Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors (4 page)

So, as the chemo nurses placed a metal carrying case on the bed next to me; and as they opened it and withdrew a large, clear plastic cylinder containing a bright orange liquid that was to be injected into a vein in my left arm – specifically my left arm, because I’m right-handed – our fears were of the burning or tingling sensations that I might feel as the chemical was pushed into my veins and into my body.  This chemical, if administered
very
slowly,
very
carefully, over the course of fifteen minutes for this one tube alone, could glide into the vein and cause only the predictable damage in the expected areas of the body.  But if pushed into the vein too quickly, if any leaked out of the vein, or, God forbid, if the needle slipped out of the vein, the chemical would burn and blister the flesh, causing intense pain for months, and leaving permanent scars.  As one of the hipper male IV nurses, who’d been around to witness it, had told me, “That shit would tear your ass up.”

Jackie had already apologized for her squeamishness and left the room, so it was just me and Mom and Dad.  I was terrified, and I think my mother was more so.  But, bless her heart, she was staying in the room with me.  I knew she wanted to run and hide, that she would have given almost anything to get out of that room.  And at any other time in my life I would have lost my temper.  I would have scolded her and told her to go ahead and leave if she couldn’t hide her agony.  But on that day I just wanted her help.  Any help she could muster.  My mother, trembling and close to tears, was holding my free hand and whispering encouragement to me, as the container of orange chemical was solidly clicked and locked into place at the end of the tube that was connected to the needle that was in my arm.

And that’s when the chemo nurse said it.

“You’ve been to the sperm bank, right, Evan?”

I said, “…Huh?”

The two nurses turned toward each other in what looked like a perfectly choreographed move.  They gave a priceless, puzzled glance, and then turned, again in unison, back to me.

The other one spoke.  She addressed me slowly, drawing out each syllable, as if I suffered from the most severe of mental disabilities.  “Evan, didn’t your doctor tell you about the
sperm bank
?”

I answered her with the same controlled exasperation.  “No.  No, he didn’t.  Is there something I need to know about the
sperm bank
?”

This time they didn’t look at each other.  With the swiftness and urgency of a bomb squad team they clicked and pulled and had the orange cylinder detached from my arm.  The cylinder went back into the metal carrying case labeled “Biohazard,” the two picnic basket-type lids were slammed shut, and the box was picked up off the bed and placed on a table several feet away.

“We’ll be right back,” one of the nurses said, and they turned and left the room.  A split second later the other one reappeared, grabbed the biohazardous metal picnic basket, and fled once again.

My mother was still holding my hand.

And so I was welcomed into the wild and wacky world of sperm-banking.  I was issued a pass that allowed me to leave the hospital.  Insurance regulations had prohibited my leaving the hospital at all until now, under the assumption that anyone well enough to go outside and breathe fresh air is not sick enough to necessitate payment for a hospital room.  That’s a rule that continued through all my hospitalizations in New York.  No matter how beneficial the sunshine might have been, how therapeutic a walk around the block might have seemed, the only place to be outdoors was on a ten-foot-wide terrace on the fifteenth floor of a building holding eighteen floors of people.

Jackie and I left the hospital, and we headed for the sperm bank — on Madison Avenue.  Nothing but the best address for my progeny.  Along the way we had our first taste of the disturbing realization that everything in the world was just as it had been five days ago.  New York City, and certainly the world beyond, didn’t seem to have any interest in the devastation that we were in the midst of, or any awareness at all of the teeming, seething society inside the building that we had just left.  We started joking about the absurdity of walking around the streets of Manhattan with a deadly disease and played with the idea of going to the airport and getting on a plane.  Paris, perhaps.  Definitely Europe, somewhere.  Maybe if we went someplace where we were unknown, where there was no history, then the whole situation would vanish along with our old identities.

I also had the first notion of the depth of trust that I was being forced to give to an entire community of strangers.  State-certified as they might be, those doctors and nurses and pharmacists and technicians, they were still unknown to me.  And this was my life on the line.  My existence.  My confidence in them was a suspicious one at best, and my confidence in the state that regulated them was somewhat lower than that.

Call it denial, and I guess that’s what it was, but as we reached the IDANT Andrology Laboratories on Madison Avenue I had the additional thought that it was at least
possible
that I didn’t have anything seriously wrong with me at all.  Maybe no one inside Sloan-Kettering really had a disease.  How many of them had been shown the slides of their abnormal tissues?  Shown the slides, been taught how to understand them, how to compare them to normal tissues, and been satisfied enough to allow strangers to carve them up or administer lethal doses of toxic chemicals?  I hadn’t.  What if this was the way that the medical establishment, the government, did its research?  Its experimentation.  Take every forty or fiftieth person who walks in the door, tell them they have a dread disease, and get them into the laboratory, the torture chamber, of their own free will.  For their own benefit.  I’d read news accounts of governments doing things just as diabolical in the past.  My paranoia felt not only justified to me, but wise.  Maybe we were all just being good little citizens and doing as we were told.  Just remove your jewelry, drop your clothes in the bin, and have a nice hot shower before we assign you a bunk.

At IDANT I was given a clipboard by a woman dressed in white standing behind a window.  There were forms to be filled out before I could open my bank account.  I didn’t realize I was staring into space until I heard Jackie say, “Sweetie?  Sweetie, are you all right?”

I looked up at her, and with my IDANT-supplied pencil poised, I asked, “How do you spell ‘leukemia?’”

Jackie spelled the word for me, slowly, and then I said, “I’m sorry this is happening to you.”

Back at the window, the woman in white handed me a small plastic container with a lid.  She told me that I was to go into room number three, “produce” a specimen, and, without touching the inside of the container or contaminating the specimen in any way, “deposit” it in the cup, and bring it back to the window.  She then gave me a key on a ring with a large plastic “3″ attached to it, handed me a thick manila folder, and called, “Next!”

I was tempted to ask her
how
I was supposed to “produce” the specimen, but I resisted, and the question that I didn’t really need to ask was answered when I got inside room number three.  After struggling with the giant key chain I opened the door, and I was met with a gust of
freezing
cold air.  Inside the tiny refrigerated room was a simple metal folding chair, a miniature three-legged side table, and a box of tissues.  I sat down in the chair and put the manila folder on my lap.  I must have been terribly unsophisticated in the ways of sperm-banking, but I had no idea what I had been given in the folder.  When I opened it and found about a dozen pornographic magazines, I was stunned.  Then I giggled.

Did they subscribe, I wondered?  Or was it someone’s job to go shopping periodically, to keep the supply varied and up-to-date?

I was really interested in checking out the magazines.  I like pornography, I find it fascinating.  And not that it doesn’t turn me on, it does.  But in addition to that, I’m always astonished by the idea of people making really hard-core pornography.  Who they are, what it was like there at the time, how it felt to them.  And there was some really hard-core stuff in there.  All mixed in with the
Playboy
and the
Oui
.  There were the
Juggs
, the
Beaver
, the
Ass Fuckers
.

I was actually a little bit thrilled with the magazines in my lap.  I still haven’t gotten over a certain adolescent relationship to pornography.  A kind of substitution fantasy that turns the book, and my feelings toward it, into something very much like those I’d have toward a woman.  There have been times that I’ve stopped not very far short of setting a candle-lit dinner table for myself and a magazine.  It’s probably magnified by the fact that I never got over my inhibitions surrounding buying the stuff or about being open and shameless about my interest in it.  Maybe this confession will help.  Either that, or six more years of therapy.

And, Jackie was with me.  We had decided to try and make sperm-banking fun, and to try not to lose touch with our sex life, by having Jackie help me to jerk off into the cup, inside the refrigerated room, on Madison Avenue.  Very sexy.

Jackie took off her shirt, and instantly broke out into the most extreme case of goose bumps I had ever seen.  As we started to fool around in that room, I wanted nothing more than to be left alone.

Jackie and I had fallen in love quickly, about a year before, in a small town in the Catskill Mountaintans.  How appropriate for two Jews.  But this wasn’t the Borscht Belt Catskills.  Tannersville was a rustic, small town that came alive only during the winter, when the local ski mountain became a prime destination for thousands of New Yorkers.

We met in the summer, when a theater company that we were both involved with held its annual artists’ retreat.   I had come up as a result of having met a woman named Rachel through mutual friends after one of my last performances in a play called
Found a Peanut
, at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival.  Rachel and I decided to rent a car and share a ride up to Tannersville.

At least, that’s what I thought we’d decided.  Upon arriving I found myself immediately infatuated with the slim, wavy-haired, blond woman exercising on the front lawn.  Jackie was dressed in dark blue sweat pants that had shrunk enough to show off her still girlish athleticism.  I followed her up the steps to the porch, smitten by just the sight of her, and when she turned to face me and I saw her blue eyes smiling at me from her adorably lopsided face, I felt like I’d been away on a trip somewhere and had just returned home.  Jackie said “Hello,” giggled, and disappeared.  For the rest of that afternoon I fantasized about how I might get to speak with her, as I was relentlessly pursued by my driving companion.  Unknown to me, as I had parked the car, Rachel had responded to the innkeeper’s inquiry as to whether we were a couple requiring a shared room with a simple “not yet.”

The tension mounted through the weekend as I maneuvered my way into private walks and talks with Jackie, trying not to insult anyone in the process.  I wasn’t being coy or rude.  While I certainly suspected that Rachel was interested in me, nothing had been spoken.  I felt it would have been presumptuous of me to explain a lack of interest to a woman who hadn’t actually communicated any to me yet.  At least not in a way that I was capable of understanding at that time in my life.  Acknowledging my own attractiveness to a woman who might pursue it aggressively was way beyond my limitations at twenty-three years old.

The climax, or lack of one, came on an oppressively humid night during Mario Cuomo’s keynote address to the 1984 Democratic National Convention.  I was lying facedown, with no shirt on, in my room of the Forest Inn, with Rachel on a chair facing me.  My denial could not have been more complete.   Rachel stared at me longingly, offering conversation, and making gallant attempts to rekindle the flirtation that I was able to engage in only while swimming in a large group, as we had been the night we met in Manhattan.  I, meanwhile, was straining furiously to hear Cuomo’s voice delivering his rousing speech, as it floated across the hall from a small clock radio next to Jackie’s bed, where I wanted to be.  I listened to that speech as if I was in the room with her.  I raised the volume of my comments, my oohs and aahs and groans of appreciation, my
breathing
, all in the attempt to share that night with her, to use Mario and his vision of the future to connect us, and to fuse one of our own, together.  Weeks and months later Jackie and I joked that Rachel would have to be invited to our wedding.

Now, in our cozy IDANT cubicle, Jackie was being every bit the ultimate of what someone in my position could hope for.   Until my diagnosis, however, our relationship, after one year, had reached a point of stasis, and I had begun to feel dissatisfied.  Our lovemaking, up to this point, had been deeply affectionate, but hardly uninhibited, and the frequency had tapered off, at times to the point where I would wonder if Jackie was even still attracted to me.  But I was well aware that I was going to need a sturdy support system for what lay ahead, and both my fear of abandonment and Jackie’s startling devotion had caused me to reexamine my doubts.  When she offered to spice up the sperm-banking expedition I was moved, I was more than happy, even if a little bit self-conscious, and I welcomed her gift.  I also didn’t feel like I had the right to turn her down.  In any case, it became excruciatingly clear to me that I was about to have one of the most intimate sexual encounters of my life, inside a locked closet, with strange men masturbating for medical purposes on either side of me.

Coming into a cup is not easy.  I was surprised to learn that, then surprised that I was surprised, because I had surely never tried it before, so how could I know?  It’s not so much the simple act of hitting a target with an ejaculation, though I’m not sure that’s really so simple either, but the repeated instructions “…not to touch the inside of the cup,
in
any
way
!” that posed problems.  Especially when combined with the warning that “…
the greatest number of sperm are contained in the
first
spurt
.”  Who would have known?  The woman in white at the window, that’s who.