It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive

• Also by Evan Handler
  
• Dedication
  
• Epigraph
  
• Preface: Or, “Then Again”
  

• 1. Remember Richard Burr
  
• 2. The Sickest First Kiss
  
• 3. “Separation” Anxiety
  
• 4. I Don’t Know
  
• 5. I Eat Meat
  
• 6. The Biggest Mistake I Ever Made
  
• 7. Menace to Society
  
• 8. My Life Story
  
• 9. My Clock Ticks, Too
  
• 10. I Hate New York: A love letter
  
• 11. Tiffany ’99, Sotheby’s ‘01
  
• 12. The Two-Month Second Date
  
• 13. Medicine Man
  
• 14. Thanksgiving Days
  
• 15. Italian Dreaming
  
• 16. How Did You Two Meet?
  
• 17. A Little FAME AND Lots of WOMEN
  
• 18. Renovations and Terminations
  
• 19. You Don’t Know Where You Are, Until You’re Somewhere Else
  
• 20. On Death and Dying
  
• 21. The End Is the Beginning (of the Beginning of the End)
  

Copyright © 2008, 2012 by Evan Handler

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced, downloaded, scanned, stored, or distributed in any stored in any form or manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

For information, address Oxymoronic Industries, Inc. c/o David Black Agency, 335 Adams Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, the author assumes no responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the author does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.

Throughout this book, the names of some places as well as individuals and their personal details have been changed.

Cover design by Jennifer Bergamini, Alamini Creative Group

Author photo by Kirk Edwards/Showtime Networks

Background photo credits: Lowell Handler, Drew Carolan, Van Williams

Print ISBN 9780786754809

ebook ISBN 9780786754816

Distributed by Argo Navis Author Services

Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors

 
“A raw, thoughtful memoir…suspenseful and harrowing…moving and admirable.
”

—
New York Times Book Review

“A captivating memoir. Entertaining, harrowing, and ennobling. Handler speaks with a fresh voice that is entirely riveting”

—
Publishers Weekly

“
Vivid, whip smart…Spiked with humor and dizzying clarity, Handler’s story is a genuine testament to human will.”

—
Salon.com

“Brutally frank and blisteringly angry, Handler’s story is also the most enjoyable account of a battle with cancer you’ll ever read…Painfully funny, remarkably open and life-affirming.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

“A visceral knockout of a book, a Kafkaesque Saturday Night Live version of negotiating for your life. Evan Handler is a brilliant writer, unrelenting in his observation of the sacred and the absurd.”

—Amy Tan, author of
The Joy Luck Club
and
The Bonesetter’s Daughter

“Angry, hilarious, and riveting. A wildly humorous, keenly observed journey. A ceaselessly compassionate vision of the human spirit.”

—San Francisco Review of Books

“A harrowing and funny account of a triumphant fight to beat ‘incurable’ leukemia.”

—
Chicago Tribune

“Blunt, swaggering, observant, and seductively charming. A great performance.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

 
“A simply magnificent book, beautifully written, heartbreakingly honest, inspirationally courageous. I could not put it down. It deserves to become a classic.”

—Larry Kramer, activist, author, and playwright of
The Normal Heart, The Destiny of Me

Per Elisa…

 Tu ed io, insieme, per sempre.

“If pleasure exists, and we can only enjoy it in life, then life is happiness”

Giacomo Casanova, 1725-1798

“Call no man happy until he is dead”

Solon of Athens, c. 594 B.C.

I’ve never been a fan of explaining myself before I’ve begun, or of those who make it a practice. Then again, Oscar Wilde wrote introductions to many of his works, and some of them said what the book said much better than the book did, and in one one-hundred-twenty-fifth the space. Then again – again – Oscar Wilde went to prison and died at forty-six. He wasn’t greatly appreciated in his day.

Which brings us to this book, and why it hasn’t (officially) started yet. As I’ve been published or quoted over the years, I’ve noticed that each utterance I make offers infinite opportunities for misunderstanding. No matter how clearly I think I’ve put my message across, I’ll be surprised to learn I’ve failed to adequately anticipate the prisms of each and every reader’s mind. So I’ll say it as best I can: this is a book about perspective, and how it can change. It’s a book about how one man finally learned to live well in the world, in spite of possessing the knowledge that his life – like everyone’s – will be of limited duration. My first book,
Time on Fire
, was about how events caused me to be disappointed by my own life story. This book is about how further events have allowed me to fall in love with it.

This is also a book I’ve attempted to write in a manner that mimics how we get to know other human beings more accurately than a traditional narrative. In my experience, people don’t tell each other their life stories in chronological order (at least not the people that I know, unless we’re talking about some very bad first dates). What I most often get is a growing compilation of individual stories, told out of order, many of which overlap, and might refer again and again to a set of shared characters. Details are delivered in jumbled fashion, scattered throughout the tales they tell, and it’s often up to me to sort out which episode happened prior to another, or decipher which nuggets are most revealing of the storyteller’s character. And forget about consistency. I’m guessing we’ve all had the experience of hearing about a friend’s friend, or ex, long before meeting them, only to find the actual person largely incompatible with the portrait we’d painted in our own minds. Only over time, as my friends’ stories add up, as the people they’ve mentioned are introduced to me, and the blank spots on the canvas are filled in, do I feel I’ve come to “know” someone.

The events and ruminations in this book, taken together, tell the larger story of a man’s attempts to put a shattered life back together. I’ve chosen to present the stories here in a similarly fragmented fashion, to allow the reader to piece the book’s subject together, just as one cobbles together the stories of a new friend. This might make for a bumpier read. It might require more patience and determination. After all, the people who actually populate our lives demand greater tolerance than heroes of literature. Dramatic protagonists tend to learn swiftly from their mistakes. Friends often repeat their disasters over and over, seemingly oblivious to patterns that are all too clear to everyone but themselves.

Which is all to say that, should you find portions of this book – like a new friend – confusing, I urge you to keep reading. The information you crave is likely around the corner – in the next story, or the one after that. For that matter, should you find aspects of your narrator’s personality to be trying, like everything in life, that personality is bound to change. In fact, it’s part of the point. A transformation lies ahead. Just as there can be no “middles” or “endings” without “beginnings,” there can’t be an “after” without its “before.” And we often can’t begin to know where it is we’ve been, until we’ve traveled somewhere else, and are able to look back.

E.H.

I’ve taken up running. But I can’t call myself “a runner.” In fact, I can’t really even claim that I run. What I do is trudge.

Every second or third day I walk swiftly from my home near the Hudson River into Central Park, where a dirt jogging track circles the reservoir embedded in the park’s northern sector. I pass the seemingly homeless men who occupy the benches where I enter the park. One of the men – a muscular African-American — has recently taken to calling out greetings to me when I pass.

“Hey, lookin’ good,” he told me once.

He looks better than me, is what I thought.

I’m the slowest man on the track. I’m also slower than the vast majority of the women. This includes, for the most part, the overweight and the elderly. I move at a speed that’s hard to describe, because it’s so slow it’s hard to imagine. I’ve begun to wonder if the speed at which I walk
to
the park is greater than the speed at which I jog around the reservoir. I’ve also wondered if moving so slowly might actually use more energy than it would take to go faster. I have wondered, that is, until I try to speed up. I make it just once around the track – one point six or so miles – in utter agony, pleading with myself the whole way to stop, to keep going, to stop, to keep going. It’s all I can do to keep from collapsing at the end of my single lap, while others trot past effortlessly for a third and fourth.

It’s a problem, because I’m a competitive person. In fact, I’m so competitive it’s rendered me unable to effectively compete. Even back in Little League, as a prepubescent baseball fanatic, my desire to excel was so strong that it created insurmountable anxiety. At practice I was a phenom. During games, I’d alternate between sensational plays and uncountable errors. I was Chuck Knoblauch before he was even born.

Now, when I go for my run, I can’t stop comparing myself to everyone else on the track. About a quarter of the way in, I’ll hear plodding footsteps from behind, see the shadow of a lumbering figure approach, and watch as a heavy-set man makes his way into my field of vision. I’ll privately mock the physical condition of this jogger, wondering how anyone could classify such a lethargic pace as cardiovascular conditioning, even as the person pulls astride and, eventually, passes me.

God, he runs so slow, I’ll think, as I watch him pull ahead.

I run so slowly because I’m pacing myself. When it comes to physical exertion, I haven’t got that good old-fashioned stamina. I have inner dialogues in which I tell myself that I’m now past forty, and for my age, I’m not doing so badly. After all, many of the people speeding by are under twenty-five. Except for the sixty-year-olds. That works a bit. Or I’ll remind myself of where I’ve been: “How many of them have had bone marrow transplants?” I’ll ask. “See how fast they run after that. See if they’re standing upright.”

I remember in junior high school, or sixth through eighth grade, we’d run a timed six-hundred-yard dash twice a year in gym class. A third of a mile. I could never understand why it was called a “dash,” because, for me, it certainly wasn’t. I was a decent athlete. I played baseball and basketball relentlessly with friends on local fields and courts. I even made my high school tennis team – though where I went to school, in 1978, tennis wasn’t considered a “sport.” It was classified as “recreation.” The team didn’t even have a photo in the school’s yearbook. The football team was made up of thirty-five chunky local heroes of Irish and Italian descent. The tennis team had seven or eight members, at least half of whom were skinny Jewish potheads. On game days, football and basketball players wore their team jerseys to school and all day long kids called out in the halls, “Good game, Matt!” or “Go get ‘em, Danny!” On the days we had tennis matches we’d wear our warm up suits to school. Kids would give us funny looks as they passed and ask, “Why are you dressed like that?”

But the six-hundred-yard run was a dreaded event. It was usually announced the day before, which gave me twenty-four full hours to anticipate the pain and humiliation. I’d go about my business, getting absorbed by homework and my favorite television shows. Then, like the feeling I’d later come to know of waking up to remember my lover had just left me, thoughts of the next day’s run would come barging back into my awareness. The next morning, dressed in my mildewed gym clothes and shivering in the post-dawn chill, I’d set off in the dewy grass, desperately trying to put distance between the feeblest of my classmates and myself. My speed was restricted by the limitations of my lungs. It would only be a matter of moments before they were burning, screaming at me to stop.

My proficiency in “the six hundred,” as Mr. Cammaro, the gym teacher, called it, was poor. I usually finished toward the bottom third, right on the border between the last of those who thought it mattered, and the ones who didn’t give a shit. At least they acted as if they didn’t. Who knows, maybe every one of them had dreams of athletic glory.

One kid I remember is Richard Burr, an utterly ostracized boy who walked the whole way. Richard would stare off into the sky, brushing his hand along the tops of the soft weeds that lined the trail, singing indecipherable tunes to himself as he drifted along. Some of the faster kids – the sadistic Nordic heartthrob Tom Skyfford, or the prematurely acne-infested but athletically gorgeous Jimmy Leiffert – who passed Richard on their second lap before he’d finished his first, would lightly smack the back of his head as they galloped by. Richard would make no move to evade their assaults. He’d stroll along, his face betraying nothing other than an assumption that some natural force had caused his head to snap forward every twelve seconds or so. Only when he’d fallen behind everyone would Richard now and then scamper a few paces. His gait was more of a skip than a sprint, and it wasn’t to increase his speed. It wasn’t because the gym teacher was watching. No, Richard fluttered along like a butterfly, his pace determined by nothing other than how much the wind and sun inspired him.

Did this mean that Richard Burr didn’t dream of victory? Just because he’d given up all hope of excelling doesn’t mean he didn’t want to win. Or at least to avoid coming in last. But Richard was unreadable. Any shame he might have had as he ambled toward the finish line was invisible. Mr. Cammaro, on the other hand, was clearly insulted. He took his responsibility as a gym teacher seriously, keeping time even through the extra sixty or ninety seconds until Richard had rejoined the rest of the class. He’d issue Richard’s time as a futile rebuke: “Six minutes, Richard!” Richard would simply collapse like a folding chair into the grass, just beyond the finish line. And when Mr. Cammaro blew his whistle (the gym teacher’s equivalent to the Kapo’s sidearm) to begin the next activity, Richard always remained at a distance, tugging at weeds like an orphaned lamb feeding off to the side of the rest of the herd.

I was the anti-Richard. Being the youngest sibling in the family, and scrawny to boot, I’d been ultra competitive since shortly after birth. In school, I couldn’t bear the scorn of the other kids any more than I could stand Mr. Cammaro’s disapproval. I had no ability, but I was determined to show heart. When I realized heart didn’t improve my speed significantly, I just tried to avoid abasement. I’d stumble across the finish line, consumed with pain, aching for the two minutes or so to pass before my gasping would stop, and life would return to a relatively agony-free existence. Until the next semester’s run. My status in the six hundred depended on how you looked at it. I was either the very best of the worst, or among the decent, but dead last.

And what was my time? How long would I be required to withstand the discomfort of exertion on that six-hundred-yard run? Two minutes twenty seconds? Four-forty? I don’t remember. But how incongruous that lack of stamina seems when compared with my success in the super-marathon of chemotherapy and bone marrow transplantation I found myself running in my mid-twenties. I’d never before thought of myself as a physically strong man. As an adult, I’d still never demonstrated any of the stamina I lacked in gym class as a kid. Yet I managed to be one of the few left standing in the grueling hospital survival race. I suppose there are different types of endurance. I’ve skimmed some pages of the bicycle racer Lance Armstrong’s book about his surviving testicular cancer that had spread to his lungs and brain, only to win the Tour de France seven consecutive times after his recovery. I haven’t bought the book and read it – I’m much too competitive for that – but I have glanced through it. From what I’ve gleaned, Lance attributes much of his racing success to a willingness to endure more pain for longer periods of time than any of his opponents. It’s why he believes his training is more effective, and why he’s able to outlast others on the road. He also believes it’s why he was able to absorb such large doses of the toxic chemicals that eradicated his cancer.

I must have had some of that same talent. But I’d never been aware of it before, and I haven’t felt confident in it in all the years since, when I’ve been well. My memory of the six-hundred-yard dash, at twelve and thirteen years old, was that it hurt like hell. It either didn’t hurt the others as much as it hurt me, or about two-thirds of them were more capable of enduring that pain than I was. Now that I’m up to three thousand yards it still hurts just as much. Not just physically. Even though there’s no Mr. Cammaro there to scold those who might have walked part of the way, no Tom Skyfford or Jimmy Leiffert to feel jealous of for whipping along at speeds I couldn’t have maintained for one-sixth the distance, I drag myself around that reservoir feeling as if the whole of my self-esteem depends on how long I last and how fast I go. As if everyone else on the track – the entire island of Manhattan – is watching and judging. After my run, I shuffle home feeling like a failure if I had to stop and rest anywhere along the way.

I’m not even out there to compete. I run for two reasons: to improve (hopefully) my health, and because it makes me feel better. You know, after I’m done. I get an endorphin rush and it alleviates, for a while, my tendency toward depression. But, in my mind, the comparisons with others continue. I’m not even sure anymore with whom I’m contending. The scolding is no longer coming from some small-town guy trying to make his living wrangling seventh-graders through meaningless physical fitness tests. Now it’s coming from me. Maybe that’s what makes me so uneasy, that no one’s taking notice. I survived the eighth grade. Tom Skyfford and Mr. Cammaro didn’t destroy me. I made it through high school, have ventured out into the world, earned a living where they tell you no one does, beat the odds on a terminal illness, reached my forties, and I’m moving one foot in front of the other, working my way down that track. Who cares if everyone else does it quicker and has an easier time? How come no one has offered me a prize?

What I’ve still got to learn is that it isn’t about being given an ovation by the audience. After all this time, I still haven’t quite gotten that it’s about enjoying the run. The precious moments are the ones spent
on
the track, not the ones analyzing how quickly I got back off. The one who had it right was Richard Burr. He didn’t let the clock, or the other kids, get in his way. He wasn’t affected by Mr. Cammaro’s admonishments. He looked at the sky, felt the sun on his cheek; picked a dandelion and blew the seeds, watched them scatter through the air and mingle with the bees. Richard wasn’t in the game, as we knew it. He refused to play, except on his own. I always thought he must have felt tortured to always finish last, to have no chance at all of ever being the best, or even to count himself among them. I’d thought, for Richard, gym must have been hell. Looking back at eighth grade, or even last week, I wonder if that isn’t where I’ve been keeping myself.

I don’t know if Richard’s wandering so freely today, or if his disinterest was completely unfeigned. But for me, as I enter the thirty-ninth grade, I’m going to try to strike a balance between pleasing myself and letting myself off the hook. Between wanting to push myself toward new and better things, and leaving myself free to wander through time as if the rest of humanity had no interest in me at all.

I’ve always looked at giving up hope as the end of life, and considering where I’ve been, I suppose that makes sense. But what if that’s when life begins? When you become ready to release it. More of a Buddhist way of thinking about things, no? The freedom of no expectations. The joy of no desire. Of course, I don’t know anything about Buddhism, so I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I have a hunch it would be a good thing if I could get to a place where it doesn’t matter if I run all the way around the park or never even make it there. Where it doesn’t matter if I go faster than the two-hundred-pound woman or drop dead on the track. Where it’s the journey that’s important. Where the only thing that matters is whether I knew the sun loved me along the way.