A week later I was back in the hospital with another attack, and they shot me full of morphine. I had to miss two days’ work. Then about a week before Christmas, just as I was about to finish up work on my night job, I got a hell of an attack. (I didn’t mention that I was working nights in a bank to get extra money for Christmas.) The pain was excruciating. But I figured I could make it to the VA hospital on Twenty-third Street. I took a cab that let me off about a half block from the entrance. It was now after midnight. When the cab pulled away, the pain hit me an agonizing solar plexus blow. I fell to my knees in the dark street. The pain radiated all over my back. I flattened out onto the ice-cold pavement. There wasn’t a soul around, no one that could help me. The entrance to the hospital was a hundred feet away. I was so paralyzed by pain I couldn’t move. I wasn’t even scared. In fact, I was wishing I would just die, so that the pain would go away. I didn’t give a shit for my wife or my kids or my brother. I just wanted out. I thought for a moment about the legendary Merlin. Well, I was no fucking magician. I remember rolling over once to stop the pain and rolling off the ledge of the sidewalk and into the gutter. The edge of the curb was a pillow for my head.
And now I could see the Christmas lights decorating a nearby store. The pain receded a little. I lay there thinking I was a fucking animal. Here I was an artist, a book published and one critic had called me a genius, one of the hopes of American literature, and I was dying like a dog in the gutter. And through no fault of my own. Just because I had no money in the bank. Just because I had nobody who really gave a shit about whether I lived or not. That was the truth of the whole business. The self-pity was nearly as good as morphine.
I don’t know how long it took me to crawl out of the gutter. I don’t know how long it took me to crawl through to the entrance of the hospital, but I was finally in an arc of light. I remember people putting me in a wheelchair and taking me to the emergency room and I answered questions and then magically I was in a warm white bed and feeling blissfully sleepy, without pain, and I knew they had shot me with morphine.
When I awoke, a young doctor was taking my pulse. He had treated me the other time and I knew his name was Cohn. He grinned at me and said, “They called your wife, she’ll be down to see you when the kids go to school.”
I nodded and said, “I guess I can’t wait until Christmas for that operation.”
Dr. Cohn looked a little thoughtful and then said cheerily, “Well, you’ve come this far, why don’t you wait until Christmas? I’ll schedule it for the twenty-seventh. You can come Christmas night and we’ll get you ready.”
“OK,” I said. I trusted him. He had talked the hospital into treating me as an outpatient. He was the only guy who seemed to understand when I said that I didn’t want the operation until after Christmas. I remember his saying, “I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but Fm with you.” I couldn’t explain that I had to keep working two jobs until Christmas so my kids would get toys and still believe in Santa Claus. That I was totally responsible for my family and its happiness, and it was the only thing I had.
I’ll always remember that young doctor. He looked like your movie actor doctor except that he was so unpretentious and easy. He sent me home loaded up with morphine. But he had his reasons. A few days after the operation he told me, and I could see how happy it made him to tell me, “Listen, you’re a young guy to have gallbladder and the tests didn’t show anything. We went on your symptoms. But that’s all it was, gallbladder, big stones. But I want you to know there was nothing else in there. I took a real good look. When you go home, don’t worry. You’ll be as good as new.”
At that time I didn’t know what the hell he meant. In my usual style it only came to me a year later that he had been afraid of finding cancer. And that’s why he hadn’t wanted to operate before Christmas with just a week to go.
Chapter 6
I told Jordan and Cully and Diane how my brother, Artie, and my wife, Vallie, came to see me every day. And how Artie would shave me and drive Vallie back and forth from the hospital while Artie’s wife took care of my kids. I saw Cully smiling slyly.
“OK,” I said. “That scar I showed you was my gallbladder scar. No machine guns. If you had any fucking brains you’d know I would never be alive if I got hit like that.”
Cully was still smiling. He said, “Did it ever cross your mind that when your brother and your wife left the hospital maybe they fucked before going home? Is that why you left her?”
I laughed like hell, and I knew I'd have to tell them about Artie.
“He’s a very good-looking guy,” I said. “We look alike, but he’s older.” The truth is that I’m a sort of charcoal sketch of my brother, Artie. My mouth is too thick. My eye sockets are too hollow. My nose is too big. And I look too strong, but you should see Artie. I told them that the reason I married Value was that she was the only one of my girlfriends who didn’t fall in love with my brother.
– -
My brother, Artie, is incredibly handsome on a delicate scale. His eyes are like those eyes in the Greek statues. I remember when we both were bachelors how girls used to fall in love with him, cry over him, threaten to kill themselves over him. And how distressed he’d be about that. Because he really didn’t know what the hell it was all about. He could never see his beauty. He was a little self-conscious about being small, and his hands and feet were tiny. “Just like a baby’s,” one girl had said adoringly.
But what distressed Artie was the power he had over them. He finally came to hate it. Ah, how I would have loved it, girls never fell in love with me like that. How I would like it now, that sheer senseless falling in love with externals, the love never earned by qualities of goodness, of character, of intelligence, of wit, of charm, of life-force. In short, how I would like to be loved in a way never earned so that I would never have to keep earning ft or work for it. I love that love the way I love the money I win when I get lucky gambling.
But Artie took to wearing clothes that didn’t fit. He dressed conservatively in a way that didn’t suit his looks. He deliberately tried to hide his charm. He could only relax and be his natural self with people he really cared about arid felt safe with. Otherwise he developed a colorless personality that in an inoffensive way kept everyone at a distance. But even so he kept running into trouble. So he married young and was maybe the only faithful husband in the city of New York.
On his job as a research chemist with the federal Food and Drug Administration his female associates and assistants fell in love with him. His wife’s best friend and her husband won his trust, and they had a great friendship for about five years. Artie let his guard down. He trusted them. He was his natural self. The wife’s best friend fell in love with him and broke up her marriage and announced her love to the world, causing a lot of trouble and suspicion from Artie’s wife. Which was the only time I ever saw him angry with her. And his anger was deadly. She accused him of encouraging the infatuation. He said to her in the coldest tone I ever heard any man use to a woman, “If you believe that, get the hell out of my life.” Which was so unnatural of him that his wife almost had a breakdown from remorse. I really think she hoped he was guilty so she could get a hold over him. Because she was completely in his power.
She knew something about him that I knew and very few other people knew. He could not bear to inflict pain. On anyone or anything. He could never reproach anyone. That’s why he hated women being in love with him. He was, I think, a sensual man, he would have loved a great many women easily and enjoyed it, but he could never have borne the conflicts. In fact, his wife said the one thing she missed in their relationship was that she could use a real fight or two. Not that she never had fights with Artie. They were married after all. But she said that all their fights were one-punch affairs, figuratively, of course. She’d fight and fight and fight, and then he’d wipe her out with one cold remark so devastating she would burst into tears and quit.