Half Empty

by David Rakoff

  Thomas Dolby takes the stage at close to 1:00 AM dressed in WWI flying-ace gear—goggles, headphones, double-breasted olive-drab trench coat. He is putting on a hell of a show, but for a skeleton crew of twenty people. Here’s what I do not see in all my time at Pier 94: vomit, major drunkenness of any kind, a fight, a couple going at it, anything resembling an erection, clothed or naked. At 1:30, a doughy, shirtless boy in khakis is being worked over by two dominatrices up on a small stage, but their torments are of the gnat-like schoolyard “got’cher nose” variety. The place lacks that up-too-late spirit of abandon, the grand erotic gesture that one will doubtless regret in the morning but which one does anyway.

  If I stay any longer, I will be the only one left and they’ll probably make me help clean up. I catch a cab on Twelfth Avenue and head home.

  I have always tried to be the kind of New Yorker who can simultaneously decry the hideous corporate annexation of the city without getting misty-eyed over a time when an underage runaway girl could abase herself for a bunch of leering patrons in a Times Square peep show. I’ll admit that it saddened me when I first heard that New York had to import something like the ball to get its groove back. Had we collectively become such a bunch of super-egotistical milquetoasts that we were looking to Northern Californians to be our wizards of id? We seem to be at an age, both personal and historical, where sex can only answer for so much. As unimpeachably true as a statement like “Make love, not war” may be, it also feels quaint, the reductive naïveté of a bygone world. Even Perry Mann, who founded the ball back in 1979, has taken a break from having sex for the last two years and, although born Jewish, has become a regular churchgoer, too. “I’ve had threesomes, foursomes, orgies, and I’ve stepped back. It’s interesting. I look at people and things in a different light.”

  All the Time We Have

  Many are the tears of grief—there are those who might even say the majority—that fall for no one but the one who is shedding them. A literary agent I knew, his AIDS-related symptoms escalating daily, decided to retire from the business and make a graceful exit before his final reckoning. He called up his clients to tell them he was, in essence, dying, and one of his writers, his eardrums barely done trembling from the sound waves of this news, responded with an immediate and lachrymose, “But who’s going to represent me?” Would that this was even fractionally as aberrant as it is appalling. At the memorial service of another literary agent, a giantess in her field, one of her stars—a mystifyingly, wildly successful children’s book author with a penchant for neo-feminist retellings of fairy tales and a cloying, breathless prose style, given to phrases like, “O, but how she did run like the wind!” and “stealing out into the darkling night with naught but a loaf of wheaten bread and a flagon of ginger beer”—found it charming to tell the assembled crowd that her six-year-old granddaughter, upon hearing of the death, responded with a wailed, “But she was going to be my agent!” I kept these cautionary tales in mind when I made my way to Beth Israel Medical Center to visit Del.

  Del had been my therapist. His efforts in my behalf were Herculean; he earned every dollar I ever paid him. I had been a chilly and resistant analysand from the start, although I stayed with him for ten years. I once admitted to a woman at a dinner party that I had never once cried in therapy.

  “Never?” she asked, astonished. “Your therapist is no good.”

  “No, my therapist is very good, but I’m better,” I joked.

  That I was ever able to extricate myself from my day job and become a writer was largely thanks to Del. The debt I owed him was unpayable. Even so, when I finally quit, the thought that I might never see him again was only mildly troubling. The very notion of post-treatment contact struck me as inappropriate. Having grown up surrounded by psychiatrists, I lack that general curiosity people seem to have about shrinks, or their own shrinks, at least. From a very young age, I can recall being out in public, and seeing my father stop suddenly, or if we were sitting at a table, subtly turn his back to the restaurant and face us, an attempt to not be seen by a patient. Sometimes it was unavoidable and an efficient hello might be exchanged, but we knew, my siblings and I—notwithstanding the eager smiles and eyes that raked over us like searchlights—that we would not be introduced. These were not social interactions, and any questions we might have had would emphatically not be entertained, although I can’t recall having any. Chalk it up to time and place, the 1960s and early ’70s in Canada, where a British reserve still overlaid society. Things were different in New York, I have been told. The membrane between shrink and patient was more permeable. That still seems to be the case. Once, at a birthday party for a friend, her former psychiatrist got up and sang a Joni Mitchell song to all assembled. Putting aside the romantic declaration of the lyrics, “I want to knit you a sweater, Wanna write you a love letter!” (appalled italics my own), it just seemed improper.

  I could never really get with the looser program. There were aspects of my relationship with Del that played out in the usual transferential manner—the craving for his approval, the briefest flashes of displaced anger on my part—but that classic desire for intimacy didn’t really come up for me. I didn’t hunger for details of Del. I was never moved to Google him (or as we used to call it back in 1989 when I started treatment, “look him up in the phone book”). I gleaned things about him over the years without trying: he was from Omaha; he had a Jewish father and had been raised in a Jewish household, but had seen fit to formally convert in adulthood (I translated the Hebrew of a rabbinical document he showed me); he had been a practicing Buddhist for years. I even found myself marching behind him one year during Gay Pride (that was not a bombshell; I had gone looking for a gay therapist from the beginning). He looked back and smiled. There was no internal flutter, like when as a child I would see a beloved teacher beyond the confines of the classroom. I didn’t even take the opportunity to see who he was marching with. The moment seemed nothing more than ripe for a joke. “It’s my shrink,” I said to my friends. “Quick! Knock me to the ground and pee on me!”

  Not long before we decided to terminate—no doubt exhausted by years’ worth of pulling teeth and scoping around for some last-ditch tactic to crack me wider than I’d theretofore allowed—Del started to employ that old reporter’s trick of disclosing things about himself in hopes that I might finally, monkey-like, proffer confessions of my own. With a defiant regularity, he began co-opting our conversations. He extolled the benefits of acupressure and how it cured a bowel obstruction he’d had (ick). He mentioned a recent trip to Cuba and how beautiful the men were, although “We figured they were mostly hustlers,” he added (I did not inquire who the “we” was). Once, when I was leaving, he even told me that my blue shirt was doing “wonderful” things for my eyes. All to no avail. Finally, he stopped me one day mid-rant about being broke. “David, I’m between a rock and hard place here. I hear and understand your anxiety about money, but we have something like seven sessions left and we have to at least talk about your leaving.”

  Turning things around, I asked him what his feelings were about our ending things. “I’m incredibly angry,” he responded fondly. “How dare you? You should at least have to come and have coffee with me once a week.” I asked if he felt this way about most of his patients. “Not really,” he responded.

  (Sigh. Should you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness—a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest Self which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of a kitchen chair—then this confirmation that you have triumphed agai
n and managed to gull yet another mark, except this time it was the one person you’d hoped might be immune to your ever-creakier, puddle-shallow, sideshow-barker variation on “adorable,” even though you’d been launching this campaign weekly with a single-minded concentration from day one… well, it conjures up feelings that are best described as mixed, to say the least.)

  At the end of our last session, I stood up to leave and put out my hand. “No way,” he said, and pulled me into an embrace. In our ten years of acquaintance, it was the first and only time we ever touched. Bills, breath mints, money had all passed between us in hermetic and sanitary noncontact. I was shocked to find that he was shorter than me.

  There is that archetypal moment in a women’s film, where a title card reading “Three Years Later” comes up and then you see the protagonists—a little wiser, with incipient crow’s feet, their hair a little duller perhaps, their clothes most definitely better—meeting across a table at ‘21’ or the Biltmore Room where they bring each other up to date on all that’s happened in the intervening time since all of their dreams came true (or did they?). I wrote and dedicated a book to Del, and mailed him a copy, but I had already heard through the grapevine that a virulent and aggressive colon cancer had forced him to close up his practice, seemingly within a matter of a few short weeks. He was very moved, but he begged my indulgence; he had little energy or focus for reading. He was already in hospice care at Beth Israel, although he sounded positively cheery on the phone. He would love a visit. I asked if I could bring anything and without hesitation he asked for two Budweisers, a Big Mac, large fries, and a Diet Pepsi. His last hurrah. I was reminded of the only true fight we ever had.

  He had once asked if he could eat during a session. I didn’t care. I saw him at the end of the day, he didn’t have a moment to himself. Del’s supper was a Tupperware container of unhulled grains and some dark, leafy greens. If a Joan Baez song could be food, this was it; a sad and earnest cloacal scouring pad of a meal. This was around 1991, a period during which I was spending a good amount of my time shuttling back and forth among New York’s AIDS wards visiting sick friends. I made numerous shopping trips to the Integral Yoga store on Thirteenth Street where I would root around in the bins of grimy vegetables for exactly these ingredients for one friend who was piebald purple with Kaposi’s lesions. I asked Del if everything was all right with his health.

  He didn’t mind that I would ask such a question, but he took issue with the way I asked it. I thought I had invested my voice with a calm assurance and a let’s-not-worry-until-there’s-something-to-worry-about unflappability. To his ears, I had sounded clipped, harsh, and unforgiving. I had always appreciated my own oncologist’s English stoicism and distaste for sowing false hopes (a man who, when at the age of twenty-two I asked him if my impending chemotherapy would have side effects, responded with a bright-eyed, “Oh yes. It’s profoundly nauseating. You’ll be vomiting within half an hour”), or my erstwhile New York GP whose bedside manner was borderline-actionable and hilarious. A man who would say during every rectal exam, “Bet this takes you back.”

  As I recall, Del and I reached a chilly détente, each acknowledging the other’s different verbal style, but neither of us giving an inch.

  McDonald’s bag in hand (I would have brought him a Cuban hustler if he had asked me), I arrived at Del’s room on a sweltering summer day. He was on the phone. More metastases than man, tipping the scale at ninety pounds maximum, he was sitting up in bed, his underpants gaping around the tops of his emaciated legs. I’d stopped being shocked by that change in appearance. Perhaps years of having seen friends diminish to skeletal shadows of themselves inured me. Or perhaps it had more to do with the very odd nature of our bond.

  “Hi, David,” he said, handing me the phone to return to its cradle (those words always had an avuncular, almost regretful falling intonation). “You look good,” he said, appraising me. “Actually, I take that back. You look fine but there’s a slight reserve, a kind of sadness there.” I gave him a No shit, Sherlock look, which made him laugh. I poured his Diet Pepsi into a small cup and stirred it to get the bubbles out. He slowly unwrapped the hamburger, took a tiny bite, chewed it for a few seconds and then discreetly spat it out into a napkin. His interest in the food was gestural at best. He could no longer digest solids. His systems were breaking down. He was to be fitted with a PIC line later that day, a port that bypasses the smaller veins and lets the pain meds go more directly into his system. All of these were signs that he was “getting closer,” as he put it. “And I have to deal with that emotionally,” he said.

  For the next three hours, I fell into my preferred hospital-room function of bustling around, picking things up, replacing the ice in the pitcher, delivering the cookies I made in his behalf to the nurses’ station, deadheading the flowers. He catnapped and we talked. He expressed some mild regret—what can only have been the merest tip of a ship-splintering iceberg—that he hadn’t traveled more. “California! I went there and thought, ‘This is marvelous! One really needs a month here to explore this place properly.’ ” He had desperately wanted to go to Italy, but delayed two critical weeks until he was too sick. “But I saw Tibet,” he said. (This was all a surprise. As a resentful twentysomething, filled with rage, I had constructed an angry fantasy of this man getting rich off of my dollars, financing country houses and numerous trips abroad with moneyed abandon, while I scraped together my pennies so that weekly I might enjoy the dubious privilege of dredging up feelings I’d rather have kept tamped down.)

  Later in the afternoon, I don’t recall how it came up—I certainly didn’t ask—he mentioned as how he was planning on being cremated. “A friend of mine knows a place in Florida where Krishnamurti might have once been, so I’m going to have some of my ashes scattered there.” As for the rest of him, the implication was that whatever was left over after this Panhandle Hegira didn’t really concern him.

  Where Krishnamurti might have been? There was something so utterly bleak about this disposal, being cast into an apathetic wind in a place whose significance was little more than a matter of conjecture. The relinquishing of craving and thereby achieving detachment is perhaps the noblest of the Four Noble Truths, I know, but I wanted nothing more than to take him in my arms and moor him to the here and now. This all felt like some obstinate standing on principle on his part, the spiteful child taking leave of a world that he felt had cared about him insufficiently. Del would have said I was projecting (as would anyone, frankly). I didn’t know anything about his life to justify this conclusion, but I wished that I could turn to those closest to him and say, “Talk some sense into him. Tell him how much we love him.” That I might have told him as much myself only occurs to me now.

  A nurse came to check his diminishing vitals, along with someone from his temple who was going to say some prayers. They drew the curtains around him and I stepped out into the hallway.

  Searching through literature on therapists’ deaths and its effect on their patients, I came up with scant material. One analyst, in introducing his article on the subject, wrote, “A few heroic analysts have described their work in the face of life-threatening illness. However, there are only limited descriptions of these illnesses and deaths from the patient’s point of view. Experiences of less heroic colleagues are almost unavailable.” That he would characterize as less than heroic the tending to one’s own impending death—whether by having one’s days filled with the projectile expulsion of vomit, bile, or God knows what else until one is an empty sac of lifeless meat, or the pre-morbid twilight of a pain-masking morphine drip or a PIC line, or by simply having the narcissistic, cowardly gall to buy the farm by sailing through a windshield and scrambling one’s brains on the pavement, with nary a thought given to one’s patients—was precisely what I found so troubling when people said, “That must be very intense for you,” when I told them that Del was dying. It was. I suppose. It is always intense to lose someone, and Del was an unbelievably good egg. His
being under fifty-five seemed doubly unjust, and he had quite literally saved my life, to boot. But given my decade’s worth of egocentric monologue, would I be grieving a man or the imminent demise of a reliquary of my deepest pains, most artful observations, and wittiest bon mots? Was I mourning the cancellation of the David Show (“Who’s going to represent me?”)? I didn’t feel entitled to that particular hue of despond.

  Outside of Del’s hospital room, I listened to the low chanting of sutras. There was a framed copy of the New York State Patients’ Bill of Rights posted on the wall. It was written in English and Spanish, and also Yiddish. Rosetta-stoning with the English translation at the top, I read through the text. In about five years’ time, I thought, this version would no longer be relevant, even at a place like Beth Israel. An era was passing.

  After about thirty minutes, Del’s friend came out to tell me he had fallen asleep. I went home. I would not see him again.

  A day or two later, the following dream just before waking: a phone call from Del. “Hi, David. I’m much better, and in fact we’re to meet for dinner at seven just around the corner. The head of oncology will be there, too.” And suddenly there he is, only now he is a small boy, no older than six, fresh from a bath, his black hair wet and combed (between Del and myself, only one of us has dark hair and it isn’t Del). Wearing light blue pajamas, he climbs onto my lap. “Look,” he whispers, unbuttoning the jacket. The pale skin of his chest is marred by something, a tattoo, or a wound, or a scarification. Whichever it is, it is clear this injury is a devotional mark. Incised for my benefit, it is a bruise of allegiance that would be carried forever.