by David Rakoff
Another Shoe
Vanity, thy name is Matt. I think. (I had dubbed him “the Sleeping Statue” early on, for the beauty of his sculpted form and his perpetually heavy eyelids that made it look like the perfume of his own perfection had drugged him. After the day he said hello, I renamed him “Garbo Talks.”) His very presence in the gym was a rebuke. With my mid-forties looming and the corpus an unsightly ruin of a thing, I went each morning and, in grotesque imitation of the Sleeping Statue, lifted my weights while I stood wobbling on a half ball like a poodle in a dog act.
The effect was almost immediate. Within days of the new regimen, my left thumb and forefinger started to tingle and go numb, a feeling I could dial up or down just by turning my head. Mere days after that, the tingling and numbness graduated to a pretty constant pain. I had pinched a nerve in my neck. I could almost see it: a protuberance poking out from between my disks, a tiny balloon twisted tight into a tense and angry bubble. The more I exercised and stretched, the worse it got. Gone were my dreams of aesthetic payoff and now I was just looking for relief. For the better part of eight months, I jolted out of sleep every night between 2:00 and 3:00, woken abruptly as if someone had poured gasoline over my left arm and lit a match. Running my hand under cold water helped a little, but only for the time I stood at the sink. What scant sleep I got was a matter of rocking back and forth on the couch until dawn, when exhaustion finally gave me an hour or two. I became useless with my circadian rhythms shot. The only upside was when I traveled to Australia for two weeks and experienced not a moment’s jet lag.
“There’s bad wind in the arm,” said the acupuncturist. “You should take a hot bath.” I have no tub in my apartment and at that point, it was a little bit like being asked where on my gunshot wound would I like my Barbie Band-Aid. I had tried everything, and none of it provided any relief beyond the duration of its administration. The physiotherapy; the electrical stimulation, involving sticky pads and a dial that could administer effervescent mild shock waves; the X-ray-guided cortisone shots directly into my neck; an expensive massage; the Eastern medicine … all of them, while okay in the moment, hadn’t worked. The physio doctor, out of options, in an effort to see what, if anything, was in there that was causing so much pain, scheduled an MRI, a claustrophobia-inducing procedure that I had managed to avoid my whole life.
At eight years old, in the Canadian Rockies and faced with the prospect of an enclosed gondola that traveled up to the summit of a mountain, I wept in fear, as I was often wont to do, even as I understood myself to be in surroundings of unconscionable majesty and loveliness; magnificent peaks rising through the pine-scented air, with adorable, nut brown chipmunks scampering about. After what must have been a trying interval of patient parental psyching up, I finally marshaled myself and got on. In the snack bar at the top, tears all dried, my father made me a medal in one of those machines that presses letters into a metal disk—part sheriff’s star, part one of those plastic cogs one used to put over the central post in a turntable to play a 45. DAVE THE BRAVE it read. Everything about it was counterfeit, from the rhyming slogan’s required shortening of my name into the falsely masculine Dave, to the lightness of the cheap, soft aluminum, too easily impressed—more thumbprint cookie than Vulcan-struck ingot. It could have been a mirthless joke, given the surface falsehood of the inscription, but it turned out to be a counterphobic talisman. If something was frightening, the fear itself was reason enough to do it.
Dosing myself with enough tranquilizer to fell a horse, I managed to climb into an MRI machine, getting through the scan by silently alternating between singing “Court and Spark” by Joni Mitchell and reciting Elizabeth Bishop’s “Letter to N.Y.” in my head, both of which were the perfect length and afforded me some distraction from the fact that I had been slid into a highly magnetized coffin. Kudos to phobic little me. The next day, I sent the long-suffering technician a bottle of bourbon, so guilty and grateful was I.
Grateful for what, I am not sure. In my characteristic stupidity, I had confused the taking of the test with the result. I danced around the city like an idiot, out of jail, feeling brave, effective, free! The doctor called to tell me that it was a pinched nerve, but it was being pinched by a six-centimeter mass.
The oncologist palpates the area and sends me for a needle biopsy to see if they can extract any cells. Two doctors plunge fine sharps into my neck where they think the mass is, but the points come out clean and acellular, as if they’d tried to extract fluid from a pencil eraser. This is very good news, apparently. Lymphomas can be juiced like ripe tomatoes, I am told.
“I’m happy for you,” says the oncologist. Uttered as they are by a man whose job it is to sometimes deliver horrible news of the most hopeless kind, I take his words immediately to heart. I’d had lymphoma in my early twenties and was worried that it had somehow come back, but I am only a tourist here, after all! I gather my things with an air of impervious superiority, like a coach passenger whose upgrade to business class has just come through. A mother and father wheel their grown son into the waiting room from the suite of offices behind the closed door. The son appears to be in his late twenties, but disease has swollen his face into an angry red, almost Asiatic Brezhnev mask. The news has not been good and all three are crying quietly. The son manages to maintain vocal control as he says to his mother, “I only care that you’re okay.” She responds with an equally brave, “And I only care if you’re okay.” The father’s eyes are wobbly with tears. If he makes a move, it is clear he will fall apart. It is hard to witness and I’m a little choked up as I remit my $25 co-payment, but I recognize in my incipient tears the remove of spectatorship and the joy in that which separates us. There is nothing so cleansing or reassuring as a vicarious sadness. This is precisely why I never went to talk to a cancer group when I had Hodgkin’s disease. It was the heartless mathematics that kept me away. I didn’t want to provide the charm of contrast to those less sick than I was, and I didn’t want to subject others to my own silent but unmistakable “Well at least I’m not you” relief. Scientifically baseless though it may be, if your chances are one in ten, you will derive a predatory comfort from the presence of nine other souls facing a similar numbers game. I could only envision us as serving as one another’s wounded gazelle, the member of the herd most likely to fall behind and take one for the team when the lions attacked, as if someone else’s misfortune could inoculate one from circumstance. It was all a little too Agatha Christie for me.
I go to a neurosurgeon who confirms the oncologist’s initial high hopes and speaks of the ease of the procedure to rid me of my so-trifling-as-to-be-nearly-nonexistent affliction. It’s a nerve sheath tumor, nothing more. He sees them all the time, and they’re almost always benign. Even the name, schwannoma, delights me, sounding as it does simultaneously Native American and Yiddish. Benign even in patients with previous histories of cancer? I ask. Yep, I am assured. We schedule surgery for early December. I do not tell my parents, looking forward to the day when they will see the by-then healed scar and I can say, “Funny story …” I cook Thanksgiving for ten people, and days later walk into the operating theater. After a brief night in the hospital, my friend Stephen picks me up, and I stroll home across charming Stuyvesant Square on my own two legs.
Cheap poetry abounds. Everything is intensely clear, shot through with a cold blue light. Clean and perfect. I am overwhelmed by a sense of bullet-dodging gratitude and an arrogant regard for my own efficiency. My hand and arm are still on fire, but that’s postsurgical. I can look forward to the day, very soon, when I will be pain free, now fully a year in the waiting. For now, how beautiful the world seems, how lovely the friends who deliver a potted amaryllis to my house. It blooms into a three-flowered stalk, its pink-and-white-striped petals like a child’s drawing of an ideal flower, if children could actually draw. It is huge and unabashedly happy, and when that withers, another stalk rises up to take its place, this one with four exuberant peppermint trumpets. It’s like
some candy-striped (and candy-assed) metaphor about the enduring power of love one might find on the side of a bottle of peach-scented body lotion, a platitude for a douche box.
Everything bustles with can-do energy. A week after surgery, the pathology report as yet undelivered, I do a reading to benefit the library of a primary school. On the bill with me are two women who read cancer-related pieces, both essentially comic in nature. One is hilarious and the other one does that annoying thing about correlating laughter and attitude with morbidity, which the psychologist James Pennebaker showed was a false connection. A sense of humor and the strength to wear sky-high Jimmy Choos to chemo is a fine stance if it works for you, but its inverse seems to constitute a failure of character, ultimately a judgment against those folks who just aren’t funny or stylish enough to disarm their metastases with well-dressed wit. I am happy not to be reading my funny cancer story. I wear a jaunty scarf to cover the blackened, bloodstained Steri-Strips on my recently excavated neck.
About one week after that I act in a friend’s short film. I wear another jaunty scarf, although the wound would hardly be out of place given my character’s extended monologue: a jaded diatribe about the inevitability of death, the anarchy of the universe and its pure, unfathomable apathy for our little hopes and dreams, all delivered while smoking fake cigarettes. “Somewhere, someone is dying every second, and in the most hideous, least photogenic manner imaginable. In every hospital at every second of every day, someone is just giving up the ghost in some vile, farting, shitting, vomiting display. Every orifice discharging all at once. Their one final thought, which should be some profound, Oh, so that’s what it is, is more often than not, I guarantee you, a simple No! I have so many regrets!…” Even as I do take after take, a small voice inside me tells me I am tempting fate with this undergraduate world-weary posturing—that, in fact, I wrote myself—that it could bite me on the ass.
———
It bites me on the ass.
I know before they even tell me that the mass is malignant. I get very quiet. I think a lot about my folks and what is going to be their third time in the role of cancer parent. I think about the ineffectual superstition in the gesture that had me inscribing books and baking cookies and delivering them here to these offices less than thirty-six hours postsurgery, as though to ensure the benign status of the tumor. Pathetic, really.
Gone is the brilliant blue light of icy purity and minty fresh health. Just like that, it’s a cold winter in New York and I am back in the world of the sick, a hoosegow I really didn’t think I’d see the inside of again before age sixty or so. More than twenty years prior, newly back in the city, post-lymphoma and getting on with my life, I went every Wednesday morning before work to the local public school in downtown Brooklyn to tutor a little girl in reading. The children, first and second graders, were debilitatingly cute. It embarrassed me how sweet I found them, especially one little boy whose hair was a regular cockscomb because he didn’t know enough to run his hand over his head to lay it flat. At other times, he still sported a milk mustache from breakfast, or would take off his sweater which caused his T-shirt to ride up over his cherub’s stomach and, like the hair, he lacked the awareness or need to pull it down for the whole morning.
The mother who coordinated the tutors was probably all of thirty-five. A Brooklyn Mom before the term meant someone with a full brownstone and a high-powered job, the off-hours from which were spent running triathlons and militant locavoraciousness culminating in butchering hogs and curing her own charcuterie. She showed up in the mornings, having gotten her kids out the door to school, hair a mess, her own shower something that could wait until she got back home midmorning. Somehow it came up that I had recently been ill, and she piped up with a cheery, “Oh, I have ovarian cancer!”
There is little in this world that I find more galvanizing than someone else in trouble. I am well aware of how dubious that sounds, coming from someone who makes a living writing in the first person. I am the furthest thing from a do-gooder. I am venal and glib and too clever by half, I know, but the thrill of the most brilliantly quicksilver aperçu is no match for the self-interested high I get from having done someone a good turn. You’d think I’d do more good turns as a result, but there you go.
Brooklyn Mom and I spoke often and openly about her illness. I remember feeling grateful that the only people around us were children, not because adults who could understand us might be traumatized by the dire nature of our conversation but because the kids’ largely uninterested ears meant that she would not blow my cover. I was not happy being dragged back and reminded. It was like being away for junior year, having finally perfected an English accent, only to be visited by someone from back home who would remind me and all assembled that I was in no way British. Plus, I was too freshly out of the woods to feel safe, as if merely talking about it might bump me out of remission.
By dint of her age, or courage, or the fact that she had to try and stay alive for her children, Brooklyn Mom was confronting her illness and getting her hands dirty with it in ways I simply had not managed. She was seeking alternative treatments along with her chemo, meditating, doing regular psychotherapy, eating a macrobiotic diet, and staring her mortality in the face in a way that made me uneasy. One morning, having had a less-than-optimal result on a test, she told me about sitting at her kitchen table, eating a bowl of brown rice with the sun streaming in and illuminating everything in a warm glow. She felt such gratitude then. The world had seemed so beautiful.
In the movie The Other Side of the Mountain, a marvelous tearjerker biopic from my childhood, the skier Jill Kinmont severs her spinal cord on the slopes and spends the rest of her life in a wheelchair. Early on in her rehabilitation, she is visited in the hospital by her boyfriend, an impossibly handsome and fit skier. Showing off, Jill demonstrates her progress by jamming her fist into a bowl of potato chips, eventually lifting her hand to reveal one lone shard grasped tentatively between the knuckles of two crabbed fingers. “It’s the hardest trick,” she tells him. He is, naturally, aghast at the limited mobility and the bleakness of her life, and never visits again. (Beau Bridges will eventually step in as the amorous hero before he himself goes down in a plane something like two days before their wedding. See it. You’ll cry from beginning to end, especially if you’re ten and gay.)
All I could think was: A bowl of rice? Beautiful? What kind of impoverished existence are you settling for, lady? Brooklyn Mom was right, of course, and I would eventually get there decades later, but at that moment I could only be Jill Kinmont’s shitty boyfriend, and I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. In the end, my full-time secretarial job didn’t allow for mornings off to tutor kids, but I was grateful for the out.
The diagnosis carries with it not a sense of relief, really—although there is a bit of a sigh after being in such terrible pain for so long, as if the long-awaited rain has finally arrived after months of threatening skies—so much as a kind of egocentric “of course.” It fits with an inarticulate but ever-present sense that I have done something wrong; an infraction, inadvertent but inescapable and deep as oak roots, marring my permanent record, permanently. The piper would have to be paid. I’d say I had a grandiose sainted martyr complex, and I would be right, but in my defense, I didn’t make it up out of whole cloth. I had some critical, early help. My two favorite stories as a child were Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf” and “The Happy Prince” by Oscar Wilde. I loved them both like the bitterest candy. Odd favorites for a Jewish boy, perhaps, given their intense Christian imagery, but both tales had the abstemiousness, the penance, and the ultimate sacrifice (let’s just call it death, shall we?) that fed an appetite already there. What choice did I have, really? I tell you the stories here briefly, because they say so much, and because they are magnificent.
Young Inge was a beautiful and cruel child. Her physical loveliness only amplified her wickedness. She liked to pull the wings off of flies.
&n
bsp; A poor girl, Inge is sent into service to a wealthy family who treat her well and one day send her back to her village to see her mother. On approaching the town gates, however, she spies the poor woman resting with a large bundle of kindling at her feet. Hot with shame, Inge turns back before she is even seen, her only feelings anger and contempt for such a lumpen, destitute parent.
(So far, it’s Imitation of Life, but wait …)
Sometime later, Inge’s mistress suggests a visit home once more, this time pressing upon the girl a large loaf of bread for her mother, which will surely be welcome. Bearing her gift, Inge sets off, proudly wearing a new cloak and a fine pair of leather shoes, picking her way over the damp ground to keep them dry and clean. Coming upon a particularly boggy stretch, Inge throws the loaf into the puddle to use it as a stepping-stone.
Such open disdain for the staff of life would not sit well in Lutheran Scandinavia, obviously, so Andersen has the loaf sink underground, with Inge on it, beneath the mud into the brewery of the Marsh Woman. “A cesspool is a wonderful palace compared with the Marsh Woman’s brewery. Every vessel is reeking with horrible smells that would turn a human being faint, and they are packed closely together; but even if there were enough space between them to creep through, it would be impossible because of the slimy toads and the fat snakes that are creeping and slithering along.” It is here that Inge spends an age, fused to her bread, frozen with the cold and unable to move. But this is just a stop on her downward journey, because one day Satan himself visits, along with his great-grandmother—who is, not surprisingly, a total fucking bitch. It is decided that the frozen Inge would make a pleasing addition to her antechamber, and so the girl is taken down to Hell itself. There she stands, moving only her eyes, witness to the countless torments of the souls around her, her once lovely clothes filthy and enslimed, covered in toads, twined with snakes, foul, debased.