Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors (2 page)

I rode the elevator to another floor where I got better instructions.  I was to undress,
put my clothes in a locker
, and wait in another holding pen to have a chest X ray taken.  This waiting room was so crowded that I couldn’t find a seat, and  included rows of people lying on stretchers who stared into that middle distance that only the truly abandoned seem able to see.  Another hour or so and I was hustled through the procedure and on my way to the twelfth floor.

The elevator door opened and the noise hit me.  A hospital floor is not a quiet place.  Bells were ringing, metal carts were clanging, and there were voices constantly blaring over the PA system.  Nurses were calling for doctors; patients calling for nurses; nurses calling out instructions to each other.  My parents, who had come up while I was waiting for my X ray, came over to meet me.

“You’re in twelve twenty-nine,” my father said.  “Twelve twenty-nine B.”  And we started down the hallway to find the room.  Zigzagging toward us from the far end of the hall was a man wearing blue flannel pajamas, with a bright red fresh incision running from just over one eyebrow all the way to the back of his hairless head.  The skin of his scalp was stretched so tightly that a seam was formed along the incision line and his skull was held closed with what looked to be very large staples.

He smiled, and called, “Good morning!” as he passed.

I stole glimpses into some of the rooms as we walked.  Most held pairs of beds with older people lying on their backs, very still.  Some had either nurses or family members leaning over them, talking quietly or tending to some need.

In the hall were a few younger men and women, pacing in hospital gowns and bathrobes, or huddled with a loved one who wore street clothes, whispering quietly to each other, in poses that reminded me of prisoners plotting escape in B movies.

“Ohhh.  Help me.  Please.  Please help me.”  A woman alone in a room was crying out.  The sound got louder as we passed and faded as we turned the corner.  “Please help me…please help me.” I realized that her voice had been in the background since I got off the elevator.  And it was the background music that played all night and day for the next four weeks.  “Oh, God…please help me.”

As we passed the patients’ lounge I tried to peer in through the dense haze of smoke and saw a small room, crowded with pasty-looking figures, all hooked up by tubes to bottles dangling from dilapidated, leaning poles on wheels.  They were furiously puffing on cigarettes with grim expressions on their faces as they sat on couches with torn orange upholstery. 
The Price Is Right
was blasting away at high volume from a TV set that no one was watching.

A madhouse, I thought.  I’ve come to die in a madhouse.  We got to room 1229, and I hurried in as if I was diving for cover.  I went right to the bed and sat down with my head in my hands.  Before I could have a thought, or erase the one I’d just had, the curtain separating the two halves of the room flew open and there stood an older woman, sixty or seventy years old, no more than five feet tall, with blazing neon red hair.  Her eyes were wild with excitement, her tiny, ravaged features stretched to the outer limits of enthusiastic openness.

“Oh, look, Joel, look,” she said.  She spoke his name using two syllables, as if to rhyme it with the popular Christmas greeting.  “Jo-el, look!  A new neighbor!”

The woman was looking at me, but she was talking to a man who lay in the other bed staring straight ahead at the wall.  He was a deep ash color, about twenty years younger than the woman, with a dark blue, knit ski cap pulled down over his head and forehead as low as it could go without covering his eyes.  He held a can of Dr. Pepper in his left hand.  He wasn’t moving at all.

“Oh, dear.  Oh, dear, so young,” the lady said.  “Tsk, tsk, tsk.  Look, Jo-el, look.  So young.”

Joel stared at the wall straight ahead.

“What?  What is it, sweetheart?”  She asked me.  Her tone was softer now, intimate and sympathetic.  “Why?  Why are you here?”

I stared at her like the Puerto Rican woman had stared at me.  Was she real? I thought.   Am I really here?  Is this really me?

“I’ve got leukemia.”

“Ohh.  That’s
wunnn
derful,” she said.  “No, no.  Really.  If you’re gonna have one that’s the best one to have.  Right, Jo-el?” She looked over at him for the first time.  Joel stared straight ahead.

“
JO-EL
!”  she screamed.  I nearly leapt up from the bed.

Joel spoke.  His voice was weak and gravelly.  It seemed as if it were being sent a long distance by an old man trapped deep, deep within.   He sounded a lot like the confused character Jim Ignatowski from the TV show
Taxi
.

“Evelynn?” he called.

“She’s gone, Jo-el.”

“Evelynn??”

“She’s gone!”

“Give me a kiss.  Evelynn…?”

I got the feeling that this had been going on for a while before I came in.

“Just a…little kiss?  Evelynn?”

“Why are you being so funny today Jo-el?”  his mother asked him.  She raised her voice and tried again.  “Are you trying to be funny?”

The woman turned back to me.  “He’s just trying to be funny.”  Then, shrugging her shoulders, “They think he has a brain tumor, but they can’t find it.”

“Evelynn?  Thirsty…”

“There’s a Dr. Pepper in your hand, Jo-el!  Stop being funny!”  And she sat down in a chair next to his bed and started reading a magazine, as if she had never spoken to me at all, had never even seen me come in the room.

The only sound for the next several minutes was Joel drinking.  Sighing.  Gasping.  Slurping.  Like a man who’s been lost in the desert, who is dying of thirst, and who finds a small cup of water.  Not nearly enough to survive, but good for one last taste.  To be relished and savored for the precious moment’s pleasure, and nothing more.

The rest of that weekend was spent having a party.  That’s what it turned into, in a way.  Sometime that Saturday the phone in the room was turned on, and it started ringing and didn’t stop.  It seemed that everyone I’d ever known or met was calling on the phone.

As soon as the situation had become clear the day before, I had asked Jackie to tell some of our friends.  I’d called Lowell and Lillian and a few of my closest friends myself, but each telling of the story took a high toll.  My heart would pound as we meandered through the meaningless chatter that begins most conversations.  Then I would drop the bombshell and suddenly I’d have a victim on my hands myself.  Who could be expected to know how to deal with information like that?  These people, my friends, had no better idea than I did what “leukemia” meant.  If it meant anything at all to them the definition would have come from sentimental films on television whose message was: “If you’re the strongest, bravest, most loved person to ever walk the Earth, then you will put up a gallant, inspiring fight that will not be quite good enough.”  That was the only image in my mind.

So Jackie had been putting out calls, helping our friends through their shock, and then I’d quiz her as to every aspect of their reactions.  It was somehow titillating.  I’d guess that we’ve all spent
some
time imagining ourselves as the victim of a tragic fate, and wondering just how our loved ones might grieve or rush to our sides.  Well, I have.  And here it was happening.  I was getting a glimpse at my own life from an angle that made me dizzy.  Not quite being at my own funeral, but close enough.  I was aware of the perversity of these thoughts as I was having them, but I’ve never had the experience of any kind of awareness diminishing a perversion.

The breadth of the response to my situation stunned me.  The room became stuffed with people and balloons as visitors started pouring in through the door.  Friends and relatives, friends of my parents and Jackie’s relatives — all joined in a macabre reunion.  Part celebration of their love for me and part somber disaster scene.  After all, there was nothing wrong with me yet.  Other than having a deadly disease.  I wasn’t bedridden.  I didn’t appear to be or feel terribly ill.  I was surrounded by all the people closest to me; every fifteen minutes brought through the door someone dearly loved, whom I’d not seen in months or years; gifts and bouquets were stacked to the ceiling.  I was fully dressed, in a state of deep shock, and I was receiving the kind of unconditional love and attention that I’d always dreamed about.  I just happened to be sitting in a hospital room with a voice calling “Help me…” from down the hall.  Things were shockingly festive, broken every so often by a visit from a nurse’s aide, who would take my pulse and temperature.  I felt like they were embarrassing me at my birthday party.

The way that I had found out about the leukemia in the first place, the reason I had seen Dr. Nixon the Friday before, was that the platelet count in my blood was low.  Very low.  I didn’t know what a platelet was until I met Dr. Scott Kessler a few days before that.  Kessler is an ear, nose and throat specialist who treats a lot of performers — actors and opera singers, dancers and rock stars.  He was the doctor who examined Madonna in her film
Truth or Dare
while Warren Beatty squirmed in the background, asking her, “Isn’t anything private to you?”

I had gone to see Kessler because I had the flu.  Or else something like the flu.  Whenever I’m sick, I say I’ve got the flu.  But I wasn’t getting better and, as an understudy in
Biloxi Blues
, a Neil Simon play on Broadway, I was scheduled to go on in a few days.  The actor who was playing the role of Epstein had decided to take off Yom Kippur, the Jewish holiday.  (Neil Simon plays always get interesting around the Jewish holidays.  The conflict of loyalties between God and the producer — who’s also a Jew.  So you feel like you’re in trouble with someone whatever you decide to do.  But the question is, Who comes to a Neil Simon play on Yom Kippur?  And will they even get it?  It turns out, who comes are the families of all the Jewish actors who are performing for the Jewish guys taking the day off.)

This Dr. Kessler was extremely thorough.  In fact, I probably owe my life to his careful exam and his probing questions.  He thought I looked a little pale and asked if I had been bleeding with unusual ease or frequency.  I was only there about my sore throat, but since he’d asked, I told him I had a rash that I couldn’t explain on my ankles and waist.  Dozens of tiny, red pin spots within perfectly smooth skin.  Kessler was soon on the floor, kneeling down by my ankles, and I was talking to the top of his head.  As he brushed his fingers lightly over my flesh, I talked on and on, telling him that my girlfriend and I had decided it must be heat rash; that I’d had it for about three weeks; asking if he thought I needed any antibiotics for my throat.  I think that’s the first time I ever felt scared in a doctor’s office.  Because the doctor seemed concerned, about something in particular, and was finding evidence of what he was concerned about.  Dread is what I really felt.  A sudden, short, deep stab of dread.

“So, uh, what are you thinking?” I asked him.

Kessler spoke to my foot.  “Well,” he said; “I think I’d like to take a piece of skin from the back of your throat.  I see some of these same red spots there, and we might as well send it off and find out exactly what’s going on.  I’d also like to send you to the lab and run some blood work.”

AIDS.  I thought, Holy shit, holy shit, I’ve got AIDS.  He wants to biopsy these red spots because he thinks I’ve got Kaposi’s sarcoma.  This was all happening about two months after Rock Hudson’s illness became public, so AIDS had finally hit the front pages, so to speak, and was floating in the front of everyone’s mind, no matter how small a risk group they were in.  As a heterosexual man who struggles to believe in the world as a safe place, the actual danger of AIDS to me personally has zoomed in and out of the foreground over the years.  Sometimes I’ll be able to convince myself that the danger is extremely remote.  Other times, such as when public icons like Rock Hudson and Magic Johnson fall prey, I’ll be concerned and feel very vulnerable.

And I read the “Science Times.”  I have to admit that even before I was ill, I would read the science section of the
New York Times
every Tuesday, trying to match whatever symptoms I might have ever had in my life to whatever diseases happened to be described that week.  And I had gotten pretty good at it, too.  It’s like the crossword puzzle.  Just keep doing it and somehow you get better.  I was able to give myself a pretty good scare on a regular basis with the science section of the
New York Times
.  I had already thought of AIDS.

Dr. Kessler was quickly preparing a small hypodermic needle with an anesthetic, which he then stuck deep into my mouth as I tried not to pass out or punch him and scream for help.  He stuck the needle into the soft flesh all the way at the back of my throat.  If you opened your mouth really wide and someone shot you with a water pistol from right in front of you, where the water would hit, that’s where the needle went.  He then picked up an instrument that he gripped like a pair of scissors, but whose gleaming, curved blades faced front.  Each time Dr. Kessler distractedly snipped the air, the grinning blades snapped at me like a hungry set of teeth.  When he used this tool to clip off a small chunk of meat, Kessler had some trouble.  He pulled his hand back, trying to remove his specimen before the blades had finished making their cut.  For a moment, it was as if I was being led around the examination room by a miniature hedge clipper stuck down my throat.  When he was done I was sent to a blood lab downtown and then went home to wait a couple of days for results.

The next morning the phone rang.  It was Dr. Kessler.  There were some abnormalities in the test results and he’d like to repeat them.

“Oh?  What kind of abnormalities?” I asked him.

And that’s how I first learned about platelets. Platelets are an indispensable component of the blood.  Tiny disc-shaped cells that help the blood to clot, without which survival would be impossible.  Normal level: two hundred thousand to four hundred thousand.  For some reason my platelet count was only seventy-five thousand.  So the test was repeated.  The result, twenty-four hours after the first test, was a platelet count of thirty-five thousand.  Less than half the level of the day before.  I hadn’t even known what was going on inside my body when it was working right.  What the fuck was going on inside there now?