Of What Was Everything
I used to say of Pearl Jam’s music that it likely saved my life. I knew this as the most authentic thing in junior high, and I’ve carried that around for thirty years since their first album, Ten came out.
I grew up a quietly enraged boy. I had a stable family and an average suburban upbringing, but I was also born with spina bifida and went in for surgery after surgery to fix god-knows-what for the first ten years of my life. When I was out of the hospital and back at school, bullies bullied me near-competitively. I was in a lot of pain, emotionally and physically, and I had nowhere to put it. My school life was so bad to where I once came home from a tough day at school and cried in shame so hard I tried to strangle the life out of a blanket. My mother was always there for me to wail in her lap, but I knew she was throwing her hands up in frustration.
No kid should ever have to go through that. I didn’t see a way out, and although I’ve never been suicidal, I’m sure I thought if I died, I’d be better off.
However, it happened that one fateful summer while visiting with relatives in Brooklyn, my older cousin had gotten Ten on CD. At that point, my music diet consisted of show tunes and whatever played on Z-100.
(There was and is nothing inherently wrong with pop music, but it mollified the listener. That’s why it’s popular. I would take a broader view of music later, but it was presently a dead end.)
We listened to the first few tracks through these tinny speakers, and my head almost exploded. I wasn’t even sure I was allowed to listen to anything this dangerous. It was noisy and aggressive, and the guy singing must have had something wrong with him. Track four, “Why Go,” shook me with the opening drums and bass, and then that voice again:
“Maybe someday another child won’t feel as alone as she does…”
I was in a daze. For the very first time, music was speaking to me. It was honest and painful, full of doubt and rage against everything. What I couldn’t admit, or didn’t have the words for, was that Pearl Jam made me feel less alone. Eddie Vedder’s growling felt like a grizzly bear protecting me. In his vulnerability, I felt a brand-new strength. Suddenly, the world made more sense. It was me against them, and I had to fight, to scream, and be heard.
I was never the same. Year after year, album after album, I grew as a human being. I saw them live multiple times (thirty-nine and counting) and made them the center of my universe along with the movies. Edward Scissorhands and Ten coming out within a year of each other provided the double-Big Bang for the rest of my life. There was a safe space for the outsider. It didn’t have to end as “Jeremy” ended, with blood on the walls and nothing solved. I found myself in art and art in myself, and I found the door to the rest of my life. I wanted to see the world, see it all.
Twenty years later, I moved to Los Angeles on my own to get into the film industry. It’s arguably the best decision I’ve ever made,
Cut to 2011, and I’m going with friends to the 20th anniversary weekend the band held in Alpine Valley, WI. The two days rocked, and I felt as enlivened by the music as I had as a kid listening to them in my cousin’s basement. One highlight, among many, was seeing the reunited Temple of the Dog perform.
Here’s where it gets weird.
When I got on the plane to fly back to LA, I briefly blacked out. The following days dogged me with headaches and a sudden inability to read or see very well.
Really weird.
Having been born with another condition called hydrocephalus, which causes “water on the brain,” necessitating a shunt to fix the problem, I was sure this was the problem, despite my symptoms not being too severe. I went right to the ER, got x-rayed, and was sent home with the doctors telling me there was no issue.
The problem persisted, and I slowly started going blind, which became particularly problematic given I was trying to break into filmmaking.
My eyesight declined steadily for four years. I saw ophthalmologists, optometrists, neurologists, neurosurgeons, and several primary care physicians. As a long-time patient at UCLA, I joked they should have named a hallway after me. Still, the answer kept coming back: “Nothing’s wrong.”
My brain, ever the punk, refused this and kept screaming.
I finally permanently kicked the door open, getting an MRI of my eyes at UCLA — prescribed by another doctor. The most enraging part was that the neuro-ophthalmologist called with the results and said I needed to get to a hospital immediately. She said I had a shunt malfunction — the magic words I thought I’d hear much sooner — and if I didn’t take care of it soon, I’d go completely blind. I asked her how long it took her to put the puzzle together. She said, “an hour.”
Four. Fucking. Years.
I flew home to New York to see a neurosurgeon at New York Hospital. I had been there before for every other shunt surgery, and I trusted them. They opted to put a new one in — this time programmable to control the amount of voided brain fluid — so Christmas 2015 was spent recovering and wishing for the best and expecting the worst.
A lawsuit was pursued and subsequently dropped because the legal team maintained I hadn’t “acted quickly enough.” I felt myself spiraling into that headspace of a frightened child again. Yet, something told me to grit my teeth and try to find a solution. I switched my care to Cedars-Sinai in LA and a team of specialists — primarily women — who listened and acted with empathy. I’ve recovered my eyesight from being legally blind to somewhere better, if not great. Life continued. I kept kicking.
What does this have to do with Pearl Jam or Ten, beyond the initial circumstances?
I’ve worked on this for months, what to say and how to say what that album has meant. Despite what I’ve written, I feel this ironic lack of anecdote.
Then, I realized the anecdote is the past thirty years. I grew up, became a man, and learned to have a life not despite my pain, but because of it. I learned to cope, to seek, and to be counted.
Pearl Jam and Ten gave me that.
I’d be the last person to say a song can change the world. It can’t. What it can do, though, is give the listener the push they need to make changes happen. Music inspires us to make a difference for ourselves and others. It is the ultimate expression of empathy. Pearl Jam play to me, and I feel better. This is especially true of the angriest songs. They tell me it’s okay to be upset. They tell me to use the momentum of emotion to move the world.
They tell me their is a safe space to process, to feel, to act.
So, I want to say thank you. Thank you, Ed, Mike, Jeff, Stone, Matt& All The Other Drummers, for the past thirty years of my pretty damn good life. It hasn’t been easy, and I’ve felt like crumbling on many occasions, but I always get back up again, putting one foot in front of the other.
I said before Pearl Jam probably saved my life. That’s not true. They did something far more profound: they empowered me to save myself.
Yes, I’m still alive.