Rocking the Pink (21 page)

All I really heard him say was “two percent chance of cancer.” In my mind, that was akin to “zero percent chance of cancer.” But, of course, I did not disagree with his recommendation for lump removal and biopsy. I added only one caveat: “Just don't pop my boob when you're poking around in there with a scalpel, Doc.” I smiled.

“I haven't popped one yet,” he assured, but he didn't smile back.

I wasn't worried at all.

And then, fast-forward three weeks, and—
snap!—
I was falling
down an endless well of so-sorry-to-inform-you phone calls from doctors, MRIs, blood tests, and hospital gowns—drowning in a torrent of tears as Brad and I learned that yes, I had breast cancer; and yes, it was triple negative; and yes, it was multiplying rapidly; and yes, it had spread outside my breast; and yes, I'd need surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.

In the blink of an eye, I wasn't an undercover rock star anymore. I was a cancer patient.

In a sudden jolt of reality, I realized I had to call John from the record label to give him the news. Right? I had to do that . . . didn't I? Yes, I did. The honorable thing to do was let him out of the contract—a contract we had signed only days before that world-upending phone call from the surgeon.

Due to the eight-hour time difference between San Diego and London, I had to wait until early the next morning to call. I barely slept that night, anticipating having to make that call. All night, I felt like Anne Boleyn trapped in the Tower of London the night before her gruesome execution.

When I called John's office the next morning, a receptionist with a Bond Girl voice cheerfully patched me through with a fervent “good day!” When John came on the line, I awkwardly cut off the polite pleasantries.

“John,” I said evenly, “I have some bad news. I just found out I have breast cancer.” My voice was calm, but my heart was breaking inside. “I don't know what's going to happen to me.” I took a deep breath. “John, I release you from the contract. You signed a girl with hair and boobs, and I might not have either of those much longer.”

John did not hesitate. “Laura,” he said in his clipped British accent, “I don't want to be released from the contract. And
I
certainly don't release
you.
Do whatever you need to do to get better. Take care of yourself. And when you're all better, and I know you will be, we'll have you over here to film that music video after all. Just do what you need to do to get better.”

I cried tears of joy and relief all at once, which I much preferred to my recent torrent of anxious tears.

“Thank you, John. You're a saint,” I whimpered, my voice breaking.

“Not really,” he quipped. “I just really love your music.”

At age eight, one year after my parents had divorced, I sat on the bottom stair at my dad's new house, crying a river of tears, after having discovered that my Rubik's Cube had been relieved of one of its essential red blocks, courtesy of one of my brand-new stepsisters.

“What's wrong?” Dad asked, settling himself next to me.

Wordlessly, I held out the broken Rubik's Cube in my hand, a fresh round of sobs rising up from my raw throat.

“Laura,” Dad said in a firm but gentle voice, “never cry over
things.
Cry over
people.
Things can be replaced.”

Sage advice. I've never forgotten it. Indeed, I've repeated it to my own children many times as they've mourned headless Barbies and eyeless teddy bears.

But what do you do when someone
is
crying over a person? What do you say when the man you love with all your heart is sobbing
uncontrollably at the thought of losing his wife, the love of his life? And, in particular, what do you say when that wife, that love of his life, happens to be you?

On the eve of my third chemo session, as Brad and I lay in bed, clutching each other even in our sleep, I was awakened by the sound of his crying.

I was half asleep. “Don't cry,” I said quietly, fumbling in the dark to pat his arm. “It'll be all right.”

But Brad did not respond.

I sat up in bed and touched his chest. I looked at his face.
Oh, my baby.
Brad was asleep. He was crying in his sleep. I exhaled sharply, overcome by a pang in my chest.

“Don't cry, baby,” I whispered, smoothing his hair.

He didn't respond.

I rolled over to go back to sleep.

I closed my eyes. I opened them again. I sat up. A song was rushing into my head at full speed. I leaped out of bed and rushed to my desk.

Twenty minutes later, I shook Brad's shoulder. “Baby! Brad! Wake up!”

Brad opened his eyes, startled. An instant panic seized him. “What is it? What's wrong? Are you okay?”

“I'm fine, Birdy, I'm fine. You were crying in your sleep, baby.”

Brad's expression said,
And so you woke me up?

“A song just came to me!” I exclaimed, by way of explanation.

He looked groggy.

“Listen to this,” I said. And in the darkness, I sang to him:

“Buddy, I love it,” Brad said, pulling me close to him. And then, completely contrary to my purpose in writing the song in the first place, he began to cry.

Brad never even considered missing a single chemo infusion or doctor's appointment, even though countless friends and family offered to take his place.

“I want to be the one to hold your hand,” he said firmly. “I'd
do
the chemo for you if I could.”

Obviously Brad couldn't do that, and even if he could have, I wouldn't have let him. But there
was
something he could do for me, something I was too embarrassed to ask anyone else to do, something I'd never done in my whole life: hold the hash pipe for me when I finally inhaled my first hit of Mary Jane. Now, that's what I call being a caregiver.

A fellow cancer patient had given me a baggie full of marijuana as a gift. “It's the only thing that helps me,” he had told me in a weary voice, totally unsolicited. “Maybe it'll help you, too.”

Of course, given my lifelong abstention from drugs, and my
goody-two-shoes nature in general, I had been about to say, “No, thanks” to my benefactor. But then, for some reason, I had instead replied, “Thanks a lot.”

Nonetheless, that little bag had remained securely hidden in my medicine cabinet for several weeks, until one night, after a particularly difficult chemo session, I crept downstairs once the girls were sleeping soundly in their beds and found Brad watching TV on the couch.

“Brad, will you help me?” I asked, holding up the baggie and the pipe.

Brad glanced up, and an amused grin washed over his face. “My pleasure.”

If my new friend (i.e., my new drug dealer) had given me a rolled joint, I'd have known exactly what I was supposed to do: light it, stick it in my mouth, and inhale (unlike Bill Clinton). Simple. But I'd never seen this particular type of pipe thingamajiggy and bag of green buds before, and I needed a tutorial.

Now, don't get me wrong—I'd seen pot before. Way back when I was nine years old, I sat on the couch with Dad's new wife, Laila, as she watched
Fantasy Island,
all the while toking away on a big fat water bong. The hypnotic gurgle of the bong, and Tattoo shouting, “Da plane, da plane!” filled the smoky family room.

After a long inhale, Laila turned slowly to me, a vacant look in her eyes, and said, without a hint of irony or intentional humor, “You know who Mr. Roarke is, don't you?”

I shook my head.
Ricardo something,
I thought.

“He's God,” Laila answered. And then she took a long, gurgling hit off the bong.

Not too long after that, Dad sat me down to tell me that he and Laila were kaput. “Some people have little capsules inside their heads, sort of like Tylenol capsules,” he said. “And sometimes one of these capsules opens up and tiny beads spill out.”

I looked at Dad quizzically, trying to make heads or tails of what he was trying to tell me.

“The problem is,” Dad explained further, “sometimes the beads are . . . crazy beads. And that's what's going on inside Laila's brain,” he summed up.

I understood pretty well: Laila's crazy beads had gotten loose and were rolling around inside her head.

And so my own fleeting, real-life Cheech and Chong movie came to an end.

But the damage had been done: I became an antidrug zealot, certain that one little puff of pot would decimate two million brain cells at a time and reduce me to a Mr. Roarke–worshipping ninny. And thus I primly declined each and every joint that was proffered to me throughout my teens and twenties, never entering my own personal Age of Aquarius.

After college, after I'd embarked on a career as a professional tight-ass, lighting up a doobie never occurred to me. And, of course, once I had become a minivan-driving mother of two, becoming dazed and confused was out of the question.

And that was why now, at age thirty-eight, I needed Brad's help to become a pothead. Really, this pipe and loose bag of buds didn't look anything like the water bong I'd seen in my childhood, and they didn't come with an instruction manual. Although Brad's last puff on
a joint had been as a teenager almost two decades before, at least he'd had more experience with the stuff than I had.

Brad looked strangely elated. His straitlaced wife was finally going to join the rank and file and get stoned! No matter that I was bald and sickly; this was his chance to finally knock me off my holier-than-thou pedestal.

We went outside onto our patio into the chilly night air, where, after sitting me down at a table and wrapping me meticulously in a warm blanket, Brad gave me proper instructions.

“I'm going to put the buds into the pipe, and when I light it, you need to inhale deeply into your lungs. Okay?” I nodded, my eyes wide. “The hardest part for first-timers,” he continued, “is inhaling deeply enough that the pot gets into their system. You can't just inhale into your mouth and throat; that'll just make you cough, and you won't feel anything.”

“I can do it,” I assured him. “Hit me.”

Brad laughed. “Hit me,” he echoed, and grinned.

He carefully packed the little mosslike balls of pot—or, as I like to say, weed, herb, Mary Jane, spliff, ganja, reefer, bud, dope, doobie, purple haze, devil's lettuce, hashish—into the pipe, and then he lit it with a match.
Ooh, that smell.

Brad gently held the pipe up to my lips, and I inhaled. Deeply. And then I held the smoke in my lungs for what seemed a very long time.

The seal had been broken.

“Oh my God,” Brad whispered. “You're a natural.”

I laughed, and a white puff of smoke shot out of my mouth. And
then I coughed. “I guess I've got big ol' singer's lungs,” I reasoned. Or maybe I'd picked up a thing or two from watching my blink-and-you'll-miss-her stepmom, Laila.

My throat felt hot and scratchy, and my lungs hurt. I felt as if I'd just escaped from a burning building.
How the hell is this so alluring to everyone?
I wondered. But, hell, I had nothing to lose.

“Hit me again,” I ordered.

Now that I'd given up my reefer V-card, I figured I might as well find out what all the fuss was about. And given the sickness and pain I was already feeling, killing two million brain cells didn't seem like such a travesty. I'd have sacrificed all of them to make the pain go away.

“This is hysterical,” Brad whispered, as he held the pipe up to my lips again, and then we both started laughing uncontrollably, although we were careful not to make so much noise as to attract notice from our neighbors, a mere ten feet away, on the other side of the fence.

Perhaps you are wondering if Brad took the opportunity to smoke with me. He did not. You might not believe me, but it's true. Pot held no attraction for him, he said. And even if it had, he had two little girls sleeping upstairs who needed a sober parent in the house, as well as a cancer-stricken wife who'd just taken her first hit of weed at the age of thirty-eight. Who knew how I'd react?

Brad and I settled onto the couch to watch TV together before I inevitably drifted off to sleep. I was staring intently at the television, watching the medical drama
House,
when I heard Brad's garbled voice next to me, sounding as if he were standing in a distant wind tunnel.

“That was so funny,” Brad mused about something that had just happened in the show.

I turned my dull gaze to him. “What was so funny?” I asked slowly, though I'd been staring at the television the whole time.

“Oh, honey, you are so stoned,” Brad observed. And he was right.

But even in that state, I still felt absolutely horrible. Now, I was just feeling horrible
and
stoned, and my throat and lungs felt as if I'd just spent the night in a Las Vegas casino. For me, marijuana (even this strong stuff) was no match for the powerful chemo drugs coursing through my body. As it turned out, I much preferred the antinausea medications, painkillers, and sleep aids Dr. Hampshire gave me to combat the chemo's effects; at least with those, I didn't feel like my lungs were on fire. But, oh well, it was worth a shot. And, I must confess, it was a relief to hang up my long-standing goody-two-shoes for good.