In the Body of the World (10 page)

There’s still time to back out. In theory the cancer is gone, so I do not need this poison. It’s overkill. I see Toast and Lu catch each other’s eye. They quote the “all you need is one bad cell” story. I think of all those much more evolved people who cured themselves with juices and diets. As the nurses prepare me for the first treatment, I think of a documentary I recently saw about assisted suicide. The man in the film was dying from ALS and he was only a few days away from not being able to swallow. I repeatedly watched the part where he drinks the poison and then slowly dies. His death was totally mundane, almost relaxing. My death from chemo will not be like that. It will happen within minutes. There will be choking and green toxic vomit and writhing. Diane, a tough-talking nurse from the Bronx, senses my terror and ambivalence. She launches into a cautionary tale of a chemo resistor (with Bronx accent): “There was this patient who came in here with her breast literally hanging off from the size of her tumor. She was giving herself those fancy vitamin C treatments. After about two weeks on the chemo her tumor shrank and began to disappear. Then she tells
me, ‘You see, Diane, the vitamin C is finally working.’ ” Diane is hysterical, and funny people can get me to do just about anything. Her partner is Regina, a woman who is so much a nurse that you instantly stick out your arm when you see her coming. They are kind and weathered and know their chemicals and antineoplastic drugs. It’s always people. Dr. Deb and her enveloping kindness, Dr. Handsome who walked around the table. Dr. Katz who made a house call that saved me. The nurses at the Mayo who took me for walks and bathed me. Now Diane and Regina.

Regina has to stick a huge needle through my chest skin to go into the port. And that first stab is so deep and painful, it punctures my soul. I follow Sue’s direction. This is my medicine and these women, Regina and Diane, are my medicine women guides. There are no trees in the infusion suite. There is no moon or night sky, but the suite will be my rain forest. There are bags of liquids hanging above my head—Benadryl and more steroids. These enter me first and pump me with heart-racing adrenaline. I am taking off. Then it’s time for the Taxol. Lu holds my hand. I take a deep breath and close my eyes. I pray to surrender. I invite Kali’s magic into me. I visualize liquid fire coursing through my muscles and organs and blood. I see it reaching deep into my nodes and intricate fibers and cells. I see it going in even deeper down to the archetypal network, down to
molecules of sorrow and self-hatred and pain. I ask Kali to let me be brave. I ask her not to hold back, to take me all the way. Suddenly my face is on fire and Regina comes, takes one look, and stops the Taxol. This happens, she says. The body gets overwhelmed at the beginning. Somehow I like this burning. I like my red face. I am an awakened warrior. I know Kali has taken root. I know now I have the women around me who will guide me through.

The whole ritual will take almost five hours. I will do this five more times. Each time I will close my eyes and feel Kali and her raging fluid. Each time she will ravish and char me deeper, and each time I will look at my fellow patients in their cozy bedlike chairs. The Dominican woman in her fabulous hat, the stunning Egyptian girl who looks just like her attentive mother, the twelve-year-old African American boy with his raging headphones, the elegant Waspy woman whose husband always comes to fetch her later. Some are dozing. Some are staring off. Many of them are here alone. I will look at their faces and know they are my tribe. I will say a silent prayer for each of us that our potions burn away our sickness and despair. I want to live, of course I do. But right now what I want the most is to be swimming freely alongside the others in this burning river.

SCAN
THE OBSTRUCTION, OR HOW TREE SAVED ME

I was flying through days one to three of the first treatment without even the slightest reaction, and I was a little spooked. It might have been the steroids that had me amped and busy cleaning out closets at two in the morning. Or the Zofran, a very effective antinausea medication, that had kept the side effects at bay, but suddenly on day four the chemo was in me, on me, through me. It began with mild skirmishes and then, within minutes, there was all-out body war.

Chemotherapy can kill cancer cells if it can stop them from dividing. The faster the division of cells, the more hope of zapping them and dissolving the tumor. I no longer had any tumor or cancer cells. The chemo was going after the
possibility
of cells: any lone soldier cell that brazenly began forming would be zapped in the act of creation, or commit cell suicide, something called self-death or apoptosis. I was lucky that my cancer
was the kind in which cells did rapidly divide, the kind that chemo was most effective at killing. But sadly it couldn’t distinguish those cells from the healthy ones. It attacked them where they grew the fastest: in the blood, the mouth, the hair, the stomach, and the bowels. My stomach and colon were already vulnerable from the months of infection, which is why on day four, my whole lower body shut down, literally. My stoma and the surrounding area had already proved to be highly sensitive and would swell whenever I ate the wrong food or was even a little anxious. Then I wouldn’t be able to anchor the bag properly on the swollen surface and it would fall off or break open. But now something else was going on. Well, actually nothing was going on. That was the problem. My poop and my body had come to a complete standstill. It was as if my body had been scared into shock and had died, even though I still seemed to be breathing. I began to get sick, really sick, nauseous and dizzy and weak. My goddaughter, Adisa, and my niece Katherine, had volunteered to take care of their auntie godmother for the weekend. I didn’t want to worry them, so I really tried to ignore what was happening, to eat things that would make the nausea better. But all that did was further clog the drain. My stomach began to swell around the stoma and I felt worse, sicker, vomiting and spinning until sometime very early in the morning I found myself crawling on
all fours, moaning in pain. My bag was empty. Before I knew it, I was back in the hospital, strapped to an IV. I had a serious obstruction—an obstacle, a block, a barricade.

I was back in the room with the tree. This time I felt lonely and sad, deeply sad. Some part of me didn’t want to cooperate or move forward.

The tree seemed to mock my self-pity. I was raging, I was totally exhausted by myself, exhausted by my desperate fear of vanishing into ordinary. I was at the end of my body’s road. Everything had stopped inside me, even tears. I passed out.

When I woke up my bag was full and life, it seemed, was coursing through me. The tree had worked its magic. What I didn’t know was that the tree was actually inside me and saving my life. It turns out that Taxol, one of my chemo chemicals, is found in the bark of the ancient yew tree. Even better, the Taxol is made from the needles of the tree, so the tree does not have to be destroyed. Taxol functions to stabilize the cell structure so solidly that killer cells cannot divide and multiply.

It was a tree that was calming and protecting me, fortifying my cell structure so it was safe from attack. I had finally found my mother.

SCAN
I WAS THAT GIRL WHO WAS SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD, OR HOW POT SAVED ME LATER

It seems a lifetime ago that I smoked pot on my way to school, sitting in a tiny sports car driven by a huge guy named W. I would be wrecked by homeroom, starving for munchies by second period. W, the son of a famous sports star, and I had gone from being a rising football player (him) and an overly enthusiastic, slightly desperate cheerleader (me) to a stoned-out dealer and a hippie chick in about three weeks. The transition was seamless. I knew that W, who reminded me of Lenny in
Of Mice and Men
(those huge hands), had a crush on me, so I was happy to be in his car every morning, sharing his stash. For my sixteenth birthday he gave me a tin filled with an ounce of grass and hundreds of black beauties, which kept me awake for the rest of the year, compulsively talking and constantly licking my lips. I did better on speed than on pot, which made me paranoid, and I was already paranoid. When I smoked pot, all I did
was apologize. I’m stoned. I’m sorry. But that didn’t stop me. I loved arriving at school, stepping out of W’s incredibly cool car in a cloud of reefer, sunglasses concealing my bloodshot eyes, as Janis or the Grateful Dead blared in the background, and wobbling onto the plush green lawn in my torn blue jeans and Frye boots. I had no desire to be present. I despised Scarsdale. I was an outcast from the get-go. Never pretty enough, rich enough, thin enough. Never having the right friends, house, or clothes. The ’60s, well, really, drugs, freed me. I got stoned and stopped giving a shit. I see now it was a momentary solution. Drugs and booze saved my life until they started to destroy it. From the first drink something hard, taut, and wired released in me. I was suddenly fun and funny—the life of the party. I was that wild girl, the one everyone secretly thought would be dead by twenty-one. The one who always pushed the edge, drove the car too fast with no hands on the steering wheel at midnight, the one who dared the boys and, when they were afraid, led the way leaping off the high quarry ledge, the one who got drunk with much older guys in dark joints that no one else even knew existed in a place like Scarsdale. The one who dated Billy, the heroin addict who was at least seven years older. With his Harley and his cool black motorcycle jacket, he would pick me up every day and we would spend the afternoon at his house, Billy nodding off, me
mad methadrine talking. I was that girl who couldn’t stop having sex. Sex relieved the pain and I was almost always in pain, so I needed a lot of sex. My life was spent managing the pain. I did heroin the night before my French SATs and was still so stoned the next day, I drew a huge black
X
through the entire exam. I was that girl who got arrested for stealing a huge bag of sunglasses from Genung’s department store in White Plains for my friends or my wished-for friends, in order to ratchet up my popularity. I was that sad, wild girl, who was clearly the outcome of something that had happened or was happening to her inside her house, but in those days no one knew the signs or would even admit that such a thing was even possible. I was that girl who ran away after my father found me on the phone with Beth Post, my girl crush, the most beautiful blond girl (also a theme throughout my life). My father went crazy, humiliated me on the phone, called me horrible names for hours, whipped my legs so hard with his belt there were welts, then told me he was sending me to a school for juvenile delinquents and threw me in the basement to sleep with the dog. I was that girl who took off in the middle of the night and walked miles in the dark (diving into bushes to dodge police) to the other side of Scarsdale, where I snuck into my best friend Ginny’s house, up into her attic bedroom, and woke her up pacing, out of breath. I was that
girl who slipped out every week and drove with W and his hippie friends to Manhattan to the Fillmore East (with at least a pound of hashish under the seat) to hear Grace Slick or Tina Turner. I was ready for anything. I was that wild girl who never thought about consequences. When I was seventeen and my parents were out of town, I flew to Berkeley, California, from New York and met Jimmy, the coke dealer. I spent two days testing coke and did so much, I had no ability to tell one crop from another. All I remember is eating a cooked artichoke dipped in warm butter. I flew back with a pound of pure coke (a thousand dollars’ worth) in the pocket of Billy’s black motorcycle jacket, which he had loaned me for courage. Imagine trying to get through today’s security with a pound of coke in your pocket. I was a suicide girl on a radical mission to get out—out of Scarsdale, whitebourgeoissocialclimbingshoppingmallstifling, out of my family, out of my body—and drugs were the means of transport.

I was that girl in college who lived half naked, an exaggerated exhibitionist, an out bisexualalmostlesbian, guilt-tripping and seducing every straight woman I knew, sleeping with my roommate during the week and with men on the weekends when her boyfriend came to stay. I could never seem to land in either court. My hunger for flesh and touch, breasts and penises,
mouths, love, and sex was massive, urgent, and indiscriminate. I was that girl who became a bartender in a redneck bar in Vermont and brought booze to all my literature classes. I was the one who slept with most of my professors and thought that was simply part of the course. I was that girl who gave the commencement speech at college graduation and spoke out against racism and sexism and then sat down in my seat in my cap and gown and drank a bottle of Jack Daniel’s passed to me in a brown paper bag.

Later, when I’d spent all of the thousand dollars that my father gave me at graduation (in about two weeks), I was that wild girl turned mundane tragedy. I was that girl who fell into my twenties unglamorously and compulsively promiscuous, drunk, and weepy, who ended up working in a Mafia after-hours club sleeping with a delicious-smelling hit man, waitressing in black tights and an emerald tuxedo top with cheap diamond buttons. I was that girl who woke up one night from a blackout to find Frankie, one of the good-looking Mafia owners of the joint, banging my head against the bar, ripping off my necklaces, while the other owners watched without even thinking of intervening. I was that girl who went out every night praying someone, anyone, would finally put me out of my misery. It was on the hard ground of the Old San Juan airport parking lot in Puerto Rico, having just been beaten up by my
then boyfriend, eventual husband, that for whatever reason, and to this day it confounds me, I got down on my knees and swore to a God I didn’t believe in that if I were granted the return of my mind, I would change. As I gripped the broken high heel of my shoe, and as cheap black makeup dripped down my swollen, drunken cheeks, I knew I needed to offer something huge because I had fallen so far. I was that wild girl who had totally lost my way, squandered my talents and gifts, alienated those who loved and believed in me, betrayed lovers and wives (an entrenched pattern born of an early love triangle—seducer father, perfect mother). I was that pathetic girl who had spent those central formative years frying my brain molecules. I had lost huge opportunities because of my arrogance, defiance, and righteousness. Putting down the bottle and the drugs was the hardest thing I ever did. At twenty-three I was sober, totally broke, and regularly visiting the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Hospital in the Village with anxiety attacks. I didn’t have a dollar to my name. I didn’t even have a bank account until much later. I lived in a fourth-floor walk-up on Christopher Street for $120 a month and sold Avon to drag queens on the block. I taught writing in Harlem at a school for pregnant girls where full-bellied teenagers spent most of the class sucking their thumbs, trying to calm their poor terrorizedsoontobemotherwithoutaclueordesire
nerves. I had nothing with which to self-medicate. There was no way to silence the avalanche of self-hatred, criticism, and fear that had been unleashed once I put the booze and drugs away. I was addicted to Tab and Vantage cigarettes and was a serious vegan, which meant I was eating pickled mushrooms and getting very little protein for my very troubled brain. Honestly, I don’t remember eating. But I didn’t drink or drug.