[sic]: A Memoir (9 page)

The next time we saw one another was not a second date. Like acts in American life, there are no second dates. There’s only a first date, either successful or unsuccessful; in the former case, the second meeting is referred to euphemistically as a second date. But one always knows, right from the start. From the part one can read the whole. The second time we saw one another was dinner, and I told her that I was sick and was about to have a bone marrow transplant and she told me of her lifelong struggle and triumph over addiction. Somehow, a pact was made, a partnership was formed: and like the merger, unlike the acquisition, liquid assets were swapped to share the risk. We fast-forwarded into mid-relationship; both parties were compliant, agreeable.

I remember not knowing how to read words, but I don’t remember not knowing how to read music. Sophie doesn’t
remember not drinking. She drank constantly: the only moments
she would ever stop—
ever
—were the moments devoted to vomiting. As soon as regurgitation was complete, she would drink. The only time alcohol wasn’t going into her mouth was when vomit was coming out. She blacked out constantly, of course: waking up on trains, subways, in friends’ houses, hotels, on front lawns, at her parents’ place, on sidewalks. I don’t like thinking of her lovely cheek against cold concrete: opening her eyes to discover the
x
and
y
axes have been switched. There were other substance abuse problems too. She had been in a couple of abusive relationships, which she never really went into. I don’t know if these concerned family members or lovers or what. Curiously, in spite of all this, she had been able to lead a fairly functional social life. She avoided injury; she didn’t have to work because her family was wealthy enough to support her financially, though not healthy enough to support her in any other way. She had friends, relationships. Ironically, she said, if she hadn’t been drinking for the first thirty years of her life, she would have, she believes, died.

However, one day this self-medication that had been preserving her sanity turned around and almost killed her—she never explained precisely how, and I had the impression that it was simply a moment of self-apprehension, rather than some physical near-death incident, although I could well be mistaken. She went immediately to an AA meeting and never touched the stuff again. I know next to nothing about AA, and I had never encountered someone with a comparable degree of addiction. The figure of the addict is such a familiar one from mass media, films, celebrities in rehab. Sophie breathed life into those clichés, traits that were familiar and strange at the same time, like finally visiting Rome. It was literally one day at a time for her, an hour at a time, sometimes a minute or a second at a time. Her face, strikingly attractive, was tightly drawn. I’ve never seen anyone eat so much candy—entire bags at a sitting, the bags of candy you find at a drugstore that no one ever seems to buy. She quite literally was unable to sit still. Seeing a movie, for instance, was impossible. She would shrink down in her seat, then straighten up, then leap onto my lap, then stretch out, then hop out of her seat to buy more candy. (Granted, the film I took her to was the African director Abderrahmane Sissako’s
Bamako,
not the fastest moving of screwball comedies. Sissako is a beautiful filmmaker, but a minimalist.) When we first started hanging out I wondered how she slept. Later I learned it was through considerable medication. We shared a completely contrived intimacy—to the point that she would often, before a kiss,
wink—
I know you know I know you know—which does to romance what breaking the fourth wall does to the cinematic illusion of verisimilitude. The calls to the sponsor at appointed moments, the journal keeping, the form filling, all followed with the diligence of a prayer schedule. She never commented on the religious aspects of AA, a matter of some controversy. AA has its critics. And while it certainly worked for her, there was the overzealousness of the proselytizer. As I began my multiday hospital stays, with a week or so at home in between them, I was also beginning to suffer from symptoms of anxiety derived from the trauma of not simply the diagnosis but the fact that the chemo hadn’t worked; I found myself inexplicably grasped by new phobias, a clenching sense of panic on the subway, for example, or when going over a bridge. I would have the sensation that time was about to stop, or that space was on the brink of bankruptcy, or that things actually ceased to exist when they were obscured. Or that suddenly it was not three in the afternoon but four in the morning, and I was the only one in the room to realize this. Such episodes would arise out of nowhere and just as quickly disappear. Meanwhile I was also enduring episodes of blind rage, directed at no one and nothing in particular except of course a malignant universe or myself at having sinned to deserve such a penalty. It was not because Sophie and I were both pretty much thoroughly occupied with our own private manias, not because we were basically total strangers to one another, that I was unable to share my experiences with her; it was because, in the throes of them, I couldn’t recognize them. She recognized but misidentified them; they were familiar to her, and they scared her. One evening, we went to dinner at the apartment of a couple of dear friends of mine. We drank freely (not Sophie, of course), there was wonderful conversation, wonderful food. In the taxi on the way home over the Brooklyn Bridge I was infused suddenly with uncontrollable fury; I slammed my fist repeatedly against the seat of the cab until my hand was bruised and my fingers were bleeding. Sophie, next to me, was terrified; she had seen this type of violence before, as the result of drink or drugs, directed toward others, toward herself. She shrieked in terror, and as soon as we got off the bridge into Manhattan, the cab driver pulled over and threw us out onto the street. She screamed that my behavior confirmed what she had long suspected: I was a serious alcoholic, a drug user. This was a perfectly understandable reaction; she was relating my conduct to the world she knew; it couldn’t have occurred to her that I had drunk that night in an intuitive, clumsy attempt to counter anxiety resulting from the fear of imminent death, and it didn’t occur to me, either: it took a psycho-oncologist to explain it.

Rather than leave me, however, she plunged into the project of rescuing me. I had little idea why, at the time. The stress and the high-dose chemotherapy and radiation had shut down my libido, and my mood swings were unpredictable and scary to both of us. And we didn’t even really know each other. Later it occurred to me the project was necessary to her own recovery, not mine. This is not to say that she was selfish: on the contrary, it was Sophie who set up the group e-mails for updates to family and friends on my progress when I became seriously incapacitated; she dealt with transportation issues when I finally was admitted for the long stay, bringing books, clothes, until the moment she finally quit; and even when she did quit, she made sure that my mother was able to take over her duties. But she had to assume this identity, as she had to assume, consciously, and with enormous effort, her other roles: girlfriend, New Yorker, freelance designer, person walking down the street, person having breakfast, person sitting down, person engaged in conversation, person giving someone a hug. None of her actions was in the least inauthentic, but her degree of alienation from goals, actions, simple states of being—the acute, inescapable self-surveillance of the addict—resembles that rarefied ontological space of the depressive, the anxious, the ill, the poet. The two of us weren’t amateurs in suffering, we were very much, by now, professionals.

•

CHEMOTHERAPY AND RADIATION
are as different as night and day, pagans and Christians, Laurel and Hardy. With chemo, you
feel
the slow drip of poison overtaking your body; everything is slowness, gradations. You gradually feel awful, and then gradually better. Radiation, on the other hand, doesn’t work in degrees. You feel nothing. It takes about three seconds. You feel absolutely fine, until the moment when your hair falls out, your skin burns off, you’re too tired to move, you’re throwing up, and this is where the pain medication comes into play. At first they give you pills, but then they have to switch you to morphine. I was afraid to start the drip, for some reason; I guess I wanted to wait until the last possible minute, so that when the pain got really bad, it would have more effect. But that’s not how it works. “We’re gonna start the drip now,” one of the staff members ordered, “because in a month the pain will be unendurable and the drip won’t do anything anyway.” My mom recorded the conversation:

“If you think you hurt now, you will be in agony then.” I think this to be an utterly unjust and cruel statement but I say nothing. The doctor ignores my presence. When he tells Joshua about the upcoming “agony,” Joshua is extremely calm and replies, “Oh, really?” Inside, I am trying to control my fury.

My mom had flown in a couple of weeks into my stay. On the plane, she sat next to none other than Luke Duke himself, the venerable Wisconsinite actor Tom Wopat, star of the beloved 1979 television series
The Dukes of Hazzard
. Why was Luke Duke flying to New York? No, he wasn’t fleeing that double-dealing commissioner Boss Hogg and that forever-bungling sheriff of his, Rosco. Tom had been in Milwaukee doing a tour with a musical, and the next stop was somewhere in Africa, so he was
heading home to New York for a week’s respite. My mom says they had a great conversation, and I believe it. He told her he was glad to get out of Milwaukee. The audiences at the show had sucked. One night, he said, there were like a dozen people out there. Why was my mom flying to New York? he asked, and she told him.

Your son is a courageous guy, Luke Duke said. I know things will be okay. But I will keep him in my prayers.

They went back to their reading, but when the plane landed he gave my mom a sweet “good-bye” and a handshake. At baggage they were on opposite ends of the carousel. His luggage tipped onto the belt first, so he grabbed his bags, and then, to my mother’s surprise, walked all the way around the carousel to her and said, “I will not forget you nor your son, Mrs. Cody.”

The other day I asked my mom if she remembered walking into my hospital room for the first time, and she e-mailed me (and this must be a transcription from a journal or diary she was keeping at the time, not just a response to my query):

He is thin, which I expected. His complexion is grey. Of course, he has no hair, no eyebrows. But, most of all, his eyes are sunken into his skull and he looks like a skeleton.

I greet him by saying, simply, “Hi, Josh, darling.” I am determined not to cry. I sit down and we nervously talk. Although I am so proud of Joshua, I feel as though my chest is going to explode. His manner is calm, sweet, and loving. He seems to appreciate that I am here.

I certainly did appreciate it. One aspect of multiday hospitalization that tends to be forgotten in the horror of it all is the sheer complexity of performing ordinary, daily management—mail, bills, clothes, rent, notebooks, pens, et cetera. Being sick is very much a full-time job. Take a look at the calendar my mom and I were keeping.

And here’s a very touching page from one of my mom’s notebooks that gives some sense of the constant errand-running, the housekeeping the caretaker of the ill must sustain: running to the local pharmacy for a certain type of soap, a certain type of lotion; taking the subway all the way downtown to the apartment to grab shirts, pants, Wite-Out, and Hugh Kenner’s book on Ezra Pound,
The Pound Era
, wherein Mr. Kenner states that Mr. Pound is the most emblematic artist of the twentieth century.

What’s more touching, to me, is a discussion I unfortunately do not recall sharing with my mother regarding the question of mariachi’s assimilation of the trumpet, because that’s
when they started the morphine drip.

It was also great that my mom was there when they started the morphine drip because Sophie, who had essentially been the unofficial chief of staff, was unfortunately forced to step down from her position for personal reasons.

One afternoon, she came into the hospital room, and I could immediately tell she had traded the role of Rescuer to that of I Can No Longer Help This Man For He Will Bring Me Down. She was shaken up, trembling. Of course, she was always shaken up and on the verge of trembling. But she was awfully pale. She had just come from my apartment.