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Overview
On paper, Frazer is the world's healthiest guy. He eats right, exercises regularly, gets plenty of sleep, has never smoked and has missed only one day of flossing in the last five years. But inside he's a swirling vortex of angst, capable of contracting a new malady every month. Once Frazer realized that all his ills were tied to stress, he went on a quixotic quest for calm, venturing into everything from Tai Chi, serotonin blockers and Kabbalah to an unfortunate incident involving pineapple-chicken curry at a Craniosacral therapy session. Never has the road to wellville taken so many unforeseen turns.
Achingly funny, uncomfortably true and always entertaining, Hyperchondriac is just the medicine for anyone who wants to take it down a notch.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781416538912 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 03/06/2007 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 322 |
| File size: | 466 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Hyper-chondriac
One Man's Quest to Hurry Up and Calm DownBy Brian Frazer
Atria
Copyright © 2007 Brian FrazerAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780743293396
1
YELLING
"Jesus Christ!"
"Jesus Christ yourself!!!!"
My parents yelled "Jesus Christ" at each other a minimum of fifteen times a day despite the fact that we were Jews.
It hadn't always been like this. Before my mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis my parents didn't fight much. But when I turned ten the house became a war zone. The screaming coupled with the constant barrage of doors slamming might as well have been gunshots.
"Sam! This isn't the jacket I wanted! I asked you to get me the red one! You do NOT listen!"
The disease had transformed my mother ostensibly overnight from an independent, warm, thoughtful first-grade teacher to an angry, frustrated woman who couldn't get her shoes on without assistance. Before MS invaded our household, I'm not sure there was a better mom on the planet. My mother, who looks like a Sheepshead Bay version of Audrey Hepburn, was beloved by her students and worshipped by our family. She wrote and directed new plays combining pop culture and fairy tales for her first-graders every year. She would read to my younger sister and me each night in a smooth, melodic voice reminiscent of radio commercials one would hear in the 1950s. She'd take us to arts and crafts shops weekly so we could do little projects (such as making hippopotamuses out of mini pom-poms)and drive us to Marsh's or Macy's and let us pick out clothes for school that were far more expensive than what we could afford. But the MS took all of that away, and more.
Since she felt helpless and relied heavily on my father for simple tasks like getting out of bed and using the bathroom, her pride took a hit. Even as a child, I could sense the embarrassment she felt at losing her independence as I was gaining mine. To compensate, my mother managed to package the endearing troika of being very demanding, very impatient and very irritated. And not only did she yell a lot, but objects were flung around as if we lived in an arthritic Foley studio. She had just turned thirty-seven.
For some reason, I always seemed to be in the thick of things. My brother, Mark, had the room adjacent to my parents, but because he was seventeen he wasn't around much. He had just become an Eagle Scout and happily spent much of his time sleeping in the woods with his troop. My sisters shared a room downstairs, but the older of the two, Debbie, had just turned fifteen and discovered the glamour of dating boys with driver's licenses. She preferred to be driven around in a Trans Am by a guy with a mustache and Black Sabbath thumping from a half-dozen speakers than to be exposed to the unmelodic shrieking of angry Jews. Meanwhile, my younger sister, Stacey, six, could be found huddled in the corner of the top bunk bed rereading The Phantom Tollbooth with cotton balls stuffed into each ear.
My room was upstairs directly across the hall from the madness and because I didn't know anyone with a Trans Am yet, nor was I interested in learning how to tie fifteen different kinds of knots, I was always around. And, since frustration is easily transferable, I was especially susceptible. Every syllable of fury permeated my tiny skull and would be stored inside for later use.
As bad as I felt for my mom, I felt even worse for my dad. Although he always dropped whatever he was doing if my mother needed something, it never seemed to be fast enough -- and as in a video game, one little mistake would wipe out everything positive that had been accomplished. If he brought her home a pastrami sandwich, picked up all her prescriptions and did her laundry but mistakenly handed her a Diet Fresca instead of a Tab, my mother would unleash her wrath: an onslaught of constant reminders of how unlucky she was, how much pain she was in and how she couldn't wait to die. I sometimes wished I would go first.
Despite this harsh treatment, whenever my father was out running errands he'd rush back to be at my mother's side in case she needed anything or an emergency arose. Or maybe he was just scared of the repercussions of returning "late."
The owner of curly blond hair, a Fred MacMurray face and Popeye-sized forearms, my dad grew up in the Great Depression. His parents had emigrated from Poland in the early 1920s to escape the pogroms and had filled him with fear. He was never allowed to learn how to ride a bike or swim (both too dangerous) and even now he's scared to death to drive over bridges or at night, and forget about bridges at night. He's also afraid to shower or bathe and thus rarely does either. Whether this is symptomatic of his fear of water or of the prisoners' fate at Treblinka, or he just likes to be dirty, no one's quite sure. At the age of seventy-three, he still hasn't eaten a slice of pizza because my grandparents were convinced that any pizza parlor in Brooklyn would funnel the profits back to Mussolini in Italy who would then subsequently transfer the funds to the Nazis to be used against the Jews. Apparently this elaborate plan even included garlic knots. To this day, my father screams regularly in his sleep from nightmares of Nazis chasing him.
Perhaps because of all his fears, my dad immersed himself in the world of Golden Age comic books. When he was a kid he would run down to the corner store and buy every comic he could get his hands on: Superman, Batman, Action Comics, Plastic Man, The Star-Spangled Kid, The Flash, Captain Marvel, Captain America. If there was a guy with a cape on the cover, the comic would find a way into his bedroom. However, for some mysterious reason his collection peaked and then began to dwindle. No matter how many comics he bought, they continued disappearing faster than he could replenish them. Finally, he discovered the cause. Whenever my dad was out playing stickball, my grandmother would throw a few out. She had no idea he'd even notice; cleanliness was more important to her than the latest exploits of Clark Kent.
So whether to relive his childhood, feel protected or just ward off evil, my father was the only adult in town who still collected comic books and was obsessed with superheroes. He wore a Justice League of America jacket -- even when it was way too hot for a jacket of any kind; a baseball hat with the Mighty Thor proudly displaying a large hammer was a fixture atop his head; and he always wore a large pewter Superman ring on his right hand with a giant S on it, decades before Hollywood started sinking its teeth into the comic book genre.
"Sam! Get up here! You forgot your Superman ring!" my mother would shout. (In later years they rigged up an intercom system so my father would transform into Pavlov's dog whenever he heard a buzzing sound.)
"Just a second, Rhoda!"
Then he'd charge up the fifteen stairs and enter the bedroom, crawling on the ground in slow motion.
"Too weak...need...ring...have...lost...all...superpowers!"
"You're an idiot, Sam!"
My mother didn't laugh a lot, at least in her current condition. So being called an idiot was the equivalent of a round of applause at a comedy club.
She probably could've used a drink, but that wasn't an option in our house. My parents have had a total of four drinks over the last three decades (two Old Milwaukees, a White Russian and a frozen piña colada). And cursing was nearly as rare. We probably had the highest yelling/squeaky-clean language ratio of any household in America. Four-letter words were prohibited under any circumstances. Approximately once a year, somebody would go absolutely nuts and spell "shit" aloud. "Your father is such an S-H-I-T!" my mother would say, in a cadence barely above a whisper.
Luckily, I didn't have to worry about too many of my friends being exposed to the tension emanating from each room, because it was rare that I had anyone over. I blamed it on Rufus, our Old English sheepdog, named after an innocuous character on Sesame Street. As a puppy in his pre-Frazer days, Rufus was cuddly and friendly, but he quickly transformed into a bona fide attack dog from living with our family. And one day he snapped. A cable TV man went into our backyard when we weren't home, ignoring both the leaping, overtly aggressive, loud-barking ninety-five-pound shaggy dog baring pointy teeth and the large-font Beware of Dog sign displayed prominently on the fence. Rufus tore him apart in about twenty seconds and my family had to go to court. Although we won the case, my mother blamed me for the incident, since I was the one who wanted cable.
In addition to my parents' behavior, I was aesthetically ashamed of my house. The common areas were all exceedingly messy and the carpets threadbare and stained. And, unlike any of my friends' homes, ours consisted solely of antiques. I made all my phone calls from an old 1943 rotary pay phone inside a 1927 phone booth with a glass accordion door that shut for optimum privacy. I watched television lying horizontally in a 1902 red vinyl-covered barber chair and checked the time on a 1936 neon bank clock that was the size of a small desk. There was a giant movie poster for Down to Earth starring Rita Hayworth from 1947 above a Woolworth's Five & Ten sign from 1931; velour movie theater seats from the 1940s sat next to a Ringling Brothers' drum from 1908. On the extraordinary occasion when we had any guests or relatives over, my dad would plug in the 1938 Wurlitzer jukebox, deposit a nickel from a nearby 1920s pickle jar and we'd hear the Andrews Sisters singing "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" or Peggy Lee crooning "Rum and Coca-Cola." I know, it may sound pretty cool now, but when you're growing up you just want some modern shit in your house like everybody else.
My mom's main joy in life had been reduced to buying antiques through mail-order catalogs, but she may have been even more gleeful when yelling at my father while he attempted to hang the nostalgia on the wall.
"It's not straight, Sam!"
"It is straight, Rhoda. I measured it."
I would always take my father's side. He'd gone to college on an art scholarship and began his career teaching it. He also made money on the side doing calligraphy and transforming wedding and bar mitzvah photographs into pen-and-ink drawings. When it came to hanging things he had the magic eye.
"Cool Yer Pitz, Ma!"
This was Debbie's method of restoring order, but her proclamation just got everybody more riled up.
"Don't you DARE tell me to cool my pitz!" my mother thundered. "You cool your pitz!"
"No, you cool yours!"
"Deb-bie! I am not speaking to you anymore!" And my mother and Debbie would ignore each other for the next month. The silent treatment was actually far more intense than any bellowing because you can't fight silence with more silence. So whoever had initiated the silence held all the power. It was, in fact, a brilliant tactical maneuver, albeit a destructive one.
"Sam, I am tel-ling you" -- my mother would break even the simplest of words apart to emphasize her point -- "it is not str-aight!"
"What part of it isn't straight?"
"The who-le thing."
And on and on the argument would go until he'd moved the piece around on the wall like a pointer on a Ouija board, eventually circling back to where it had originally been hung. Only now, my mother would take the credit for its perfectly symmetrical position.
"Now it is strai-ght, Sam!"
Besides arguing with my father about minutiae, my mother's main source of solace was shopping. However, she rarely left the house and going to a store to try on clothes was out of the question. Practically every other day the UPS man would be at our door requesting a signature, and every other day my dad would be at the mall returning or exchanging merchandise my mother had charged through catalogs. Her purchases were based solely on a two-inch photo on glossy paper, so inevitably, 90 percent of them wound up being the wrong size, a poor fit, of inferior quality or exactly as the catalog advertised but she had changed her mind. As my mother's condition worsened, her catalog shopping increased dramatically and my father's trips to the mall exponentially. Our "family" trips to the plethora of indoor stores weren't exactly relaxing either. But when you're ten or eleven years old and you still don't drive, you're at the mercy of whoever has car keys.
When David Sywak's parents drove us to the mall, they'd give us a minimum of an hour to look around and then meet them back at a designated spot. Mr. Hastings even gave us two hours. My dad: fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes? In a friggin' mall?!?! You've gotta be kidding! But he wasn't. "But Mr. Frazer," my friends would plead, "there are over a hundred stores here!"
"Yes," replied my father, in his deep monotone schoolteacher voice. "But some of them sell things that won't interest you."
Since we had little choice but to obey the rules, my friends and I had to run around like prepubescent madmen to Spencer Gifts and that store that just sold purple things, and no matter how much we rushed, we always seemed to be at least a minute late, which irritated my dad. And forget about trying to buy anything. Unless there was a combination of no line and a cashier who was actually lucid and competent, no matter how fast we ran around, there was little chance of having any transaction take place and getting to our red VW bug on time.
With all his rushing and stress, why didn't my father have hyper-chondria? Maybe because he couldn't get sick. If he did, we'd all die. Or at least starve, since he did all the food shopping.
Being hyper, I learned, seemed a surefire way to please my mother. It was certainly the method that would result in the least criticism and anger. Her chief complaint was that nothing she needed was ever done fast enough. And when you're lying in bed all day, it's tough to argue with that. Ironically, it would seem that since she didn't need to rush around and actually be anywhere at any given time, slow would be just as preferable. But it wasn't. Time became a different entity that was measured not in minutes and seconds but in units of pain and discomfort. Her theory (which was soon to be mine) was that there was no use in putting things off because you'd eventually have to do them anyway. So, at the tender age of eleven, I became ultra task-oriented. I made lists of things I needed to accomplish, and if a writing utensil wasn't handy to cross items out, I'd tear off the part of the paper that contained the task I had just completed, eventually rendering the mighty eight-by-ten-inch sheet into a fortune-cookie-sized sliver. I walked Rufus after he had barely started eating; if I was asked to vacuum the living room and load the dishwasher, each chore was done before anyone had even thought it was started; when assigned a book report in school, I'd read the entire thing that night (although by the time we'd discuss it in class, I'd have forgotten pretty much everything but the title); if it snowed I was outside shoveling as the first flake hit. As far as I was concerned, my mother's logic was flawless.
Continues...
Excerpted from Hyper-chondriac by Brian Frazer Copyright © 2007 by Brian Frazer. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
Introduction: Itching
Part One: 0 mg
1 Yelling
2 Foaming
3 Gambling
4 Lifting
5 Swallowing
6 (Not) Chewing
Part Two: 100 mg
7 Laminating
8 Stretching
9 Scanning
10 Sitting (Still)
11 Walking & Standing
12 Cranialing
13 Ayurveda-ing
14 Knitting
15 Grudging
16 Reiki-ing
17 Petting
18 Erasing
19 Ending
Acknowledging
What People are Saying About This
"How did Brian Frazer take his neuroses and write a hysterical book, while mine just annoy my family? Seriously, this is one funny book. Damn it."
"Brian Frazer has written a very touching and hilarious exploration of family, hypochondria, and road rage. It's awesome."--(Greg Behrendt, coauthor of He's Just Not That Into You)
"Hyper-chondriac is an amazing book. It's funny, raw, moving and original. And I'm not just saying that because I'm afraid Brian Frazer will be angry at me if I don't."--(A.J. Jacobs, author of The Know-it All)
"Hyper-chondriac is my new favorite memoir! It was so funny I laughed out loud, so honest I gasped out loud and so relatable I immediately called my therapist. I love this book!"--(Stefanie Wilder-Taylor, author of Sippy Cups are Not for Chardonnay)