Hollywood Animal (111 page)

My father responded by saying that he would give me his larynx in a transplant.

We went to see the head of the Cleveland Clinic’s radiology department. This doctor looked at the video Dr. Strome had taken of my throat and said that in his opinion I didn’t have throat cancer … but had a pre-cancerous condition which a round of radiation would “zap.”

As soon as I left his office and got outside, I lit up a cigarette.

I saw other people out there smoking, too, people who had what looked like burn marks around their throats.

They were people who’d just had radiation treatment for throat cancer.

I knew I was deeply in denial, but even I couldn’t make myself believe what the “zapping” radiologist had said about my “pre-cancerous condition.”

I called Dr. Strome. I told him I was ready to go ahead with the surgery and he scheduled an immediate biopsy as a first step.

Before he could do the biopsy, I had to have a pre-op physical at the clinic.

I flunked it.

My blood pressure was sky-high and my bloodstream was filled with alcohol.

The doctors asked me about my drinking habits and I told them that every day since I was fourteen years old, I’d had something alcoholic to drink. I told them I was drinking three or four bottles of white wine a day now plus some gin or tequila or bourbon plus maybe a couple of beers.

I couldn’t deny that I was an alcoholic any longer
.

I’d have to go through detox at the clinic before Dr. Strome could do the biopsy.

The doctors were afraid that if I went through surgery in this condition, they’d have to do an autopsy instead of a biopsy.

I’d done a CAT scan on the morning of the day before. The instructions said I could only drink “clear liquids” before the test.

I drank two shots of gin.

The technician was a young woman who’d asked me for an autograph.

“What are you in here for?” she’d asked.

“Too much rock and roll,” I’d said.

I checked into the clinic with a pocketful of stones I had asked Naomi and Steve and Suzi and the boys to paint me … for luck.

I kept them in my pocket.

I began detox. I was in the Cleveland Clinic’s VIP wing with a room that was more a luxury hotel suite than a hospital room.

Naomi stayed with me in the room while the nanny stayed at home with the boys.

My neighbor in the VIP wing was a Saudi prince who, when he found out who I was, invited us to go falcon hunting with him in Africa.

His personal physician, a Frenchman, told me he always wanted to be an actor and not a doctor.

The Saudi prince’s nephew, a little boy of about six, saw me playing with my painted stones and came over to see them.

I let him play with them and then he showed them to the prince, who played with them for a while, too. The prince was there for a brain tumor.

I was drugged up much of the time but, even so, went into severe withdrawal.

I saw rats scurrying around on the floor in my peripheral vision.

My hands shook so badly that I couldn’t find my nose.

I was still smoking—in the bathroom, in a special smoking room, and outside, hooked up to my IV cart.

Sometime during that week of detox, Naomi and I made love in the shower of my clinic suite.

It was therapeutic. I stopped shaking for a while and it routed the rats from my peripheral vision.

My father kept calling for me while I was going through detox.

He wanted to speak to me. Naomi told him I was in the hospital with my benign polyps.

My father kept saying “
Joe? Joe? Joe?
”

· · ·

I finished detox.

The rats were out of my peripheral vision, my shaking had stopped, my bloodstream was alcohol-free for the first time in forty-two years.

I felt a leaden flatness and a deep depression I’d never felt before.

I was ready for my biopsy now. My blood pressure was normal.

I held Naomi’s hand, I kissed Steve and Suzi, and I was wheeled away into the operating room.

When I woke up in the recovery room, I couldn’t breathe. I was desperately trying to catch my breath and couldn’t. I felt like I was drowning.

A nurse kept saying, “Please, Joe, breathe, breathe!”

I asked another nurse afterward why I hadn’t been able to breathe in the recovery room and she said, “Do you smoke?” I nodded and so did she.

While Naomi and Steve and Suzi were in the relatives’ waiting area, a woman waiting there for her husband’s surgery to be over … collapsed and died.

When Dr. Strome went to the waiting room and told Naomi and Steve and Suzi that I definitely had throat cancer, Steve turned red, said
“Fuck!
” and went outside to smoke a cigarette.

They wheeled me back up to my suite. I read Naomi’s and Steve’s and Suzi’s faces immediately. I had cancer, the biopsy had showed.

Dr. Strome told them I not only had to stop smoking immediately but had to stop drinking, too. My esophagus looked pre-cancerous.

When they told me what Marshall Strome had said—I said, “
Cocksucker!
”

They thought that was funny.

I thought to myself: I’ve had all these fights my whole life against various enemies and now my life’s greatest enemy is inside me and wants to kill me.

I remembered what I had said to Naomi on Maui: “A thousand barstools. A thousand barstools before it’s over.”

Heh heh heh:
it was over!

While we waited for Dr. Strome to come to the suite, we had the local TV news on.

We saw film of our new house in Bainbridge Township shot from a helicopter. The news said that I had moved from Malibu back to my hometown.

Our nanny called from home to say there were helicopters circling the house.

· · ·

Dr. Strome came to my suite looking grave.

He said that he would probably have to take my whole larynx out … which meant I wouldn’t be able to swallow … which meant I’d never be able to eat or drink anything … and would have to feed myself through tubes inserted into my stomach.

I told Dr. Strome that I didn’t want to live that way.

Naomi said that if that was my decision, she understood it and supported it. Then she started to cry. So did Steve and Suzi. So did I.

A priest came by and asked if I wanted to pray with him and receive Holy Communion.

I told him no and asked the nurses to post a sign on my door like the Saudi prince had:
“A
BSOLUTELY
N
O
V
ISITORS
!”

I was desolate. I loved my wife and children but if I couldn’t eat or drink, I knew I’d walk into the woods around my house and lie down.

I had done this to myself. I had poisoned myself. I had been so stupid and arrogant and full of shit to think that while everyone else paid the price for smoking …
I
wouldn’t.

I thought about the boys growing up without me to guide them … Naomi moving into middle age without me to hold her hand … Steve and Suzi having children I would never see.

Dr. Strome came back and said he’d been thinking about it.

He’d try a surgery that he’d never done before. After removing the cancer from my larynx, he’d take muscles from the left side of my neck and attach them to what was left of my larynx.

If it worked, I’d be able to swallow … and eat … and drink.

“But you have to quit smoking and drinking,” he said. “The only chance you have—and it’s a long shot—is if you quit smoking and drinking.”

I said, “I’ve already quit drinking. I promise you this. If you do this surgery successfully for me, if I’m able to swallow, I’ll quit smoking, too. I promise you. I give you my word.”

He looked at me a long time—sadly, I thought—and nodded.

It would be a lengthy and complicated surgery. I held Naomi, Steve, and Suzi and thanked them for what they had brought to my life.

I watched the Indians lose, got my shot of Ativan, and fell asleep early.

At 5:30 on the morning of my surgery, there was an electrical storm that flashed for an hour. I was awake, still high from last night’s Ativan, enjoying every flash and crash.

Fitting, I thought, for this day … the day that I might die … having been born during a bombing.

And I woke up thinking: If this is the last day of my life, how fitting, too, that the Indians lost last night.

The last thing I remember before going under in the operating room was the Supremes blasting on WMMS-FM.

At the last moment, as I was being wheeled into the operating room, I panicked.

“Where’s Mano?” I said.

Steve was there, right next to me. He leaned down, kissed me, and said, “I love you, Pops.”

The surgery took eight hours and I was another fifteen hours in the recovery room before I woke up.

A man near me was crying out, “Oh, God, help me! It hurts. Please, God, help me!”

A nurse came over to me, handed me a pad and a pen, and said, “How do you feel?”

I tried to answer her but what came out of my mouth was a hot, gaslike hiss. I realized I had a hole in my neck where my throat was.

I took the pad and pen and wrote: “Hot … anxious … where is family?”

Dr. Strome came in, looked at me, and told me to swallow.

This was the moment of truth.

If I was able to swallow, then the surgery had been successful.

If not, then we’d have to do the full laryngectomy and put me on the feeding tubes.

Eighty percent of my larynx was gone.

I took a deep breath, lowered my head to my chest, and tried to swallow.

I swallowed perfectly.

It didn’t even hurt.

Marshall Strome grinned.

“Congratulations,” he said.

Naomi and Steve and Suzi were soon there and Naomi had a child’s toy with her—a Fisher-Price Magna Doodle, a magnetic slate on which I could write and erase quickly.

I wrote: “Too bright. Sunglasses.”

I was having difficulty keeping my eyes open with all the bright lights in the room.

She handed me her sunglasses and I put them on.

I saw myself in a nearby mirror. Tubes were everywhere around me, attached to me and to machines. A thick tube was pumping blood and what looked like mucus from around my neck. My long hair was piled atop my head like the John Belushi samurai on
Saturday Night Live
. And I had Naomi’s shades on.

A young recovery room doctor came by, looked at me, and said, completely deadpan, “Rock and roll.”

Equally deadpan, I held up my middle finger at him.

He didn’t laugh or smile, but a nearby nurse did.

“I think you deserved that,” she said to the doctor.

Then the doctor smiled at me.

They took me to a post-op “step-down room,” filled with patients whose throats were being suctioned after surgery. A tube was put down the hole in our throats and was supposed to pump phlegm and secretions from there.

When the suction device hit me, I felt like I was drowning again. The suctioning was necessary to prevent infection, but the treatment was like medieval torture.

They shot me up with drugs in this step-down room, with OxyContin and Ativan and morphine, but the drugs didn’t do anything for me … except to put me into a very cold and lonely place in my head.

I felt isolated from everyone, near dead.

A nurse, while putting a catheter back into me, asked me what movies I’d written. I listed my credits.

When I mentioned
Basic Instinct
and
Showgirls
, she did something with the catheter that caused sudden lacerating pain.

I said to her, “You really hurt me.”

She didn’t say she was sorry, but she looked to me like she was smiling.

I wondered later whether she was really smiling about the pain she had caused me … or whether the morphine had made me imagine it. Looking back on it now, I think she was really smiling.

She looked a bit like Carrie Rickey, the film critic for the
Philadelphia Inquirer
.

For whatever reason, maybe the morphine, I became fixated that the man across from me in the step-down ward … suctioning himself … feeding himself through the floppy tube sticking out of his nose … was Billy Friedkin.

I watched them torture a big black man named Mr. Wilson, who had long surgical scars running down his chest and back. They were suctioning Mr. Wilson, who was gasping for air and who, while gasping, was watching me and smiling and saying—I am sure I heard him right—
“Heh heh heh.”

· · ·

They moved me back to my private suite. The Saudi prince shared a Mideastern feast they were preparing for him with Naomi and Steve and Suzi.

The television set in my room, I noticed, even had Saudi cable.

I tried to watch an Indians game but fell asleep as the Indians were losing.

I looked at Naomi and thought: Is this what happens to a great love story? One of the lovers starts to rot?

A supervisor at my father’s nursing home called Naomi to say my father was hardly eating and had started saying
“Joe? Joe? Joe?”
all the time now.

He stared ahead and said my name over and over again.

Every time I swallowed I had to bear down. I lifted my head, then lowered it close to my chest, and pushed down as I forced what was left of my larynx to function.

I had a feeding tube sticking out of my nose. Mashed food was placed into it and it traveled through my nose into my stomach.

I hated it. It was like I’d grown a new appendage on my face.

In the middle of the night, drugged out of my skull, I ripped the feeding tube out of my nose, tore the suction tube off my neck, and yanked all my IVs out.

Naomi awoke and saw me sitting on the bed naked, smiling at her, with blood and clotted blood all over the wall and the floor.

I looked at Naomi and Steve and Suzi sitting at my bedside.

Watching Naomi with me here constantly, I thought my kids finally understood … and couldn’t deny … how much she loved me.

How much did she love me?
Her babies had been yanked out of their familiar surroundings and whisked across the country into a new world and a new house and suddenly their mother and father were gone from their lives. John Law, the nanny told us, was inconsolable, crying all the time.