Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors (17 page)

Meanwhile, I would become furious at myself for giving so much credence to statistics of what had happened in the past to people other than myself.  I tried to keep in mind that my situation was unique, and that I had abilities that no equation could calculate.  I wanted to make a decision based on my own potential and beliefs, not out of fear over what had happened to someone else.  However I would do it, I had to make up my mind; not about what to wear, or where to live, or who to date, or what to say — but about which weapon to choose.  I had to determine how I was going to try to stay alive, and in doing so, I discovered that dying is not the only part of life that is inevitably done alone.

In the end, quite simply, I went with my heart.  I remained true to the work that I had put in so far; to the faith that I had nurtured and grown out of nearly nothing.  I reminded myself that I had been in the top 5 or 10 percent of almost everything I had done in my life, and so, in forgoing any more treatment, I still had a 10 or 15 percentag- point cushion to feel comforted by.  The act of making the decision based on faith, especially since I’d started out as a completely faithless being, only strengthened the faith I had gained.  I was through with hospitals and medication, with studies and statistics and the anxiety that they instilled.  I was going to walk away and live my life, to create the life that I had promised myself, and to reap the rewards of transcending fear and expunging it from my existence.

In spite of our difficulties, Jackie and I had decided, during the last hospitalization, that we both wanted to be married when I was well.  We cried together, and we spoke on and on about the wonderful life ahead of us.  But, as her strength and spirit – her sexuality and sense of adventure – continued its retreat from me, I found myself mourning the life I’d locked myself out of with my predictable hospital bed proposal.  Had I avoided death, I wondered, only to spend the rest of my days in a sexless marriage with a depressed partner?

I’m sure the memory of seeing her lover reduced to such helplessness for so long contributed greatly to Jackie’s inability to feel remotely sexual within our relationship.  In addition to that, I was aware of how difficult it must have been to open up again, to reinvest her love, in a prospect whose future was so dubious.  I was certainly capable of recognizing these dynamics at work in our relationship.  I was aware that the danger existed that Jackie might give of herself, identifying herself with my struggle, until she had no separate self left.  I may even have had an inkling that it was just such a loss of independent identity that had rendered Jackie incapable of sexual desire.  But, while I hoped that the passage of time would heal most of the wounds, Jackie was not the only one who was acutely aware of the ticking time bomb that might or might not be set to go off inside me.  Time was the one ingredient that I simply, and absolutely, could not afford to grant her.  Regardless of the debt that I owed her; no matter how much I would have liked to have been her hero the way that she had been mine; no matter what promises had been made, I needed to live – right away – because, with the odds stacked against me like they were, it might very well be my last chance.  If Jackie was unable to seize hold of life, right now; if Jackie had to recover from the trauma of all that we’d just been through, I wished her well.  But, to my way of thinking at the time, Jackie had the privilege of expecting a safe, secure future for herself.  She would recover.  If I waited for her, my time might pass me by.  When all my feeble, amateur attempts to rouse her failed, in an act of utter desperation, I threw myself into an affair with another woman.  When Jackie confronted me with my betrayal of her I broke off our engagement, and our relationship.

I left Jackie sobbing at the kitchen table of our apartment, and I went off to make a movie in upstate New York. 
Sweet Lorraine
was a film that I had been cast in before illness had struck and that had gotten delayed in order to raise more financial backing.  It was the story of a small, family-run, kosher Catskills resort hotel.  The director, a man named Steve Gomer, had grown up in the very hotel where we would be filming.  It had been owned and run by the family of his second cousin, Jane, who later became his wife.  I had been cast to play one of a number of young summer staff members, the backbone of the hotel, in this film about the people and the lives behind the scenes of an all but extinct way of life.  When the production resumed, it coincided perfectly with my decision to end my treatment, and I was thrilled by the serendipity of it all.  I took it as an omen that I had made the right choice after all, and that one minute aspect of life had stopped speeding ahead and was waiting for me to climb back on.  As I waited in the hallway for the elevator, I heard Jackie’s cries from the apartment where I’d left her grow louder and louder.  Between the wrenched gasps, I could hear her whimpering: “I don’t want this to be happening….I don’t want this to be happening.”  The same words that I had cried myself to sleep with night after night in the hospital for months and months on end.

If I could have physically torn myself in half, I would have.  Listening to Jackie pleading out loud, to no one, in an empty apartment, nearly did the trick for me.  Standing in the grimy hallway, staring at the floor, I was able to see only two options: go back and try to save Jackie or save myself.

Fuck the elevator.  I ran down the stairs.

The lush dampness of summer in the Catskill Mountains was the perfect climate to plant the seeds for a new beginning.  The adventure began with a cab ride up to Broadway and Sixty-eighth Street, where I was dropped onto the deserted sidewalk just after dawn.  It was early in May, but the temperature had soared in the past few days, so I was dressed in cut-off denim shorts.  The morning air still held a damp chill, but it was clearly temporary, destined to be burned off long before afternoon.  A hot summer day passing itself off as another cold spring morning.  The flashbacks to the days when my parents dropped me off for summer camp were strong and only got stronger as one, and then another, of the cast members straggled around a corner or flopped out of a taxi to wait for our ride to the country.  We approached each other cautiously, with no way to be certain that we belonged to the same club, except for the fact that we were the only humans on the street so early, and that we were each dragging enormous trunks and duffel bags, stereo music boxes, and other identity-proclaiming accoutrements.  We made hasty introductions, laughed about mutual friends and acquaintances, and piled ourselves into a van for the three-hour drive.

As we left the city and any concrete clues to our previous histories behind I was grabbed by the thought that I could simply invent a new one for myself and my unknowing companions.  Nothing from the past would apply over the next six weeks, I naively thought.  Crossing the George Washington Bridge and speeding up the Palisades Parkway, listening to the others tell tales of how they had arrived at this moment in their lives, I kept quiet in the front seat next to the driver.  The questions and the banter being thrown around behind me felt oddly threatening to my imagined secret identity.  The blandness of innocuous questions such as “What have you been up to lately?” now possessed the power to blow my cover completely.  I hadn’t invented a story for myself before leaving home; indeed, I hadn’t even thought about withholding any information until we got into the tight quarters of the van.  Only then did I recognize the quandary that would confront me over and over for the next six weeks.

Of course, I could just be open and honest with everyone.  Let them all tell stories of their winter’s employment; explain the pain and sorrow of their latest love; bitch about the indignities of the business we shared.  When it was my turn, I’d just turn around in my seat, smile, and say, “Oh, you know.  I got leukemia back in late September.  Been in the hospital since then.  Got out a few weeks ago.  They say I’ll almost certainly wind up back there before long.  Then I’ll be dead soon after that.  So I’m just trying to have as much fun as I can until then!”  But I expected that, if half of them didn’t leap out of the speeding vehicle to escape, such a statement might cast a bit of a pall over the forced intimacy of our first moments together.  And it’s not that I necessarily
wanted
to tell them exactly where I’d been for the past seven months, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.  It was as if my life was empty of any experience that I could relate other than my recent struggle to survive.  Not only was I completely bankrupt of my ability to engage in any kind of small talk, but I was keeping close tabs on a nagging aggravation I was feeling about all of theirs.  I was beginning to squirm with impatience and jealousy as  I listened to those vibrant young souls giggling over the latest of their meaningless triumphs and disappointments.  I felt worlds away from them as I sat, only a car seat apart, hurtling along the New York State Thruway toward my future.  It was a future that we would all, to a certain extent, share.  But the past that would inform my slice of it left me feeling set apart, as if I was inhabiting an entirely different time zone from the rest of them.

Immediately after being offered the role, I had been contacted to go for a medical checkup, as are all actors contracted to work for a week or more in a film.  Production costs on a film set can range up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per day.  Should an actor become unable to complete a shoot once he’s been on camera for three weeks already, it could bankrupt the production company.  An insurance policy is therefore taken out on each actor, so that, in the event one becomes ill, the company can get reimbursed for its costs, recast, and reshoot.  When I was contacted about the physical, I panicked.  No insurance company would have covered me at that point, just weeks after completing treatment, only seven months after being diagnosed with an almost always fatal disease.

Steve Gomer’s wife, Jane, worked as a physical therapist at Sloan-Kettering.  We had never met before, but I assumed she had something to do with easing her husband’s concerns, and I was hired for the job without a physical being required.  Steve and his partners were willing to take a chance on me, bringing me on board with no insurance coverage, risking their entire production.  This was a decision so far out of the ordinary it was difficult to imagine they knew what they were doing.  I was living life as a tightrope walk without a net, but only because I had no other choice.  The generosity of Steve and the other producers, in their willingness to take that walk with me, all so they could have me in their film, made the stakes that much higher.  I wanted to prove to Steve, and to the rest of the world, that they had done the right thing.  Whenever I worried about my health over that six-week shoot, I was aware of the fact that I was carrying a responsibility not only to myself, but to others as well.  Each night I would go to sleep and pray that I would make it through the schedule.  I would count the days gone by like money safely in the bank, looking ahead to the shrinking number still to pass.

The first week in the Catskills was devoted to rehearsals and training.  Each morning we would get up at the crack of dawn, change into our waiter’s uniforms, and be driven over to The Pines, one of the fading Borscht Belt resorts.  There we would trail one of the waiters or waitresses, trying to learn the techniques behind lifting forty pound, food laden trays with only the thumb and two fingers of one hand.  Afternoons were spent reading and rereading the script, joking endlessly with each other, and tailoring our lines and roles to best suit our own particular sense of humor.  It was Steve’s idea, and his strength as a director, to give us wide leeway in our performances.  As long as it made Steve laugh, we could do or say just about anything we wanted on camera.

The freedom of this atmosphere allowed me to relax right away.  After the van ride up from the city, I decided that I wasn’t going to allow anything to shut me out of this experience.  Whatever gap needed to be bridged to find my way back to the childlike exuberance I saw around me, I was determined to cross it and keep on running when I hit the other side.  And, most surprising of all, I was able to do it.  I watched myself in amazement as I attacked everything put in front of me with a ferocity of spirit.  I was overjoyed to find that, in spite of the isolation my experiences inflicted upon me, I was able to approach life in a much less inhibited fashion.  The training sessions, the rehearsals, and the hours we all spent laughing and joking with each other were all imbued with a newness for me that resulted in my catapulting myself into them.  I latched onto a Salvadoran waiter at The Pines who, like the character I was to play, was a freewheeling, fast-talking, horse-betting hustler.  I watched as he good-naturedly charmed the elderly guests of the hotel, and not so good-naturedly poked fun at them behind their backs.

“Decaf,” he’d scoff, as he came back from a table and rushed over to the coffee station.  “I’ll give them decaf.”  Then he’d cut the full-strength, caffeinated coffee with 50 percent hot water and head on back to the table with a big smile for everyone.

His name was Henry, and I was awed by his ability to pick winning horses at the track. Then I’d laugh with him after he drunkenly misplaced the two hundred dollars I’d watched him win ten minutes before.  I tried to adopt his reckless attitude toward life.  He seemed to know that all that really mattered was the feeling of the moment, and he was a master at finding his fun there.  For the first time in my life I was able to muster a little bit of the same skill.  In my sly asides to loosen up the other actors between takes; in our all-out basketball games played on our lunch breaks; in my insistence on trying something different and new each time the cameras rolled, I was playing every moment out for all the juice that could be squeezed out of it.  Dreaming about the future, however, which reminded me of its uncertainty, was something I could not allow myself to indulge in.  And so I leapt at each moment as it was presented to me.  It was the life of a man possessed.