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

  She pokes me in my lower abdomen. I’m shocked by the contact. It’s a sensitive spot.

  “Ouch, my kidney—”

  “That not even right place!” she scoffs. “You not even know! Kidney in back, that where they take it, put new one in front, right here.”

  She prods me again, same spot. “You worse than Larry,” she says. “Larry is what he is, but at least he not pretend he big hero….”

  I’m withering under the truth of her attack but try to fight back. “What about you?” I say, trying to match her volume. “Why don’t you give him yours?”

  Mary steps back, shows her teeth in a smile or a grimace, I can’t tell. “Larry no want me to, say too risky,” she says. “But you his cousin, Dan, in family of doctors, no excuse….”

  I’m speechless. I can mount no defense as she softens her tone.

  “Why you think we all have two?” she asks me. “One is extra, for giving.”

  It strikes me as startlingly true, the obviousness of it. I don’t know what to say.

  “How can you leave your Larry, Dan? He say you good man, you kind man.”

  “He does not.”

  “He say you kindest man in world.”

  “Bullshit.”

  She clutches me by both shoulders, resolutely. “He says you his big brother, that you only family left….”

  I charge into Larry’s room, where the nurses are cleaning his surface wounds. “What do you mean I’m kind?” I demand.

  “To me you are.”

  “Fuck that. If I’m so kind, why’d you never ask for a kidney from me?”

  “I would never presume.”

  “And Mary?”

  “I would have declined if she offered. She has no health insurance where she comes from, deficient medical care, she can’t put herself at risk. Matter of fact, I should forbid it in writing, in case she gets any crazy ideas.”

  He looks around for a pen, but the Kleenex box with all his worldly goods is nowhere to be found. That’s okay, he’s made his wishes known. Cherry is here to witness his decision, should it ever come up again.

  “But you’ll notice that I’m a fair negotiator,” he says. “I’m not making this veto without giving you something in return. So tell you what, I’ll yield on the question of surrender.”

  “What do you mean, surrender?”

  “White flag, peace pipe, laying down of arms. No more fighting you—I swear on my mutha’s grave.”

  The decision made, he gives himself up to exhaustion, a kind of self-liberation. The act of capitulation is so enormous to him that it amounts to a kind of deliverance; he can’t keep himself from making sounds of relief as I discuss the situation with Cherry. The whole time she and I are talking, Larry drops his own comments in: “I’ll let you people decide.” “Whatever you say.” “I defer to you.” “I won’t stop you.” “I’ll let you talk in peace.”

  With a wink to me, Cherry leaves the suite. Mary is off nursing her pride somewhere. At last Larry and I are alone. His surrender proclamation’s so monumental to him that he still feels he needs to explain himself.

  “All my life I just wanted to assert my independence.”

  “I know you did, cuz.”

  He looks a thousand years old, like a thousand-year-old panda, so weary of the world and its nonsense. No, he looks worse than that: What he looks like is just another patient, biding his time in a dirty Yankee uniform.

  “That’s why I kept leaving the hospital,” he says. “It was me demonstrating that I could make my own way.”

  “I understand, Larry. You don’t have to explain.”

  “When I’m having a fear reaction, that may be the only thing I can do. I don’t know what else there is to do. But I agree it would be ironic if we were to come all this way for a kidney, only to be struck dead by a Chinese bus.”

  “It would be more than ironic, Larry, it would be dumb as hell.”

  “Look at the abrasions on my arms,” he says, clucking at himself as if at the foolishness of a minor who’s seen the error of his ways. “We’ll have to get me healed up.”

  “We will, Larry, we’ll get you good as new. It’s just…we have it within our grasp now, and you don’t want to pay.”

  “I’ll try to pay.”

  “You mean that?”

  “I hope so, Dan. I hope it doesn’t come in too high, but I’ll do my best to pay.”

  “You won’t go back on this, Larry? Because I can’t babysit you 24/7. I’ve got my own babies at home that I’ve put on hold for you.”

  “It’s done, Dan.” He breathes peacefully.

  I believe him. Because, like everything else about Larry, it’s contagious: I find myself in surrender mode, too. In the semi-dark of the hospital room, with the sheets draped up and surrounded by pistachio shells, I sit by his bedside in silence. On the TV variety show flickering in the background, a Chinese Jackie Gleason is trying to talk on a red-hot telephone. There’s lots of canned laughter at low volume, but we’ve learned to tune it out.

  “Thank you, Dan. I don’t know if I’ve told you this before, but thank you a hundred times.”

  “Friends and family, you don’t need to say, Larry. It’s understood.”

  “I’m sorry, Dan.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about. You’re doing the best you can.”

  “No. I mean…for everything. Getting sick and being such a bother. I never meant for this to happen. I always thought I was going to make a million dollars and be in a position to take care of everyone else in the family, not have someone in the family take care of me.”

  “You just rest, Larry. You’ve lined up a great surgeon, and I’m going to be with you every step of the way.”

  He lies there, the vein in his neck pulsing so delicately as the Chinese Gleason keeps almost scalding his mouth on the red-hot phone. Now there really is a thunderstorm outside, not a false alarm but the real thing. It’s drenching our windows, and I’m glad we’re safe inside our cave.

  “You know one thing I don’t get, Dan?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why you agreed to come here in the first place, after what I tried to do to you with the FBI.”

  “Water under the bridge, Larry. C’mon, it’s a no-brainer. Your cousin’s sick and you have the power to do something about it? Then what’s the question? You do it.”

  He shakes his head, beyond him. “I guess you’re better in the forgiveness department than I am.”

  “You kidding? I hold grudges worse than anyone. I’m just being…unpiglike. I’ve got a good life—how could I not help? And stop looking at me that way.”

  “What way?”

  “With stars in your eyes. Save it for Chinese mothers who find it in them to forgive Red Guards for stabbing their babies. For people who really do donate their kidneys to save their cousins. What I’m do ing should be standard operating procedure. It’s like you saying that being an organ donor should be our default. Same deal with helping each other—helping should be our default. If I hadn’t lifted a finger, then you could ask me why.”

  He takes this in quietly, as the rainstorm drums against our window. “Funniest thing,” he says. “When I was outside before, freaked by all the signs as usual, I realized that I’m as lost in China as my futha was lost in America. Now I know what he must have felt like, not being able to read the language.”

  The Chinese Gleason dumps the phone in a bucket of ice water and smiles with relief.

  “I’m telling you, if I come to terms with my futha, that will be an added bonus of this trip, even if I don’t get a kidney. Imagine: a reconciliation, after he’s been dead twenty years.”

  “Better late than never,” I say.

  Outside, the lightning flashes, the thunder booms. On TV a new act: A policeman in a girdle and wig cries as he tries to explain something to a judge. Soon all the girdle-and-wig-wearing policemen in the courtroom are crying. The flood level rises to their knees.

  “Know
what I think, Dan?” Larry says.

  “What’s that?”

  He looks at me with panda eyes. “I think you’re sort of a black sheep yourself. Not in the traditional sense, maybe, but—”

  “Baaa,” I say, silencing him. “And you know what I think?” I say.

  “What?

  “I think I came here because I love you.”

  “I understand.”

  “I never said that to you before, and I don’t even think I knew it before this moment, but that’s why I’m here.”

  “I appreciate that. Thank you.”

  That’s all. Only time we ever broach the subject. Mary’s right: I cannot leave my Larry. I don’t know how long it’ll take or what it’ll cost, but we’ll see it through together. Side by side in the semi-dark, with the flood of tears in the courtroom rising to hip level, we wait.

  CHAPTER 17

  Fate Make Us Together

  Govern a family as you would cook a small fish—very gently.

  The thunderstorm seems to have chased summer out, and the October air is clear and cold. The call could come at any moment—we’re poised to spring into action—but the passage of time has actually made us less clutchy, curing us somewhat of our frantic American impatience. A kind of temporary peace has settled in. In our newfound forbearance, Mary’s fur coat makes sense all at once; I never understood that it could get chilly here. Even the acrylic sweater she gave me comes in handy; I wear it every day. Gone is the totalitarian pollution—there are gaps in the one-party smog—which I was actually getting fond of. That luscious ivory-gray smoke, with its tinge of fish stink, it’s become part of me, and me of it: We’ve been respiring together, China and me. Larry and I have been in Shi five weeks, in China a total of six, and without warning we’re witness to a lovely succession of serene, cloudless days, so clean we can see the tops of buildings at last. There they are, the uppermost windows with the shades wide open. It’s like having been held captive by someone who finally decides to be your friend and whips off his mask so you can see that his eyes are startling blue—like Larry’s!

  For Larry has undergone a transformation, too. In the past six weeks, he’s been yanked away from everything safe and reliable in his life and been exposed to trauma and fear. Broken down to his core, it’s like he’s been depatterned so he could be reprogrammed. Long story short: He’s sampling parts of chicken that have not once in their lives been encased by KFC Styrofoam.

  “Even if I don’t care for the food, it’s always arranged nicely,” he concedes.

  But he is caring for the food! He’s switched loyalties from KFC mashed potatoes to Chinese sticky rice and has developed a hankering for Chinese eggplant. He even shows remarkable aptitude for chopsticks.

  “Hey, you’re okay with those things,” I say.

  “You eat enough takeout, eventually you pick up chopsticks,” he says.

  Of course, “remarkable” is a relative term. Truth to tell, he uses chopsticks like a toddler uses paintbrushes: one in each hand, and both operating independently of each other.

  But there’s no gainsaying his palate, which continues to prove far better than mine. We play a blindfolded tofu-testing game, and he blows me away. He’s letting down his guard in other areas, too. He relaxes enough to skip shaving on the days he’s scheduled for dialysis, figuring that the procedure is draining enough without his needing to get groomed for it. (To pick up the slack, I’ve taken to shaving more frequently, in case Dr. X decides to bestow a kidney on someone with a more reputable-looking companion.) Larry has also stopped begrudging me the time I spend with the Badminton Boys, even though he still contends they represent the competition (“kidneys don’t grow on trees,” he says, and he’s right). It’s all part of the general world change brought in by autumn. Fewer firecrackers are being sounded, as China gets back to business after its holiday season has passed. The dewy, stalwart Jade comes and goes several times with quickie visits, making sure all’s running smoothly for us. No more beaten-up toenails are on view, because everyone is thickly shod. Summer’s over.

  Meanwhile, in what may constitute the greatest change of all, Mary is adding what Larry insists on calling a womanly touch to our cave: arranging his clothes according to season, sweeping his discarded pistachio shells into corners, even bringing a pet into our lives, sort of—thumbtacking onto the wall a scroll that features a goldfish that’s way too big for its bowl. It looks like it barely has room to turn around, but Mary says proudly, “We make nice home for him…and we, too!”

  Yes, her English is improving. She immerses herself in her workbooks and now understands perhaps every fourth or fifth word Larry says. It’s not perfect—she’s still capable of breaking into squalls of laughter when asked how her parents passed away—but there’s enough common language between them that they can have a conversation like the following:

  “Larry, you like so many food! Lunch and every day dinner, many!”

  “I even eat the soup you got me, despite the floaters.”

  Mary is proud of herself. “I order! Me!” But mostly she is proud of her beau, beaming over him like a mother panda at her cub. “Big appletite!”

  Larry chuffs on orange soda going down the wrong way. “You should have known me in my prime, Mary. I could walk into any McDonald’s in Florida and eat two helpings of their apple pie.”

  “Two?”

  “Two!”

  They smile and take each other’s hands, smiling happily.

  “She’s also opening up about her family,” Larry reports. “Mary, tell Dan what you told me this morning about your son’s girlfriend.”

  “Morning.”

  “Tell Dan. What you told me. About the girlfriend.”

  Mary wears her getting-ready-to-spit-out-pig’s-knuckles expression. Then her face brightens unexpectedly. “I-ah like my son girlfriend. She has degree in ah engineer. But I not ready. Ah. To be. Grandmutha!”

  “Hear that?” Larry says proudly. “She’s even picking up my speech impediment!”

  Great: a new generation of Chinese speaking Larryspeak. Like a new generation of Chinese dancers dancin’ the Dan.

  “Good for you, Mary,” Larry says. “Tell Dan the other thing you told me this morning. About fate.”

  “Fit?”

  “Fate, remember Mary?”

  Blank face, hard-to-describe mouth expression.

  “Any case,” Larry says, “this morning Mary tells me, ‘Fate make us together.’ Isn’t that nice? I thought that was a very thoughtful concept.”

  But it’s not as simple as that. Mary’s also learning enough language to express her discontent about certain issues. “Ah, ah,” she begins, marshaling her English, “I wish to do for Larry,” she says. “Do more.”

  “I know you do, and that’s nice, but no,” Larry says. “Enough is enough. There are some things that are just too intimate.”

  “What does she want to do, Larry, you don’t mind my asking?”

  Larry looks discomfited, like he’s just been told he’s wearing someone else’s jockstrap by mistake. “Sing to me.”

  “And why won’t you let her, exactly?”

  The jockstrap is chafing. “My mutha sang to me, she’s the only one.”

  Well, this is personal. I stay out of it, looking down at the pistachio shells in the corner.

  “I want please you. I study…hard!” Mary tries again, her voice breaking. “Now I want sing!”

  “And I appreciate that,” Larry says, squeezing her hand.

  “I go back my home if no let me sing you.”

  I lift my head. This is not the statement of someone who’s entirely out for her own aims.

  Larry studies the proposition on the table so starkly before him.

  “You win,” he says.

  “You do it?” Mary asks. “You let me?”

  “I said you win. I’ll win the next battle.”

  “Yay-yay,” Mary mouths silently, ardently. She turns Larry’s hand in hers, lifts and k
isses it with her eyes closed. And it’s like a snapshot that makes history the instant it’s taken. In that simple gesture, my heart warms to her at last. Click. Open and shut. Case closed.

  “That was easy,” I say to him.

  “I don’t have any fight left in me,” Larry says. “I just shut up and do what everyone tells me.”

  “That’s the best news I’ve heard all month.”

  “Surrender is becoming second nature.”

  Me, too, I think, carrying his kidney-shaped bedpan to the toilet without cringing—though I don’t say such a thing aloud. Couldn’t if I tried. He’s off and running again, not letting anyone get a word in edge-wise. “I even feel like accepting myself more, too—and note please that I’m saying this before my surgery, so it’s not like I’m getting some mystical infusion of wisdom from the donor’s kidney—”

  “Shhh,” I say, hushing him so we can hear what’s beginning to happen: Mary singing a little country tune, standing still in the middle of our cave, almost too big for her bowl.

  And Larry listens from his bed with his eyes closed, in pain or pleasure, it’s impossible to tell, but just maybe it’s not pain.

  “You know, Dan,” he says, signaling me to come closer and keeping his voice low, “in my earliest phone conversations with Mary, two years ago, she was so ashamed she couldn’t speak English that she would try to sing to me. I would cut her off at the pass, of course, but she did manage to get in an occasional note here and there.”

  I look at Mary’s face as she warbles, the muscles of her throat working with so much sincerity it’s almost frightening. “Why didn’t you tell me that detail at the get-go?” I ask. “I would have softened to her then and there.”

  “That’s why,” he says. “I needed you to stay objective.”

  “Not too dumb, Feldman.”

  “And I still do, Dan,” he says. “I still need you to keep your eyes open. It’s not over till the fat lady sings.”

  Well, perhaps not the best image for him to use right here. The fact is, the fat lady is singing, and it’s putting another lump in my throat. Must be something in the air….

  Meanwhile my voice. My Chinese accent is coming along nicely. “Damn dim bulb!” has become my all-purpose curse phrase of choice. Hot water running out? “Damn dim bulb.” Phone on the blink? “Damn dim bulb.” Also, when I find myself wading through a gang of card sharks playing Chinese blackjack on the sidewalk, I provide my own running commentary so they don’t have to: “Oh, look you at the crazyheart American Cowboy! He wear socks! Isn’t that beyond the humor? Instead of normal ankle stockings. And look, he drink water from a bottle he carry slung around shoulder. What a crack-up and hot card! What madcap business of monkeys will him think of next? No wonder we giggle on top of giggle as he pass. He may as well be of clown hat! But look you, now him writes in pad with characters that are not Chinese! Is there no tomfoolery this screwballs will not perform to keep us up-stitched?”