Reclaiming Futures; Losing Futures

Back from Ithaca. Had an excellent time although driving there and back was problematic.

I stuck to fugly toll ways and Interstates because I figured the risk of black ice was less. At some point on the way there, I found myself trapped in Binghamton, which apparently has invented time travel and imported engineers from some Soviet block nation in the 1980s to do its highway upgrades. That was a horrifying experience. Then the Whitney Point Bridge was out so I was rerouted via an unmarked detour for 30 miles along the narrow, hilly, ice-covered roads of Broome County’s backcountry.

B is exactly at the midpoint of the new Hep C protocol. Appears to be doing extremely well – liver enzymes back to normal, and there is color in his cheeks. He has a future again. I couldn’t be happier for him.

B has a very close female friend named Berta who was diagnosed with Stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma 15 years or so ago. This is tantamount to a death sentence. Berta didn’t want to die, so she researched the most effective experimental treatments, found one, and then pressured the initially reluctant Canadian health care system into providing it for her. A decade and a half later, she is alive and thriving.

I have another acquaintance – the erstwhile Busy on the Well – who did something along those lines after she was diagnosed at Stage 4 with grapefruit-sized tumor on her chest. She had to grapple with the Louisiana health care system. Her misadventures are chronicled here. She is a brilliant writer, and I always wondered why she never published this blog, which I’m sure would be a runaway bestseller.

So anyway, you know. Recovery. It can be done.

“I always figured that Robin was the central focus of your life,” I said to Ben. “That you were more or less living through him.”

Ben shook his head. “Robin has never been the central focus of my life. Robin is the central responsibility of my life. Subtle but important distinction.”

“So what is the central focus of your life?” I asked. “Your health?”

Ben shrugged and nodded. “What Berta taught me is that for the first six weeks or so, everyone’s there for you, everyone cares. But then they get tired of caring. And you’re still sick. So it’s better never to talk about it.”

Now that he has a future again, he’s begun making long-term plans. Sketchy long-term plans. But still…

“Hugo,” he said. “I want to live in Hugo, Oklahoma.”

Hugo, Oklahoma is Circus Town USA.

“Wow,” I said.

“It’s warm,” he said. “Most of the time. And most of my friends live there. I have a much bigger social circle there than I do here. Plus, you know, elephants. Cairn & Noble” – biggest of the American touring circuses – “has been after me to work for them for the past three years. A thousand bucks a week under the table.”

“Not bad,” I said.

“And then when I hit 64, it’s off to Cuba.”

“Cuba?”

“Sure. I figure once relations are entirely normalized, Cuba will be the number one place for Americans to retire. Cheap, excellent health care system, and 90 minutes by ferry from the motherland.”

I felt a distinct pang then thinking that Ben could ever be farther away from me than a five-hour car ride over the river and through the snow.

Thing is Ben is still the human being I most enjoy on the planet. He diverts, amuses, and informs me like no other. He’s one of the very few humans who’s more than just another slot in the social algorithm for me that can be filled by – really – any number of replaceable human beings. Ben is completely irreplaceable.

I still mourn the fact that we weren’t able to make a go out of it.

Although I know perfectly well that we cannot make a go out of it, that our complementary character dysfunctions mix like bleach and ammonia, so I’m not tempted to try.

But he is – and I suppose always will be – the other voice in my inner dialogue.

###

Ben had invited me up there to watch movies, and watch movies is what we did. Foxcatcher. (Meh.) The Imitation Game. (Brilliant.) Inherent Vice. (Meh.) He also gifted me with this exceedingly cool Kindle and a pair of old-fashioned earphones that have the best sound quality of any electronic audio device I’ve ever listened to so that listening to MP3s of Variations on a Theme of Paganini on my phone is like summoning the ghost of the old, arthritic maestro Rachmaninoff to perform on the foot of my bed.

On Saturday, I got the sad news from Stephen that Alice T had died. Drank herself to death.

When Alice was Playboy’s fiction editor, she bought the very first short story I ever wrote. I was a good enough writer at the time to capture her interest, but sadly not a good enough writer to incorporate her very painstaking edits, so the story never actually ran. Alice made sure I got paid a very handsome kill fee.

She was unfailingly gracious, generous, and supportive of me. I used to stay in her gorgeous, antique-filled West Village apartment every time I traveled to NYC for years and years and years. She introduced me to all sorts of movers and shakers in an effort to further my career. She was a great lady. My own private Jackie Kennedy.

I never knew she had a drinking problem. I don’t drink very much myself, so I never know what constitutes acceptable alcohol imbibing in others. Two drinks after dinner? Ten drinks after dinner? I have no gage.

She wasn’t able to reinvent herself after she got laid off from Playboy. Although she played Gordon Lish to any number of up-and-coming writers in the 1990s who now publish regularly in The New Yorker, Playboy was the brand, not Alice T.

I have another friend, Ellen D, who found herself in a similar predicament. But Ellen is attached to the very big, very gluey science fiction fandom community, so was able to leverage the power of her own name to produce – and sell – any number of fantasy and horror anthologies.

Alice couldn’t do that. Or didn’t want to do that.

I’m quite sure that Alice could have taught at the college level or become an editor at any one of a number of prestigious if non-remunerative lit-fic magazines like Tin House. I’m not sure why she didn’t. I know Playboy paid her a shitload of money, but I always had the impression she had her own money, too.

I guess, you know, the thing about reinventing yourself is that you have to be humble. You have to have the strength of character to say, Yes, even though I once made $150,000 a year and now make but [your paltry figure goes here], what I am doing is worthwhile.

Of all people, I should know, right?

But Alice apparently preferred an alcoholic blur to this kind of exercise in recontexturalizing.

It makes me deeply sad to think of her dying in despair and all alone. She deserved more.