I sped onto the infamous Mulholland Drive. Love the movie, hate the street. It’s basically a serpentine hiking trail that’s super congested because it’s on the “star tours” bus route. Mulholland Drive is also a mess because it’s eternally torn up and under construction, much like my personality, or on this particular day, the skin on my head.
I drove toward a construction site that had been pissing me off for weeks. Every day I had to wait for the construction worker to let me pass through the now-one-lane street. Every morning I pulled up, stopped, resented him, and forced a smile. Little did I know that the man who had been a daily annoyance for the past month was about to be my guardian angel in one of the most traumatic moments of my life.
I hadn’t cried or felt any physical pain yet, but once I looked over to the construction worker and we made eye contact, I exploded in sobs. Through tears and blood I uttered a phrase that my vocal cords usually boycott: “I need help.”
He didn’t miss a beat. He called an ambulance and started looking through my car for things that could work as tourniquets. Luckily, he had no problem finding something, given half my wardrobe lives in the backseat of my car.
When the paramedics arrived, they asked me to show them my ear, but I couldn’t. By this time I was violently shaking and my whole chest was contracting. I wasn’t even sure if the ear was still attached to my head and I didn’t want to find out. The three very handsome, buff paramedics finally convinced me to show it to them. Solely because they were cute and primordial biology is a filthy pervert, I finally acquiesced and pulled my hands away from my ear. Nothing. My hand was stuck. The blood had congealed so much that my hand was plastered to my head. The hot EMTs poured something over my hand to liquefy the blood. Once I was finally able to pry my hand away from it, they saw my “ear.”
Their eye line told me that my ear was still in the same general vicinity of my head, but their winces implied that the injury was bad. I remember one of them gasping, which I concluded couldn’t possibly be a good sign, given the horror paramedics are exposed to on a daily basis. Look, I believe men should be able to wince and not be shamed for it, but I have to admit that I’ve seen grown men wince only a couple other times in my life: when Anderson Silva’s leg snapped on live TV, when “two girls one cup” was making the rounds on YouTube, and when I showed a paramedic my cartilage frappuccino of an ear. Suddenly this day was in very weird company.
I heard the sirens of an ambulance. That noise usually makes me anxious, but when the ambulance is for you, a sense of relief fills your body. Once I was in the ambulance, that relief was quickly shattered. I was strapped to a wheelchair, but was far from secure. Every time we stopped or turned, I would jolt over the chair like a crash test dummy, bracing while trying to hold my ear on. I was less than thrilled to find out that while being rushed to the ER I had to engage my core, and as far as I’m concerned, the only thing worse than missing an ear is having sore abs.
I’m not sure if paramedics are trained to make boring small talk to make sure you’re coherent, but the guy in the ambulance with me was what I can only describe as aggressively casual.
“Cold out today, huh?” was his opener.
It was as if we had been married for forty years and had officially run out of things to talk about. Mind you, I was in a fetal position on a wheelchair, releasing guttural screams and erratic prayers to a couple of different gods. The most annoying part was that it wasn’t even cold out. We live in L.A.; it’s actually never been cold before. His small talk wasn’t even based on accurate information. My guess was he was nervous about how much I was crying and his weird conversation was intended to distract me. From what I gather, it’s pretty overwhelming for men to see a woman suffering, even when they cause it, and this may actually have been the least bizarre way I’ve ever seen a man cope with watching me cry. In the past, when men have seen me have a meltdown, they’ve done everything from abruptly leaving the room to start laughing to offering me money to stop. Twice I’ve had guys get an erection when they saw me cry. I know, primordial human nature is a nightmare.
I mustered all the strength I had to formulate a sentence, something in the vein of asking the aggressively casual paramedic if I could borrow his phone. With no irony or apology, he handed me an old LG flip phone. Look, I’m not a snob about technology. I’m basically a Luddite: I’ve never waited in line for a new iPhone, until very recently I thought .com meant .computer, and my current e-mail has a number in it. I know. Ghastly stuff. Oh, and .com stands for .commerce if you’re like me and didn’t know.
I never got the flip phone to work, but trying to remember phone numbers and press the impossibly tiny keys at least kept me distracted during the seemingly five-year ride to the ER. Maybe that’s why they give patients a Stone Age phone, so it keeps them busy, serving as more of a Rubik’s Cube than an actual communication device. The truth is, there really was nobody I could call. If I’d had a functioning smartphone, I would have bombarded a bunch of people who couldn’t do much except show up and wait for other people to help me. Stressing my friends out would just stress me out more. The only people who could actually help me in this moment were complete strangers. Maybe this was a profound Buddhist lesson in nirvana or maybe it was a sign from the universe to befriend some surgeons.
We’ve all had horrible ER experiences, so I won’t pretend like I’m the first person on the planet to be rolled into a corner in the waiting room facing the wall. The nurse had nice enough intentions and was trying to keep me hidden, but I wasn’t really worried about TMZ showing up at the ER. Given how white I was from shock and how much blood I had on my face, I would have loved to have seen the headline the next day: “Marilyn Manson Rushed to ER Holding a Phone from 2006.”
I leaned my forehead against the cold, Pepto-Bismol-colored wall and rocked back and forth, trying to keep myself amused by uttering “Nobody puts Baby in a corner” after Baby was aggressively put in a corner. I realized I was literally banging my head against a wall. This is something I do in a metaphorical sense very regularly, but doing it literally was a new development.
I turned the wheelchair around and a young, handsome Middle Eastern guy was sitting to my right. He looked at me intently. “What do you need?” he asked in a thick accent. I didn’t know the answer, and even if I did, I don’t think he could have given it to me, so I settled for “Can I borrow your phone?”