Larry's Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China with My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant--and Save His Life

by Daniel Asa Rose

  End of saga. Larry starts counting the broken eggshells overflowing the ashtray from the previous diner’s meal.

  “So what happened?” I ask.

  “I told you, he moved in with his mutha! Weren’t you listening?” Larry conceals his annoyance by stretching across the table to spear another watermelon cube.

  “No, I mean, to Tammy.”

  “Overdosed sixteen months later. Died with the needle in her arm. Too bad, sweet kid, just a little confused.” He signals the waitress sidling by with ten soup bowls stacked in her embrace. “Any chance of our getting that Sprite, dear?” he asks with a winning smile.

  “And what happened to Killer?”

  “Serving twelve to fifteen for possession of kidney porn,” he says.

  “Kidney, did you say?”

  “Kiddie, kiddie, get your ears checked, Dan,” Larry advises.

  “Well, anyway, that’s an amazing story,” I say.

  “So am I sorry I took the action I did?” Larry asks rhetorically. “No. I did the right thing. Plus, I dated the sister in Sioux City for like six months. Amazing oral technician. Treated it like a French horn. You think it would be rude to ask our waitress for more pineapple?”

  “You mean watermelon?”

  “Sure, I’m not picky.”

  Just in time the duck is wheeled over, looking like it was pulled out of a pond of brown glaze and had its throat sliced two minutes ago, about the time in the story when the saber was put to the guy’s balls. A man in white flips the duck back side up. He resembles a surgeon, but he’s a duck slicer wearing a surgical mask as he carves so adroitly. Snip, carve, slash. Such a pro you can’t even make out his breath moving through the mouth gauze. Two male waiters prepare the table, but one makes the mistake of reaching to ready Larry for his meal. Larry smacks the man’s hand away and gives him a dirty look.

  And so the meal begins.

  And then the meal’s done. The duck’s hit the spot. Larry has pushed back his chair and is applying Blistex to his lips with a sigh of satisfaction. Without meaning to, Larry has proved to me that he has a better palate than I do—discerning breast skin as having a different flavor from thigh skin. Additionally, he’s used his utensil with great skill—the KFC spork that he apparently plans to carry everywhere, like an all-purpose Swiss Army knife. As for me, I’m still trying to process things.

  “Why are you staring at me like that?” he asks me, whittling at one of the holes in his teeth with the plastic dragon toothpick.

  “It’s just hard to imagine anyone in our family being connected with either the mob or the MM,” I reply. “See, look, now you’ve got me calling them by their initials. I don’t want to call them by their initials. I want to call them by their real blood-and-gore name—”

  “Call them what you wish,” Larry says. “All I can tell you is, time comes, they’re gonna have Burton’s ass on a stick.”

  “Whoa!” I say, pushing my chair back and holding up my arm like a traffic cop. “What are you talking about here?”

  Larry takes off his sunglasses and gives me a Mona Lisa expression that says, I have no expression whatsoever. “Dan, you’re my cousin, and besides that you’re more or less my friend, so I’m going to do you a favor and say, ‘No comment.’”

  I re-strain the muscle in my neck. Now it’s officially a crick. “I thought the fatwa was over, Larry. Larry?”

  “You’re absolutely right, it was over,” he says, taking a tissue that serves as napkin to pat the drops of sweat that constellate his brow. “Then it became under again.”

  “But you said it was done!”

  “If you recall, I didn’t say it was done. What I precisely said was it was behind us, and it is behind us. Specifically, it’s behind Burton, not to get too anatomical.”

  “But, Larry, here we are in China on a whole new page. What did Burton ever do to you that was so unforgiveable you can’t let it go?”

  The Mona Lisa smile means he means business. “Dan, believe me when I tell you, you don’t want to know. Suffice it to say he stabbed me in the back, trying to swindle my mutha.”

  “But if you don’t tell me, how can I judge it for myself?”

  “Who’s asking you to? I know what I know. That’s good enough for me.”

  He spears another watermelon cube and sucks it thoughtfully for a minute. A cab races by the window. More more more more, goes its horn.

  “Okay, bottom-line reason, sparing you the details? He said I owed him money, I said I paid him back. To teach me a lesson, he demanded a mortgage on my mutha’s house, saying it’ll be a learning experience for me, a growth experience. Long story short: My mutha died the worst kind of death, thinking she had lost her house and that Judy and I were left homeless. We were with her day and night at the hospital at the end, and she thought the only reasonable explanation was that she had lost everything to Burton and we had no home to go to. Yes, she was delusional, and we tried to convince her otherwise, but she was set on it, and she died in agony. She died sick with worry, and for this I blame Burton. For this he deserves everything coming to him. That’s why it’s not over.”

  “But Burton didn’t get the house,” I protest.

  “Doesn’t change anything. He tried.”

  “But you’ve got to keep things in balance,” I say. “Didn’t you tell me a couple of days ago that you wouldn’t have been able to arrange the cure for Judy’s epilepsy if it hadn’t been for Burton?”

  “Absolutely. He was an angel.”

  “Then why—”

  “That was then. This is now.”

  I can feel my face doing funny things. It’s as though my eyebrows are trying to convince him out of it by sheer force of contortion. My neck muscle is seizing up. “But the FBI interviewed you last time, when they advised him to go to a motel for two weeks. You’ll be the first person they suspect.”

  Now the Mona Lisa smile deepens a bit, so the toothpick can reach some deeper recess. “Let’s just say I have made arrangements,” he says. “To be dispatched upon my death.”

  “You’re kidding me. Tell me you’re kidding me.”

  “No, that’s the beauty part, because as soon as I’m dead, presto, the plan goes into effect. They can’t come back at me. Pretty sweet, huh? So in a way I hope Burton does find out where I’m going to have my surgery and does manage to squash it, because it’ll be his ass.”

  I’m squinting through the smoke from tables everywhere, blinking much more than I want to. “So I’m assuming this is still a wake-up call rather than a fatwa fatwa, as you said. And Burton will survive it, right?”

  “Yes. Whether he’ll want to, that’s a different question. Put it this way: It’ll be a learning experience for him. Like he prescribed for me. A growth experience. He thinks he rules the world. He’ll find out that he’s not even an ant in the real world.”

  I’ve never heard such contempt packed into a single word as what he does with “ant.” He extracts his toothpick and points it at me.

  “And you know the part I love best, Dan? That he thinks he’s safe. Oh, I relish that. This is my masterwork. I want to be remembered for this.”

  “But, Larry, you don’t think something more moderate might be in order? Like challenge Burton in a court of law?”

  “I’m not interested in paperwork. This is poetic justice. He screwed me up the ass, I’m returning the favor. And in front of his wife. That’s the part Killer especially liked. When Killer heard about my mutha on her deathbed, he said he couldn’t wait to take care of it personally. He was very attached to his mutha, too, apparently. Well, I already alluded to that. She called him ‘Button-Nose.’”

  Larry’s eyes are dancing. Even the thought of the deed makes his eyes sparkle with happy menace. I haven’t seen him this animated since he was ten, doing his favorite trick of speaking Clint Eastwood lines into the fan: “I tried being reasonable, I didn’t like it.”

  I look around the crimson restaurant, aghast. My eyes search out a T
V for distraction. On the screen above the waiters’ station, they’re running a show about pandas. What is it with this country and pandas? Everywhere you look, pandas chewing on celery stalks, pandas batting one another playfully in the balls, pandas in positions that in any other species would be called obscene. They even have an expression for someone with droopy eyes: “panda eyes.” Enough with the pandas already. I make one last effort at denying Larry’s news.

  “You’re gaming me, right? You’re hoping I get back to Burton with this so he freaks out all over again, even though in reality there’s nothing to it.”

  “Oh, I like that version,” Larry says. “That adds a nice little bit of surrealism that even I couldn’t have dreamed up.”

  “But that’s the truth, right? You never really issued the first fatwa against him. You were just blowing smoke to shake him up. You’d never do something like that to your own cousin, or anyone else for that matter. You just said it so he’d get anxious, and that would be punishment enough right there.”

  “Good. Keep your head in the sand. That’s the version we’ll go with.”

  “Because you’ve got the golden heart, even for people who cross you. I mean, you’re someone I’ve known my whole life, you’re not…evil…are you?”

  “No, I like the first scenario. We’ll leave it at that. Why spoil a nice Friday-night duck feast. Good Shabbos, by the way. We ought to make this Peking duck a Friday-night tradition.”

  The denial is over. I’m at one of the next stages of grief—depression—and am surprised at how weak and supplicating my voice comes out. “I really thought the feud was dead.”

  “Not dead. Dormant. But I do have some good news.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ve refined it somewhat. I now want the act recorded on film so it can be posted on YouTube.”

  “Larry, I’ve got to tell you this is making me physically ill.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s less than a grand. Killer gave me a discount—”

  “I don’t mean how much you’ve had to shell out, Larry! I mean the idea of you doing bodily injury to a relative. To anyone!”

  When have I ever seen eyes so merry with deadliness? And then it comes to me. At his father’s funeral. There was a man no one recognized at graveside. He stood right beside the casket, waiting patiently for it to be lowered. And when it was set into the ground, he was the first person to pick up the shovel and perform the traditional rite of casting dirt upon the grave. Only he did it with too much gusto. It’s meant to be symbolic, a reluctant drizzle of soil, but this grunting stranger heaved five, ten, twenty-five shovelfuls: He didn’t stop till his shirt was soaked through. It was only after the ceremony that it occurred to me he must have been someone with whom Sam had had a blood feud. Decades earlier, perhaps, the man must have vowed, “I’ll toss dirt on your grave!”

  Who knows, maybe it was what kept the guy alive all those years. Maybe Sam, too.

  Primitive business, this vengeance thing. People took their restitution seriously back in the shtetl.

  Larry’s watching me, an enigmatic smile playing on his lips. He looks more like Mona Lisa than the original Mona Lisa does, so that I understand something about Leonardo’s model that I didn’t understand before. She’s more than enigmatic. She’s a schemer. Behind that famously mysterious smile, she’s plotting to violate her cousin. And make another cousin an unwitting accessory.

  “So come to think of it, Dan, you’re doing a twofer too, just like me,” he says.

  “How’s that?”

  “You thought you were coming to China just to save one cousin. But if you save me, you save Burton, too, at least for the time being. Two for the price of one….”

  CHAPTER 13

  Dear Florida Power & Light

  Even a hare will bite when it is cornered.

  Sept. 19. Dear Florida Power & Light:

  It has come to my attention that despite my entreaties you still have not turned my power back on in my condo, due to you thought I had not paid my bill. The check is in the mail. Please reinstate the above stated relief henceforth. Sincerely, Larry Feldman.

  Five days have passed. I’m at a new stage of grief—stupefaction—after Larry’s announcement, trying to fathom how I managed to land myself in an episode of The Sopranos in Asia. (This week’s episode: Is Dan saving the life of a monster?) Larry’s dominion over me is total: I’ve been horrified into a state of submission. Between the bombshell that he hasn’t rescinded his fatwa and the realization that I’m now for all intents and purposes an accessory, my mental state is disabled; I’m good for nothing more than being Larry’s manservant. He dictates, I type:

  Sept. 19. Dear Mary:

  Here I am in the hospital with nothing to do but wait. Feel like a prisoner, but even more painful is not being able to communicate with you. Is there any chance of your coming back to me fairly soon? Of course I will pay all your expenses and then some. Please let me know how much money you need and I will have Dan dispatch it. All my love, Larry.

  One thing’s clear: Larry’s in his element, reigning supreme. Divulging his fatwa seems to have freed his creative energies, which are further fueled by infusions of imitation Do-Si-Do peanut butter sandwich cookies I managed to find in a local grocery store. His blood pressure is down to 190 over 120 and his mood bullish, his body weak but his drive ascendant. In his box-turtle shades and Businessman’s Running Shoes, conducting business through me from atop his thin-as-silk hospital sheets, he’s the ayatollah of the ninth floor. Since he ordered the A/C to be shut down, I’m wilting in the heat of central China’s late-September furnace, so disenfranchised I’m not even allowed to correct his grammar.

  Sept. 20. Dear Netflix:

  You must have me mixed up with another Larry Feldman. I sent back all boxed sets of “Dirty Harry” eight or ten months ago. If you insist on charging me for someone else’s blunder, I will have no choice but to desist being a customer of yours and/or institute legal recrimination with no ado.

  Sept. 21. Dear Nuvention Clearing House:

  Thank you for your encouraging words. I do in fact have a new invention and one I think you can market to great advantage. Enclosed you will find the business plan for my latest proposal, as well as a personal check to cover the cost of registration. It is my belief that Fortune Rubbers, novelty condoms printed with Chinese cookie-style fortunes, could really strike pay dirt with the gay demographic as well as normal people.

  Sometimes I can’t even tell which letters I’m writing for him and which I’m inventing, for sanity’s sake. Other times I forget where I am, sweating in the room where I’ve again risked life and limb to jury-rig extra sheets in the windows against the glare of smogshine that hurts his eyes. In the dim light punctuated by the Arabic gutturals from Al Jazeera that susurrate night and day, I muddle my Middle East geography and half think I’m hiding out with the Taliban in some Afghani cave. Only the periodic flocking of Chinese nurse-groupies relieves the desert mirage. (“Lar-ry! Lar-ry!” they chant when he makes an appearance in the hallway to hobble to the weight scale. He flashes them a V like Winston Churchill in his dotage.) That and the regular appearance of the KFC man, who has a double row of teeth like the keyboard of a harpsichord and who performs a high five with the patient each time he delivers a catered meal of Double Crunch with Honey BBQ sauce.

  Artie to Larry: “Professor, look, both you same size now!”

  Larry to Artie: “Yes, and that’s for the first time since my bar mitzvah, I believe. Look at Dan, he’s so skinny his shorts are falling off his hips.”

  Or did I make that up? Daydreaming has become my only escape, a life-saving pressure valve that allows my brain to, among other things, revert to a time when the whole clan got along: Sam passing out silver dollars, Little Larry showing off his collection of switchblades, Burton patting him on the head, saying, “Aww, isn’t that cute.”

  Sept. 23. Dear Florida Power & Light:

  Know by these presents tha
t I had 45 pounds of expensive beluga caviar in my freezer. If even one ounce of it is ruined due to you shut off the juice, this is to inform that I intend to seek financial relief in the amount of no less than $85,000.

  Meanwhile the personal fusion between us, master and man, no longer even frightens me. I just accept it. That we’re indistinguishable from each other, one creature with borderline psychopathic tendencies, is accepted without qualm by the cashier’s office downstairs whenever I go to make a deposit of Larry’s money into his ever-ravenous account. When I borrow his camera’s memory card to back up his pictures into my camera, as he instructs, it feels like I’m being force-fed a brain implant. Entering his e-mail account to do his correspondence, I feel like I’m leaping into Larry’s body, like Patrick Swayze using Whoopi’s in Ghost. Is the merger almost done? Huwwo, have I really adopted his speech impediment as my own? I’m his lackey, what he might inexcusably call his personal coolie, captive to the mini-sagas that I can no longer orchestrate and which are more than ever like papal bulls, standing fully formed on their own outside the normal rules of discourse.

  LARRY ON H IS O WN E THNIC G ROUP

  Rarely met a Jew I didn’t respect. I didn’t say like, I said respect. Certain family members excepted. Oh, and except in Vegas, which is populated mostly by irrespectable Jews and irrespectable Italians, bofe wearing Hawaiian shirts.

  LARRY ON S OLVING THE M IDDLE E AST C RISIS

  While we’re on the subject, I may as well give you my suggestion for achieving peace in the Middle East. If I were the negotiator, first thing I’d do would be greatly expand the city of Jerusalem. Ninety percent of the old city goes to the Jews. Ninety percent of the new city goes to the Palestinians. The new stuff can be a pile of dirt, they just need to claim some land, and the Israelis should be responsible for developing it for them. They want a homeland, let’s create it for them. It’s called Enlarging the Pie.