"Hey, Rocky, Watch Me Pull a Rabbit Out of My Hat"
"Again?"
"Bad liver," the doctor repeated.
At that moment, I had at my disposal several witty responses, including an allusion to Prometheus and a facile remark about being as good a "liver" as anybody else. The one thing I didn’t consider was to ask the doctor whether this meant I was dying. I already figured I was.
"It’s probably the drinking," the doctor continued, and I was grateful that this conversation was taking place over the phone. He would have seen me roll my eyes.
Two weeks earlier I had chosen the doctor for a routine physical exam from a list that was provided by my company’s HMO. I chose him because a co-worker told me that the doctor was "physically challenged," and I’m always willing to toss a cripple a bone. As it turned out, Dr. Moore was youngish guy whose office was decorated with antique fishing paraphernalia and photos of him and his teenaged children waving large-mouthed bass at the camera. Immediately before my appointment, I saw him puttering around the office in a motorized wheel chair and calling out greetings to his small army of assistants. A few minutes later, after one of the nurses directed me into the examination room, Dr. Moore used his arms and a special railing to swing himself from the wheelchair outside the doorway to a strategically placed chair inside the room. I didn’t know if this was vanity on his part, some attempt to withhold his infirmity from a new patient; but eventually, after he had stuck a rubber-insulated finger up my butt, chatted with me about my mental health, and presumably concluded that I was a good guy, he mentioned his handicap. It was while he was trying to talk me into Prozac: "Take me, for instance. I could try to think myself out of having MS, but certain things are just medical problems and they respond to medication better than they respond to denial.. It’s the same with depression."
Eventually I accepted the prescription; but thinking it was a waste of time, I never got it filled. Two weeks later, I fell back on this same kind of biological fatalism when the doctor called to tell me that my liver was eating itself. I didn’t bother to ask him about a cure. I already knew, from a hundred bad movies and from the blood that was in my urine, what he would tell me: that I could quit drinking or I could die.
It was liver failure that killed my uncle Rich when he was 47 years old, six months after he quit drinking and two days after he checked into the hospital with a mysterious pain in his side. Rich was my favorite relative, the bachelor uncle who lived his entire life in my grandparents’ house. From the time he was 18 -- the year I was born to his older sister and started my own brief residency in that big house -- Richard endured his father’s antagonism and the taunts of "deadbeat" in order to stay near to my grandmother. If Rich was an alcoholic, he was the kind who did his drinking in front of a television and never raised a hand in anger toward anyone. Kinda like me. When he finally checked into the hospital, the doctors told him he was as good as dead. My mother immediately flew out to New Jersey to be at this bedside, but she didn’t make it in time.
Thus I had a certain the hell-with-it attitude about this whole liver business that was equal parts denial and fatalism.
A couple days after my chat with the doctor, I got a phone message from this drinking buddy of mine who happens to be my wife. Ashley was calling from the phone booth at Baker’s Bar, a waterfront dive in Frankfort, Michigan, where we have shared some adventures in the recent past. She was calling to announce that she had finally left her abusive biker boyfriend in Los Angeles and she was free at last, free at last. Ashley sounded merry as she described the ebb and flow of revelers in the bar and invited me to come up and visit her. Just a year earlier, Ashley had been diagnosed with cancer. When I heard about it, I had freaked. Across the miles, I shifted into my commando psychic-lifesaver mode, sending her positive vibrations and little tokens of affection in the hopes that the cancer would run screaming from her body. As a final bargaining chip in my negotiations with God, I wrote a hopelessly confessional "short story" about our love affair and our sham marriage in which I took all the blame for the pain we had caused to the other people in our lives (specifically her boyfriend and my girlfriend).
As it eventually turned out, the cancer diagnosis was a false alarm, a harmless mistake, and by the time that she called me from the Baker's Bar phone booth, Ashley was as fit as an Irish fiddler.
After listening to Ashley’s exuberant sing-song on the answering machine for the third or fourth time, I suddenly remembered something else about that pathetic little story I wrote to save her life. In it, in exchange for keeping Ashley alive for even one minute longer, I had casually offered to "let myself be hung on the cross of these words until everyone I have ever harmed has pecked at my ragged liver and left me for dead."
Yes, I had offered my liver.
Sometimes God is so fucking literal it’s not even funny.
Over the years I have been fascinated with stories about people who die in ridiculous, unpredictable ways. There is a feature that appears in alternative newspapers around the country called "News of the Weird" that I can always count on for my weekly fix of depressing, true stories that illustrate the comic futility of human existence: "Forest Ranger Killed by Amorous Porcupine." "Off-Duty Nurse Decapitated by Runaway Ambulance." "Honeymoon Couple Drowned by Exploding Waterbed." I can’t help wondering if these people were specifically marked for this kind of frivolous extermination from the moment they were born. What kind of person passes through the world, making friends, dreaming dreams, accumulating a sense that they are the center of the universe, only to have the whole process halted by a bowling ball tossed from a highway overpass? Tennessee Williams (no relation), the first dead body that I ever saw, was allegedly killed when he choked on the cap to a pill bottle. If ol’ Tennessee had written an incident like that into one of his own plays, he would have quickly stricken it out as implausible. And yet here was I, faced with the possibility that I might be dying of liver disease because I made the mistake of choosing an overwrought metaphor in trying to save the life of the woman I loved.
Sheesh.
I wondered if people who were unknowingly close to their own death would move through the world with a heightened sensitivity in the period immediately preceding their demise. Did they look upon their loved ones with a inexplicable tenderness? Did the final Christmas in their lives have a special poignancy that they didn’t quite understand at the time? Similarly, did those who already knew they were dying (like, say, me) have a season of wisdom and forgiveness before the final, sputtering agony?
After listening to Ashley I had the sense that I was entering one of those periods in my life where everything was going to be a symbol for something else. I wasn’t too keen on the idea that this particular joyride was leading me straight to the grave; but if, in fact, God was now setting me up for one of those wise-death scenarios, I wanted at least to have some control over the scenery. Thus I called Ashley the next day in Michigan and convinced her that she’d love to see me.
Besides being my wife (a legal matter that we initiated on a whim in Las Vegas about six years ago and have never officially resolved), Ashley is also something of a sorceress. Perhaps it isn’t the literal truth, but it’s undeniable that Ashley’s world is a playfully haunted one. As I am fond of telling people, she was born on Halloween, and each of her many bedrooms (including the one that she once kept at my house) has been a shrine of to the pop appropriation of religious and mystical symbols. Maybe you know the type: lots of candles and Mexican puppets, winking Christmas lights choking the life out of fat ceramic Buddhas, velvet Elvises hovering over Ouija-boarded alters. She reads paperback books about UFOs and astral projection. She keeps a pack of gyspy tarot cards in her bedside table. Thus I figured that if there were something I was supposed to learn from this experience, I was more likely to learn it from an episode with Ashley than any other way. As a bonus (and as further confirmation of her status as a benevolent blonde witch), the cancer-free Ashley now represented miraculous escape from the jaws of illness. Thus I found myself hoping that some of her luck would rub off on me, that Ashley would place her hands in the vicinity of my liver and milk the poison from my body.
And if that didn’t work, we could always drink ourselves to death.
In the two weeks before the trip, I walked through suburban Indianapolis like an autistic, my eyes darting from one sign to another, my ears perpetually cocked to the wind.
I heard that an old love of mine had gotten pregnant, and I consulted my karmic slide-rule to determine what it meant about my impending doom. I peeled Bazooka Joe comics from the sidewalk and scrutinized their fortunes. I checked my horoscope. I consulted the I-Ching.
At a thrift strore, I found a copy of a game that I had as a child, "The Kreskin ESP Game." I took it to my little furnished apartment on the edge of town and carefully set it up, thrilling to the remembered feel of the "fortune-telling pendulum," the bold coloration of the "psychic cards ," the weird gravity of Kreskin’s own advice that you must "believe in your heart to make it so." Almost without fail, I was able to guess whether the next card in the deck was the red triangle, the blue circle, or the orange square.
I was about as magical as a dying guy could get.
By a quirk of cartography, I am able to leave the parking lot from my job in Indianapolis, travel north on that same road for eight hours, and arrive at Ashley’s doorstep. That is what I did on a Friday after lunch, not bothering to mention to anyone at the office that I was leaving for the day. This straight-line trajectory neatly reinforced the idea that I was being lured into the center of the web, that I was driving into the heart of a big symbol machine that would rattle me around like a cocktail shaker, fill my head with fizzy wonder, and leave me raped and bleeding at the side of the road. It was just what I needed.
The last time I’d made this trip it was similarly exhausting and blissful. The occasion was the wedding of Ashley’s sister Kristin to my friend Bill. It was also, not incidentally, the third anniversary of my brother’s suicide. The symbolic weight of that occasion was further reinforced by a full moon and a six-pack of malt liquor in my lap.
Kristin had scheduled the wedding for the night of the blue moon, that rare occasion when there is a second full moon in a calendar month. I arrived in Frankfurt at sundown, just in time for the start of the wedding, which was held in a tent within a grove of red pines about a hundred yards from Lake Michigan. I took a seat in a folding chair just as the procession music started. (This was not the first time that I arrived at a wedding alone and just in time.) The music that thumped out of the stereo over the soft purring of the diesel generator was an American Indian tribal chant. The wedding party bustled through a thicket of young trees on the path to the tent. Ashley was at the front of the line in an antique velvet dress and matching floppy hat. My heart did its predictable flip at the sight of her, and I felt an extra measure of tenderness when I registered that she had gained about ten pounds (from hospital food?) since last I saw her a year earlier.
The wedding itself was a fabulous burlesque of tradition. Their friend Dan, a mail-order minister in the Universal Life Church, performed a ceremony that was equal parts liberated consciousness and stand-up comedy. At one point he pulled from a cardboard box a 50-foot iron chain that was festooned with ribbons and meaningful artifacts from the life of the happy couple. He unfurled it from the box like linked handkerchiefs from a magician's hat and passed it to along to the assembled congregation "to signify the great chain of love that links us all together." The chain did not reach to the back row, where I sat with my hat in my hand.
Later in the ceremony, the respective parents stood to say a few words, and Ashley's father gave a touching speech about the rollercoaster ride that the family had experienced with Ashley's near-death and recovery followed by Kristin's engagement and marriage. It was something a lot nicer than a Dad's dutiful windbaggery, and I cried, like I always do at weddings.
After the ceremony, everybody adjourned to the make-shift bar at the back of the tent or the keg of beer stuffed into a trashcan next to the portable toilet outside. Before I had a chance to corner Ashley, I was distracted by a rustling in the woods. A shadowy figure was darting from tree to tree. It was human-sized but not quite human. As it got nearer, it took shape in the darkness. It was a raccoon - or rather, someone dancing around in a raccoon costume, complete with giant raccoon head and color-coordinated tennis shoes. The big raccoon threw its arms around the happy couple while everyone else roared with laughter. A quick survey of the nearby human faces convinced me that the raccoon was Ashley's mom, a fact that was confirmed a few moments later when somebody snuck up and yanked off the giant raccoon head . That's the kind of family they were: Five minutes after her daughter's wedding, the mom is dancing through the woods in a raccoon outfit. ...
[TO BE CONTINUED]