Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors (7 page)

Of course, even if there were a clear, documentable cause for these illnesses, there would still be the question of why these particular people became ill when so many were exposed to the same environmental factors.  What Drs. Simonton and Siegel were offering was a sense of power and control.  A sense of simple cause and effect.  While all the doctors were emphasizing the randomness of my history, and more important, of my hope for recovery, here was a way of thinking that offered me some influence over the course of events.  Even if I wasn’t sure, it made a certain amount of sense to me to simply
assign
a cause for the illness.  Just pick one that felt emotionally vivid, and work on changing that particular aspect of my life.  At the very least, I would be sending to myself the powerful subliminal message that I was working toward gaining the very greatest potential for healing.  And, although I could never be positive, there was always the possibility that I might actually hit upon a contributing factor, and by acting upon it, substantially enhance my chances.  If the way that I had responded to the stress of the world included cultivating a cancer, then changing the way that I experienced my life should alter the chemistry and make for a less fertile environment.  Indeed, according to Simonton’s thinking, one’s belief systems were simply choices themselves, to be eagerly embraced for as long as they proved beneficial, and then discarded and replaced when they no longer served to enhance the quality of one’s life.  He saw a change of convictions as nothing more than a change of outfits, or hairstyles.  I figured, “Hey, it seems to work for a lot of politicians.”

And so began the propaganda campaign.  With myself as maestro and Jackie as devoted lieutenant, minions of scouts and messengers were dispatched to find and retrieve any and all accounts of long shot victories.  There were no criteria as to the field of reference; these didn’t have to be replicas of my own predicament.  Of course, nothing would have soothed me more than to have had a visit from someone who had conquered precisely what I was facing, but I was starved enough to appreciate much humbler morsels.  Tell me about the “infertile” couple who were celebrating the birth of their first child; read to me about the runner who was told she’d never walk again.  The topic didn’t even have to be related to health in any way.  My life was being transformed by sportscasters who would announce certain defeat for teams losing by margins that had never been surmounted before.  Each time I witnessed one of these premature eulogies shattered by an unexpected comeback, I took it as a personal message that my duty was to provide the world with yet another example, this one more miraculous than any that had come before.

A lot of the propaganda handed to me was brought in or sent  unsolicited.  Some of these items were wondrous accounts of spontaneous healings that had supposedly occurred.  Occasionally, these would be described in letters, written by the subjects themselves, who happened to be people that I had known or been introduced to in my life.  One woman, an ex-girlfriend of a good friend of mine, wrote me a long letter describing her medical history of cervical cancer.  Soon after her diagnosis, she began a journey of investigation, delving into many different types of spiritual healing and emotional therapies.  She told me, in her letter, about coming to terms with the sexual abuse she had suffered as a child, and how, after one particular day of deep contemplation and cleansing tears, a small mass of tissue had dropped out of her body, and no cancer was ever found again.  I became fascinated with these accounts.  Hearing about them, reading documentation of them, boosted my spirits tremendously.  I remained skeptical about a lot of what I was hearing, but there were also stories that were compelling and hard to dispute.  In the hours that I spent pondering them, fondling them, I would luxuriate in their reassurance, relishing the inspiration they offered.

This sudden shift in my demeanor and outlook took a lot of people who knew me by surprise.  Friends, relatives, anyone who came to visit would enter the room slowly, cautiously.  Their body language seemed to suggest both an empathic concern for me and my privacy in such a difficult time as well as a not so easily disguised expression of “Oh, Jesus.  Just what am I in for when I enter this room?”

Not that I blame anyone for that.  I can think of nothing that I would have dreaded more than having to call on someone just diagnosed with a horrible disease.  I’m barely better equipped to handle that kind of thing now.  It’s not that I don’t like sick people.  It’s not that at all.  I just hate to be around them.

My visitors, once the treatment had begun, were met not with grief and agony, but with a transformed individual who would regularly give long, detailed inspirational lectures.  I would chastise anyone whose grief showed through for bringing me down, assuring them that I was not only confident I would survive, but that I could now envision a much more fulfilling life for myself as a result of the trauma.  I was exhibiting a vigor and a spirituality that had not previously existed in me.  I was, in some sense, brought to life for the first time at the prospect of having it taken away.

I had been leading a life of not so quiet discontent for some time, I would explain, and now my life at last had a clear, well-defined purpose.  First, to simply survive; and then, to learn to live my life in a manner much truer to my fantasies of what I wanted life to be.  Not that there wasn’t plenty of despair still surfacing, but I was also experiencing a euphoric high from the anticipation of how amazing my existence could be if I could reclaim it after having endured the agony of its apparent loss.  I spent hours fantasizing about how it would be, if I ever got well, to run into some of the people from my old life again.  I swore that I would pour my heart out to them, to let them know what I had learned.  That life on the planet Earth was the sweetest candy, the milkiest pearl.  That to have a day to spend with someone you love and to expect another one tomorrow had become the most beautiful, lush, and soothing privilege to me.  I think that not a few friends left the hospital during this time relieved to have been spared a more mournful scene; inspired to reapproach their own lives and opportunities; and just a little concerned for my mental stability and my connection to reality.

I even went so far as to employ the services of several psychics.  Laurel Starr was a psychic healer living in Tribeca, whom my friend Didi told me about.  I scheduled Laurel to come to the hospital for a first session.  When the day arrived, I had a pretty clear picture of a rounded, middle-aged, gypsy-looking woman that I’d spot as soon as I saw her.  The door to my room swung open and Laurel looked at my girlfriend in the chair and said, “Jackie?”

Wow.  Pretty fucking psychic, I thought.  Jackie said, “Laurel?  Laurel Kummerman?”

It turns out they went to grade school together.  Laurel Kummerman had turned into Laurel Starr, and, according to Jackie, her nose had been revamped as much as her name.  Well, however she had done it, she was gorgeous.  A blond psychic bombshell.

Laurel and I began having regular sessions together.  She became my spiritual guide, in a way.  The sessions were like therapy, like a shrink, but with the emphasis on intuitions, mine and hers, with a hands-on healing included with each one.  Anyone who saw Laurel was astonished by her beauty, which was accentuated by the provocative way she dressed for her visits to the hospital.  She’d often arrive with several bags from Bloomingdale’s in tow.  Lots of jokes were made about what went on during our sessions, how come I seemed so content afterward, and how come I needed to go to sleep right after each one.

The reality was that amazing things were accomplished when we saw each other.  Laurel saw aspects of me that I had not been aware of, and related them to the disease I was fighting.  Laurel spoke to me about her impressions of a soul that was clinging to childhood, refusing to mature.  She described me as an individual who needed to discover that he was capable of surviving his own mistakes, and to then go on and learn to relish them.  Laurel was able to predict serious medical episodes, as did the dreams that I would relate to her.  She also told me a great deal about her personal life, which included a husband and a Sicilian boyfriend, both of whom lived with her — together.  I started to fantasize about Laurel.  A lot.

This brought up some problems.  First of all, I was really sick by this time.  I was heavily drugged and depending on blood transfusions to keep me alive.  If my counts were down and a transfusion was due, just walking across the room could make my heart pound so hard that I imagined the nurses in the hallway could hear it.  In the hours after a fresh infusion of blood cells had perked me up, I would get incredibly turned on from thinking about my guru, Laurel; even more, my body seemed to sense that it was being poisoned by the chemotherapy, and this produced a level of horniness that I’d never felt before.  My theory was that the body sensed its own destruction and had one priority:
REPRODUCE
.

And then there was the problem of Laurel’s “psychic powers.” She had often spoken of her own trouble of having her thoughts confused by messages she would get as other people thought about her; or of how difficult it was for her to go out in public because her mind would be assaulted by other people’s thoughts leaking into her head.  I began to have uncontrollable sexual fantasies about her whenever she was around, always accompanied by the horror that she knew exactly what I was thinking all the time.

A few times, I braved my fear and actually masturbated in my hospital room — in spite of the fact that I was afraid my heart might literally explode, or that I’d have a stroke if I were to have an orgasm.  That, and the fact that I was thinking about my psychic at the time, a guilt that I guess was equal to fantasizing about a priest or a nun — except that my psychic might actually be assaulted by images of me jerking off in my hospital room, inches from death, while she was making breakfast at home with her husband and her Sicilian boyfriend.  I started hoping that he wasn’t psychic as well.

I still find that whole phase of my life terribly difficult to describe or to reconcile with who I was before or who I have been since.  The truth is, I can’t muster the kind of optimistic attitude I had then while trying to pick out a good cantaloupe today.  That’s why I regarded my newfound optimism as a form of opportunism.  I was able to incorporate, to absorb a system of thinking completely laughable to me.  I was able to exploit some odd mechanism in my brain that allowed me to reprogram it for the purposes of maximizing my survival potential.  I think that I knowingly brainwashed myself.  And I think that the part of me that was brainwashed knowingly allowed it to happen.  That kind of duplicity was, for me, absolutely essential.

If my friends were perplexed by my soaring spirit, the hospital staff was downright bewildered.  And most of them seemed determined to bring me right back down to Earth.

I would begin each day by pushing aside the chairs to create some open space in the cramped half-a-hospital room.  Semiprivate, in hospital double-speak.  As if privacy isn’t something whose very nature is either absolute or nonexistent.  Then I’d put on earphones with a fifteen-foot-long cord.  I’d roll the IV pole that I was attached to, along with all the bottles dangling from it, across the hospital room and I would dance.

I had brought a collection of my favorite, most inspirational music to the hospital and I would close the door to my room, close my eyes, and dance and forget where I was.  I’d get caught up in the power of the music and let it surge through me.  I would try to imagine that the energy being released in each drum beat, in every bass note, was being passed on to me and being stored up as part of my life force.  I’d begin to break a sweat as I would let my body swing and gyrate more and more, giving myself over to the rhythms.  I’d look up and be startled to see the door to the room open.  Two or three nurses would be standing there, huddled together and staring at me, with looks of concern and confusion on their faces.  When they saw that I had discovered them there, they would snicker and whisper to each other as they walked away.

That was on a good day.  More than once I was torn from my blissful trance by the scolding voice of a nurse who hissed, “What are you doing?”

“Dancing,”  I’d said, surprised that it wasn’t obvious.

Then, with a tone and manner of someone doing a campy nurse Ratched impersonation, she’d charged into the room saying, “Well, I’ve got to make up the bed.  You should be eating your breakfast.”

For those very reasons I started hanging a sign on my door requesting that I not be disturbed at certain times of the day.  I may have been paranoid.  But I suspected that if dancing was a threatening activity to them, they might not understand seeing my psychic healer waving her hands over my body.  Or my hypnotherapist drumming in his subliminal messages.  Or my psychiatrist taking notes calmly while I sobbed in a chair.

A huge part of my daily life in the hospital became covert and had to be hidden.  Even little rituals.  Laurel Starr had instructed Jackie on how to “charge” my food before each meal.  First, Jackie would go out and get some take-out food from the neighborhood.  I very rarely ate the hospital food, ever since my first day there, when I was served Kellogg’s cereal, replete with BHA and BHT to “insure freshness.”  Jackie would close her eyes and meditate.  She’d concentrate on forming a healing, purifying white light in her mind.  Then she’d send this heat and energy into her hands, hold her hands over my food, and shoot all those hot, happening rays out and into my meal.

I loved this.  I mean I
really
loved this, and I really got into it.  This was something that I could sink my teeth into, both literally and figuratively.  I was having a hard time eating to begin with, due to the nausea from the chemotherapy, and this gave me a reason to make myself eat, as well as a fantastic visceral image of strength and empowerment with every mouthful.  For hours after each meal, I’d feel the warmth of Jackie’s love and her healing prayers being carried through my bloodstream to all my hungry cells.