Faker

Remember Chicken Little?

He's the little feathered bastard who told everyone the sky was falling down. Don't you just hate fakers?

I used to be a faker, on occasion. When I knew I had a math test coming up that I hadn't studied for, or I just plain wanted to stay home, I would turn up the acting skills, surreptitiously lick my palms and hope I could slide past my mother's eagle eyes for a get-out-of-school free pass.

It rarely worked.

Even when I was legitimately sick, she would schedule the earliest possible appointment with Dr. Greene, my allergist, and he'd check me out and say, "Well, you're wheezing, so I want you to take two puffs of Ventolin, have a nebulizer treatment here, and then you'll be just fine to head off to school."

Sometimes I don't know why I loved that guy so much-- he was a real hardass. A smiling hardass, but a hardass nonetheless. Of course, bowtie-wearing intellectuals certainly realize the value of a good education, so he was rarely one to suggest staying home from school.

As many of you know, despite Dr. Greene's untimely death five years ago, I still go to my pediatric allergy and pulmonology office, and am seen by Dr. DiDario, who embodies much of Dr. Greene's personality traits. Fortunately, I don't have to worry about weaseling my way out of a day of school anymore. When I arrived for my appointment yesterday, I found a note on the office door, asking patients to use the "new entrance" down the hall. The tenant across the way had moved and my allergist's office was taking over almost the whole floor.

Change. Not my favorite pill.

So I signed in with the receptionist.

"How old are you now?" she asked.

"Uh...." I stalled, looking at all the pre-adolescents and their saggy mothers sitting in the waiting room. "Twenty-nine."

"You've been coming here a long time," she remarked.

"I have, and proudly so," I replied even though, for perhaps the first time, I was a little self-conscious about my age, perhaps because one of the droop-mothers was staring at me as if my penis was hanging out of my fly.

I sat down and pretended to read "Road & Track" while I observed the clientele around me. Next to me, there was a sixteen year old d-bag wearing a gray t-shirt and ripped jeans. He was sprawled out on the burgundy, vinyl couch fast asleep while his younger brother was inside getting an allergy shot. Over in the far corner, a fake-blonde mom was attempting to operate her new iPhone while her two sons strangled each other on the floor. I'm sure it was all in good fun. A small girl by the window was diligently picking her nose while her mother texted away on a slider phone. A ten-year-old child was mesmerized by the film playing on the wall-mounted flatscreen TV.

"Chicken Little."

When I finally went in for my appointment, Dr. DiDario did something unheard of-- he won a battle with me. For well over a decade, Dr. Greene tried to persuade me to get my tonsils removed. Every single time I'd come in for a visit, sick or well, he'd look in my mouth and say something to the effect of,

"Wow. Those things are huge and they're disgusting. I want to set you up with an ENT to have them taken out."

"No thanks," was my mother's, and later on my party line. Same with the dentist and braces. And look where that's got me. Two days ago a teenager called me "Bunnicula."

Well, ever since I started seeing Dr. DiDario, he's been pressuring me to get scratch tests to determine whether or not my allergies have changed.

"When was the last time you got skin tested?" he asked. They don't call it "scratch tests" anymore because that's "scary."

"Um... probably 1986."

He stared at me.

"Are you serious?"

"Um, yeah. I think so. Might have '87."

He flipped seemingly endless papers in my chart, and then turned the whole thing over and started right back at the beginning. He got to a page, looked up at me and smiled.

"1987."

He then made the case for new scratch tests, citing that I was still having breating issues and that if my triggers have changed, we can only address them if we know what they are. It's hard when a rational man tries to reason with an irrational man, but he did it successfully, only after convincing me that my shitty insurance would pay for it.

The nurse came in to administer the tests.

"Are you nervous?" she asked.

"Well, the last time I had this done, the nurse squirted medicine into her own eye and then scratched the hell out of my back, I remember lying, face-down on the table and screaming... but I noticed that you left the door to this room open, so it can't be that bad now."

She laughed.

"No. It's much better. This test is called the Comfort 10."

Then I laughed.

But it was seriously just fine, a small amount of rubbing and tingling on my right arm in ten different places to test for ten different allergy triggers-- dust mites, cats, dogs, trees, grasses, etc.

She left the room and said that she'd be gone for about ten minutes. She left my whole chart on the exam table next to me. I couldn't resist. So much of my life was in that very thick volume. I flipped away.

First visit, October 25th, 1986. I weighed 43 pounds. Chief complaint, wheezing and coughing. Dr. Greene's improbably small chicken scrawl littered the page. I flipped further, to a typed page, something I could actually read. It was a physician's report from the Children's Seashore House at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. One morning in June of 1992, I woke up with a fever, a rash on my stomach and extreme pain in my legs, such that I could not move them without agony. I could not walk. Refusing a bedpan, I would throw myself out of bed and army-crawl to the bathroom, which was fortunately only eight or so feet away from my bedroom at the time. My parents took me to Dr. Greene, and he referred me to Dr. Balu Atraia, an Indian physician in his middle fifties whom I took great pleasure in imitating in months and years after. After my examination by Dr. Atraia, he had a private conference with my parents, and I remember suspecting that he was telling them I was faking to get attention of some kind.

At various points in my adult life, I harkened back to that moment and was filled with shame that maybe I had made it all up for some twisted psychological reason-- maybe I was really a faker. A fraud. A sham.

As I read through Dr. Atraia's note, I kept searching for the word "malingerer" which is leagalese/medical jargon for "fucking faker." I couldn't find it. I read through his findings-- I read that I was a "typically developing normal, circumcised male" and that made me feel better. I saw Dr. Greene had circled some key phrases in the report, "noticeable skin warmth on left thigh." "Acute tenderness upon forced movement." "Patient is most probably recovering from a severe viral infection and is suffering from neuralgia as a result of that illness." He recommended pool therapy, which I did, and pain medication, which I took.

"One day," Dr. Atraia said to me with his hot, foreign breath, "you will wake up and this will be gone, just as quickly as it came."

And it was.

And Chicken Little walked again.

Phony

I spent much of this weekend writing a grant. It's for an ambulance company-- not the one I used to work for. They want a powered stretcher that automatically lowers and raises at the push of a button, so the EMTs and paramedics operating it don't pop their vertebrae every time they have to transport a fat bison. It's also extra durable and extra wide, again, for the benefit of the bison.

I mean "patient."

I met the managing director of this ambulance squad after I had written a scathing editorial in the Philadelphia Daily News about the state of Philadelphia's 911 system, which is pretty poor. I wrote the letter after a woman called 911 complaining of chest pain and shortness of breath. According to national standards, the average response time for an emergency call to 911 should be under 9 minutes. An ambulance showed up at her house 41 minutes later. She was obese, like many patients are, and the crew had a very difficult time getting her out of the house and into the ambulance. Once they had her loaded in, the truck wouldn't start. They called for a second unit, which had to race across town to get there. They arrived in around 3/4 of an hour, too.

Don't be surprised when I tell you that the patient died.

In the editorial, I wrote that the Philadelphia Fire Department, manning 40 ambulances, cannot possibly provide effective and timely service to the 1,447,335 citizens of Philadelphia without assistance, and I suggested that they integrate any number of the almost 50 different private ambulance companies that operate in the city for help when Philly can't respond to calls for help.

This gentleman, the managing director of a private ambulance company, read my editorial and was impressed. He had long been saying the same thing I was saying, and he was happy to find a friend. He asked me to come work for him as a grantwriter. This was last year, and it began my first paid gig as a writer.

The only problem is, I'm not a grantwriter.

In my regular, full-time job, I write grants also. But I'm not a grantwriter. I never learned how to write a grant. Nobody ever told me. I've never been to a grantwriting seminar. I've never read "Grantwriting for Retards" and I've never been formally trained on the ins and outs of writing grants. I've been given advice by successful grantwriters. I've looked at a lot of grants, both successful and unsuccessful, and, by this point in time, I've written probably close to ten full grant applications. I've applied for a total of probably close to $200,000. Let's just say I haven't earned nearly that much for my benefactors' benefit.

I told you: I'm not a grantwriter.

Engaging in professional or even avocational activities for which I am unqualified, untrained or unskilled appears to be a hallmark of my existence. My level of fakery, then, must be pretty good, because people keep trusting me with responsibilities, hiring me for jobs, giving me assignments and casting me in roles when, probably, they shouldn't. In November, I'll be appearing in my fifth Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. I know nothing about singing technique. I've never had a private voice lesson. But I get by, I guess. People keep handing me the keys to Gilbert's Rolls Royce. Don't ask me why.

At age 20, I was hired as an optician in a small eyeglasses store. I didn't even know what an optician was. Was it the doctor? Did I just get hired as an eye doctor as a sophomore in college? Was I going to have to puff air in peoples' eyes and perform surgery on fishook eyelids? Didn't you have to go to school for that? To my relief, I found myself cleaning 300 pair of eyeglasses and the display boards on my first day of work. I eventually sold, repaired, cleaned, and adjusted eyeglasses, checked prescriptions, managed the doctor's appointment book, ordered lenses, cut and grooved lenses (though I never got very good at this), measured bifocal heights and did a lot of other boring stuff like taking out the trash (which I was very good at.) I learned how to do all of this stuff by watching my boss. But I didn't actually know anything. I was faking my way through it.

Then I was hired as a loan officer. Talk about faking it. Amortization schedules? Debt-to-income ratios? Charge-offs? Lending practices? I didn't know what the fuck I was talking about. But I had an office with a big desk, and a computer, and a filing cabinet and a bunch of loan applications that I barely knew what they meant. I was on the phone with banks and they were saying shit to me that was like some alien dialect. I was truly alone in the ocean with this one. But I hung on for a year. Being a phony.

We're all phonies to a certain degree, I suppose. Some more than others of course. People trust us with things and tasks that they probably shouldn't, mostly because they're probably too lazy to go out and look for someone who is actually qualified. Plus, qualified people are much more expensive than unqualified people, aren't they? They demand big bucks for their competence. Us? We're just happy to have a job.

My favorite character from literature is probably Holden Caulfield, not that that should be pretty surprising to any of you who know me well, or even those of you who don't know me well. I love Holden very much, and it depresses me that, if he met me, he probably wouldn't like me half as much as I like him. He'd undoubtedly call me a "phony" but I guess that's okay, because I am. And he is, too, and I guess that's the point. Holden and I have very little tolerance for the world, but, then again, I don't think we're particularly fond of ourselves either.

"My brother D.B.'s a writer and all, and my brother Allie, the one that died, that I told you about, was a wizard. I'm the only really dumb one."