Cancer on Five Dollars a Day* *(chemo not included): How Humor Got Me through the Toughest Journey of My Life

by Robert Schimmel

  My mother drives, hands squeezing the hell out of the steering wheel at two and four o’clock, eyes squinting with unshakable focus into the desert sun. We don’t say much. Two reasons. One, I’m too weak to speak. Two, I’m trying to fig-ure out what I’m going to say to Melissa.

  I rehearse a couple of opening lines in my head. Nothing seems right. Everything seems canned and forced.

  “Where are we going?” my mother asks. Across her forehead runs a gulley of sheer, brutal concentration.

  It suddenly strikes me: My mother driving me to L.A.? This is not a good idea. I cough and throw this plan out the window. I go to Plan B. “I have to make a phone call,” I say.

  “Out here? You have a phone in your room. We had to drive thirty miles for you to make phone call?”

  “You can’t call long distance from my hospital room.” This is the truth and I realize now that it was the plan all along. I pause and pretend to look at something outside my window. “I have to call Melissa.”

  “Melissa.” My mother’s voice is matter-of-fact, without judgment.

  “Yeah. See, here’s the thing.” I cough again, then clear my throat. When I speak now, my voice is low and gravelly, as if I’m channeling Tom Waits. “Ma, I miss her.”

  “That’s natural. It’s been a while since you’ve seen her or even talked to her, no? And you two were close—”

  “No. I really miss her.”

  My mother raises an eyebrow. Great thing about me and my mom. We have a kind of shorthand. I don’t have to say much. She gets what I mean after a very few words and sometimes just after a look. She keeps her eyes locked on the road. She spots something ahead, a desert mirage. “Look. Arrowhead Outlet Mall. Neiman Marcus has a pay phone. I’ve used it.”

  “Damn.” I pat my pockets, then remember that they’re empty. “I don’t have any change.”

  “You can use my calling card.”

  She guns the car, speeds up toward the mall. She swoons. “I love this place.”

  “I know. It’s your idea of Disneyland.”

  To confirm and annoy, she begins humming the tune to

  “It’s a Small World.”

  The phone rings once, twice, and then right before the third ring, Melissa says, “Hello?”

  Her voice is just as I remember—soft and tentative, bordering on shy. It’s the most beautiful, sensuous voice I’ve ever heard, and just hearing her say that one word Hello has me practically clawing my way through the phone.

  “Hi,” is all I say.

  Melissa pauses long enough to make lunch, to write a letter, to go to the store and come back. It is an endless pause. A gaping crater of a pause. For a second I think she has gone away or passed out. And then finally she says, “Robert?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I didn’t—where are you?”

  “Phoenix. At a pay phone.”

  I switch ears. I sit down on a bench outside the department store and suck down about five gallons of oxygen. I need to gather my thoughts and, honestly, I just want to hear her breathe.

  “Robert, how are you?”

  She knows. Somehow she knows. She must’ve heard about my cancer on Stern.

  I say, “Well, you know, up and down. But the good news is I only have one more chemo treatment and—”

  “Wait. Chemo?”

  “Melissa, I have cancer.”

  “Robert, you—”

  Her voice sails off. For what seems like forever I hear nothing, not her breathing, nothing. I panic. I’ve lost the connection. I’ve lost her.

  “Melissa?”

  “I’m here.” Her voice is a tiny echo.

  “I thought you knew,” I say after another mother of a pause. “I don’t know why I thought that. I just . . . I don’t know.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Well, so, yeah, that’s the story. That’s where I’ve been. At the Mayo Clinic here in Arizona. I haven’t been on an island cruise on the Love Boat or anything, if that’s what you were thinking.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that,” she says.

  “I have one more treatment,” I say.

  “And then, what, you know, what happens?”

  “Toss of the coin,” I say, then add quickly, “but the doctors are optimistic. I feel good. And I look fantastic. Really buff. The chemotherapy agrees with me. I’ve put on weight. I’m up to one twenty, one twenty-five.”

  She actually laughs.

  “I really do weigh about a hundred and twenty,” I say.

  Melissa doesn’t speak, but now I can hear her breathing again. I close my eyes and imagine the mist from her breath brushing my face.

  “I really miss you,” I say.

  It must be my imagination but I think I can hear her heartbeat. I hear thump-thump-thaa-thump and then I realize that it’s not hers at all, but mine. I’m hearing my own heart. My pulse is pounding and my armpits are soaked, my head is flushed, and I hear myself blurt out everything that’s been swirling through my head: “I’ve never stopped thinking about you. Ever. Not for a second. Every day, morning, night, no matter what I’m going through that day, all I can think about is you. I can’t stop myself. I can’t help myself. I don’t know what to do. But I can’t imagine getting my last treatment and living the rest of my life, no matter how long that is going to be, without ever seeing you again. It just can’t be like that. It can’t. I can’t allow that to be. The thought that I’ll never see you again is killing me.”

  Thump-thump-thaa-thump.

  Her breath caresses the phone.

  I’m gonna pass out. Right here. Right now. In this outlet mall in Phoenix with my mother sitting on a bench fifty feet away knitting like a maniac. I’m burning up. I must have a fever. My forehead is a swamp. My cheeks feel like ovens.

  Melissa says nothing. But now her breathing comes faster, racehorse fast. A drumbeat tapping in my ears. I’ve gotten to her. My speech has moved her. That was close. I wasn’t sure how it was going over. I spoke from the heart, true, but you never know. This is going well.

  “Robert?”

  “Yes, Melissa?”

  “I’m seeing someone. You told me it was over,” she says. “You said not to call you and that you were never going to call me. You kept telling me to move on.”

  “I did. I know I did. I meant it at the time. I didn’t want you to have to deal with me sick.”

  She sighs. I sigh back. Sigh and response. Well, now I have to ask the big question.

  “Are you two, you know—?”

  “We’ve been going out three weeks, a month, something like that.”

  And then Melissa chuckles. Hard to pick up irony over the phone but that’s what I hear. Irony.

  “What are you laughing at?”

  “The Schimmel Touch,” she says. “Rears its ugly head once again.”

  “Do I really want to hear this?”

  “We slept together last night for the first time. Last night. Get it?”

  “Perfect,” I say. “Why couldn’t I have called yesterday, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “Yeah, well, I have the answer. Yesterday I thought for sure I was going to die. If there was one day that I didn’t think about you twenty-four-seven, it was yesterday. Yesterday I was just trying to live.”

  “And today?”

  “Today I just want to see you.” I swallow and stare at my feet. And then I whisper. The words barely escape my lips. “Melissa, I miss you so much.”

  “Oh, Robert,” she says. “I miss you, too. I really do. Shit.”

  And then she starts to cry.

  That’s all I need to hear. I hang up the phone and run over to my mother. Well, I don’t actually run. I waddle as fast as I can. My mother looks up from her knitting. “How did it go?”

  “I’m going to L.A. You have to drive me to the airport.”

  “What? You weren’t supposed to leave the hospital. You’re not even supposed to be here.”

  “I know. Come on, Ma, we gotta mo
ve.”

  She doesn’t budge. She shoves her hands into the mountain of unknitted yarn on her lap. “First you get me to break you out of the hospital. Now you want me to help you leave the state?”

  “Ma, please. I have to see her.”

  She tilts her head, studies me from a new angle, as if from this perspective she’ll see or hear something different. “You can’t stay over. You have to come back tonight.”

  “I will. I promise. It’s an hour flight. I’ll be back before midnight.”

  My mother shakes her head and hauls herself up to her feet. “I’m your mother. I’ll cover for you.”

  “Thanks, Ma.”

  I kiss her on the cheek and walk like a penguin toward the car.

  When I get to L.A. it’s raining.

  It rains once a year in L.A. and I pick the day. The Schimmel Touch once again.

  By the time I rent a car and inch through the parking lot called rush hour from the airport to Melissa’s apartment in West Hollywood, it’s almost seven o’clock. Miraculously, I find a parking space on the street a block from her building. I start to get out of the car, stop, check myself in the mirror. It’s been six months since I’ve seen her. I want to make a good impression, want to make sure I look great.

  Let’s see. I weigh a hundred twenty-five pounds. I’m wearing clothes that are three sizes too big. I’ve got on a baseball cap because I’m completely bald. I have no eyebrows or eyelashes. I look like something out of the bar scene in Star Wars.

  Melissa’s gonna see me and melt.

  Or scream and go running out of the apartment.

  Nothing I can do about it. I look the way I look. If she can’t handle it, the trip was worth it because I’ll know how she really feels. I’ll go back to Mayo heartbroken and miserable, but at least I’ll know. And I’ll be able to move on. Maybe.

  The rain has tapered to a drizzle. I push the car door open and somehow manage to extricate myself from the seat belt and climb out of the car. I feel like I’m a hundred years old. Every inch of me creaks. I shiver violently. I’m freezing and afraid. I still don’t know what I’m going to say to her after all this time. Maybe it’s best to say nothing, let her take the lead. No. I’m the one who broke us up. I have to take the lead. I have to take responsibility. She didn’t want to break up with me. I have to remember that.

  I should probably start with an apology. That really is the right thing to do because it’s true. I am sorry. So, yeah, I’ll open with a sincere apology, and then—

  I’m here. Standing in front of her building. I stop and look up at her apartment. She lives on the second floor. And then, as if she can somehow feel me on the sidewalk below, she appears in the window, framed there like she’s posing for a photograph. She tosses back her hair. She’s let it grow out a little. It’s still golden, luminous, like her. I wave. She smiles. She’s radiant, even more beautiful than I had allowed myself to remember.

  But she’s not looking at me. She’s not smiling at me. She’s looking off at something inside her apartment. And then a guy appears next to her. He’s tall, full head of black wavy hair, and here’s the best part, the punch line, he’s shirtless. And his stomach muscles ripple. Forget a six-pack. He’s got a twenty-four pack. A case. She’s going out with the guy in the Calvin Klein underwear ad.

  And now they’re kissing. Melissa and Abs of Steel. Right up there, framed in the window. Then, of course, the topper, the rain kicks up. The intermittent trickle becomes a stabbing downpour. I stand on the sidewalk, two floors down, pelted by the rain, watching Melissa kissing the shirtless male model and I realize that things are not going as well as I’d hoped.

  I’m frozen. The rain is dripping down off the bill of my cap, drenching my shirt, and I can’t move. Do I yell up at her? Do I throw rocks at her window? Do I knock on her door? Do I drive back to the airport and hop on the first plane back to Phoenix?

  Jesus. They’re still kissing.

  Have a heart. Or at least close the shades.

  I slosh and stumble back to the car. In the blinding rain, rented windshield wipers slapping feebly at the wet arrows soaking the glass, I creep across Beverly Boulevard and end up back in my apartment, a one-bedroom in Hollywood that I lease still, for no apparent reason. No reason until now, when it has become my safe haven. Shelter from the storm.

  I wring myself out in the living room, pace, trying to think. What’s my next move? Do I even have a next move? Is this hopeless? Crazy? Stupid? Probably all three.

  But I heard her voice a few hours ago. I heard her cry. I felt what she was feeling and I know, I just know that she’s feeling exactly the same way that I’m feeling. Which is why I’m here. And, cancer lesson seven, I’m not giving up.

  I’m strangely calm. I’m not even upset that she’s kissing the Calvin Klein underwear guy. She has every right. I broke up with her. She moved on. She doesn’t know I’m here.

  I have to tell her. I have to get to her.

  I pick up my pace. I walk from room to room, living room, bedroom, kitchen, dinette, thinking, hoping to find some clue somewhere—

  And then I see it.

  On the nightstand.

  The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Guide.

  The book Melissa gave me last year for my birthday.

  Talk about irony. I’m living the worst-case scenario right now. I’ve got cancer, I’ve fled the hospital in Phoenix to return to the arms of the love of my life, only to find her standing in the window kissing Stan Studmuffin.

  I pick up the book and turn to the first page. A year ago Melissa had signed it and written, “There’ll never be a worst case scenario because I love you forever and there will never be anyone for you but me.”

  I rip out the page.

  I stuff it into my pocket and head back outside to the car, which I’d parked illegally in a red zone, figuring there’s no way the parking police are writing tickets in this weather. Wrong. Flapping under my windshield like a trapped duck is a $125 ticket, soaked and half-shredded. I crumple it up and toss it onto the passenger seat. At some point, my luck’s gotta change, right? Yeah. After fifty years of the Schimmel Touch, tonight’s the night. What are the chances of that?

  Squinting through the driving rain, I creep back to Melissa’s apartment building. Head swiveling, casing the area as if I’m a thief, I pull into her parking garage. I spot her car. My heart’s racing as I get out of the rental car and stick the page of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Guide, the page on which she’s promised her undying love in writing, under her windshield wipers. I pat the page, hustle back into the car, and drive the hell out of there as fast as I dare. As I skid out of her garage, I blink. The rain has stopped and the sky, with the sun sinking, has become a brilliant shade of red and gold. This sudden whipsaw change in the weather doesn’t mean anything, does it? It’s not a sign that my luck is finally turning around, is it? Nah. Just coincidence.

  Now, back to my apartment for the second part of my ingenious plan, which is—

  Well, okay, there is no second part. There really wasn’t a first part. So now I wait. And pace some more. Maybe I’ll throw in a little praying. Then I might try some visualization. Add a dash of positive thinking.

  Ah, shit. Melissa might not even see the page. Or she might see it and toss it in the trash.

  This was a horrible idea. A desperate move by a desperate man. A wild shot in the dark. I should drive back to her apartment and pull the page off her car. I crash through the living room and wrestle my sweatshirt back on. I reach for the door handle and—

  The phone rings.

  I stare at it.

  It really did ring. Right? I want to be sure.

  It rings again.

  I let it ring a third time. Can’t appear too anxious. Have to play this cool even though my heart has flown into my throat and feels like it’s gonna hop right out of my mouth.

  Fourth ring.

  I’m all over the phone.

  I fling it up against my ear, drop
it, catch it, cradle it between my cheek and shoulder and I speak, trying to sound nonchalant, casual, even slightly annoyed as if I expect the caller to be a solicitor.

  “Hello?”

  “So you’re in town, huh?”

  “Yeah.” I switch ears because the receiver is soaked in my sweat. “How did you know?”

  “Take a guess.”

  “You found the note.”

  “Actually, no, I didn’t,” Melissa says. “The guy I’m seeing went to get us something to eat and he found it.”

  “Oh. Shit.”

  “Yeah. He came back upstairs and said, ‘What the fuck is this?’”

  “Awkward.”

  “A little bit.” She holds a beat. “It’s not important.”

  Another beat. Longer. Now my heart feels lodged in my throat like a brick.

  “I want to see you,” Melissa says.

  “I don’t want to force you into anything because if you and he are serious—”

  “Robert, I want to see you.”

  Now I hold, but just long enough to blink away the tears that are welling up. “I want to see you, too, Melissa,” I croak out.

  “I’m coming over.”

  “Well, the thing is, when you see me, you might be—”

  Click. The dial tone hums and then howls for what seems forever and I can’t stop it because I’m nailed to the floor. And then there is a soft knock on the door five minutes later, maybe ten, I can’t be sure, but I open the door and there she is, Melissa, and she looks at me without judgment, she looks at me with simple longing, and then we’re holding on to each other and our tears are flowing and we can’t tell whose are whose because our faces are pressed together.

  “I’ve always loved you,” she murmurs. “Always. I never stopped.”

  “What about your, you know, friend?”

  “As soon as I read the note, I told him it was over.”

  “Just like that?”

  She shrugs. “Kind of. I told him my boyfriend was back.”

  “Back from the dead,” I say.