The Heart Does Not Grow Back

by Fred Venturini

  All of this resulted in the tapings of season two getting as much coverage and buzz as the episodes themselves. The tapings were like nested dolls from which the smaller, more concentrated version of reality would emerge—heavily edited, of course.

  * * *

  In the first taping of the second season, Patrick Debrobander, an eight-year-old burn victim, was the star.

  Patrick had no parents. He lived in an orphanage in the desolate, corn-fed state of Iowa. One of the boys at the orphanage was a couple years older and was a known bed wetter and animal torturer, leaving him just one merit badge short of the serial-killer trifecta. He earned it on a Friday in September, rolling up Patrick in a blanket and setting it on fire. He called the game “human log” and they found him putting a marshmallow on the end of a coat hanger while Patrick thrashed and screamed to escape the flaming blanket.

  Third-degree burns on his arms, straight to the bone. Second-degree most everywhere else. Barely a patch to harvest a skin graft to get his cheeks one bit closer to flesh-toned. His blue eyes twinkled in a mess of pink and red, his nose, luckily, had shape, but no flesh. His hair, scalp, forehead, and eyebrows were all fine, making him the perfect makeover candidate for our show. Obviously. I wouldn’t have met the boy if the story editors couldn’t deliver a happy ending.

  Dr. Reynolds tested my ability to regrow skin by removing a patch on top of my thigh. In three days, it returned, no scars, just a barely visible line where the incision was made. “You scar,” he had told me, “but barely. It’s imperceptible.”

  This episode would definitely need a “Warning: Graphic Content” voiceover after every commercial break. Seeing Dr. Reynolds pull out a pink glop from my guts, as he had in past surgeries, looked neat compared to this massacre. Two surgical teams worked, my skin getting yanked off in big patches still orange from iodine, then getting carried to another surgical room, where they shaped Patrick back into a flesh-colored human being.

  Considering the amount of blood and gristle that was spilled, the outcome startled even me. He had suture lines and the shape of his lower face wasn’t quite right, but the world could be his again. He smiled and hugged me at the end. This hug took place a month after surgery, after I had recovered in a sterile environment, protected from the media, while my skin slowly crawled and expanded over craters of itching rawness, making me new again.

  After I checked out, Doc Venhaus insisted on driving me home in his rented Chevy Cobalt. Rae had gone silent. I could do nothing but wait. For once, I knew what Hollie felt like. But Doc knew something about Rae and Harold, and the more I hammered him for information, the more he kept his distance during the tapings of the surgeries.

  “So what’s your complaint of the day?” I asked him.

  “Did you tell them about your healing timeframe, compared to your healing in my office when you first met me? Not that it matters. I can’t be so stupid as to think someone as sharp as Reynolds hasn’t noticed.”

  “I think he’s noticed. He just doesn’t care. Without me there’s no show, and he lives for the show.”

  “So you know. You just don’t care.”

  “What’s your family think of you being attached to my hip in L.A. for six months?” I asked.

  He turned up the radio and we didn’t talk again until he pulled up at the curb in front of my apartment.

  “Why did you bring me out here, Dale? Did you think I’m another person you need to save?”

  “If you aren’t, then why the hell are you here?”

  “Same as you. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You left and didn’t tell me where you were going, so I didn’t have any information to give them when they finally came on strong.”

  “They?”

  “It seems that Hayes is a proper representative of ‘they’ in this affair. The surveillance was keyed in on me at the time, like I was the one laying the foundation of some massive hoax. It’s a lucky break for you it was that way, otherwise they probably would have sniffed out your plans to come out here with your friend.”

  “You would have told them I was out here, if you knew. Right?”

  “You’re goddamn right,” he said. “Anything they had planned is better than this carnival you built out here. They would have treated you better than you’re treating yourself. Better than they treated me.”

  “Which is how?”

  “Hostile. Evasive. Even though I wasn’t either myself. I gave them everything on you, every piece of data I had. Detailed statements about my evaluations of you. I signed affidavits. I passed lie detectors.”

  “And they still wrecked you,” I said.

  “First, they took my license because I gave you prescription lidocaine with no legitimate medical purpose.”

  “That’s bullshit. How did they even know?”

  “Because I told them in a statement. But don’t worry, if it wasn’t that, there’s only a thousand other reasons they can conjure out of thin air to revoke a medical license. Without the license, my practice was quite obviously gone. My income. Then our credit cards went dry. My bank accounts were frozen. My house descended into foreclosure. Lucille tried, and wanted to stay, but I was damaged goods. The divorce was my idea, to keep her from circling the drain with me. Samantha went to live with her mother.”

  “So what did you do after all that?”

  “Government aid, if you can believe it. They gave me an apartment and a monthly stipend. All I had to do was sit by the phone and wait for you to call, and when you did, I had to cooperate.”

  “So you’re spying on me right now?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And I’m supposed to put pressure in the right spots because you trust me. But I say fuck ‘them,’ and fuck Hayes. When I became a doctor, I took an oath and I’m going to keep it for once. You’ll get nothing but the truth from me. They can’t do anything more to me than they already have.”

  “Sounds like you do need saving,” I said.

  “You more than me, Dale. Did you know surgery causes depression? Have you been given psych evaluations?”

  As a matter of fact, I had. Weekly. A psychologist traveled with us. I had a clean bill of mental health, proof positive that the psychologist was either incompetent or knew where his bread was buttered. Like the team doctor on a pro football team, the goal is to keep the star player in the game.

  “You seem to be the only one who cares about my psyche. Let’s hope it’s in good working order. I need to figure out a way to get the heat off of you, and I’m beginning to think there’s no clean way out of this for me. Not without a toe tag. And Rae Stillson—she was out here, you know. She had to ask me something but never got around to it. How’s her husband doing? Do you still treat him?”

  “Not anymore,” Venhaus said. “He’s dying.”

  * * *

  Episode two was the first living-donor, full-leg transplant in history. A Spanish doctor had performed the first full-leg transplant just a few years before. But living donors weren’t apt to give up their leg—and no one insane enough to want to would get past a psych consult. Luckily for me, the playing field was rigged in my favor.

  Chop-chop.

  Jack Bryson ran a family farm of three generations. He got his leg caught in a hay bailer. The hay bailer won. The story editors played up his desire to play baseball with his young son one day. “I can’t show him my fastball from a wheelchair,” Jack tearfully confessed to the camera. “I can’t train him to work his great grandfather’s farm. My boy needs all of me.”

  Jack, like most people, figured losing a limb was a guarantee he’d never be the same. He didn’t know the full capability of modern prosthetics. However, for the purposes of the show, we never drove this point home, heightening the drama of Jack will never be the same without the Samaritan.

  I assumed Jack’s marriage wasn’t in good shape because we didn’t see much of the wife during the taping and she was all but in
visible in the episode, save for a few testimonial comments. But the boy was cute, and it was nice to see a boy who wasn’t burned up after Patrick Debrobander’s heart-wrenching ordeal in the first episode, so this one got slotted into week two even though everyone thought Farmer Jack was a colossal asshole who thought God owed him a leg. But there weren’t many legless, tough-luck stories with kids out there, so Jack got his wish in the form of my right leg.

  My leg’s progress was a daily news bite. The anchors gave a quick update, as if my leg was a rare, just-birthed zoo animal. Then they’d go off script, sharing synonyms of the word “unbelievable” while shaking their heads.

  I had a whole, functioning leg back in three weeks. The world was amazed, but I was concerned, since I was reasonably sure that if I’d lost a leg in high school, I would have had it back in half the time.

  After episode two was finished taping, I had enough of a gap to take a little break. Turns out, chopping my leg off entailed a pretty straightforward recovery. Mack and I ate dinner at a trendy steakhouse, because that’s where we always ate now. Sometimes I’d even get a few photographers outside, waiting for me and Mack to hit the sidewalks. Not many. Usually because I answered their questions politely and didn’t mind if they took my picture. Mack hammed it up for them most of the time. We weren’t difficult.

  Tracy hated this. Hayes didn’t mind, since I never broke his prescribed protocol, refusing to comment on the subjects he was concerned about. I said awkward things to the paparazzi. Mack was no better. On addressing the rumor that I was gay: “Only on Sundays,” I said. “And Arbor Day,” Mack added. “The best day to bury the old root.” The quote ran. No one paid much attention. No sponsors threatened to pull their ads. I could have gone all Courtney Love batshit and no one would have budged. Really, Coca-Cola, you going to pull your support of a guy who donates organs? Of a show that saves lives?

  The paparazzi get a bad rap. They’re rather simple, hounds that smell fear. They feast on it. They thirst for lies. They hope for cowardice and denial. They never got it from us. So we went about our business, and Tracy scrambled to keep us away from open mikes, interviews, and cameras.

  Over a steak that cost more than one of my old Wal-Mart trips, Mack asked if I was holding up okay.

  “Why do you continue to worry?” I said. “If I don’t hold up, you’re my lone heir. How’s that.”

  “Relax. It’s just that I noticed something.”

  “The waitress has tippable titties?”

  “Yes. And also something else. Heart transplants. You never do them.”

  I couldn’t remember if I ever told him anything about my Internet research on my condition. He was that kind of friend—I could have a secret but be comfortable enough to tell him, and then later forget that I told him. From what I could tell, I had vascular regeneration, the same as starfish and salamanders and other creatures with similar healing abilities. The healing was heart-based, the one organ those creatures could not regenerate.

  “They never approach me with them,” I said.

  “That’s the weird thing I’m noticing. It’s a pretty frequent transplant operation. People writing in, maybe half of them are begging for a heart. Yet they never even consider it.”

  “I wonder why,” I said, but I already knew the answer.

  * * *

  The taping of the third episode dissolved into catastrophe, all caught on film. In any other world, it was an episode that would never air, but the coverage was so thorough on the tapings themselves, they canned and aired an episode that showed everything in the best possible light. It didn’t matter. Everyone would know the details of this episode before it even aired thanks to the reliable publicity of disaster.

  Marvin Randle was going to die without a bone-marrow transplant. He was forty, a country boy from Tennessee, the kind of guy who had a white fossil ring in every pair of pants from where tobacco tins ground into his pocket. He wasn’t television material, with black hair that looked wet all the time, greasy stubble sprouting unevenly on his face, shirts with holes—not intentional holes, like the trendy stores have, but unintentional ones, the salt of his sweat eating through the fabric over the years, decomposition taking place at glacial speed. Yet he wasn’t poor and he wasn’t stupid, and he didn’t want to die.

  He came from a big, loving family. I met most of them during the taping. His brothers. His one sister. His cousins. His father, Carl. All of them had the welcoming slur of a Southern accent. They offered to feed me all the time. They treated me not like a savior or a celebrity, but as a family member. “I hope my boys learn something from your visit, Mr. Sampson,” Carl said. “They need your heart.”

  I assured him that they most certainly did not need my heart, and it was lucky for them that they didn’t. He scratched the bald spot on the top of his head, which was glazed with sweat, making the gray curls that surrounded it cling to his scalp at awkward angles. “One of them does,” he added.

  The one he was referring to was the ostracized son, Jonathan—Marvin’s brother. He was forty-five with two full-grown sons of his own. The entire family had all taken a compatibility test to see if their marrow could save Marvin’s life, and of all the cousins and nephews and brothers and sisters, one lone compatible donor was found by the testing. Jonathan.

  After the initial “praise Jesus” had passed, Jonathan decided he wasn’t going to go through with the donation. To call it a rift is an understatement—the fractures of hurt and fear left Jonathan alone to stew in his healthy marrow. By ignoring him, the family hoped he would reconsider his position. The expulsion of Jonathan was supported by his own two sons. I spoke to both of them, and neither could contain their disgust for their father.

  “Uncle Marvin taught me how to fish,” one of them said. “My father isn’t just killing his brother, he’s killing a good person.”

  Killing. In America, the organ-donation system is based on altruism. Nothing can be forced. Yet here was a man being accused by his own blood of murder, not through activity, but through inactivity. I knew a little something about inactivity.

  As Marvin neared death, a lawsuit followed, hoping the court would force Jonathan into donation. They didn’t have a legal case, save for embarrassing Jonathan and relying on the power and pity of a judge. The ploy worked, in roundabout fashion. The judge ruled in favor of Jonathan. His body, his rights. Altruism could not be forced. Yet the judge said, “You have legal defense but no moral defense. Your family’s opinion of you is justified. I find the act disgusting and you are now the very definition of a Bad Samaritan.”

  A beat reporter for the local paper got the quote into the Tennessean. And that one quote turned it into a national story, because it was just so damn clever to say “Bad Samaritan” in news bites while The Samaritan had just come off a hot first season.

  Once it hit the wires and Tracy and her gang got hold of the story, I was on a plane to Tennessee to tape an episode. The angle was for me to save Marvin’s life, and with the pressure of donation out of the way thanks to my intervention, we could reunite the family as Jonathan learns the error of his ways. Or pretends that he does, at least. Tracy was saying things like “two time slots, season finale, and in the long run, we’ll end up syndicated as fuck.” Everyone smelled jackpot. I didn’t.

  Despite being classified as a “universal donor,” my antigen count did not match Marvin’s for bone marrow, just like the rest of his family. This was a Samaritan first that concerned our medical team. I chalked it up to my slowly fading gifts. Healing slows, antigens start fucking everyone. I figured the endgame was that something didn’t grow back and I’d be stuck either dead or crippled.

  Just like the rest of Marvin’s family, I sat around their dinner table eating casseroles and trading anecdotes, the cameras rolling, getting their background footage for an episode that was either going to be a dud or not get made because I couldn’t jump to the surgical rescue.

  Tracy’s idea to salvage the taping was for me and J
onathan to have a sit-down talk. In this talk, I would relay to him the gift of giving, of saving people, what it felt like, how it changed me, and it would inspire him to change his mind. My legend would grow. And it would be a cheap episode without the need for surgery.

  Jonathan agreed to the sit-down. Seems that for guys, television has the same allure as unprotected sex and cold beer—hard to say no, even if it’s bad for you.

  We went to his home. His sons were gone. A stuffed bass was on one wall, a deer head on the other. Jonathan’s wife had been dead a long time, but her pictures were on tables and on the entertainment center, which had a dinosaur of a television that sat on the floor and had an actual dial, with curved glass that offered black reflections of the crew’s lighting and sound equipment and cameras. Chairs were not set up; there was just the sofa and a recliner. Just two guys having a talk, according to Tracy.

  I was supposed to break the news I wasn’t a match, news that Jonathan already knew, but we would cut up the footage for dramatic effect. So I was told.

  I stood outside Jonathan’s house, waiting for the crew to finish up their preparations. Tracy kept trying to give me talking points. “Make it real to him. Make him know that you’ve seen death and he doesn’t want to see his brother dead. But don’t badger him.”