Ed Gavagan - Whatever Doesn't Kill Me

 

 

You know, you wake up in the morning, you get dressed, you put on your shoes, you head out into the world, you feel like you're going to come back home at night, go to sleep, get up, you do it again. That rhythm creates the framework that you use to create a life and you make plans and you count on continuity. And John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you while you're making other plans.” 

 

I woke up one morning. I wasn't wearing any of my own clothes. I had two chest tubes. I had a hose going up my nose down to drain my stomach. I had a catheter, a morphine drip. I woke into this fog of pain. It felt like I had broken through the ice into a lake of frozen hurt. At the end of my bed, I could see the surgeon who had spent all night saving my life. He was holding my foot, and he had given me about a 2% chance of living. Next to him were two homicide detectives. 

 

Now, they were homicide detectives because they had gotten the case because they didn't think I was going to make it, and they didn't want to have to do the paperwork swap. Let me tell you, when you start your day with two homicide detectives explaining what happened the night before, it's the downhill from there. They began to explain to me they had five young men in custody, and they wanted me to identify them from the mug shots before I died. I didn't know this, but they just wanted me to make an X next to the pictures. 

 

What had happened is that these young men had come in from Brooklyn, they were part of a gang. The initiation for them to move up into the upper echelons of their gang was to come into Manhattan and kill somebody. They had set up this little ambush, where they had one lookout at either end of the block, and the three guys would sit on the stoop and they had their knives open up their sleeve like that and the lookout at either end and they would wait. 

 

It was late at night and it was the night before Thanksgiving, so the city was really empty. And this guy walks around the corner, and he heads down the block, and the two lookouts give the go ahead. The three guys stand up and start walking towards him. He has his key out and he puts his key in the door and he goes into the lobby and the door closes behind him and they're locked out. He pushes the elevator button, he goes upstairs, and he gets undressed, and he goes to bed. And he never knows what just didn't hit him. And I'm the next guy. 

 

I come down the block. One of the very lucky things from that night is when I was in University of Notre Dame, I was on the boxing team. So, I got one good punch and knocked the middle guy out. They caught him and he gave up everybody else, which is how they had these five guys in custody. Nobody expected me to make it, and I did. I lived. They took me off life support, moved me into ICU. The nurse comes in with the clipboard and she wants to talk to me about my insurance. I was self-employed at the time, so I like to say I was insurance free. [audience laughter] When she found that out, the next morning, the person that I saw said, “It's amazing how well you're doing and we just think you ought to go home.” [audience laughter] They gave me a bottle of Percocet and a cane and a bag to put my stuff in. The flowers hadn't even stopped wilted yet. 

 

So, I end up in my apartment at home in very bad shape. The nightmares were unbelievable. I couldn't eat. They had removed about a third of my intestines. I had two collapsed lungs. I was missing organs that I didn't know that I had. And things were very, very difficult. In New York, if you can't go to work and make money and pay your rent, you don't get to stay in your apartment. [audience laughter] I would try and walk down the street to do my job. I had a little business building custom furniture. Whenever I saw a young man that had any hint of menace, this feeling would hit me. 

 

And the feeling was, if you're driving late at night in the winter on a snowy road, and you're going a little fast, and you come into a turn, and you feel all four wheels slip, and you feel the car start to go, and you see the guardrail, and you know there's nothing you can do. And then, all of a sudden, you hit the dry pavement and the wheels grip and you're back in control and nothing happened. And then, you get hit with this adrenaline feeling in the back of your knees and your palms and you taste your mouth. But you're driving and you're like, nothing happened. I would have that feeling seeing teenage kids on the street six, seven, eight times a day if I tried to ride the subway. And it wore me out. I was having, in the end, what was post-traumatic stress symptoms. 

 

I ended up losing my apartment, and essentially then becoming homeless. I lost my business. I went to the district attorney's office for an appointment where I had five attempted murder trials that I had to handle. I broke down. I was crying. I was like, “I can't believe I was so lucky to be alive, but now I'm homeless.” He gave me a number a little late, I thought, for the victim's assistance people. [audience laughter] But it was because I didn't talk. I just kept it all in. 

 

And so, I go and I talk to the-- I sit there and I don't have an appointment or anything. I'm waiting and this girl comes out and she's like Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde. She's got the turtleneck and the ponytail, and she leads me back to her cubicle. I'm in this really dark place, and I have this feeling that we're not going to connect. I get to her cubicle and pinned up on the wall next to her monitor is that poster. I know you know it, of the kitten with the branch saying, [audience laughter] “Hang in there, baby.” I just don't feel like she's going to help me. [audience laughter] 

 

She gives me this paperwork to fill out for Medicaid, and she gives me some more paperwork on how to get on a list for subsidized housing. It's an 18-month wait, but at least you're on the list. Another sheet with some addresses in the Bronx where I can go for group counseling that's free. I feel like a drowning man who's just been thrown a kit to build a boat. [audience laughter] 

 

I walk out of there, and I go to my favorite bartender, who's this cute Lebanese Canadian girl who's a poet. She lets me move in and stay on the couch. She's rocking this Simone de Beauvoir look, and she's got this whole-- She's smart and funny. The thing from those days that-- She listened, which was amazing, because what people did, and they were all very well meaning, but they had one of three responses. And the first response was when I tried to talk about my feelings and my fear and this turmoil in my head, they would say, “Well, everything happens for a reason.” And that made me want to punch them in the face and ask them if they knew what the reason for that was. [audience laughter] 

 

And then the second thing that people tended to say was, “You've just got to get over it, man. You're alive. You're lucky. You've just got to put this in the past and just move on and gather yourself together.” And that made me want to stab them six times and come back and talk to them in six months and go, “So, how's it working out? You got any advice for me now, because I could really use some help from somebody that knows what I'm going through?” And the third thing that people would say, and again, they're very well meaning, it just was absolutely no help, was that, “Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.” [audience laughter] 

 

The problem with that was that I felt like I had come to New York, I'd started this little business, I had built a life, and I had lost everything. I'd lost my apartment, my business. I got no help. This girl that had become-- Let me move in with her was getting a little worried, because I was just so sad all the time, and that I felt like you could actually-- I read Nietzsche. I went to college. I was up all night in the student union, drinking coffee and going, “Yeah, if it doesn't kill you, man. It makes you stronger.” But I felt like I was actually broken, that things could happen in your life that would just break a man. And not only you wouldn't be stronger, but you would never have ever again what you had before. 

 

I felt like things had slipped in a way that I would never be able to recover. What I would do to try and make money and have a job as I gather my little set of chisels and tools, and go up to the Upper East side, Manhattan, where there's always some billionaires working on his mansion. I could see a construction site, and I'd go up and knock on the door and ask if they needed anybody to work just a day laborer. And the foreman, he sees a guy with his own tools. He knows his way around the job site. English is his first language. They'd be like, “All right, put him down there and see what he can do.” 

 

I go and I start working. I knew what I was doing. I'd be in this incredible mansion being renovated, and I'd look around at the unbelievable materials, and I'd think of how lucky these people were to be living. When we were done with this work, they'd be surrounded by beautiful materials and amazing craftsmanship. I'd be there working, and I'd be making a mortise for an offset pivot hinge in a rosewood door. The beauty of everything that I was working on contrasted with my life, I would just start to cry. And so, I'd be on my hands and knees sobbing in the library under construction. One of the laborers would go tell the foreman, like, “You know that dude you hired, man, he's sobbing in the library.” 

 

The foreman, usually this Irish guy come and, “Ed, I'm going to pay you for the day. Go have a drink, man. We don't need you anymore.” And then, that would be it. I'd get fired. I was getting fired again and again. It was always-- These people didn't know what happened to me. They just knew they couldn't have some guy weeping in the basement. [audience laughter] I couldn't hold a job, and I was getting angrier. And now, she's my girlfriend, the Canadian poet bartender, but she's worried because my attitude is not so good. 

 

And I leave. After being fired yet again, I walk out onto Park Avenue. I've got my little bag of tools, and I see this guy walking by, and he's got his hair, he’s perfectly coiffed, and his Hermes tie is knotted and his shoes are shined, his impeccable suit with his shiny briefcase. I see that guy, and I just want to tackle him and just kneel on his chest and punch him in the face and go, “You know? You're not good. You're just lucky, man. You think that all of your assumptions and everything you know, and all you're doing is keeping you where you are. You're just lucky, because it can all just be gone. You can lose it.” 

 

I have this rage at him. I don't do anything and let him keep walking. But I realize as I have that feeling that I have just wanted to hurt an innocent stranger, passerby, to make a point about what is wrong with my life. And in that moment, I realized I've become more like the kids that stabbed me. I've lost who I was before. It's an incredible feeling to feel like you're not who you used to be, and that the feeling was that I was slipping down into someplace where I was going down a road where I was going to meet the guys who were my attackers and I was going to be in hell, because I would go there alone. Like, that path was just of bitterness and there was no way out. 

 

At the same time, for the first time as I was sitting there thinking about these feelings of what was happening to me, I realized I can never get back to where I was. That guy, that business, that whole life is just gone. I lost it. But I had never believed that I had lost it. I always thought I was trying to get back to be that guy. As I sat there and I thought about, I realized I got to do something new. It felt liberating. It was like, “All right, I can't go back because that's gone. And I don't want to be evil and bad, and I'm going to do this new thing.” And I'm like, “I can do it. I can do it. I have this girl.” 

 

And I run home and I'm like, “Okay, I'm not going to be the sad guy and I'm not going to be the mad guy. I'm going to change and we're going to work this out. Will you marry me?” And she's like, “No. [audience laughter] You need a little more work here.” [audience laughter] But she's enthused by my enthusiasm. She knows I'm never going to ask her again. So, after about another year and a half, she feels like we got something and so she asks me to marry her. And so, we do. And we end up building this routine again and setting up a life. And now, I have a two-year-old daughter. I put her shoes on in the morning and I head out to work. Thanks.