The Day My Brain Exploded Read online

  Of course, my looks hardly mattered at that point, and I knew it was ridiculous to even contemplate how I appeared. I had entered a room where fashion was the least of anyone’s concerns.

  After each member had been seated, the moderator introduced herself as Kari, and welcomed us to “the once-a-month brain support session,” as she called it. She was a petite, attractive mid-thirties white woman who worked at the nearby hospital as a social worker.

  The room was chillingly quiet, as in support group tradition we told our stories one by one. I suddenly had monstrous pangs of guilt. I was one of the few there whose ailments, while severe, appeared nonexistent. I wasn’t in a wheelchair. Though half-blind, I could see. I could hear. I could speak. And, yes, I could samba.

  I had always been irritated about this lack of obvious scarring, thinking mine to be a silent disease. Nobody could look at me and tell that I had a scorched battlefield between my ears, in part because, by all accounts, my brain still worked. I could articulate my thoughts, and even better, I had thoughts to begin with.

  We went around the circle, each of us sharing our circumstances. We were different ages, different races, and different genders. The one commonality was brain injury. But even our brains were altered in diverse ways. Three of the younger ones, maybe in their twenties, couldn’t speak at all; they sat in wheelchairs and simply nodded.

  An overweight mid-fifties white woman with an unkempt gunmetal bob sat lazily in her chair. Wearing an oversized gray running jacket over a shapeless green sweatsuit, she had a foolish grin and drooled thickly.

  Kari smiled at the woman, whose name, she told us, was Sara.

  “Sara’s just started speaking these past few weeks,” she said with pride.

  Everyone smiled.

  “She now can form full sentences,” she said, her pride even more pronounced.

  Everyone applauded.

  I learned after the meeting that Sara had been living with brain injury ever since the early nineties, when she was involved in a three-car accident on the Long Island Expressway. She was the only driver substantially injured. Kari gave me the background.

  “That’s terrible,” I said, “but even though she’s in bad shape, it’s great that she’s speaking again.”

  “I know,” Kari said, “I’m so happy for her progress. Just last year, she didn’t even understand the meaning of the word ‘the.’ ”

  “That’s fantastic,” I said, attempting a forced cheerfulness that unsuccessfully masked my sadness. “What was she doing before her injury?”

  “She was a corporate lawyer.”

  Our group also included a former model. A brain bleed had left half of her face paralyzed. She looked like she was wearing a mask.

  One distinguished-looking middle-aged black man dressed in a suit stood up. His companion, who could have been his twin, or lover, or friend, said the dapper fellow was named Matt, and had been a heart surgeon.

  Matt shushed him. “I can speak for myself, Tim,” he barked. “I just want to tell everyone how proud I am of myself!”

  We waited for Matt to continue, but he didn’t say anything more. He simply sat down again, closed his eyes, and began rubbing his face. He looked exhausted.

  Tim broke the silence.

  “I’m proud of him, too,” he said, without revealing the nature of Matt’s injury. “Time for show-and-tell,” he said and turned to his friend.

  Matt revealed to us the reason for the delight: he stood up, opened his right hand, and showed us a small metallic object.

  Then, like a five-year-old thrilled to understand finally the difference between a nickel and a quarter, Matt exclaimed, “For a while I’ve been thinking this is only some stupid pointy thingy. But now I totally understand what this is! I know what this is! It goes in your skin!”

  He was holding a syringe.

  A tall, attractive thirtysomething white man with longish black hair stood up. His companion, an elderly white woman, immediately told us the gentleman had been an established soap opera actor.

  The man seemed to have come straight from a fashion shoot, decked out in sleek black slacks and a fitted blue sweater that hugged his well-built body. I wondered why a guy so sharp was in a place like this.

  When he started talking, I understood.

  “My-y-y-y-y- n-n-n-nayy-y—”

  It took him more than a minute to utter “my name.”

  One of the group’s main rules was not to interrupt any member when he or she was speaking. We waited out the next two minutes, until he was able to complete “My name is Charles.” But his main problem was not stuttering; he seemed to be floating in and out of lucidity itself. In the next breath, he began speaking coherently, but extremely slowly. Like a three-year-old reading Mary Had a Little Lamb.

  Even though I was curious to find out the anatomy of his injury, nobody asked him. Perhaps that was the code of the group, I figured, to let everybody speak the way they wanted to, and to tell only as much as they felt comfortable revealing.

  Standing up, he recounted the day-by-day schedule of his week. Everybody listened carefully, even me. Usually I had a tendency to be impatient and interrupt. But I said nothing and joined the others in offering silent nods until he was done feeding us his datebook.

  Kari picked me to follow Charles. When I was done confessing, I looked around the room. Everyone appeared shocked. One wheelchair-bound elderly Hispanic woman, who had yet to speak in group, introduced herself as Natalie.

  She stared at me.

  “You seem very healthy and well-spoken, young man,” she said. “You must have had the brain injury around ten years ago, am I right?”

  “Not really,” I said, looking down.

  “Oh my gosh, I’m sorry. It was probably more than ten. That was stupid of me. I know brains take a long time to recover, honey.”

  Her face became solemn. “Even if it’s taken you fifteen years, or your whole life to recover, you should be proud. You’re still alive, and that’s all that matters.”

  “Actually,” I said, “this happened to me three years ago.”

  “Listen, kiddo,” she responded, displaying hints of irritation. “Be serious. When did you have your trauma?”

  I tried to explain that I was telling the truth, but nobody in the group seemed convinced.

  Then the soap star stood up again. Perhaps feeling encouraged by my openness to talk, he was ready to tell us what happened to him.

  Whereas before he couldn’t even speak one sentence coherently, now Charles’s words came out with eerie clarity. He started slowly, and progressed to a faster pace.

  “Ten years ago . . .

  “. . . my boyfriend was saying bye to me in the Fourteenth Street subway station at midnight waiting for the E train must have been behind a stalled car since it was taking so long to get to me. . . .

  “Mike and I had been holding hands and hugged when he left I didn’t think . . .

  “. . . much about it

  “Two minutes after he left a cop comes up to me. . . . He holds his crotch and asks me if I want it. I looked shocked and as soon as I say something he punches me in the face calls me all the names you can think of . . .

  “He punches me four or five more times I beg him to please stop I’ll do what you want please stop he doesn’t I can’t think straight when he’s finished he pushes me into the tracks I survived I ate pizza for breakfast today and . . . I held the slice with these many fingers”

  Charles held up three fingers on his right hand.

  After recounting his tale, Charles left, with his companion. The silent room became, impossibly, even quieter.

  Of Hair and Heroin

  After receiving increasingly upsetting stares by strangers, I let my hair grow long to cover the carved back of my skull. I refused to go to any barber, especially my former hairstylist. But one steamy, sweltering day in mid-August, I finally gave in to the heat. I wanted a haircut from him, and only him.

  His name was Phil,
a fortysomething Italian man with long flowing red hair and a bushy red beard. His thick, hairy arms were covered with tattoos—eagles, tigers, thunderbolts, the word Mom—making him look like a biker, or at least a trucker. Phil was an anomaly in the prissy, faux-manly runway world of Chelsea. Imagine the love child of Willie Nelson and Hulk Hogan—that would be Phil.

  Phil asked where I’d been for so long. I told him the story. He listened silently and then exploded with a loud laugh.

  “Still the same Ashok,” he said, “always joking.”

  But as he began cutting my hair, clearing away the deep growth on the back of my head, the scar came into view. Phil gasped.

  “You mean your skull was really opened?”

  “Phil, bone don’t lie.”

  Gently grabbing a handful of my hair, Phil parted the mop again to get a full view of my skull-steel. “That is one awesome scar,” he said, then whistled. Clearly he had new respect for me.

  I told him to do anything that would cover the devastation and watched in the mirror as Phil examined the scar. Then he looked up, a mischievous glint in his eyes.

  “Let’s cut it all off.”

  “Are you crazy?” I whined. “The scar is disgusting. I want it totally hidden. Everybody stares and makes comments about it.” I realized that I sounded like a thirteen-year-old girl.

  Over my shoulder, Phil gave me a hard, deep look in the mirror.

  “Do you think that veterans feel that way? That scar is a badge of honor. It means you survived.”

  “Oh yeah, and what the hell do you know about this kind of surviving?” I said.

  His face suddenly became serious. “I know all about it,” he said. “I survived a killer. Heroin.”

  This was news to me. It’s kinda cool, I thought, having a former junkie cutting my hair.

  “Twice,” he said. “I was hooked for over ten years, before my wife finally pushed me into rehab. But two weeks after my release, I reunited with my true love. I became an addict all over again.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said.

  “I tried everything, even methadone. No dice. After my second stint in rehab, I finally quit shooting up. Cold turkey.

  “I’m not saying that I can possibly know what you went through,” he quickly added. “But I know what it is to live through a nightmare.”

  “At least you don’t have a permanent physical reminder,” I said, surveying his big, furry arms for track marks. Perhaps the tattoos had covered them.

  Phil sighed. “A long time before coming here to Chelsea, I ran a barbershop in Queens. Real roughneck joint. I used to cut gang members’ hair. They asked me to shave designs into their flattop fade cuts, stuff like shapes, gang symbols.”

  My mind wandered back there, to the years before my head exploded; hearing about flattop fades made me think about eighties rap music and Adidas footwear.

  “Hey Phil, remember ‘Rapper’s Delight’? Remember when hip-hop first came out?”

  He sighed, obviously irritated by my lack of attention. In turn, he ignored my question. “These guys would have paid to have your scar. It’s hardcore. Looks like the Batman logo without the bat. And without the oval.”

  I laughed. By comparing me to Bruce Wayne’s alter ego, he won me over. I let Phil shave my head completely. When he finished, he turned me around and held a mirror behind my head so I could see what I had been hiding under my hair.

  Butchered. My head was butchered. Yet as I scrutinized the back of my skull, for the first time I felt no shame.

  “Be proud, Ashok. You’re like a POW. If anyone asks you about the scarring,” he said with a chuckle, “say you got it in a war!”

  Smiling broadly now, I paid for the trim and gave Phil a big tip.

  Phil may have been kidding when he made that remark, but he was right.

  It was a war all along.

  Peanut Curry: 1974

  Fuck Holden Caulfield or David Copperfield or any other overanalyzed fictional white guy.

  Let’s talk about an Indian American guy for once, a nonfictional brown guy who Mr. Caulfield would likely walk past, even if he saw the brown guy getting bashed by a gang of white supremacists in a dark alley.

  And let’s begin by discussing how the brown guy had once been Baby Buddha.

  “Once upon a time,” my mother would tell me as a child, “there was a pretty Indian woman. She loved eating peanuts all the time. So she gave birth to a peanut.”

  Okay, so she never actually told me that fairy tale, but I was, indeed, called Peanut by the nurses who helped her give birth to me in 1974, in a tiny hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

  This was the real tale told by my mom, a slender and petite South Indian woman named Sheila. With a complexion of deep, rich cocoa, she had fleshy cheeks and thick, waistlength hair, usually tied in a loose, braided ponytail. Her large, chocolate almond-shaped eyes shone under meticulously plucked, arched eyebrows.

  At twenty-five, barely measuring five foot four and a little over one hundred pounds, she was already mother to Prakash, born three years earlier.

  Expecting her second baby in early December of 1974, she was astonished to awake with contractions on the morning of November 3, at around ten o’clock. Even though it wasn’t too early in the morning, it was a Sunday, the day of the week on which my parents would usually sleep until noon. But no such luck on this day. Sunday morning or not, I was up and ready to go.

  “It’s time,” she whispered to my father, who had been snoring loudly and peacefully. His slim five-foot-eight frame was wrapped in a flimsy white T-shirt and his standard dhoti, the south Indian male sarong, which resembled a transparent, floorlength white skirt.

  Mahogany-hued with an oversized honker that I would inherit, his name was Rajamani. His full moniker was Puthucode Narayanswamy Rajamani, the first name being the town of his birth, the second being the name of his father, and the third being his actual birth name. This was the custom of our people, South Indian Tamil Palghat Brahmins. Technically, then, his name was simply Rajamani. Like Cher. He called himself Raj.

  Upon awakening, he responded groggily. “You’re just having gas, Sheel; we have another whole month until the big day. Go back to sleep.”

  She responded by turning on the light.

  In just a few minutes, Mom and Dad and a sleepy Prakash were on the way to the nearest hospital in Dad’s beatup blue Chevy Vega.

  After quickly signing the paperwork at the front desk, Mom told Dad to take Prakash, who was screeching at the top of his lungs, to the home of their friends, Shrini and Thangam, a cheery married couple. Dad resisted at first but eventually yielded.

  Left in the care of the nurse, Mom was wheeled to her room, where she practiced her Lamaze techniques, hoping her husband would return quickly.

  By the time he returned, just forty minutes later, I had been born. It was right before noon.

  Dad yelled joyfully when he was told Mom had given birth to another son.

  By the time he arrived, I had already been given a nickname. Since I was born prematurely, almost an entire five weeks before the standard nine-month pregnancy delivery date, I weighed barely five pounds.

  The doctor and nurses called me “Peanut.”

  I was not crying. I was wrinkly, dusky, and oddly serene, with East Asian eyes. And because I was dark, the total effect was that of a Southeast Asian newborn.

  An ancient Tibetan, if you will. The doctor even jokingly asked Mom if the Dalai Lama was the father.

  So Peanut was given an extra nickname: Baby Buddha.

  The real name my parents gave me, of course, was neither. But they chose it precisely because of my placid demeanor: Ashok, in Sanskrit, means “one without sorrow.”

  The Day My Brain Exploded: 2000 (I)

  The Discovery

  Time seemed to blaze through a blackened stretch of undiscovered galaxies following my hotel room collapse. When my eyes opened, and clear sight had finally returned, I had no idea where I was.

/>   Fuck Fuck Fuck.

  I was in a bed. But where? I looked up. High above me, a metallic, gray-steel ceiling spread out overhead. Then I saw Prakash’s face staring down at me, a terrible mingling of fright, anxiety, and terror.

  This didn’t look good at all.

  “You’re in a hospital,” he said. “They say you’ve had a brain hemorrhage. Your brain bled.”

  No way. There was no blood. Just some cum.

  “You’re in a hospital,” he repeated when he saw my look of horror. “You don’t remember? I picked you up a while ago from the hotel room and walked you here. You’ve been pretty much unconscious, sleeping since I got you here. The doctors just took a CT scan of your head.”

  I then noticed Mom standing next to Prakash.

  Both were silent. Next to them stood a pink-faced man in a white coat. Extremely skinny, balding, and sporting a scraggly white beard, he looked like an anorexic Santa Claus.

  “Ashok, I’m Dr. Brown. You gave us quite a scare. Let me tell you what happened.”

  “Prakash told me I had a brain hemorrhage,” I said.

  “Yes, you did. It’s called a Subarachnoid Intracranial Cerebral Hemorrhage, and after taking the CT scan, we discovered the cause of it,” he continued, holding out an X-ray in front of my face.

  He pointed to a major dark spot on the bottom left corner of the brain scan. I inspected it. Prakash and Mom moved in closer for a better look.

  “See that?” he said.

  We all nodded.

  “That,” he said, “is an AVM. AVM means Arteriovenous Malformation. I assume you’ve never heard that term.”

  Even in my blurry state, I almost replied sarcastically, out of habit, “Duh.”

  “An AVM is a tangle of veins and arteries hidden in the brain,” he explained.

  Prakash suddenly lashed out at me. “See what you get for all your whacking off?” Clearly I must have told him about my private activity before the wedding, although I couldn’t remember doing it. Mom’s face contorted into a grim, stony-faced mask, looking as though her tightened, immobile lips would prevent her from bursting into a flood of tears.