I cant save you, p.1
I Can't Save You, page 1
Riverhead Books
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Copyright © 2023 by Anthony Chin-Quee
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Chin-Quee, Anthony, author.
Title: I can't save you / Anthony Chin-Quee.
Description: New York: Riverhead Books, 2023.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022039768 (print) | LCCN 2022039769 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593418888 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593418901 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Chin-Quee, Anthony. | African American otolaryngologists—Biography. | African American surgeons—Biography. | Racially mixed people—United States—Biography. | Otolaryngology, Operative—United States.
Classification: LCC RF38.C45 A3 2023 (print) | LCC RF38.C45 (ebook) | DDC 617.5/1092 [B]—dc23/eng/20230125
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022039768
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022039769
Cover design: Tyriq Moore
Book design by Amanda Dewey, adapted for ebook by Maggie Hunt
pid_prh_6.0_143008039_c0_r0
For Pippa:
I’m able to love you so easily and completely only because I learned to love myself before you arrived.
Thank you for choosing me.
Author’s Note
The idea of a memoir is fascinating to me. Its very fancy French etymology defines it as an account of an author’s own mémoires—their memories. But here’s the thing about memories: they are informed by one’s state of mind, both in the past when they were formed and in the present as they’re being told. With that said, all events depicted in this book are as true as my memory has allowed them to be.
The only intentionally falsified portions of this story are the names and identifying details of some individuals I’ve shared my life with. Their stories, experiences, and perspectives are not mine to tell, so I have done my best to respect their privacy by obscuring some personal details of the innocent and not-so-innocent.
All of this is to say thank you in advance. For being here. For reading and for listening to the truths that took me a lifetime to find. The opportunity to put this story into your hands has been an immeasurable gift to me.
Hold on to your butts. It’s a wild ride.
—Tony
Contents
Prologue
one.
Chin-Quee, M.D.
two.
A-Side—Success*
three.
B-Side—The Fall
four.
You
five.
Fear of Flying
six.
Rainbow Connection
seven.
Y’ain’t (k)no(w)
eight.
Fatherhood
nine.
Eulogy
Acknowledgments
_143008039_
Prologue
I know you hate me.
You only had to say it once, but I believed you.
Because you’d never hated anything before. And nothing since.
You turn yourself inside out to forgive and accept everything and everyone.
Except for me.
And I get it. I was never able to lead you to the perfection you thought would mend you.
But I kept pushing. I kept appealing, encouraging, pleading to the parts of you that could be amazing if only you’d let them try, fail, be forgiven, and try again.
But you hear failure louder than any voice.
So you locked me away in the space between dreaming and waking, where you could write me off as an echo of whatever story you’d told yourself overnight.
And that’s fine. I was built for patience—the trait that always drove you nuts about me, especially when I got preachy about it.
But something’s not right. Lately my attempts at patience only leave me squirming restlessly. My diminished voice—the one that fell into disrepair once you chose to become deaf to my calls—has been croaking desperately back to life. I’ve been propelled by an urgency, and I’ve only just understood its origin: fear.
Fear of time.
Suddenly I don’t think we have enough of it left.
So that’s why I’ve crawled my way up to the surface now. That’s why I’m screaming with every shade of voice you’ve left me.
You’re in danger. You’re teetering on the edge of something tragic.
Please let me in. Together we can save you.
* * *
—
You just need to wake the fuck up.
One
Chin-Quee, M.D.
So, I had the dream again.
The Vegas dream, where I wake up in a hotel room face-to-face with my father.
I still can’t tell how old he is. Or how he got there. His ever-present glasses are nowhere to be found. Neither are mine. Maybe that’s why his face is so hard to read. Not hard to see—hard to understand. He still looks way too much like me. Far more than in real life, but I guess my sleeping brain fucks with genetics way more than I do in the daylight.
And still, just like all of the other times this dream has found me, he doesn’t say a word. Nothing but silence from my old man as he studies me with eyes that are just a little too much like mine.
Then he smiles.
And I wake up screaming.
Heart pounding against my ribs, sweating bullets, arms and legs thrashing, the whole thing.
It definitely freaked out the chick who was sleeping next to me. I tried to apologize, but she was already fumbling in the dark for her clothes. She’d forgotten: she had some place to be at (checks analog watch in the dark) 3:15 a.m. On a Sunday. I can admit I was moderately bummed that she didn’t even ask if I was okay. But honestly, we’d only just met last night in a hookah bar. Hadn’t quite reached the I’ll-be-your-late-night-dream-trauma-therapist stage of the relationship. Lucky for her I didn’t add insult to injury by peeing the bed. That’s actually been happening a lot lately. And by “a lot” I mean more than never, which is way too often for a fucking grown man with a medical degree. So run, Carrie or Courtney or Carney or whatever your goddamn name was. Run for your life and don’t look back. You definitely dodged a bullet.
What I’m saying is, I think I might be fucked.
I think my brain is . . . short-circuiting? Inhospitable? Broken? Melting out through my ears? Goddamn it, none of those feel right. What I’m trying to say is I feel . . . asphyxiated, I think? Like there’s a vise around every muscle in my body and every corner of my mind and with every twitch or stretch or idea or hope the crank spins and the jaws squeeze tighter and nothing anywhere can breathe.
And that’s a run-on sentence. With a mediocre mix of metaphors that’ve been stretched within an inch of their lives. Great start.
I suppose what I should lead with is the infuriating truth: I’m not good with words. Actually, I am really good with some words. I can bullshit my way through just about any situation that I don’t deem personally consequential with the charisma to make anyone believe me. It’s just one of the gifts that make me so deceptively toxic. But I’m very, highly . . . ungood at the other words. The ones that matter. To me.
Selective mutism. And I don’t just throw the phrase around to flex SAT-level vocab retention—I’m pretty sure it’s been baked into my faulty brain wiring since I first blinked and breathed. There were countless times before I even had a tenth birthday when I found myself consumed by feelings that weren’t as simple as the ones I’d learned in school. You remember those books we used to read in class: point to the colorful cartoon faces whose entire existence demanded they live up to the name Happy! Sad! Angry! Scared! Never any faces for their more complicated descendants Guilty! Traumatized! Ashamed! Inadequate! Depressed! And even if they’d considered expanding the feelings family tree, I don’t think the illustrators would have had the guts to draw the deeper truth: all of those new emotions would most likely wear the same expression as the unassuming, flat-mouthed pastel disembodied head named Fine! Yeah, Everything’s Fine!
And so the result was a seven-year-old boy who appeared totally fine. Until he started going to sleepover parties at perfectly nice children’s houses only to knock on their parents’ bedroom doors at 11:00 p.m., tearfully pleading to go home. He’d sit in a choke hold of wordless responses to his father’s frenzied demands that he explain himself, and accept the blame for wasting gas and precious night hours that should belong to sleep. And then he’d be fine again for weeks. Maybe months. Until he fell uncharacteristically quiet for a few days, then plunged into a fevered, vomiting illness for a few more, only to miraculously recover when his report card arrived with nothing but “exceeds expectations” in all subjects. His psychologist mother was no fool, and she did her professiona
Where does a kid find the words to explain that the sleepover party debacle wasn’t just homesickness but also an all-consuming, unfounded dread that something terrible would happen to his family if he wasn’t home to know everyone was asleep and safe? Or that he’d been caught doodling in a notebook at school one day, sending him down a spiral of panic that he’d not only fail his classes but also be expelled from school and earn the rare honor of a belt-assisted ass whupping on the living room floor, and so the panic shut his body down, rendering it defenseless and susceptible to whatever opportunistic infections waited to fuck up insolent children?
Way, way too many words.
And even if the words had existed for me, I still wouldn’t have said them aloud. Because I’d somehow always had it in my head that my fears were faults, and faults were failures. And if I was a failure, who would want me?
That’s not normal, right? Like I said: faulty brain wiring.
My sputtering mind came equipped with a pressure release valve—one with a mercifully low word-count requirement. I’ve always found it easy to make things. Imagine things. Mold all of the abstract, slippery things into shapes and sounds and movements and characters that would say so much more than I could say. Art, I believe it’s called.
Back when I was first learning to swallow the pain of asking for things my family couldn’t afford, I started drawing my own comics. I had several marbled composition notebooks full of the serialized adventures of a too-cool-for-school, wrap-around-sunglasses-toting, Rollerblading kid from Brooklyn who solved low-stakes neighborhood crimes with the assistance of the unique powers of his Rollerblades. He’d then hold celebratory press conferences where he thanked his Rollerblades, without which justice would not and could not have been done. Any guesses as to what I was too scared to put on my Christmas list that year?
And oh, man, music—a language that always made sense to me. I grew up in the days before music streaming. Pre–MP3 player. Actually, pre-internet. I’m talking about the time when FM radio ruled pop culture, and your parents had record players with big-ass floor speakers, and when personal cassette tape players were the height of luxury until your nonrechargeable batteries bit the dust after two hours. Unlike today, music was not available everywhere all the time back then. So I carried it with me in my bones. Without saying a word, I’d converse with melodies all day, bounce along to syncopated, jazzy drumbeats with each footstep, and hold out hope that I’d stumble across an F major 9 or B-flat major 7 chord hidden in a radio pop song. At the time, I didn’t know how or why the notes fit together so beautifully. All I knew was that they’d reliably send literal waves of euphoria through my body. Probably not on the spectrum of normal responses to hearing DMX or the Backstreet Boys, but at least my weirdo brain synapses were good for something.
I went on to play a few instruments, and I think that any time I touched my saxophone or piano keys or drumsticks I did so in search of those fleeting moments of joyful clarity—when, in the space of a single breath, a collection of dancing notes would soothe the anxiety crackling in my muscles and tickle my messy subconscious feelings until their heads popped out, just long enough for a momentary bashful wink, gone before I could see their faces.
Oh, and movies! And not just watching them but the act of sitting in a dark theater with sticky floors and popcorn-infused, musty anticipation in the air. I’m pretty sure I learned my love of the multiplex from my father. He was severely handicapped in communication too, so it always felt like he took me to the movies instead of talking. And he took me to the movies a lot. Maybe he was holding out hope that, in those two hours in the darkness, some made-up words coming out of a made-up person’s mouth would resonate with the very not-made-up kid bouncing excitedly next to him. Maybe that would replace all of the conversations we’d never have.
Or maybe I’m just projecting and thinking wishfully. Maybe it was just lazy parenting.
Regardless, I fuck with movies hard. For me, the secret sauce was always that they existed in magical worlds where communication came so easily to everyone. No one was ever truly lost for words. One line always led to the next. Jokes were snappy and perfectly timed, motivations always clear by the end. And stories never lingered. Every action had its purpose, and these tales of heightened reality moved along faster than the speed of normal-ass Brooklyn life.
So of course, at some point I figured I’d moviefy my own life. Just to make it easier for me, you know? Age nine was the perfect time. Especially when Natalie Augustin emerged as the harbinger of my understanding that girls didn’t have cooties. She was incredible: a preternaturally sophisticated fifth grader with cow-spotted wing-tipped glasses, a mouth full of rubber-banded braces, and the latest adventures of the Boxcar Children in her backpack at all times. Plus, she always had a full rainbow’s worth of colored gel pens ready to share, which I found bafflingly hot. When she auditioned for the school talent show by singing a highly average rendition of Tevin Campbell’s “Can We Talk,” I was officially hooked. Yes, Natalie. Yes, we could talk. And I’d blow her away with the uncanny wit and worldly intelligence she so clearly expected.
We were in the dog days of the fifth grade, just a couple of short spring weeks before graduation, after which we’d all be headed to junior high schools across New York City. One Friday, I sat lulled into a daze by the ne’er deodorized summertime stench of my preteen classmates, staring open-mouthed across the classroom at the back of Natalie’s head, hoping she’d turn and look at me, when I came to a realization: my time had come. I was going to go home that night, pick up the phone, and call the girl of my dreams to tell her how awesome I thought she was. What was the worst that could happen? She’d laugh at my heartfelt honesty, hang up, tell her friends about it, they’d laugh, say I was corny/lame/pathetic, and I’d endure their giggly consternation for the final seven days of school? Fuck it. I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was a young man. I could take it. I officially had nothing to lose.
But first I needed to prepare. In depth. I was so scared that I’d say the wrong thing / run out of things to say / stumble and sputter my way through my words that I figured I’d script the entire call ahead of time. Armed with index cards and colored pencils, I mapped out every conversational possibility. A choose-your-own-adventure flowchart for the ages. It looked something like this:
For a plain-text version of this flowchart, go to this page.
I’m totally not a control freak. I just have the non-stage equivalent of stage fright. Spontaneous high-stakes wording always gave me pit sweats and bubble guts, so I tried to mitigate them with intense scripted preparation. It wasn’t that I was trying to control the situation and everyone in it. It was more that I wanted to steer conversations in a direction I could anticipate so that I didn’t poop my pants.
Maybe that’s just two ways of saying the same thing.
I’ve always been good at rationalizing my red flags.
I hyped myself up with some pantomimed jump shots and crossover dribbles in my bedroom, brushed my teeth (because you can never be too careful where breath is concerned), picked up the phone, and dialed Natalie’s number on that Friday night. Her mom answered and told me that Natalie wasn’t even home. Why, Natalie? Why? I mean, fucking come on! How was that the one possibility I hadn’t planned for? Stupid. Stupid and unprepared. I stuttered my name and call-back number and buried my head under mounds of pillows in defeat.
The next afternoon, Natalie called me back.
And I’d misplaced my index cards.
The conversation went just about as badly as you can imagine. Between unhinged riffing on Ninja Turtle lore, an ill-advised conversational detour into the war in the Persian Gulf (“I’d hate to get killed fighting in the desert. Getting shot and being thirsty sounds super hard”), and laughing so desperately hard at one of her jokes that I squirted some pre-poop into my shorts, I barely got off that call with a shred of dignity intact. Needless to say, Natalie and I never began our grand love story.
