She had another heart attack. They kept us out of the room while they performed emergency procedures. I was certain at that point in time that we were not going to have dinner at all. After about an hour her doctor came and talked to us. He said she had stabilized and her heart was beating normally again. He would monitor her through the night. We should go home and get some rest. We would “keep our fingers crossed” that she would be better in the morning. The “fingers crossed” bit was a disturbing lack of certainty from a man of science.
The next morning we arrived at the hospital at about seven. As we got off the elevator, one of the nurses looked at me. In her look a thousand pieces of information were transferred through our eyes: “It was a bad night and it’s going to be a bad day.” In that instant I knew that this was the day my mother would die.
We rounded the corner and there was her doctor. He looked at us with what I call a “golfer’s smile.” Even when a golfer makes a putt, his smile is usually turned down in the corners like a partial frown. He knows there’s a water hazard on the next hole. The doctor told us it was a bad night. We should go in and say our good-byes. She may only have a few minutes.
Minutes?
We walked in. She looked so small in the bed. Unconscious. The monitors showing a weakened heart along with a lot of other numbers that meant nothing to me but made my brother raise his eyebrows and look at me with terrifying certainty.
My sister was flying in from South Carolina where she worked at the university. Our hopes had been reduced. We just wanted Mom to live long enough for Barbie to get here. And in my heart, now, I would have given anything to sit in a hospital room yesterday reading Charles Dickens with Mom sleeping, thinking about eating Italian food and wishing I were back in our living room smiling and saying with kindness that the room was comfortable and the tea was good.
My cell phone rang. It was my sister. She was at the Dallas airport and on her way to the hospital. I told Paul, “Barbie’s here. She got an earlier flight. She’ll be at the hospital within the hour.” And here is when I had my miracle. Mom’s heart started beating again. Like it did yesterday. The doctor came rushing into the room. His face showed surprise. He wanted to make sure his equipment was working right.
It was true. My mother had stepped from the brink. After Barbie got there, we stood around Mom and held her and each other. And then, unexpectedly, we started laughing—laughing and telling Mom stories. Mom and the cat. Mom and the roast beef. Mom and the basketball player—endless and hilarious.
And while we were together, all together, laughing—Mom’s heart stopped. Not all at once but over a couple of minutes. The laughter stopped. The monitors showed a flat line with an occasional, inconsequential blip. The doctors and nurses rushed in again.
I am not certain that my miraculous moment was a miracle at all, and that Mom stayed alive until we could all be together and left when she heard us laugh and knew we would be all right. And whether this could be a scenario for a Hallmark movie or a Twilight Zone or just another in a series of coincidences that make up a life, I am certain of something invisible in that room. Something powerful. Something faster than the speed of light that for a moment was in our midst and in our hearts.
6.
THE MIDDLE CHAPTERS
I CAME OUT to Los Angeles in the year of the bicentennial, 1976. It was the year of the tall ships. I had broken my big toe two months earlier on my last day as a graduate student at the University of Illinois. After weeks of wearing a gigantic cast, I was making baby steps back to the world of Man and was wearing what Mom called a “moon shoe” on my right foot.
It was a good news/bad news situation. The bad news: I was not fully functional. The good news: I learned to drive with my left foot. Because I was somewhat handicapped, my mother decided to help me make the long drive to L.A. That was also a good news/bad news situation.
The car was as full as a car could be. It was like something in the Guinness Book of Records. The trunk was packed. The backseat was stacked to the roof. The front seat was full. Even the driver had to sit with a clothes basket on his or her lap and a stack of magazines under his or her chin.
Mom and I developed a “buddy system.” When we got to a rest stop, whoever was in the passenger seat would have to get out of the car, run around, and open the driver’s door. They would unload the baskets and magazines so the driver could get out. After the rest stop whoever was driving would get back in the car and be buried under baskets and magazines before we took off again.
After four days of driving we reached Hollywood. We found an apartment building with a vacancy. Mom thought it looked clean primarily because it was painted white. My room had a Murphy bed that pulled out of the wall. I liked the basic concept of the Murphy bed. It was perfect for Hollywood. At its core, it was delusional. It allowed me to think I had a big living room during the day and a big bedroom at night. Mom cleaned the kitchen and bathroom. I put my twelve-inch black-and-white TV set on an orange crate from the alley. I plugged it in, there was the evening news, and wham—I had a home.
Mom and I went to the grocery store and bought provisions. I bought cereal, milk, bologna, bread, mustard, and pickles. Add beer and you have the four basic food groups.
Mom got a plane ticket to head back to Dallas. She hugged me and with a look of love and terror, issued her parting words: “Stephen, whatever you do, don’t go into porno.” And she left. And I was on my own in the City of Angels.
I was not naïve. I was twenty-five years old. However, I was living in an area that was dubbed West Hollywood. Every morning I had breakfast at a place called the French Market. The customers were all men. Many of the men wore leather pants, or leather vests, or cowboy outfits. One morning a man asked if he could sit with me. I assumed there was a shortage of tables. When I continued eating and reading my newspaper, the man stormed off. I had no idea why. One morning a waitress came up to me and asked what “we” did during the day. “Who is ‘we’?” I asked.
She said, “You guys.”
I said, “Which guys?”
She said, “Gay guys. What do you gay guys do during the day?”
Oh. My. Gosh. All the clues came together like the end of a Hitchcock movie—the muscle shirts, the exposed butt cheeks, the leather chaps. These were gay guys, not cowboys! My Texas upbringing had lulled me into a false sense of normalcy.
But there was nothing normal about California. The weatherman on TV mentioned that we were moving into “earthquake season.” Earthquake season? Back home we called it August. Then came the fires, which from a distance at night were lovely in an Armageddon sort of way.
Then the floods came. I had some friends who had also moved out from Dallas who lived in the country. Topanga Canyon. They lived in a house where the sixties rock band Canned Heat used to live. Storms hit the area and Biblical floods now threatened what had been spared from the fires. They called me to see if I could lend a hand in saving what was left.
With all of the rain, the normally tiny Topanga Creek was now a torrent. You could see cars being swept out to the ocean. My friends’ home had been sitting safely above the canyon. But the water had risen overnight and ripped away the entire foundation of their home, leaving the living room and second story above it teetering over a forty-foot cliff.
The only thing left of their bottom floor was some slats of hardwood flooring extending twenty feet into space over the gorge. It connected to a rain-soaked portion of the opposite wall. And teetering up against that distant wall was their stereo. And on that stereo was Fleetwood Mac’s new album, Rumours.
Whenever I had visited them in happier times (like a week before) that album was playing nonstop while they passed around a joint and talked about college or dogs or sunsets. There was an unintended irony in my friends humming, “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow,” in the middle of this destruction.
That evening they came up to me with a long, thick rope. “Stephen, glad you could come out. We’ve come up
with a plan. We want to know if you can get the record player?”
I looked out over planks of wood. I could see and hear the rapids through the broken and missing floorboards.
“I don’t know, Joe. It looks scary,” I said.
Joe put his arm around my shoulder. “Don’t worry, we’ll tie this rope around you in case the floor collapses.”
I looked unconvinced.
Joe, whose face is etched in a perpetual smile, continued, “Stephen, I was in the merchant marines and can tie a good knot. There’s a big, strong tree over there. We’ll tie the rope to it. You’ll be secure. Trust me.”
So that was Plan A.
“Why pick the biggest, heaviest guy for this job?” I asked. “Why not a small woman?”
A small woman answered, “Because I may not be strong enough to carry the stereo back.” I learned then that feminism worked better on a college campus.
But she had a point, and after we shared an unusually large reefer, I agreed to get the stereo.
Joe tied a knot the size of a cantaloupe around my waist. I headed out across the boards. Here’s where I had a teaching moment: Any endeavor has unintended consequences. Any ill-conceived endeavor has more.
As I walked onto the pieces of unsupported flooring, they started to bend downward with my weight. With each step the floor creaked and groaned and bowed down another few inches. A quick review of the remaining scraps of sophomore trigonometry still in my brain calculated that at this rate, even if the boards didn’t break, the planks would be bent down at an eighty-degree angle by the time I reached the stereo. I would never be able to get back.
I had another teaching moment. With the poker motto “If you think it long, you think it wrong” as an inspiration, I coined, “If you think it short, you must abort.” I stopped and made a decision. I came back. Joe undid the rope and went out himself. He rescued the album and the turntable. The speakers didn’t make it.
I walked back to my car feeling a coward. I had chickened out. I started to drive home, and I felt a burning pain, not in my cheeks from shame, but in my middle, just below my belly button. I figured it was a bruise caused by the big knot. I got home and took a shower. The pain hit me again. A deep, prolonged burn. I went to bed and didn’t think anything of it. Until the next morning when it hit me again.
I knew something was wrong. But what? Internal hemorrhage? That was my first thought. The location made me think of appendicitis or maybe colon cancer.
Health is a lot like horseback riding. I ride horses now. People ask me if I am a “good rider.” The answer (for me and a lot of people who ride) is I’m good if the horse is going the same place I’m going. If the horse wants to go a different place, I’m not so good. It’s the same thing with health. We all are convinced that we have good health, until we don’t.
I needed a doctor, but I didn’t know any. My dad was our family doctor. Medical care was something I never had thought about in my entire life. It never crossed my mind I’d get sick in Los Angeles.
How does someone find a doctor? Who was good, who was bad, what part of town did he work in, how would I pay for it? It was overwhelming. I tried to use the Yellow Pages but a lot of the doctor ads were in Korean.
I had a system. It was the same system Billy Hart taught me when we were in the Dangerous Animals Club and were hunting for tarantulas. I got in my car and drove in ever-widening concentric circles using my apartment as the midpoint. I figured I would stop at the first doctor’s office I saw, and that at least would be the closest.
The office I found turned out to be an Urgent Care Facility in the heart of Hollywood, not far from the French Market. The doctor in charge that day was a man named Dr. Glitter. I waited for about an hour in a room full of cowboys and longshoremen. All of my breakfast companions.
When I got back in the examination room, I told Dr. Glitter everything. I had no idea what was or wasn’t important information. I told him about the flood, and the stereo, and rescuing the Fleetwood Mac album from the turntable, and the big rope around my waist, the size of the knot, the length of the rope, and its distance from the tree.
To his credit, Dr. Glitter listened patiently, though he glazed over at my description of the increasing angle of the bending floorboards. Then I told him about the burning pain in my middle and the location below my belly button. He raised his eyebrows and with a touch of just a little too much Noël Coward for my taste, he asked me to “drop my drawers.”
He felt around my groin. I was getting uncomfortable. Then he said, “Up on the table on your knees and elbows.” I had never had a prostate exam in my life. No one prepared me. I was suspicious that I had stumbled into some gay satanic cult.
The only way I can describe the prostate exam was that it felt like someone was ripping out my insides with a red-hot pair of pliers. Dr. Glitter felt around and then mumbled, “Hmmm, I think we have a boggy prostate here.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. He told me to get dressed and then he hit me with the hard facts. I had a prostate infection with epididymitis. I asked what that was. He said, “Inflammation of the balls.” I was horrified.
In the sixth grade, I was wasting time looking through an encyclopedia in study hall, and I saw a picture of a group of African natives with huge, gigantic balls. They were holding a big snake over their heads and their balls almost touched the ground. Oh my God! Was that my future? Kiss my acting career good-bye. How would I ever shop for pants?
Dr. Glitter told me I would need antibiotics. He asked me if I had a “strong” jockey strap at home. I said I didn’t know they came in strengths. He said go out and buy the strongest one I could find. The good doctor told me that exertion and vibration made epididymitis worse. So I should stay in bed, wrap my testes in ice, and prop them up on a pillow. If I had to go anywhere—put on the strong jockey strap and take the medicine. Then come back and see him in a couple of weeks.
I shuffled out of the office. I looked like I was trying to hold an orange with my butt cheeks, but in truth I was afraid to jounce too vigorously. I had to keep my balls from growing at all costs. As I made my way through the crowded waiting room, Dr. Glitter stuck his head out and called, “Remember, Mr. Tobolowsky, wrap those testes in ice and prop them up on a pillow!” Every conversation in the room stopped. Every magazine lowered about two inches. Every cowboy looked at me. I smiled and pretended he was talking to someone else.
When I got home my girlfriend, Beth, asked me what was wrong. I started to tell her. That’s when I learned all relationships have limits. Our limit was discussions about scrotal swelling. My friends out in Topanga asked me what was wrong. I had difficulty explaining. The extratight jockey strap constricted my speech. Some maladies have no curb appeal.
Curb appeal for diseases only matters when you’re healthy and listening to someone else’s problems. Alcoholism has always had more curb appeal than overeating. A broken bone always has curb appeal. You just look a little silly with the cast. You are only temporarily out of commission, and you usually have a good story. A broken bone is in the same category as a dog bite or being in rehab.
Infected prostate. Swollen balls. Zero curb appeal.
The antibiotics patched me up quickly, but Dr. Glitter told me that I might have problems off and on the rest of my life. Apparently the testicle is a miraculous thing. There is something like two linear miles of tubing in each ball. Teeny, tiny tubing. The immature sperm starts at one end and it travels all the way to the other and on the long journey it matures. Like high school for sperm. Because the tubing is so tiny it is impossible for antibiotics to get everywhere a germ could hide, so recurrences are normal.
For the next several months, whenever I got that certain feeling in my gut, I would take an ice-cold can of Coke and stick it between my legs. It put the fire out and felt great, but it had the same effect on my friends as if I were a dog dragging my butt across the living room carpet. No curb appeal.
Time passed. We slid from ear
thquake season to fire season and neared flood season once again. The fire I had down below kept intruding into my life. There was no cure. I felt a little like Job. Some friends of mine from Texas came to town and I took them to the French Market for breakfast. Over omelets I started explaining the size of my scrotum and what a boggy prostate was.
While they listened to my horror story, out of the corner of my eye I began registering some changes in my fine old eatery. Lots of empty tables. That was odd. The place was always packed. Many of the regulars were gone. Some of the regulars who I could recognize were looking like they lost a lot of weight. Some young men wore bandages on their arms. One man at the counter had what looked like holes in his face. I had no idea what was happening. I hadn’t put all the clues together. I didn’t know it was a visitation from the Angel of Death.
In a city that prided itself on its disasters, no one had mentioned that something called GRID was on the loose. I heard it whispered about in the restaurant and on the street. In a few months, we heard the word “AIDS” for the first time. If I were to give Armageddon a face, it would not be the fires or the earthquakes, but one of the faces of these young men.
Just like me, they came out to Los Angeles to find something. And I guess they did. No one ever said Pandora’s box had a warning label on it.
There is a Zen parable: A young married couple goes to the Master for a blessing. He looks at them and writes on a banner, “Grandfather dies, father dies, son dies.” The couple is horrified. They curse the Master. How could you write such a terrible thing and call it a blessing? The Master looks at them calmly and answers that this was a blessing. This was the formula for a happy life. Grandfather dies, father dies, son dies. If the order is different you will have the greatest of sorrow.
Los Angeles had become a city of unintended consequences. A land of dying sons. My malady, besides having no curb appeal, had become trivial to boot. I was no longer the central victim in my own life.
The Dangerous Animals Club Page 7
