Larry's Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China with My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant--and Save His Life

by Daniel Asa Rose

  “You talk like roller coaster! I like!”

  “I know it’s a lot,” I say. “Getting this close to Larry must be going to my head. So anyway, they were good people—‘salt of the earth,’ in my family’s rather patronizing phrase—but Larry always felt he didn’t measure up, even though he’s compensated for it by getting a million degrees.”

  “They no like him?”

  “They appreciate a lot about him—his fight, maybe even his lack of pretense—but not the baggage that goes with it. He truly has a heart of gold unless you cross him, which he feels some members of the family have—”

  And then suddenly there he is. Not Larry but Mao—twenty feet high and airbrushed since I last saw him. Hanging above the main entrance to the Forbidden City, his portrait looks younger than before, a little less weary and a little more cheery, more like a slightly menacing Ronald McDonald than the wart-faced tyrant of yore—the despot as Fred Flintstone. Twenty-five years ago, I got a bout of dysentery walking beneath him, but this time, squinting through the smoglight, I feel a family connection—that roly-poly skepticism, that chunky bullheadedness—so help me, he looks like a Chinese version of Larry.

  And of course, across from the portrait looms Tiananmen Square, still as gargantuan as ever. Last time it was a geologic anomaly: the largest public square on earth, the size of ninety football fields. But this time it reminds me of the infamous student massacre, which offers me a chance to turn the tables and ask Yuh-vonne some questions.

  “Do you know what happened here?”

  Yuh-vonne winks lasciviously. “Inside those walls, emperor spend so much time playing with his concubine,” she says.

  “No, not inside the Forbidden City,” I say. “Across the street in the square. In 1989.”

  Yuh-vonne quickly averts her gaze. “Our elders will not tell us,” she says. “Many time we ask them, but they say don’t ask.”

  “Do you know that students were hurt here?”

  “A few,” she says carefully. “That about it.”

  I bring her gaze back to me with a hand on her shoulder. “Not a few,” I say. “Hundreds. The tanks rolled right over them when they were protesting.”

  “Ow my God!” she says, sucking in her breath. “I have to go tawlet!”

  “Seriously?”

  “No, I can wait,” she says, but she looks constipated suddenly, buttoned up.

  On the square as we drive past, children are flying kites and shrieking. Young women are ambling through with frilly little ankle socks. Old women are limping along with parasols held high against the sun. But where are the people my age? Where are the Red Guards of the seventies who performed such monstrous deeds against their countrymen, to say nothing of the Tiananmen Square student protesters of the late eighties? They couldn’t all have been massacred here, could they? Or do they avoid this spot? Come to think of it, I’ve seen hardly any people my age since arriving at the airport.

  Mostly what I see are soldiers, skinny adolescent soldiers everywhere, clumps of sunken-chested, pimply boys at rest, horsing around in their olive green uniforms, fragile boys encased in weaponry, roughhousing with one another, bored and playful as boys anywhere, putting one another in headlocks, dropping spit bombs before smearing them into the concrete with their boots, snapping cell shots to send their mothers. Boys.

  “You know the Cultural Revolution?” I ask Yuh-vonne.

  “It-take-place-’67-to-’77,” she says in a flat tone. “But I didn’t born then.”

  “What do you think of it?”

  For the first time, I see that her lips are bitten up, self-inflicted, bespeaking an inner severity at least as harsh as any state-sanctioned one. “Maybe-a-good-thing-in-beginning-but-then-a-bad-thing.”

  “So where the hell are all—”

  “People nowaday very happy and rich,” she says, to shut me up at last. As if on cue, we get cut off by a limo even bigger and shinier than ours.

  “We only poor limo, but he rich rich limo!” She rolls down the window and sticks the upper half of her body out. “I love you, China!” she shouts, arms outstretched.

  And off we speed down the avenue to my hotel a few blocks away, the damp furnace of China’s summer air blasting in through the open window.

  “Over the next few days, I’m going to be in need of some rather non-traditional tour-guide services,” I tell her when we get there. “You available to step off the straight and narrow?”

  “I am at your service night and day,” she says.

  “Bingo,” I say. “What’s the forecast?”

  “Smoky.”

  As I open the car door, a flash of something comes back to me. I turn to face Yuh-vonne. “Jong may, jong moy…?” I say experimentally, trying to remember the toast I knew twenty-five years ago. “Long live the friendship between the Chinese and American peoples: jong mee?” But it escapes me.

  Yuh-vonne disregards my effort and grips my hand meaningfully. “Night and day,” she says.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Larry and Mary Show

  A sly rabbit will have three openings to its den.

  Chamomile. The smell of chamomile.

  After a good day’s sleep, I wake at 5:00 P.M.—it’s 5:00 A.M. at home—with visions of kidneys floating in my mind like dust motes on the surface of my eyes. I shake them off and lift my head from the chamomile-infused pillows. My expense account has provided me a luxury suite with private butler who brings me coffee that is distinguishable from tea—a welcome change from the beverage they served twenty-five years ago in this very hotel. The lobby, when I descend, is a castle, complete with Flemish tapestries and high-gloss Clinique counter, behind which a fashion model in heavy mascara crouches in the deep-knee-bend position of waiting, patiently picking her toes.

  In minutes I’m cabbing my way through the steam heat to Larry’s discount hotel, which is basic but perfectly decent. In the small greeting area, a row of five receptionists who look like the stunning women vamping it up in those Robert Palmer music videos from the eighties—identical tight black dresses and tight black hair—giggle uniformly and direct me to a unit across the grass courtyard, second floor.

  I knock at Larry’s door and am greeted by the sound of a key fiddling in the lock from the inside: fiddling, fiddling. Finally the door is swung open by a giant cleaning lady in a thick coat, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows and suds dripping off her hands, who immediately bows out of the way to give me my first sight of Larry, rising from a chair in the back of the room. But if the cleaning lady’s a larger figure than I expected, and more overdressed, Larry is smaller and underdressed. I haven’t seen him in years and am surprised by how he’s shrunk. He’s naked except for a pair of saggy underpants, a boxy pair of sunglasses, and his Businessman’s Running Shoes. Not that he’d ever dream of running three steps, but he wouldn’t be caught dead without his Businessman’s Running Shoes.

  “Huwwo, Dan,” he says in the monotone he always uses to keep himself from getting too happy or too sad.

  “Throw on a robe and I’ll hug you,” I say.

  “Oh, that’s an inducement,” he deadpans. Larry’s emphatically not the hugging type. Nor am I in this case. He looks so terrible that I find myself wanting to keep our cooties very separate.

  We’re both relieved to shake hands.

  But even at arm’s length, his diminishment is a shocker. He’s slumped to the point of being stooped. He’s lost a lot of weight, way down from the 280 pounds he was at his peak, but this isn’t the sort of weight a person wants to lose. I clap him on the shoulder and find the wasted shoulder of an old man. He’s lost one, maybe two additional teeth in his head—I’m not sure, because he doesn’t smile enough for me to count. His sunglasses mask the slight edge of menace he always used to have, making him look almost benign, like a box turtle you could keep for a pet. But his face is bleak—puffy and pinched at the same time. Mostly it’s gray: He lacks a blood-cleaning kidney to give him the rosy hue of health. As if
to make up for the absence of pink, however, the insides of his arms are the color of Coca-Cola.

  “What’s with the bruising?” I ask, discreetly wiping my hands.

  “Dialysis,” he tells me. “My nurses in Florida basically treat me like a pincushion, though you’d think they’d be able to find this,” he says, revealing an ugly blue knob on his forearm.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “Fistula,” he says. “It’s where my surgeons in their wisdom fused my vein and artery to provide better access to my circulatory system.”

  “Jesus,” I say. Because I never expected he’d look this bad. “Nice watch, anyway,” I say, referring to the fake Rolex dangling from his skinny wrist like a bracelet.

  “Like it? It’s yours,” he says, shucking it from his wrist.

  How could I have forgotten? Larry’s generosity is so old-school that it’s impossible to compliment anything about him without immediately receiving it as a gift. It’s no exaggeration to say he’d give you the shirt off his back. I once made the mistake of complimenting an undershirt and immediately received a polyester wife-beater, still warm from his ribs.

  “No thanks, got one,” I say, dismayed that I do indeed have a fake Rolex just like his. Bobbsey Twins with my cousin Larry wasn’t the look I was going for.

  “Suit yourself,” he says. “How about a calfskin billfold, I brought some extra ones for gifts, or a leather carrying case, or some cash to help with your flight?”

  Larry used to handle money like a gambler, shuffling a wad of crisp bills like a fresh deck of cards. But now he grunts to extract a single bill from his aromatic wallet while the rest fall to the floor, presenting him with the problem of how to bend down to get them.

  “No thanks, I’m set,” I say, kneeling to retrieve the cash while I take stock of my cousin. This was Larry, the little fatty who used to delight in running up the down escalators? Who used to crack me up by putting his lips right against the grille of a fan and mumbling Clint Eastwood lines through the moving blades? “Go ahead, make my day.” How did someone of my generation become so hunched and withered? Any doubts I might have had about coming to China have vanished with the sight of him.

  “I can’t begin to tell you how tired I am,” he says, collapsing into his chair and beginning a ten-minute discourse on what end-stage renal disease feels like. For someone in such a state of fatigue, it’s as if his mouth operates on a separate generator. I only half listen to the gruesome account, because I need to preserve my spirit; if I’m going to be of any use to my cousin, I have to stay upbeat, which means being selective about how many depressing details I allow in. I take the opportunity to indulge in a little daydream about being at home with my wife and kids, who’ll be starting school tomorrow, fourth and seventh grades. “You have no idea,” he concludes ten minutes later, digging both thumbs into his eyes wearily. “ I had no idea before I got sick. I thought kidney disease was something you could take a pill for. And this Peking Opera doesn’t help,” he adds, indicating the colorful pageant screeching away on the wall TV. “It’s been playing nonstop since it clicked on apparently by itself this morning, and I can’t shut it off. (No kidding, have you heard this stuff?” he adds. “I mean, it makes Yoko Ono sound like Frank Sinatra.)”

  “Can’t you unplug it?” I ask.

  “You’re welcome to try,” he says. “Maybe you’ll have better luck than I’ve had.”

  He coughs feebly for a while—the remnants of a bronchial infection that came with dialysis, he says—while I find the plug right behind the set and pull it out of the wall.

  “Mystery solved,” he says, relishing the sudden silence. “By the way, just FYI, I reserve the right to kill myself at any time, Dan. My mutha is dead, my futha is dead, my sister is dead, there’s only me left and I don’t owe anything to anyone. And just so we’re clear, if anyone tries to stop me, I would consider it the most egregious thing you’ve ever done.”

  My mind tunes him out, because I’m thinking about why he couldn’t find the TV plug—that’s not like the Larry I remember. His phlegmatic exterior has always masked a razor-sharp brain, but is something more wrong with him? Is his physical deterioration only half the story? I watch the cleaning lady on her hands and knees in the bathroom, scrubbing the floor around the toilet. She really throws herself into it, a big woman made even bigger by the coat she’s bundled up in, a suede-and-sheepskin affair that just about doubles her mass. When I tune back in, Larry’s still going: how a transplant is a treatment not a cure, how even the best outcome means he’ll be on expensive antirejection drugs forever, how he won’t settle for being an invalid in a chair.

  “Larry,” I say, “you have to realize this is your depression talking.”

  “Yeah, well, if it’s talking, I’m listening,” he says morosely. Then flashes a milky-mild smile that makes him look a little like the Mona Lisa. “Of course, I could run out of cookies at any moment, and then my life will be a moot point,” he says, reaching into the suitcase at his feet, where I glimpse several boxes of Girl Scout cookies. “You didn’t think I was going to chance eating the native cuisine, did you?” he asks, offering me a Caramel de Lite. “So how’s your hotel? Classier than this one, I assume.”

  “Only because the magazine’s paying for it,” I say. I’m a little embarrassed for my better circumstances, and hope I’m not giving off the scent of chamomile. “It’s the same one I stayed in twenty-five years ago, though a lot nicer this time, I have to say.”

  “That the one where the coffee was so bad?”

  “You have an amazing memory, Larry.”

  “I remember everything you ever told me, Dan. I look up to you, you’re my big cousin. Matter of fact, wasn’t that where you shtupped a stewardess on the rooftop?”

  Scrub, scrub, scrub.

  “Okay, I can see by your face that was a lifetime ago,” he says. “You don’t want to be reminded of your divorce days. I just want to show how much you’ve always meant to me, not that your wife ever needs to know. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, as far as I’m concerned. And you can quote me.”

  “I think you must have misheard me, Larry.”

  “I don’t believe so, Dan. You told me a lot of stuff in those days. But in your defense I ought to say that you were hitting the hooch pretty hard back then, Dan. I’m glad you stopped. What was the final straw, don’t mind my asking?”

  “Larry, let’s try very hard to keep this on you.”

  “Good idea. And now that we’re clear about your colorful past, maybe it’s time I come clean and mention one other little thing I neglected to say until now.”

  The cleaning lady moves from the toilet to the sink fixtures: scrub, scrub, scrub.

  “I know transplants are illegal, Larry. You already leveled with me.”

  “Took me long enough, though. I was pretty nervous, trufe be told.”

  “I understand. You didn’t want me to take it the wrong way.”

  “I’m glad you accept me with my flaws, Dan.”

  “I…uh…do.”

  “That means a great deal to me. So by the same token, there’s one other thing I don’t want you to take the wrong way either. You can see how visibly nervous I am all over again.”

  “Just spit it out,” I say. “What am I going to do, bite your head off? I’ve come all this way to help.”

  “And you are helping, just by being here. I can’t tell you what a comfort it is, your presence alone.”

  “I’m glad, Larry. So?”

  “I’m getting married.”

  “Larry, congratulations,” I say, so relieved it wasn’t bad news that I have to stop myself from giving him a hug. “Why would I get mad at that? That’s wonderful news!”

  He looks as pleased as a box turtle given a fly carcass to munch on. “You were right as usual, Dan. I didn’t have to be nervous after all. Thank you for supporting me.”

  “Wow, a lifelong bachelor getting hitched after all these years.”

&nb
sp; He accelerates his monotone just a bit. “Yes, I’m very excited about her,” he continues. “I’ve never been with someone who shares so many of my values. She doesn’t drink, doesn’t gamble, doesn’t run around. She’s basically stable, like I am. It’s like we’re in sync. I’ve never felt this way about anyone before.”

  “I’m thrilled for you, Larry. So when’d you meet her?”

  “Well, it’s in process,” Larry says. “I think it only prudent that I spend a little time with her first.”

  There’s silence for a moment while the only sound is the scrub, scrub, scrub of the brush gnawing at the faucet.

  “Larry, are you telling me you’re meeting her here for the first time? That this was another reason you wanted to come to China?”

  “Dan, I can’t believe you of all people would expect me to marry someone sight unseen. Plus which, your opinion of her is very important to me, Dan. You’ve always been an excellent judge of character.”

  He registers the expression on my face.

  “Besides,” he says, “don’t act like I didn’t give you fair warning.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “On your chairlift, Dan. I distinctly remember you mishearing me.”

  “Larry, it wasn’t the best connection in the world. I could barely make out—”

  “When you thought I was feeling merry.”

  A pause while something irreparable snaps in my brain.

  “Larry, maybe I half heard you but it certainly didn’t register. There was a lot coming at me then.”

  “I grant you there may have been some psychological blocking on your part—‘merry,’ ‘marry,’ plus her name is ‘Mary’—it was a lot to take in.”

  Speech fails me. I sink into a chair.

  “Well, anyway,” he says, “who the hell cares, as you like to say. Besides which, I wouldn’t want to burden an upper-caste person such as yourself with crass commercial concerns, but it would have been fiscally irresponsible of me to shell out for a ticket to come all this way and not get my money’s worth, see what I’m saying? Doesn’t a twofer sound like a better deal? Get a kidney and throw in a bride for free. One from Column A, one from Column B. (And I trust that’s not a racist thing to say, because racist is the last thing I want to be, under the circumstances. I’m a guest of the Chinese, they’re not a guest of me. Notice I’m making a concerted effort never to use the word ‘Chink’ while we’re over here.)”