When I first woke up from surgery, the room was dark and empty, except for a tiny little woman in a white sweater checking tubes and dials on the IV stand next to me. She gave me a blank look, uttered something totally unintelligible, and walked out the door. I screamed, "What??" and passed out.
Next thing I remember, the surgeon, one Dr. Irving Grabscheit, is standing beside my bed. A pale, fat nurse dressed in what had to be size XXXL Sponge-Bob scrubs stood beside him, looking slightly bored. The doctor is leaning over and peering intently at me, tapping me on the arm
"Hello? Hello? Can you heah me? Sally, can you heah me??? You just came out of SURgery, Sally. We thought we were just going to remove your apPENdix, but NO, it turned out it was a TUmah. In your inTEStines. NOT benign! Size of a GRAPEFRUIT."
Question: why do they all compare these things that they remove from inside of you to something in the produce department? Size of a grapefruit. What if it were bigger? Oh! It was the size of one of those seedless melons, or...Oh! It was the size of a large hybrid acorn squash. I guess it somehow sounds less horrid than, Oh, madam, we took out a tumor the size of a giant mutant hairball, or, a five-pound cellular turd from your Inner Space.
Come on---it’s not some nice piece of fruit in there. It’s the fucking Angel of Death, sucking on my soul, trying to pull me into the Void. Not benign. Grapefruit, my ass.
So. Not benign, I croaked? At which point I started choking on a piece of phlegm the size of, well, you know, a small Key lime, and so Grabscheit clears his throat several times and says, OK, OK, I’m going to send Dr. Kaddir to talk to you. He’s an oncologist.
Really? I thought, furiously kicking at my brain in order to wake up from this fucking nightmare. But, alas, no. There stood the Grabscheit, there stood the giant, bored Sponge-Bob woman, and there lay I, with tubes and phlegm and a seven-inch vertical rip in my abdomen.
And this, dear listeners, is that magic moment when your, let's start small, let's say your priorities, suddenly start to gasp and heave and puke and spin around inside whatever, at that point, is left of your brain, .
Not benign? NOT BENIGN???? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
But, of course, I know exactly what He.Is.Talking.About. He had me, cold and clear, from that first syllable in the word "tumor", right? Oh, yeah.
"...it was a tu---....."
and that's really all you need to hear, isn't it, that "tu--" sound? Hmmm?
It was a.....tu---(sound cue--solo violin flourish).
I got on intimate terms with the sound "tu" much earlier than that, though..
I grew up in southern Kentucky, and started singing at the age of three. We were a church-going family, and nothing will give you a better grounding for singing your brains out at least once a week than the Methodist Church. Four hymns and that’s before the sermon. Then another one after the collection, then at the end, a final and rousing one to send you out into the world of trials & tribulations. And, for what it’s worth, another thing you will encounter at the Methodist Church. Tuna fish. Every Sunday night at Youth Fellowship, or MYF to the initiated. Tuna fish sandwiches on white bread and your choice of soda. And more hymns. Every time I smell tuna fish I feel an almost uncontrollable urge to sing Are Ye Able, Said the Master. I studied piano and by the time I was seven, I could play every damn hymn in the whole hymnbook while singing along.
At some point, my father decided that the Methodist church did not have an answer to any of his questions, and blew his brains out in an abandoned church-yard parking lot when I was ten. I’m pretty sure it was a Baptist parking lot, though.
My mother, after wandering stunned in the darkness for four years, decided to return to school in the next town over and get a degree in Art History. It was a brand new life, and I’d decided long before we moved that singing was my ticket out of anything resembling a normal life. I did not want a normal life. Too fucking dangerous. While in high school, I got a job singing in the choir at the State St. Methodist church and for payment, the choir director would give me voice lessons once a week. His was a hands-on approach. He appeared to have a rather healthy interest in my uvula. Ah, well. Another punch on the ticket.
Singing was all I ever wanted or imagined I would do.
I started working on the old Italian Art Songs when I was fourteen. Right there in blue-green Bowling Green, I would fall asleep to the voices of exotic divas and bassos named Leontyne and Birgit and Corelli and Gobbi singing songs and arias by Torelli, Scarlatti, Puccini, Donizetti, Verdi. And as they wrapped their red, capacious mouths around that word "Tu"--- it means "you" in Italian, the very intimate, second person singular "you"---I always, always felt a hot little quiver as that tu flamed by in a phrase.
And then, out of the pod and into the pot. University life down in Florida.
(music begins)
Serious study now, the young singer's slow cooker of listening and repeating and phrasing, over and over, and late nights in the university practice rooms, the temperature still so hot outside that it invades the cool, waxed halls of mad sopranos, corpulent tenors, midnight cellists and crazy little Chopin pianists from St. Cloud, Atlanta, Rochester, all of us working into the dawn. And we’d secretly take off our clothes in the practice rooms, and sing or play tu!
We sweep across the strings of our own lyres---our vocal cords, our keyboards, our violins, but we all sing tu!, and pound the long cool black-and-ochre ivory keys, crazed by the beauty and sadness of Scriabin and Shostokovich and Mahler and Mozart, all of us singing or playing, in truth, to that tu. Wrapped in the gleaming, silvery wickedness of The Magic Flute, gorging on the pink, silky confections of Der Rosencavalier, standing dumbfounded in the pounding heart-flood of the Choral movement of Beethoven's 9th. All of us pressing down on our body's heartstrings---tu, tu, tu, second person singular, I'm singing for you, I'm doing this for you, you. You, my oldest dream, floating just beyond me in my fractured eternal space, whoever you are and I am, or will be---
(Music climaxes and ends here)and in those midnight hours we, we are all transposed, transfigured, naked and deathless.
(Sound cue: Tu lo sai by Torelli;recording. Translates for audience after each phrase.
Tu lo sai, Quanto t'amai You know how much I loved you
Tu lo sai, lo sai crudel You know how cruel it is
Io non bramo altra merce I don't long for another tenderness
Ma ricordati di me but remember me
E poi sprezza infidel. and then leave me.
(Lights out. Music/sound cue—creepy, whirring, insect sounds followed by the Torelli recording played backwards for 8-10 sec. SALLY, as Daddy Cancer, looks up, exuding a reptilian, heavy-lidded, suave, evil huckster persona which lies somewhere btw Steve Busciemi & Tony Soprano. Very NJ, very nasty, wears a fedora. Lounges in chair, lights up a cigar, waxes philosophical)
Well, tough titties, girly-girl. I mean, ya know, I never know exactly what to say at this point, so I just say what's perfectly freakin’ obvious---Tough Titties, yeh!
And lookit, you're all alone in here, right? That's sad, really. God, where is this, New-fucking-Jersey? Aw, what? You thought you were gonna morph into a goddam rosebush in this place? Heh, fuckin hilarious, sweetheart, fuckin hilarious. Jersey. Gotta love it.
(Following line sung to the tune of My Kind of Town) My Kin-da Dump, New Jersey is...my kin-da Dump! New Jersey is.... (next line spoken) Cancer Uterus of the World!!! Am I right, huh? Whoa, yeh!
So where's the family? Oh, right, right, right, yeah---wait, I know, I know. Pops offed himself in the parking lot, boom! Mommy's sittin' in an urn in, where is it, oh, I must be gettin’ old or somethin', wait.....Miami, right. Miami. With your brother.
Actually, if you’re wonderin’, she's in the garage. Over the washing machine. Third shelf. Melita coffee can. Yeh, South Florida. Great place. I spend a lot of time down there, ya know. So, now, what about that big lawyer brother of yours there in Coco-Nut Grove?? He called yet? No? (Beat). Well, it's early. Yeh, busy with his new boat, new kat’maran out there in beee-yootiful Biscayne Bay, suckin’ down Bloody Marys every Saturday, Sunday morning. (beat) Wondering if he's next! (bursts into raucous laughter) Probably too late to get any of your money back he stole from Your Lady of the coffee can, huh? The boat, right? Yeah, too fuckin’ late... Not that you need any money! (More laughter). Lawyers. They're truly awesome, yeh. I love ‘em.
Hey, so I gotta go. Other dates to keep, right? But I'll be around, be checkin' on ya, so don't go too far, ok? Tough Titties, girly-girl. Tough Titties.
(Daddy Cancer disappears. Lights down, with opening bars of My Kind of Town, then music fading. Soft, warm lighting up, with some leafy shadows moving around. The following is acted by SALLY as herself.)
The two brothers. They were like a river that had divided but kept running into itself .
I’d first met David back in the early 70’s, down in Tallahassee, down in the slow-cooker. Big bear-shaped guy, played clarinet. He lived with a mutual friend over on Palm Court where I parked my rusting, blue VW bug every day. It sported continually sprouting pot seeds on- the floor in the back. A traveling greenhouse. I don’t remember much about David then, other than he was incredibly talented and had a wonderful laugh. And to be truthful, my memories of those days, thanks to the greenhouse, are not quite as sharp as they could be.
I met David again in those same hallowed halls fifteen years later, both of us on vacation from the wide and low-paying world of professional music-makers and grimly resigned to take up our unfinished business with a higher musical education.
He was now graying, and still a musical bear. On the afternoon we bumped into each other, he looked down at me with a pair of eyes so blue and sweet I could have licked them right out of his head. Late that afternoon, we drove south to the coast to eat oysters, drink beer, and watch the sun go down over Appalachee Bay.
We became very happy together. We were also incredibly poor and lived in a half-finished little dwelling called the Pickle House, right square in the middle of an abandoned tree farm north of the city. It got its name from the couple who built it, back in the early ‘50’s, Mr. and Mrs. Pickle. We loved the fact that the current owner was a formerly rich old fart from Atlanta who’d once been a capo in the IRS under Richard Nixon, and now suffered from substantially reduced means.
Late at night, after a hot, sticky day of being two of the older students at the Music School, we’d sit naked beneath the thick bank of cala lilies, which grew just off the sloping front porch and drooped their red and orange blossoms into our twenty-dollar swimming pool from Toys R Us. Sipping Heinikens and tuned to the local jazz station, we’d spend a few hours listening to swing music from the '40's, and stare up into the creamy swirl of stars of the blackberry night.
David kept saying, you should visit my brother Dennis the next time you go to New York. I wasn't so inclined. I'd spoken to Dennis several times on the phone, and he always sounded a little crazy. Funny, but crazy. I was in retreat from all that, at least for a while.
However, one night in April, before returning to Florida on the morning train from a fast New York City fix, I found all my money gone, got restless and called him.
We agreed to meet a little restaurant on Broadway and 71st St. He was waiting for me at the bar and my first memory of him is how the lights bounced off his gold-rimmed glasses when he stood up put his arms around me. He smelled vaguely of Dr. Bronner's Eucalyptus Soap. He had David's eyes, only a darker blue, and a deep, raspy voice that felt like chocolate syrup oozing down my vertebrae.
Dennis was a jazz man, string bass. He'd brought two photographs of himself and David when they were kids. One was of David at age four, sitting on the lap of an elderly lady, staring solemnly into the camera and holding out a cone of soft ice-cream. The other, taken in their grandmother’s garden in Birmingham, was of the two of them, barefoot and wearing only their underpants, with their faces buried in giant yellow squash blossoms.
We sat down, and began to laugh at each other's stories. Didn't leave until the place closed, five hours later. For reasons I will never totally understand, that night I fell irretrievably in love with my lover's brother. I couldn’t understand how this was possible, but there it was.
I called him up the next morning, right before getting a cab to the train station, and said, listen---I don’t know what do about this. Nothing, he said. Go back home. Maybe it will all disappear. So I took the cab to Penn Station and watched the east coast rock by in the pale green of early springtime.
It didn’t disappear. He made wonderful tapes for me with all sorts of wild music on them---impossible-to-find performances of legendary opera stars, folk songs from Andalusia sung by real shepherds, tapes of Ornette Coleman made in Coleman’s apartment---and I sent him books on Mayan scholars, poetry I’d started publishing in a small university press in Arkansas, and the complete works of William Blake and John Dunne, his two favorite poets. We met at family gatherings, at jazz festivals where David and I went to hear him play, and one early summer, he brought his son Michael, then ten, to visit us at the Pickle House. We drove to the coast, floated in the warm bath waters of the Gulf of Mexico at the Red Neck Riviera, and watched Michael discover horseshoe crabs at low tide.
We never really kissed. I know that if we had started, it would have never stopped. For all the right and wrong reasons, we didn’t cross that line.
For years, I had the same dream. Dennis I were children, maybe six or seven years old, riding in the back of an old rusty truck, or sometimes sitting in a wagon pulled by two horses that I never saw, but only heard. We just lay on our backs watched the trees go by above our heads.
By the time I moved back to New York, with Dennis never far from my mind, he was a world-famous bass player, and shared his life with a lady jazz singer. He traveled all over the world and was seldom in the city. I knew from mutual friends that he was also neck- deep into a coke habit and drinking copious amounts of alcohol on a daily basis. Every few months or so, he'd call in the middle of the night from Europe, or from a bar or club on the West Coast, or maybe Montreal, Johannesburg---always with his words running together, sniffing and giggling, and telling me stories that were so funny that I would literally fall on the floor. I distinctly recall peeing on myself at around three in the morning at a story about an old woman on Corfu who tried to sell him an accordion that had no keys.
Just a few months ago, I stood next to Dennis' bed in the ICU unit at Mt Sinai. He was unconscious, on a ventilator, and had become very jaundiced with the cirrhosis that had overtaken his liver. David the Bear stood aside, and let us alone. He'd figured it all out a long time ago, and it was partly the reason we'd gone our separate ways.
Dennis and I had been diagnosed with cancer within two days of one another. His was deathly and he was leaving us. I was doing ok, and well enough to be with his brother when he came up from Florida for the end.
I bent over him, kissed his forehead and stroked the snow white beard he'd grown while lying unconscious in the ICU. The next day, the ventilator was removed and he set sail in the late afternoon. I was not there.
That evening, a thumping, driving concert in Dennis' honor took place at Town Hall. I couldn't go. David stayed a few days in the city, talking to Dennis's friends, and then went back home to the Sunshine State. We still talk by email, David and I.
(Leafy shadows out, reg. lights back up)
About a month before the cancer-tsunami hit me, I took a new job, working for United Cerebral Palsy out in NJ. I had to wait three months before my health insurance kicked in.
And I would like to stop here and take a second here to thank my government for ignoring all of the, what is it, now? 49 million of us American men, women and children with no health insurance? You guys are just terrific! No, really, you are. Kudos, hats off, tip jar.
So. Three fucking months before I could start pooping and puking in that downward trajectory toward better health. My first really groovy encounter with (spoken sound cue: CHEMOWORLD!!!)
began with Dr. Kaddir, so kindly referred by the Grabsheit.
(Sally, as Dr. Kaddir, sits behind his desk, flipping through a report of several pgs, obviously delaying what he has to say with nervous body language, blowing air through his lips, tapping a pencil on desk. Finally he looks up. Disapproval & indifference are minimally concealed on his face.)
So. Why did you wait so long to begin chemo?
Sally: What? What do you mean, "why"? I told you. I had no insurance. I had to wait 90 days after they hired me.
(Sally, aside) Why does anybody wait, other than a/ not having the necessary $350,000 just lying around in the bedside drawer and or b not wanting to be poisoned, puke their brains out and go bald?
DK: Well. (ponderously clearing throat.) The news is not good. Your scan shows that there are bad cells that have moved into your system, some here, some here (touching the liver area then R chest area.) The computer tells me that if you do nothing, you have, at the most, eight months. If you go into chemo, right now, no delay, and if it's successful, you have two, maybe three yrs. Maximum. And then, well....
Suddenly,regular lights down, lurid hellish orange/red lights engulf DK, and he grins evilly.) YOU'RE TOAST!!
Sally: The computer? The computer tells you? The COMPUTER? (jumps up, climbs over desk, attempting to choke DK) SCREW YOU, ASSHAT, AND YOUR FUCKING COMPUTER. I AM NOT TOAST, I WILL NOT BE TOAST. I DON’T EVEN EAT TOAST.
(They scuffle. SL ends fight by stomping on him.)
Motherfucker, you are fired!!!!!!!
(Hell lighting out---norm lights up.)
So, I found another oncologist. Dr. Berkowitz. A woman. Not that it should make any difference, but somehow, at that point, it did. Skinny little thing, a hundred pounds soaking wet. A big smile full of very white teeth, and frizzy hair held back with a leopard skin motif plastic headband. Very perky. Perky Berkowitz.
OK, I’m poking at Perky. But she had the wisdom to not refer to me, or anything inside of me, as fruit or any type of grilled or baked grain item.
(Light cue: Lurid blue)
Keee-mohhh. Aw YEAH. Don't remember when I had so much fun. No, really. Everyone should try it. Expands you. Shrinks you. Gives you that unique perspective on having shit in your pants and scabs in your mouth. I don't really have more to say about the process itself.
(Lights back to reg.)
Well, maybe. It's a scourge from the medical industrial complex that invades you, fills you with poisons, and is supposed to be your savior. It's a thief of your otherwise good health and high energy, in the event that you should retain any, and yet purportedly is your best friend, at this, or that, point.
My skin turned into an all-encompassing alligator bag, I lost 56 lbs, and to say that I had constant shit-itis is the ultimate understatement. I was a human pipeline to the toilet. I did manage to keep my hair. At least the hair on my head. My pubic hair fell out. The nurses at Chemoworld, who were altogether wonderful, said that was a new one on them. The pubes are back, in case you’re wondering.
In all fairness, I must admit chemo did slow things down, in terms of the nasties that wanted so badly to thrive inside of me. My scans, after the first and, so far, final round of all that, indicated that the nasties weren’t growing much at all.
And there are possibly individuals for whom chemo may be absolutely the only option, I don’t know. I’m not an oncologist, god knows and thanks me for it. And I would never tell another person what to do about treatment. That is, ultimately and harrowingly, up to the person. But as for me, I was pretty sure that another round of chemo, should it be recommended by Perky, would utterly wipe me out. I could hear the crows circling above me. I was also forbidden now to have anymore of that particular shit-kicker drug. And Perky agreed that I had earned, yes,
(sound cue) A CHEMOVACATION!!!
(Carnival music/samba a’ la Rio---flashing lights, tropical colors, heavy partying sounds, people laughing, shouting, palm tree gobos, etc---Sally does 10-second dance routine.)That was after twelve treatments of a poison so virulent that if it’s spilled anywhere near any medical personnel or there were leaks from its container in any microscopic amount whatsoever, it’s considered a total fucktard emergency situation and the hazmat team rushes in and everyone is scrubbed down and injected with antibiotics and given vodka enemas.
There’s lots of fun facts we could talk about, but I’ll just cruise by a few of them. Here’s the deal-breaker of our basically non-existent "health-care system"---and I’m sure many, many of you have figured this out, ‘cause it ain’t quantum physics:
If you’re well, or get well and remain well, Big Pharma and the Big Insurance don’t make the Big Money. Period. And these groups of assholes comprise the primary driving money-making force for a humungous number of oncologists, plus countless other specialists.
Consider China (sound cue)---and forget for a very brief moment about all the horrid shit that deranged baby formula and toy manufacturers manage to squeeze into their products. In China, which has, arguably, one of the finest healthcare systems on the planet, if you don’t get well, your doctor doesn’t get paid. Think about it.
Chemotherapy is also a treatment in which 75% of all oncologists, when asked if they themselves would undergo chemo or recommend it for one of their family members diagnosed with the Big C, said, ‘uh, well no, absolutely not, uh-huh, no-can-do.’ I’m not making this up. It’s documented.
(Sally displays documentation papers)
Three-quarters of all oncologists questioned would categorically refuse the treatment for which they are trained and are recommending to their patients.
And other than all the fun rides and games at ChemoWorld, why do you think they would refuse to even say yes, possibly just lying to look good or keep their ever-so-lucrative jobs, or something? Because they know. They know that the success rate of chemo, in terms of both saving your life and/or improving the quality of your life, and boy, you gotta really laugh at that one, the so-called success rate is, you ready? wait for it.....3%. Yeppers. One, two three. Tres percentos, amigos. Documented.
(Sally again, waves documentary papers.) It’s all true.
Here’s another morsel for thought, actually the best and most tasty morsel, no irony attached. There are TONS of alternative treatments out there for the Big C. Tons. And even more astounding, they almost all have a better success rate than that fucking 3%. And, here’s the extra-good part---they aren’t toxic and horrible. And some of the most successful ones are actually incredibly cheap. Buy the stuff at the damn grocery. Don’t believe me? Friends, allow me to turn you on to one of the most fabulous functions of (electronic sound cue) the Google! Just type in cancer plus alternative treatments. Maybe all of you here know a lot about alternative cancer treatments. But I can assure you that there’s a universe of folks out there whose oncologist has told them is their only choice in terms of what to do about the toxic grapefruits and melons and other produce products proliferating in them is, yes, (spoken sound cue) CHEMOWORLD.
Brief science drive-by: Anybody ever had a swimming pool? OK, you know the deal---you test the water with those little strips to be sure you have a balanced pH, right? Supposed to be 7.2 or thereabouts, or just about in the middle of the pH scale so that all sorts of creatures do not begin to grow in your pool. And we test soil to be sure it’s the right pH so whatever we’re planting thrives. The pH balance of any substance is crucial to the ability of that substance support organic growth.
There’s a surgeon in Italy, Dr Tullio Simoncini, who is, as I speak, having crazy success treating cancer with, wait for it, our old friend from the refrigerator, bicarbonate of soda. He injects bicarbonate of soda into the nasties and in an overwhelming number of situations...POOF! they start to disappear. Why? Because bicarbonate of soda is famous for alkalizing stuff. It’s the poor man’s Alka-seltzer. And why is that important? Because of this: it turns out that everybody who has cancer, without exception, tests acidic. Hold on to that thought for a bit.
Here’s another factoid. Cancer cells, are basically always with us. Everybody, without exception, has a few here and there. In healthy people they are just snoozing, doing nothing, just hanging out being useless and lazy. However, when your body becomes acidic, these guys really get a real hard-on from those acidic conditions inside us and get busy making tumors.
So. If you got raging cancer nasties, you’re acidic, you’re a car battery. Why? Because being acidic is what causes the snoozing nasties to wake up and go, whoa, hey honey, it’s time to party. Not the other way around, OK? You aren’t acidic because you have cancer. You are hosting the cancer disco ball because you are acidic. And if you change your acidic condition, you no longer are, well, you know the right location-location-location , you’re not especiale-cancer-caca prime real estate. So Dr. Simoncini, over there in bella Roma, has people flying into Rome, camping out on his doorstep, begging him to help them, because this shit is working. He can’t even begin to see all the desperate people who know he "gets it" because they’ve done their homework, and they know he’s onto something very big. His cancer patients get gently bombed with the bicarb treatments, and in an overwhelming number of instances, the tumors start to go away, and mostly at a rapid rate.
And why aren’t we all being told about all this? Why isn’t Newsweek magazine selling multiple copies about the acidic thingee and the bicarbonate of soda treatment ? Why aren’t Dr. Simoncini and other doctors and research folks in this country who agree with him having to fight off journalists and insipid, blonde CNN reporters and mad monkey-cam operators? Good question, good question. In my less accusatory moments, I can imagine that medical industrial complex that holds our lives in its greedy little palms just doesn’t care. New and promising treatment for cancer? Pffft. Let ‘em eat shit! But in my darker, more honest moments, I know why, without a doubt, why. Don’t you? Tell me-- (addresses an audience member): How much do you pay for a box of bicarb at the grocery or pharmacy? A dollar? Maybe two dollars for a large one? (Waits for an answer from any audience member) There’s your answer. It’s too cheap, plus it’s an item that cannot be regulated and priced out of your price-range by the FDA as an actual medical treatment. So they don’t want to know. And if they don’t want to know, they don’t want you to know. The truth may indeed set you free, but it will also depress the hell out of you. On the other hand, their loss, our gain, for once.
And that brings us to number two: Fred. Fred Eichhorn. I found Fred’s name on, you guessed it, an internet site devoted to alternative nasties treatments. The individual writing about him said he was brilliant, a genuinely pleasant man, was helping tons of people free of charge. Damn. What’s not to love? So I drove out to Long Island, where he’s located and visited with him and his wife, Lora. He heads up his own one-man band research group, called the National Cancer Research Foundation. Fred’s so smart he makes all of us look like a room full of village idiots. He spent three and a half hours with me, and charged me not one dime. He cured himself of pancreatic cancer many years ago, and devotes all his time to helping us lesser mortals cure our brand of nasties. No chemo, no poisons. If you’ve been handed a death sentence, Fred’s your man.
Fred’s take on things is basically this: Our diets are mainly shit, we inherit imperfect DNAs, our lives are fraught with anxiety and toxic living habits, like all those fun things, drinking and smoking and consuming gallons of caffeine, and via all that, we turn ourselves into cancer real estate by becoming acidified. And we become, more or less, sitting ducks. We find ourselves hosting the Cancer Monsters’ Ball because we’ve become acidified and have altered our body’s ability to produce healthy, groovy cells. And Fred’s treatment is mind-bogglingly simple. He’s got the recipe for groovy cells. It’s all over the counter stuff, vitamins and cod liver oil and milk thistle and all this New Age-y sounding stuff. Very inexpensive. Yeah, I know--the hippies are winning! Get over it.
Fred’s most recent work is with the first responders for the World Trade Center attack. Most of them are terribly ill with all sorts of respiratory illnesses and giant tumors the size of you-know-what growing in them. And of course, you will be shocked to learn that they aren’t getting shit-on-a-shingle from the government in terms of money for treatment or research. However, Fred’s treatment is now being employed, and many of them are getting better, for the first time.
(She picks up the grapefruit, and during the following, slices off sections, places them in bowl.)Let me tell you what I think. The most real and true statement about this entire experience is the one I found on Fred's website. Here it is: Cancer introduces you to yourself. He probably didn’t originate that, but he did have the sense to appropriate it. I mean, something has to get our attention, right? And cancer will do it, trust me. Fine-tunes the station, so to speak.
There are other conditions that will bring you there, of course. Losing one of your senses, being incarcerated somewhere in Indiana, or Guantanamo, losing all your money with some porcine investment group on Wall St. Death of a child, most definitely.
But a cancer diagnosis packs a very nicely aimed smack-down at your so-called normal life.
A moderately good friend asked me, when he found out I was hosting the Big C: ‘ Are you freaked out that you might be dying?’ And it hit me. Might be? Well, shit! Had I been under the illusion that somehow I was NOT going to die? Not to descend into cliché-dom, but hello, we're all terminal here.
And thank god, you know. Can you imagine being condemned to eternal life, really?
I have a friend who's one hundred and three. Adrien. Came to America in 1910 and ended up working in the garment industry, sewing furs. She loves her family, who takes very good care of her, and she has had a remarkably productive and lovely life. And she told me that while she can appreciate her longevity and life-long blessings, she's often fairly disgusted that she keeps waking up. She's exhausted. Been there, done that. At one hundred and three, she’s ready to take a load off.
While you are healthy, or think you are, you are asleep. Content or fretful, whining or laughing, rich or poor, alone or wrapped in the arms of love----you are asleep, and Lord knows, it is an elaborately blase’ but action-packed sleep. Plans are made, children are born, money is wasted, wars are waged, cherished houses are lived in, then sold to utter strangers, murders are plotted, and hearts are often redeemed.
(Steps off stage area, and serves the grapefruit sections to audience in the front row.)
And while most of us seem destined to sleep through our time here on the blue marble, there’s also a number of us destined to wake up. You know, except for the stray bus running the stoplight or the falling construction crane smashing into you while you're out shopping, at some point, some of us wake up and learn to pay attention to whatever it is---and it’s probably different for each person, I don’t know--- that we must do in order to live joyously in the time that's been allotted to us.
Just dare to be as happy as possible, I think. You may be rich as a lord, loaded with blessings and wealth and success, or you may be on the edge of disaster and feeling like a bag of dirt. Either way, it can change in an instant. You never know what’s just ‘round the bend.
Years, or minutes. Months, or perhaps seconds. No guarantees.
Here's the advice I give myself every morning when I wake up, absolutely not yet disgusted.
(Back to CS; with spot)
Stick out your tongue at the darkness.
Flick your Bic.
Eat that fucking grapefruit! (Lights out)
THE END