coat. Part of my mother's love-language is buy stuff for the people she loves and my wife's coat was typically DIY, possibly found somewhere, and Mom thought she could use something nicer.
We walked around, looking at this coat and that, when my wife turned on a dime, headed to the changing room, and commenced to sobbing like she'd just realized they shot Old Yeller. Loud. Wailing. Overwrought. My mom just looked at me with shock. I had no answers and assumed I'd done something wrong because, you know, husband. We are always on the hook for something we fucked up.
Later she claimed she was just overwhelmed by gifts. By the thought of new stuff. By my mother's generosity. Made sense.
Over the years of our marriage, this happened in tandem with what I'll call white-trash outbursts of unreasoning rage, so caustic and hateful I'd just leave the apartment and walk around until the storm passed. She explained it away as she just needed to “let that stuff out.” It was healthy to cry uncontrollably, she'd say. It was a sign of mental health to pry open her psyche and let those demons out.
She was muscling through the pain. It turns out that she married me out of a sense of escape, an opportunity to evade the kinds of scumbags she was so often attracted to who fetishized her as a depository for kink, a way out. She confessed later that she was never in love with me yet married me anyway. She was living two realities like a trumpet player with an exposed cracked tooth doing his level best to function past the pain. So she drank too much, bottled up the pain of her double life, and let that stuff out once in awhile to survive the consequences of her duplicity.
That stuff finds a way to pop up and out because muscling through the pain has limits.
"Dude. I don't how you're even sitting here, eating lunch, cracking jokes. If I were in your shoes, I'd be in a fetal position with a gun in my mouth. How are you Okay?"
My friend was among the first I'd told the tale of my third divorce. It was fresh, maybe two weeks from the reveal of her third and fourth lives she'd adopted since coming to Vegas. It was a story that seemed so surreal, so outsized and nearly comical, it would have been as ridiculous if she had confessed to being a space alien or a person from the future. Infidelity is common; this was not common. This was insane.
"Well, first, I don't own a gun."
I muscle through it.
I had, in the first nights alone in my apartment (formerly our apartment), to let that stuff out. I pounded whiskey and laid on the floor sobbing like an Italian widow. I cried so much and so hard my face resembled the puffy redness of a recent plastic surgery patient or the recipient of a severe beating. For three days and nights I hid from the world and wept.
Then I got up, took a shower, and started muscling past it.
The pain finds its way to creep out but never in front of others. As much as my friends and family let me know that it's fine if I lose my shit, let's be honest, no one wants to deal with a GenX man wallowing in his grief. In the brief hundred years between the divorce and my leaving Las Vegas at the end of August, I've become a hermit. I keep to myself for the most part and muscle past it.
I recognize that it's still right there, waiting to leap out and crush my chest. I'm bingeing on Manifest—a Netflix science fiction show—and find myself bawling like a baby at any sort of grief-oriented storyline. No one would call the show a sentimental vehicle. No one watching it cries. But this show has me weeping like I'm bingeing on Pixar.
It's cool. I find myself watching random gameshows and sobbing when someone wins big money, too.
Muscling past it.
Soon enough (but not soon enough at all) this pain will be like my tooth. I won't feel the pain but will remember it in abstract. I know that if I live long enough, the devastation becomes a story to tell. We are all just an amalgamation of stories. I'd rather tell one that involves getting up after a punch in the soul than one that simply can't muscle past the pain.
Hopefully, unlike the tooth, it won't seep in more assholery. I mean, how much more of an asshole can one be?
