It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive (9 page)

We talked about all sorts of individuals, from the impossible, to the improbable, to the realistic. Within minutes Bob offered his own opinion.

“What would probably make the most sense would be for you to direct the movie.”

Of course it’s something I’d thought of. When you spend weeks, or months, working with someone you think is mucking things up, it’s hard not to think, Oh, man,
I
could do this – and better, too. But it wasn’t something that had entered my mind until the problems with Tim became unmanageable. Even then, I’d had no thoughts of it being a possibility. I could hardly believe Bob had brought it up. That made it even harder to accept when, once the unsigned contract became known throughout the company, I was accused of having planned such a mutiny all along.

Tim had paid me fifteen thousand dollars for the option on the material a year earlier. The production company had reimbursed him for that expense when they took the option over six months later. At that time they’d paid me twenty thousand dollars for the “advance on writing services.” That thirty-five thousand dollars was what I’d been living on for the past year. I offered to give back every cent I’d been paid, even though it was already nearly gone. The company’s response was to initiate a series of legal maneuvers to defend their right to tell my life story, with my permission or without it. I was forced to hire a well-known film industry lawyer who, upon hearing my predicament, eyed me with barely concealed scorn.

“You’re the first person who’s ever asked me to defend his right to give money
back
.”

Finally I decided to appeal, once more, to Tim. Surely, I thought, my old friend would be able to understand a direct, human approach, concentrating on the morality of the situation, instead of the business aspects. I apologized for whatever mistakes I’d made along the way. I asked him to understand that I’d lost faith in our ability to make a film that would make the statements about my existence that were important to me.

“Forget about contractual issues,” I said. “Do you think it would be right to make a movie about the things I went through, knowing that I don’t agree with the way you’re representing them, and knowing that I don’t want it to happen?”

Tim said, “They’re telling me they want me to direct this movie, Evan. As long as they tell me that, I’m obligated to stay involved.”

“But Tim,” I said. “They can’t make the movie without my signing over the rights. And I’m not going to do that as long as you’re attached. I’m sorry. But it’s not going to happen.”

“Well,” Tim said. “I guess we’ll each have to play out our hands, and see who rakes in the chips.”

Several months later, after dozens of threats of lawsuits were hurled my way, a note arrived at my lawyer’s office. It was an acceptance of my initial offer to repay the production company the money I’d received in exchange for its dropping all claims. The letter arrived on a Wednesday, and stated a deadline of the end of business on Friday. I had less than forty-eight hours to come up with thirty-five thousand dollars. I had seven thousand in the bank.

First, I borrowed twelve thousand dollars from my parents. Then I arranged for a
twenty-thousand-dollar bank loan to be issued within twenty-four hours – no small trick for someone with my level of assets. I combined it with every penny of my bank balance, as I had to pay back the money with interest, and had a check delivered to the production company’s office by Friday afternoon. Shortly thereafter my lawyer received a letter relinquishing all claims. A few signatures erased one nasty little dispute of little consequence to the world beyond our small circle.

Just as powerfully as the telling of the story drew people toward me, the selling of the story fragmented relationships. My old friend who’d wanted to direct, the people at the production company, the lawyer who handled the undoing of the deal. The first film company to have approached, Mike Nichols, and the agent who’d recommended I turn him away. As inclusive and nurturing and nutritious as I’d found the act of telling others the story of where I’d been, I found an equal level of divisiveness and depletion in the act of trying to sell it off, or get it back from those who believed it was theirs. It was a costly miscalculation. But worse was the loss of a friend from bygone days.

Meanwhile, Patricia, a woman who struggled with her own substantial difficulties in sharing with me the most personal details of her own life, became the staunch defender of my right to control the disbursement of the details of mine. We hunkered down together through the legal threats. Patricia encouraged me to protect the story as both the asset it was, and for the value it held for me and for those it had touched. She reminded me of the hundreds of letters I’d received from people thanking me for telling what they felt was their own story, and the thousands more who might have felt the same way and not made contact.

“So many people have been inspired by you,” Patricia said. “People who took strength from your recovery. Who wouldn’t have been able to put their own feelings into words. And there’ll be more like them every day who’ll be looking for their own inspiration. That’s an incredible thing. You can’t let anyone take that away and ruin it.”

Patricia is a wonderful woman. We were, for a time, not only a functional couple, but also deeply in love. The juxtaposition of one old friend working hard to betray me while a new love was working to defend and support me made Patricia’s actions feel all the more impressive.

What I was left with after everything was resolved was my history. The tale of where I’ve been. Sharing my history was an act that has had tremendous impact – for me, and for many who’ve let me know what it’s meant to them. For now, my life story is back where it belongs: in my possession.

Or, actually that’s not true. My life story is back where it belongs: in possession of me.

My children don’t live with me. I learned recently, through articles in the newspaper, that their place of residence had been ordered closed by the New York State Department of Health.  I immediately made some calls and, concerned for their safety, made arrangements to have them transferred.  Today I left my apartment to pick up my children and take them to their new home.

On my way to the Empire State Building, where my kids have been stored for close to ten years, I thought the same thoughts as many neglectful fathers.

“If something is going to happen to my children, I’m going to be with them when it does.”

My children don’t really exist.  All that exists is the potential for their existence, and even that is in desperately short supply.  Since I was successfully treated for (and ultimately cured of) leukemia, I’ve been sterile.  As a precaution against just such a probability, I had semen stored years ago, to be used to attempt a pregnancy sometime in the future.  At the time, when I was twenty-four years old and unsure of even short-term survival, the fact that inseminations using frozen sperm had resulted in full-term pregnancies after up to ten years of cryopreservation (the deep freeze) offered me all the breathing room I could’ve ever imagined needing.  I was in a
love-filled, committed relationship. Our future together, in which parenthood would feature prominently, was one of the most compelling reasons to walk the hellish treatment path that promised the only hope for any future at all.

Traveling the subway toward my imagined offspring, I thought back on my young life. I’d rushed into the excitement of an acting career at the age of seventeen, reveling in the travel and adventures while my friends were settling in for four-year stints at state universities.  After the five-year battle to save my life, I scoffed at the notion of stability while attending the weddings of those same friends.  Their children were born, and I felt my pose of superiority substantiated by their jealousy over my latest in a string of lovers. The rest of them are filing cooperatively along the line that runs safely down the middle of the road, I thought. I’m filling my memory banks with a priceless treasure trove of experiences to look back on someday.

Staring into the steam pouring out of the gurgling tank of liquid nitrogen where my emissions had spent ten years, I thought back on the women I’d loved.  I’d had a seventeen-year stretch of serial (more or less) monogamy, with an assortment of beautiful, intelligent, and talented women. They were women who, for the most part, had their own agendas for the future.  Agendas that had more to do with fulfillment achieved through career accomplishment than through building a lasting connection with another human being. The medical technician showed me the thin plastic straws wherein my forsaken extrusions were suspended in an airless, unconscious existence. He plunged them into the portable metal tank in which I would carry them across town. The liquid nitrogen hissed and boiled as it swallowed them, and I wanted to say, “I’m sorry, kids.  I fucked up.  I failed you. I can see where I went wrong, but there’s not a lot I can do about it now.”  Like any father who’s put himself first for too long, I wanted to beg my children’s forgiveness, to circumvent their anger and limit the damage done.  But those are not my children. Not yet.  Only a part of myself, spat out long ago, the denial of which has damaged no one as much as me.

“You wanna watch them transfer your specimens, right?” asked the receptionist at my children’s new home.  Apparently this is a parental tradition of which I’d been unaware.  Not wanting to miss out on any more milestones, I bore witness as another technician, in another lab, immersed them again in their unfathomably frigid womb. There, they’ll continue to wait.

“So, for how long can you use this stuff?” I asked the man who was planting my seeds in the tank.  “How long does it stay good for?”

“We’ve had successful pregnancies with sperm that’ve been cryopreserved for up to thirteen years,” he said.

So there’s still time for me.  Time to get to know those children I might never meet.  I left through the same unmarked door I came in through. I hit the street and reentered the swirl of humanity in the same way I reentered my life.  Saddened by what I’d seen of myself.  Determined to make the next phase of life more meaningful than the last.  And eager to meet the woman who’ll help me bring those kids to life.

I hate New York. I abhor it. I find it an ugly, stinking, depression inducing environment filled with oozing sores in the form of piles of rotting garbage, riddled with bright pink pustules in the form of the violently mentally ill, and wheezing like an asthmatic from stiff, hot blasts of dusty automobile emissions.  And that’s just what you can see. I hate New York. And it’s where I live.

I think New York is a wildly outdated experiment gone horribly, retchingly wrong. I hate the way I feel walking its streets, I’m angry from morning ‘till night at the people crowding me everywhere I go, I fear for my life every time I hop into a cab, and I’ve gone half mad due to denied access to seeing my own sky.  I hate New York City as if it were a syringe filled with lethal virus headed for one of my veins. I hate New York. It’s where I live. It’s where I’ve
chosen
to make my home.

I hate the people in New York. The only place I’ve seen people angrier is on the TV news, beating themselves in Iran or stoning each other in the Middle East. I hate the filth and the brick oven heat of the tunnels we call subways, the toxic black slush we’ve learned to call snow, the miles-wide spillways we’ve dubbed our rivers, and the meager strip of grass beside an eight-lane highway someone says is a park. The only person I like in this city is one man on Ninety-First Street, who stands all day in a green metal box. He sells me my newspaper and he knows, when he gives me my change, not to let his flesh touch the flesh of my hand. For this small act of kindness, which he performs unerringly, he is the one I refuse to condemn.

People possess dogs in New York City. I do not understand this. (People also bring up children here, but that’s a crime too big for this court.) I watch people walking their dogs in the city. It happens on my block, and every block I’ve ever passed. People walk alongside their canines, absently holding a slackened leash, their hands slipped inside a paper-thin petroleum product, while the dogs sniff the ground for what I already know is there. The remnants of other dogs’ shit.

I hate watching people waiting for their dogs to shit; I hate watching the dogs waiting to shit; I hate watching the dogs while they’re shitting; and I hate watching the people picking up the pieces of warm dog shit in their plastic covered hands. I hate all these things. I hate the puddles of urine half on the building and half on the sidewalk. I hate to see it running down the cracks between the slabs of concrete. I hate the smeared mess of a dog with diarrhea, and I hate the well-formed mounds left by those whose bowels are at the top of their game. I hate the dogs of New York City, and I hate their doggy runs; I hate the dog owners of New York, and the people who love them. I hate New York City. It’s where I live. I hate it. I live here. This is my home.

I hate the stains left by the dog shit on the sidewalks of New York City. I remember when the laws about dog shit were changed, because I’ve been here twenty-six years and that’s a very long time. They called them “pooper scooper” laws, and while I liked the law, I hated the name because I suspected it was like Father’s Day and Hallmark – a creation on which to found an industry. For a while it even worked. There were those dog owners who toted plastic contraptions that looked like a child’s toy, if ever a child’s toy existed that was a miniature version of a custodian’s broom and dustpan. Yes, “pooper scoopers” were actually seen on the streets of New York City for a few months, until the savvy inhabitants discovered the uses of disposable plastic storage bags. We are truly God’s wretched spawn.

I liked the laws when they came about – which is the only thing I’ve said I like so far other than the man in the green metal box – but I now feel they are inadequate. If dogs are to be allowed on the island with the rest of us (a prospect that is already more than a prospect but that I feel shouldn’t be) there need to be much tighter controls in regard to their emissions. My concept, you won’t be surprised to learn, is harsh. Yet it is simple and elegant, in its manner of putting responsibility into the hands of those with whom it belongs. It is not even very far from the laws already on the books. Were I the leader of this city, I would hereby proclaim that from now on, to spare us all the distasteful inevitability of tracking particles of dog shit from those tan and brown outlines on the sidewalks into our meager refuges seven stories up, all dog owners be required not to pick the shit up once it’s already besmirched the walking surfaces we’re all sentenced to share. No, not to pick the shit up once it’s already left its imprint on our city’s epidermis, but to catch the shit as it comes out of the dog’s ass
before it hits the ground
. That is a disgusting sight I would be glad to see.

I know most people won’t agree. I know most people will say it’s unwieldy and unrealistic. In fact, I was imagining how several people I know might react to this idea as I was walking home the other night. I was crossing West End Avenue at Eighty-ninth Street, where the traffic lights lose their synchronization with the others up and down the avenue. Sometimes this leads to lucking out in terms of getting a green light to cross, even as all the others along the avenue would be red, and sometimes it makes the wait to cross seem endless. I was, on this particular night, trying to figure, and then trying to figure if it was possible to figure, whether my luck has been mostly good or mostly bad in regard to this in the ten years I’ve lived at this location. Deciding that the answer would be impossible to obtain without sacrificing substantial amounts of sleep to research, I finally started to cross West End when I saw a woman walking her dog.

I don’t know how I knew what I was about to see. I had a premonition. The woman was behind and to the left of her canine. The dog hunched its back in its pre-defecatory stance. She held the leash in her left hand, as her right hand was already prepped with a plastic baggy. Some dog owners prefer to pre-bag their hand, while others prefer to apply the bag after the dog has completed its mission. These distinctions might be worth an investigation of their own at some point. I was watching the dog shit (which I don’t like to do), and I was watching the woman getting ready to pick the shit up (which I didn’t plan on observing, if I could help it). I was thinking, “Wow. People would think I was crazy if they knew what I’d like to make the dog owners of this city do”. Then, before bagging her dog’s shit, in a move that was done with a precision that made me sure it was practiced, the woman shifted the dog’s leash into her pre-bagged right hand, reached into her pocket with her now free left hand, withdrew a piece of tissue from her pocket, and
wiped her dog’s ass
.

I stopped walking in the middle of the avenue. I couldn’t believe what I’d seen, just as some of you won’t believe me now. I don’t know if this woman’s actions were due to a concern for her dog’s contentment, or to one-too-many stains on her white chintz sofa slipcovers. I had never seen anyone wipe a dog’s ass before, and I’m glad to say I haven’t seen it since. For those of you who feel my idea of having dog owners catch their dog’s shit before it hits the ground is too harsh, I can say that I don’t ever want to see it again. I vow that I will never propose legislation requiring dog owners to wipe the assholes of their pets. If the woman I saw recently was spotted doing it in public again, I’d suggest she ought to be given a ticket. “Public lewdness”, or some such charge. “Unnatural intimacy with an inhuman” might fit. However, on the matter of pooper scooping, or baggie grabbing, or whatever label you’d like to give the grotesque action of inefficiently scraping dog shit off of concrete, I will remain unmovable. If you think recent administrations were tough, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Forget Giulliani time, All Hail Handler land! And a clean land, for humans, it shall be.

Meanwhile, I’ll go on hating New York City. I’ll go on ranting about the money spent by the transportation authority to formulate the most indestructible plastic seats that get smashed to bits within weeks of delivery. I’ll continue to fantasize about placing the bus driver who drives as fast as he can from red light to red light under the wheels of his own bus. I will keep imagining executing the drivers who run red lights, the bike messengers who speed down one-way streets the wrong way, the men – and women – who piss between parked cars, and the guy I saw jerking off lying on the sidewalk on Seventh Street twelve years ago but I can never forget.

I hate this city with a passion I’ve never felt for anything else. It has nearly murdered me with its septic swill, destroyed my spirit with its pernicious indifference, made me paranoid from its pestilential infestations, and nearly homicidal from the madness of man’s penchant for their chemical remedies. I hate New York City, I hate the people who live here, I hate the ones who come to visit, I hate the ones who go back home. I hate myself, I hate every one of you, I hate everyone I’ve ever met. I hate New York City, it’s where I live, I’m never leaving, I hate it. This…is my home.