And I was angry. Mindlessly, relentlessly angry every minute of every day. I did all the work my teachers gave me, and I did it well, but I was so tense while I was doing it that I broke mounds of pencils, erased right through the paper repeatedly, left indentations on my desktop from writing so hard. Word got out at school about my “tragic situation,” and I was like a mini-celebrity. Renee was instantly my pal, and Annette forgave me, as usual. Teachers were thrilled with my “great new attitude” and kept telling me what a “trooper” I was. On the rare occasions when they noticed my presence, my relatives commented about how “strong” and “brave” I was, about how “lucky” Jeffrey was to have me for a brother. Why didn’t they try being “lucky” like Jeffrey for a few months?
And I wanted to scream at every teacher, “Why are you making me do this stupid busywork while my brother’s white cell count is so low? Who cares about listing the first ten presidents when my brother has another spinal tap on Friday? What possible use is the FOIL method of multiplying binomials when my brother’s gums are bleeding every time he tries to brush his teeth?”
And I wanted to punch every kid who told me they “understood” my pain. Nobody understood my pain. Maybe if I had gone to each of their houses, whacking random family members with a nail-studded two-by-four, they would have begun to have some basic comprehension.
And my parents—they were trying…but GOD! I couldn’t even look at them without having to bite my tongue.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey went bald. He lost his beautiful, golden hair. Soft ringlets were all over his pillow, the shoulders of his favorite Buzz Lightyear PJs, the bathroom sink. And then one day, there was just nothing left to fall out. For a long time, he never said anything to me about it, but between that and the swelling in his face from all the steroids he was taking, he was looking horrible.
Of course, the steroids also made him hyper beyond all belief, so even while he was the only person I wasn’t mad at yet, he was driving me pretty crazy. He wasn’t able to go to school for weeks on end when his white blood cell counts were low, so I was basically his sole source of entertainment. A typical weeknight when he was home went like this:
Sit down and try to do homework.
Get interrupted by Jeffrey: “Please play with me!”
Ignore brother, try to do homework.
Get interrupted by Jeffrey: “Come ON, Steven! I’m BORED!”
Beg Jeffrey for five minutes of peace.
Get begged for five minutes of play: “Steven, you never, ever play with me—ever!”
Move entire homework operations center to different room.
Repeat steps #1-7 as directed by small, drugged maniac.
I did play with him for at least an hour each night, but a lot of times, neither of us was concentrating too much on the games. I was constantly hoping for an excuse to stop playing, and Jeffrey often wasn’t feeling well. It was like Checkers Nite at the Terminal Boredom and Nausea Clinic.
Also, if anyone out there ever wants to experience the ultimate in crippling guilt, I recommend that you try beating a bald, bloated five-year-old cancer patient at a board game. So to avoid the guilt, I would spend half my time sneakily cheating so that Jeffrey would win over and over.
Which also sucked, because the more he won, the more he wanted to play.
There’s another thing for which I will feel guilty forever: Jeffrey was driving me so nuts with his need for attention that I was often relieved when he went back into the hospital. I mean, I needed the time off from him so I could catch up on schoolwork, but how hideous was that? I wished for my own baby brother to be hospitalized just so I wouldn’t have to play some one-sided Chutes and Ladders games.
I had a moment of triumph in January when I finally handed in my last overdue worksheet. I wrote about it in English class and even read the journal out loud. Here’s the conclusion of the day’s entry:
My fellow students, I stand here before you a changed man. Once I lived in fear, sneaking from place to place, avoiding schoolwork at all costs. My life was a tangled mass of lies and half-truths. And I thought I could get away with it. I thought I could carry on indefinitely with my schemes and deceptions. I thought I would be able to leave my homework undone forever. But I was wrong—oh, so very wrong. Friends, there exists on this planet a delicate balance, a balance between good and evil, righteousness and wretchedness, crime and punishment. And when any one man tries to tip the scales too far, they always bounce back. Beware. BEWARE!
Okay, so the journal prompt was “Pick any character in Mark Twain’s works and explain how he or she is changed by his or her experiences.” Miss Palma did commend me on my “rhetorical flair,” though. And that’s gotta count for something.
So my work was made up. My ‘rents wouldn’t be getting the dreaded phone call from Mrs. Galley. I could stay in All-City. And it looked as though my school worries were over. But who are we kidding here? Nobody knows how to get slapped down by fate like Steven Alper. Just when things were turning around, I got the flu.
Big whoop, right? Sweat a little, barf a little, lie in bed watching videos for a few days while the ‘rents wait on you hand and foot—not a bad deal, overall. However, if you have a brother with leukemia who needs to avoid exposure to viruses, you can’t BE in the same HOUSE as your parents when you have the flu. So, just when I needed my parents the most, in my hour of deepest need and intestinal crampage, they shipped me off across town to my grampa and grandma’s.
Now, I love my grampa as much as I love anybody—and my grandma is all right, too, when she’s not dusting around me every five minutes or nagging me about my posture—but their house is, to put it mildly, primitive. Do they have a VCR? No. DVD player? Nope. CD player? Negatory. Computer? No. PlayStation? Uh-uh.
It was like my parents had sent their diseased eldest child to Siberia.
I spent a total of eight days in that glorified hut, but I mostly just slept the first few away. The last five were the problem. How many games of Go Fish can a normal thirteen-year-old boy play with his grandma without suffering permanent brain damage? Hopefully, the limit is more than the seventeen in a row I played with mine. How long can that same normal boy talk with his grandfather without running out of meaningful things to say? The answer to that is four days, IF the boy is essentially comatose for the first three of them. And how weird does my grandparents’ house smell, by the way? Once my nose started clearing up on Day Five, my nausea got even worse, because that odd aroma of old pot roast mixed with mothballs was nobody’s idea of a stomach soother.
Speaking of pot roast, I had spent the three months before this involuntary visit subsisting only by a combination of my wits and the microwave. You would think that this week of having actual food, prepared by a human cook, would have been a welcome change. However, despite the lingering meat fumes, my grandma never fed me anything other than bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast, in consideration of my illness. Gggrrrrrr! It got so bad that I actually spent hours lying on the couch watching Grandma knit, plotting ways to sneak into the kitchen and steal some meat.
How pathetic is that? A week with the grand-’rents and I was desperate enough to contemplate the vile crime of beef felony. Another few days and I would have probably gotten scurvy or goiter or something.
There were some good things about that week, though. Lack of school attendance comes to mind as the biggest treat, although I was worried about having more makeup work to do and about failing my finals. I got lots of phone calls from my mom and Jeffrey, and they even dropped stuff off in my grand-’rents’ mailbox for me. The nicest one was a present from Jeffrey with a note my mom must have told him how to spell.
Dear Steven,
I’m sorry you are so sick. I sent Matt Medic to help you get better. When he gives you a magic flu-blaster shot, make sure you think strong no-flu thoughts. Doctor Purow said that’s important.
Also, Mommy told Daddy you sound like you’re about to die. If you promise you will get better inst
ead of dying, I promise I will, too.
Your pal,
Jeffrey Alper
Good thing he put his last name on there, huh?
I also got some surprise phone calls; I guess my parents were giving everyone my grandparents’ number in the hopes that they would all call and save me from a slow, agonizing death by malnutrition and gin rummy. Annette called me twice, a couple of the guys from school left messages, and Mr. Watras and Miss Palma each called once. It was exceptionally strange talking on the phone with teachers. I mean, I was lying there in ratty sweatpants, amid a vast sea of soggy tissues. It couldn’t have been a pretty mental picture. Mr. Watras asked me whether I was practicing, and I told him I was practicing my tissue basketball skills. Then I got all embarrassed. I mean, I know teachers are people, or at least most of them are, but you don’t usually talk with them exactly like you talk with everybody else. Still, any call that got me away from watching All in the Family and Golden Girls with Grandma for the third straight evening was an A-OK call in my book.
By the end of the week, I was still kind of hurt by the fact that I had been exiled. I mean, I knew exactly why it had to happen, but it still gets to you when your brother is all cozied up at home with both parents and you’re stuck sucking down applesauce with the mah-jongg crowd way across town. I wanted attention from the ‘rents, and I wanted it big-time. Also, I was having these bizarre dreams about hunting down wild game with my bare hands. I had to get back into a diet with some protein, and fast. So that Sunday, I bade farewell to my grandma and got into the huge cruise ship that is Grampa’s car for the ride back to my actual life.
But silly me! I was forgetting that I didn’t have an actual life. Thus, when I got home, the banners, flags, and tumbling cheerleaders that should have been lining the curb to celebrate my return were notably absent. In fact, my parents and Jeffrey weren’t even home. I got the ritual crushing handshake from Grampa (“See ya soon, Muscles!”), let myself in, and staggered into the kitchen so I could consume heaping quantities of lifesaving meats and cheeses.
Or, in the case of our barren wasteland of a refrigerator, three-quarters of a thing of yogurt and half of a microwave bean burrito.
Then I booted up the computer so I could see how many people had e-mailed to check whether I was OK. I had seventeen new messages, which looked promising. But eleven were just spam—which would have been great if I had been seeking a cheaper mortgage or a way to “lose that weight fast!” I was looking for a bit of human contact and sympathy at the moment, so I went right to the six that were from actual people I knew, and they all said basically the same thing: “oh my god youve been absent for two (or three, or four) days and youre never absent. is jeffrey all right? hes in my prayers. We all miss u! ”
In case my friends’ grammar and punctuation weren’t upsetting enough, the fact that nobody thought there might be a problem with ME was enough to blacken my mood pretty thoroughly. I stormed over to the couch and called the one person who had gradually, without my even noticing it, become my confidante: Annette.
Hey. I’m home.
That’s great! Are you all better? We really missed you in jazz band this week. And every teacher asked me about you. And some girl was pretty curious about where you were, too.
Who?
Oh, somebody.
Annette, I’m not in the mood to be tortured right now. Would ya just tell me, please?
I’m not sure about this, Steven. Your heart might not survive the strain of this if you’re not fully recovered.
Annette…
OK, I’ll give you a hint: She wears very tight shirts, and you drool over her like a deranged monkey boy.
WHAT? What are you TALKING about? I don’t drool over Renee like a deranged anything.
But you knew who I meant right away, didn’t you?
On the one hand, Renee continued to show remarkable, if sudden, interest in me. On the other hand, gggggrrrrrr! What was Annette’s problem?
We talked for a while more, until she got called to dinner: veal parm. Evidently, there still existed an abundance of animal-based food if one knew where to find it. And if one were just too pathetic, forlorn, and unremembered, one could always scrounge up some decade-old, generic canned fruit cocktail from the depths of the basement pantry.
I was sitting at the kitchen table, alone, picking out the cherries from the various beige floaty things which made up 93% of the fruit cocktail, when my family returned home, laughing at some private joke that they had shared during my week in lockdown. Jeffrey looked at my parents for approval, and when my mom nodded, he launched himself into my lap.
I thought I’d never see you again.
Why? I just had the flu.
But Mommy said you were…
I know: dying. But I wasn’t dying at all, and now I’m fine.
Then Mom piped up, Oh, Stevie, it’s great to have you back.
Hey! You noticed I was gone? What was the big clue that gave it all away?
Steven AL-per! What has gotten into you?
The ensuing fight was not so entertaining for anyone concerned, although Jeffrey giggled when I said Grandma was a “demented child-starving hag.” Dad may have found some truth there, too, but he wasn’t dumb enough to jump into the raging battle, so he just took Jeffrey off of the field of combat and up to bed. Without an audience, Mom and I wound down pretty fast, without any kind of resolution. I just kind of tapered off and walked away, went downstairs, and played on my practice pad. At first, my wrists were rusty after more than a week off, but I gradually warmed up until I was playing blazingly fast and much harder than usual. When I got too tired, I stopped for a while and listened to blasting punk music on my Discman. Then I went back to the pad again. I must have been down there, banging away, for a couple of hours—I was trying to stay hidden until everyone else went up to bed so I wouldn’t have to deal with anybody. Finally, I decided the coast was probably clear, so I tiptoed upstairs.
Nobody was sleeping yet. As it turned out, my family hadn’t necessarily been having the excellent week I had been imagining so resentfully. I could hear noises from the bathroom upstairs: Jeffrey vomiting and my mom trying to soothe him. I also saw something shocking—right in front of me, at the kitchen table, my dad was slumped over a pile of papers with his head cradled in his hands.
And he was crying.
POINTLESSNESS AND
BOY PERFUME
If you had a father who hadn’t shown any emotion for three or four months, and then you stumbled upon him weeping as though someone had just shot Bambi right in front of his eyes, what would you do? Right—you would sneak away and never let on that you had seen anything. And that’s what I did. I crept back into the basement like a highly skilled sneak thief and then proceeded to listen to the most calming music I know: the Beatles. Somewhere between “Revolution” and “Hey, Jude” I fell asleep. When I awoke in a small puddle of my own drool on the ratty playroom carpet, with my left earphone seemingly welded to my head by the force of gravity, I looked at the Zildjian cymbal clock my parents once got me for a birthday. It was 11:45 p.m. I felt pretty sure of two things: Nobody had noticed that I was hidden away in the dark basement like a leper, and everybody would be asleep when I went upstairs this time. For a change, I was doubly right. In the kitchen, I couldn’t help but notice that my dad’s mysterious pile of depressing papers was just sitting on the table, in plain view.
To see or not to see? That was the question. Well, for about a tenth of a second, anyway. Then I dove on those papers like Sherlock Holmes on a cappuccino binge. What I was looking at, what had turned my strong, silent dad into a weepy mass of pudding, was a stack of bills. Medical bills. Jeffrey’s bills. The top sheet, which was written in my dad’s handwriting, was a tally of the total unpaid amount to date: $27,000. The total expenses so far were unbelievable, definitely in the six-figure range. If not for the fact that my parents both had good health insurance (which I knew from overhearing some discussions about this
stuff), we would already have blown the whole cost of a college education in these three months—and I knew Jeffrey was going to need at least three YEARS of treatment. As it was, I figured I’d be attending the University of “Would You Like Some Fries with That?” There was no way either of us would have any kind of college fund at the end of this. Then I had an even more depressing thought: Jeffrey might not be around long enough to go to college.
OK, so we were losing money hand over fist, my dad was crumbling like a day-old scone, and my brother might die. Really, what could I do about any of it? At the moment, the only answer I could come up with was “Nothing.”
I went upstairs to get ready for bed, and a new obsessive slogan started running through my mind. It worked like this: “OK, I’ll brush my teeth now. But Jeffrey might die, so what’s the point? Time to wash my face. But Mom’s not working, Dad makes maybe $40,000 a year after taxes, and there’s $27,000 in unpaid bills downstairs. We’re going to be homeless any minute—so what’s the point? I should floss now, too, but I didn’t even brush, so what’s the point?” So I went to bed with a grimy face and yuck-encrusted teeth. And that was just the start of my depressing What’s the Point? period.
The next day, I came back from my week of absence to a barrage of “oh my god what’s wrong with Jeffrey is your mom okay how’s your dad taking it what you were sick oh.” You can imagine that that didn’t snap me out of my funk too well. Renee talked with me all through homeroom, which should have made me ecstatic, but I just kept thinking, “Soon I’ll be leaving school to go live under an overpass, so what’s the point of Renee liking me now?” Also, somewhere in the back of my mind I was realizing that she hadn’t suddenly discovered that I was an actual human-being-type person because of any new attributes I had developed; she was just temporarily fascinated by me as a tragic figure. I still couldn’t help going gaga over how beautiful she was, but I was almost mad at her, because she wasn’t noticing me for the right reasons.
Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie Page 8
