Heir to a Scandal

With the diagnosis came no talk of a cure, Gifford says, only prescriptions for pain medication that muted Gifford's suffering somewhat but offered nothing close to relief or comfort. "I lived by the pain pills. I'd take the first dose early in the morning and wait for them to work so I could get out of bed. I'd take the next dose at 4 p.m. Then I'd get home from work at 7 and wait until 9 p.m. to take the last dose," he says. "I wanted to die many times."

And yet, somewhere amid the despair, Gifford found the optimism and the energy to pursue his dream of starting a literary press. "I'd always wanted to publish books. I guess I felt a challenge," he says. "I felt defeated by a lot of things in life -- I didn't want to be defeated by this." Since he'd turned to reading after his father's disappearance, Gifford had been interested in books and publishing. In his sophomore year at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, he'd applied to be editor of the literary journal Chips but got turned down. "So I started my own journal called Splinters," he says. "I went around and asked a bunch of friends, and they asked their friends, and, surprisingly, a lot of stuff came in. It was crazy stuff. The first cover showed a baby urinating in the air. Inside it were the rantings of high school kids. I was told gently not to distribute it on school grounds." After Splinters folded, Gifford started a publishing company, Purple Publications, to publish the work of friends whose work he admired. "One was a rewriting of the Bible that was pretty funny," he says. "They would just be printouts that I Xeroxed and put a cover on."

In a way, Gifford's publishing company came out of a similar impulse to promote and share writing he admired. The idea was born in a bar in New Mexico one night when he and his uncle, Takoma Park-based writer Richard Currey, were bemoaning the lack of support for writers in America. Their first move was to create a writing contest judged by a notable author who would read the work of emerging writers and mentor and support them. Since its launch in 2000, the contest has been judged by such luminaries as Jayne Anne Phillips, Chris Offutt and Robert Olen Butler. After several years of running the contest, Gifford decided to plunge in deeper and create the press, using a chunk of the $20,000 he'd inherited from his mother to fund it. "In 2002, I read 'Moody Food' by Ray Robertson and loved it. It had been published in Canada but didn't have a U.S. release, and I thought that was criminal," he says. Gifford created the press and did all the work on the first book in 2005 (selecting a cover, hiring a printer, arranging for distribution, creating a Web site and handling publicity) while "high on pain pills," he says. Yet when the book was released, Gifford couldn't celebrate it because he was having a pain episode. "I couldn't speak. I was gritting my teeth and inching around like an old man," he says.

Robertson's book, a fictionalized saga of music, love and the power of revolution inspired by the life of the legendary singer-songwriter Gram Parsons, cost about $10,000 to produce and sold only half of the 2,500 copies Gifford printed, resulting in a financial loss. And yet, a year later, Gifford selected two novellas from acclaimed Washington-based writer, National Public Radio books commentator and George Mason University creative writing professor Alan Cheuse and published them under the title "The Fires." That project cost Gifford $15,000. Like many who know Gifford, Cheuse is awed by his determination to enter an arena with such slim odds of success. "You know that old saying, 'You have to have a large fortune to make a small fortune in publishing,' " Cheuse says. "Any rational person would have said, 'I won't do it,' but he didn't pay any attention. He decided he was going to do it, and he did it."

Or, as Robertson said in an interview posted at sfwp.org, "Publishers like Andrew Gifford at SFWP are [expletive] heroes. Fools, maybe, too, but you probably can't have one without the other."

Pagan Kennedy's book, "The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories," will be the first title Gifford has funded completely through his own savings and credit cards. He has been a fan of Kennedy's since he was in high school; he used to buy her 'zines at Phantasmagoria in Wheaton and has followed her career ever since. Now Kennedy is a fan of Gifford's. "Andrew is such a generous guy. All through his torment, he was building this literary press and working hard to support authors and the writing community," she says. "He really is a hero."

BY 2006, GIFFORD'S PAIN WAS ROUTINELY DEFEATING THE PAINKILLERS, even as he increased the amount until he reached the maximum safe dosage. At that point, his neurologist offered him a choice: He could start on a different regimen of drugs or undergo a surgical procedure. "I was tired of taking those pills," he says. "I was so dopey for so long. That's why I went for the surgery."

In October 2006, Gifford underwent percutaneous glycerol rhizotomy, a procedure in which a surgeon inserts a needle through the face and into an opening in the base of the skull in order to inject glycerol into the trigeminal nerve. The glycerol damages the nerve and blocks pain signals, leading to relief for many TN patients. But Gifford wasn't one of them. "I put a lot of hope into that and then just woke up in pain," Gifford says. "After that, I went to see the neurologist again. I couldn't speak. I was just grinding my teeth and crying. And he said, 'Okay, we'll go to Carson.' "

Months later, in April 2007, Gifford traveled to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore to undergo microvascular decompression (MVD), a far more invasive surgery than the glycerol injection and one that carries with it all the risks of brain surgery: stroke, bleeding, death on the operating table. During the procedure, Carson entered the deep recesses of Gifford's brain to separate the trigeminal nerve from the blood vessel that was compressing it and causing it to misfire. Then he wedged a piece of Teflon between the artery and the nerve to separate them and ensure the artery wouldn't compress the nerve again.

Four hours after he went under, Gifford awoke in the Hopkins neuro-intensive care unit. There, a physician's assistant pinched his cheek. At first, he was terrified. Then he realized that, for the first time in 12 years, he was not in pain. Someone had touched his face, and he was not crying out. He wept in utter shock, and in relief.

As days, weeks and months passed after the surgery, and as the scar behind his ear healed into a gently raised S, Gifford found himself at once fearing the pain would return (as it can for some patients after MVD surgery) and, oddly, mourning its disappearance. He found he couldn't throw out his medication, even though he didn't need it. Some nights he would pour the evening dose into his hand just to feel the familiar weight and shape of the pills.

"I've often compared the pain to a lover," he says. "It was that intimate and that consuming." He still fears shaving and still cuts his food into tiny pieces and gums it down, even though he doesn't need to. He's still amazed that he can put his head under the shower and turn on his right side while sleeping. "It really does feel like I've woken from some sort of coma," he says.

Before he left the hospital, Gifford learned from Carson that the incident he was sure had caused his TN probably wasn't a factor at all. "We don't know what causes it," Carson says, but there's a slim chance that the fight over a girl 13 years ago played a role. Although Gifford was grateful to learn that he didn't bring on the TN himself, he must now contend with the information that the sources of all of his life's traumas -- his father's destruction of the family ice cream business and disappearance, his mother's unraveling, his physical agony -- remain inexplicable and mysterious.

What isn't mysterious is the literary press that he founded and that he funds through his workaday job and his modest lifestyle. And that's why Gifford feels something much more powerful than pride when he looks at the three books he has published in the past three years. The books are proof that in a life defined by bad things happening to him that were beyond his control, Gifford has created a small, good thing of his own.

Laura Wexler is the author of "Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America" and a writer in Baltimore. She can be reached at laura@laurawexler.com.