by Bruce Feiler
So what’s it like around there? A challenge. I’m skinnier than at any time since our wedding. I’m bald. I’m on crutches. A cold I caught this week lasted three times longer than it normally would have. Just the other night I lay awake in bed, muttering to myself, “Nothing good ever happens to me anymore.” Later, I had a dream in which I imagined life around my home after I had died and was no longer living here. It ended with me walking into my office and seeing photos of someone else’s children on my desk. I screamed a deep-throated scream and woke up.
We have been struck that our situation raises one unfamiliar challenge. We are at an age when many of our friends are dealing with the issues surrounding aging parents. As unpleasant as these issues are, most of us know we will face them—and know many who already have. But when the person getting sick has four living parents, as I do (counting mine and my in-laws), the illness overturns the natural order of life. Few of us have the emotional vocabulary to deal with this reality, especially when those parents move back in for a while.
More than once I have scowled at my mother for treating me like a child or suddenly prying too deeply into my bowel movements or sex life. (No, I didn’t check whether Cisplatin could be countervailed by Viagra, but thanks for asking.) I growled when my mother-in-law called an air-conditioning repairman for our guestroom, when the device just wasn’t turned on. If nothing else, we need our parents now, and we are grateful for the disruption they are causing to their own lives to help us—and our daughters—thrive. But setting new rules has been trying.
As for Linda, her life can be pretty crummy these days—from daily insurance battles to a perpetual slog through hospital waiting rooms to a husband who barely looks up from his pillow. I spend a lot of time staring into space. Linda keeps saying, “I’m so sorry this is happening to you” or “You don’t deserve this,” but I don’t often find it comforting. One night recently I was performing my grim bedtime ritual: putting down my crutches, pulling my pants and underwear down to my ankles, sitting down gingerly on the bed, pulling my pants and underwear up over my right foot, then, after lifting my left leg carefully with two hands, kicking them off my left. I then repeat the entire exercise in reverse with my pajamas, a humiliating routine that has now added nearly a full minute of stomach-wrenching indignity to the simplest of everyday tasks.
Observing the look on my face, Linda asked, innocently, caringly, “What’s wrong?”
“My life sucks, that’s what’s wrong,” I snapped. I instantly felt miserable. I took her in my arms and kissed her. “I’m ruining your life,” I said. “I feel so bad.”
Even with all this agony, Linda managed to find some joy in recent weeks. She helped our girls have a wonderful summer, including time with the Rottenbergs on Cape Cod and the Feilers on Tybee Island. Her friends showered her with cupcakes and massages for her birthday. And though it will be taxing on us, I am excited that Linda is scheduled to make brief trips to California, Argentina, and Dubai in the coming months.
The girls, meanwhile, are doing great. A few blips aside, Tybee and Eden are sprouting with maturity and showing fewer signs of stress. They were gleeful at learning to swim by themselves at the beach this August. They daily prance around, belting out their new theme song, from The Sound of Music: “I am sixteen going on seventeen,” including the gem that they are completely unprepared “to face a world of men.” And they are so consumed by reading that they regularly correct our spelling.
We had a moment of crisis a few weeks back when during a regularly scheduled tea party, a friend asked our darling Purplicious (Eden) and Pinkalicious (Tybee) what their favorite colors were. Eden, per years of preference, said “purple and rainbow.” Then Tybee, overturning equal years of pink intransigence, also said “purple and rainbow.” For a second time stopped, the heavens parted, and it was one of those moments as in the Book of Joshua when God seemed on the verge of hurling the planets toward Earth. We all felt as if we were witnessing a once-in-a-lifetime alteration, like the changing of the Coke formula or the fall of the Berlin Wall. Linda was ready to cheer this sign of growing up, but Daddy quickly stepped in. “Mommy has already bought you a college tuition’s worth of pink sweaters, coats, mittens, and snowsuits. I’ll be darned if you’ll wear anything but pink until spring.” The Old World Order was quickly restored.
So what’s the big picture? After months of living with cancer, I still find it easier to be at home rather than venture too far into the world. Here everybody knows I’m sick, and it’s safer. Often when I’m driving down a busy street and looking out at all the pedestrians, I think to myself, “That person doesn’t have cancer. That person doesn’t either.” Seeing other people walk without thinking can bring on a surge of sadness—or anger. “Do you know how lucky you are?!” I want to shout. As someone said to me recently, “We all have a gun pointing at our heads; it’s just easy to forget.” This year, at least, we won’t forget.
Still, the many e-mails, letters, and gestures we have received from far and wide have reminded us that we are not alone, and that even as we all hurry down the avenues of our own lives, there are many invisible eyes looking out for us and prepared to hurl a few planets our way if the need arises.
Thank you for being a part of that, and if these letters have caused you to pause even for a few minutes in a busy day, perhaps you’ll consider some of the gestures that have brought meaning to our family. Write a Friday missive to a forgotten friend. Reach out to someone you kissed—or kissed off—long ago. Remember a forgotten wish.
Or, take a walk for me.
Love,
.11.
DAVID
Don’t See the Wall
THE FIRST TIME I MET David Black he was sitting in a blue velour barrel chair in his office overlooking the Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Five foot three and a half, on a good day, in cowboy boots, he rubbed his fingers together like a shaman and peered out eagerly, like a mongoose ready to pounce, managing to be both cute and fierce, lovable but still capable of killing a cobra.
Six years into my writing career, I had hit a wall. I had three books published but had no visible path to earning a living. In a final act of desperation, I left my mother-knows-best agent and went looking for help. With a platoon of bestseller lists on his wall and a roster of rising stars he helped manage, David Black was recommended as a would-be savior. A sports fan and work-out fiend, David also had something none of the other candidates on my list had: a penis.
He soon started proving it. He took one look at my six-foot-two body and announced, even before I sat down, “If I were your height I’d be in the NBA.”
Self-delusion is a beautiful thing, but bravado is even better.
Especially in an agent.
Within days he was peppering me with phone calls and telling me that my entire approach to fulfilling my dreams was wrong. To a dreamer flat against the bricks of disappointment, the words were magic. I signed on eagerly.
But still I wondered: How do I get over the wall?
ONE UNEXPECTED GIFT OF the Council of Dads was that it forced me to formalize what otherwise would have gone unsaid. It obliged me to sit down with my closest friends, tell them what they meant to me, then ask them to play an important role for my daughters. As my treatment ticked on and the surgery grew closer, the men in my Council would have been there already. The daily postcards from Jeff were gathering by my bed; Max’s fortnightly phone calls grew to three times a week. But by inviting these men into the innermost space of our lives, we were cementing a new kind of bond.
And by forcing us to sit down and discuss our lives, I began to detect certain patterns among these men. First was a new kind of maleness, one that would have been completely alien to my father’s father, or even to my own father, who has a more distant relationship with even his oldest male friends. For starters, we talk—and fairly regularly. More important, we talk about things that were once the exclusive domain of women’s magazines and daytime chat shows:
our children, our feelings, even our bodies.
For me, no friend represents this new vernacular of modern manhood more than David Black. David is both a classic man’s man and a modern woman’s man. On the manly front, he picks up the phone with “Yo, motherfucker!” He’s hypercompetitive and prone to giving endless paeans about obscure bottles of wine. He even bought a convertible sports car for his fiftieth birthday. (Actually, like many a true guy, he’s impatient: He bought it on his forty-ninth.)
On the new-man front, he leaves work early to coach Little League, he hugs, he’s the first person to call when distress breaks and the last one to check in at the end of a crummy day. And he bakes. Someone asked me if David cried when I invited him to join my Council of Dads. “David cries when you invite him for a walk,” I said.
Part of this personality mix comes from deep childhood insecurities about his size and weight. I asked him what he looked like when he was younger. “I was chunky as a kid,” he said. “What does chunky mean?” I asked. His answer came swift. “Fat.”
David was born in Jackson Heights, Queens. His father was an editor at William Morrow, and the first book he published was Reginald Damerell’s Triumph in a White Suburb: The Dramatic Story of Teaneck, N.J., the First Town in the Nation to Vote for Integrated Schools. Hillel Black was so besotted with this bedroom community that he relocated his family there when David was eight.
“Because my father was an editor, he used to work from home on Fridays,” David said. “I would always ask him to come out and play, and he wouldn’t because he had to work. He would sit alongside one of those old tube radios, listening to opera. I grew up hating opera because he would never come and play. To this day, I don’t like opera.”
Did he romanticize books because of his father? “I admired what my father did, but I never wanted to do it. I wanted to work for myself. When I was a kid, I wanted a stereo. My parents told me I could have one, but only if I earned the money to pay for it. So I got a paper route. I delivered the Bergen Record off the back of my bicycle. After a few weeks, my mother drove by in the car and said, ‘Your father and I have been talking, and we’ve decided we’ll buy you a stereo.’ I said, ‘Mom, you can keep driving. I have a paper route to do.’”
David’s self-reliance, which at times can be bull-headedness, became a hallmark of his personality. At twenty-one, he finally applied it to the one arena that most plagued him as a child. “I was working at Macy’s,” David said, “and I had put on a lot of weight. So I started running. From April to October I dropped forty pounds and entered the New York City marathon. It was the single most formative experience of my life. Hands down. Not even close. Because it taught me that I can do what I set out to do. It harkened back to that time delivering newspapers. I had a goal. I was going to realize that goal. And nothing was going to stand in my way.”
Not even his father. “I ran the last half of the race half an hour faster than the first,” David said. “And as I came to the twenty-fifth mile, my father came out into the road, happy to see me. I looked up and said, ‘Fuck off.’ I felt terrible the moment I said it, but I realized what I was doing. This was my moment. Nobody was going to take it from me. It’s no accident that a week later I met my wife.”
“You credit the marathon with meeting Melissa?” I asked.
“I was feeling good about myself. I was ready. Most men don’t articulate concerns about their bodies, but I bet you most men think about them. How often do you see somebody in the street with his belly hanging out over his belt, and he walks with a sense of anger about himself? You don’t feel good about yourself, you’re not going to be happy. I would tell that to your girls.”
ONE HALLMARK OF THIS new breed of men is that the old boundaries of male bonding no longer apply. David is the colleague who also became a friend; now he’s the friend who’s also a colleague. No one on my Council of Dads knows my work life better than David; and, because he lives nearby, few know my home life better. Our families have a regular calendar of Halloween trick-or-treat visits, Super Bowl parties, birthday celebrations. (David and I share a birthday, though, ahem, he shared it alone for five years before me.)
There are advantages to this kind of relationship: a seamlessness between work and family, a comfort that the people who help you make professional decisions understand the consequences for your personal life. But there are drawbacks, too: It’s harder to get away, and, if things go wrong, it’s harder to extricate yourself. I’ve experienced both sides with David.
A literary agent is a broker of dreams in a world in which most dreams don’t come true. It’s this aspect of David—his finesse at handling aspirations and setbacks—that is his greatest skill, and the gift Linda and I most wanted him to share with our daughters. David would push the girls to imagine some unimaginable goal, then pick themselves up when that goal proved elusive.
David would teach them how to dream.
David Black began his career in the book business delivering mail in a large New York agency. He moved on to answer phones at another, then finally got the courage to start his own. He was twenty-nine years old. “When I was a kid, I was walking with my father on our front lawn one day, and he said to me, ‘Son, I don’t really care what you do in life. Own it.’ That stuck with me, and the day I incorporated, I called my dad. ‘There are one hundred shares in Black Inc.,’ I said, ‘and you are talking to the man who owns all of them.’”
“Were you scared?”
“I was never scared until I signed my first payroll check. That’s when I realized that somebody else’s family was eating in part because of the work that I was doing.”
“When did you know it would work?”
He didn’t blink. “I never thought it wouldn’t.” David has certain assets that make him good at his job. He thinks schematically and is somewhat impatient, which helps him find structure in often disjointed book ideas. When I wanted to follow five country music artists in Nashville for a year, he persuaded me to cut it to three. He was right. He’s entrepreneurial yet sensitive to corporate culture, which helps him craft creative deals. When I wanted to publish a book of photographs from my travels in the Middle East—a quixotic and surely money-losing idea—he suggested that my publisher and I share the costs, thereby splitting the risk and any upside. The book was published successfully.
But most of all he’s emotional, with well-plumbed insecurities of his own, which helps him manage the emotional sinkholes and bottomless insecurities of his clients. A year after our initial meeting, when David tried to sell my fourth book, he blundered the auction, and overnight I’d lost a year’s income. It was devastating for me, yet somehow worse for him. “The most humiliating experience of my career,” he still calls it. As I stood face-to-face with another professional roadblock, David flew halfway across the country, slept on my couch, and vowed to walk by my side. It was a mutual treaty of neediness.
“That’s why I cried on the day you made the bestseller list,” David said.
Seven years later, at the bottom of my life, the day Linda and I had our first meeting with Dr. Healey, David came to our home to slip on my shoes, shoulder my bag, and watch my back as I teetered down the stairs, into the taxi, up to the waiting room, and into the void of unknowing.
Later, after the tears and the fear, after the poison started ravaging my blood, after I’d stopped writing altogether, I asked David what he learned from all these years as a curator of dreams. What’s the most important gift you can give to a dreamer?
“The belief in their ability to succeed,” he said without pause. “Because when you believe in them, you give them the strength to believe in themselves.”
“But at that moment when I first walked into your office,” I said, “I didn’t believe. I’d been working my dream for a decade, and I wasn’t making it. I was at a wall.”
“I don’t see the wall,” he said. “And I’m telling you to be the same way. ‘Don’t see the wall.’ Of course you may encounter a wall fro
m time to time, but you tear it down, walk through it. You find a way to get over it, or around it, or under it. You acknowledge it but move beyond it. Whatever you do, don’t succumb to it. Don’t give in to the wall.”
“So it’s twenty years from now,” I said. “Tybee or Eden Feiler plops down in your barrel chair. She has a dream. She wants to open a restaurant, or climb a mountain, or run a marathon, or write a book. But she’s scared. I can’t. It’s too hard. I don’t have the money. What do you tell her?”
“I tell her, ‘Let’s sit down and figure out what’s possible,’” he said. “‘Let’s make a road map to the top of the mountain, or a business plan for the restaurant, or an outline for the book. Let’s make the awesome mundane.’”
At times like this, David’s voice loses its bravado and its bluster. It gives up its towel-snapping manliness altogether. It shrinks instead to a near whisper and swells with the empathy of that chunky little boy, alone in the backyard, just waiting for the opera to end, who knows what it’s like to not believe in yourself and to want what you cannot have.
“And if, for some reason, that dream should fail?” I asked.
“Then I tell her, ‘Let’s find a dream that can work,’” he said. “It may not be the first dream, or the dream of the moment. But you shift your dreams. You find a dream that might come true. And when it does, you focus on the joy of the success rather than the devastation of defeat. Because in my experience, anybody can dream an impossible dream. But only a few find a dream that’s possible.
“And those are the ones that are happy.”
