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

“I didn’t know that, Larry. You were always filled with such bravado.”

  “At sixteen I dropped out of school, but I didn’t get a job at Irving’s garage, like everyone told me to. I made it my business to enroll myself in a private school that I researched myself. Within a day I knew I had made the right choice.”

  “How’d you pay for it?”

  “With my winnings from KFC.”

  I want to say, “No wonder you’re so devoted to them,” but I restrain myself. Instead I say, “Larry, that was nothing less than heroic. You altered your circumstances. What’s that old expression? You picked yourself up by your bootstraps.”

  “I did.”

  “You could have withdrawn from the world. But you found something in yourself to hoist yourself up. It’s like how you cured Judy’s epilepsy. These are heroic actions, Larry. Why do you never give yourself credit for them?”

  “That’s a good question. I’m confused about that.”

  “Why do you think?”

  “I’m too busy giving myself kudos for the things I oughtn’t, and not for the things I ought?”

  So help me, I love the quaint language coming out of this miscreant’s mouth. The truth is, and he doesn’t want this to get around, but he isn’t a miscreant at all. He’s a gentleman, checkered like all gentlemen, with a gentleman’s checkered heart.

  “I’m hard on myself,” he says. “I don’t want to be selfish.”

  “It’s not being selfish to give yourself credit, Larry. There ought to be a better word. It’s being self-generous.”

  I can feel him struggling with this concept in the tropical dark.

  “So when are you going to claim your right to take the coldest Coke in the cooler?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. I got my pilot’s license just to see if I could do it, and even then I still had my self-doubts. I do this, I do that—”

  “May I make a suggestion?”

  “As you wish.”

  “Yoo-hoo, you’re doing another heroic thing, by finding your way to this hospital room. Maybe that ought to do it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, the American medical establishment in its wisdom counseled you to be a good little Do Bee for ten years and make no fuss—”

  “That’s the U.S. policy for how to help its citizens—”

  “And instead, you took charge of your destiny and joined the army of half a million Americans last year who got off their asses and are doing something! Whether you succeed in saving your own life or not, that ought to convince you of your self-worth.”

  Down came the rain and washed the spider out….

  “Think about it, will you, Larry?”

  “I do, Dan. I always think about what you say.”

  From nine floors below, a fleet of police cars sounds like an armada of rowboats with outboard motors. The fridge makes a ghastly noise as it shudders to a stop. Larry flinches.

  “Did I ever tell you about the time I saw the apparition?” he asks out of nowhere.

  “What operation?”

  “Not operation: apparition. Remind me to tell you that saga sometime.”

  “We’ve got time now.”

  He points to his ear and shakes his head no.

  “No one’s gonna overhear. Or understand.”

  Still he shakes his head no. “I lived through the Nixon years. I make a policy of not trusting.”

  I close the door. And lock it. Now he’s ready.

  “Dan, you know me well enough to know I’m not exactly touchy-feely. But when I was ten one summer day, I was helping my neighbor Frankie DelSesto on his newspaper route. Nice kid, grew up to tour with Aerosmith, in charge of selling their souvenirs. Any case, we were just turning back from the beach when I saw a ten-foot-tall Jesus Christ on a rooftop. He had an intricately carved staff, a full beard, and a long deep brown luxurious robe. Instantly I knew it was Jesus. I have no idea how I knew it was Jesus and not Moses, given my heritage, but there wasn’t even a question. It was Jesus. He knew my name though he didn’t speak; it was thought transference. What I got was a wonderful feeling of absolute peace–nonverbal absolute peace. ‘What’s the message?’ I wanted to know. ‘Everything’s A-OK,’ he said, without words. It wasn’t a question of him trying to convert me or anything, he just wanted to reassure me. There was an awareness of me and what I needed. I loved it at first, but the next day, when I tried to make sense of it, I didn’t like it one bit. I was a reality-based kid. It was too scary. I never spoke about it for years. Finally I asked a psychology major, did that make me insane? He said, ‘No, you are not insane.’ I thought that was a pretty strong statement.”

  “Jesus said, ‘Everything’s going to be A-OK’?” I ask.

  “No. ‘Everything’s A-OK.’ Like it’s A-OK right now and always will be. Eternally.”

  “For the record,” I say, “I don’t think you’re insane either. So where do you want to go with this?”

  “It’s just to say,” Larry says, struggling, “sometimes I have feelings. Premonitions, call it what you will. And I have a very bad feeling about this surgery.”

  “Larry, you need to rest. Post-dialysis is no time to make sweeping statements.”

  “No, Dan, I’m in my right mind. I know it’s bad luck or whatever to speak ill of it, but I think something bad is going to happen. I am not going to be all right. Even if a kidney comes through and they put it in, the surgeon’s going to botch something and I’m not going to make it.”

  “Larry—”

  “I’m just informing you, Dan. Please take it seriously. Contrary to what Jesus, or whoever he was, was telling me when I was ten, I do not have the feeling that everything is A-OK. Never has been and certainly isn’t now.”

  I don’t know what to say. I feel like my brain has been scrambled by dialysis, too. But it’s vital to keep up an optimistic façade in front of him. Two nurses walk past in the hallway, conversing. “Quizzical gums he has!

  Major social craze!”

  “Ow, the light hurts my eyes,” he tells me. Even with everything turned off in the room, too much light seeps in through the gauze curtains from the floodlights outside for his sensitive, post-dialysis eyes. I help him put on his box-turtle shades, glad to be distracted from thoughts of his demise. But still the floodlights bother him. I remove the sheets from the spare twin bed and rig two squishy chairs by balancing one on top of the other and—another thing I never thought I’d be doing for my cousin—climb up to tie a series of knots in the sheets around the curtain rod. Being on my tiptoes on such an unstable surface against a thin picture window nine floors above the ground serves to keep me from dwelling on his premonition.

  “Better?” I ask, panting, when I come back down.

  “Thank you, Dan.”

  “Does that closet light bother you as well?” I ask, because one of the Freakishly Thin Business Socks lovingly laundered by Mary is keeping the closet door ajar a crack.

  “I use it so I don’t get nervous in the dark.”

  “But isn’t it too bright? The light slants right into your eyes. I can turn on the bulb in the other room instead, if you like, and let the light peep under the door.”

  “I don’t want to trouble you.”

  I show him how little trouble it is.

  “That’s good,” he says.

  “You should be snug as a bug in a rug,” I say, tucking him in.

  “Why are you doing this, Dan?”

  “It’s going to be too bright otherwise.”

  “No, I mean…all this.”

  I look over this relic of a man, trying to grasp that he’s the same person as the chunky little boy who used to run up the down escalators. How much of that boy is left to save? The nurses pass by again, on their way back to their station. “Sheer drizzle spice, steak on top!”

  “Y’know, I don’t know why, exactly, but I’ll tell you something,” I say. “Every now and then, I get your mother’s face in the back of my mind, saying, ‘Thank
you, Danny. Thank you for taking care of my little boy.’”

  “That’s nice,” Larry says.

  “But as for the other reasons, can I get back to you? Honestly, I’m still working on it.”

  WHY I’M MORE AND MORE FREAKED BY CHINA

  Now that I’ve left Larry’s room, I can admit that his premonition rattled me. He’s right about so many things. Will he be right about the surgery, too?

  The lights are out in the stairwell, and as I blindly feel my way down eight pitch-black flights of stairs, I wonder if Larry’s not the only one with brain damage.

  When I reach the street, the city’s inflamed in a firestorm of neon. Swirling dragons. Flaming serpents. It looks as if a demon magician has touched it with an evil wand.

  The darkness here’s more diabolical than the darkness at home. As I walk alone down a spooky alleyway, bike riders fly out of the murk like bats on wheels, squealing “Go back to quack-a-doe!”

  The air, when all is said and done, is no laughing matter. It’s totalitarian pollution, a one-party blanket of smog so supersaturated that it can’t absorb the smoke from the sidewalk barbecues, much less the blue plumes from firecrackers that erupt out of nowhere, veiling all.

  I’m lost. Even though the arms of the hospital are more or less visible through the haze, tonight they spread like the wings of a malevolent owl, leading me nowhere I want to follow.

  I’m wet, or about to be. In a spot not far from the hospital, a promenade functions as a nighttime amusement area for adults, between fake volcanic rocks and a patio for old-timers to do their tai chi. But as I’m venturing closer, a fountain of colored water erupts from the rocks, drenching me head to toe.

  Wet and lost as I am, I understand that these old-timers were my first enemies. Delicately doing tai chi between the fountains, these are the infamous Red Chinese of my childhood, the ones we were told were sadistically brainwashing American POWs in secret North Korean camps. And here I’ve put myself at their mercy, surrounded by them on all sides….

  The next group is even worse. After so many days of not seeing people my age, I run into a whole brigade of them on a terrace by the promenade, and it hits me that they’re the original Red Guards who committed some of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century. While we student activists were making hay at home with a pretend revolution, our counterparts in China were making real hay, forcing millions out of the cities to reap grain in the countryside, butchering intellectuals and raping ballerinas and turning themselves into the human equivalent of swirling dragons and flaming serpents.

  And what’re they doing on this sweltering September night? Waltzing. After all the carnage they wrought, they’re waltzing to old songs from the 1930s playing on an ancient gramophone. “When I Grow Too Old to Dream.” “The Touch of Your Hand.” “Falling in Love with Love.” Lit up in the smoglight, their eyes red in the glow of firecrackers, they turn gracefully clockwise, changing steps to turn counterclockwise. How can they be dancing, after all they’ve done, like Nazis doing a jig on the graves of their victims? But they’re sad-looking, and their waltz is sad. Wreathed in smoke, they sense that I’m of their generation. They beckon to me: “Join us!”

  Never have I felt more a stranger. I withdraw into the shadows.

  CHAPTER 12

  Shabbos Duck

  When the map is unrolled, the dagger is revealed.

  Next morning there’s a dead body on the sidewalk. Outside a bakery where I’ve gone to grab breakfast, the baker lies faceup on the asphalt, still wearing his white chef’s hat. He’s a big, florid man; it’s inscrutable that he used to have energy enough to keep his bulk upright—and that suddenly he doesn’t. Two women stand above him, waving their arms and making their pocketbooks swing. A police officer also stands over the chef, his car parked casually in the middle of the street. The tableau would have been unthinkable only a moment ago; now it’s as banal as dirt.

  Then we onlookers, being not dead, go about our business, as the Vermont poet said. Life goes on: The take-out window ten feet away doesn’t even suspend its business, cash bills handed in, steamed buns handed out. I order a half dozen little pastries with almonds stuck in sweet white goo. A treat: If this is a bad omen of some sort, all the more reason to make sure I keep my spirits up….

  Returning to the Super 2, I arrange to keep getting Internet in my room. The unfriendly receptionist in her flounce is never happy to see me, nor is the Internet an easy concept to express to her in party language, but eventually we work it out.

  “So it’s all set for me keep accessing from my room?”

  “Okay-okay,” she answers with a forced smile.

  “I steal Tsingtao shot glass with lukewarm coffee from lobby, okay?”

  “Okay-okay.”

  “I go upstairs cry my heart out, okay?”

  “Okay-okay.”

  Sometimes the only way to make sense of your surroundings is to reach out to a far-off source. So now in my little Super 2 roomette, with paint droplets from the construction floating down and hardening on the outsides of my windows, I spend the day deep-Googling. I learn that Shi is an industrial city with little charm, known predominantly for two things: exceptional hospitals and a plethora of massage parlors. The first fact I’ve gathered by now, but the massage parlors are like nothing I’ve ever seen. Some of the Web sites offer virtual tours of their palatial interiors: fantasy temples with saltwater grottoes, saunas decorated with ceramic parrots and ceramic eagles, complete with discreetly bowing hostesses giving the revolving doors a little spin to help you through….

  Larry’s right. Massage Central is where I’ve landed us.

  And other facts. (It’s laughably easy to get information, despite there being an estimated thirty thousand Keystone Kops devoted to blocking Web sites seemingly at random.) Those fountains of last night that I found so alien, they were nothing worse than replicas of Old Faithful in honor of the U.S. of A., going off every quarter hour with a big blast at midnight. Also, sixteen of the world’s twenty most polluted cities are Chinese, and Shi is among the top performers.

  Yet for all its flaws, there’s something about this land that makes people want to waltz. As I munch on cold shrimp and celery cubes left over from breakfast, I recall one of the only times I’ve ever waltzed in my life, twenty-five years ago, when I was taking an overnight steam train through Shandong province, and at a rural station the woman I was traveling with started waltzing me beside the track. The fields around us were filled with peasants sleeping in the open air, with a small fire at the entrance to each family’s field of crops, but dozens of them roused themselves to stand and watch the strange sight of us dancing under the moonlight. Does something similar motivate the Red Guards to waltz? The haunting vision of last night is still fresh in my mind, those revolutionaries waltzing to old American favorites from a time before they were born….

  By late afternoon, when I get to the hospital, I’m determined to figure out where the badminton noise is coming from. Before even checking in on Larry, I walk down the halls past the Family Crush Room, turn left at Sufferers Locker Room, and enter a wing I haven’t been to before. The badminton sounds grow louder, and soon I find an empty corridor where two ferocious Arabs in long robes are lunging for a birdie. I’m impressed: all that fierce heft in service of a corrugated plastic birdie. They’re really throwing themselves into it, their grandstanding cutthroat but silent, so hushed that the only sound is their bare feet making quick grippy noises on the glittering marble floor.

  I whistle in admiration after a particularly savage smash shot hits one of the guy’s kaffiyehs. The ice is broken.

  “You belong to America?” the smasher asks.

  I admit it. Even though I know it’s stupid to do so when in dicey territory, I’m never able to pretend I’m Canadian. “I do belong to America. You?”

  “Saudi Arabia,” says the smasher.

  “Yemen,” says the smashee.

  Our conversation draws visitors from
a communal kitchenette off the hallway. Five men slip out to join us, reticent and stern. One of them, a lanky young fellow in Western clothes, sips judiciously from an Oodles of Noodles steaming from the microwave. “You here for a liver?” he asks me.

  “Kidney,” I say. “For my cousin.”

  “Me also,” he says, giving me a fist bump. “Kidney for my father.”

  “Liver for my brother,” says the Yemenite smashee. “Lung for his uncle,” he adds, since the Saudi smasher is too intent on his serve to speak for himself.

  It really is a medical mecca for Middle Easterners. I’m introduced to an Egyptian with lovable brown eyes who owns a chain of stalls in a Cairo marketplace. He’s here while his nephew awaits a heart transplant. A Moroccan wearing an iPod that is more advanced than anything I’ve seen in America awaits a pancreas for his uncle. The lanky fellow is named Abu, and he’s the scion of a sporting-goods empire in Pakistan, responsible for all the badminton paraphernalia. There’s no royalty in residence, apparently, but these gentlemen are commercial royalty—rich and well connected enough to have found their way here, all speaking better English than the Chinese do. They tell me that instead of putting themselves in hotels, they’ve purchased nearby apartments to live in while they wait for the transplants to take place. I try to keep it straight. Egypt/heart/nephew, Yemen/liver/brother, Morocco/pancreas/uncle. All males, naturally. Do the women in these lands not require transplants, or simply not merit the expense? The only women are the wives and mothers in shawls and trinkets who shuffle soundlessly about, obsequious as servants. Except for being the recipients of an occasional tongue-lashing, they’re not spoken to, thanked, or otherwise acknowledged.

  And no Westerners, of course.

  “We are friends?” I venture.

  “Oh, yes, no problem.” Big pat on the back from Abu, who all but says, “We are family of patients together!” But he doesn’t need to say it. We’re in neutral territory facing the ultimate common adversary. The usual rules are suspended. We even find it possible to chitchat about the state of the world—stuff that’s easy to agree on. For ten or fifteen minutes, we swap geopolitical truisms, and then it’s time to ask the question that’s preying on my mind.