Just One Catch (60 page)

At Joe's request, Joe Stein read the rough pages of the King David novel. Joe feared he'd have to submit the pages to a publisher for quick money. Through friends, he tried a rapprochement with Candida Donadio, who was terrified and deeply concerned to hear about his illness. Stein cheered Joe by reporting the pages were “simply marvelous. A pure joy.”

On New Year's Eve, one of the ICU nurses offered to pour a little champagne into Joe's tube. He didn't feel like celebrating.

On January 4, 1982, doctors moved Joe to a private room in the hospital's Klingenstein Pavilion. He was both grateful to leave the ICU and fearful any change would precipitate disaster.

“It's not bad here,” Julie Green said, looking around. “We could do worse.” From the window, Joe had a view of Central Park and the West Side skyline. George Mandel said the room's coziness reminded him of the old social & athletic clubs in Coney Island. “Did I tell you guys how we always used to kick Joe's ass out of our clubhouse because he was still just a kid?” Mandel asked Green and Speed. The question provoked laughter from someone behind them. They turned and saw Valerie Humphries, one of the three private-duty nurses who had been hired, at $2,100 a week, to tend Joe as long as he stayed in the hospital. She was slim and tall, with reddish brown hair—she “looked like she could easily eat apples off my head,” Speed said.

All of Joe's nurses were attentive and cheerful, but Valerie seemed to find Joe and his pals especially amusing. “My first view of Nurse Humphries [had been] from the rear,” Speed recalled. “She was bending over her patient, adjusting the pillow under his head, and making funny noises. It sounded like cooing. When she stood, I realized she was simply giggling. She was also blushing. I don't know what Joe said to make her laugh, but I surmised that it was either a probing, personal question or a lascivious remark. Or both.”

For her part, Valerie admitted she knew little about Joe's literary accomplishments, except he “looked like Norman Mailer.”

One of Joe's friends brought him a transistor radio so he could listen to classical music on WQXR. His weight had been dropping and his muscles atrophying, so the nurses tried to bulk him up on carbohydrates, running ice cream, cookies, and chocolate milk through a blender for his nasogastric tube. He had gotten movement back in his arms and hands, some dexterity back in his fingers, and he could grip a paperback book. He took pleasure in brushing his parched lips with moistened toothbrushes. Speed was happy to see him develop a new form of oral gratification; he knew Joe missed chewing soft orange Stim-U-Dents. Earlier, when Joe was still in the ICU, Dustin Hoffman had read about his illness in the
New York Times,
and he dropped by, bringing a Sony Walkman (a gadget Joe had never seen) and an electric toothbrush, with which he proceeded to brush Joe's teeth.

The private room was so much nicer than intensive care. Joe's friends hesitated to leave after a visit. They enjoyed joking with one another, trying to lift Joe's spirits—and it pleased them how easy it was to tickle Nurse Humphries. Joe's kids came by. In
No Laughing Matter,
Speed said that Ted “would phone and ask who was around before he would commit to a visit that day. If Joe indicated he was either alone or with people his son didn't find funny, Ted's response was, ‘Nah, I think I may go to a movie instead. Maybe tomorrow. Let me know who shows up … is Dustin coming again?'”

One night, as Joe's visitors—Speed, George Mandel, Julie Green, and Joe Stein—shuffled out the door, they expressed regret for abandoning him. He wasn't buying it. He knew they were eager to head to Chinatown. The Gourmet Club was now “just a bunch of old guys stuffing themselves and talking about girls,” said Stein's son, Harry, but they still had a good time together. It wasn't the same without Joe, though. The latest restaurants they'd found didn't stack up to the old ones, and their favorite all-night fruit stand for after-dinner treats had been torn down, some time back, to make way for the World Trade Center. You couldn't count on anything.

*   *   *

JOE WAS ATTRACTED
to all of his nurses. His gratefulness approached love, in the way a psychiatric patient will sometimes transfer familial or erotic affections to a therapist. He got along particularly well with Valerie. She laughed easily and liked food as much as he did. He asked about her likes and dislikes, favorite movies, books, and singers. One day, she told him she was a fan of the country music singer Kinky Friedman. Joe had heard of Friedman from Speed, a live-music aficionado. He had friends in the music business and knew Mort Cooperman, owner of the Lone Star Café, who introduced him to Friedman. Years earlier, Speed told Joe the name of the singer's group, the Texas Jewboys. Joe wanted to use it in
Good as Gold.
“Great. How much will he pay me?” Friedman asked Speed. “That I can tell you right now. Not a fucking nickel,” Speed said.

Joe asked Speed if he would take Valerie to hear the Jewboys. “I … thought [she] was a bit tall for me, but she was good-looking,” Speed wrote. It took a while for him to grasp that Joe was flirting with Valerie indirectly. The date was a hit. Prompted by Speed, Friedman announced from the stage of the Lone Star Café, “Here comes my good friend Speed Vogel, and with him is Joseph Heller's beautiful nurse, Valerie Humphries.” He dedicated a song to her, “Ol' Ben Lucas,” whose lyrics ran, “Ol' Ben Lucas had a lot of mucus / Comin' right out of his nose.” She spent the next morning entertaining Joe with details of the evening. She said the song reminded her of him.

Later, when Friedman came to visit, he saw Joe had “taken a turn for the nurse.”

Her official reports on his progress—“NG feedings of large quantity,” “black phlegm,” “four steps forward,” “knees buckled”—indicate he was happier in her presence than with his other caretakers.

1/8: “Patient is in good spirits.”

1/21: “In good spirits (still).”

Covert love notes.

“I court[ed] her with all my might,” Joe said. He asked her to stay until 6:00
P.M.
each working day, and bumped her pay for the added time. “She hung around for an extra hour or so [after that] most days anyway,” he said. One night, Joe asked Speed to take her to dinner at Elaine's. She was dazzled by Joe's pals. Mario Puzo was there that night; Woody Allen and Diane Keaton sat at a nearby table. “I'm so glad I met you!” Valerie exclaimed to Joe later. “Otherwise, I would never have known how good borscht is, and I wouldn't be eating so much of it!” The only downside to her new life was the number of short men accompanying her. “If there were just two more of us,” George Mandel said to her one day in Joe's room, “you could be Snow White.”

On January 26, 1982, Joe was transferred from Mount Sinai to the Rusk Institute. Valerie agreed to stay on as his private nurse as he began physical therapy. Her cheerful presence was crucial to him. At Rusk, he was surrounded by victims of car accidents, people born with physical handicaps or permanently disabled. The staff had no patience with him when he responded, “I can't” to a request to lift an arm or leg. They knew he
could,
with effort. One doctor told him, “I think you're the only one [here] with a chance to recover enough to live a normal life.”

In the novel he'd been writing before he got sick, bathing was an erotic bond between the king and his consort, Bathsheba. Now, Valerie sponged Joe clean. “There were wisecracks and verbal games between Valerie and me … when she was … in the shower room with me, none of them compromising,” he said. “I could not extend my hands far enough to reach my knees, let alone her.… Valerie brought a shower cap from home.… She shampooed my hair and combed it too, and did not seem to mind doing that.”

Her “technique” for bringing him to his feet from bed to sit him in a wheelchair was “[s]exually suggestive,” he wrote. “In this stand-and-pivot maneuver, we [began] with our arms around each other and her skirt hiked over her knees, and we [came] to rest belly-to-belly and cheek-to-cheek, with her legs parted and her skirt still up, and with our arms still around each other.”

He was not yet to the point where he could whisper sweet nothings in her ear. A speech-pathology report, prepared by the Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine of the NYU Medical Center, dated February 5, 1982, reports that “Mr. Heller presents mild symptoms of dysarthria … characterized by a mild distortion of articulation and a slight weakness in voice production (i.e. reduced loudness and breathiness).… [M]ost prone to distortion are [sounds] associated with lip rounding (r, w, o). There is also a mild distortion of sibilants (s, z) which patient reports predates his present illness.… Range of motion of tongue retraction and protrusion are affected.”

In the meantime, Joe was trying to put on weight (the tube was still in his nose). “When my swallowing ability came back, it came back as an instinct, whole,” he said. A salami sandwich, provided by one of his doctors, struck Joe as “more beautiful … [than the] Sistine Chapel.” His lawyer, Jeffrey Cohen, brought him bagels. Julius Green arrived with cupcakes and Häagen-Dazs ice cream. The Gourmet Club brought him leftovers from Chinatown. Valerie ate almost as much of the food as he did, and he took great pleasure in watching her.

Mel Brooks came for another visit. For several minutes, he hovered over Joe in his wheelchair. Then he raised an arm and shouted, “For Jesus! Stand! Walk!”

When Joe couldn't do it, Brooks shrugged. “I thought I'd give it a shot,” he said.

Finally, on March 18, the doctors removed Joe's tube. It “looked filthy when … [they] extracted it simply by pulling it out and dropped it in the wastebasket,” Joe said. Valerie spread a red-checkered tablecloth across his bed for a celebratory picnic. Joe's friend Bob Towbin brought champagne from “21.” Towbin, a former English major at Dartmouth, was now a Wall Street investment banker—“[the] only virtue of finance capitalism of which I have ever heard,” Joe said.

“All that was missing [at the picnic] was a Dubonnet umbrella,” he mused. He and his guests looked calmly out the window at the East River and at helicopters landing on a nearby helipad. “Knowing Valerie's esteem for the artist Manet … I suggested she undress and eat with us naked,” Joe said. “She blushed … and declined.”

Later, when the others had left, Valerie got Joe showered and helped him with a carbon dioxide suppository. Joe recalled, “[S]he had an extremely delicate technique [with the suppository] which I [soon] made known to the other nurses … who were not so instinctively gifted as she was in this area.”

*   *   *

THE NIGHT
in early April when Jerry McQueen pulled the car onto the sidewalk at the Russian Tea Room's door followed two occasions Joe considered his first official dates with Valerie. He was still paying her to be his nurse, but on St. Patrick's Day, she helped him shower and dressed him in a sports shirt and a V-necked sweater, combed his hair, and rolled him in his wheelchair into the elevator. Downstairs, a party ensued with Irish dancers, singers, and fiddlers. Joe sat next to a former policeman who had been shot in the spine while trying to prevent a holdup. A bagpipe group from the New York Police Department arrived to serenade the young man. Joe was deeply moved. Afterward, Valerie rolled him back to his room, removed his clothes, and helped him into bed. He told her he didn't believe in kissing on the first date. She smiled and pecked him on the forehead.

Ten days after jettisoning his tube, Joe received approval from the hospital to spend a weekend in his Eighth Avenue apartment. Valerie accompanied him. The place felt unfamiliar—Speed had added furnishings, including a “custom-built queen-sized platform bed with eiderdown pillows and a … down quilt in a smart Swedish quilt cover,” Joe said. He and Valerie ate a modest Thai meal at a restaurant nearby, joined by Stanley Cohen, a friend of Joe. After dinner, Cohen helped Valerie get Joe inside the apartment and stayed long enough to make sure he was comfortably settled. “Then Valerie and I were in the apartment alone,” Joe said. “She knew me intimately. The inevitable question was in the air.” Valerie seemed to have answered it: “She had brought a nightgown.”

The day was approaching when he would be released from Rusk. Technically, he would no longer need a private nurse. The thought terrified him. He did not know where to go. The weekend in the apartment had convinced him the place was inadequate for a man with mobility problems. To make matters worse, Speed and Julie Green had discovered, while paying Joe's bills, that in leaving the Apthorp and summering out west, Joe had inadvertently let an insurance policy lapse that would have covered 80 percent of his medical bills in excess of ten thousand dollars. Now where would the money come from? Two days at Rusk cost him more than a month's worth of book royalties (royalties reached approximately $830, depending on the month). In February alone, Speed had written checks on Joe's behalf totaling $17,097.32. Joe was paying for five residences, none of which he occupied (the Apthorp, the Eighth Avenue apartment, the East Hampton house, the Santa Fe apartment, and a co-op in Greenwich Village where Ted lived). On his own, Speed talked Joe's Santa Fe landlord into letting him out of his lease. To ship Joe's clothes and books, Speed forged Joe's name on a fifty-dollar check to Joanne Wood. At Joe's request, George Mandel notified Candida Donadio that, because of mounting expenses, Joe would like to forgo her commission, in the event he was able to finish and she was able to sell his King David novel.

On May 1, he was fifty-nine years old. He feared going broke, living alone, convalescing in a veteran's hospital somewhere.

To cheer him up, Jerry McQueen drove him to Coney Island. Valerie went with them, along with a physical therapist named Mary Kay Fish. Joe couldn't gaze long at the high-rise apartment buildings standing where the old walk-ups he had lived in as a child once stood. The Steeplechase was gone. He enjoyed watching fishermen on the piers dropping lines with colorful bobs and sinkers to catch crabs. Most of the men were Hispanic, another sign of change. There were no Italians, no Hasidic Jews davening on the boardwalk. Joe thought of his childhood pal Lou Berkman, who had died not long ago of Hodgkin's disease. He thought of his brother's wife, Perle, and his sister's husband, Bernie. Beansy Winkler was still alive and kicking, but he had moved to California and Joe never saw him.