I'm Not Gonna Lie (10 page)

ONE
morning, I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, smiled, and made a decision.

“That's it. I'm getting my teeth fixed.”

I was finally gonna do it. I'd lived with Stonehenge in my mouth for fifty years, and I'd had enough.

My mouth was a mess and getting worse. My gums had receded all the way to Reseda. My receding gums had caused my teeth to start caving in on themselves. A couple of my front teeth looked like crossed swords. Then I noticed that whenever somebody took my picture, my bottom teeth cast a dark, foreboding shadow. Not good when you spend a lot of your life in front of a camera.

I'd put off dealing with my teeth before, because I'm not that crazy about fifty-year-olds with braces. Especially when I'm the one walking around with the grille. That's not a good look for me. I refused to leave the house looking like an oversize sixth-grade science nerd or the Mexican version of Flavor Flav.

As a kid, I let my teeth go. It was partly cultural. Going to the dentist was never a high priority for our family. It was too expensive and just not something you did. Plus it was a pain in the ass when I did go, because the dentist always found a ton of cavities. He gave me crap when I told him that I slept all night with a piece of candy in my mouth. Like that was a bad thing.

When I reached middle school, I started to become self-conscious about my bottom teeth, because they were a little crooked. One in particular was not only crooked; it was shorter than the others. I hated that. Made me feel like a freak. I decided to ask my grandmother about getting braces, but then something happened at school that changed my mind: Girls noticed me. And here's the weird part: They thought my teeth were cute.

“Ooh,” they said, “it's so adorable how your little tooth is kind of crooked. It gives you such character.”

I couldn't fix my teeth after that. Forget it. I had to stay cute.

Then my little tooth kept growing. And growing. It kept growing until it became a fang. Suddenly girls no longer called me adorable or said I had character. They stopped talking to me at all. One day I brought up the idea of braces to my grandmother.

“Braces? You kidding me? Your teeth are so adorable.”

It took several years, until I was out of school, but I finally decided to pay more attention to my teeth. I made an appointment with a dentist, a guy RJ recommended. One thing about RJ: Dude has good teeth.

“Go to my guy,” he said. “He'll fix you up.”

So I went. The dentist spent about an hour going over my teeth, poking around, and peering into my mouth with that little handheld mirror. The whole time he kept shaking his head and muttering, “Wow, yeah, huh,” and occasionally, “Ooh, wow, damn.” Finally, he snapped off that big overhead lamp, the one that makes you want to confess all the bad stuff you've done in your life, folded his hands in his lap, and said, “I'll be straight with you. In ten years, your teeth are going to start to go.”

I fidgeted in my chair. I wanted to make sure I heard him right. “What do you mean by my teeth are gonna
go
? Where? Where are they going?”

“You're going to lose them.”

“All of them?”

He sat back in his chair and paused. He chose his words carefully. “Think about it this way,” he said. “Pretend your mouth is a house. One day the ceiling starts to crack. Suddenly, a month or two later, the whole roof falls in and you can't even stand up.”

“So, my ceiling's starting to crack?”

“Yes. It's cracking. You need to come back as soon as possible. We have to get to work.”

Now I folded my hands. “All right. You convinced me. I'm in. I'm gonna come back and patch up that ceiling.”

I didn't go back.

Until I turned fifty.

Sickened by the shadow of my smile, disgusted by my disaster of a mouth, I decided that once and for all, I had to fix my teeth. I sucked it up and went back to that same dentist.

“Remember me?” I said.

“Long time between appointments,” he said.

“I got freaked out. But I'm ready now. I just hope that the roof of my mouth house hasn't fallen in yet.”

“Let's take some X-rays and we'll go from there.”

He called in his hygienist, who jammed this alien, space-age thing that looked like a big nose up against my cheek. She then draped a heavy bib over my chest to prevent me from getting zapped with radioactivity. As soon as she had the bib in place, she sprinted out of the room. I thought, “All they got to protect me against deadly gamma rays is an extra-large bib? Seems wrong. She should have to stay in here, too.”

After she came back in and moved that alien nose to the other side of my face, then under my chin, and removed the bib—running out of the room every time—she snapped the X-rays she had developed onto some clips on the wall. Then the dentist came in and spent what seemed like forever staring into my mouth with his little hand mirror. Finally, he flicked off the overhead lamp and again sat on his chair and folded his hands in his lap the same way he had fifteen years before.

“Okay,” he said.

“I'm
okay
?
”
I said. “Yes! Thank God!”

“No, I mean, ‘Okay, we have to redo the whole thing.'”

“Everything? My whole mouth? All my teeth?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“I've been flossing. I flossed twice yesterday.”

He shook his head. “I'm sorry.”

I sagged into my chair. “What happened?”

He shrugged. “You got old.”

“See what happens when you turn fifty?” I thought. “It all goes to hell.”

The dentist stood up and walked to the photos of my teeth that the hygienist had clipped to the wall. He slapped at the picture of my whole bottom row. “You've got a ton of silver fillings,” he said. “That's like putting asbestos in your mouth. Nobody does silver fillings anymore. And the rest of your teeth, well . . .”

“So, the whole roof caved in, huh?”

“Put it this way,” the dentist said. “If your mouth were a building, it would've been condemned.”

“I used that little rubber-tipped thing, too—”

He shook his head again, gravely. Now I folded my hands in my lap. I was resigned. I wasn't going anywhere this time. “Okay, I'm in,” I said. “How much is this gonna cost? Roughly.”

He paused. “You like cars, right?”

“Yes.”

“Think about it this way: We'll be putting a seven-series BMW into your mouth.”

“Can't we test-drive a Honda?”

He shrugged and shook his head at the same time.

“You're killing me,” I said.

“When your mouth gets dirty, you get decay, your gums go, and you have constant bad breath. All that happens when you get older.”

“You're really making my day. You got any good news?”

“See that nurse out there?”

I craned my neck and caught a glimpse of a very unattractive bear of a woman in a green uniform that looked as if it was about to burst.

“Don't tell me,” I said. “The good news is—”

“Yes,” the dentist said. “I'm not screwing her.”

In the end, the dentist overhauled all my teeth in two relatively quick, relatively painless appointments.

First, he took molds. The hygienist shoved my bottom teeth into a sticky, mushy, gooey mixture that looked like oatmeal and tasted like a combination of plaster and bad hummus. She tapped me on the shoulder and I pulled my bottom teeth out of that goo, and then she shoved my top teeth into the same yummy crap. When she finished making the molds, the dentist gave me a shot and knocked me out.

While I slept, she and the dentist scanned my teeth, cleaned them, drilled them, filed them, and fitted them with plastic temporaries and mouthpieces. I came to with my dentist's hairy fingers in my mouth.

“He's awake. Okay, almost done. In two weeks, you'll be wearing your brand-new set of teeth.”

“Umgraybum.”

“Terrific. Tell me if this hurts.”

“Gwantawaggamumba.”

“Great! Okay.”

He removed his fingers and smiled down at me. “I'll see you in two weeks. Don't forget.”

“I promise I won't blow off that appointment. I can't. You have my teeth.”

Two weeks later, I sat in the same dentist's chair and waited. Within a few minutes, the dentist came in holding a wooden box the size of a cigar box. “You ready?” he said.

I nodded.

The dentist slowly opened the lid of the box.

Inside was a mouth.

Filled with gleaming gorgeous white teeth.

My teeth.

“Wow,” I said.

“These are yours,” the dentist said.

“It's so freaky. I feel like I'm in some weird horror movie.”

“I think they look terrific,” the dentist said.

“They're perfect,” I said. “They look like Chiclets, only better.”

“Shall we?” he said.

“Yes.”

A nurse waved in an anesthesiologist, who set up and then injected me with a dose of propofol, the stuff that killed Michael Jackson. That was a terrible tragedy, a senseless loss, but I have to say, this propofol was unbelievable. I felt peaceful and zonked and . . .
young
. The drug made me feel fifteen years old again. And incredibly rested. No wonder this shit is so dangerous.

When I woke up, I felt strange and I felt different.

The dentist lowered the large overhead mirror in front of me and I stared at myself. I blinked. I didn't recognize the face in the mirror. Then slowly I recognized my nose, my eyes, and my cheeks, and I realized it was me. But, man, I felt like a new person.

Because I had a whole new mouth.

I'd heard some people say that having veneers made them feel insecure.

I had the exact opposite reaction. I felt totally secure. I loved how I looked, and I no longer felt embarrassed to smile. I wanted to smile all the time. I wanted to walk around like a grinning maniac. I wanted to ask strangers to take my picture. I was hoping that I would be recognized just so I could show people my new teeth.

The point is, if there is something wrong with you, you need to deal with it, and soon. Do not wait. Go to your dentist or your doctor and get your problem looked at. And go regularly so that they can keep an eye on you. It's not cool to say, “I've been pissing blood, but, screw it, I didn't go to the doctor. I'm fine. I haven't been to the doctor in nineteen years.”

Yeah, tough guy.

Don't take pride in shit like that.

That is no badge of honor.

That's like saying, “Yeah, my husband's been beating the crap out of me for twenty-two years, but we're still married!”

You know what? You shouldn't be. You should be gone, and your husband should be locked in a jail cell with several inmates named Killer.

IN
my forties, I was diagnosed with kidney disease. My first reaction was not, “Oh, no!” or, “Why me?”

It was, “Why not?”

I thought, “Sure. That makes sense. What's the worst that can happen? Whatever it is, it'll happen to me.”

I wasn't being a doomsayer, and I wasn't saying, “Oh, woe is me.” Not at all. At that point in my life, I was just used to experiencing a continuous series of worst-case scenarios coming true. You know in
Peanuts
when Lucy keeps picking up the football every time Charlie Brown runs up to kick it? That was me. Not Charlie Brown. The football.

So, yeah, I was used to bad news.

February 2005.

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

I have kidney disease. That much we know. What I don't know is how bad. I know it's bad enough that I need a transplant—I'm scheduled to receive a kidney in April—but can I make it through the remaining weeks of production for
The George Lopez Show
? Hell, will I make it through the rest of the
day
?

Nobody knows how sick I am.

I
don't even know how sick I am.

I walk into the lab at Cedars for an ultrasound, a scan of my back. The technician grins when he sees me. We exchange a few words in Spanish. He laughs as he rubs the gel on my back. The gel is cold. I jump a little and make a joke in Spanish. The tech laughs again. He reaches over for the wand attached to the ultrasound machine and rolls it in a circle on my back. He starts to say something else, but stops abruptly, right in the middle of a sentence. He slowly rolls the wand, but now he looks away from me and stares off at the ultrasound machine. A pall hangs over the room. The technician says nothing more. He completes the scan in stony silence. He wipes off the gel and smiles at me, but we both know what awaits me in the doctor's office on the other side of the door.

The worst-case scenario.

I enter the doctor's office and take a chair opposite him. He's tall, white haired, distinguished-looking. He has a reputation for being one of the best kidney specialists in the world, but I've been warned that he lacks a warm bedside manner. He's blunt, to the point. He has no talent for small talk.

“I read your scan,” he says. I expect him to tell me there's good news and bad news.

“I have to tell you, you're a walking miracle.”

For one precious moment, I leap out of my skin. I'm wrong. He has only good news. No. He has
great
news.

“It's a miracle you're walking at all.”

I feel my entire body collapse into itself.

“Your kidneys don't even show up on the ultrasound. They're not
there
. It's like they don't exist.”

“That can't be good,” I say.

“It's not,” he says. “Are you urinating?”

“Yes.”

“Good. If you do not urinate for a day, or a day and a half at most, drop everything you're doing and get right in here.”

“I have six more shows to shoot—”

“I don't care. If you stop urinating, that means your kidneys are shutting down. You understand how serious this is?”

“Worst-case,” I say.

“Correct. You have two months until your transplant. You have to make it until then.”

I somehow make it. Each day is torturous. I live every moment with one question hanging over me like an executioner's ax: “How long has it been since I've peed?”

Pee or die.

That becomes my mantra, the bumper sticker inside my brain.

I live in a state of exhaustion and fear.

No matter how much I sleep, I wake up wasted.

The toxins swirling around in my body affect my memory. I have to memorize my lines in the remaining six scripts we have to shoot and I get lost, confused, the words coming at me in a blur, jumbled up. I manage to make it through the first episode, barely get through the second, then the third, ticking off each one like a prisoner counting off days on death row.

I have no energy. I struggle to perform the simplest tasks. Shaving, showering, sipping tea become monumentally painful chores.

I try to come to peace with what may happen.

I tell myself, “If I don't make it, then, okay, I wasn't meant to go on. I'll accept it. I have to. What's my choice?”

I want to pray for my life, but I'm uncomfortable asking for things.

Then, somehow, I make it through the end of the season.

We shoot the final show.

I manage to keep my disease a secret.

I check into the hospital April 19.

I have my surgery April 20.

When I wake up the morning of April 21, two overpowering and completely new feelings fill me up.

I feel better than I have ever felt in my life.

I know that my life has forever changed.

•   •   •

I
was born with extremely narrow ureters. The ureters are the tubes that deliver urine from the kidneys to the bladder. Picture a wide four-lane superhighway. Those would be normal-size ureters. My ureters were like a bike path on the side of the road. I could never figure out exactly why this happened. Eventually somebody in my family told me that I was born early. I guess my ureters never got a chance to develop fully.

The result of my narrow ureters was that I wet the bed. Not just when I was a baby. Always.

Of course, in our culture you could never admit that you wet the bed. We can never admit shit like that. You can't reveal that there's anything wrong with you. You could be coughing up blood and instead of telling anybody, you just say, “Excuse me,” and leave the room. We go right into denial. We believe that we're tougher than any disease. We're not gonna let a little thing like coughing up blood or wetting the bed stop us from living our lives.

“I've been coughing up blood for, like, lemme see, one, two . . . six years. No. Seven. Yes. Seven years. But I'm not gonna let it get to me.”

Over time, it will get to you.

Time is the boss, not Bruce Springsteen.

•   •   •

WHEN
I was a kid, I wet the bed every night. I couldn't control myself. My grandmother thought it was because I drank too much water. Yes, she, too, was in denial. She refused to believe that I could be sick, or that, even worse, there might be something seriously wrong with me. I would wake up with the mattress all wet and I would sheepishly tell my grandmother.

“Grandma, the mattress is all wet.”

“So turn it over.”

She just couldn't deal with it. So I would pee the bed and turn the mattress over, pee the bed, turn the mattress over. My mattress got so wet and nasty that it looked like cinnamon French toast.

I never slept through the night. I would dream of being in water—playing in rivers and rain showers and fountains and waterfalls and running through sprinklers and playing with hoses and splashing in swimming pools—and I'd wake up having peed the bed. I had to joke about it. I told people that my grandmother said, “Growing up, George used to wet the bed,” and I said, “Yeah, it was the only hot water we had.”

We ignored the danger signs. I know. It seems obvious that something was definitely wrong, especially as I got older and still wet the bed, but my grandparents were simply not conditioned to go to doctors. They were conditioned to tough it out. They were always in bad health. They never watched what they ate or exercised, and I'm sure they were under a ton of stress to make ends meet.

It all caught up with them. My grandfather died when I was twenty-seven. He had a weak heart and was short of breath all the time. Finally, he had an angioplasty. The doctors told him not to walk until he recovered, because he could clot. He didn't listen. Or he misheard. Or he didn't understand. “Yes, they said walk. I'm sure. They told me to
walk
.”

The first day back from the hospital he walked, he clotted, the clot got loose, he went to his room, lay down, and died. Boom. Just like that. Poor guy.

People fear what they don't understand. So, rather than deal with my bed-wetting, my grandparents ignored it, insisted that I drank too much water, and let it go at that. I don't blame them. They didn't know.

It reminds me of people who continue to drive their cars after the warning light comes on. The light appears on the dashboard glowing bright fire-engine red and they ignore it. What do they think, that the car is gonna run forever and that the blazing red light doesn't mean anything? Then when the car breaks down, they say, “I'm so pissed off. I have to replace the entire transmission. I can't believe it.”

“Wow. Really?”

“Yes. It turns out I was driving the car for three months without any water. No water at all. Bone-dry. Piece-of-junk car.”

“Didn't the red light come on?”

“Yeah, but I thought that meant
service soon.
”

Same thing happens with our bodies. We are equipped with warning signs: pain and lumps and knots and bulges and bleeding and, yes—

Wetting the bed.

•   •   •

I
kept wetting the bed through elementary school, into junior high, and into high school. I tried to control it—and sometimes I did—but I knew that wetting the bed as a teenager was not normal. By then I was too embarrassed to tell anyone. I dealt with it. I covered it up. It became my dirty little secret.

The first time a doctor noticed something a little unusual was in high school, when I took the physical for the baseball team. I'd had physicals before and always passed, no problem, and nothing ever came up about my bed-wetting. I always felt uncomfortable, though. I was worried that somehow I'd get busted.

Senior year my high school brought in a doctor to conduct the physicals, a bored-looking older guy with a salt-and-pepper beard. He wore a sport jacket and a button-down shirt and draped a stethoscope around his neck like a tie. I'd say he was dressed a little fancy for our school. He conducted each physical slowly and deliberately, as if he had nowhere else to go, ever, which, looking at him, was probably true.

This guy was wasting our time. We were athletes, eighteen years old and in peak condition. Getting a physical seemed stupid and unnecessary, not to mention humiliating. We began by stripping down to our underwear and stepping onto an industrial scale. The doctor held a clipboard and wrote down our weight, then pulled up a metal tape measure attached to the back of the scale and scribbled down our height. Then he put his clipboard aside and listened to our chest with his stethoscope. Last, he told us to drop our drawers. We looked up to the ceiling as he cupped our balls and asked us to cough while he checked for a hernia. I was tempted to say, “One more second and you have to buy me flowers,” but I thought it was probably a good idea to shut up while he had my balls in his palm.

Then we went back into the locker room, put on everything but our shirts, and came back out so he could take our blood pressure. This was the most boring part, because it took the longest: two minutes. We took this opportunity to fuck around—rag on one another, laugh, call one another out. The bored bearded doctor paid no attention, ignoring us as he went about taking our blood pressure.

I took my place in line and waited as the doctor nodded his approval to all the other guys on the team and dismissed them. I watched them head into the locker room to finish getting dressed. Finally, my turn. I stepped up to a chair that had a desktop attached and sat down. I stretched my arm out on the desktop and looked away as the bored bearded doctor wrapped the blood-pressure cuff around my arm. He squeezed the bubble tight, waited, then released it and watched the meter rise and fall. “Hmm,” he said. He seemed alarmed.

“What? What's the matter?”

“Your pressure's a little high.”

Time stood still. All he said was, “Your pressure's a little high,” but his words sounded ominous and as if they were coming from far away.

It felt like an eternity before he spoke again. “I want you to go outside,” he said. “Sit down for a few minutes and then come back in. I'm going to take your blood pressure again.”

“Shit,”
I thought.

“Okay,” I said.

I stood up slowly and, head down, went outside. I knew everybody was looking at me. I was the only one on the team who hadn't passed the blood pressure test. I kept my head down, as if I'd flunked an exam or gotten caught screwing around in class.

I found a seat on the bench near the dugout. I didn't know where to look, so I studied the grass in front of me. I didn't know how, but I knew that somehow my high blood-pressure reading was connected to my wetting the bed. I also knew that I was I too scared to mention anything about that.

After a while I went back inside, took my place in line again, and stepped up for my second blood-pressure test.

The doctor wrapped my arm in the blood-pressure cuff and squeezed the bubble tighter this time, I thought. He seemed to be moving in slow motion. The two minutes felt like twenty. Finally, he released the balloon and squinted at the meter. “It went down a little,” he said.

I felt a huge wave of relief.

“But . . .”

“What?”

I thought he was about to say something else, but he stopped. He nodded slowly. “Nothing,” he said. “You're all right.”

Of course, I wasn't all right.

Kidney disease creates high blood pressure.

That's one of the signs.

But the doctor didn't allow himself to consider that worst-case scenario. Or maybe he looked at me, saw a healthy-looking eighteen-year-old kid, a baseball player, and thought, “There can't be anything wrong with him. What are the odds?”

I put on the rest of my uniform, grabbed my glove, and went out to the outfield to shag flies.