It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive (5 page)

I’m a meat eater. Not necessarily red meat. In fact, I only rarely eat beef, and when I do, it’s almost always a hamburger. I haven’t eaten steak in years, except to take a small bite when someone says I have to. You know how that goes: “Oh, my God…this is so good. Do you want to try it?”

“No.”

“Oh, you have to.”

And, so, you do.

But I do eat flesh. And the sorry fact is, I feel I need it. I did once live for some very few years as a strict vegetarian. A more precise reckoning of “some very few years” actually comes to precisely nine-and-a-half months. A more precise reckoning of “strict vegetarian” means I was macrobiotic. I suppose there will be those readers who don’t know what that term means, and to that I reply that no one does. It has something to do with eating only produce that can be grown locally – though it doesn’t have to actually have
been
grown locally. It also has something to do with avoiding alcohol and other stimulants – though coffee and cigarettes are somehow justified. Macrobiotics believe in eating only vegetables and grains…unless, of course, you crave fish, with the primary emphasis on a diet centered on the complete protein concocted out of beans and brown rice. This is also a wildly misunderstood stricture, however, and there have been several deaths reported due to malnutrition among those who insisted on believing that the true nutritional necessities of humans could be met by ingesting only rice – and the fewest grains of rice imaginable at that. In the complex, ever-changing world of dietary recommendations, an easy mistake to make.

Macrobiotics is further defined by the delicate balance of yin and yang. Certain foods, as any fool might gather, possess the qualities of yin, while other foods, it goes without saying, are decidedly yang. I investigated the distinction between the terms when I was adhering to “The Macrobiotic Way”. I wanted to be able to discern, without the aid of a book titled with that same phrase, just which foods fell into which camp. I read extensively, and spoke with several devotees. The answers I received in print were declarative, yet unenlightening. They proclaimed the dangers of foods such as tomatoes and eggplant, due to the fact that the fruits did their growing at night. They dubbed them “deadly nightshades”, a moniker popularized in the seventeenth century. The answers I received verbally were delivered impatiently and most often referred to “balance”, as if I were a contestant in a gymnastic competition. Edible substances were consistently divided into camps based on degrees of heat and coolness that had nothing to do with their temperature. My final conclusion was that in order to be considered yin, or “hot”, an entrée must be of interest to the editors of
Interview
magazine. To be yang, or “cool”, of interest to
Vanity Fair
.

I was led into macrobiotics as a result of a diagnosis of acute leukemia, an excuse that could serve for crimes much more severe than following the vague, capricious dietary notions of the movement’s pillar, the chain-smoking Japanese mystic Michio Kushi. I’m fairly certain I could have murdered someone at the time and not suffered a moment of state-sanctioned punishment. Looking back, which I do far too often, I’m amazed – and not slightly disappointed – that I didn’t take advantage of my misfortune a great deal more. Cursed is he who dwells on missed opportunities.

Now I eat meat. Regularly. Though, I suppose, in the current climate, even that statement requires clarification. There are those misguided souls –  vegetarians by their own definitions – who don’t consider the muscular tissue of fish or fowl to be “meat”. Salmon, tuna, chicken, duck, oysters, mussels, guinea hen. It makes no difference to them. As long as it had wings or gills, or perhaps no face, it can safely be classified as a vegetable. Go figure.

I’m no vegetarian. Rare is the day I don’t eat a piece of chicken. If I don’t, it’s a good bet I’ve consumed some shrimp, beef, fish, clams, snails, pork, goose, rabbit, goat, or snake. I’ve actually never eaten snake, but if none of the others were available, I just might. I’ve come under the impression that I lack a degree of physical strength without animal protein. I can trace the feeling back only as far as the illness, I’m afraid, and it’s a poor reference point. Vegetarianism never occurred to me before it, and was adhered to afterwards only out of primal fear. Take that as my statement on the bravery of the survivor.

For years after I recovered from leukemia I was plagued by seemingly constant upper respiratory infections. Sore throat, head cold, chest cold, sinus infection. Somewhere between thirty and fifty percent of my time is spent not feeling very well. And the way I’ve soothed myself, the avenue I’ve chosen to compensate for the pleasures denied me during my repetitive echoed convalescences, is to eat rich foods. Why I haven’t sought comfort in constant sexual indulgences, unbridled spending sprees, constant sexual indulgences, or constant sexual indulgences is a disgrace to desperate souls everywhere. I suppose I lack the joie de vivre of the truly tormented.

When I lived downtown in New York’s East Village, I’d head over to the Second Avenue Deli. It was a bold choice for someone suffering from his seventh flu of the season. Most restaurants in the neighborhood boasted of free delivery, but not the famed shrine of Kosher cholesterol. I’d wrap myself in sweaters and scarves and brave the winds for the six-block journey, spurred on by the promise of a sandwich made of brisket of beef on soggy, doubly-mustarded rye bread. In addition, I’d bring home a tray of potato kugel that I’d heat in a filthy toaster oven. I’d imagine I was somehow fortifying myself against the microscopic tormenters of my tissues as I devoured the roasted tissues of another creature, even less fortunate than myself. Now that I’ve written it down, I can see that perhaps my unconscious motivation was simply to spread my misery around.

My meat eating was thrown into crisis some years ago in the city called San Francisco. I was in California on a book tour, reading in bookstores from the memoir I wrote about my illness and unexpected recovery. Most of my experiences on that tour were enjoyable. Traveling the country as an author, on someone else’s dime, being interviewed and treated as someone with opinions worth heeding is a heady adventure. But the fun of the actual bookstore appearances could often be equated with that of chemotherapy. I read to over a hundred who laughed and cried appropriately in Manhattan. In Chicago, while hundreds of African-American women hauled their children to the Borders across the street to listen to Toni Morrison, I sat on the second floor of Barnes and Noble reading to two strangers, Lisa and Tom, both bone marrow transplant recipients, accompanied by Lisa’s husband, Mike, and Tom’s grandmother, Judith. Imagine the Q and A interplay afterwards. To end my tour I landed in Los Angeles, a city in which I have nearly as many friends as I do in New York. On the night of my elegant party at Rizzoli in Santa Monica it rained. Angelenos responded to the light precipitation as they always do: by locking themselves in their storm cellars. The platters of food – chosen to sate carnivores and vegans alike – remained untouched.

At Hiro, the Japanese restaurant on State Street in San Francisco, I ordered salmon teriyaki. I don’t eat sushi. I’ve had few qualms about eating creatures over the years, but I do insist they be cooked. Thoroughly. The “few qualms” I do have preclude me from hunting or fishing for my own meals. I can’t abide the cruelty of directly causing the animal’s death. In addition, I suppose I fear that the hunting of an animal makes me fairer game to be hunted by one in return. While being eaten by a beast does seem, in an ecological sense, to be an honorable death, I’m intent on avoiding it nonetheless. My qualms aren’t limited to creatures larger than myself. I won’t eat raw fish, shellfish, crustaceans or other flesh due to worries over bacterial infections or parasitic attacks. Yes, I live in fear. Then again, such things do happen.

I enjoy salmon cooked teriyaki style. But, as with all meats, I insist it be cooked well. Japanese restaurants are ideal in this respect, because it doesn’t require special instructions to the chef. While the current recipe de rigueur in regard to seafood is to cook it until barely heated through, I’ve found that most Japanese restaurants cook their salmon to within an inch of incineration. Since most of these establishments also offer sushi, I find it an interesting juxtaposition of extremes. Fish either raw, or, in the eyes of most other-ly oriented gourmands, destroyed by fire. Perhaps the reason salmon teriyaki is so well cooked in Japanese restaurants is that the chefs know the only customers ordering it are the ones who are afraid of sushi.

The flavor of the salmon was fine. I cast no aspersions on the freshness of the fish. But from the first bite I had a sensation that has troubled me to this day. As I chewed my meal and swallowed, as I enjoyed the crisp outer crust of caramelized sugars and animal fat, as I sat alone in San Francisco and wondered who might show up later to listen to an unknown author read from his rabidly angry tome about every detail of his bouts with acute leukemia, I had the disturbing impression that I could taste the personality of the fish.

Every taste bud registered the presence of a being who was stunned and frightened to be caught in a net. I knew I was ingesting someone who had hoped for nothing other than to escape and reach home. I knew, as I chewed, that his terror increased, and his hope became simply to send word back to those he loved of how he was taken, and to where he’d disappeared. I know he thought of his family and friends, and felt distraught over the panic they were sure to experience when he didn’t return. His agony was indescribable, his frustration unbearable, as he imagined their imaginings of his choice to flee and never come back.

“They’ll think I’ve rejected them”, the fish feared. “They’ll think I didn’t want to see them again.”

He thought of who his mate might find to replace him. Wondered if she’d grow old alone.

He worried for the safety of his offspring, if they’d come to love someone else as they’d loved him.

He worried if the pain of death would be unbearable. If there were fish he knew nearby who might witness the un-heroic panic with which he was to meet his end. If there was ever a reason to have done any of the things he’d done, or to have ever hoped for anything more than what was being given him right now.

And I chewed the fish. I ate him. And he tasted good.

There is no way I can prove the truth of what I felt that night, but I know it to be real. I tasted his terror, his pride, and the extinguishing of his will. I tasted his final realization that he would not be saved, and I tasted the exhaustion that is too often attributed to acceptance of one’s fate.

And I swallowed. I nourished myself with him. And he tasted good.

I left that restaurant in San Francisco haunted by what I’d taken inside myself, and I’ve remained haunted to this day. I made my way to the “Clean, Well Lighted Place” bookstore and read to a smattering of souls about my own narrowly avoided death. I have examined what I experienced that night, and wondered if there were more emotional distortions at work than I’ve been willing to admit. If the aphorism says we are what we eat, who’s to say we don’t turn what we eat into us? Most likely, what I tasted in my salmon teriyaki that night were all the feelings I remember having back when I thought I was destined for that fish’s fate. But then, no one would have eaten me. Anyway, after all the horrible shit they ran through my veins, I doubt I would have passed USDA inspection.

And, if I know the taste of that fish’s terror – from both inside and out – how is it that I still eat meat? Is it as simple as what I felt in the hospital when they’d wheel a tightly wrapped corpse down the hallway on its way to the morgue? I’d be shocked at the undeniability of the possibility of my own demise. But, for the most part, my feeling then was “better him than me.” Statistically, everyone else who succumbed increased my chances for survival. I was rooting against them, in spite of my warm feelings toward the individuals involved, because that was the same as rooting for myself. It’s not that I’m incapable of feeling for the soul whose life was stolen in order to nourish my own. I’ve come to taste it in every bite. But, alongside each gram of sadness I feel for my part in the bargain is the increased assurance of my own existence I get with every swallow. It takes the death of another for me to survive. Someday I’ll be taken to make room for someone, or something, else. Like it or not, that’s the way of the world – at least the one I walk in. And, having once felt that net closing around me, having barely made it back to where I insisted I belonged, the chapter where I don’t make it out is the one I plan to keep unwritten for as close to forever as my mind can fathom. Until then, bon appetit.

On Valentine’s Day in the year of 1999 I proposed marriage. My girlfriend Patricia and I had planned to cook dinner together that night, as well as bake a cake for dessert. We’d never cooked well together before – had hardly even tried, in fact – but we were set to start with a challenging pan-fried cod from the Union Square Cafe cookbook. The idea of the cake came from a newly purchased appliance. For Christmas, several weeks earlier, I had bought us a shiny new five-and-one-half-quart-capacity KitchenAid mixer. Fire-engine red.

I’ve only owned one car in my life. It was also red, a brand-new Acura Integra that was bought for me by my father. We weren’t wealthy, and my father had never before bought me any item approaching the expense of a car. He hadn’t even paid that much for my college. For that expense I’d taken out my own student loans. But the car was on Dad, due to the fact that I was twenty-seven years old and convalescing from a bone marrow transplant with only a 25 percent chance of ever seeing thirty. The checkbook comes out mighty quick when death hangs in the air.

The only reason I mention the car is that it was also red. Well, that, and that it brings up the fact that I might have been dying at the time. It’s important to work that information into any story I tell, in the hope it might excuse whatever behavior I confess to later on. And after two bouts with leukemia, four brutal rounds of conventional chemotherapy, two bone marrow harvests, and a bone marrow transplant, I just can’t seem to ever stop talking about the illness anyway. Did I mention it was twenty years ago?

The KitchenAid mixer was red and so was the car. This is the story of how I proposed to Patricia, using the cake we baked together on Valentine’s Day in the year of 1999. It’s important to note, though, that I’d also proposed to Jackie, the girlfriend I’d had throughout the illness, and afterward when I owned the car. Did I mention that it was also red? And that the mixer was, too?

Still, I don’t consider myself to have been engaged twice. The first marriage proposal happened while I was sick, during an especially grim passage of that particularly bleak period. “Deathbed marriage proposal” is a term that fits in every way, other than that I didn’t actually go ahead and die. I was, though, in a bed, in a hospital – Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, to be exact – with an infection and tubes running into and out of me and, well, if one can get any closer to dying and going to Hell, I don’t know about it, and I don’t want to. You see, there were
extenuating circumstances
. In that particular instance, for that particular indiscretion, I had an excuse. I may rely on it too much, you may think I use it as a crutch; I may have woven it into the myth I’ve made out of my life and attributed all sorts of preexisting neuroses to it. But it did happen, I’m trying to get over it, and if you’re ever jealous of the way I occasionally use it to bludgeon others into submission, then I suggest you start in on the sixteen years of psychotherapy that have been so marginally successful for me.

As I’ve said, the car was red, and so was the KitchenAid mixer. Or, the car was red, and the KitchenAid mixer still is, because it still sits on my kitchen counter. It has been used only once since baking that cake back in 1999 and that was to make mashed potatoes, because they are one of Patricia’s favorite foods. The mixer gleams in the light and projects a splendid image. It is impressive to visitors and conjures assumptions of skill, precision, and power. It sits in my house, a useless item that is rarely touched or noticed, and in all those ways that red KitchenAid mixer is just like me. It was bought to impress my lost love Patricia, as the red car was chosen to impress the fiancée before. I no longer live with either of them, but share my space with a cold, indifferent yet beautiful machine. I wonder when it will decide to leave me as well.

The baking of the cake went well. Patricia and I put aside some of the difficulties we’d had, to that point, when trying to do things as a team. I say the difficulties “we’d” had, but the problems were really mine. I have extremely low tolerance for anyone doing anything in any way that I don’t think of as being the best way. (If you’re starting to find me tiresome, please remember that I was once very sick.)

I was in love with Patricia. Which would only be appropriate, being the night I asked her to marry me. I had my plan mapped out, but kept it secret from her. We baked the cake, and I tried to be a better man than I was. I tried not to take over in the kitchen, not to find fault with her inexperience as a cook, not to instruct her on things she didn’t ask to learn, and not to show how much it bothered me that she didn’t want to learn more. (Oops. It just showed again.)

When the cake was done, we decorated it. Patricia used a kit I’d bought, and she drew, with icing, the most perfect, beautiful multicolored flowers I’d ever seen. Drawing is a talent I’ve never had and never will, and, as she was doing it, I felt all the wonder that a person is supposed to feel about people they admire. Patricia was the most sensational, lovely, warm, fun, and enjoyable person on Earth to me that night, and I was amazed at how calm I was about what I was about to do.

I sent Patricia out of the kitchen after the cake was done. Our plan was to put the cake aside while we cooked our fish, and then to eat it for dessert. But I told Patricia that I had a surprise, and would need a few minutes alone before we cooked dinner. She left the kitchen, only slightly suspicious, and I took up the tools with which she’d already decorated the cake. I chose a bright red icing – no intent behind it at the time, I’m noticing the symmetry only now – and I wrote on the cake in a billowy script: “Happy Valentine’s Day. Will You Marry Me?” I put the cake out of sight, on top of the refrigerator, and we cooked and ate our fish. We had a wonderful dinner. Afterward, I presented the cake to Patricia, who burst into tears and said, “yes.” The night was the high point of my life in terms of trust, faith, certainty, and lack of ambivalence. I was, for sure, the best man that I ever had been.

I have a videotape of my marriage proposal. Not the actual moment, but the ones immediately after. There are images of Patricia and myself blowing kisses at each other, teary-eyed, glowing with love. I was struck, when I first viewed them, by how bad we looked. Not in any serious way, just the lack of pretension and preparation. We were dressed in sweat-pants and stained, faded T-shirts – the kind you only wear to sleep, or to lie around the house in. The kind you only let your lover see you in.

There is something tender and unnerving about the casualness of the people in that video. There is something incongruous about my droopy pants and T-shirt with peeling lettering. Patricia’s smile beams from an unwashed face under crushed, uncombed hair. It is either an image of marvelously unself-conscious contentment and acceptance, or another symptom of how dreadfully I took her devotion for granted.

Now Patricia is gone. Our engagement lasted two years before flaming out. That’s the same amount of time we’d been together prior to that Valentine’s night, though the second half of our relationship wasn’t nearly as much fun as the first. Two good years, two bad. We spent as much time trying to turn each other into things we weren’t as we did enjoying ourselves.

Also gone are Jackie, Graciella, Ellie, Rebecca, Christina, and Noreen. Not all fiancées, thank God, but somewhat serious relationships each. In between there were less devoted liaisons, and still more encounters that, I’ll confess, were not always in between. (Remember, I was sick…) Does it seem insane that I consider myself, generally speaking, to be a pretty decent guy? Apparently several of my exes agree. Of the list above, three have remained among my dearest long-term friends.

Patricia isn’t the first partner I’ve had trouble loving properly in person, only to be overwhelmed by a surge of feelings after she’s gone. I’m on to the pattern. And it’s only taken me four decades to decipher it. My father thinks it’s simply a sign of the times, bless his soul. He finds it bewildering, and confesses that he can’t relate. “I’ve never had a broken heart,” he said to me after one painful breakup of mine. At that moment I realized we’d never be able to truly know each other. “Your generation has too many options,” he said. But the vast majority of my friends were in stable marriages with children. It was his son who had such difficulty choosing.

My ten-year-old nephew was, in his way, more compassionate by way of being more direct. His understanding was limited, due to his years, but his questions and comments could not have been cannier.

“Why did you and Patricia break up, Uncle Evan?” he asked. I’d felt bad as this visit approached – my first without Patricia – because I knew my nephews and niece were fond of her and loved the way she played with them for hours at a time. I wanted to let him know that it was important to recognize your mistakes, as well as to help him avoid some of the mistakes I’d made.

“I wasn’t very nice to her, Josh,” I said. “You ever have a friend who wasn’t very nice to you and so you don’t want to play with him anymore?”

“So, it was your fault?” he asked.

“Yep. It was my fault.”

Josh cocked his head and arched his eyebrows. He looked over at his mother first – my sister, and his teacher in life – then looked back at me. He scrunched up his mouth and shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, if it was your fault…” There was no need to say any more.

So what’s a guy like me to do? One who feels love so deeply, but only after the object of it is gone? And what do I do with a videotape of a broken engagement? Throwing it out, or taping over it, seems a sacrilege. It was – in some ways it
is
– the proudest moment of my life. I have tapes of Patricia and me hiking in the woods, hunting for houses, and promising to love each other forever, through anything. Is a dream a lie if it doesn’t come true? For now, the tapes are in a drawer with the love notes and letters I can’t bear to destroy. They sit inside my desk, aging like bottles of fine wine, potential betrayers to any current visitors of the depth of my regret and sorrow.

The path is not so grim as I’ve made it out to be. I’ve already been slightly involved with another woman (I don’t blame you if you want to tell her to run); a fiercely intelligent Australian whom I’d thought might possess qualities to give us a better shot at making a go of it than those I’ve been with before. By that I mean she’s not quite so cowed by me. As I rant and rave, complain, or – as she puts it – “whinge and moan,” she doesn’t indulge me or try to placate me. She doesn’t go out of her way to ease my easily aroused discomfort. She tends to briefly interrupt whatever she’s doing, look my way, and say, “Could you…could you
stop
? Could you just
stop
?” And lo and behold, I do. I’ve discovered that I can, and so I do. The fact that she lives 12,500 miles away also seems to lend us some assistance.

I’ve recently passed my fortieth birthday, so the “just stop” realization may be way past due. Forty years is a long time to learn some basic lessons about restraint and tolerance in relationships. Still, I’m happy it arrived just the same. It means there’s hope for me yet, so long as I live long enough.

And since forty was a birthday I thought I’d never see (I just had to work that in one more time), who knows how much time I might still have to get it right? I think the first step was being able to know what my nephew picked up on, and it’s what I’d say to Patricia today if she’d listen to me. It was my fault, Patricia. You were my friend, and I didn’t treat you right. It was my fault.

But I suppose she already knows that.