Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors (13 page)

I brought this up to my new doctor.  She said, “Yes, Evan.  It’s true.  But while we can’t say for sure that it is beneficial for you to have more treatment, we think that it probably is, and so we recommend it.”

What was I supposed to do with that?  We were talking about a month-long ordeal, which, by itself, had a 10 percent chance of killing me.  How was I supposed to enter into that with the knowledge that it might not be necessary and I’d have the same chance for recovery without it?  I had no idea what to do.

In the moments that I had been able to sleep between the fevers, the medications, and the blood transfusions that made no distinction between night and day, I was gripped and transported by furious dream activity beyond anything I had experienced before.  During my first week in the hospital, I had repeatedly had the dream that I was in prison, sharing a cell with a dangerous inmate.  I had been accused of killing someone by stabbing them through the eye with a ball-point pen.  I knew I hadn’t done it, but I had to endure the situation and survive, until I got my day in court.  When my day for justice arrived I strode into the courtroom, eager to reclaim my freedom, only to stare in horror as I was shown a film of myself committing the crime.  I had that dream every night for a week.

During the second hospital stay, I’d had a dream in which I was chewing on long metal nails and shards of glass.  There was no pain involved, only a squeamish sensation as the sharp objects were driven by my own jaws deep, deep into the flesh of my gums.  My left upper gum, specifically.  A few days later, a serious infection was caused by an impacted wisdom tooth in that very spot.

Then, as the third hospitalization approached, as I was faced with the decision of how to best proceed with my medical treatment, I had the epic dream of my life.  I found myself in a hellish, medically themed production of
Hamlet
.  Not only was the play that I dreamt about perfectly symbolic of the terrible indecision that I was suffering through, but I also found myself unfamiliar with my lines and my surroundings.  I’d wind up lost, cornered by enormous stage flats that conspired to trap me in inescapable configurations; other actors chased me around with machetes as I tried to escape, stumbling over the webs of IV tubing and medicine bottles dangling down from between my legs.  At the play’s intermission, I was told that I was being replaced in the next act by another actor.  The ultimate indignity, though, was still to come.  As I heard the second act beginning without me, and as I searched for an exit from the building, from the whole humiliating nightmare, I was stopped backstage, and asked to contribute money for the cast party.

Once outside the building, I found myself wandering on a wet country road, where I was approached by Jackie.  Jackie pulled close, and told me that she had a message for me from Steven, an actor friend who had, himself, had cancer as a teenager.  Jackie told me, in the dream, that the way to “get home” was the same way that Steven had done it.  The key was in his hitchhiking technique.  Walk along the road, I was told, and let two cars pass.   Then, turn and face the third.

I checked back into Sloan-Kettering and I did it all again.

Temescal Canyon sits in the highlands overlooking the Pacific Ocean just north of Los Angeles, in Pacific Palisades, California.  Back from the main road, in the midst of a state nature preserve, is the Presbyterian Church Retreat; a ramshackle collection of meeting houses, a cafeteria, and dirty, miniature, summer camp-type bunkhouses.  This is where, for one week each month, Carl Simonton and his staff conduct the workshops of the Simonton Cancer Center.

Jackie and I arrived in early March for a week of therapy sessions, instruction in guided imagery, words of wisdom from Dr. Simonton himself, and we didn’t know what else.  Not long after we’d dropped our bags onto the gritty floor of our sparsely furnished, screened-in cabin, we started to hear about the fire walk.  No one would say much about it, at first.  We were told we’d have to wait and see.  But we were promised a belief-altering thrill when the week’s activities culminated in a demonstration of the mind-over-matter miracle of walking through a fifteen-foot channel of hot coals without suffering injury.

I glanced suspiciously at the other seminar participants.  They were a collection of Caucasian adults, all but me between the ages of thirty-five and seventy, none looking too robust or healthy.  There was a woman in her sixties with bone cancer who walked with a cane, and a woman in her thirties with nearly translucent skin who wore a jet-black wig that sat crookedly on her head.  All day long I’d watch her tug at it, each yank bringing it too far over one ear or the other, somehow never hitting the middle mark.  There was the woman from Alaska with enormous breasts who told us the first day that she’d just had her second one removed, and the sprightly old Irish munchkin-man dying of liver cancer who sipped whiskey from a flask all day.  I had just gotten out of the hospital one week before myself, after being inside for the better part of the past six months.  My muscles were so weak that standing upright and taking ten steps felt like walking a mile on stilts.  I was drawn back to the voice of the staff member speaking as we were told that, at the end of the demonstration, we would each have our own opportunity to blow our minds even more by taking the fiery walk ourselves.

“Wonderful,” I thought.

As soon as the fire walk subplot had been established, the meetings began.  There was a group of several instructor/therapists, each with his or her own brand of New Age, psychoinspirational speaking, each trying to illustrate various points of Simonton’s philosophies.  In between these seminars and workshops, we would be entitled to spend three half-hour sessions with our assigned therapist, with more available for a negotiated price.  Then we were told about the various kinds of massage therapies available to us over the course of the session.  We were encouraged to take full advantage of the incredible healing talents of the body-work professionals joining us for the week, and it was recommended that we try them all by having at least one massage a day – costing only forty dollars apiece.

I had paid two thousand, one hundred dollars “tuition” to attend the Simonton Cancer Center.  Jackie, as my “support person,” had paid somewhat less, to cover her food and lodging, and this was all in addition to our cross-country airfare.  It had been a fear of mine all along — indeed, through the whole illness, with my various healers — that I might be just one more desperate soul feeding the hungry hands of opportunistic con artists.  When, after each of the first three workshops, we were offered audiotapes,
for sale
, by whichever individual had conducted the seminar – tapes for relaxation, for pain release, for childhood regression, tapes on trust – I was ready to storm out and demand my money back.  When I forced myself, through my nervousness, to mention my complaint to one of the instructors, I was told that it would probably be a good topic to bring up in my individual therapy.  Since I had a session scheduled for later that day, I decided to hang in a little longer and seek some satisfaction before taking off.

Barbie Monde was a youngish blond woman who could have served as a model for those who like to ridicule Southern California’s penchant for wide-eyed cheerfulness, and breathy, awestruck spirituality.  In a match made anywhere but in Heaven, Barbie was assigned to me as my personal therapist.

“Isn’t that in-ter-est-
een
, Evan.”  Barbie said, fascinated.  She pronounced the word using four syllables and ending with the common West Coast substitution of “-een” for “-ing.”  “What do you think it is about your relationship to money that makes you so angry about spend-
een
it on yourself?”

Baffled, I took a moment to get my thoughts together.  “I don’t have any problem spending money on myself,” I said.  “I have a problem with arriving someplace that I’ve had to borrow money to afford, only to discover that a large portion of the recommended experience isn’t covered in that fee.  I think everything should be included in the “tuition” price, or else it should be clear in advance that many of the tools and activities are an extra cost.”

Barbie gently took the small spiral notebook I was fidgeting with from my hands.  Wearing a joyful smile, the kind you use when you’re about to give someone a wonderfully generous and unexpected gift, she wrote in a large, neat script.  Barbie handed me back my book, smiling even wider than before.  As I read her words, I could feel the heat radiating from her glowing satisfaction with herself.  She was apparently intoxicated by her ability to impart wisdom and relieve the suffering of others.  Barbie had written,

Things are never the way they seem.

There is good in everything.  Always be grateful.

When I looked back up at her, Barbie’s smile was stretched so wide I thought her face might split apart to reveal the coils and wires and transistors I suspected were buried beneath.  When she had finished saying a silent prayer for my recovery, Barbie’s eyes popped open and she chimed, “Well, that’s the end of our first session!”

Somehow, that made me laugh.  I laughed very hard, and it went on for a long time.  At first, Barbie seemed frightened.  She didn’t know me, and it was obvious that she had no idea what I was laughing about.  But it only took a moment for her “feel good about everything” instincts to kick back in, and soon Barbie was laughing along with me, smiling and nodding in agreement, as if we were actually sharing the same joke.

To me, it was clear that I had escaped from one lunatic asylum, only to enroll myself in another.  I decided to stay, just to see what might happen.  If nothing else, it promised to be a good show, and at twenty-one hundred dollars admission, I wasn’t keen on missing any of the action.

In spite of her initial resistance in recognizing my complaint, Barbie soon made it clear that she was determined to get me a little something extra on my trip to California.  In the course of conversation she became aware of my interest in Louise Hay, a woman who had become well known as a healer and spiritual leader, largely through her newly popularized book
You Can Heal Your Life
.  Louise was the healer who’d helped my friend Steven through his illness as a teenager, and, though he had tried to interest her in my plight, she had been too busy to take on any new clients.  Barbie helped run some of Louise’s weekly get-togethers, and she agreed to take me along to one during the week.

I was, at first, confused by Barbie’s secretiveness about our field trip.  She had sternly insisted that I tell no one else at the center of our plans, which I could somewhat understand in terms of avoiding the impression that I was receiving preferential treatment.  But, in addition, Barbie would not reveal what nights of the week Louise’s group would meet, or which meeting we would attend.  When I tried to press her, or, as the week wore on, when I tried to get some reassurance that our plans were still intact, Barbie would gush with a lot of talk about which group was the best to visit; about how difficult it was to know whether Louise would actually appear or not; about a host of veiled, obtuse mumblings that made little sense to me.  On Thursday, at lunch in the cafeteria, Barbie strode by me with a peculiarly stricken look on her face.  It wasn’t until she had passed and was out of my field of vision that I realized she had spoken.  Her words hung in her wake, taking a moment to penetrate my confusion.

“Meet me in the parking lot at eight o’clock tonight.”

I turned to respond, but Barbie was already sitting across the room with the staff.  She was leaning forward, engrossed in conversation, seemingly oblivious to me, giving no indication that we had communicated at all.  I had no idea what all the espionage was about, but I finally felt like I was getting my money’s worth.

“Now, Evan,”  Barbie was saying, after hurrying me into her car in the dark of the unpaved parking lot.  “I’m going to ask you to scootch down under the seat until we’re out on the road.”

Barbie was reaching down under my feet to clear out the debris that was carpeting the floor of her car.  She spoke as she threw fistfuls of wadded up papers and crushed diet soda cans into the back seat.  I had irrepressible flashback memories of the puzzling excitement I had felt when riding in the car of one of my schoolteachers.  The pride that accompanied the invitation into the teacher’s private sanctum was demolished by the evidence of their untidy mortal habits.  While I crouched low in the footwell beneath the passenger seat, Barbie drove roughly over the bumpy dirt road toward the Pacific Coast Highway.  The last time I’d been smuggled anywhere was in high school, riding in the trunk with two other friends trying to avoid paying for a drive-in movie.  Never before, though, had I been forced to sneak
away
from any place.

Barbie calmed down, a bit, once we were on the road.  During the short drive into Santa Monica, sitting back up in the car seat, I learned the reason for her nervousness.

“Carl wouldn’t like it if he knew,” she said.

“Wouldn’t like what?”  I asked.  “Is it that he doesn’t want the clients leaving the compound?  Or he doesn’t like the staff fraternizing with the inmates?  What?”

“He’d be mad if he knew I was taking you to see Louise.”

Ahhh.  Professional alternative-therapy jealousy.  I was being secretly whisked away to an enemy rally, my mind primed for subversion back home.  I was stunned.  This would have been my very last guess at an explanation.

I had, in fact, found Carl Simonton to be a fascinating and admirable man.  He appeared to be in his mid- to late forties, with a rather dour-looking, bearded face.  Carl dressed simply, in casual, country clothes — usually jeans and a flannel shirt — and he spoke directly and compellingly.  In opposition to his appearance, he was irreverent, and he was funny.  His lectures focused on the themes of his book, and then reached beyond.  He spoke of the importance of living a life that was in tune with one’s chosen purpose, and he had developed effective methods for exploring what that might be.  In addition to the somewhat esoteric techniques of meditation and imagery he imparted, Simonton had gone further and designed concrete methods for people to plan how to put their choices into practice.  In this vein, he encouraged all the seminar participants to design a “six-month plan,” in which they would set realistic goals toward guiding their lives in the direction of their desire.  As Joseph Campbell advises his readers to “follow your own bliss,” Carl Simonton would often intone “The path of least resistance is the way of greatest joy.”

The entire session in Temescal Canyon, in fact, had been well designed, and after my initial anger, I had been drawn into an embracing of the experience.  One lecture of Carl’s led to another instructor’s more practical workshop, which in turn laid the groundwork for another of Carl’s inspirational sermons.  Whatever his own abilities or difficulties, he was able to convey a great enthusiasm for life, and for insisting on living it on one’s own terms — whether free from illness, or saddled with a myriad of ailments.  Carl seemed especially proud of the story of his arrival in California years before.  Late for an appointment, behind in his work, he insisted on being driven first to the beach, where he put together his kite and flew it in the wind blowing off the Pacific Ocean.  Carl loved to fly his kite, you see, and so it was his first priority in life.  Once he had experienced the pleasure he was able to provide himself, the pleasure that the world made available to him, then Carl was ready to go to work.  What I was even more impressed with, above all else, was his lack of pretension.  Carl seemed to believe what he was teaching, and he seemed to teach it because he believed it.  His lack of self-promotion and self-congratulation didn’t prepare me for Barbie’s description of a man who was plagued by the relative obscurity of his pioneering work.

I wrote it off as another illustration of the mysterious wisdom in Barbie’s first cryptic message to me.  “Things are never the way they seem.”  Then, in the thickly carpeted living room where Louise Hay’s support group was meeting, I tried to remember the rest of her advice:  “There is good in everything.  Always be grateful.”

If you’ve ever seen a tall, blond woman with intense, unapologetic eyes glaring out at you from a television talk show while unabashedly embracing a child’s stuffed animal, you may very well have been introduced to Louise Hay.

Louise spoke with a deep voice she used to impart a practiced sense of commanding calm and spiritual connectedness.  She was sitting in front of a fireplace mantel, surrounded by a large group of mostly young people who sprawled across the living room, across the furniture; who spread themselves  like paste into every nook and crevice of the room.  Eager faces, some grinning, some teary-eyed, all painted with a blend of expressions seen wherever pained souls seek communal reassurance.  A touching mixture of the joyous relief that comes from finding a refuge of like-minded wanderers, and a tentative hesitancy to reveal too much – lest they be rejected here like they have come to expect everywhere else.  Most of the young adults were holding, caressing, snuggling one or more of the dozens of stuffed animals sitting amongst them.  One by one, they offered updates to Louise and the group about their problems, their hopes, their bank accounts, and their health.  They spoke of sexual abuse by step-fathers, addiction to unhealthy lovers, and about the number of T cells left in their bloodstreams.  All seemed convinced, as Louise espoused, that the universe was structured to provide all that was needed to any who were ready to receive it.  If you were lacking something necessary to your happiness, the answer lay in why you were keeping higher powers from providing you with what you claimed to desire.