Joey hit a horun in his Little League game and as he ran around the bases I heard myself trying to yell “Attaboy, Joee!” but it came out as a soft croak and nobody heard me but me.
On a hot summer day during my morning walk, I gave up and sat down on the curb and started to sob.
I was sweating like a pig. Bugs and mosquitoes were attacking the tube in my throat. I was having trouble breathing. My feet and legs ached and cramped. I was shaking. I felt like I was going to throw up. My heart felt like it was going to explode. Every centimeter of me craved—desperately craved—a cigarette and a cold beer, two cold beers, three cold beers and a shot of tequila and …
I sat there and sobbed, the tears hitting the pavement in front of me.
And suddenly, inside my own head, I heard myself saying, “Please, God, help me. I can’t do this anymore without you.”
I knew as I heard myself saying it that this was the first time I had spoken to God since I was a boy on Lorain Avenue.
As I sat there, I prayed, really prayed for God’s help. I said the Our Father and the Hail Mary and a Glory Be and then I said them over and over, begging God to help me overcome my addictions.
I begged God to keep me alive so I could help my little boys grow up. And I made God a promise. I promised Him that if He helped me through my misery, I would do everything in the time remaining to me to help others to stop smoking.
I sat there staring at the ground and praying a long time that day and when I got up I felt a renewal of strength.
I wasn’t shaking anymore. My heart beat normally. The bugs and mosquitoes had eased off my trach.
I still craved the cigarette and the cold beers and the shot of tequila … but I’d asked for God’s help, not a miracle.
We started going to church regularly. We picked the parish nearest us—Holy Angels—and took all the boys with us each Sunday.
I still couldn’t speak, of course, and I could tell from their looks that our fellow parishioners knew who I was.
I knew how oddly it must have struck some of them: the author of Basic Instinct and Showgirls holding hands with his children and praying each Sunday. Wasn’t this the same guy who’d told teenagers to sneak into that X-rated movie?
Naomi went to Holy Communion each Sunday but I didn’t.
I viewed God as a newfound friend. I didn’t want to be presumptuous. I didn’t want Him to think I was trying to suck up to Him.
On my walks—I was walking three miles a day now—I was praying throughout, asking God to show me the way, asking for His help.
I started doing what I’d heard Johnny Cash did to begin each day.
First I said, “Good morning, God.”
Then I said, “Praise the Lord!”
At home, we taught the boys catechism and prayed with them before they fell asleep.
One Sunday in church, as Naomi went to Holy Communion with Luke in her arms, I got up behind her and went to Holy Communion, too … the first time since I was a schoolboy at St. Emeric’s.
“Body of Christ, Joe,” Father Bob Stec said, giving me the Host, and I put the Host in my mouth and swallowed it with my ravaged throat.
I felt an inner glow all of that day and I felt God’s love surrounding me.
A dark and deeply cynical voice from a cold and dark place inside me said, “Now that you’ve found God in Cleveland, will you find Elvész Prezli alive here, too?”
Marshall Strome took my trach out and my new voice sounded weaker and higher and thinner than Brando’s in The Godfather.
If we got lucky, Dr. Strome said, my voice would sound louder and lower over time.
The bar I’d liked so much, the Coyote Moon Café, the place where Naomi and I had discussed death and dying before we’d moved here … burned to the ground.
I was sure God had burned it down just for me.
Dr. Strome had been looking at my throat every week. Everything had looked good to him.
Suddenly, three months after the surgery, he saw something in my throat he didn’t like. He thought it was another growth.
I needed to have surgery again immediately.
I was at peace this time. I hugged and kissed the boys the night before and made love with Naomi.
I prayed and felt at peace, my fate in God’s hands.
I told Steve and Suzi not to fly out again … but to lead their lives.
As I was wheeled into the operating room, I heard the Supremes blasting again.
It made me smile. I’d never much liked the Supremes.
I fell asleep saying the Our Father and thinking about making love on the beach on Maui with Naomi.
It wasn’t a new cancerous growth. It wasn’t a growth at all. It was granulated tissue from the previous surgery.
I was fein. Marshall Strome didn’t even have to tell me. I knew the moment I saw his face.
I was cancer-free.
· · ·
“You’re not smoking or drinking, are you?” Dr. Strome said.
“No, sir,” I said. “If you remember, I made you a promise.”
“I remember very well.” He smiled.
This occurred to me: Was it possible that I had conjured God because an afterlife had suddenly become a very important concern to me? Was my ego too large to make peace with an afterlife of rot and worms? Was I the nearly satiric evidence of “foxhole religion”?
I had the feeling that I didn’t know this sober, clear-eyed, and lucid person that I had become.
I had the feeling that I had to get to know myself again.
I had this thought, too:
I started flooding my brain with nicotine and tobacco when I was twelve … and I started flooding my brain with alcohol when I was fourteen …
Was it possible that I had never gotten to know the real me?
Was it possible that I had hidden the real me from myself with nicotine and tobacco and alcohol?
Was I now, finally, pushing sixty, meeting the real me for the first time?
Sometimes … in the middle of a five-mile walk …
I had the odd feeling that I had died and that I was now living someone else’s life.
A friend that I hadn’t seen for years bumped into me on the street and looked right through me.
I realized he didn’t recognize me. I’d cut my hair and lost almost fifty pounds and I was wearing an Indians Chief Wahoo baseball cap like everybody else in Cleveland, even bank robbers caught on videotape.
I thought to myself: If you don’t look like you and talk like you and smoke like you and drink like you … then who are you?
While we were no longer in Hollywood, we saw that some people here in Bainbridge took movies as seriously as some people in Hollywood.
After the first screening of the new Star Wars movie at Chagrin Cinemas, police were called because a group of filmgoers gathered in the parking lot and staged a mini-protest. They thought the movie was so bad that they wanted their money back.
· · ·
We drove down to Mansfield one day and visited Looey Bromfield’s Malabar Farm. The boys were bored and wanted to hurry and get a sub sangwich at Mansfield’s “world-famous” Leaning Tower.
But I lingered over Looey’s old Royal typewriter, the one he’d written all those books and scripts on. It still looked in fine shape, I reflected bitterly to myself, much better shape than all the new Olivetti Lettera manual typewriters I had in my closet.
I said to Naomi, “Where’s Oh Jesus Hill?”
Naomi smiled and said, “Oh, Jesus, I don’t know.”
The Indians traded or got rid of the good players who had made them pennant contenders for so many years. Now that I was back home, the Indians stunk again just like they’d stunk through all the years when I’d lived here and lived and died by them.
I found a new bar that became my favorite—out on a two-lane blacktop road in Amish country … nothing but a neon sign that said “Skip’s” on a vacant lot. The building had been razed.
The gr
ip around my throat was still there—but it didn’t feel like iron anymore … it was rubber.
We found a beach spot on Lake Erie that we liked a lot and that was pollution-free.
I sat there on the sand bare-chested in a bathing suit, watching my boys frolic in the water with Naomi. I felt old.
I thought of the carefree life we had led on Maui … before we had the responsibility of children and before I had cancer … when we jumped the riptides together and I couldn’t wait to get back to the beach to sit at the little bar with the attached roof where I could smoke a cigarette and have a frozen Seabreeze.
Lake Erie wasn’t Maui. There were no riptides here and no thatched roofs and no cigarettes and near-frozen Seabreezes.
But Naomi was still here, playing with the little boys I loved so much, and when they came back from the water with the shells and stones they’d collected for me … that made me feel younger.
My voice was better. It had come off its high perch into down-low registers. I thought that on my good days I sounded like Louis Armstrong on his bad ones.
Naomi said I sometimes sounded like Kristofferson, sometimes maybe even Bogart.
Still, my official medical condition was “day to day.”
I was, “for the moment,” cancer-free. I hadn’t even reached my two-years-without-recurrence mark—viewed by cancer survivors as reaching first base.
Marshall Strome also said, “This is a horrible disease. You can have a lump appear on your neck tomorrow and in six months you’ll be dead.”
I dreamed I was smoking again. It tasted and felt sensational. Cigarette in hand, I was asking where I could buy a bottle of Porfidio tequila.
But I was feeling somewhat better and had relatively fewer addiction attacks.
Sometimes I’d pass a bar and feel deep pangs and once when that happened, on a snowy day, watching a fireplace inside and a group of people with drinks in their hands … I felt tears in my eyes.
Walking through a smoking area at Jacobs Field, I was first struck by the wretchedness of the stink … but then, almost against my will, I took a big breath and breathed all the smoke in and it felt … orgasmic.
I walked five miles now even in the dead of Ohio winter, when the wind-chill was eight below. I walked bundled up in many layers, in heavy hiking boots. I carried the walking stick Naomi had made for me on Maui so I wouldn’t slip in the ice and snow.
I looked like the Abominable Snowman. I never missed a day.
In church one Sunday, Father Stec stopped next to me on his way from the altar and said, “Do you know what this means? This means that the best is yet to come. The best part of your life is still ahead of you!”
He said it out of the blue, as though we’d been having a conversation … but he and I hadn’t … unless he’d somehow overheard a part of my ongoing conversation with God.
We put four flags up in front of our house for the Fourth of July.
We counted three hundred flags on the houses in a one-mile proximity to us.
I told Naomi we were real Americans now in the real America. We didn’t smoke or drink. We went to church. We prayed with our kids each night. We had Old Glory in front of our house. And we lived and died by the Cleveland Indians and by Little League baseball.
On the night of the Fourth, we went to Solon High School’s football field and watched the fireworks from our lawn chairs. We took our ball caps off as we sang the national anthem. We were wearing Old Navy Old Glory T-shirts. On the way back home we stopped at McDonhole and bought the boys Happy Meals.
· · ·
Every night after dinner, I took Naomi and the boys down to Dairy Queen for vanilla cones with jimmies on them.
No, it wasn’t as good as a little cognac or amaretto after dinner.
But it was … pretty damn good!
And it was a lot of fun, sitting there with ice cream all over us, laughing, enjoying the summer night. If we got lucky, we saw some heat lightning on the way home.
We bought our vegetables from a farmer down the street who put his fresh corn and squash and eggplant and tomatoes and peppers into a shed … and we stuffed the cost into an envelope that went into a box.
It was definitely not a Hollywood way to do business: the honor system.
I dreamed that Father John Mundweil and I were at the Debrecen Hungarian Restaurant on Lorain Avenue, almost across the street from where I had grown up.
We were both adults. We were sitting at a table laughing, smoking, and drinking glasses of red Hungarian bull’s blood wine.
Father John knocked the cigarette out of my mouth and the glass of bull’s blood out of my hand and he said angrily:
“What’s the matter with you? Didn’t you get the message that God gave me to give to Father Stec to give you?”
Sometimes Naomi and I went on adventures to the many antique stores near us.
I found a tin container from the Num Num Potato Chip factory.
Naomi found a dolly just like the dolly she had when she was a little girl.
I found an old Rocky Colavito card.
Naomi found a crystal Blessed Virgin Mary statue.
I found a souvenir knife from Niagara Falls, the same kind of souvenir knife with a Mountie on it that my father bought me when we visited Niagara Falls.
Except for Gerry Messerman and his wife, Gale, and Naomi’s family, we saw few people. I couldn’t talk very well. I couldn’t handle being in a setting where people smoked and drank. My life, I realized, bored people. Nobody wanted to hear about cancer. Nobody wanted to go through the nightmares of withdrawal. Nobody wanted to hear about God.
On the local Bainbridge radio station run by golden agers and high school kids, I heard “I’ll Remember You” and remembered Guy singing it at our wedding. I suddenly missed Guy McElwaine’s presence in my life so painfully that it was as though I’d cut into a wound.
George W. Bush was quoted as saying he believed in “prayer and exercise.”
A lifelong liberal Democrat, I agreed with President Bush wholeheartedly. I, too, believed in prayer and exercise.
I had a new line now to replace the old one I had used whenever something went wrong: Hey, it ain’t the refugee camps!
Hey, it ain’t cancer!
John Law fell off the top of a shopping cart onto the hard cement of a parking lot … smashing his head on the pavement with a sickening “thunk” which Naomi and I will never forget. We rushed him to a hospital only a block away. He was fein.
Joey fell headfirst off his bicycle onto the blacktop at the end of our driveway without a helmet. His eyes were black and blue and so was much of his body. We took him to the hospital. He was fein.
Steve fell between first and second base during a softball game in Portland, Oregon. He suffered a badly broken leg, needed major surgery, and screws put into a bone. For a while he was in a wheelchair and then on crutches and then he limped … and then he was fein.
Suzi was sideswiped by a speeding driver in Mill Valley, California. She was seriously hurt. She had to go through extensive physical therapy … and she was fein.
God is good!
It seemed sort of perfect that Bainbridge Township, where we lived, was part of a village called Chagrin Falls … a place where chagrin fell … so very far away now from Point Doom.
I dreamed I was smoking again. I felt horrible in my dream. I felt like I’d betrayed myself and Naomi and the boys and Steve and Suzi.
Eighteen months after my surgery, keeping my promise to God, I wrote an article for the Op-Ed section of the New York Times revealing that I had throat cancer and begging Hollywood not to make movies showing smoking on-screen.
I took the blame for the many smoking scenes I had written in my movies.
I did the Today show and CNN’s Paula Zahn and, later, Hardball with Chris Matthews talking about Hollywood’s moral responsibility not to show smoking on-screen.
That interview I did for the Today show was the first interview I’d ever done s
tone-cold sober.
I said a prayer before I went on—instead of slugging from an Evian bottle filled with gin.
The prayer worked. I felt calm and articulate.
While I was speaking to Paula Zahn, a crawl at the bottom of the screen said, “Has throat cancer … speaks with difficulty” so people wouldn’t think there was something wrong with their TV sets.
“Smoking was an integral part of many of my screenplays because I was a militant smoker,” I wrote in the New York Times. “I have been an accomplice to the murders of untold numbers of human beings. …
So I say to my colleagues in Hollywood: What we are doing by showing larger-than-life movie stars smoking on-screen is glamorizing smoking. What we are doing by glamorizing smoking is unconscionable.
Hollywood films have long championed civil rights and gay rights and commonly call for an end to racism and intolerance. Hollywood films espouse a belief in goodness and redemption. Yet we are the advertising agency and sales force for an industry that kills nearly ten thousand people daily.
A cigarette in the hands of a Hollywood star on-screen is a gun aimed at a twelve- or fourteen-year old. The gun will go off when that kid is an adult.
We in Hollywood know the gun will go off, yet we hide behind the smoke screen of phrases like “creative freedom” and “artistic expression.” Those lofty words are lies designed, at best, to obscure laziness.
I know. I have told those lies. The truth is that there are a thousand better and more original ways to reveal a character’s personality.
Screenwriters know, too, that some movie stars are more likely to play a part if they can smoke—because they are so addicted to smoking that they have difficulty stopping even during the shooting of a scene. The screenwriter writing smoking scenes for the smoking star is part of a vicious and deadly circle.
My hands are bloody; so are Hollywood’s. My cancer has caused me to attempt to cleanse mine. I don’t wish my fate upon anyone in Hollywood, but I beg that Hollywood stop imposing it upon millions of others.
The Plain Dealer reprinted my New York Times article and a lot of people came up to me in church and whispered, “I’m praying for you.”
Hollywood Animal Page 88