by Gene Wilder
That Christmas, before entering Memorial Sloan-Kettering for the long stay, I gave Karen a beautiful, but simple, necklace and wrote the following poem on a little card:
Of all the Mormons I’ve ever met,
You’re the first I ever et.”
The day before I entered Sloan-Kettering, I was told that because I was in such good shape, they were going to knock the shit out of me with radiation and heavy chemo, and then pour the stem cells back into my bloodstream. That night I had the following dream:
GENE’S DREAM
I was on the fifth floor of a dilapidated apartment house, where I lived in a one-room artist’s garret. Because of some great emergency I had to leave my room, but it was suddenly invaded by a small herd of prehistoric bulls, with long antlers. The bulls weren’t threatening, they were just frightened, and the only way to get them out of my room was for me to whistle for a herd of black stallions to come upstairs, as quickly as they could, and carry the frightened bulls down the four flights of stairs and outside, to safety.
I went to the top of the stairs and whistled as loudly as I could, and, to my great relief, a herd of black stallions came rushing up the stairs and started rounding up the bulls—putting them on top of their backs and ushering them out.
But there was one bull, with long antlers and some human features protruding through his animal hair, who was trying to teach himself to play a violin that had been resting on a small table in the center of the room. And although he wasn’t playing a melody as such, the sounds he was producing were beautiful.
I looked at him while he was playing, and I said to myself, “How is this possible? This young prehistoric bull has just picked up a violin and is not only figuring out how to play it, but is playing beautifully.”
Then I got terribly worried about how much time was passing and about the imminent danger—whatever it was. I pleaded with the bull to put down the violin, but he kept saying, “Not yet . . .wait . . . a little more.”
I finally got him to put the violin on the table just as a beautiful black stallion came up, and, together, we got this unique bull onto the stallion’s back and safely down the stairs. And then I woke up.
* * *
I checked into Memorial Sloan-Kettering on January 30, 2000, under the name of Larry Carter—which was my character’s name in the murder mysteries. That evening, just after I had settled into my hospital room, the phone rang. Karen answered and heard, “Hi, this is the Blah Blah County News—how’s Gene doing? We know he’s there under the name Larry Carter—we were just wondering how he is.” Karen said, “You have the wrong number.” We changed rooms.
The next four days were not painful—I had radiation each morning and in the late afternoons—then they dripped in very heavy chemo for five days. Still no nausea. By now every cell in my bloodstream had been killed, and I didn’t have an immune system to speak of. Anyone who came into my room—every doctor, nurse, cleaning lady—had to wash his or her hands, put on rubber gloves, and wear a mask. Karen was not allowed to use my bathroom—she might contaminate it. I made a joke and said, “Come on, she wouldn’t do that,” but she was told that if she needed to pee, she had to take off her gloves and mask, throw them away, walk down the hall to the ladies’ room, come back to my room, wash her hands again, and put on a new mask and a new pair of gloves. Karen came to see me each day. When it was time to say good night, she would kiss me good-bye through her mask. In a strange way it was very romantic. I thought I was in a movie.
In the middle of all these treatments, the press representative for Sloan-Kettering came to see me—wearing her gloves and mask, of course—and told me a story out of Grimm’s fairy tales, except that it had just happened in the lobby downstairs. A young woman walked into the lobby of the hospital, carrying a huge basket of flowers for Larry Carter. The chief of security recognized this woman’s face and said, “What are you doing here?” The woman said, “Oh, shit—I can’t do this. STAR sent me. They want me to get into Gene Wilder’s room and get an interview. Here, give these flowers to anyone who wants them—this is too sleazy for me.”
What Star didn’t realize was that if the young lady had succeeded in getting to the floor I was on and had walked into any of the rooms with stem-cell patients while she was looking for me, she could have jeopardized their lives, because—I’m sure—she wouldn’t have known to throw the basket of flowers away, wash her hands, and put on a pair of gloves and a mask before entering the room.
After four days of radiation and five days of the heavy chemo, they gave me a day of rest. On the eleventh day, Karen and I watched three technicians march into my room, wearing masks and gloves and carrying a tiny plastic bag with six million stem cells, all thawed out. (They had taken seven million, but they like to keep one million in reserve.) Everyone sang “Happy Birthday” while the stem cells were being infused into my bloodstream. They weren’t singing because it was my actual birthday but because it was the first day of my new life—February 10, 2000. They had told Karen to bring a bag of lemons because, for some reason, when they pour in the thawed stem cells, there is a strong smell of garlic. I thought it was a joke, but it wasn’t. I had to pass half a lemon back and forth under my nose while the infusion took place, or else the smell of garlic would have been overwhelming.
The next ten days were the most difficult except for one thing that I keep in a small treasure chest in my memory. Each evening, after he had finished his long day in the research lab and after attending to his other stem-cell patients, Dr. Nimer would come into my room, masked and gloved, pull up a chair, and talk with me about movies. He would answer any medical questions, of course, but afterward he loved to talk about movies. Because of his work he had missed so many good films over the years, but now most of them were on video or DVD, and he wanted to know which my personal favorites were and who was in them. When my throat was too sore for me to talk, I would write my answers on a long, yellow legal pad:
. . . City Lights, Random Harvest, Dark Victory, Bringing Up Baby, City for Conquest . . .
He had never heard of most of them. The only thing missing from our evening soirées was a nice cold glass of Sancerre.
While Dr. Nimer sat with me each evening, those little stem cells were busy multiplying, deciding if they wanted to grow up to be red or white. After the ten days of misery were over, I started talking about going home.
On February 24—after only three weeks and four days in the hospital—I was told that I could go home with Karen that night, if my platelets had reached fifty thousand. If they hadn’t reached that number, I might bleed to death if I happened to cut myself shaving.
The night nurse, Suzie, took some blood. An hour later she came back, trying not to look grim as she said, “Forty-eight thousand!” Karen took my hand and said, “It’s only one more day, sweetheart.” Then she leaned over and gave me a long good-night kiss, through her mask. It was the only time I cried during my stay in the hospital. Dr. Nimer had told me that same afternoon that I was getting out in record time and that I was now the poster boy, but I wanted to go home with Karen that night. I suppose I was crying because I came so close. After Karen left, I asked Suzie when they would take my blood again. She said, “Tomorrow morning, six-thirty. I’ll take it myself.”
While Suzie was loading my intravenous for the night, babbling quietly while she worked, I kept thinking about Karen and the way she kissed me good night through her mask. How could it have happened that I found her at this stage of my life? If we had met twenty years earlier, it wouldn’t have worked. I know that. I wasn’t ready for her, and she probably wasn’t ready for me. Then I suddenly remembered a most curious incident.
Several years earlier, I was having supper with Karen’s family in the little town of Arco, Idaho, population eleven hundred. There were eight of us at the kitchen table—seven Mormons and a Jew. One of the children—a four-and-a-half-year-old boy named Michael—had finished his supper of fresh trout and boiled potatoes and was l
ooking at a child’s astronomy book that he always carried with him. Michael’s mother explained to the rest of us how much Michael loved astronomy.
“Go ahead,” she said, “ask him a question. Anything!”
“All right,” I said, taking up the gauntlet. I just wanted to see how this little pisher would deal with a real question.
“Michael,” I said, “why does everything weigh less on Pluto than it does on Jupiter?”
I hadn’t a clue what the answer was, and I hoped that I wasn’t embarrassing him. Michael looked at me as if I were the dumbest person on earth. With an unbelieving ‘Jack Benny’ face, he looked at everyone else sitting around the table. Then he looked back at me, and with a shrug of his shoulders, he said, “Gravity.”
Suzie interrupted my little memory with, “Do you want me to turn out the hallway light, sweetie?”
“Yes. Suzie, wait! I’ll give you a million dollars if you do me a special favor.”
“You’re not ready for that yet.”
“Hey—I’m trying to stay sad and you’re not helping. All I want you to do is get a bunch of cotton and tape it over the speakers in this room so that I can’t hear the P.A. system going on all night. I don’t mind it during the day, but I can’t stand it at ten or eleven o’clock when I’m trying to fall asleep and I suddenly get this blast over the loudspeaker: “JUANITA, JUANITA—REPORT TO THE DESK PLEASE. JUANITA, REPORT TO THE DESK.” The nurses should wear those silent buzzers. This would be a wonderful hospital if it weren’t for ‘Juanita, Juanita.’ ”
Susie hesitated for a moment. “You won’t tell anyone?”
“I promise you I won’t tell.”
Susie got a big pile of cotton and taped it over the two speakers in my room with adhesive tape. Then she took my temperature one last time and said, “Good night, sweetie—try to sleep.”
And I did try. I thought that if I could just fall asleep, the sadness over not going home would dissolve into a dream, and then Suzie would wake me at six-thirty and say, “Get up sweetie—time to take your blood.” But I couldn’t fall asleep. The thoughts kept rushing in. Maybe I’ll be home tomorrow. Where can I buy some platelets, fast? Will I be able to act again in six months? I wonder if I’ll be alive in six months. I want to kiss Karen without the mask. When will I be able to make love again? When will my hair grow back? And my eyelashes? I forgot about my eyelashes. I look pathetic. I wonder if Karen will still desire me when I get home. Actors are children. We’re all just babies. “Look at me! Look what I can do!” Why didn’t we grow up like other kids? All we wanted was to be loved for ourselves, just as we were, our true selves—but it didn’t seem to be good enough, and when we’re six or seven, and Mama is sitting in the living room crying or reading a book or sewing, and we tell a joke that we saw in a cartoon, or we do a little dance or sing a song, and suddenly Mama gets up and says, “Oh, my God—honey, that’s wonderful. Bill, come in here—look what your baby can do! Do it again, honey—do that for Daddy.” And we sing or dance or tell our joke again, and they applaud. Mama and Daddy applaud, and they hug and kiss us and we feel that they really love us, and we grow up longing for that exhilaration again, and we do get it, years later, from an audience that applauds and cheers us and we go home exhilarated and fall asleep feeling loved, but the next morning we wake up feeling lonely again, and we need another fix from another audience. I wish I could be a Catcher, like Holden, and save all those lonely children who become actors and grow up thinking that the applause is actually love for them and not for their performance. Maybe some of them will find real love . . . if they’re lucky.
“JUANITA, JUANITA—REPORT TO THE DESK PLEASE. JUANITA, REPORT TO THE DESK!”
Oh no! Come on, I can still hear it, Suzie. It’s better, but I can still hear it. What time is it? . . . Ten o’clock! . . . Oh, no . . . miles to go before I wake. “Now I lay me down to sleep. . . . If I should die before I wake” . . . Well, so what if I do? I have no complaints. I had a wonderful career and beautiful friends . . . and I found Karen . . . gravity. . . . Oh,shit . . . I forgot something, Karen. . . . I was going to tell you something when you were kissing me good night. . . . I was going to whisper in your ear, “i carry your heart with me. . . . i carry it in my heart. . . .” How could I have forgotten? . . . because I was crying like a baby just because they wouldn’t let me go home with you. . . . I wonder why e. e. cummings wrote poems in lowercase? . . . I’m getting drowsy. . . . Ativan must have kicked in. . . . Good . . . I can still feel you kissing me through your mask. . . . I won’t ever forget that. . . . I’ll tell you tomorrow how much I love you . . . but I gotta get some platelets. . . .
At 6:30 A.M. Suzie woke me up and took my blood. She came back at 7:30 A.M. with a big smile on her kisser: “Fifty thousand, you lucky duck!”
Now here’s a question: did I actually will my body to produce two thousand platelets while I slept, or did Suzie slip me some kind of a verbal placebo, if there is such a thing—something tricky that she might have babbled while she was loading up my intravenous? What difference does it make? I’m going home! Suzie was right—I am a lucky duck. I keep thinking of the children I saw in the basement of Sloan-Kettering, five and six years old, bald from chemotherapy and sitting next to me in their wheelchairs, waiting to receive their radiation. The old urge to pray would cross my mind when I saw them, but I gave that up a long time ago. What is God, but something inside of me? What I wish for those children is just some good genes, and a very good doctor—that’s what I wish for them.
If I escape death, it will be for one reason that I can believe in—it will be because of a phone call I made to my friend Ed Feldman to tell him how well I was doing. “All I need is one more chemo, Ed, then a little rituxan, and I’m all done. Isn’t that something?” And Ed answered, “I’m very happy for you, Gene, but I’m not content . . . not until you see Carol Portlock at Memorial Sloan-Kettering.”
* * *
chapter 30
STOLEN KISSES
It’s a cold and sunny morning as we arrive back home. When we get out of the car, I have a strong urge to walk to the mailbox, just to see if I can do it, but I’m a little wobbly, so I’ll try it tomorrow.
Karen lays on a beautiful fire in our big 1734 fireplace. She covers my body with a blanket that doesn’t itch, and I take off my shoes and put my feet up on the old Spanish coffee table, which used to be a door about a hundred years ago.
I can’t really swallow anything yet—I mean nothing that I would call food—but Karen thinks of a divine solution: vanilla milkshakes, with lots of vanilla ice cream. There’s a wine in France called L’enfant Jesus, so named because the winery is run by a charity hospital in Beaune, and the story goes that when the nuns first tasted it they said, “It goes down like the little baby Jesus.” On this first day at home, I name her milkshake “Karen’s divine milk.” It goes down my throat so cool and so easy.
For supper I have a mixture of Rice Krispies and Cheerios, with lots of milk and a little sugar. Then we go up to our bedroom. I look in the mirror as I brush my teeth and think I’m seeing someone who just got out of Auschwitz. When we go to bed, we watch television for a few minutes. When I start to get drowsy, I kiss Karen good night. I don’t have to kiss her through a mask anymore. I’d like to do more than just kiss her, but I’m not ready for that yet. Perhaps I’ll try tomorrow, or next week, when I get some strength back. Instead, after we’ve both said good night and turned out the lights, I reach out and run my fingers over her bare arm and fall asleep holding her hand . . . in my own bed.
When tomorrow comes, I walk up the driveway to the mailbox and then back to the house. It’s not that far—maybe a hundred yards all together—but that’s enough for one day. Tomorrow I’ll go back and forth two times. I tell Karen that I’m going to be playing tennis with her by the last week in April.
On April 26 I play a very short game of tennis with her. On this day she could beat me even if she played left-handed and hopped on one leg. Bu
t I don’t fall over—that’s the important thing, although I almost did, twice. But I do get the ball back, most of the time. In a few weeks I’ll beat her so badly that she’ll think I turned into Agassi. Well, I don’t want to humiliate her.
Six months later, and I’m still alive. My sister came through her cancer and is doing really well. . . .We both must have good genes. What I’ve learned from cancer is not about appreciating all the little things in life that you take for granted. After Gilda died, I was already that person who walked by a rose and noticed the shades of red and orange and yellow and who could smell the rain and could get a thrill at seeing two children holding hands. . . . I know that stuff. What I didn’t know was that I don’t need to act. I might want to act—just for the love of acting—but not because I need to earn the right to feel loved by God. I’ve got something much better. . . . I feel loved by the person I love.
My blood tests are very good, and I’ve started painting again. Karen and I hit with a tennis pro twice a week. I think I’m getting a little chubby—not so much in the face, but around the middle. I even thought of dieting, but Mel warns me that men’s faces look hollowed out if they get too thin when they’re older.
I can make love with my wife again. And here’s the amazing thing: it feels as exciting now as it did when we had our first actual date, when she was still a stranger to me.
EPILOGUE