Screen Time, Take 10: The Doctor Is In
My mother was the first famous person I ever met.
As a doctor with her own practice on the West Side of Cleveland, she couldn’t so much as go out for ice cream a half mile from the house without someone coming up to give her an update on their shallow breathing spells, the new medication they were on for chest pain, or what they might be able to do for a spastic colon. If there were ten people in line at East Coast Custard, a slab of gray concrete with two sliding glass windows on the front, three of them formed a new line to talk to my mom.
I usually rode to East Coast Custard with my brother on our bikes and hauled my cookies n’ cream back home, the cold condensation hurting my left hand as I pressed the plastic cup against one side of the handlebars while using my dominant hand on the other side to steer. I looked over to see my brother Sean, skinny, backward baseball cap, peddling his neon green Schwinn while barely looking up, both hands occupied by the ice cream and spoon floating far behind his untouched handlebars. He looked like he was sitting on the couch at home as he raced effortlessly down the street while eating. He was often already pulling a basketball out of the garage by the time I arrived home. I was left to sit on the porch alone eating a half-melted mess that was now closer to a milkshake. I would beg my brother to go with me to the ice cream spot because if I had to go with my mom, a quick trip would turn into an hour of talking to people who wanted advice, to express gratitude, or (and this was the most common) to have a quick therapy session about their deepest fears and mortality. When they were through, they’d turn to me to tell me how lucky I was to have a mom like her. Eventually, East Coast Custard added a drive-thru so we could get our food quietly without my mom’s fans interrupting.
In 2009, I was sitting with a comic who everyone in the New York comedy scene knew was destined for Marvel movie fame. We were discussing video games and how the crowd looked from our semi-private booth at the back of The Slipper Room when I heard the familiar tone of a stranger interrupting us: “I swear I’m not a stalker” a woman said (an insane way to start a conversation), “…but I love you.” (weirdly, something a stalker might say!). He graciously accepted the compliment while I stewed about how I was interrupted right as I was about to inform my friend of my struggles with Demon’s Souls, a game he’d recommended that had stolen the last few weeks of my life.
In 2018, I was eating Dippin’ Dots and taking turns playing Skee-Ball at Six Flags with a famous battle rapper. Like me, he was also too scared to get on the giant rollercoaster that our partners had decided to brave together, so we hung out in the arcade. Yes, we were regressing. We were two sugar-high 30-somethings screaming at each other about proper Skee-Ball throwing form. We were also, however, in the middle of a serious talk about which of our friends were currently in open marriages and if any relationship amounted to a hill of beans in this crazy world. In the middle of this conversation, I heard someone say, “Excuse me, I don’t mean to bother you, but you’re a rapper, right?” We turned to see a man holding cotton candy in one hand, and his daughter’s hand in the other. His wife stood behind him and rolled her eyes. She realized that part of a family outing was about to be ruined. The guy talked to my friend for the better part of a half hour before letting us get back to screaming about what our tickets could buy and discussing when it was necessary to try couples therapy.
The courtesy of these preambles was never extended to my mom when I was a kid. There was no “sorry to interrupt. I swear I’m not following you! I have a quick question.” All my family ever heard was “Oh, Doctor Wilbur!” and she was theirs for the next few minutes.
I have plenty of memories of my mother at soccer games undistracted as she cheered my brother on, and plenty more of her helping me with my own mental and physical health complaints. These memories of impromptu meetings with her patients don’t bother me now, and growing up, my annoyance was nothing more than the average kid gripe about when moms see each other in the mall and you have to brace yourself for five minutes of boredom while they chat. The problem was the frequency. Everyone needed my mom’s attention all the time. To be fair, the conversations were nominally about life and death, but most could probably wait until the next appointment at her office without any serious consequences. I wanted to go shopping for school supplies without my mother being stopped by anyone. I wanted to have dinner at a restaurant without hearing “Oh, Doctor Wilbur!” before the bread could hit the table. I wanted to have a movie night when my mom was on call without her suddenly leaving the room for a twenty-minute conversation about someone’s aging parent having heart palpitations.
A child vying for his busy mother’s attention throughout childhood is common enough, but this continued into my adulthood. Namely, I was about to be put under for surgery at 20, and an overweight anesthesiologist appeared in the doorway to give my me and my mom the rundown of the day. He spilled cold coffee on my hospital bedsheets while gesticulating about how easy the procedure would be. Mid-sentence he looked over to the woman sitting at my bedside and realized who she was. “Oh, Doctor Wilbur!” He said, “Do you know a good sleep specialist?”
“Jesus.” I said when he left, “Am I going to wake up from this?”
This week, I read most of Charles Duhigg’s Supercommunicators on my phone. Duhigg wrote the (for many) life-changing pop science book The Power of Habit about how positive and negative lifestyles become routine. In his newest book, he focuses on a subject that could be equally life-changing: how effective conversationalists navigate interactions with other people. For the most part, when people speak to one another successfully, they’re constantly negotiating what the conversation is about. Meetings with your colleagues or spouse are often aimed at practical matters, but you then find yourself venting and asking for support from one another rather than delegating responsibilities. You realize mid-conversation what you needed to do was air a few grievances, not discuss the state of the kitchen at the office or in your home. Miscommunication, as I already knew before reading the book, happens when one person wants to vent (my wife) and the other person offers practical solutions (me).
Some of the book is explicitly about how doctors talk to their patients, and how people want their fears allayed more often than they want to be told the list of side-effects their current medications might cause like they’re listening to the end of a drug ad on TV. When people approached my mother in public, ostensibly to get advice on their health or the health of an ailing parent, they wanted her to fulfill the role of "good listener” not “medical doctor.” They wanted her attention. My mom listened and nodded and laughed with her patients. She knew their problems and personal lives from memory and didn’t need a chart in front of her to remember who was suffering from what specific crisis. She was a priest and they left these conversations feeling as if their sins had been forgiven.
I assume previous generations were not as into therapy as Millennials and Gen Z are now. This assumption is anecdotal. I’m basing it strictly on stories my mother told me of patients coming into her office to talk instead of getting physical treatment. One old lady wanted to tell her how much Barack Obama scared her, how she was worried she’d be sent to the “back of the bus.” Fears, real and imagined, were expressed to a person with rudimentary training in mental health counseling. I know my mom is an effective communicator and served as a part-time therapist because a guy often knocks on the door of my parents’ home, my mom over a decade into retirement, to thank her for how she helped him. He’s a large Italian man who tells me every time he sees me that he “used to be a wise guy” who did a lot of “stuff in the past” for some neighborhood guys that he regrets. Why watch The Sopranos when I could hear from a real guy who relied on my mother for therapy? (Sidenote: he volunteered this information, not my mom. The HIPAA Privacy Rule was not violated in the writing of this essay.)
I was sick for the twelfth day of a single school year. If I hit fourteen days, the school would make me repeat the 4th grade. I came downstairs, thinking I’d see my mother at her chart-covered desk in the living room, dictating notes about arrhythmia and carcinoma in a rapid cadence. Dictation and paperwork is what my mom did on her Wednesdays “off.” She caught up on work when she didn’t have to physically be in her office or do rounds in the hospital. Still, on days like today, she took time out for me.
It was at that desk I remember she paused what she was doing to explain to me what “breaking the 4th wall” meant after I interrupted her to ask questions about Daniel Pinkwater’s odd children’s book Fat Men From Outer Space. Whatever heart condition she was helping someone cope with could take a backseat to her son’s sick day reading struggles.
But when I walked downstairs on Sick Day #12, I found her at the kitchen sink, sobbing. I knew it was about me. “If you don’t get better,” she said through intermittent sniffles. “You’ll never be able to do anything. You won’t be able to play sports or go to school or see your friends.” I decided then to not take advantage of my stomach aches anymore. In truth, only six of the twelve days were debilitating. I threw up, my abdomen cramped, and I couldn’t pay attention in class if I made it to school. The other six days, I just wanted to stay home and watch The Price Is Right. You would think a professional could spot the difference between a real and fake illness, but she may have been overly cautious ever since she sent my older brother to school with a slight ache in his side that turned out to be a burst appendix.
It wasn’t until a recent conversation that I realized my mom’s concern wasn’t strictly about me. Is it ever? She was a practicing doctor with seemingly unlimited access to other specialists. She had years of training and had rarely misdiagnosed a patient. Why, then, could she not solve the riddle of her son’s stomach troubles? Why was he throwing up every other day in Kindergarten? Allergies? Milk? Stress? Was it the antibiotics he needed for his twice-a-year strep throat infection, a sickness that spread through the family so often she once, in desperation, cultured the family dog to see if she was the carrier?
None of the above. An endoscopy showed that I had the beginnings of an ulcer, probably caused by bacteria in my duodenum (the first part of the small intestine for those of you who do not have doctors for moms). We’d found the physical culprit. Liquid Pepcid and not eating Pop-Tarts after every meal helped, but my mother crying at the sink inspired me more.
Attempting to play football after showing no previous interest in the sport was a little like Teddy Roosevelt moving to the Badlands. He was a legislator and author, not a cowboy. I was a theater kid and budding couch potato, not an athlete. When another player’s helmet hit my foot, instead of swearing like the other kids I announced to my coach, unwittingly mimicking my mother’s voice, that I had “bruised one of my metatarsals” and needed a moment to shake it off. After the coaches screamed at me a few dozen times that linemen weren’t allowed to run downfield on passing plays or that throwing up during wind sprints was my fault for being out of shape, I got the hang of the sport. I was getting good at something other than video games and all it took was letting a grown man flick lit cigarette butts at my face whenever I did something wrong or half-assed a run.
When I broke my wrist in 6th grade (avoiding any damage to my metacarpals) the first words I heard were from my coach telling me to take a lap for falling on my knees during the drill. I tried to explain that my wrist was broken and he screamed again to “get runnin’!” I went to the X-ray department of the hospital with my mom that night. My attempts to overcome bellyaching had been literally crushed (my friend Chris’s helmet cracked my pisiform) but they couldn’t see the break right away. Later, I woke up in the middle of the night from the pain insisting it could not be a mere sprain. The next day we got word it was broken.
Only a few weeks after the bright red cast was wrapped around my arm, I was back on the field, a giant foam pad held together with gauze covering the harder material underneath so I couldn’t hurt other players or myself. In under two years, I went from missing full days of school due to a little heartburn to playing contact sports with a broken wrist. The final practice featured a “last hit” where every 6th grader tackled a bag at the end of a tunnel of cheering younger players who applauded our leap into middle school. My coach, who had screamed at me every day for months, patted me on the shoulder lightly and whispered “the sky’s the limit for you.” I ran through the grass toward the soft foam pad.
In 8th grade, I had a music teacher named Carmen, an extremely talented jazz drummer who mostly relayed quotes he read in the Thich Nhat Hanh books instead of teaching me how to play drums myself (I enabled this behavior by rarely practicing). The muffled sound of the drums stuffed with pillows would cease after the first five minutes of our half-hour together, and he’d show me dog-eared pages of his books and teach me how to meditate.
Relaxing is part of playing music well, so in a sense, he was teaching me a worthwhile skill. When I was having my first bout with girl problems, however, I leaned on him for counseling. That kind of advice was not his forte. His curly white beard and hair were getting out of hand, he perpetually smelled like tobacco, and he gave straightforward tips like “don’t ever start smoking!” One day, he popped open a small case and said “I’m down to one a day,” and revealed the fattest self-rolled cigarette I’d ever seen. It looked like a joint. It probably was a joint. Though he wasn’t as strict as he should have been about getting me to play along with Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” he did offer career advice that I still follow, for better or worse. Over the sound of us both practicing paradiddles on small drum pads that served in place of snare drums, he said: “when the phone rings, you pick it up and say ‘yes.’” He held one stick up to his ear without breaking the ta-ta-ta-ta rhythm with his left hand. “As soon as you pick it up and say ‘no,’ the phone stops ringing.”
Do you see how this is all adding up? What the kid who overcompensated for staying home sick too often has become? I am another workaholic. Another FOMO-ridden Millennial who feels a pang every time he says no to a gig or party or even a small social outing. I work a day job and spend the entire time there thinking of the homework I have to do as a comedian and writer. Most of my waking hours, even when I’m watching a movie or reading, are spent thinking about how these tasks can serve me, either in the form of a joke or other piece of writing. I’m committed to my job as much as my mom was, except I’m in a specific business and general American economy where hard work doesn’t guarantee remunerative results. I’m in it for the work itself.
I find myself saying yes to way too much. One-nighters in the boonies that pay $200, memorizing scripts and recording auditions at home on a day’s notice, punching up other people’s work whenever they ask, commuting for hours to and from the city to work on jokes for free in front of strangers, building and maintaining a web presence, and answering emails or texts within 20 minutes of receiving them, almost always replying yes. The rare occasions I don’t “pick up the phone and say ‘yes’” is because the stand-up show requires me to be nude or have a dominatrix on stage doing dominatrix stuff (?) while I tell jokes. I wish I were making this up. Short of public sexual humiliation, I say yes every time. The alternative is saying ‘no’ and feeling shame, and Catholic guilt, like I’m letting everyone down. And why? Because I didn’t go to a comedy club for the 6,000th time to watch a show? When I wonder why I behave this way, I remember I’m not seeking the approval of a crowd or even my peers. I’m trying to impress the crying woman at the sink who worried I’d never say yes to anything.
I was in Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn circa 2012 to read from a humor book I had written. Other enviably funny writers were in the room, including David Javerbaum, God Himself on Twitter, and the head writer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
While being an extremely successful writer, David, as far as I can tell, isn’t a celebrity. At least in the sense that TMZ photographers aren’t lining up outside his home when he goes to check the mail. Still, I was starstruck. Here I was in the big city, inside a tastefully-lit indie bookstore, hiding near the register from the 10s of fans who’d shown up, when who should I find myself standing next to but the head writer of my favorite show (who was the head writer during the Bush years!). It took me three glasses of free wine to build up the courage to talk to him.
“Hey,” I said, “David. Hi. You came to my school. I went to Bard College.”
“Yes, I did.” he said.
“OK, yes.” I swallowed. “There was a woman who yelled that your show should do more to stop the war in Iraq. You remember that?”
“Uh, vaguely,” David said.
“So, yeah. That wasn’t me. Haha.” I took another sip of wine. He looked tired but he was being patient. “Anyway,” I said, “I was there and you made writing for TV seem like fun, and you made me want to write comedy for a living.”
“Aw, that’s great.” He smiled and nodded generously.
“I guess what I’m saying is…” I continued, buzzed enough that I dared to lean in for emphasis: “You owe me an apology.”
He laughed and said, “I owe your parents an apology.”
We shook hands, he read his piece, and walked out of the store. We never bumped into each other again.
Here’s the issue: my parents love that I’m a writer. They might not love that I’m a comedian. They would prefer I was a fiction writer who also teaches. Honestly, I’d make a better funny professor than a pedantic comedian. If adjunct college professor gigs paid more per semester than you can make in a single night performing stand-up for an hour at the same college, I might consider it.
I don’t owe my parents an apology nor do they owe me one. I’m glad they loved their jobs and wanted me to find fulfilling work too. The person they owe an apology to is any woman I’ve ever lived with. Not a day has gone by in the last 20-odd years where I don’t grumble about some missed opportunity and the limitations of only having so many hours in the day. Once again, I think Claire Dederer’s thesis is correct: all artists are monsters to their loved ones because art demands stealing so much time from them.
When I reflect on the insatiable, ambitious man I became, there is no one artist, book, school, or family member to blame. However, when I think of the choice to do something with myself, to try, to go out and be more than a person who watches the first ten seasons of The Simpsons on repeat (obviously, I still do this once a year), I think of my mother worrying she’ll never figure out what’s wrong with me, worrying I’ll be sad and immobile the rest of my life. She was not worrying that I wouldn’t “amount to anything” like I’m certain my grandfather did. She was not worried the way my 89-year-old American History teacher thought I was destined to be a “box mover” (a prediction that proved true when I decided to become a bookseller, a job that entails a lot of box moving). She was not disappointed with my choice to act, write, perform stand-up, and study Ancient Greek (though that one has the biggest question mark over it for all the Wilburs, including me). She simply wanted me to be well enough to truly live.
My father is sick now, and my mom is no longer a practicing physician. She claims she’s the "worst patient's family member ever" because, as a physician herself, she asks so many specific questions. I’m sad she didn’t get another easy decade. Unlike the confusing years spent cracking the code on my gut health, my father's diagnosis is not in question. Inoperable pancreatic cancer. With a few Hail Mary clinical trials already in the rearview, there’s not much she can do but drive him to appointments and do everything around the house that abdominal pain precludes him from doing himself. She finally finished raising a sick kid, got a few years to enjoy a healthy happy family, and now she’s taking care of a sick husband. It’s not fair.
She took on an entire suburb of sick people and now has to take care of someone closer. In all this time, I never stopped to wonder if my mom ever got enough time to herself. Maybe one day, as a gift to her, I’ll get sick and will call my own doctor first instead of calling to let her know about every rash and fever. Then again, we’d miss out on disturbingly funny exchanges like the time I sent a bunch of photos of mystery dots on my arm and all she texted back was “what body part am I looking at here?” I am almost 40. It might be time to give her a break from work.
I know she enjoyed helping others, and, if her frequent forwarded emails from the CDC and annotated copies of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report sent to me by mail are any indication, she genuinely enjoyed her work in medicine. I hope she realizes that when patients reached out they weren’t always looking for a practical cure for their ills. Instead, they wanted — the same way they wanted a brief moment in the summer sun outside an ice cream stand — to have a few minutes of her undivided attention.