Next morning we landed the ROKs, and the crew of the first Papa boat that returned to the ship was white faced. “Jesus, Doc,” the coxswain told me. “You know that poor ROK dogface who stole Mr. McGrath’s curtain? They marched him behind a sand dune, jabbered a few words in gook, lined up a firing squad, and shot the fucker. Bingo! Like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“Just saving face,” I told him.
Later on that same visit I had to go ashore myself, to pick up some medical supplies. It was winter, black ice in the roadside puddles, corpses of homeless civilians who’d frozen or starved to death lying in the unpaved streets. I accidentally kicked one and he crunched like a popsicle. I had to carry a loaded Colt .45 on such trips, there were rip-off artists everywhere ashore, Koreans and round-eyes both. On my way back to the boat landing where the LCVP was standing by for me, a Korean in padded gray cotton pajamas jumped out from between two hooches and made a snatch for the satchel of drugs I was carrying—ampules of penicillin, mostly, but some morphine Syrettes as well. I fought him for it but he was stronger than he looked. I fumbled the .45 from its holster, let go of the bag, jacked the slide, and pointed the pistol at him.
“Hands up!”
“Fuck you, lound-eye.” He flipped me the finger.
One of my Marine escorts shot him. His sternum collapsed as he fell, imploding inward. A concavity the size of a softball. He geysered blood from mouth and nostrils. His eyes stared up at me, glazing fast . . .
“Not to worry, sir,” the SPs told me. “This guy’s a Commonist, sure as shit. We’ve been lookin’ for the fucker high and low. There’s some wounded Chinks hid out somewhere in the boonies and they need medicine.”
Ah, the Navy. Those were the last of the biblical “seven lean years” for me. But it wasn’t all Sturm und Drang. I loved the Navy, particularly being at sea, cruising independently from island to island, continent to continent, the timeless empty gray days of wind and weather, the Pacific spreading out unto eternity so that you felt you’d never see land again, and it was a good feeling; pilot whales broaching like enormous bubbles of black glass alongside and wheezing their misty spouts skyward; then the water going electric blue as we entered the Philippine Sea, porpoises flirting with the bow waves, flying fish skimming the trade wind and sometimes hitting the deck by miscalculation, flopping steely bluegray in the gunwales, and the Filipino mess boys scuttling to pick them up before they flipped themselves back overboard . . . . The Filipinos who prepared our wardroom meals of iridescent green beef and sodden gray potatoes always cooked up a mess of sticky rice, bamboo shoots, tropical greens, and fresh, stir-fried fish for themselves. My cabin was right up the ladder from the officers’ galley, and sometimes in the late afternoons I’d be snoozing in my fetid rack when the aroma of their supper reached me. I would begin to dream of the Firesteel and the meals Ben and I prepared at night with the trout we’d caught—way back when, in our boyhood.
After the Navy I joined an eye practice in Santa Monica. It was owned by two old ophthalmologists who were looking for young blood. Old, I say. They were about forty-five. But already they’d earned enough, even in those days, before lasers, cataract surgery, and corneal transplants, to pull the pin. There’s a lot of money in eyeglass frames. They wanted someone to buy out their practice and I was the golden boy. I’d met and married Kate during my last year in the Navy. Kate Winston, nee. She was a registered nurse at the naval station clinic in Long Beach, a leggy, bright, witty blonde from Des Moines, Iowa, with a taste for jazz. She caught me one night at the Blue Note West in Redondo Beach while I was riffing with some black cats from K.C. She dug my sax. She dug my sex. She scraped up the dough to help me buy out the old farts who ran the eye practice. She bore me three kids, two boys and a girl. Our daughter, Taffy, married well but moved to Wales with her husband, a professor of ethnology at Aberystwyth. We have made trips over there now and then, and it’s not the same. One of the boys—Frank, the eldest and my favorite—was killed in the carbombing of the Marine HQ in Lebanon. October 23, 1983. I’ll never forget that date. A Marine, yes, like my old friend Ben Slater. The younger son, Eddie, majored in economics at Berkeley, took an MBA at Wharton, and disappeared into the canyons of Wall Street. We hear from him three times a year, on our birthdays and at Xmas, tasteful Hallmark cards every time.
I piled up the shekels, year after year, bought IBM in the ’50s, invested in offshore oil, caught Xerox early on, then Wal-Mart, cashed in on the Silicon Valley boom, made a killing in spousal abuse—every wife-beater left me a thousand bucks richer for each eye he blackened; I cheered them on. No, I didn’t. I hate the bastards.
We built a house in Palos Verdes on a cliff overlooking the Pacific, a sprawling stucco hacienda with a red tile roof, all grown around with succulents and pampas grass, with a big slate deck and a kidney-shaped pool. Kate and I shot clays off that deck, hunted valley and mountain quail from El Centro to Bakersfield. Even up into Oregon sometimes. She was a natural wingshot, wiping my eye at trap and skeet with the nifty little 28-gauge Parker I gave her on our first wedding anniversary.
Later, we built another place, a redwood log cabin up near Bishop in the High Sierra. We fished trout there, but it wasn’t the Firesteel by a long shot. I bought a forty-five-foot Norwegian ketch, a double-ender, clinker-built. Oak and pine, brass brightwork and teak deck, heavy and somewhat slow in stays but capacious and weatherly. We painted her hull bright scarlet and rechristened her Red Orm, for the hero of a Viking sea saga I loved, The Long Ships, by Frans Bengtsson. Kate and I cruised her whenever I could get away from the practice—long voyages, down the Baja to Cabo and beyond, clear up to Anchorage a few times. Once as far as the Cocos, off Ticoland.
I fished hard on those trips, always had a line or two out with a spinner trolling astern, stopped to cast a jigging rod whenever we saw albacore or bonita breaking; off the Revilla Gigedos, south of Cabo about two hundred miles, caught a yellowfin tuna over two hundred pounds, great sashimi, sliced still quivering from its flank, dark red fine-grained meat, cold as the sea herself, with plenty of wasabe and soy sauce; big wahoo as well, though not as good raw—and horse-eye jacks on the flyrod at night, under the searchlight on the transom, when we were anchored off Clarion that time, or was it San Benedicto? Up north, the big tyee and halibut that could break your arm if you gaffed them wrong, silvers and sockeyes on the Four Weight, strong tough swift steelhead in the Babine and Alaska’s Situk River. But none of them matched the thrill of the Firesteel. Maybe it’s the water.
I played my sax at dawn and sunset while we were at sea, did-dybopping with the gulls, summoning up cetaceans . . .
Kate died two months ago. July 10th of the first year of the new fucking millennium. A stroke, while playing tennis with her lady friends, five days after I’d sold the practice and retired. We were fitting out Red Orm for a long cruise this fall to the Marquesas, Tahiti, and the Tuamotus. I buried her, sold the ketch, and then started drinking in earnest. The kids made a one-day appearance for the funeral and then split. I don’t blame them. No, I don’t. Not a bit. I don’t blame them at all. Really . . .
I found myself pissing six times a night. Thought it might be the booze. I quit. I still pissed, every hour on the hour. Good thing I’d sold the boat. I could never have single-handed her to the mid-Pacific unless I wore a diaper at the helm.
Diabetes? I tested my blood. Negative.
The Big PC?
There was no way I could palpate my prostate all by myself.
I went to Jack Trevanian, a urologist pal I’d played poker with for many years. Okay, against my better judgment. But what the hell. Tests. PSA through the roof. A mindboggling forty-five. The biopsy in Jack’s office. It took only a minute, no pain on a local anesthetic. Rectally. With the “gun” that propels a needle very fast, like the tongue of a snake, into various areas of the prostate, nipping out samples with every lick.
These samples will not only detect a malignancy, but will show whether it’s
slow moving, “nonaggressive,” or a metastatic meteor. Or somewhere in between. The scale runs from one to ten. With a ten, you might as well write yourself off.
I waited out the results of the biopsy. I went back to drinking and pissing. No, I’d never given up pissing. I was pissing my life away. Maybe I’d already done it. I was dying. Or maybe not. I didn’t know. Or at least I didn’t know when. All I knew was that I’d fallen into their hands. From here on out I faced a series of time-consuming, ever more depressing tests—sonograms, MRIs, bone scans, CAT scans, X-ray sessions, rectal prods and probes, clever, dancing fingers up the bunghole, and the sad, hopeful smiles of underpaid female assistants. Not to mention the bills I’d get from my compatriots, the ultimate reaming.
Timor mortis conturbat me.
Five days later Jack called. “Well, old buddy, I won’t beat about the bush. It’s positive. Six of the ten spots I tested. Looks like it’s about a nine on the Gleason Scale . . . ”
“Don’t you mean the Richter Scale? Hyper-fucking-aggressive.”
“Very.”
“What’s next?”
“Well, we’ll have to see if it’s metastasized, like into your bones or your colon. Hell, it could pop up almost anywhere, Harry. I’m afraid you’re in for a lot of clinic time. Bring a book along—they’re pretty busy right now. We’ll start with an MRI . . . ”
I hung up.
2
THE AFTERLIFE
Isat up late that night, sprawled on the veranda in a chaise longue, listening to the beat of the Pacific crashing the cliffs below. Now and then I blew some changes to the rumble of the surf, but the sax tasted dead in my mouth. The mouthpiece full of cold spit. Without Kate the music meant nothing anymore. I lay the horn aside and sipped Armagnac on the rocks. I was popping tranqs like M&Ms.
If it comes to it, I thought, like say a preexisting malignancy that’s already metastasized from the prostate to maybe a bone cancer, colon, lung, liver, testicular, or whatever—should I check out before things get really rough, too depressing and grim? I could end up like my old fishing buddy Jim Jury, who never knew (or let on that he knew) what caused the cancers that devoured him.
Cancer: the ugliest, most frightening word in the English language. In any language.
What is it in other tongues?
Krebs in German, le cancer in French, el cáncer in Spanish, close to that in Italian.
But in the gentle koine of East Africa it’s jamii moja ya nyota. Swahili. Almost musical. To die for . . . . Coming out of the tent at the crack of dawn, still cool before the sun cleared the acacias, and Wamatitu pussyfooting toward me from the mess tent with a tray of black, hot Kenya tea, smiling that broad, sweet Louis Armstrong grin of his, Salaama, Bwana—habari gani? Chai, Bwana? Beaded dew gleams like shards of diamond on the green canvas of the tent, and the air smells clean as cold canvas. Through the tops of the doum palms the snow-capped peaks of Kirinyaga float in the hard blue sky. A herd of Tommies is grazing out on the plain, their short white tails whirring like miniature helicopter rotors. The tails stop only when they die . . .
You’ll never go there again, Doc. Have a Halcyon instead.
I picked up the saxophone and tried to play around it. It didn’t help.
Checking out: Gunshot? Preferable: cheap, quick, painless, certain if you have a steady hand at the critical moment, and best of all no one else has to be involved. But it’s messy. I wouldn’t want the maid to see it later and feel obliged to clean up. Josefína would faint dead away before she even went for the mop and bucket. And what about the kids? Those images that yet fresh images beget . . .
Have another schnapps.
Drugs and poisons? Barbiturates, tranquilizers, rat poison, Drano, etc. An overdose, then? Of what? I’ve got whole drawers full of drugs in my office, freebies in a selection of delicious flavors from Roche, Pfizer, Schering, Glaxo Wellcome, and all the usual suspects. But which flavor works best, and what’s the optimum dosage to off oneself for sure? I could look it up. But there’s always an element of uncertainty.
The Rope? Who cuts you down? Hanged men shit their pants. The dead always tend to void their bowels, leaving a terrible stink behind. Apt enough, but messy.
A car crash at high speed, à la Death of a Salesman? Too melodramatic, and there’s always a chance of hurting someone else . . . in another vehicle, or maybe a pedestrian.
Disappear? Leave a farewell note? To whom? Jack Trevanian? It would be excessive, fucking romantic.
And after all, where would I disappear to? And what would I do when I got there?
I could drown myself. Swim out to sea like Norman Maine and never come back. Clichéd, and anyway I’m too good a swimmer. It would take me forever to sink. But then again, perhaps I might reach the Happy Isles, or anyway Hawaii . . .
Defenestration? I’m acrophobic. It would scare me to death.
Carbon monoxide in the garage with the Range Rover’s motor idling? Not foolproof enough, I could end up half dead with brain damage. Picture it: an old fart in diapers, grinning mindlessly, drooling, gurgling nonsense. Forget it.
I could update the Romans, open my veins in the hot tub. It’s said to be painless, the heat of the water assuaging the sting. Do it at night, under a full moon, you’ll have something to distract the eye from the carmine cloud you’re drowning in. They’d find me in the morning, a pale, leached-out hunk of flotsam adrift in a stale Red Sea . . .
But to hang on knowing that it’s pointless, nothing afterward, going through the indignities of a long, slow, mindless, drug-dulled and terribly expensive death . . . it doesn’t make much sense, except that it’s “proper.”
Think about it.
If it comes to suicide, I’d want some comfort along the way.
From whom? Kate’s gone . . .
So when was the last time you thought about heaven, Doc? You haven’t believed in it since you were ten. Now you’re pushing seventy. Sixty-eight anyway. It’s a nice idea all right if you can get in the right frame of mind.
I’m sure as hell getting there.
Have another schnapps.
Prosit Neujahr!
Who would you want to be there?
What would it be like?
Have another Xanax.
I’d certainly want my dogs, a dalmatian like Popsy, that coach dog my mother loved so much—yes, a coach dog, the kind that used to run along behind the fire engines when I was a kid, every firehouse had one; they were bred to run behind the coaches of the aristocracy, my mother’s notion of high tone. Then Gayelord, who hunted well for me all through med school and finally died of leukemia when I was away in the Navy. Then Spunky, the fox terrier Kate and I adopted that time when the Douche Boat was in Mare Island Naval Shipyard near Vallejo and the pooch hung around for handouts, someone must have abandoned him there, and we kept him for a while even after the Navy, even though Kate was allergic to dog dander, and then gave him to a shipmate who said he had an uncle with a big chicken farm in Utah; then our black Lab, Peter, who got chomped by that white-tip off Clarion on the Big Tuna Cruise; and then freaky Max (the German shorthair, a great gundog); and the big yellow Lab Simba, who took it as his droit du seigneur to scarf the first quail of the season but fetched perfectly on every bird that followed; and finally his successor, black Luke, the best gundog of them all, the best dog I ever had, another cancer victim, and why the fuck am I crying now?
Then Kate died.
Have another schnapps. Prosit Neujahr!
Have a Nembutal . . . no, take two!
I’d want Kate there in heaven of course, lean feisty smart hawkish—my blonde kestrel, no, my merlin—but not in her occasional combative mode.
Prosit Neujahr!
Another Percodan? Don’t mind if I do . . .
And the kids?
Sure, why not?
But only if they’re little still.
Pros’t . . .
Maybe my parents if they could be nice to each other for a change, and my g
randparents, at least Frank Taggart and Rosa Pueringer Seidel. But you don’t have to have everyone in your own particular heaven, that’s the guilt-free beauty of it, those you leave out will have heavens of their own, and maybe some people can drop in from time to time, like my smartass cousin Maureen, and Captain Harold W. Becker USN, if he’d ever deign to spend time in the heaven of a mere doctor.
Ben would be there for sure. Even if he isn’t dead yet, by God I’ll have him in my heaven.
Here’s to you, Ben. Glück auf!
Bird would be there, and Diz, and Coltrane, Max Roach, Lionel Hampton on the vibes, Lady Day diddybopping along with them, all in fluffy white robes and haloes.
And what would heaven look like? What would be the geography of it?
Well, it’s my heaven, so I can make it anything I want . . . the best places I’ve ever known. Kenya in the early ’70s; Baja ditto; Wisconsin in the ’40s and ’50s; Alaska now and forever; maybe even California in the ’50s when we were first married, smog still a Bob Hope joke, and the earthquakes only spiced things up, but it would have to be a very big house to hold all those people, or a very big neighborhood, and the seasons would always have to be spring and early summer and September and October, and maybe a touch of winter. A kiss of snow . . .
There’d have to be a boat, of course, a ketch like Orm but lighter and quicker in stays, and Kate not prone to seasickness, and I’d have a wire snips with me when she got that fishhook through her thigh that I had to cut out, and I wouldn’t offend the boys by drinking too much and pushing them too hard to hold a true course and shoot straight and cast with a flyrod, and I wouldn’t argue against abortion when Eddie’s girlfriend was within earshot not knowing that she’d had one, because Kate had kept that information from me, and I’d never be sullen or “out of touch.”
The Run to Gitche Gumee Page 16
