Phew… deep sigh. Shoulders back, chin up, chest out.

Naming it will set you free.

Story will save you.

I’m thinking about Tommy Orange this morning. I think about Tommy a lot.¹ His first novel, the brilliant encapsulation of how my mind perceives the world: a multifaceted tale of beautifully detailed stories intertwining into a magnificent tapestry shawl. It’s Anansi spinning Indra’s Web in the Western Hemisphere. It is the most beautiful linking of the micro to the macro I’ve seen in recent memory. Through Orange’s lovingly woven act of creation, the realities of Indigenous Peoples in Oakland, California, echo, resonate, amplify, refract, and enhance the experiential forces of heart and history.

In a pivotal scene in one of the characters’ lives, she is told, Your story will save you.

Another involves a man on a toilet. Constipation a stand in for his quarter-life inertia.²

And here is where I follow Tommy’s lead, embrace our entwined appellation, and accept my position atop the throne.

The Hero’s Call

Number 2 is hard to do.

My name is Thomas. It derives from an ancient Aramaic word for twin that became Didymus in Greek.
Didymus
Twin
Two
It’s a good thing this conversation isn’t about number 1, as any song involving a pee diddy must be relegated to the latrine of history.

Enough toilet humor. Here’s a commode confession:

For my entire life, I have felt like there was something terribly wrong with me. I don’t mean wrong in the general sense, like I’m weird or eccentric (although those do factor in). I mean wrong in the archetypal right/wrong sense. I wasn’t built right. And someday the world will see how very not-right I am, and I will be exposed.
Vulnerable.
Alone.
Annihilated.
One terrifying manifestation of this comes in public bathrooms.

I can’t do number 2 too close to you.³

My whole life… I just can’t go unless the conditions are just right. I have to be in an environment that feels “safe.” I thought I was broken, perverse… I learned much later t’was neither blessing nor curse. It was my hypervigilant nervous system refusing to stand down due to the trauma of living with unaddressed Neurodivergence. It wasn’t that I was ashamed, it wasn’t that I had anything to hide, it was that my body, my beautifully engineered body, was doing what it was beautifully engineered to do. It was on lookout. Number 2 is for when you can let your guard down. My guard was always up outside the den. My mother, Denise, is Den to those close to her.

It wasn’t that little Tommy wanted his mommy; and boy oh boy did the burgeoning Shakespeares of his provincial land-locked coastal town⁴ weave that one into their very own Gregorian-style chant during Religious instruction at St. Gregory the Great’s not so great church vestibule as good little boys and girls line up for first confession to show penance for bullying kids like me…. Sincerely.

No. Little Tommy knew that Mommy was Home and that Home was Safe and that he could finally put down the evolutionary armor that natural selection and genetics demanded he wear every waking moment of his conscious life.⁵

So Little Tommy struggled to make…. well, you get the picture, and from this point forward, I’ve fully armed you to say that I am full of sh*t.

Dueling Deuces

Long day. I teach public high school in a large urban school district. I hate to use the word urban. I have a modest background in communication studies and have taken a special interest in the connotative vs. denotative meanings of words. Words, properly used, are magic spells (spell it out), and some of us are adept at packing as much magic as we can into these singular units of semiotic substance. Is it the sibilant finesse that makes me so digress? (Grassy Ass, Tee Ess)

But I teach in the places ignored by most of the people with whom I grew up. Under-resourced, we do what we can with what we have. Like McLuhan’s idea that the medium is the message, John Dewey made the classroom the lesson. The environment shapes the meaning. The connotative message saturates the denotative carrier signal. It takes a lot of work to make my classroom a den. And I try to cultivate a garden of a den.

I’m on the toilet. Noise-canceling headphones on and a YouTube video about… I don’t remember. Phone rings. Nursing home. Sh*t. I pick up on my not-so-but-so-called-smart-watch. I sh*t you not. Whilst otherwise tied up, I answer. The hero is called down from his throne.

I pick up on the watch.
Hi, can you hear me? My name is Martha. I’m a social worker.
Martha. Already I like her.
Your father’s insurance company just sent us a non-coverage letter. They won’t cover him after Sunday. He asked me to reach out to you. He said you would know what to do.
I’m literally — Martha, I’m talking to you on my watch right now, can I call you back in two minutes?
Oh, absolutely, yes — I’ll just forward you the email with the number. You call the number, initiate the appeal, and we handle everything from our end.
And Martha — do I have to go Luigi on them?
She laughs. No. You just call the number.
I sh*t you not, that’s all she said. You just call the number.
He asked me to call you. He said you would know what to do.

The nursing home told us this was not only possible, but highly probable.⁶ But cognitive priming doesn’t prepare a person for the punch to the solar plexus of such a visceral violation.

Off the throne and to the phone

Set up speaker phone. Hit record. I want to get this on record because there’s a lot of info, taking notes by hand is a wall of awful for my neurology because my attention to detail coupled with the need to constantly cross-reference the bottom-up data with the overall context is a level of psychophysiological panic that can only be described as existential. Voice notes are key here. I can have the conversation and let the technology take the notes.

I am evolutionarily engineered for moments like this. The parasympathetic nervous system’s fight or flight response that once protected my people from a sabretooth tiger is now protecting my people from more modern predators.

The First Threshold Guardian

I call the number on the letter. Commence Health. QIO. This call may be monitored for quality and insurance purposes.
Randy answers.
My name is Randy. May I have your first and last name, please?
Randy, I say. You’re lucky. It’s not Luigi.

A beat. 

Then Randy laughs — a real laugh, not a customer service laugh. A throaty, damn I like this guy laugh.
I’m glad this is being recorded, Randy, and I’m glad I got a laugh out of you. I need you to know that I know this isn’t your fault. But I also need you to know that your companies are evil, and I’m done. My father is 83 years old. He cannot walk. He has prostate cancer with a Gleason score of 10. He went into V-fib multiple times — we almost lost him. He is just now taking his first steps with a walker. And someone, somewhere, decided that Sunday is when we pull the plug on that progress. I need to file an appeal. And I’m sorry that when families are going through something like this, the system makes us spend our energy on calls like this one. That’s not your problem. But it’s somebody’s problem.
Randy says: That’s exactly why we’re here.
And I believe him.
I made the call expecting to preemptively strike the six-fingered man before he could hurt my father. Instead, I found my own Inigo Montoya.⁷

Unexpected Allies Abound

Having won Randy over with the vulnerability that only the authenticity of master-level effacement through humor can provide, I walked him through the last month of my existence.

Both parents hospitalized, juggling their care with full-time job, maxing out sick time… all I want is to be treated like a human.

Because when I’m treated like a human, I treat you like a human.
I don’t like who I become when we forget that we are both human.
It’s happening too much lately. Inside me, outside me, within me and without me.

That’s the first mask — we all mask, some of us more than others — and the very first mask we receive is the realization that I am me and you are you and we are not the same.

Mask becomes perspective.
Perspective becomes premise.
Premise becomes practice.
I am me.
You are you.
We are not the same.
But underneath the mask?

The Revelation & Return

Randy walked me through the process.⁸ He carefully explained his role, how his company is contracted by Medicare to ensure that people are properly insured and that they don’t slip through the cracks. A physician will review your father’s case, and you will be notified by text as soon as a decision is made.⁹

In your experience dealing with cases like my father’s, do you anticipate a favorable outcome?
Randy pauses. Not a stall — a consideration.
I can’t make any promises. But what you’ve described — the documentation, the PT progress, the medical complexity — that’s exactly the kind of case we’re here for. The physician will have everything they need to make the right call.

It wasn’t a guarantee. But it was a human being telling me he saw my father. Not a claim number. Not a Sunday discharge date.

Thomas, he said before we hung up. I want you to know — I’m rooting for you.

I sh*t you not.

Approximately 19 Hours & 30 Minutes Later

Text comes through:

This is good, right? There’s a weird multiple-negative here that is thoroughly shredding my processing. The physician reviewer disagrees with termination of services…. Running diagnostics… disagrees with termination of services equals agrees with not terminating services which waitaminute working memory overload is it negating to termination or terminating the negation and sh*t…. 

I run it through an AI chat just to be sure. I knew it was good. But I had to be sure.

Triumph.

I call my parents to tell them.

I am proud.¹⁰

I tell Dad I handled it. He don’t have to worry about this one no more.¹¹

Tommy, I knew you would. You can do anything.
I know with you, I always have the best shot.
I love you.

Every time we take a loop around the hero’s roundabout, we spiral upward. That is the journey. That is the growth.

Until next time…

1. We met Tommy Orange under strange circumstances a few years ago. He came to speak to some of my students, and in the commotion of everything, nobody introduced us. (I wasn’t the teacher who organized it all.) Tommy read an excerpt from his second novel, Wandering Stars, to the AP students and a handful of other students deemed worthy by gatekeepers. While The New York Times recorded an awkward back-and-forth with teacher (not me), Tommy, and students, I watched my name-brother squirm in the awkwardness of it all. He was articulate, cordial, confident, but not there. In his excerpt, he described a fascinating therapeutic model, and I was intrigued. In a quiet moment, between Q & A and book signing, I walked over to Tommy.
   
   Hi, I’m Tom… yup, Tom.
   Nice to meet you, Tom.
   We’ve been teaching this book for a few years now and it’s just… amazing.
   Thank you.
   Thank you! Quick question, that backward masking thing you just read about with Orvil… is that really a thing?
   He grins, eyes widen… You wanna go down a YouTube rabbit hole?
   
   Then it’s all:
   PLACES PLACES EVERYBODY, THE DOG AND PONIES MUST LINE UP FOR THE PHOTO OP!
   I’m in the NYT photo. Gray-ish beard. Toward stage left, 2nd row, crouched a little, smiling.
   Tommy and I connected.
   I’ll take the connection every day of the week. ↩︎
2. Aptly named, Edwin Black… a late bloomer, low confidence, weight issues… Jesus, books can be mirrors. ↩︎
3. Oh, the cruelty of Pepsico’s ad campaign of Do the Dew… dangling it in my face… I would if I could Do the Dew when I need to, so screw you and kick a poo with no shoe….
   Forgive me. This is how I deal. I play. I am the bete bricoleur… fol da ree fol da rah ↩︎
4. Yes. Land-locked coastal town. It’s the only town in a region called The Sound Shore that doesn’t have a shore. Two neighboring towns meet beneath to box it out. And frankly, I can see why. ↩︎
5. Is this why playing hide and seek, or the more RPG-style thus terrifyingly realistic Manhunt or Ghost In The Graveyard, would literally send me into fits of parasympathetic existential panic?
   Interesting. ↩︎
6. The indignity of being anyone but the wealthiest of the wealthy in America is that one is at the mercy (the irony pains my connotative sensibilities) of predatory parasites who siphon capital through a pyramid scheme called health insurance. ↩︎
7. Does this make me the Dread Pirate? Aye aye, Cap. ↩︎
8. Ram Dass famously said, We are all walking each other home. Clearly Randy got the memo. ↩︎
9. As soon as a decision is made. I remember back during the sub-prime mortgage crisis a driving factor of the collapse was bundled mortgages valued highly but ultimately worthless.
   That’s the passive voice. ↩︎
10. I know that pride is a deadly sin, and I know that there are seven of them, but there are also nine lives, and the mind can twist a lifetime into infinity because forever is forever until it’s not. ↩︎
11. Damn straight I’m using multiple negatives. It’s okay when I do it. ↩︎