Makeup to Breakup

by Sloman, Larry

  I was so angry at God. How could he do this to a person who was so spiritual and helped so many people with their own problems with sobriety? Then I just got angry in general. I was angry at Gigi for getting it. I thought about the fact that she smoked cigarettes, the thing that killed my mother. Maybe the cigarettes caused this.

  “How could you get cancer? Now you’re gonna die and leave me alone,” I said to her. I was such an asshole.

  Ever since my grandmother took that diabetic stroke in front of me, I had no heart for dealing with people who were sick. But God forbid you don’t take care of me when I’m sick: I’ll kill you. I was that way with Lydia, Deb, and Gigi too. If they got sick, it was “Take a fucking aspirin, have a bowl of soup, see you later.”

  But this time, besides being angry, I was really, really scared. I hadn’t been that scared since I had gotten carjacked and I was sitting alone in my apartment. I just couldn’t believe I was going to lose my wife at such an early age.

  Gigi’s men and women friends from her 12-step program were much more supportive than I was. They were calling morning, noon, and night. I always had issues with the whole 12-step thing, but if that’s what it took to get Gigi off drugs and drinking, then God bl,” Ace said. “Td ever ess her. But the way they rallied around her gave me a whole new respect for them.

  One day I came home from the gym and Gigi was talking with a friend. I figured they were discussing her cancer, so I went upstairs and took a shower. I was lying naked on the bed afterward and unconsciously checking myself, because if you wore spandex as much as I did you would notice things that don’t belong there. So I felt my pecs and they were fine, but when I passed the towel over my left nipple, I saw stars. It felt like someone had popped a nail into it. Then I started messing with it and I felt a small lump behind the nipple.

  Of course, my first paranoid thought was that I had cancer. Cancer was on our minds 24/7 then. But men don’t get breast cancer, so I figured I had lifted weights at the gym and strained something. It was probably a cyst.

  The next day, Gigi was scheduled to consult with Dr. Gae Rodke—a well-respected doctor in Manhattan—about her cancer, so she suggested I come along with her. Gigi went in and I was waiting when the nurse came over to me.

  “Could you come in? The doctor wants to see you, too,” she said.

  I went back and Dr. Rodke explained to me what tests she wanted to do on Gigi. She had wonderful blue eyes and a reassuring smile and she really made me feel that everything was going to be okay with Gigi. Then she said, “Your wife mentioned that you have something on your breast. Would you mind if I look at it while you’re here?”

  I took my shirt off and she started futzing around with the nipple.

  “Hmmm. Let me do something,” she said.

  She rubbed some lubricant on my left breast and did a quick sonogram.

  “If you were my husband, I would send you to see my colleague Dr. Alex Swistel. He’s over at Cornell, and he’s a wonderful doctor. Let me call over and make sure he can see you right away.”

  Peter, what is she telling you? There must be something wrong here. She’s sending you to see a heavy doctor, you get the message?

  “I could come back . . .”

  “Now, Peter,” she said. She got Swistel’s office on the phone and told them that she had a VIP patient and she’d like it if Alex could see me immediately.

  We went right over to Cornell, and it was a beautiful building. We got to Dr. Swistel’s suite and there’s a big sign, BREAST CANCER RESEARCH. Now I was freaking out again. We sat down in the waiting room and I looked around—all women there, except for a couple of men who were there with their wives. I saw a very tall, beautiful young girl who had no hair and was wearing a scarf. She could have been a model, and here she was, dealing with this. Another woman was obviously on a lot of medication and was nodding out in her seat. All around there were women who looked drained of life, with sunken cheekbones and wigs. You just felt you were in a room of cancer, a room that no one should ever have to be in.

  I was sitting there holding Gigi’s hand, really nervous. They called me in, and Dr. Swistel introduced himself. He was like House: He had a whole bunch of young doctors following him around.

  Swistel started feeling the nodule.

  “Do you think it’s breast cancer?” I spurted out.

  “I don’t know, but at this point I doubt it,” he said, trying to reassure me._gd ever

  Then one of the resident doctors started asking me a few questions. She was straight off the boat from Ireland, a beautiful brunette with green eyes.

  “Do you feel any nausea?” she asked me in that thick Irish brogue. I had learned some dialects in acting school, so I answered her right back in a nice brogue. She gave me a great smile.

  “I love the Irish,” I said. “I have a shamrock tattoo. I’m half Irish, actually.”

  Gigi was not smiling. She was pissed that I was flirting in front of her.

  Dr. Swistel told me to hang there: He was going to run a test and come right back. The Irish doctor followed him out.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Gigi cracked. “She’s only here for the day. You’ll always have that wandering eye, huh, Peter? You will never change.” We laughed about that Irish doctor the whole way home.

  Swistel wanted to get a biopsy on the nodule and was going to have me make an appointment with someone at Cornell, but Gigi wondered if it would be all right to schedule with a doctor closer to our house in Jersey. I hated to come into the city, and she knew of a breast center nearby. Alex reluctantly agreed, so we made an appointment with this doctor in New Jersey.

  We went to this hospital center. I was sitting in the room waiting for the doctor, and I was scared. All of a sudden the door opened and this very short doctor walked in. She was wearing a short skirt and black nylons, black stiletto heels.

  This doctor knew who I was and was being flirty, and I flirted right back. And I felt the fire coming from my left side, where Gigi was sitting. Right away this doctor said something negative about Dr. Swistel, and that didn’t sit right with us. But I let it go, and they took me inside for a mammogram and an ultrasound. Then it was time to do a needle biopsy. She sprayed something to numb my breast, then stuck a long needle into the nipple. It hurt like hell.

  Now we had to sit and wait forty-five minutes for the results of the biopsy.

  The doctor finally came over to me.

  “So do I have breast cancer?” I cut to the chase.

  “Oh, no. We got some stuff out with the needle, but it’s just a cyst, nothing to worry about.”

  I leaned over and tapped her on the knee.

  “All right,” I said. “I was worried that I had cancer.”

  “That’s very rare in men,” she said. “But if it keeps hurting you, you should go back to Dr. Swistel and have it removed. Otherwise it’ll probably go away on its own.”

  I left feeling like a million bucks. Some time later, Gigi got a call from Dr. Swistel. The medical center in Jersey had never sent him the results of the biopsy. When he finally got the benign report, he called again and told Gigi that he wanted to take the nodule out just to be safe. So we made an appointment for the surgery.

  We drove into the city and I felt great. I wasn’t worried—they were going to give me the joy juice and put me out, I had the best doctor in the city, and it wasn’t cancer anyway. So they put me out, and the next thing I knew I was waking up in the recovery room and Gigi and Dr. Swistel were standing over me. Everybody was smiling. Dr. Swistel wanted me to stay overnight as a precaution, but I told him how much I hated hospitals, so he let me go straight ho a picture of my daughtermyrnme.

  A few days later, it was a Saturday morning and I was watching a horror movie, something I’ve done all my life. I heard the phone ring and then Gigi came in.

  “It’s Dr. Swistel. He wants to talk to you.”

  I picked up the phone.

  “Are you sitting down or standing up?�
� he asked.

  That’s not a good thing to hear.

  “I’m standing up,” I said.

  “Well, I think you ought to sit down,” he said.

  I sat down.

  “What have you got, Alex?” I asked.

  “It’s not what I’ve got, my friend. You have breast cancer.”

  My heart fell out of my asshole onto the floor and stopped beating. I couldn’t blink, I couldn’t open my mouth. I felt like I’d never talk again.

  “I know you must be in shock, but the good news is that you couldn’t have come in at a better time. You caught it right at the beginning. I want you to come back in and I’ll do another procedure and take your lymph nodes out just to be on the safe side. What do you think?” he said.

  “Can we operate now?” I said. I just wanted that cancer out of my body.

  We scheduled the surgery for the following week. My imagination ran wild. Both of us had cancer, and you could palpably feel the fear in the house. What a way to go, I thought. I did all those drugs, I shot people, I’ve been shot and stabbed, I’ve nearly died in car crashes, and now you’re going to take me with breast cancer? Jesus Lord, of all things! I’d even buy ass cancer—I’d buy taking a big one and going “boom,” and I’m gone. But breast cancer? What a sense of humor you’ve got.

  I was walking around in a fog. Everything seemed surreal; time seemed to stretch out forever. It was like paying a visit to Jandel, Ace’s home planet. Come the day of the surgery, I was a total wreck. Now I know that I’m going in for surgery for cancer, and if they don’t get it all, I’m fucked. Gigi later told me that she’d never seen me look so frightened. Dr. Swistel got me a private room and they booked me under a phony name. I got there on time, but Alex had two emergencies, so he took them first and I was waiting around for six hours. I was trying to rest and calm myself down in the bed, but the nurse kept coming in every five minutes to take my blood pressure. Each time she looked at the pressure she shook her head and said, “It’s got to go down. The doctor can’t operate unless it goes down.”

  “Stay out of the room and his blood pressure will go down,” Gigi said. “You’re driving him crazy.”

  Finally, it was time for the surgery. Gigi was next to me as they walked me into the operating room. I really thought that I would never see her again, that I would die on the operating table. When we got to the door, I was cold to her. I didn’t hold her and tell her that I loved her because I didn’t want to let her know how afraid I was. I just said, “All right, see you later.”

  They put me on the gurney and wheeled me in and I saw the white coats and the big white mirror. Sure enough, they took my blood pressure and it was high.

  “Alex, I’m scared shitless. I’m really afraid I’m not going to make it through this,” I said. a nice chunk of change,gd ever

  “What are you talking about? It’s going to be fine, Peter. Just relax,” he said. He told his associate to give me a shot. Seconds later I was floating, my blood pressure was normal, and everything was kosher.

  “So, you ready now?” Dr. Swistel asked.

  “Yeah, whatever you want to do,” I slurred.

  “See, now that I got you stoned, you’ll let me do anything,” he smiled.

  That was the last thing I remembered. Later, Alex told me that he took my nipple off, did a mastectomy, removed my lymph nodes, and sewed the nipple back on. He did such a great job. I have so much feeling left in my nipple that I can just rub it and get a boner.

  Once again, I opened my eyes and there were Gigi and the doc standing over me in the recovery room. Of course, he suggested I stay in the hospital for the night, and naturally I told him I wanted to go home. He told me to wait an hour, and then I could leave. Meanwhile, he was thrilled with how the surgery went. My lymph nodes were clean as a whistle and the cancer was highly contained and not even at stage one, we caught it so early. So it was a nice ride back to Jersey.

  Dr. Swistel had recommended that Dr. Daniel Smith do Gigi’s cancer surgeries. She had two, and then she was given a clean bill of health. So we were both in remission. But except for a few close friends, we hadn’t told anyone about our cancer battle. That was going to remain a secret in our home. Gigi especially felt that with me being in the limelight, we should keep it on the QT. I didn’t want to deal with reporters: The one time I had the run-in with Star magazine was enough.

  In October of 2009, two years after our diagnoses and after we both got clean bills of health, I was talking to Gigi one day.

  “I’m always seeing these commercials on TV with women talking about breast cancer. But I’ve never seen a man come on TV and say, ‘I had breast cancer and I beat it.’ That irritates the shit out of me,” I told her. “A man needs to step forward and say that men can die from this as well as chicks. A hundred and fifty thousand men a year die from breast cancer. I’m going to be the man that does that.”

  “You sure you want to do this?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. I had gone to church and prayed on this. I knew I had to go to the press and tell them that I had it and that I wasn’t going to die because we caught it early.

  So Gigi called my publicist in L.A. and she put the story out, and I went on Good Morning America and CNN and the story spread like wildfire. Then the phones hit, everyone wanted to interview me, talk to me, take pictures with me. Dr. Swistel called Gigi and told her that he had a patient come in who had seen me on TV talking about breast cancer. He was a huge fan and he said, “If Peter could say ‘I had breast cancer and beat it’ to millions of people, then I can go in and get it checked d I both almos

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Whenever I talk to people about my spiritual beliefs and tell them how I relate to God, they tell me that I should write a book about my religion because I have a unique relationship with my maker. It didn’t start out that way. I was born and raised in a traditional Catholic setting. I was baptized at All Saints. I went to the same Catholic school my mother did.

  My first issu,” Ace said. “lo when ikes with the organized church came when it was time for me to go to confession. We had to go every Saturday afternoon at four o’clock. You’d go into a dark box. The priest was sitting next to it and pulled open the screen. Then you confessed your sins, listing them one by one.

  Then he talked. “You know it’s not good to masturbate. It can lead to other dysfunctional behavior, so say twenty Our Fathers and don’t do it again. And it’s bad to say the f-word, so say three Hail Marys . . .”

  He went on and on, sentencing me for each offense. After a while, I thought this was a bunch of shit. So I started lying, just to get a rise out of him.

  “Hey, Father, I couldn’t help myself, I beat the shit out of a guy last weekend. I wouldn’t let him up and I kicked his teeth in. And I smoked my mother’s cigarettes . . .”

  But I couldn’t get a reaction from him. He just calmly told me to do my Hail Marys.

  After a while I started believing that I should confess directly to God. Not that I don’t respect priests but I just felt that there shouldn’t be a middleman. So I talked to my mother.

  “Ma, this whole confession shit don’t fly with me. If I want to talk to God, I can just talk to him, right?”

  “Absolutely,” she said. “As long as you go to church, I’m happy.”

  I’ve always said my prayers, though, every night, ever since I was a little kid. I stuck to the rules of the church. I’d bless my father, bless my mother, bless my grandmother and my sisters and brothers. Then I’d do four Hail Marys, two Our Fathers, and an act of contrition. It was a genius way of getting kids to fall asleep. By the time I got to Hail Mary number two, I was gone. I hardly ever made it to the Our Fathers.

  Even when I was going to Catholic school and suffering those horrific punishments at the hands of the nuns, my belief in God remained unshakable. I have a childlike faith that is impenetrable. I know that there’s a higher power, somebody who pulls strings and has literally saved my life many
times. I knew that it wasn’t God who was throwing me in the closet in school; it wasn’t God who was rapping my knuckles raw. It was these frustrated nuns.

  Then, when I was a teenager, I got a visit from another kind of female authority figure. At the same time that I was being made to sit in my own feces by these nuns and my faith was being tested, one night I was lying in bed about to fall asleep when I felt a presence in the room. I was almost afraid to look because I knew it was something strong. My heart was beating through my pajamas. When I finally looked, my breath was taken away. It was Mother Mary. She was standing in a blue-and-white aura and she had a crown of gold on her head that glimmered. She looked like a porcelain goddess. There wasn’t a wrinkle or an imperfection on her face. She just stood there with a Mona Lisa–like smile, a look of pure contentment, and I was in awe. She made me feel that everything was going to be okay, that I shouldn’t be shaken by what I was experiencing in school.

  I felt that I had been touched by God. And ever since that night, I had immense faith. I believed in God, end of story. Nobody could shake my crown. I didn’t tell my parents about what had happened. I thought they would just say it was a dream. I went back to Catholic school and still hated and feared it, but I endured it because we were taught that Jesus endured pain. I think suffering is embedded in Catholics,” Ace said. “qu” ayis. When I finally left Catholic school for public school, my tormentors changed from the nuns to the bullies. I really believe that my faith in a loving God got me through that year of getting beat up every day outside of school.

  In my mid-twenties I broke away from the formal rules of the church and began talking to God directly. That made me feel much better, and I think that’s the ultimate goal of any religion: inner peace. I don’t care how you get to it—you can be Jewish, Protestant, Buddhist, whatever, it’s all fine with me.