Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art (27 page)

Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to discover that he had been transformed into a giant insect—in Kafka’s short story, “Metamorphosis.” In 1999 I awoke one morning to discover that I had a problem not so different from old Gregor’s . . .a sharp pain on my left side that turned out to be non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I don’t like talking about cancer—and I don’t intend to do much of it now—but there are a few ironies that can’t be overlooked. It’s not a sad story.

A very kind hematological oncologist whose office was only twenty minutes away, arranged for me to have nine chemotherapies, one every three weeks. I had my first chemo in the doctor’s office while Karen read to me from
She’s Come Undone
by Wally Lamb. I had supposed—because of my experiences with Gilda—that
I would be either extremely anxious or not anxious at all. I was not anxious; I don’t know about the “at all” part—you’d have to ask Karen—but I was very calm and, to my great surprise, because of a wonderful new drug that Nurse Mary Harvey infused into my bloodstream while she dripped in the chemo, I didn’t get sick or nauseous, not even for a minute.

After I did that first chemo, I went to New York in the afternoon to do publicity videos for
Murderin a Small Town,
a murder mystery that I had done for Arts and Entertainment a few months earlier. I told the crew to hurry up, because my hair was going to start falling out any minute. When my hair did fall out, after two-and-a-half weeks, my doctor kindly agreed to let Mary Harvey come over and give me the chemo in my living room. After two treatments my spleen had returned to normal size, and I was told that I wouldn’t need nine treatments, just six.

During my third treatment, while I joked with Mary Harvey as she was dripping in the chemo, Karen handed me our portable phone. It was Mel Brooks.

MEL
: How ya doing?

ME
: Great.

MEL
: When do you get your chemo?

ME
: Now.

MEL
: Whaddya mean?

ME
: I’m getting it now, while we’re talking.

MEL
: Where?

ME
: In my living room.

MEL
: Well—how do you feel?

ME
: Great.

MEL
: When do they think you’ll be able to eat again?

ME
: In about fifteen minutes. We’re having veal chops, linguini, a little salad, and some red wine.

MEL
: How can that be?

ME
: A new drug called Zofran. They didn’t have it in time for Gilda.

MEL
: It’s a miracle. Which wine?

ME
: Larose Trintadon.

After we hung up and I walked Nurse Harvey to her car, Karen and I sat down at the kitchen table and had our lovely meal.

When I finished my fifth chemo, my doctor said that he would give me one more and then something called rituxan for four weeks, and that would be it. All done! Apart from losing my hair, which I knew would come back, I felt fine—playing tennis with a pro, indoors, twice a week, and playing in a hard men’s doubles game each Saturday.

I decided to call my dear friend Ed Feldman—the gastroenterologist in Los Angeles who had looked after Gilda so lovingly. I wanted to share the good news with him. When he heard the news, he said, “I’m very happy for you, Gene, but I’m not content . . . not until you see Carol Portlock at Sloan-Kettering.”

I had my medical history and tissue samples sent to Dr. Portlock’s office and made an appointment. Karen and I went to see her a few days later.

Carol Portlock was tall, very blond, and quite thin. She was cordial, but reserved. I was expecting some cheery news, but from the subtle hints in her face, I suddenly wasn’t sure.

“You’re very healthy,” she said, “very chemo-responsive. But it’s going to come back.”

I was stunned. Karen’s face froze.

“When?” I asked.

“In six months,” she said, so assuredly that I didn’t question it. After a long pause to catch my breath, I asked her what I could do.

“Stem-cell transplant.”

I asked what that meant. She made an appointment for me to see Dr. Stephen D. Nimer, who was the head of hematological oncology at Sloan-Kettering.

Karen and I went to Dr. Nimer’s office the next day. I took to him like a fish to water. Over two-and-a-half hours, he took us through every phase of what would happen to me and how I might feel—if I decided to have the stem-cell transplant. He pulled no punches. Every discomfort was described in detail by Nancy, the nurse practitioner who worked with Dr. Nimer. I was told that I would be in the hospital from four to six weeks, depending on how things went, but that I should count on six weeks. When Dr. Nimer was finished, he asked if I had any questions.

“When can I act again?”

“When do you want to act again?”

“In six months. I’m supposed to do another one of my murder mysteries in May.”

He looked at me with such a beneficent smile and said, “You’re a painter, aren’t you?”

This shocked me. I didn’t remember telling him anything about painting. I suppose I must have mentioned it in passing, but the question seemed like a non sequitur, given what we had been talking about.

“Yes . . .Karen and I paint watercolors.”

“How would you feel if—just as you were about to finish a painting—someone came along and mucked it all up?”

I stared at him a long while. What was he getting at?

“You and I are going to paint a beautiful picture together. In six months you’re going to feel pretty normal—but your immune system will only be about 80 percent of what it should be. Why don’t
you give it another two months? We don’t want anyone to ruin our painting, do we?”

“SOLD!”

I went to Greenwich Hospital for an overnight stay on two occasions, two weeks apart, and they dripped in heavy chemo while I slept. No nausea. I would get up the next morning and go out and play or write or do anything I wanted. The heavy chemo encouraged the production of baby stem cells in my bloodstream. They weren’t red or white cells yet—it was almost as if they wouldn’t decide which color they wanted to be until they grew up. When my blood test shouted, “This guy is ready,” I rushed to Sloan-Kettering, as an outpatient, and—while I was watching television—the doctor in charge extracted stem cells from my blood. It doesn’t hurt; you don’t feel anything. The machine takes your blood while you’re reading or watching television, extracts the stem cells, and then sends the rest of your blood back into your body. The whole thing takes about an hour and a half. You go home, come back the next day, and do it again. After three days they had extracted seven million stem cells, which they put into a small plastic bag and froze.

That Christmas, before entering Memorial Sloan-Kettering for the long stay, I gave Karen a beautiful, but simple, necklace and wrote the following poem on a little card:

Of all the Mormons I’ve ever met,

You’re the first I ever et.”

The day before I entered Sloan-Kettering, I was told that because I was in such good shape, they were going to knock the shit out of me with radiation and heavy chemo, and then pour the
stem cells back into my bloodstream. That night I had the following dream:

G
ENE’S
D
REAM

I was on the fifth floor of a dilapidated apartment house, where I lived in a one-room artist’s garret. Because of some great emergency I had to leave my room, but it was suddenly invaded by a small herd of prehistoric bulls, with long antlers. The bulls weren’t threatening, they were just frightened, and the only way to get them out of my room was for me to whistle for a herd of black stallions to come upstairs, as quickly as they could, and carry the frightened bulls down the four flights of stairs and outside, to safety.

I went to the top of the stairs and whistled as loudly as I could, and, to my great relief, a herd of black stallions came rushing up the stairs and started rounding up the bulls—putting them on top of their backs and ushering them out.

But there was one bull, with long antlers and some human features protruding through his animal hair, who was trying to teach himself to play a violin that had been resting on a small table in the center of the room. And although he wasn’t playing a melody as such, the sounds he was producing were beautiful.

I looked at him while he was playing, and I said to myself, “How is this possible? This young prehistoric bull has just picked up a violin and is not only figuring out how to play it, but is playing beautifully.”

Then I got terribly worried about how much time was passing and about the imminent danger—whatever it was. I pleaded with the bull to put down the violin, but he kept saying, “Not yet . . .wait . . . a little more.”

I finally got him to put the violin on the table just as a beautiful black stallion came up, and, together, we got this unique
bull onto the stallion’s back and safely down the stairs. And then I woke up.

*  *  *

I checked into Memorial Sloan-Kettering on January 30, 2000, under the name of Larry Carter—which was my character’s name in the murder mysteries. That evening, just after I had settled into my hospital room, the phone rang. Karen answered and heard, “Hi, this is the
Blah Blah County News
—how’s Gene doing? We know he’s there under the name Larry Carter—we were just wondering how he is.” Karen said, “You have the wrong number.” We changed rooms.

The next four days were not painful—I had radiation each morning and in the late afternoons—then they dripped in very heavy chemo for five days. Still no nausea. By now every cell in my bloodstream had been killed, and I didn’t have an immune system to speak of. Anyone who came into my room—every doctor, nurse, cleaning lady—had to wash his or her hands, put on rubber gloves, and wear a mask. Karen was not allowed to use my bathroom—she might contaminate it. I made a joke and said, “Come on, she wouldn’t do that,” but she was told that if she needed to pee, she had to take off her gloves and mask, throw them away, walk down the hall to the ladies’ room, come back to my room, wash her hands again, and put on a new mask and a new pair of gloves. Karen came to see me each day. When it was time to say good night, she would kiss me good-bye through her mask. In a strange way it was very romantic. I thought I was in a movie.

In the middle of all these treatments, the press representative for Sloan-Kettering came to see me—wearing her gloves and mask, of course—and told me a story out of Grimm’s fairy tales, except that it had just happened in the lobby downstairs. A young woman walked into the lobby of the hospital, carrying a huge basket of flowers for Larry Carter. The chief of security recognized this
woman’s face and said, “What are you doing here?” The woman said, “Oh, shit—I can’t do this.
STAR
sent me. They want me to get into Gene Wilder’s room and get an interview. Here, give these flowers to anyone who wants them—this is too sleazy for me.”

What
Star
didn’t realize was that if the young lady had succeeded in getting to the floor I was on and had walked into any of the rooms with stem-cell patients while she was looking for me, she could have jeopardized their lives, because—I’m sure—she wouldn’t have known to throw the basket of flowers away, wash her hands, and put on a pair of gloves and a mask before entering the room.

After four days of radiation and five days of the heavy chemo, they gave me a day of rest. On the eleventh day, Karen and I watched three technicians march into my room, wearing masks and gloves and carrying a tiny plastic bag with six million stem cells, all thawed out. (They had taken seven million, but they like to keep one million in reserve.) Everyone sang “Happy Birthday” while the stem cells were being infused into my bloodstream. They weren’t singing because it was my actual birthday but because it was the first day of my new life—February 10, 2000. They had told Karen to bring a bag of lemons because, for some reason, when they pour in the thawed stem cells, there is a strong smell of garlic. I thought it was a joke, but it wasn’t. I had to pass half a lemon back and forth under my nose while the infusion took place, or else the smell of garlic would have been overwhelming.

The next ten days were the most difficult except for one thing that I keep in a small treasure chest in my memory. Each evening, after he had finished his long day in the research lab and after attending to his other stem-cell patients, Dr. Nimer would come into my room, masked and gloved, pull up a chair, and talk with me about movies. He would answer any medical questions, of course, but afterward he loved to talk about movies. Because of his work
he had missed so many good films over the years, but now most of them were on video or DVD, and he wanted to know which my personal favorites were and who was in them. When my throat was too sore for me to talk, I would write my answers on a long, yellow legal pad: