“I’m coming to town,” he says. “No jam bands this time, I promise.”
We make plans to meet at a bar off St. Marks Place, and when he sees my thinner-still frame, he looks visibly taken aback.
“You’re too skinny,” he says. “I mean . . . you look great and all, but I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
Ten months earlier, I had met Dr. Tom during one of the most important trips of my life: the one I decided to take without my then husband after we decided we were separating. My medical school PR job had a few notable perks, one of which was an annual conference gathering together university types around the country—always located in some fun vacation spot. In 2005, it was in New Orleans, months before Katrina. The city, always a hotbed of utter magic, felt like it was under an actual spell when I was down there—purple skies, strangers whispering secrets. Everything seemed to fall into place.
I had planned to go with James, until I realized that I was becoming the picture of a woman enabling her emotional abuser. Nothing physical, but the verbal abuse was beginning to take its toll. (Among his greatest hits: “You’re not smart, you’re not funny, you’re not a good writer, and you’re not pretty.” “You are pathetic.” “You’ll always be able to find a guy to slap his dick in your face and call you a whore.”) I told him I was going solo at the last minute, and it was the best decision I’d ever made in the course of our marriage.
It was the trip of a lifetime—a drunken one, albeit, but I woke up every morning and the coffee at Café Du Monde was sweeter, the breakfast at Le Croissant d’Or was tastier, and the nightlife at Jacques Imo’s was pure heaven. That’s where I met Dr. Tom, whom I sidled up next to at the bar, and we proceeded to spend the rest of the night together until I ditched him for a strip club DJ who lied to me and told me my stand-up was great.
In the months following, Dr. Tom became more than just a friend: He became a lifeline. As I grew skinnier and more alone in my life, my hypochondria, compounded by actual—but insignificantly small—physical anomalies, was magnified a zillion times by the fact that I was working at a medical school. No sooner had I checked my body for the hundredth time that day than I had emailed one of the medical school deans self-diagnosing myself with Crohn’s disease. I would get back an email reply, immediately.
“You’re fine, Mandy,” the dean would write. “Stop googling.”
Other times I would actually go up to his office and show him anything that seemed weird on my body.
“Still fine,” he would say.
Dr. Tom bore the brunt of my anxiety’s runoff, looking at picture after picture I snapped of my stomach and sent to him. Ever since my marriage had fallen apart, I had noticed tiny white spots that appeared there one day and were never medically explained (no, they were not tinea versicolor; believe me, I checked that out), and those, along with my insane period (marked by either constant spotting or long bouts of absence), consumed my every thought.
I was like the anti-sexter with Dr. Tom.
“What about this lesion? Hot or not?” I texted him.
My insurance was incredible, so I talked my way into test after test: a $1,000 allergy battery, an endometrial biopsy that almost made me pass out, and a sonohysterography that was so excruciatingly painful it inspired me to call my mom sobbing, thanking her for suffering through the hell of childbirth.
In the midst of my hysteria, Dr. Tom never made me feel stupid or annoying (which I most definitely was), and in one hilarious exchange, he assured me that I had passed one of the more important informal tests of all. The fuckability one. The laughter he provided in saying that gave me honestly the biggest relief of all.
Now, standing face-to-face with Dr. Tom once again, I am bombastic as I assure him that my stick-thin body is totally healthy as I do shot after shot of Maker’s.
“Well, thanks for saying I look great,” I say. “But don’t worry. I’m fine.”
Dr. Tom is handsome, but we have the chemistry of brother and sister. I love him in a way that you love the guardian angel who slips into your life at a time when you need one most.
I sit down at the bar to meet his friends.
One of them, Adam Strauss, has recently started doing stand-up comedy, so we agree to watch him do his set. He’s fairly new to performing, and as we sit at the table, it is clear he is warming up on us.
“So how soon did Tom drop the D-bomb on you after you two met?” Adam asks. “First ten minutes?”
I laugh. Not only does Tom have the D-bomb, for doctor; he also has the H-bomb, for Harvard.
“Yeah, that sounds about right,” I say. “Unfortunately, he had a penchant for jam bands.”
“You’re killing me,” Dr. Tom says.
Because I am eating very little during the day now, the shots I am downing go straight to my head, which always makes me want to drink even more. By the time Adam goes onstage, I feel nothing but pure liquid confidence.
“I wasn’t going to do stand-up in New York, because I just wanted to concentrate on the Post,” I whisper to Dr. Tom. “But fuck it, I think I’m going to do it tonight.”
Placing my name in line to do a set, I try to sober up a little bit with a water.
I have been performing at open mics in Chicago for the past year since starting my blog, and I think about all my past shows. The very first mic I did in Chicago was run by a then unknown T. J. Miller, who introduced me and, after I did my set, told the audience and me, “My only
