Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors (30 page)

When I walked through my front door, the clock read nine-fifty-eight.  I’d been gone for thirteen minutes.  The phone was ringing, and there were nine messages waiting on the answering machine.  When I picked up the receiver to answer the call, before I could utter the word “hello,” before I heard the sound of another human being on the line, I heard the beep-tone that told me another call was coming in.  I got the feeling that my location had been compromised.

I had conversations with three people on the phone that morning.  During each of those calls, I got three more on call waiting.  I couldn’t hang up the phone without hanging up on someone.  Although I had spent my entire life fantasizing about fame, now that I was getting a tiny taste of it, all I wanted was to find someplace where no one knew who I was.  After about an hour of complete madness I fled my apartment, with the phone ringing, deciding that the best place to be anonymous in New York was at a major sporting event.  I got on the number six train for Grand Central, then transferred to the number seven to Queens, where I knew the New York Mets had a game that day against the Cincinnati Reds.  Sitting on the subway, with my picture staring back at me from the cover of dozens of
New York Posts
being read by the other passengers, I felt that surely the world, or else I, had gone mad.  I leaned back against the seat, closed my eyes, and made believe I was on the run in an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

Two nights before, in front of about five hundred people at the Walter Kerr Theater on Forty-eighth Street, I had quit my job.  I was doing a play on Broadway called
I Hate Hamlet
, costarring with a somewhat well known, tall, brooding Scottish actor.  In the theater there is an ancient tradition of superstition.  One of the more fearsome rules to break is the utterance anywhere inside a theater, for any reason, of the title of William Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
.  Should the dreaded word be spoken, there are theater professionals who will react as if their lives have been threatened.  They will scream, their faces distorted by a mixture of rage and fear, until the transgressor performs one of the bizarre rituals that supposedly breaks the spell.  I have seen dignified elderly actors shove their colleagues out of a dressing room, refusing them readmittance until they have spit on the ground and spun themselves around three times.

Some theater professionals refuse to speak the word anywhere at all.  Several productions of that particular play are said to have been cursed, and the curse is passed along to other productions whenever the title of “The Scottish Play,” as it’s cautiously referred to, is carelessly bandied about.  During the four weeks of rehearsals and the six weeks we had been running
I Hate Hamlet
, the behavior of The Scottish Actor (as I had just as superstitiously taken to calling him) had been, in the genteel, lawsuit-shy language of the press, “unpredictable.”  When, after ten weeks of witnessing remakable amounts of early afternoon alcohol consumption, every conceivable tantrum, every imaginable fit of fear-induced bullying; after enduring every possible glare and growl of vituperation, The Scottish Actor began berating me in mid-performance, I felt close to my breaking point.  About twenty minutes later, during the first act’s climactic sword fight, when he wound up and smacked me with a three-foot-long piece of stainless steel, I decided that I’d had enough and left the stage.

I didn’t know, in the moments immediately following my departure, if I was mostly angry, or embarrassed, or proud of myself.  My reflection in the dressing room mirror was puzzling.  I saw fury in my eyes.  My face was a mask of rage.  I wondered if I had been cowardly in running away, rather than staying and confronting him.  But what would I have done?  Turned and attacked him?  Had a brawl right there on the stage?  I pulled down the back of my costume pants and saw a seven-inch-long welt swelling up; a perfect, double-edged, bright red imprint of the blade.

My mind searched for other options.  I supposed I could have attempted to calmly finish the act.  But surely, enduring a public beating without defending oneself in any way is beyond anyone’s responsibilities.  I had already complained bitterly for weeks about the lack of enforcement of any safety measures surrounding the sword fight.  The Scottish Actor had simply refused to participate in the nightly fight rehearsal required by the actor’s union, usually appearing at the theater minutes after the curtain was scheduled to go up.  As each of my complaints was brushed aside, other cast members had routinely pulled me aside and urged me to push harder for some action.  “It looks dangerous,” I was told.  “You’re going to lose an eye out there.”

Yes, I had done the right thing; the only thing I could do, I told myself.   At least this way, I reasoned, the bullying blowhard was left holding the bag.  At least he would have to deal with the embarrassment of finding himself left alone on stage, with no explanation as to why.

“Well, should I sing?”

It was The Scottish Actor’s voice, coming to me over my dressing room monitor.  I heard him go on.  “It seems an actor who has missed a few parries has become upset and elected to leave the stage.  Unless one is very, very sick, this is a terribly unprofessional thing to do.  We’ll ring down the curtain and begin the second act in a few minutes.”  He left the stage to a round of applause.

Well, I thought.  Touché.  I spoke briefly with one of the producers of the show; I told him I wouldn’t be back; I left the theater and I went home.

Whenever I’ve told people any part of the story since then, when I report that I thought nothing more would come of it than five hundred or so people having a good story to tell when they got home that night, I get a lot of indulgent smirks thrown my way – as if no one believes that I could possibly have been so naive.  But I left the show on a Thursday night.  Nothing had changed dramatically in my life.  I just didn’t have to go to the theater for my dose of indignities the next night, and I was glad.  Certainly the world wasn’t paying any more attention to me than it had been the day before.  Friday night I went to sleep early.  I had gotten only three phone calls that day.

When I got to Shea Stadium I checked my answering machine back home.  There were twelve new messages — including calls from CBS News,
Hard Copy
, and the
London Daily Telegraph
.  To me it seemed obvious that no one was really excited about what had happened inside the Walter Kerr Theater on Thursday night.  They were all foaming at the mouth over the fact that someone else had printed a story about it before them, on Saturday morning.

The question asked first, by anyone who was at all close to me at the time, was, “Do you think you would have done the same thing before you were sick?”  Even those who didn’t pose it as a question were making the same assumptions.  “How brave,” I was told.  “How admirable.  Saying ‘I’ve been through too much already to put up with this.  I have better things to do with my time.’”

I can’t dispute the fact that those were my feelings.  But I also can’t deny that I had been having those feelings for weeks before I was willing to act upon them.  I would try to explain to people that I was glad to have, finally, asserted myself.  But the stance that would have been admirable, I countered, would have been walking away when there was really something to lose.  What I would like to have gained was the courage to refuse to participate in such an unbalanced and abusive power structure from the moment it became apparent, before I had taken my shot at succeeding in spite of it.  Ultimately, I seized an opportunity to escape, no more.  I was stunned, really, by how little difference there was between my behavior and what might have been in the past.  I was proud of what I had done.  But the moment of pride had come after many long weeks of disappointing myself.

With all the attention that was heaped upon the
I Hate Hamlet
episode, its legend quickly eclipsed my reputation for any work I might have previously been known for.  The incident was reported on internationally for weeks, and then again a full eight months later, as part of the year-end highlight issues of
Time
,
Newsweek
, and the Sunday
New York Times
.  I had become “the guy who walked off the stage.”  While a bit intoxicated by the notoriety, I was still worried about how this impression might influence potential employers.  I was also furious about the humiliation I had suffered, both that night and in the months afterward.  As I became embroiled in a union proceeding to receive pay for the full length of my contract, based on my allegations of management’s failure to uphold union regulations and provide a safe work environment, I realized that no one involved with the production was going to volunteer to verify my charges.  Although we had all complained and suffered together, apparently there was something about my response, my refusal to toe the company line – however long delayed – that set me apart.  For the first time, I was able to pull back and see the events in perspective.  I realized that, compared to where I had been in my life, this was a meaningless engagement.  The stakes – money, honor, reputation – while seemingly enormous, were really about pride, and had very little to do with one’s ability to exist.  The distinction I was able to make, at last, was the difference between forces that are annoying and those that pose a real threat.  It’s not a matter of life and death, I told myself, even though it felt like it was.  And, in the painful, but, I’d like to believe, mature act that probably would
not
have happened at any time in my life before, I decided that it was better to cut my losses and find happiness down the line than to stay shackled to an unpleasant experience in a quest for ever elusive justice.  I dropped my sword again, and I walked away from another fight.

A lot has been written, since writing came to be, about what it is like to be ill.  Anatole Broyard became intoxicated by his illness.  Flannery O’Connor felt she had traveled to another country.  I think that anyone who has ever been sick, with even a cold or the flu, knows exactly how it feels.  But I would step back, make a half turn, and say that only those for whom illness has at one time been their companion know what it feels like to be well.

Before I had leukemia, I thought “feeling well” was a neutral state.  If I had a toothache; if I had a sore throat; if food poisoning was wrenching my intestines and causing me to shiver and sweat, these felt like dazzling intrusions on my natural, restful composition.  A flat graph, showing no data at all, broken by temporary spikes of vivid, unpleasant sensation.  “Feeling good,” I realized, had really been a translation for “feeling nothing.”

Only after high fever, nausea, and furious pains wove themselves around every fiber of my neurology; when drooling and vomiting were so accepted that I carried a plastic pea green basin with me everywhere I went; when physical torment reached its apogee with anal fissures that made a half-centimeter orifice feel like a swollen seven-ton tumor did I begin to comprehend, and cherish, the immeasurable ambrosial delights that caressed my senses in the absence of such interference.

When any of these or any of the other half-billion maladies that made up my illness receded, I would try to distinguish between and catalogue some of the previously ignored sensations of wellness.  The simple act of inhaling air effortlessly, as opposed to the labored panting of my sickbed, became a practically orgasmic pleasure.  I rediscovered the presence of the sticky-sweet taste of oxygen in the air, even in the cloying polluted haze of midtown Manhattan.  This was a taste I hadn’t been familiar with since my childhood, and that I’d since forgotten I had ever known.  Walking through Central Park, entranced by the spongy crunch of my shoes as they snapped apart decaying twigs and leaves — and enjoying the sensuousness of my shoes rhythmically massaging my sock covered feet — I took deep, appreciative breaths.  I stopped in my tracks when the taste of the air brought back a torrent of memories.  I stood rapt in the park, as my mind took me back to the summers I’d spent playing at the lake down the road from my family’s house.

“The raft” was the wooden platform that floated just a short distance from the beach and dock.  The water out by the raft was probably about ten feet deep.  When a Frisbee is released under water, it slowly rises to the top – but it doesn’t become visible in a murky lake until it is within two or three feet of the surface.  For the game we played, the “hider” would dive down into the blackness of the water, where his or her goal was to fool all the other players by getting them to expect the Frisbee to rise somewhere far from where it ultimately did.  You couldn’t do this unless you could hold your breath.  For a long, long time.

The Buttons were superhuman masters of this.  Three brothers, Alan, Richie, and Jamie, all comic book specimens of All American, Eagle Scout athleticism.  Older than the rest of us, one of the Button brothers would dive down into the water.  First his blond head, and then his perfect, chiseled body would disappear.  Moments later, bubbles would be released on the other side of the raft from where we were all lined up.  As we dashed over to watch on that side, determined not to be fooled, another burst of bubbles would come up from the side we’d just left.  By the time the Button brother resurfaced, minutes later and gasping for air, we would all be scattered over the four sides of the raft, completely bewildered not only as to where the Frisbee was, but also as to how such a feat was even possible.  When someone finally located the Frisbee, we were much less impressed by them than we were by the brilliant display by the brother who’d hidden it.  That’s why it became so urgent to win the race to find it.  The finder became the next hider, and when we won the right to take the Frisbee down, we all tried our best to imitate the miracles we had grown used to seeing, and to leave our friends as admiringly astonished as we had felt ourselves.

In Central Park, sitting on a rock, tickling myself by rubbing my fingers over its rough surface, I remembered how the air would taste after I clawed my way back up to the surface of the water, having nearly asphyxiated myself in trying to pull off a Frisbee dive to rival one of the Button brothers’.  Just before reemerging, I would feel the burning in my lungs reach a crescendo, and the roaring in my ears while I was still submerged would be replaced by the other kids’ screams as I shot out of the water and sucked fresh air into my lungs.  After I was deprived of breath for two or three minutes, the taste was distinctly sweet, and it stuck to the very top of the back of my throat.  There it would linger until, after a few more breaths, it was taken for granted once again.  Then the flavor of the sweetest scent we know faded into the background, as if it had never been there at all — as if it wasn’t there in every single breath we take.

* * *

Bone marrow transplantation erases the immune system’s memory of all it has been exposed to.  A twenty-seven-year-old man, recovering from the procedure, has twenty-seven years of immunity to reacquire.  There is no way to speed the task or to condense it into a shorter time span.  Like a newborn child, he will be safe enough from most of the serious threats to his system, but vulnerable to a slowly narrowing range of annoying infections.  I myself, seven years past my transplant, am considered to have perfectly normal immune function.  That is, normal for a seven-year-old child.  The cells swimming through my adult body, whose task it is to swarm and attack, are, on a daily basis, being confronted by particularly adult adversaries.  Few seven-year-olds kiss with their mouths open.  If they come into contact with someone else’s sexual secretions, there is something seriously wrong.  Alcohol is not a drug of choice for most first- or second-graders, nor do immune-impairing levels of stress feature prominently in their lives, as they do with most adults.  And, in direct opposition to most of the grown-ups that I know, when children are tired enough, lo and behold, they lie down and go to sleep.  It is in adulthood that we come to sense the limit to the length of a day, or the impending crunch of a deadline hurtling toward us.  We try to manipulate time and to squeeze more productivity out of smaller amounts of it.  With less energy left in our reserves than in our younger human counterparts, we make demands on our bodies that would lay a seven-year-old child out cold.  My seven-year-old child, my second-grade immune system, has had some trouble keeping up.

This fact has provoked in me a preoccupation with the possibility of falling ill, and a fear of situations that might increase the odds.  For the first few years posttransplant, when colds always became sinus infections, which were followed by strep throats, I was already exhausted from the reality of these inconveniences.  But, even when I was feeling well, my fear over when the next attack would come made enjoying myself a monumental task.  An evening out in a smoky bar, packed with the steaming, germ-laden breath of native New Yorkers would only accentuate my chronic sense of dread, my hypervigilance in terms of watching for symptoms, as I’d wait for the inevitable scratchiness on my soft palate; the familiar buildup of pressure as the glands in my neck expanded; the throbbing beat of the headache that started behind the eyes.  Gloom and despair would engulf me, mixing with the physical sensations, as I realized my defenses were being overwhelmed yet again, and I was in for another week of aches and pains, of wheezes and sneezes, of fever and lethargy.  Another week of waiting for something else, of waiting for relief, of waiting, waiting, waiting; wishing that a part of my life would fade away so I could move on to whatever might come next.  Two weeks out of each month, after clawing myself bloody to get it back, I’d be waiting, wasting, wishing my life away.

This aspect of my life has also tested the bounds of love and devotion in my relationships with women since the illness.  As a relationship progresses from casual and electric to prolonged and thoughtful, the romantic glow of perfection surrounding  all aspects of the other individual wears off – even the romance attached to that enduring legend:  the defiant, heroic survivor.  While I’m certain that my exploitation of this American myth has attracted many to me, I have been repeatedly crushed as I’ve witnessed the disappointment of my lovers as they discover me to be someone who has been weakened by the very trials that give me the appearance of strength.  As the cost of the legacy is revealed, as the frequent colds cast light on the justifiable but mind-boggling hypochondria, which exposes the environmental paranoia, which illustrates the depressive response to a world in which death is inevitable, I can recognize the second thoughts clicking into their minds like disks being sucked into a computer.  People are unprepared for the reality of the toll that’s been taken.  There has been a point in each of the relationships I’ve had since Jackie when it became clear that the woman has begun to wonder, “What did I get myself into here?”

Several relationships have blossomed and broken up since the transplant.  In an emotional crisis that includes the loss of love, especially a loss that involves the fear of being abandoned or being left alone, one of the first thoughts to rush into my head is, What if I got sick again now?  Who would be there?  Who would take care of me?  I couldn’t possibly have survived without Jackie last time.  I barely survived with her.  This can’t be happening.  I’m going to get sick again and die alone.  Somehow, the two pains – the loss of love and the loss of life – are intimately related.  As if any loss, every loss, would be as devastating as the ultimate loss I’ve succeeded in avoiding so far.

Then the real perversion will kick in and I’ll think, Hey, if I got sick and wound up in the hospital, then she’d come back.  Sure.  She’d come running.  And I wouldn’t even tell her what was happening.  She’d hear it from someone else and desperately try to find me, and she’d feel incredibly guilty for however she might have wronged me.  This thought process takes hold regardless of whether I’ve been left or the breakup was by mutual consent or if I’ve done the leaving myself.  I’ll imagine my ex-lover rushing to sit by my bed and hold my hand, then willing me to get well so we can live together happily and triumphantly, with nothing that can ever come between us or even upset us ever again, because we know the value of life, and we know how precious and fleeting it is and we’ll never, ever forget the lessons we’ve learned.

Then I’ll think,
Holy shit, Evan.  What are you doing?  What the fuck are you thinking?!
  Because now I’ve really scared myself.  Now that I’ve had these thoughts, I become afraid that I will really wind up subconsciously giving myself leukemia again out of some kind of demented self-pitying spite.  The same as when my mother made me angry as a kid.  I’d destroy my favorite toy right in front of her.  To show her how much she had hurt me.

I can understand the difficulty that my situation presents to anyone who doesn’t inhabit it themselves.  If my life didn’t require that I possess knowledge of the kinds of tragedy that can befall someone, I don’t think I would choose a companion who introduced that knowledge to me.  But for all the noise I may have made at home, for all the whining and parading I do and have done, there is much that I keep to myself.

For a period of years after the transplant, once a month, I would go for a blood test.  It is a routine that continues today, although far less often.  It is nothing but the most basic of all blood tests, a CBC – complete blood count.  A machine counts the number of cells in a certain amount of blood, differentiates between the cell types, and prints the numbers out on a piece of paper.  It takes about fifteen minutes to get the results.  For the past several years, I have gotten my blood drawn in the outpatient lab of New York University Medical Center.  I wait for them to hand me the slip, and I take it up to the office of my doctor.  But I don’t proceed directly there.

I have no need for the numbers to be interpreted for me; it’s the simplest of charts to read.  Even if one were not acquainted, as I am, with the normal range of numbers, they are printed right there with the results.  Each time I have my blood tested, I wait for the slip of paper to be handed to me, and, feeling like the judge, jury foreman, and defendant all in one, I go off to a quiet corner to read the verdict and learn whether I get to keep living my life.  The chances of recurrence are slim.  Minuscule.  But I fear the worst every time I go.

Occasionally the machine will print out numbers that are alarming.  Occasionally, the machine will say something like “abnormal white blood cell population.”  This is exactly what the machine would say if I were to have leukemia.  On those occasions, I have to sit in the waiting room, waiting for the doctor to see me.  I sit for an hour, sometimes two, and I imagine saying good-bye to my friends.  I imagine myself getting the news of a recurrence and wonder whom I would call first.  I watch the doctor come and go, ushering in one patient after another, and I want to scream.

“
No!  Wait!  I have to go now!  Take me!  I think I’m dying and I have to find out!  Help!  Save me!  Save me!  Please, save me!  I have to know now!
”

I might have to wait two hours before it’s my turn to see the doctor, and another until she can check the slide for herself.  Then she’ll tell me I’m all right, and sometimes I believe her.

If I share these anxieties with anyone, it’s still most likely to be Jackie.  She and I are the best of friends now, and we speak all the time.  In the midst of our other relationships, our loves and more petty obsessions, we have found a deep need for the other’s presence.   When I’m dealing with the difficult repercussions of all that once transpired, I get the feeling that Jackie is the only person who truly understands.  When we get together, or have long phone conversations from wherever in the world we happen to be, we share our difficulties and depressions, our glimpses of beauty and our occasional ecstasies.  We both seem to get a unique comfort from sharing our present-day skirmishes with an old war buddy who fought the big one alongside us.