In fact, Wendell continues, I’ve lost more than my relationship in the present. I’ve lost my relationship in the future. We tend to think that the future happens later, but we’re creating it in our minds every day. When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists. But if we spend the present trying to fix the past or control the future, we remain stuck in place, in perpetual regret. By Google-stalking Boyfriend, I’ve been watching his future unfold while I stay frozen in the past. But if I live in the present, I’ll have to accept the loss of my future.
Can I sit through the pain, or do I want to suffer?
“So,” I say to Wendell, “I guess I should stop interrogating Boyfriend—and Google-stalking him.”
He smiles indulgently, the way one would at a smoker who announces that she’ll quit cold turkey but doesn’t realize how overly ambitious that is.
“Or at least try,” I say, backtracking. “Spend less time on his future, more on my present.”
Wendell nods, then pats his legs twice and stands. The session is over but I want to stay.
I feel like we just got started.
11
Goodbye, Hollywood
My first week working at NBC, I was assigned to two shows that were about to premiere: ER, a medical drama, and Friends, a sitcom. These shows would catapult the network to number one and establish its Thursday-night dominance for years to come.
The series were set to air in the fall, following a much faster cycle than in the film world. Within months, casts and crews were hired, sets were built, and production began. I was in the room when Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox auditioned for starring roles in Friends. I weighed in on whether Julianna Margulies’s character in ER should die at the end of episode one, and I was on the set with George Clooney before anyone knew how famous this series would make him.
Energized by this new job, I watched less TV at home. I had stories I was passionate about and colleagues who were equally passionate about those stories, and I felt connected to my work again.
One day ER’s writers called up a local emergency department with a medical question, and a physician named Joe happened to take the call. It seemed like kismet—in addition to his medical degree, he had a master’s in film production.
When the writers learned of Joe’s background, they began to consult him regularly. Before long, they hired him as a technical adviser to block out the highly choreographed trauma-bay scenes, teach the actors how to pronounce medical terms, and make the procedures look as accurate as possible (flush out the syringe; wipe the skin with alcohol before starting an IV; hold the patient’s neck in this position when inserting a breathing tube). Of course, sometimes we skipped the surgical masks the characters should have worn, because everyone wanted to see George Clooney’s face.
On set, Joe was a study in competence and calm, the same qualities that served him in a real ER. During breaks, he would talk about patients he’d seen recently, and I’d want to hear every detail. What stories! I thought. One day I asked Joe if I could visit him on the job—“Research,” I said—and he offered me access to his ER, where, in borrowed baggy scrubs, I followed him around during his shift.
“The drunk drivers and gang shootings don’t start pouring in until dark,” he explained when I arrived on a Saturday afternoon and not much was going on. But soon we were rushing from room to room, patient to patient, as I tried to keep the names and charts and diagnoses straight. In the span of an hour, I watched Joe do a lumbar puncture, see inside a pregnant woman’s uterus, and hold the hand of a thirty-nine-year-old mother of twins as she was told that her migraine was really a brain tumor.
“No, you see, we just wanted more migraine medicine” was her only response—denial that would soon give way to a rush of tears. Her husband excused himself to go to the restroom but vomited on the way. For a second I pictured this drama on TV—an ingrained instinct when your work is coming up with stories—but I had a sense that finding TV material wasn’t only what being here was about for me. And Joe sensed that, too. Week after week, I kept going back to the ER.
“You seem more interested in what we’re doing here than in your day job,” Joe said one evening months later as we looked at an x-ray together and he showed me where the fracture was. Then, almost as an afterthought, he said, “You could still go to medical school, you know.”
“Medical school?” I said. I looked at him like he was nuts. I was twenty-eight years old and had been a language major in college. It was true that in high school I’d competed in math and science tournaments, but outside of school, I’d always been drawn to words and stories. And now my work was a great job at NBC that I felt incredibly lucky to have.
Even so, I kept sneaking away from tapings to go back to the ER—not just with Joe but with other doctors who let me shadow them too. I knew that my being there had gone from research to hobby, but so what? Didn’t everyone have hobbies? And, okay, sure, maybe spending my evenings in the ER had become the new equivalent of obsessively watching TV every night when I was restless in my film job. Again, so what? I certainly wasn’t about to give all this up and start over in medical school. Besides, I wasn’t bored by the work at NBC. I just felt that something real and big and meaningful was happening in the ER that couldn’t happen in the same way on television. And my hobby could fill in those blanks—that’s what hobbies were for.
But sometimes I’d be standing in the ER, and, during a lull in the action, I’d realize how at home I felt, and more and more I wondered if Joe was onto something.
Before long, my hobby led me out of the ER and into a neurosurgery suite. The case I’d been invited to see was that of a middle-aged man with a pituitary tumor that was likely benign but had to be removed to keep it from pressing on his cranial nerves. Gowned and masked and wearing running shoes for comfort, I stood over Mr. Sanchez, peering into his skull. After sawing through the bone (using a tool like something you’d buy at Home Depot), the surgeon and his team meticulously pulled aside layer after layer of fascia until they reached his naked brain.
Finally, there it was, looking just like the images I’d seen in a book the night before, but as I stood there, my own brain inches from Mr. Sanchez’s, I felt a sense of awe. Everything that made this man himself—his personality, his memories, his experiences, his likes and dislikes, his loves and losses, his knowledge and abilities—was contained in this three-pound organ. You lose a leg or a kidney, you’re still you, but lose a part of your brain—literally, lose your mind—and who are you then?
I had a perverse thought: I’ve gotten inside a person’s head! Hollywood tried to get into people’s heads all the time via market research and ads, but I was actually there, deep inside this man’s skull. I wondered if those slogans the network bombarded viewers with ever made it to their destinations: It’s Must See TV!
As classical music played softly in the background and two neurosurgeons picked away at the tumor, carefully depositing pieces of it onto a metal tray, I thought of the frenetic sets in Hollywood with all of their commotion and commands.