Skate Trip

by Ian Browning.

I went on a skate trip last summer. A week or so later, I was in the passenger seat of the car with my family. My son Louis, who is five, piped up out of the blue from the back. “Dad, maybe we could go on a skate trip too.” After resolidifying my melted heart, I told him we could probably figure that out. 

A few months later we camped in upstate New York, where I taught him how to pee off a cliff. In the morning we drove over to New Haven, Connecticut. I landed on going there because New Haven has it all: an outdoor skate park, an municipal indoor skate park on the bottom floor of a brutalist parking garage, and some good food. 

When he was one, we brought Louis to an allergist and found out he was allergic to a lot: peanuts, butternut squash, eggs, and dairy. What can you do? He’s five now and when we have pizza I peel the cheese off for him. New Haven’s got a unique style called—I swear I'm not making this up—apizza, that skips the mozzarella on top. Pronounced “a-peetz.” There’s a little parm, but not enough to bother him. There’s also a place called Louis’ Lunch, who claims to have invented hamburgers at the turn of the 20th century. The interior hasn’t been updated much since.

We hit the outdoor skate park first. He rolled around on his scooter while I got used to skating in camping shoes instead of the skate shoes I’d forgotten. He rolled his Hot Wheels cars in on most of the ramps, I caught some grinds, and then we got burgers. They’re served on white toast with bags of potato chips instead of fries. Cans of lemon Polar seltzer. After Louis’ lunch at Louis’ Lunch we hit the Natural History Museum at Yale to look at some dinosaur bones.

After the museum, I talked him into checking out a great hockey barn designed by Eero Saarinen with a natural transition built into a pillar up the street. He watched while I got a few wallrides in. Our neighbor in Brooklyn, an Olympian with a MFA in architecture we see occasionally playing basketball at our neighborhood park, grew up nearby and co-owns a skate shop in town. We stopped by on the way to the parking garage skate park, were sharing cheeseless apizza inside the car a few hours later, and were on 495 headed back to New York by late afternoon.

The next day I hung with Louis and my daughter Jane. I worked in bars and restaurants for a decade, several years of which I had kids, so getting to have two weekend days off—one for an adventure and one to chill—still feels like a treat. I was always forced to work at least one weekend night. We ate leftover apizza as an early dinner, and my wife Kara came home and helped get them to bed. She’d gone to Philly with Jane while we were in Connecticut, and now the adults were lightly stoned and talking about our respective trips.

Parents are tired people. Even before becoming one, I once fell asleep in a booth at a punk show (also in a pizza shop) so it was maybe a little strange but not totally when I started to feel a little fuzzy. Hitting the couch for the first time at the end of the day will do that sometimes. My eyes got heavy.

When I opened them, Kara said, “That was the scariest thing I've ever experienced.” I was out of it; groggy as hell, and feeling like my body was a snow globe filled with either black liquid and white glitter, or vice versa, that had just been shaken up. I tried to ask her what she meant. It was like the cord that connected my brain to my mouth had been ripped out by one of my kids then jammed back together with the plugs in the wrong holes. Even if I could conjure up the words I wanted to say, which I couldn’t, the words that came out of my mouth skipped like a record player that kept getting hit.

She told me that my eyes had rolled back in my head, that it sounded like I was unsuccessfully trying to get air before I stopped breathing, and my skin turned white. She thought it was due to hypoglycemia, which is something Type 1 diabetics like myself are always worried about on some level, and probably what I'd have guessed if I was conscious. She was looking for my emergency glucose nasal inhaler in the kitchen cabinets with her back to me when she heard my head hit the back of my couch hard enough that she turned around to see if I was still alive. I came to five or six minutes after nodding out, covered in sweat, and we tried to talk while I stuttered for a moment before running to the bathroom and throwing up four times. It was red from apizza sauce.

Kara suggested that I sit down in a cool shower to try and help my body level out while she tried to figure out what to do. After helping me in, she brought a metal bowl in case I had to puke again. I asked her to bring over my phone, and when I had it, threw some Ethel Cain on and put the phone in the bowl to turn it into a makeshift speaker—a classic and hallowed line cook move. As I sat on the floor of the shower, the sound of the falling water mixed with the tinny-sounding ethereal music. It turned into a sonic blanket that I couldn’t really process because my body and mind were exhausted, as if they’d both sprinted for miles. My brain was essentially thoughtless; following instincts with no analysis.

It was close to midnight by the time Kara figured out that I had probably had a seizure and that the internet said it was fine for me to go to sleep. We both agreed it would be easier than waking the kids up and bringing them to one of our parent friends’ houses in the middle of the night so that I could go to the hospital. I was zorched anyway.

The next morning I was speaking a little more clearly. We got the kids to school, then Kara drove me to the same hospital I'd driven her to when she was in labor with each of them. On the way I told her I was just going to keep talking, even though we weren’t saying much, hoping to shake the stuttering off by talking through it. Classic skateboarder this isn’t a real injury, it’ll be fine in a day or two nonsense. 

Before Louis was born, I was pushing down a street, moving pretty fast, and for reasons I'll never be able to explain, I swerved onto the sidewalk at a curb cut, hit a crack between tiles, and broke my wrist. I went on a weeklong family vacation and then spent a month telling myself that the swelling was going down and that I’d be fine before going to see a doctor and getting scheduled to have surgery. After my dad retired, he went to a doctor’s appointment about snoring and found out for the first time that he’d had his nose broken 25 years earlier playing beer league hockey after I was in bed.

I tried to muscle through my aphasia by reciting the names of a bunch of hockey players during spaces in car conversation. Real good names that I’d marveled at on TV as a kid: Václav Varaďa, Steve Sheilds, Miroslav Šatan, Bob Boughner, Alexander Moginly, Derek Plante. It seemed like a good exercise in racking my brain while simultaneously retraining my phonatory system.

I walked into the emergency room while she was finding parking, expecting to wait forever to see a neurologist and then return home before the kids got out of school. Instead I was ushered in before she found a spot.

You know in the Young Jeezy song “Soul Survivor” where he says “Just ‘cuz we stack paper and we ball outrageous, them alphabet boys got us under surveillance”? So, instead of the FBI, DEA, and those types, I hit every alphabet test in the hospital: CT, MRI, EKG, the whole nine yards. After the better part of the day, it was clear that I wasn't going anywhere, so when Kara came back with a phone charger and an al pastor burrito I told her there was no point in staying, and to go home to the family to try to pretend everything was normal for them. I got sent up to the epilepsy floor after it was dark, and was hooked up to an EEG machine, which entails having electrodes stuck on your scalp, gauze wrapped around your head to keep it all in place, and a braid of cables that come from the top of your head to a monitor. I don’t think it was possible to take a shower all hooked up.

I watched a couple of new skate videos that had come out and a hockey game. Then I stared out of the window. The view from the maternity ward looks out on New York Harbor and Statue of Liberty. From the epilepsy floor, you can see a dingy industrial block of 1st Avenue with obsolete train tracks in the middle of the road, and warehouses. I drifted in and out of sleep. 

Time moved quickly and slowly and not at all. 

I had the EEG taken off two days after getting admitted, was handed some powerful anticonvulsants and a follow up appointment. Somebody brought me to the discharge station in the lobby in a wheelchair. The woman working there verified that my wife was coming to pick me up, and gave me a $10 voucher for the cafe. 

I feel like I generally do okay in stressful situations, because my squirrel brain locks in and singularly focuses on getting through them. But it’s hard not to get depressed and lose your appetite when someone comes and wakes you up to take your vitals every four hours regardless of what time it is. I had basically eaten the burrito on the day I was admitted, followed by two bowls of oatmeal as an inpatient.

Having ditched the wheelchair, I stood in line at the cafe, blearily staring at a huge printed menu on the wall. I had considered coming here between Kara’s water breaking and Jane being born, but it just looked like a hospital commissary and I’m never hungry when I'm in stressful situation mode anyway.

The bacon, egg, and cheese is a classic, and seemingly the go-to for the type of New Yorker that likes to brag about that sort of thing. Could have probably worked here. It’s a standard by most measures, but in my Caribbean and Hasidic neighborhood, most of the delis don’t serve pork. A pastrami, egg, and swiss checks some of the same boxes, especially if they’ve got peppers and onions to throw on the griddle with it. American cheese should be outlawed. If there isn’t pepperjack, cheddar on eggs will do just fine. The good delis have breakfast options beyond all of that: waffles to sub out for bread, or a little cauldron of oatmeal ready to be ladled into a coffee cup for those in a hurry.

Few choose their deli on sandwiches, though; we choose where we live or where we work or which train to catch, and simply make do with what the closest place with a griddle can string together. You can order just extra-crispy bacon on a roll, a chopped cheese with tuna salad instead of beef, or a lettuce, egg and cheese on a hero, but you can’t get a sandwich on a croissant unless they’ve got those little pre-packaged ones next to the Entenmann's powdered sugar doughnuts. If they’ve only got plain seltzer, you’re drinking plain seltzer.

Luckily, the lowest common denominator of eggs, cheese, rolls, and hot sauce is pretty  consistently available. Tabasco, a de facto option that’s both cheap and plentiful from wholesale food distributors, is thin and spicy like a chili-infused vinegar and leaves much to be desired. But if it’s all they have, you deal with it. 

My parents met working the late night shift at a diner. My dad was a line cook and my mom was a waitress. The diner switched over from Tabasco to the much more respectable Frank’s Red Hot (a little less thin, peppery, with a good vinegar bite on the end) before they moved on to spend their lives together. 

My $10 voucher covered a large coffee and an egg sandwich with two toppings at the cafe in the lobby. After weighing the options, I landed on an egg, cheddar, and hashbrown on a roll. Ideally I'd have thrown a sausage patty on there too, but my wallet was in my bag. We make do within the confines of our situations. Carbs on carbs bring something special to the table: a reuben with french fries inside, a taco with potatoes and chorizo, gnocchi with baby potatoes and pesto.

After paying with the voucher, I walked past the register and saw a long, undulating, flecked granite-looking countertop with built-in stools, a row of tables and a row of booths. It looked like a diner. I asked the cashier if I could grab a stool while I waited, and as I looked ahead, dudes across the counter made food on a griddle in an open kitchen. It was a fucking diner. 

I took the lid off my coffee to help cool it down and opened the sandwich in front of me. It came in the standard to-go double packaging: wax paper, sliced in half, and then wrapped again in foil, with a single paper napkin underneath.

I saw someone in scrubs with a bottle of Cholula (around the same heat level as Frank’s but a bit more salinity and a bigger body, like it only got strained once). There was a bottle in a condiment caddy across one of the waves of the counter too. I gave the roll four or five dashes and it was the best breakfast sandwich I've ever eaten in my life. The coffee had cooled down a bit and I was taking sips when Kara called and told me she was outside. I checked out and stepped into the morning sun for the first time in months. Maybe a year.

The car ride home was a lot less remarkable than the way there. Things were more-or-less how I’d left them at home too: a desk with more things than places to put them all, toys on the ground, and my cast iron skillet on the stove. My equilibrium was off balance, but not enough that it had any effect on anything other than my psyche. Just a background lurker reminding me when I moved that things were a little different than they had been before. Everything was the same except for me, and after a shower and some fresh clothes there was no visible evidence of anything that’d happened.

We’d gotten back early in the afternoon and had to turn around pretty quickly to get the kids from school. When they got out they were totally unfazed that I'd been gone for 72 hours, and we went home. I sat back down on the couch where I’d later find out that I had concussed myself during the seizure, and Louis said, “Dad, do you want to play cars?”