Die Young with Me
Page 10
On the drive home, neither of us knew what to say.
“You hungry?” Dad finally asked.
“Sure.”
“What’ll it be, big boy? Anything you want.”
What I wanted didn’t seem to be something that came in a takeout container so I said pizza would be okay.
* * *
We got to the house around nine. The delivery guy from Gino’s was standing like a clown in his yellow-red uniform. He held a stack of pizza boxes that reached over his head. Dad looked at the food like he’d forgotten he ordered it.
“Right. Hold on a second, buddy.” He pulled out all the cash in his wallet and handed it to the delivery guy.
“For real?” the pizza guy asked. Dad nodded.
“Just help me carry this shit inside.”
We had seven pizzas, three packs of garlic bread, and two two-liters—but neither of us knew what we should say to Nat. He stood before the stack of boxes, confused.
Dad tried to explain what the doctor had said, leaving out the words tumor and cancer. Dad called it “a thing with my lymph nodes,” and told him that I was going back in the morning.
I couldn’t listen anymore. My hands were getting shaky.
I threw five slices onto my plate and went down to the basement. I didn’t know where else to go.
I sat down there alone, eating pizza on the stairs, trying to get my thoughts together. Through the door, I could still hear Dad and Nat talking. I didn’t know anything about cancer—except that lots of people died from it. I knew that it was BAD.
People with cancer get chemo, lose their hair, puke—I had the base-level knowledge that any American TV viewer has, but that was it.
I didn’t know what cancer really meant.
It was like some secret disease; people talk about cancer treatment, but they don’t talk about the cancer. Does the cancer hurt? Will I feel it inside of me? How does it kill?
The basement door opened. My brother slowly came down the stairs.
“Hey,” he said, sitting down beside me.
“Hey.”
“Well, this is fucked up.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“You think they’ll make you get chemo, or something?”
I shook my head. No one knew anything yet. Nat stood up and began pacing around the room, drumming on his thighs.
“Well, look, even if you do have to get chemo—fuck it. You know? I mean, you can’t be that sick—we just played a fucking show, man!”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“See! So even if you get chemo, I bet it won’t be that big of a deal. Ya know? Shit, you’ll get to miss a ton of school and maybe you’ll even lose weight. By the time Warped Tour rolls around, your hair will be grown back and you’ll be fucking fine.”
The TOUR—I hadn’t even thought about that.
“Maybe. I hope so.”
I stood up from the stairs. Nat walked closer to me.
“You’re going to be fucking fine, dude. This is all going to be fucking fine.”
I nodded. “Yeah. Okay. It’ll be fine.”
“Fuck it.”
“Fuck it.”
The basement door opened again. Dad stood at the top of the stairs, looking down at the two of us.
“Your mother is on the phone,” he said, “she asked if she could talk to you.”
I walked up the stairs and took the receiver. I was breathing heavily. Mom wasn’t crying, which was good. If she had been crying, I think I would have finally lost it.
She said that she was coming home.
* * *
It was ten thirty. Ali was still at work. I knew I had to tell her, or at least tell her something.
I looked up the number for the Route 60 Frostop in the yellow pages. Some flunky answered, and I told him to put Ali on. I told him it was an emergency.
She took the receiver out into the parking lot. I imagined her there, in the glow of the streetlights, staring at the empty space where I should have been parked.
I surprised myself by saying it out loud—they think I have cancer.
Ali screamed and screamed. I tried to calm her down, I told her it would all be fine. I told her the same things Nat told me—but she kept crying, apologizing for nothing in slurred tones. I felt the tremor in her voice when she spoke.
Eventually, she ran out of tears. She grew silent. We just sat there on the line, me in my bedroom, and her in that lonely parking lot, stained with puddles of tears for me.
“I love you I love you I love you I love you,” she swore.
“I know,” I said, “I know. Everything is cool—I promise. Calm down. I’ll call you after my appointment tomorrow. It might not be a big deal—okay? The appointment is way early, so I’ll probably just see you back at school.”
“Okay. It might not be a big deal. I’ll see you at school.”
I don’t know if either of us really believed it.
3
I heard Mom’s car pull in around three in the morning. I’d spent the last few hours on AOL, e-mailing Paul and the few other friends that I had. I told them as little as possible. After Ali, I just couldn’t make another phone call.
Mom and Dad were at the computer now, in the little home office across the hall from my bedroom. Through the crack in my door I could hear them, Dad telling and retelling the events at the hospital. He was cussing a lot. I heard the office door slam shut.
I lay in my bed, shaking. I’d never seen Dad upset like that.
What did they just read on the computer? What did they just see?
* * *
There was no chance for sleep.
I got out of bed, put on my glasses, went to my desk, and switched on the lamp. I sat down and unzipped my backpack on the floor beside me. Whatever happened tomorrow, I knew I’d probably miss a few more weeks of school. I figured I should catch up on as much homework as I could—I needed to occupy my mind.
I decided to work on my English essay, the one about punk. I’d pretty much finished it, but I needed to proof it one last time. Miss Ray was the only cool teacher I had, anyway, so maybe she’d appreciate the effort and not load me with work while I was sick.
The title of my essay was “Punk Rock Elite.” The first page touched on the history of punk—from the MC5 and the Stooges, then on to the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and the Clash. I talked about the second and third waves of punk (which is when I was introduced to it) and the way the music had changed.
But the second half of the essay—the part that I had been the most proud of—read differently to me now.
As punk rock became a successful music genre, corporations, record labels, advertising agencies, and various other sleazeballs attempted to re-create it—musically and visually—to be produced and marketed in a more profitable environment.
On many levels, this attempt was a success.
But no matter how authentic the watered-down, family-friendly version of corporate punk seems, there will always be an element lacking.
Because punk rock isn’t about how fast you play, or how big your hair is; it’s about attitude—a screw-you attitude that can not be manufactured, or thought up in a boardroom.
Punk is an attitude that goes beyond rebelling against disco or political parties—punk rock rebels against everything! And, oddly, I find this comforting.
Punk makes me feel like I can do anything, because the walls I see around me aren’t real; religion, politics, standards, status quos—punk rock takes the power away from all those preordained establishments. It spits in the face of everything, even death.
Like the Dead Boys once sang:
Ain’t it fun
When ya know that you’re gonna die young?
It’s such fun . . .
I mean, can you imagine Avril Lavigne sing
ing that?
That’s the difference between punk rock and everything else—punk rock is a way of life.
* * *
I stared at my own words. I felt disgusted.
What a bunch of bullshit, I thought. Dying young—from what? Self-destructive, self-obsessed crap? Fuck that—it doesn’t count if you never see it coming.
Did any of these young punk rockers have cancer? Did any of them die slow, in a hospital gown, not a leather jacket? If they’d seen it coming, would they still have seen such romance in it? Would dying young still seem so cool?
I threw my pencil at the wall and heard it crack in the dark. I stood up and switched off the desk lamp. I was crying.
“Ain’t it fun . . .” I said softly.
I cried alone, until sleep pitied me enough to show itself at last.
TEN
Die Young with Me
1
I awoke at six, like I was going to school. My eyes felt swollen as I showered. I spiked up my hair and put on my Ramones T-shirt, and then I went downstairs.
Nat was in the living room, watching TV. The coffeemaker in the kitchen hissed. It was a broken-mirror image of a normal morning, all fucked up and cracked at odd angles. The shadows fell crooked over our lives.
“You goin’ to school today?” I asked Nat.
“I was going to go with y’all.”
“Oh,” I muttered.
I sat on the couch and stared at the TV.
“Do you not want me to go?” he asked.
I shrugged. “It isn’t that, man. It just seems pointless. There’s no sense for you to sit there all day—plus, Ali will feel better if she sees you at school.”
“Yeah, I guess she probably would.”
I handed him my English essay. He read the title out loud.
“Can you also drop that by Miss Ray’s room for me?”
“How’d it turn out?”
“Like a crock of shit.”
* * *
Mom hugged me as soon as she got downstairs. Dad came down behind her. He didn’t say much of anything.
They both agreed that Nat should go to school—Mom promised to call the front office for him as soon as we had any news. The four of us walked out into the morning together, headed in different directions. We said a rushed goodbye, so no one had a chance to get upset.
* * *
“At least we’ll find out where they hide the sick people,” I said, forcing a laugh as we walked into the hospital.
Mom slapped my arm. We got on the elevator. Dad stared at the buttons, expressionless.
When the elevator opened, I saw my grandparents sitting in the waiting room.
“Mom,” I hissed under my breath.
“Be nice,” she said. “They’re just worried about you.”
They were dressed in their church clothes. They both hugged me, announcing that they’d come to pray for me.
Dr. Hallbeck walked into the waiting room. She hugged Mom and then she hugged me and then she hugged everyone. Let me tell you, when your test results are bad enough to turn your doctor into a hugger, it’s a scary fucking sight.
* * *
Dr. Hallbeck walked us to the elevator and took us down to the main foyer. From there, we walked down another hallway, through the twisted spine of the building. As we walked, she explained to my parents who we were going to see, what they were going to do, until we finally arrived at Pediatric Intensive Care.
Dr. Hallbeck left us with the admitting nurse. The nurse put a hard plastic bracelet around my wrist. Another nurse came out with a clipboard and said to follow her.
She didn’t check my height or weight or blood pressure—they didn’t ask me any questions, they didn’t even ask my name. The nurse rushed me—almost pushed me—into an off-white room with a bed facing a window.
She told me to get in the bed.
She took supplies out of her uniform, all wrapped in plastic. She told me to make a fist, and then stuck a long, thick needle into my hand. I yelled louder than I meant to—Mom winced.
The nurse rolled in a metal IV machine and hooked it up to the needle. Blood rose into the tube. She twisted a small knob on the plastic tube, and I watched the blood rush back into my hand and through my vein to my heart. A cold rush of clear fluid followed it in.
No one explained what was happening. No doctor had come to speak with us. Mom and Dad asked questions, but the nurses basically ignored them. One nurse taped the needle onto my hand, while the other one fucked with the keypad on the IV. It beeped like our microwave at home.
Dad wiped his eyes and left the room without a word. My grandparents followed him.
No Internet article or Bible verse could have prepared us for what was happening. There was nothing theoretical about it anymore—this was going down live, in the flesh. Our brains couldn’t process it.
This isn’t right, I kept thinking, there must be some sort of mistake. Not like this. Not like this.
One nurse brought in a bag of fluid and hung it from the top of the IV. She was about to connect it to the tube that fed into my bloodstream. Mom grabbed her with both hands and shook her.
“Stop!” she yelled at the nurse. “Where is the doctor? What are you about to hook up to this IV? Why haven’t you done any tests? Get a doctor NOW!”
The nurse looked confused.
“They haven’t done no tests?” the other nurse said.
“What?” I said.
The nurse beside Mom took my chart off the bed and looked at it. Then she looked at my plastic bracelet. Then she showed it to the other nurse. They gave each other a look and then shook their heads.
“Y’all won’t believe this, but we had this boy confused with another—someone else was supposed to be in this room! Ha-ha. Whew!”
“I better go get a doc,” the other nurse said. She left the room.
Mom was breathing as hard as I was. Her eyes were wild. She looked like she could murder both these idiots.
What the hell were they about to pump into me?
The nurse came back, holding a syringe. “The doctor is on his way,” she said. She saw me looking at the syringe. “Don’t worry—this is just something to help you relax.”
She stuck it into the port on my hand.
I tasted chemicals—they were warm. I eased deeper into the bed.
* * *
We could’ve waited twenty minutes for a doctor—or it could have been all day.
I couldn’t keep track of time. The drugs and the shock made everything soft. But eventually, those nurses returned with a guy in a white coat.
He introduced himself as an oncologist—a fucking cancer doctor. Dad came back into the room and stood in the corner with his arms crossed. The cancer doctor told us that I needed specialized care, the type they weren’t able to offer in Huntington—or at any other hospital in West Virginia.
He said the hospital I had gone to didn’t even have the equipment to do the type of biopsy needed—they couldn’t even diagnose me, let alone treat me.
He told us that the closest hospital with the capacity to care for a case like mine was Columbus Children’s Hospital, about three hours away. He’d already spoken with their head of oncology, and they were expecting me there right away.
“Ohio?” I asked weakly. My parents looked at each other.
“Okay,” Mom said, “what is the next step here? Do we need to set up an appointment?”
The cancer doctor shook his head. I needed to leave right away. I needed to leave now. An ambulance had been arranged to transport me to Columbus as fast as possible.
“Jesus Christ, is that necessary?” Dad asked.
“More than I can even say.”
I watched them all from the bed, talking about me like I wasn’t there.
* * *
My parents walked beside me, and my grandparents behind them. Mom was going to follow the ambulance to Columbus. Dad was going to ride home with Grandmother and Granddad, and then go pick up Nat. They would meet me in Columbus later that night. Dad asked if I wanted him to bring anything.
That I had the answer to: “My Minor Threat shirt. The red one. And some music.”
“Anything in particular?”
“Nat will know.”
They rolled me to a loading dock outside. A dark-blue ambulance was backed against the edge.
I asked if I could call Ali and tell her what was happening, but there was no time. Dad told me he loved me, and that he would see me soon. Grandmother and Granddad said a short prayer. Mom had already pulled the car around to the loading dock. She was idling there, ready to follow.
Two big EMTs lifted me off the loading dock and into the back of the ambulance. One of them walked around the front. The bigger of the two nodded at my mom, then hopped in the back with me. The ambulance bounced beneath his weight. I heard the engine start. He shut the doors.
As we pulled out of the lot, the EMT looked down at me.
“Was that you I heard asking to make a call, partner?”
“Yeah. To my girlfriend. I just wanted to tell her not to worry.”
He reached into his pocket. The cell phone looked comically small in his hand.
“I know how it is,” he said. “A man has got to check in with his woman.”
He handed me the phone.
I knew that Ali wouldn’t be home, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care if someone else heard me on the message machine either. Fuck it. The drugs had flushed all the shyness out. I waited five rings, until the message machine at her house clicked on.
“Ali. Hey. It’s me. Listen, I have to go to a different hospital—a good one—in Columbus—a city hospital. I’ll probably be up there for a couple days, but then I’ll be back home. I just wanted to call and let you know not to worry. Everything is fine. If you need anything, call Nat. Don’t worry—okay? Everything is cool. I promise.”