Going against the migraine

Below is this week’s Trouble With Spikol column that ran in PW. The illustration is by Alex Fine. Someone came to the office yesterday to drop a copy of the column off with the letters “TMI” writ large on it. I suspect that once you get reading, you’ll see which sentence that refers to. And yeah, I should’ve taken it out. It’s just that my writing career has been so much about TMI that I don’t know when to hide things. Oh, well. You can’t please everyone.

Head Flames
Fire shooting from skull. Game over.
BY LIZ SPIKOL

Last weekend I went to Long Beach Island. It wasn’t my first time. When I was about 9 my parents rented an apartment in Loveladies. My 15-year-old sister had her boyfriend, a Southerner of some kind, drive up from whatever kudzu swampland he inhabited to join us.

Because I’d never heard an accent like his—thick as molasses, as they say—I was fascinated. He could’ve come from another planet. (Later, after I spent some time in the South, I realized he did come from another planet.)

He, in turn, was fascinated by my sister—in particular her blond hair and her tight pink-and-white tube top. They wouldn’t kiss in front of my parents, but they went for lots of “walks.” At one point I cracked the door open and spied them making out on the porch.

The Southern boyfriend, between awkward adolescent thrusts of his tongue, opened his eyes and saw me. Laughing, he said, “Whatchoo lookin’ at, snoopy?”

I briefly thought he was referring to the Peanuts character. A split second later I realized he’d called me a snoop, and I slammed the door shut. From that moment on I hated him.

That being my only association with Loveladies, I wanted to give it another try. I imagined LBI sort of like Cape Cod: a peninsula with charming towns, each with a distinct personality but all marked by rich natural beauty.

I don’t know about all that. What I do know is that the dark wood paneling in the rooms at the Long Beach Inn can be quite soothing.

Things started benignly. Saturday morning my boyfriend Vince and I took a drive through the different towns. I like to gauge how wealthy places are by the cars I see: When you go from American to German, you know things have changed.

One house had a sign that said “Stein Shrine.” “Oy vey,” I said to myself, but didn’t mention it to Vince. I didn’t want to seem like a self-hater.

We decided to walk out on the Barnegat Inlet jetty. I thought I’d skip over a couple rocks, and we’d be at the end. The jetty, it turns out, is roughly the size of Rhode Island. The rain came down in cold spatters, and it seemed like the space between each rock was a Grand Canyon-sized chasm.

Vince was hippity-hopping across the chasms like the tall person he is, while I had to stop and build momentum to get from one to the other. I told him it was because of my height, but then a 5-year-old zoomed past us.

“Screw you,” I said to the child under my breath. Then I took it back.

It must’ve been about halfway to Providence when I felt the familiar signs: a throbbing in the right side of my face, the nausea, the dizziness, the fatigue. Vince saw me wobble (more than I already was), and asked what was wrong.

“The time of the Evil One has approached,” I said in my best Lord of the Rings voice. “We must abort the cliffs and return to the Land of Beds and Silence. We will face this challenge later.”

Actually, I said, “I think I have a migraine.” But next time I’m going to put it more cinematically.

As weak as I felt, I was determined to finish our journey. We did reach the end of the jetty, but there was a horrible beeping noise there that felt like it was piercing my skin. I ran back, this time jumping the chasms like they were lines in a sidewalk.

“I’m going to beat you back there!” I yelled to Vince. Sometimes I think he wishes his girlfriend were less like a fifth-grader.

And this, sadly, is where my LBI experience essentially comes to an end. For the rest of the day I stayed in the wood-paneled solitude of our motel room, and did all that stuff that migraine sufferers do: pray, switch positions, read, not-read, washcloth on neck, pillow, not-pillow, water, iced tea, crackers and so on. I thought about how good it would feel to have someone shoot my head off.

I tried visualization, but I kept getting confused. Should the pain be red or white? And which color should the not-pain be? I tried all different hues, even a grassy field. I tried lying on the cool tiles of the bathroom floor. I got so sick I soiled my shorts and wept as I washed them in the tub.

Gruesome.

You might be wondering why I didn’t take any medicine. Ah, but there’s the rub. I had one pill left, and it was old and crusty. After frantic phone calls to my doctor’s office, I sat in the CVS, slumped on a chair, waiting for my prescription to be filled. John Legend’s “Ordinary People” came on the sound system, and Vince said, “This song sounds a lot like early Stevie Wonder.”

Through the pain, I mumbled, “John Legend’s from Philadelphia.”

Even in agony, I can’t resist an opportunity to promote my hometown.

In the end the medicine didn’t work. So I turned to the only remedy I had left: steak. After two different tries at two excruciatingly loud restaurants (does everyone in LBI have a screaming baby?), we found Fred’s Beach Haven Diner, and Fred’s T-bone steak. Within an hour of eating it, I felt well enough to watch Animal Planet. It seems like wildebeests really get the short end of the stick.

Vince fell asleep, but I was so happy to be pain-free, I kept poking him. “Don’t you want to talk? I feel better now!”

It was too late—both for Long Beach Island and my relationship.

liz | 10:54 AM | Uncategorized