I will not dwell on the rest of my stay in the hospital, one that included conflicting shame and arousal during sponge baths, the body-horror removal of the catheter, my first quivering steps across the divide of linoleum to the bathroom, a midweek overdose of morphine that turned my lips and speech purple and brought on the random appearance of a Dr. Blah Blah Blah (him I never saw before or since) and his syringe full of narcotic-offsetting lava he shot into my arm and my instant soaking sweats and full-body convulsions and weakly plaintive “what’s happening?” Morse-coding through chatterbox teeth and my passing out in a fish-bowled roomful of medics holding me down with looks that at least shared in my terror, which I could’ve done without, although later, waking refreshed with an oxygen mask face-hugging me was a kind of nirvana (not the band; Nevermind was still two years away).

Almost ODing on pain meds. Foreshadowing, right?

Pre–spinal fusion, I was six feet and weighed one hundred forty begrudging pounds. Upon my vainglorious return home from the hospital, I marionetted through the front door of my house a humpless and hunchless six-three (and the late bloomer I was, I would grow one more inch in the following year). Sweet! But because I gained height, I had to lose somewhere else. Like a body conservation-of-mass thing. On my first day home, I tipped (well, given how not-heavy I was, there was no tipping) the scale at a scant one hundred twenty-five pounds.

[For holy-fuck-you-were-skin-and-bones reference, at the writing and editing of this book, I am six-four and roughly two hundred pounds.]

The first three days post-surgery I wasn’t allowed to eat anything but broth and Jell-O, and I followed that up with four days of bird-pecking at hospital food, ergo the loss of weight I could ill afford to lose. Now home, in theory I could eat whatever I wanted and would gain the weight back and more, but my hoped- and yearned-for physical transformation was at hand (I’d dared imagine myself post-surgery as tall, handsome, winsome, and all the -somes) and the new me was a barely walking skeleton. My collarbones were so prominent, you could hook a clothes hanger on them. Luckily, I was still in a tremendous amount of pain (even with the Percocet), which helped take my mind off my emaciated visage.

My parents set up the TV room as my nesting/healing area. Mom moved the wooden rocking chair in from the living room, jammed it into a corner so it couldn’t rock, and padded the seat with towels. I would spend a considerable amount of the summer of ’89 rooted in the splintery wooden behemoth.