JUST IN TIME FOR DINNER

I try to run my food consumption
like a good German runs his railroad:
ON TIME! Not just diabetes
nailed me to the cross,
but Ma & Pa whose world
didn't revolve around the sun,
but around a Lazy Susan.
But tonight, o boy,
tonight I was gonna feast...
Dine... Eat!...Grit-up! GO
FUCKING CRAZY!
I was sick at sticking
to strict diets & marginal fare--
not because of medical dictates,
but because my pockets were bare.
Tonight, they'll be no Heinz
baked beans/salami & eggs,
or Campbells Tomato slop
& Keebler Krackers crunched
on top like fake grated cheese;
and no peanut butter
& bullshit. No, not tonight.

Now, I ain't no fuckin chef,
but I can burn a little;
I can fry shit up
& make it happen
in the cast-iron skillet--
finish it off in the oven;
get that top char happening
& the bloody ooze
from the inside running
into that baked potato
slathered in butter
complemented by fresh
iceberg lettuce hearts,
Jersey tomato wedges
lapping up imported hazelnut
olive oil & Tuscany vinegar
& a hint of Dijon mustard.
O, man, gimme a glass
of Pelligrino with a lemon wedge
& call the undertaker--
I'm ready to go!

My man, Ramon,
cut me a one and half inch aged Ribeye
& I carefully culled the rest.
Exiting, I began to taste the dinner.
I started to salivate; drool
threatened to leak out a side of my mouth;
I made sure to swallow.

I prepared the salad & dressing,
heated the oven to 350 & inserted
one Idaho marvel which,
after 20 minutes took, cut open,
& spooned in an ungodly amount of butter
into its soul
& proceded to heat the skillet.
After dressing the Ribeye,
I flung a few drops of water
on the skillet--they popped,
& hissed; and when I lowered the red slab
of cow into the pan,
it sizzled.
The aroma of exceptional steak hitting
all the right senses.

Three minutes laer
I was sitting at my table,
watching the NBC evening world news with Lester Holt,
about to take a mouthful
of heaven...
when they came
relentlessly:
Hemorroids & rectal suppositories,
vaginal itches, penis carbuncles,
COPD & emphysema & breathing tubes,
toothless people talking out of their necks,
rasping gasping for a reason to live,
chair lifts, stair lifts, soul lifts,
menstration pads, piss pads, shit pads,
brain pads...Alzheimers leaking memories
and a thousand yard stare, Parkinsons
shakes, bi-polar, tri-polar, quasi-polar...
diabetes drugs--a new one an hour,
Pepto Bismal, diarrhea, and all manner
of discharges...
or just plain hanging on
by a fucking thread...all tied up
& made pretty by those beautiful & happy victims
by a beautiful red bow
around a Toyota for Christmas
with a Golden Retriever loving you up.
My balls went into a vacuum;
my butter curdled;
my steak stunk;
salad wilted;
Pelligrino flat & foul tasting.

I got off my ass & out.

The old Italian, Stromboli,
had the Yankee game on;
Judge coming to the plate.
Hey, Nick, gimme two slices...
and wait--put some anchovies on em;
make it to stay.
It was only the top
of the fourth
with the Yankees down a run.
All in all
not bad, not bad
at all.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

SOMEBODY'S GONNA DIE

first in this race
pitting me against
my brother.
I saw him yesterday
& it seems like
he's winning; he got fat,
sluggish, lumbering,
winded, stuggling
for air on his flight
up a starecase to see me.
For so many reasons
I can't let that happen:
who would I talk to,
laugh with,
get angry at,
believe I'm better than?
And
I never did him any favors
turning him onto dope
when I was young
& he was younger.

Seventeen years ago
I got clean
while he kept at it,
wanting to do more research
on addiction
& dependence
& being dead
while breathing.
And now
I merely have
diabetes,
congestive heart failure,
& COPD
emphysema
which puts me
at a disadvantage.
We had learned
that in our family
sickness was lauded;
the prize
was attention;
you did less
with more;
the dream was extended,
the womb elongated,
the warm float
endless.
Taking care of ourselves
only led
to taking care of others
and who really wants
to do that.

We narrowed our worlds
to only two,
racing each other
to the grave.

Stay tuned.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

STICKY-NOTES

for your brain
comes preinstalled
from the manufacture
at no extra cost
to you; some work
and some do not--
as to why
we don't know.
They're boxed
& layered
with general divisions
& sub-divisions
like: Family,
Lovers, Sex, Food,
Pleasures, Pain,
Betrayals and
Not Yet Named and some
are left blank
with possibility.

Today, it was cancer
& The Babe & his daughter's death
at the age of 102.
I never had cancer,
never knew The Babe
and didn't know his daughter,
but I did have diabetes
and thought a lot about,
and gravitated toward,
dying & death at 11
seemingly going forward.
The Times had Julia's demise
noted & all I had to do
was click on it & there I was
at 12 remembering
The Babe not able to eat
the white of a hard-boiled egg
without blood
gushing from his gums
& pain indenting his body
into a jolting question mark.
My note had many
traumatic question marks:
how was I going to die?
how messy would it be?
who would be there
to hold my hand
and get me
from this place
to the next?
I was able to see
the starched white nurses'
starched white uniforms,
smell the disinfectant,
taste the bile
of fear, and fear
each minute yet to come.

I read his bio
61 years ago,
but it stuck
somewhere
in the stack
under Health
maybe Dying
maybe both.

Breathing
after the first breath
is dangerous.
It should come
with instructions
or warnings--
but then again,
no. they shouldn't--
it's a crap shoot--
let's leave it
at that.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

MARY TYLER MOORE IS DEAD

and I can't say I'm sorry.
I spoke to her once
while she was in Canada
filming some bullshit
and I was holed up
in my Greenwich Village pad
bloody and bandaged and minus
four toes and still trying
to dream and she
was in a phone booth
with a second or two,
she told me,
between takes.
I'd tried for years
to get my memoir to her: Confessions
Of An Uncontrolled Diabetic.
I tried through my doctors,
her publicist, her husband's colleagues,
and finally through her assistants.
The years were 1982 through '85
and she was living in the San Remo.
I was convinced that between the insulin shocks,
insulin shots, piss testing, food deprivations,
depressions from sugar highs, anger from the lows,
a commonality of Brooklyn, doctors, fears and
foreboding, she'd get behind the work if
she read it, though I never particularly liked
her work: too pretty, too perky, too sweet,
too American, but, hey, she held some ins
to my outs.
She was worth a shot.
Getting published,
getting validated,
getting out of this thing
called "life" was worth
whatever lies
I had to tell.
An actor friend of mine
knew one of her assistants
and so I traipsed up to the San Remo
and dropped the book off for her
with the militarily clad doorman.
After a year
I forgot about it.
And then a phone call
on a rain slicked day.
She was probably sorry
she didn't get my answering machine.
After my hello
she told me who she was.
"Sorry," she said,
"I can't get involved with this."
I just held the receiver.
"Best of luck," she said,
and hung up.
I could hear her voice catch.
I heard, "I'd really like to, but..."
kinda tone.
I'd suspected the work cut too close
to Mary's bone and wasn't surprised
a decade later when she wrote about
her alcoholism and the less savory
parts of her so called charmed life.
"Fuck her," I said at the time
and went back to what I did best:
hide
behind words
& substances.

I might have another eleven years
to go--give or take--and am not displeased
about the arc my life has taken
before and after Mary.
Redford must have sensed, too,
her drunken selfishness and filmed it.
Really,
it was her most honest role.
I should know:
I've played it
once or twice
myself.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

BEING ALIVE

at sixty-nine
makes as much sense
as a deaf & dumb
ventriloquist,
a fountain hidden
in a urinal,
a virgin
giving her lover
skid chains;
a circus
of syringes,
earthworms
who get up
& beg; waves
cresting beneath
the skin.

Sense
& nonsense,
everything
& nothing.
I've been
a heedless
& sometimes headless
man, attuned to only
my heart's trumpet.

Like tonight:
a good-natured whore
helped me bridge
consciousness.
She promoted this semicolon
of calm
that allowed this poem
to write itself
before I test my blood
& take a shot for Hagan-Daz.

Seventy awaits.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

I WANT A LITTLE SUGAR

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbKlvWvpD2g

Don't you?
A little rush?
Make you woozy,
it will,
make you
thrash your head,
side to side,
your body shimmy
like fresh made jello,
feel the wetness slide
within and outside you.
C'mon darlin,
ya can leave
your insulin
home; I got plenty
and besides:
finally we'll be
someplace where
we're not.
Slide it
over.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

LOVING THE LIVING...& THE DEAD

COULD YOU MAKE THAT GENERIC, PLEASE


Harry was slumped over his breakfast tray; his beatific face sublimely nestled into a blueberry muffin. The only problem the nurses could discern was that he looked to be on the far side of blue, and, as far as they could tell, not a whisper was coming out of him.
In that instant the boredom of bedpans and blood pressure ceased, and a code blue was issued. All of a sudden from lethargy and sullenness, an immediacy sprang to life harnessing all their energy and focus on their lifesaving call to duty; I would imagine much like how a S.W.A.T team would feel being roused in pursuit of a cop killer. One thing was for sure: it beat the hell out of morning rounds, or meetings.
Unfortunately, besides taking the briefest of histories and current medical needs, they didn’t know shit about Harry, except that he almost bought it last night in the emergency room. He had screamed then about how much pain he was in and to prove it, threw up on one of the poor admitting nurses who had the bad luck to draw him. He had tried to warn her. He told her that among the many problems he has, he had a diabetic ulceration inside the cavity that remained after having four toes amputated. He was in so much pain it was making him nauseous. She said he couldn’t be seen until she had taken some history, including the type of insurance he had. It was then that his projectile vomit caught her a little below the opening in her blouse. Her first instinct was to brush it off her chest before it ran down her cleavage, but, luckily, she stopped herself before her hands, too, got into the goo.
Finally making his point, he was escorted into the bathroom where he rinsed out his mouth and was then led to a gurney. As soon as he was inside the ER and lying on his side, he calmed down and soon afterward was asleep. It was only when the same nurse came back to get the insurance information from him, this time wearing a surgical mask on her face and a plastic gown covering her torso, that anyone noticed that his chin was resting on his chest; a chest which was not going up and down and up and down and up and down.
Blessedly, all thinking stopped. For how long, nobody could know. All the powers of the emergency room, was focused and put into action. For the first time that night they were mercifully back to reciting the multiplication table the old way. Their reaction time was spellbinding. A nurse began stripping him of clothing and shoes. Into a new vinyl bag they went; it looked much like a large trash bag, only clear and thick. Another shook him, while still another nurse began to run a line into a vein; and another began attaching those electrodes to his chest and hooked him up to a heart monitor. The first nurse who was done with her assignment, ran back in with a bottle of glucose, should he be diabetic and in insulin shock. Harry, groggy, and in a fog, had tried to lift his eyelids. They fluttered. To Harry, it was all a berserk swirl. Jump cuts. A spastic’s dance.
One other thing moved in Harry’s struggle: his eyeballs. They rose into the back of his skull. We might consider that trivial, but they were all signs! And all they needed. Working even harder, having more purpose, (if that was possible), they began to rush in with antidotes for everything that Harry might have taken, as they hurled questions at him: Drugs? Poison? Dreams?
Harry, after a time, was coming around. And for some reason he was angry. Each question they asked he screamed out a wobbly “no” to. There was a nurse situated behind Harry’s head who dutifully recorded each “no” to their questions. They asked if he had mistakenly took more medication than prescribed or obtained illegally, drank, or wanted to end his life. Each time he answered he seemed to become more awake. Who’s your primary doctor, phone number? Harry was like a resistant submarine breaking water. A doctor went behind him, put his hands underneath his arms, and hoisted him up to where his head was lying on the pillow. Once satisfied that he was out of the woods, they returned to triaging more mundane patients. A little while after that, Harry was resting comfortably, his color having returned to his cheeks, (he now looked like a skinned pig slung over the back of a Chinatown butcher, the head lolling over the butcher’s shoulder), his vital signs stable.

It was a busy night as far as New York City’s sickness was concerned; there was never any shortage of disease. It was standing room only; so much so that they had to put people on stretchers in the hallways. A chorus of moans, grunts, mixed in with the smell of fear and antiseptics, greeted the new patient or civilian.
Harry had been down there twelve hours. Once they were sure he was well enough to travel, Dr. Dallas who thought Harry looked like his father, (and kept asking him if he was), persuaded whomever to allow Harry, even though he was a medicaid patient, to be brought up to an exclusive room on the fourth floor. It was a room that cost nearly a thousand dollars a day on top of what the patient’s insurance would pay; in Harry’s case next to nothing. But the hour was getting late, and they had no beds to put him in save this one. So after a little arm twisting, Harry got a break and was wheeled up to the next best thing after heaven.

Harry opened his eyes just when night was giving in to light, and thought he was in The Waldorf. At the very least, a Holiday Inn. He had no recollection of a nurse taking his blood pressure, temperature, and history last night, after he’d been brought up here. All he now saw was the wooden furniture, desk, desk chair, television in a beautiful mahogany bureau, and a red sienna leather lounge chair next to the bed he was in. There was a wooden closet near the door where, Harry figured, his duffle was stored. Holy shit, Harry thought, this is way bigger and nicer than my goddamn postage stamp apartment. He thought a mistake had been made and soon someone would be up to throw his ass out. Careful not to make a sound, he got up, tiptoed to the closet, found his duffle that held his toothbrush and paste, and made his way into the bathroom.
First he took a piss, but didn’t flush the toilet. C’mon, what are ya crazy? He pushed the lever. Fear rippled up into his chest. The sound the toilet made could have woken up King Tut. He put his finger to his lips. Ssh, he said to the swirling water. Almost sixty and still out of your fuckin mind, huh? He laughed and looked into the mirror. The face that looked back at him smiled, and made his eyes twinkle. Not bad, Harry, not fuckin bad, the face said. Just be cool, quiet, but stand your ground and you’re gonna stay here; nobody can throw you out. You’re here. That’s all you know. If a mistake was made, tough shit, it was their mistake.
Slowly, Harry turned the faucet on until a slow, but steady, stream of water reached his toothbrush. He loved the way that morning brush cleared up that disgusting mine field that was in his mouth. After washing his face he looked into the mirror again. Satisfied with everything except his hair, he turned to leave, but examined the shower first and shook his head reacting to another surge of happy disbelief. Tough shit, he said again to the voice inside his head, left, and crawled back into bed.
Panic seized him when he closed his eyes. Again, out of the bed, back to the closet where, after closing the slight crack that the door to his room made, searched out his duffle. Lying at the bottom it was, but with the huge plastic bag with his evening’s clothes and shoes on top. He, again, slipped his hand under the vinyl, and slow as a caterpillar, pulled the zipper open. His heart was beating faster as his hand was feeling around its innards. He squeezed the two individual pouches. Faster, Harry felt between underwear, t-shirts, and other garments until his fingers nibbled on the toes of the correct sock stuck into a corner of the bag. He felt the container that once held a hundred Bufferin. A puff of air came out of Harry’s mouth. He zipped up the bag and returned to bed.
No sooner had he pulled up the covers, when a nurse’s aide, dressed in janitor’s blue, came in to take his vital signs. He always thought that waking someone up to do this was a curious habit that hospitals had. Was it something written into the bylaws, or understood like the “silent you” before some sentences, for a nurse’s universal revenge?
Without a good morning, she went about her work after seeing Harry’s opened eyes. He could have been dead, but that hardly mattered. How times had changed since nurses were charged with doing those tasks. From Kate Smith to reggae. From rectal thermometers, to glass ones kept in alcohol with a mercury vein running up the middle, and finally, to almost the immediate digital kind with a throwaway plastic sheath. Harry looked at a bored, none to intelligent face, and regretted this crippled dance to modernity.
How am I doing? he asked, not out of curiosity, but a need to not only hear his own voice, but hers, too. The nurse, she be in soon, she answered. Her face didn’t reveal whether his readings were indeed good, or bad--not that he really wanted to know--and not that she gave a shit. If the listener cared enough to follow her, she really said it was about money needed, a job is the means, and if you’d like to empty bedpans, I’ll be glad to do what you do, and what, by the way, happened to the streets are paved with gold bullshit?
Anger, sometimes, breeds intelligence, Harry thought. What can you do with that; no matter, he answered himself, and closed his eyes.
Shit, closing my eyes must be the kiss of death, came to mind, as the door opened emitting light and allowing a nurse--a real one--to come into his room.
She’s white! What’s this!? was his next observation, as she came closer to his bed. He smelled blood. Good morning, Mr....
Call me Harry, Harry said, while thinking she had a voice saturated with innocent sincerity. Could be fake, a put on, he reasoned, but it still sounded good.
Harry then, good morning, she said.
Good morning to you, too.
I’m here to give you your Lantus. Where would you like it?
Happy to be on vacation, Harry looked around his body and all the spots the insulin could be administered to. Arm is O.K. She came to his left side, rolled up his sleeve, her fingertips brushing against his skin, and slid the syringe in. How did you know? he asked, with enough good humored surprise as necessary.
Know what?
Know that I took insulin.
Her body leaned away from him as her eyebrows arched and her black pupils widened. Oh, you gave at least some information to the resident and night nurse. Don’t you remember?
I don’t remember shit,” he replied, with so many different inflections that he stood in wonder at himself. They both let out little chuckles. What’s your name, he asked, capitalizing on this quick surface intimacy.
Angela, she replied, her body relaxing once more. I heard you were a bad boy in the ER last night.
Sorry about that; I told her the pain was making me nauseous. I am sorry, though. Please tell her if you see her. Please. And that really was the last thing I remember...I think. Angela in good natured fashion shook her head.
Maybe you can tell me about the pain, and some more things we didn’t get from you last night, but need to know now, today?
Fire away, and fall back.
Harry divulged what information he thought necessary, no more. Yet the way that information came out made you feel as if he was laying bare his whole life and soul. The parts he was asked, but left out, seemed to be nothing more than a man who tried to remember, but couldn’t. And what he let out, each word, each sentence, was crafted through long practice, to get the most mileage out of a gas guzzling dinosaur.
He was lucky to live not far away from the hospital, but unfortunate, (and don’t forget miserable), that he lived alone and had experienced for the last decade the complications of his childhood illness: amputations, pain in his lower extremities, loss of feeling, bypass surgery, and now this ulceration in his foot that was driving him nuts. But, despite it all, he’d never lost his humor, thirst to create, a great appetite to live each day...blah, blah, blah, etc., etc., etc.
Angela, used to hearing symptoms, not narratives, had become hooked. “Keep turning the pages; what happens next?” came her automatic, and somewhat unconscious response, after every period. Until the natural nurse in her rose up. You look tired, why don’t you get some sleep now?
I’ll try, but every time I close my eyes someone barges in here trying to save my life. The nerve of them, she quickly replied, and again they both let out small, conspiratorial laughs. Try, I’ll see you later. I’ll put up a “Do Not Disturb” sign, she said as she was walking out the door.
Harry got so immersed in her, he forgot about his pain. But not for long. No sooner had she shut the door then he was up and over to the closet. He opened up that little Bufferin bottle and shook out a few pills: Dilaudid--yellow for two and orange for four milligrams--and cute, tiny, white demerol pills. It was a combination that worked the best. It took Harry a long period of time and experimentation to arrive at that, but it was not an unpleasant trip.
Back in bed, he rang the little bedside button, and a voice came on the intercom--another strike against modernity. Yes, said the voice. I want to make sure my nurse remembers my pain medication, Harry said, loud enough for him to be reasonably sure it carried to the mouth behind his bed.
I’ll remind your nurse.
The ground was now prepped and the order in, but he was not at all sure that whomever this disembodied voice belonged to would deliver the message to nurse Angela. Harry, with some reservation, (and after he put the pills under his pillow, like baby teeth), once again closed his eyes.

Harry had painstakingly built into his body an internal alarm clock. It would go off every six to eight hours when his nerves began, with the faintest of shivers, to inform him that they were alive, but not at all that well. He knew what to do to ease them before they got fully jangled. The lack of preparation had happened to him in his distant memory past, and boy oh boy was that terrible, but he made sure that that would never happen to him again. Days, sometimes weeks, before he needed to, he began doing what he had to do to avoid another, boy oh boy. Sometimes though, Harry got fagged out, spent, tired, drained really. He needed a vacation. Not having the resources to go island hopping, or to a Roman spa, he took what best can be described as an all expenses paid, Medicaid vacation. After going through the list of hospitals Harry carried around in his head, he would chose one that matched whatever amenities he wanted to have at the moment. It was not that easy. Hospitals had a physical look and a personality all their own. Rooms, bedding, view, food, were only part of their makeup. They also had powers of observation that, depending on the hospital, were either turned on or not. As was the level of care, specialties, discipline, and rules. They, of course, effected what type of staff--interns, residents, doctors, and nurses--were allowed or attracted to work there. Lenox Hill, if it was a candidate for office, would be labeled a liberal conservative: east coast, upper east side, smart, and stuck-up.
It seemed like a second between when he closed his eyes and woke up. He looked at the wall clock which read, almost eight. Harry swung his legs over the side, gripped the styrofoam pitcher on top of his night stand, and poured some water into a paper cup. He looked around, quickly grabbed and swallowed the tiny teeth that had turned into money. Aside from wishing he had gotten up a half hour before he had, he was still pleased that he gobbled them before breakfast, before he drank hot coffee,--but preferably tea. An empty stomach coupled with a hot beverage was the perfect environment he found to allow the pills to come on and do their job--balm and heal. It sounded like a vaudeville team. Maybe burlesque tits and ass. Seriously sexy.
Speaking of sexy, a cute little island babe came into his room carrying a tray. Breakfast. But goddamn he couldn’t eat it without taking an insulin shot. And he couldn’t do that before taking a glucose test. Listen, this is Harry, I need to take a blood test and insulin shot before I can eat, he said, his mouth a few inches away from the intercom. When he needed to do that--which was a minimum of four times a day--there was always a certain urgency which made his voice sound strained. I’ll be right in Harry, came Angela’s response. Immediately, Harry felt his upper body sag. Relaxed, he turned to the tray, lifted the plastic round dome and saw some hardened scrambled eggs. Oh, man. Fuck that. Can’t do it. Just can’t. Won’t, simple as that. That’s it. There was a piece of whole wheat bread, some butter, (maybe), a nice looking large blueberry muffin, and a cup with a lid on top. Before he pulled the lid off, he saw a decaffeinated tea bag underneath the bread. Wanting the caffeine, he was a bit disappointed.
Just spoke with your doctor, Angela said. She’d come in like a gunslinger, two fisted, a syringe in one hand, testing equipment in the other, and extra ammo: another big syringe sticking out of her jacket pocket. Also, she brought a bottle of insulin, her pretty face, and her dumpling delicious body. Harry might be sick, but he wasn’t dead.
Eddie, you spoke with Eddie? Good man. He’s a goddamn good man. Harry couldn’t help but lower his eyes. Eddie was like any other croaker he came in contact with on his merry-go-round in again/out again bout with life. Only Eddie wasn’t a cut throat practitioner of the Hippocratic dictum; he really believed he was not doing any harm, but was helping the patient instead.
Besides, being white, educated, and old could be, if played properly, the holy trinity to gain access to those Wizard of Oz antidotes of common crucifixions: Marriage unraveled; parents dead; money evaporated; body betrayed. And Harry, if the truth be known, was very distinguished looking, could bullshit his way out of Berlin in the thirties, (even though he was a Jew), and be charming as he did it; well, the world, as the saying goes, was his oyster--at least the Disability/Medicaid world. As soon as the docs heard a literate, funny, and engaging utterance, out came their prescription pads. It was just a matter of time before he had them ratcheting up his dose. Not having to pay for visits the “seek and ye shall find” apparatus was in play. It wasn’t too hard to hunt down more than a few doctors who’d do the right thing, get out of his way, and have their secretaries fill out forms. Often, Harry would spy his name on charts on certain dates he knew he was out to lunch. Never there. Docs were making fiction money. And mucho, and how. Not here. Not there. You know, man. Cool. So nice to still be a hipster, glued to this modern, daisy chain, forgery.
Angela sat on Harry’s bed and put the machine on the corner of the table. Do you want to do it or do want me to do it?
I’ll do it. Harry stuck himself with the penlet and put a drop of blood on the testing strip; in five seconds they got a reading: 133. Good. Very good.
Your doctor gave me some instructions, guidelines, but they were so confusing he finally told me to listen to you; seems you know as much as him, she said, and a lovely crimson blush came into her cheeks. She smelled nice, too. Fresh. Like honeysuckle on that certain moment in spring, when it simply couldn’t wait anymore. Harry breathed deeper. He wanted to put his head under her dress; nothing dirty; he wanted just to rest there; maybe just his lips and the tip of his nose nestled against the soft flesh of her thigh. Damn, he said to himself, that sure was quick.
Angela, I could use some pain medication, Harry said, even though he felt the first inkling of what he’d already taken begin to work.
I’ll give you the insulin first.
Would you mind giving it to me in my arm; I’m so tired of injecting myself in my stomach? She smiled, happy to accommodate his request, knowing what a task it must be to stick a needle in yourself five or six times a day.
How much should I give you?
Well, I can’t eat the eggs, you can forget about that, and the bread goes with the eggs... So, if you can swipe another blueberry muffin...we’re in business?
She smiled conspiratorially. It’s sugar, Harry. Are you sure you can eat that?
Sure, I’m sure--as long as I cover myself with enough insulin, I can eat just about anything. Anything. He looked at her, with an embarrassed boyish smile and blush planted on his face, until it became uncomfortable--for both of them.
Harry, I’m trusting you...so,...
Guaranteed, Harry said, or your money will be generously refunded, the redness all but gone as he spoke. But, all right, we’ll play it safe...just a little safe. Harry showed Angela his two fingers, the thumb and index ones, just the tiniest bit away from each other.
You’re a rascal, you know that? she said, and grinned. Her fingertips brushed against his arm again; she raised the sleeve on his hospital gown and deftly gave him his shot. Your doctor said either percocet or dilaudid, but dilaudid, Harry, that’s for terminally ill cancer patients. And I’ll tell you what: I suspect, after what you told me, you might be in a lot of emotional pain that you’re using these drugs for.
Well...I think you might be right, but I’m still in a significant amount of pain, that’s no lie.
How about I give you a shot now, and alternate the percocets, but just if you need it, if you call out for it, how’s that?
Sounds good to me. Angela told Harry to lie on his side and with a syringe that was much larger than the first, being an old fashioned glass and metal kind, (Harry just loved the look of it), she slowly inserted it into the fleshy part of his upper arm. The long steel needle needed to penetrate the first layers of flesh.
What a pretty face can do to me, Harry was thinking as Angela was administering to his needs.
After the shot things got a little blurry. Harry began feeling sweaty, and his eyelids seemed to weigh pounds, but he concentrated to keep his head up--and he did--until Angela brought him another blueberry muffin. As the door closed, Harry inhaled deeply then exhaled, making the paper napkin ripple.

Next he awoke to the sight of doctors and nurses hovering above him.
Apparently, Harry was found slumped over his tray; his Elysiasn face nestled blissfully into a large, cushiony looking, blueberry muffin. One of which was flattened against his nose.
If it weren’t for morning rounds, Harry might have fought his last fight. The young, brightly scrubbed interns, their uniforms as starched and white as the Klan’s hood, trailed a chief resident who, after seeing Harry’s ear buried into the pastry, and his ol “Schnozzola” with a popped blueberry on the end of it, called a code blue, draining the newer one’s blood from their faces, the more seasoned interns into alert, and the nurses into full bodied action. A crash cart, wheeled by a deranged resident, barreled into the room, paddles at the ready. Angela called out that Harry had diabetes, and so an I.V. glucose hookup was run into his arm, lest he had fallen into insulin shock. Also, she informed the doctors that she had just given him a shot of dilaudid, but he was fine, he was fine, she repeated like a mantra. Just in case, get some narcan, a doctor instructed.
Harry, is that his name, a doctor asked.
Yes, Harry, Angela repeated.
C’mon Harry, stay with us, the doctor implored.
Harry, c’mon baby, another voice chimed in.
But the doctors were baffled. Harry, according to the monitors and test results so far, should be able to do The Charleston in the middle of the room. His pulse and breathing, while being slightly shallow and slow, were still well within the bounds of normal; his tox screens, except for the little morphine that Angela’s shot put there, showed nothing else; his blood sugar read like most humans: 123. Fearing that either they or the tests missed something, they continued to work on him.
I think I’m in heaven, Harry said, upon first seeing Angela. It was still a struggle for Harry to keep his peepers open; in fact, for a brief second he looked, with his eyelids fluttering, like an old, faded, funny, male ingenue, or something out of some fag transvestite review.
How do you feel, how do you feel, came at Harry from all directions while a blood pressure cuff was put around his arm. He thought his arm was about to suffocate; all his attention was distracted there; he felt like trying to make a muscle and break it apart. Easy, easy, Harry said to himself. Yeah, they fucked up your high a little bit, but you still feel cool, and there’s always later. Easy, buddy, easy. Buy some time. Be gracious; show some class.
Whoa, what happened? Harry asked.
You tell us, the doctor replied.
Man, how the hell do I know--one minute I was here, the next gone. Whoa. Lemme get back to myself, Harry said good humoredly. You guys probably saved my life.
From what I don’t know, the doctor said. But I’ll be happy to take the credit.
Whaddayamean ya don’t know?
Just what I said, I don’t know.
They had unhooked him from the miracles of modern science, and were now taking all the bells and whistles back to wait for their next chance to perform.
Well, Harry said, when you doctors don’t know what the fuck happened, you call it an “episode.” Harry couldn’t help but grin.
And neither could those gathered around his bed, especially Angela and the head doctor.
When it happens twice, he went on, you call it a law suit.
The grins stopped.
Only kidding, only kidding. I’m a schmuck, I don’t sue, even when they thought nothing of allowing this blind doctor--who even had a seeing eye dog--to do a little neurosurgery on me. Nothing very complicated, they said; nothing to it; just a little growth on your amygdala. It could have been my rectum for all this doctor knew. I think the expression, “can’t tell his ass from his elbow,” came from my operation. You see the shape I’m in; maybe that explains it.

Harry, they don’t even kid around like that, Angela said, after the doctors and staff filed out of his room. Just hearing the word, “sue,” is enough to make their testicles go into a vacuum. Angela!
Harry!
Angela!
Harry! Harry, I’m not as prim and proper as you might think--or want to think.
Angela, I’m not what I appear to be either.
None of us are.
Angela’s face was simply radiant. Harry, without wanting to, was slip sliding away. She left him happily munching away on the remaining blueberry muffin, but not before she promised to bring him back a tea. She was debating whether or not to tell him that a blueberry precariously hung from his nose when she returned.

Harry had some business to take care of; it was on his mind ever since he opened his eyes and saw those mostly hideous, but necessary, faces above him. Most faces were hideous. No sense in arguing, Harry thought, they just are. He crept over to the closest and dry swallowed another two tablets; he wanted to give the initial intake a little more fuel; a boost; a nudge; shove; glad tidings. Back in bed he drank the last of the now cold tea, and laid back in bed. Could be worse, could be worse, he said to himself, much worse.

This time the nod came to Harry slowly, blissfully, nice. That liquid heat ran up the back of his neck and spread across his shoulders. Intuitively he knew he could play with this feeling for as long as he wished, turn it this way and that, and still go to sleep whenever he felt like it. It was one of those moments that made doing what he did to obtain it worth every penny, every second of bullshit. There weren’t many places--or times--that would allow him to feel this much at home...safe. Safe from those persnickety pain in the ass elements that would play with his head, like dying and leaving a mess. Here, for as long as he could stretch it out, would be beyond the grave’s tentacles; beyond the gas man; beyond the chit chat of what passed for conversation between humans; and way beyond the simplicity of bowling balls and heroes.
Harry remembered the first few times he did dope--Christ, what was it now?...forty, forty-five years ago?--he couldn’t get to sleep at all. Must have been the quinine, or somethin with the cut. Or maybe it was the newness of the whole thing, but he couldn’t for the life of him, fall asleep. Not that it was unpleasant. No, not a bit, but...well, but nothin, he just couldn’t get to sleep. No big deal.
Then there were grace periods of, well, nothin. Nothin. Not a drop, or a drug--illegal, that is. Clean; a clean feeling. No filters. Barriers. No, (or little), fear. Sometimes that could last for a day, or a decade. No tellin, with Harry. Strange, huh? But then, like the old joke, “slowly, slowly, he turned”...he went back to the cooker, in one form or another. And anything could return him to that dark place. No tellin with that either. Sometimes six months before the actual action, volition, or whatever you want to call it, he set himself, or was setup, to be, once again, open to the seduction. That last sentence, or thought, had that faint smell of a lie breathing on it. The truth, better stated, was that Harry was both the seducer and the seduced. He knew exactly what would get him hard, and was willing, if it called for that, to make it a very long courtship before he would demand to get laid.
Unless, of course, it was a chick that Harry was head over heels about. Someone so lovely, so enticing, that Harry would have waited forever before he demanded any goddamn thing. After the act, however, that was another story. One chick told a friend of Harry's that her first mistake was telling him that she loved him. The second was, after having told him, she hung around, and stayed.

After five days the doctors were no closer in understanding what caused the seemingly arbitrary nature of Harry’s condition. One after the other they ruled out, in seemingly alphabetic fashion, today’s hit parade of diseases. There was no such thing as “consistency” as to when Harry would have these bouts of near unconsciousness. They thought him incredibly lucky to be found when he was, walking that ol precipice of death. One time they were ready to send him to the I.C.U., fearing that he was near extinction, only to find him, when they came back into his room, requesting cable television for the reruns of The Sopranos.
Even though Medicaid was picking up his tab, they didn’t flinch in ordering every conceivable test that could solve the riddle of Harry. The hospital figured that since Harry was lucky enough to inhabit one of their exclusive suites they’d write the whole goddamned thing off, and every other poor bastard, at the end of the year. It wasn’t quite the, “in for a penny, in for a pound,” ethic; it was more like how can I turn this bullshit around and make it work for us.
Harry, meanwhile, was living The Life Of Riley. It was Alfred E. Newman’s, What, Me Worry? take on whatever life could throw at him. It was arms behind the head, leg crossed over the other, foot dangling, television on, and getting loaded with impunity. He was also pleased with himself for dealing so well with the guilt that he felt when he was with Angela. He wished he could level with her, but even though in the previous days she had shown every indication of being cut from a different swatch than the rest, was still, he thought, too square for him to risk such a racket by coming clean. And it was so hot out that he could feel the days heat and humidity drip through his windows; his windows that looked out to Park Avenue; he couldn’t even contemplate being in the furnace and shit box he called home.

Is it possible to get a haircut around here, he asked Angela.
A haircut?
“Yeah, a haircut. Don’tcha want me to look good being your patient and everything.
You’re too much, Harry.
Answer the question, baby.
You need money for a haircut.
That’s a problem.
Hmm. What can we do. Let’s see. I could, I guess, advance you a little cash.
A little cabbage, yes, you know I’m good for it.
Never had a doubt.
How sweetly you lie.
Part of my charm, Harry.

What else do you lie about, he asked Angela the next day. He couldn’t get the last line she said to him out of his mind. Sometimes, after hearing something someone had said, they look completely different. Almost like another dimension was added. He was positive that before Angela left his room the other day he saw a few creases that life had driven into her face; they weren’t ugly, quite the contrary; they allowed Harry to enter.
Nothing...much, she replied.
Being cute, huh.
You think so; cute, I mean.
He looked at her, studying her, weighing her, Cute, no, I don’t think so.
What then.
I don’t know. Hard to say.
Hard to say, or you don’t want to say it.
Hard to say. Except that thirty forty years ago I’d be in deep trouble.
Is that so.
That’s so. Smart and looking the way you do, damn, always been a very lethal combination for me.
Harry, don’t do that.
Do what.
Harry, the woman was always in more trouble than you were.
Ya see, that’s what I mean. Trouble. Fucking trouble. I’m tellin ya...
Harry, enough. A smile broke across her face and carried Harry out with her.

Did you send up a barber or a foot doctor, were the words Harry greeted Angela with.
She stamped her foot and laughed. Her hand covering her mouth.
You don’t have to say it. Oh, my god!, comes next. I know.
Again she stamped her foot and kept her hand where it was.
I didn’t think that what I had to say to you before would be met with so much retribution. Jesus Christ.
Harry please, no more. I’m going to urinate on myself. Please.
“Urinate,” hmm, how proper we are.
Please Harry, I’m begging you.

Harry looked forward to Angela getting to work in the morning, and Angela couldn’t wait to get in. A few times she even showed up an hour or more before her shift was to begin. People started to talk. Harry felt this tingle that worked it’s way up his balls and into his stomach until it tickled his brain. Not since his early thirties had he felt this way. Usually the word, “Fuck,” was the first thing he uttered upon opening his eyes; now, his thoughts moved more to getting up, showered, shaved, and dressed; he even felt less of a need to raid his drugstore as of late. But Harry kept them there in case it all came crashing down--which was always a likely possibility.
And Angela had finally met someone who was unlike the someones that she kept meeting. Could have been his age, what he knew, the way he thought, the sound of his voice, looks, personality, or smell. Who really knows why we want to get close to the people we want to get close with? The irrational are more rational than the rational in understanding what’s what with that.

Angela came in through the door as Harry was kneeling in front of the wooden closet. It wasn’t anger, or disappointment, judgment, or fear he saw on her face. It was more like, What are you doing on the floor praying? and then she smiled. But again, it wasn’t a smile of compassion, understanding, sarcasm, or contempt. It confused him, but didn’t stop the blood from rushing up to his cheeks, making him feel hot all over.
I thought you were gone.
No, not yet; I’ve been spending so much time in here that I needed to catch up on some paperwork.
You’re flattering me.
You don’t have to do that, you know.
Do what. I was just rummaging around for a pad to write on, that’s all.
Harry.
Really.
He didn’t want to go down this road, but lying was really the only road he knew. The words, even if it were a one word sentence, kept sticking in his gullet. From nowhere he began to stutter like he did when he was five, when each word he uttered had the potential to kill him.
I’ll see you tomorrow, Harry. Have a good night. Again her words were light, neutral, and impossible to understand.
Stay...please.
Harry put his palm on the floor and pushed himself upright. He put his hand through the crook of her arm and led her over to the lounge chair. He tightened his grip, but gently guided her into a seated position. He sat down on his bed and pushed the hospital tray out of the way so there was nothing separating them. Angela, he began, what’s going on here?
I think you know.
I don’t know shit, Angela; why don’t you tell me.
No, Harry; we’re going to do something different this time--for both of us. Why don’t you tell me.
I feel like the old man at the end of, Moonstruck: “I’m confused.” Harry lowered his head and dabbed at his eyes as if he were crying.
You could charm the spots off a leopard. But, of course, you know that. You count on that...and why shouldn’t you...that’s what kept you alive these many years.
Sonofabitch.
If you keep trying to deflect this thing, we’ll never get anywhere.
‘Anywhere?’ He pondered the word. Where would you like this thing to go?
The one dim fluorescent light that was on, made the room look like the tenderness of a welcoming saloon.
No, Harry, she said, low, but resonate, where would you like to go. And please don’t tell me about the thousands of reasons why we shouldn’t go there, why this is crazy, absurd, and then go into your personal trough of misery--or perhaps ecstasy--to cement the impossible. Lets keep it simple: Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby?
Her smile tempered his heart with light, putting out fires so old and damp as wet ash they’d now become moldy with contradictions. I don’t know how you know all the stuff you know, but I’d like to know what you know.
Come home with me, then.
Come home with you?
That’s what I said. I wouldn’t have to talk so fast you’d miss, (or I’d forget), the good parts.
How can you be so sure.
Sure. Who’s sure. That’s what discovery is about. It’s art, Harry. Great art is work. A lot of work.
He stared at her for what felt like a long time. The night nurse came in to check his vitals. She said hello to Angela and then went about her business. Angela and Harry just watched her, and each other. They remained silent until she left the room.
I wish I had a cigarette, Harry said.
Makes two of us...and I never smoked.
Harry laughed despite himself. He knew what came next. Angela, you know what I was doing by the closet when you came in.
I knew two days ago.
You did?
I did.
What the hell can we do to fade that?
Do you want to “fade” it.
His body cleaved in two. The battle was defined, as it always was, but now, once again, verbalized, which somehow made it more real.
Wait, Harry. Think about it. I know it’s not an easy decision--if it’s really a decision at all. Tell me in the morning.
Maybe we both got lucky here; what do ya think?
Maybe you got lucky; I was always lucky. Oh, I see, you think I’m lucky to have you. How did I not know that that was, you were, a golden gift from the gods.
Harry just shook his head. Is it always gonna be this tough a ride with you?
Until you realize that you were always lucky, too.

That night Harry couldn’t sleep. At about two, he thought about taking a few of his pills, but decided to hold off. If he was going to start anything with Angela, it couldn’t be predicated on a foundation of shit. There had to be a reasonable semblance of good honest intention going in to this thing. He thought he had to talk with her about quitting. And wanted to know how she thought the best way to go about it would be. Harry knew that one of the reasons he was drawn to her was because she was a nurse; it was a profession that was loaded, (no pun intended), with fireworks and pitfalls of various kinds, and he was subject to explode or fall into any number of them.
Looking at this honeydew rind of a moon, he decided that he’d give himself one day to enjoy himself in his own inimitable way, and the rest of his life to enjoy with Angela. Off and on, for over forty years of his life, he had researched pleasure and escape that only an ego made of mush was built for. Sometime, the next afternoon, a road would be chosen, a vehicle established to see him down it, and perhaps a destination that he and Angela would agree that both wanted to go to.
Angela didn’t sleep either, but not for the same reason. She was nervous, apprehensive, and decided to clean her apartment. No sense in waiting for the last moment. Or worse, waiting for him to come to her, and finally get there. A sliver of a moon, she thought, the melon must have been very good. She had lived, and survived, her home and men who recreated that home over and over again. With her help, of course. No longer was she willing to pitch in. Angela was no fool, and no stranger to who Harry was; no pie in the sky for her. She knew it would be hard work, but interesting work. She felt drawn to him as soon as he opened his mouth...and not because of what he was, but what he secretly wanted to become, and could become if he gave himself half a chance. Age and circumstance were on her side. Now, if only time would give her a goddamn, and well deserved, break. A little luck.
Finally, at around five she finished and was so dirty that she decided to take a shower right there and then. Afterward, she laid down in her bed, put her hands behind her head and in a moment was asleep. Such a deep and restful sleep that she overslept and late, hurried off to work.

As was his habit, Harry accepted the shot of dilaudid before breakfast. Now, it didn’t get him that high, but still made him feel very nice. Content, safe, and secure in this blanket of near forgetfulness. When the nurse brought in his testing equipment and his insulin injection he told her he’d take it himself and engaged her in some meaningless, but funny, conversation. When he knew she was distracted enough, he secreted the empty syringe under his blanket and waited for her to leave his room before he got it and put it, along with his pills, in his duffle.
He got up and walked over to his window. The traffic was beginning to build on Park Avenue. The bustle of cars, and cabs, and people going someplace. Someplace!? Where the hell were the places that all of them were going to? Damned if I know, he thought.
Looking further upward at the high sky of a deep baby blue, he thought of 9/11 and the exact same color and canopy that day. Huh, interesting, he muttered. On that day, Harry was on the north side of The Brooklyn Bridge when the sky exploded. The ball of red, orange and yellow fire, then black smoke, rinsed the sky of reason. It was enough to knock Harry back against the doors of a high school; the heat followed immediately after. It felt like the outer edge of a furnace. It was official: Hell was New York City.
When breakfast came, he politely asked the orderly if she couldn’t get him a metal spoon to eat his oatmeal with--those plastic spoons feel like they’re melting in my mouth--and smiled at her. I be back, she said.
Harry was sipping his coffee, fully dressed after shaving and showering. He knew he’d have to sign himself out, but knowing that Angela and he would work this all out this morning wasn’t all that concerned about it. Geez, c’mon already. Where is she? he said to himself after a due amount of time went by when she should have been there already. C’mon.

Where the hell were you.
Getting things ready for you.
Harry was instantly calmed. Well in that case...
Yes, don’t worry even though I know you must be going crazy. I know that. I thought that we have two ways to go: one, I could get you into a rehab unit and they’ll do what they have to do and then you’d come to my place, or, two, I could get some methadone and do the thing myself. I worked in a detox unit for seven years and know what I’m doing...
So, that’s how you...
Harry, sweetie, Ray Charles could have seen it.
Harry thought he was invisible. All right, you got me--now what the hell are you going to do with me.
Enjoy you.
Harry didn’t ask her how she would get the methadone. It wasn’t his business. If she said she could get it, she could get it. That’s all he needed to know. That he wouldn’t be sick.
All right, I’ll sign myself out.
A.M.A., against medical advice.
What else is new?

I’ll just do it one more time, give me a jolt before I pack it in, he decided after a brief, if one-sided, debate. Harry sat on the toilet, his sleeve rolled up, a belt wrapped around his arm, with the tongue between his teeth. He held a syringe in the other hand. He had taken three four milligram dilaudid, crushed them into the metal spoon, added water, and with a pack of matches, cooked the mixture in the base. Slowly, he guided the syringe into his one useable vein and watched as the blood came into it, like a rose coming to life, its petals moving to the side of the plastic cylinder. Gently, he guided the plunger down and watched as this slightly water colored orange mixture went into his vein. A pumpkin exploded behind his eyes.

***

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2005-2015

UNTIL THE MUSIC STOPS--CHAPTER X--CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

CHAPTER X

KISS THE FATES

..."that the only way clear of the cool/crazy
flipflop was obviously slow, frustrating and hard work.
Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your
ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care. He might
have known, if he’d used any common sense. It didn’t
come as a revelation, only something he’d as soon
not’ve admitted."

"V"
--THOMAS PYNCHON


Katsuho came back to our apartment twice over the next few weeks. Once, to pick up her computer and more clothes, and the other to copy all of her favorite music into her iPod. Each time she did so she asked if I could not be there when she returned. I wasn’t. She told me that she would leave my keys at The Cedar Tavern. What she’d done was move into a Y on the Upper West Side and began to start piecing her life back together bit by bit. I was still managing to go to “taxi school” and waiting for her to come back to me. I had no idea just how badly she needed to get away from me and felt she’d eventually return. I would have promised her anything.
A few more days went by and I called her on her cell phone. Reluctantly, she agreed to meet me in Central Park. I’d gotten there early and was sitting on a bench waiting for her, thinking of all the things that she might say and my counter. Many conversations took place in my head before she showed up. I don’t remember if we kissed hello or not. What I do remember is that she told me that she needed time away; that she felt that her being was being taken from her; that she no longer knew what she was doing or who she was. I tried to listen attentively, all the while thinking of what to say to make her, force her, to come back and relieve this terrible “aloneness” that I was feeling. I thought that by not saying anything--and I really didn’t know what the hell to say to all that she told me--would in some way show her that I knew how she felt and would persuade her eventually to give our marriage another try. I did ask her if she was contemplating leaving or divorcing me, and she said she didn’t know. She needed time. I told her, in the most gracious, but still manipulative, way I could, to take it.
Katsuho did not come back to me. She couldn’t. I’ve only recently come to realize that. However, while we were still married and living together, she was introduced to a man, Carl Jacobs, a psychoanalyst, who needed one of his case studies typed. Katsuho took the job. Sometime later, when I knew and she knew I needed help she told me (and impressed by what she’d read in his case study), to call him. He was located down the block from where we lived. I’d always imagined myself in analysis with a doctor schooled in Freudian analysis who had an office in Greenwich Village. It suited the image I had of myself.
I began going to see him, while Katsuho and I were still together. I felt attuned to him the first time we met and his insights into my personality and behavior made a tremendous impression on me. But as I had done so many times before, I used some of our sessions together as a way of manipulating Katsuho into believing that these new and wonderful insights were sure to bring about the changes she and I wanted in our life together. Not that I knew I was manipulating her; I was really bullshitting myself. I’ve come to learn that there is no magic word, or sentence, or paragraph, or session, or drug, or woman, or anything that borders on the realm of fantasy and wishful thinking. Work, therapy, relationships, gratification, health, rent, writing, art, bricklaying, construction, everything, is hard fuckin work. All of the great insights mean shit if you don’t marry them to action. I was still an infant, thinking that by sucking on a tit, any tit, I’d get what I needed to get me through an hour, let alone a day.

I began driving a cab. It sucked. It was hard work, much different than when I drove in 1972. Three months after I started driving, I had the excuse I needed: my mom was sick and my father, who was never good in those situations, needed my help.
For the next few months I flew back and forth from New York City to Miami as if I was going to the corner store for smokes. During this period I helped my father find a nursing home for my mother, contact a lawyer who made it easy to get her on Medicaid--for a hefty fee--and watch as she went from nursing home to hospital and back again. He, while he and I met with the lawyer, had him give me power of attorney over her. It was easy for me to think he made the wise decision. I purposely spent a lot of time with her knowing that my father had always been emotionally unavailable to her and I was trying in my own guilt-stricken ways, to wash away our sins. One day, one of her more lucid days in the hospital, as I was ready to leave, I walked to the head of her hospital bed and leaned down to kiss her on her forehead. As I was picking my head up she said to me, “Have no fear.” I looked curiously at her. She had helped put the fear of God in me, certainly after I became diabetic. I didn’t know how to react. I said to her, “I won’t,” and left.
My father, too, was not doing very well, physically. He’d been very overweight most of his life, and now he was obese, and diabetic. I felt needed. And had no problem taking all the money I needed to help see him through this crisis.
Shortly upon returning to New York, and resuming my therapy, I got a call from my father telling me that my mom had took a turn for the worse. It seemed I’d just unpacked when I was aboard a plane heading south. I looked forward to getting back together with my father, going out to eat in some fashionable restaurants in Bal Harbour, and now drinking with him. Previously, I’d turned him onto high-end vodka and he took to it immediately.
My mother had developed dementia, aside from the multiple medical conditions she already suffered from. When I walked into her hospital room she didn’t recognize me at first and confused me with my brother’s wife, who she called out for repeatedly. Every time she struggled to find a word or sentence she began reciting the alphabet or multiplication table. During the next few days her condition worsened. One day, as I walked from her room, the doctor called out to me. He told me that my mother needed a feeding tube put into her. I thought for a second and told him no. He said that her heart was still strong and she had to have this tube in her to prolong her life. I refused. I didn’t return to her bedside either.
An hour later I was having an espresso and Sambuca at a corner bistro near my father’s apartment when my cell phone rang. It was a call from the doctor’s wife, a friend of my mother and father for the past twenty years. She told me that my mother had died. I asked how. Cardiac arrest I was told. I went back to my father’s apartment. He was not visibly upset, didn’t cry, and neither did I. We went to a local funeral home and made arrangements for her cremation. We came home and an hour later we were sitting at the same fashionable restaurant in Bal Harbour contemplating what we were going to have for dinner.
There were feelings I had that went unarticulated and even now I’m hard pressed to describe just what was going through me, let alone him, at the time. But the truth is the truth. My father and I did not really ever go into any of that stuff you might imagine family might when their mother or father or wife dies. In fact, that night, over dinner, my father began to tell me for the first time of his adulterous affair with a woman I knew in my teenage years who was a customer in his supermarket. She, he said, was what he’d always wanted in a woman, but because of us, his kids, he never left my mother. What to make of his disclosure hours after the death of my mother is hard to discern. It would not be unlike him to blame me for his inability to find happiness while projecting to me what a great, self-sacrificing, dad he was.
I stayed with him for the next few weeks during which we went to see my mother’s body before she was cremated. We were alone in this big chapel when they wheeled her out in a cardboard box in the clothes we picked out for her--one of her favorite Miami Beach blouses that had these sparkly fish--and placed her on this platform on eye level. The first thing I noticed was her expression: fierce. It was the anger and rigidity that she had carried with her throughout her life. I knew that lying inside this woman was “love,” though it couldn’t be seen. I went up to her body, leaned down and kissed her on her forehead. It was freezing. I wondered if they’d packed the inside of her with ice.
My father and I stood shoulder to shoulder, and I looked over at him to see what he was thinking and feeling. I couldn’t tell, nor did he tell me. I assumed he was cataloguing the sixty plus years they’d been married, like a dying person would.
We stayed about a half-hour. I guess we both felt that was sufficient. We really didn’t talk about her again for the rest of my stay. Reluctantly, a few days after, I flew back to New York City.
For a time I entertained the idea about going down to Miami to live with my father and find some kind of job. During the first few weeks I’d been back, my father began falling. I went back down there and found him a nurse’s aide that my father’s insurance policy would pay for. He liked her, and quickly developed a dependency on her similar to the one he had with my mother. And since she lived down the block from him, he quickly enlisted her services--for a few extra bucks--to be at his beckon call. He wanted me to set up Medicaid for him as we did for my mother. I contacted the same lawyer and put the wheels in motion. In regard to money, my father was a secretive and manipulative man. In fact, in regard to everything he was secretive and manipulative; but money to him meant power, and he was not about to fuck with that. To insure that I was not more of a burden to him then necessary, he strongly advised me to get government disability. Once back in New York I did exactly that.
Given what medical conditions I had it was not terribly difficult to get on Social Security Disability. I believed that in a short period of time, once I got my bearings, I’d be able to get another kind of job, get off the government tit, and make a life for myself. But actually my world had gotten smaller: Katsuho was obviously gone and who knew when she’d return. I began to drink more heavily and had stopped going to AA meetings long ago and so I couldn’t call the people I became friendly with there because I had no intentions of giving up drinking.
For quite a bit of time I emailed Katsuho, hoping my writing would seduce her into returning. I’d tell her about my recent experiences in Miami, my sessions with Carl, how my life had changed, were changing, and how, given the chance, we could make this work. She was careful to respond, but when she did, Katsuho made it apparent to me that that was not in the cards. I read, but couldn’t let myself absorb.
The Cedar Tavern had become my world. Joey had been to me the brother I’d always wanted and now he came even more to the fore. I never really had to pay for anything at his bar. I had endless conversations with him about both our lives, and we shared an intimacy, as those who are friends over the course of many decades would. The people who worked there liked me, and I also was friendly with many of the other patrons. And so, from the afternoon to the early evening, I’d be there, reading, writing, socializing, and drinking.
Jacobs was not a strict Freudian analyst. He was vocal, certainly with me. He knew the depth of my illness and used whatever tools he had to break me out of my lethargy. But by the time I left the session and got back to my pad, which was up the block from his office, my inspiration had waned and all my fears returned. I’d go into The Cedar and be sucked up by the darkness.
Very soon that no longer did the trick. One New Years Eve, I had a few drinks at The Cedar and became terribly anxious, almost panicky. My world began closing in on me even further than it had. I bolted from The Cedar and headed straight for Washington Square Park. I knew that drug dealers had hung out there since Broadway was a prairie, and quickly made the acquaintance of one. I told him that I was looking for heroin and he told me to wait for him on 8th Street. In fifteen minutes he was back and pressed a tin foil package into my hand and I gave him some money. I walked as quickly as possible back to my place, but when I opened the foil I knew I’d been “beat.” Just as quickly I walked back to the park, not to find and confront him, but to find someone else and try to be smarter. I did, and was.
We exchanged cell phone numbers and he told me he’d call me within an hour. When he called, I met him in the vestibule of my apartment, opened a bag, tasted it, handed him the money and went upstairs to make the internal pressures abate. Most of my veins had collapsed, but I managed to find a few near my wrist that were more painful to penetrate but carried the blessed liquid.
Jacobs was on vacation and I had no intention of calling him on the number he left. Because I was alone, and because I was alone, I shot drugs with impunity. I now had the cell phone number of a dealer who, even though he charged me a fee on top of what the junk cost, was reliable. In fact, when I didn’t call him, he called me and I almost made myself believe he was a friend.
When Jacobs returned I told him. It took me three months, probably because he took his customary break in February, but I stopped by “checking in” to a hospital, going through Lenox Hill’s emergency room. I’d been living on a diet of dope, sweets, and booze. I began to resent my having to eat any “real” food because of my ingrained attachment to life. My pallor was as gray as the last sight of a battleship sinking. I knew it was time to abandon ship.

A few years after having becoming president of the American Diabetes Association, Jerry Bernstein decided to retire from private practice. I had an impossible time finding a replacement. The doctor I was now seeing had provided me with an ample supply of pain medication, which he wasn’t able to wean me off. He consulted a psychiatrist who specialized in addiction who suggested because of my long history of opiod addiction, I go on a methadone maintenance program. I balked at that. I’d read about a new drug that had proved successful in treating “motivated” addicts: Buphenorphine. When I asked the psychiatrist he told me that it was quite expensive and he didn’t think Medicaid would cover it. I didn’t believe him.
I checked myself into a hospital to get detoxed. The addiction specialist I met with there told me the same thing about Buphenorphine: it’s a good tool, but expensive.
Two days after I got out of Lenox Hill I was shooting dope again. Two weeks later I was back in the same emergency room at Lenox Hill, but this time I landed in the psych ward. It was humiliating. They took away my sneaker laces, belt, cell phone and the rest of my possessions, except for my sweat pants and shirt. I saw one of the same psychiatrists who was assigned to me my previous stay and asked him if he could help me find a Buphenorphine program that would accept Medicare/Medicaid.
The psychiatrist found a program for me on the west side and gave me the information and contact number. The day I was released from the psych ward I made the phone call, but I could not keep myself away from junk. When I arrived to be interviewed and screened by two doctors, one who would be monitoring me and the other who owned the clinic, they told me I’d have to remain clean for at least 72 hours and be in withdrawal before I could be administered the first dose of Buphenorphine. It took another two weeks before I could manage that.
Buphenorphine/Suboxone is a pill that is taken sublingual--under the tongue--until it dissolves. The opiate attaches to the opiate receptors--the same mu receptors that our endogenous opiods attach to from birth--but block the “high feeling” effects of ingested opiods. Like methadone, it can be lethal, if the dosage is overridden. It could cause respiratory distress and failure. But unlike methadone it promotes energy and enthusiasm and reduces cravings. Once finding a stable dosage, I was able to take home a month’s supply, and had to adhere to the rules of the clinic: come once a week to see the doctor, once a week for counseling, and once a week for group. The psychiatrist there had me on hefty doses of a combination of anti-depression medication and my mood lifted. I felt more positive than I had in quite a few years.
My sessions with Jacobs were becoming more intense. The way I would pronounce certain words, put together phrases or the syntax of my sentences were subject to his dissection. My perceptions and assumptions were scrutinized. Sometimes I was afraid to go into sessions knowing he’d have me see the way “the other” might. Gradually, I began to develop a growing intolerance to my subterfuges, both internally and externally. What he was helping me do, which of course I’d never been able to do before, was integrate the disparate and contradicting nature of being alive. The “black” and “white” which had been my bedrock was being dismantled, rearranged, and glued together with a new kind of ambiguity. This is not to say that therapy with Jacobs did not obviate the anger, frustration, and wish for fantasy all at once. Many times I said to him: “fuck you.” And my worst fear was that he’d say, “You’re no longer my patient.” But he’d say, “Fuck you,” back, in those words. And he’d stick with me.

My father decided to go into a nursing home, the same one that my mother had been in. In a way, I breathed a sigh of relief knowing that his care would be looked after by someone other than me, and that whatever money he had left would go to me, or so he said. My brother had been on “the outs” with him and my mother for years--he’d not come down for her funeral/cremation--and I did nothing to encourage my father to try and repair their bond. In fact, I secretly felt pleased that this had happened. My brother and I, especially in regard to my father, was in and out of his grace, translated into “largess.” We alternated years of speaking and not to speaking to him or them. Now, I felt that I’d “won.” How fortunate I felt at times knowing that I was the favored son. Then the outcast, then the favored. Finally, I was ready to pick up all the marbles.
I must have “lost my fucking marbles” believing my father, but I did.
A few days before Christmas, my father called me to let me know that a strange rash had developed on parts of his body and that he’d be going to a mini-hospital unit in the nursing home. A day later I got a call from his doctor that my father had died from congestive heart failure in his sleep.
I thought for a couple of minutes before calling Jacobs, who was on his Christmas break. Quickly, he called me back and I told him what had happened. I said that I didn’t want to go down to Miami to arrange for the cremation, but could do that from up here. He advised against me doing that. Anthropologically, he said, we need to see our dead so that the grieving process can begin.
I made arrangements for a first class round trip ticket. Hell, I deserve this, I said to myself, even though Jacobs had often repeated the line from the Clint Eastwood movie, Unforgiven, Deserve has nothin ta do with it.
I’d hadn’t spoken with my brother for the better part of five or six years, but I called him and left a message that something had happened and to call me back. When he did, I told him that our father was dead. He asked if I was going to Florida and I told him I was. He told me that he wasn’t, which was all right with me. It made me feel superior.
I’d called up the same funeral home that my mother was cremated in and made arrangements for my father to be picked up. I flew in and out of Miami in a matter of a few hours. The only other person inside the chapel was my father’s nurse’s aide. They’d taken a liking to each other, based on mutual need. I was happy she was there. Unlike my mother, my father looked pretty peaceful lying there dead. He was still wearing his hospital pajamas. His aide and I stood over his cardboard resting place and she said softly to him, much like a wife, “I told you that he’d come.” I wasn’t too surprised by her statement. My father, to my knowledge, never trusted anybody, except strangers and then, only until he got to know them.

My father had told me, for years, he was leaving whatever money he had to me. He justified that decision by angrily explaining how my brother and his wife wouldn’t let him and my mother live in their home unless they turned over their funds to them. And so, when I got back to my pad in New York City and opened for the first time my father’s Last Will and Testament and found that he left my brother half of his estate, it shocked the shit out of me. But after a few seconds I began to laugh. Fearing if he told me the truth about his plans I’d no longer do what he wanted--come down to Miami, take him in and out of hospitals and nursing homes, be a friend, a son, a whatever--he did what he’d done his entire life: divide and conquer.
When my brother and I began speaking again, we compared notes. It became apparent to us that from an early age my father would tell my brother and me two different things about the same situation. Whether he feared us “ganging up” and not do his bidding or if he promoted our suspicions of each other to “work us” at his convenience, we’ll never really know. It wasn’t just coincidental that when I was speaking with my parents my brother wasn’t and vice versa. And given the fact that there were huge chunks of time that my brother and I weren’t speaking to each other, and certainly not honestly, there was no way for us to see how our father was playing us off one another. In fact, the flaws in our characters and personalities, and our shared jealousies and mistrust and anger toward each other run so deep, that after trying for almost two years to repair our relationship we are now not talking with one another. He, of course, grew up in the same house with the same parents. And had the misfortune of having me as an older brother. Many of my experiences growing up are his as well, even though there’s more than a six-year difference between us. But in a strange way I might have been luckier. My diabetes provided me with a structure that needed to be adhered to. The disease forced me to develop an intelligence and curiosity that were polar opposites from their world in Brooklyn.

Everybody has the “Dawn Phenomenon.” Between two and four in the morning, the body starts secreting glucose in order to begin waking. In those “wee small hours of the morning,” a recent scientific data show, insulin has a tendency to break down or become weaker. What this means is that diabetics, who have had nothing to eat from the time they went to sleep until the time they awoke and, who had blood glucose readings within the normal range (80-150), could find themselves with a higher or elevated morning glucose reading. There are different interventions to combat this given the differences in each of our physical profiles and our body’s idiosyncrasies. Bernstein knew and understood this. He also understood that positive, absolute control is impossible. Some mornings I’m higher or lower without explanation. This is because each night, or early morning, my body capriciously secretes glucose. I could eat the same thing, at the same hour, in two, three, and sometimes four consecutive days, and my blood glucose readings would fluctuate, some days wildly, even when I’d done the same amount of physical exertion during those periods. I’m not going to say that glucose readings are arbitrary, they’re not. But this, like living and dying, is not an exact science.
Good diabetic control implies structure, work, planning, and deprivation, food deprivation. If you adhere to some rules and regulations, your odds are better of living a life relatively free of too many problems and complications. My gut instincts are to rebel against such a life. I’ve got to try to control them, too. I’m all too familiar with what Nietzshe said, “Be wary of casting out your devils, for that may be the best part of you.” Well, Freddy, I love you, always have, but I’ve got to try to figure out some way to stay here a little longer, not so much to figure it out, but to fuck with it some more. Under the best of circumstances, I’m operating with a cylinder missing. This is not to say that if I take care of the car, I can’t put some serious mileage on her, but I have to take care of the car, and get lucky. I have to try to keep the “revs” somewhere in the middle where the engine functions best, make sure I take her in for periodic mileage inspections and have a very good mechanic.
Jerry Bernstein, my doctor, friend, and confidant, is now working as an educator and administrator in a major teaching hospital complex, Beth Israel Medical Center. He’s just returned from a trip to Russia and has become a great force in the field of endocrinology the world over. I’m happy he still returns my phone calls.
After Jean returned to San Francisco, she fell in love with someone, and they’ve been happily married for over a decade at this date. Jean and I speak often; unusual for the way I used to end my affairs of the heart.
Diane, too, while not married, has moved out of Manhattan and is living in a little town outside of Atlantic City and while we don’t speak often, we try to keep up with each other. I’d carried a torch for her for many years after our affair ended, but some women, no matter how hard you’ve loved them, and no matter how much they’ve loved you, the reality destroys whatever desire, no matter how feverish it had once existed.
Katsuho has become an owner of a business. She’d been working, as I said, as a designer and maker of furniture. When the owner of the shop decided he wanted to go back to North Carolina, he asked Katsuho if she would take over for him. Nervously, she accepted. I told you she has moxie. Except for exchanging emails once or twice a year we aren’t in touch. However, I did get an unexpected email from Katsuho not too long ago. I’m sure she struggled writing it and thought twice before sending it. She told me that she’d gotten married a few months before and said as unambiguously she thought possible, “I am happy.” Katsuho went on to say she did not want me to be surprised when I get a letter from the church regarding her and her marriage. Her husband, a practicing Catholic, felt he could not comfortably practice his faith in a church of his choosing unless he received some kind of Papal Dispensation. For Katsuho, as devout an anti-organized religion gal as one could imagine, I was somewhat taken aback by her request to fill out whatever the church would send and get it back to them. But a second later I thought: What’s true for Katsuho is true for all of us: Love will make you do the damnedest things at various times in our lives, and only the further passage of our time will reveal, from moment to moment, if it was worth it.

And me? I’ve become an “Everythingian.” Knowing that the brain of an ant is more complex than our most advanced computer, how the hell am I going to choose one explanation for how I developed and survived? I could pin it on genetics, certain pre dispositions, psycho and neurobiology, the psychic tensions between Eros and Thanatos, attachment objects, environments, social lubricants and maturation, or dumb luck, capricious and arbitrary. It’s all those, and more.
The field of Evolutionary Psychobiology interests me because it focuses on “adaptation” rather than “disease” as currently understood by medical literature. An “adaptation” is an evolved trait that solves some particular problem for a particular organism that enables it to survive, grow, and of course, reproduce. That’s what we’re about, ain’t we, to keep it going. So imagine a person casually walking around his forest, not thinking of much, maybe a little hungry, maybe pissed off about his wife, or girl, or kid, or tribal leader, or his gods, and he sees an apple lying there. He picks it up, takes a bite, and it tastes different, not bad, but different. In a little while his mood changes. He doesn’t feel so shitty, but a little silly. The next day he sees another apple and does the same as the day before. Before too long he moves his whole fuckin family and builds a house near the apple tree. Then he turns some of his family and friends onto this. For all we know he wrote The Bible tipsy, and later, while sober, invented what we call capitalism today.
Then I began thinking about God in relation to evolution. If there is someone or something orchestrating this mad affair, than that “forbidden fruit” sure did lead to and make a lot of things possible. It enabled a person to either hold on for a little while longer and it provided some incredible insights. And any insight can potentially father future insights and inventions from science to industry to the arts to academia to just about anything. Of course, there’s also a very fluid and dangerous line of demarcation when that same substance tears away at the fabric of a person or society, but the mystery, the magic, is not knowing where that line is. One thing I do know: as of this writing I’ve survived and that’s triumph enough.

I’m reminded of a wonderful story I heard about Miles Davis and John Coltrane when they were playing together. It seems that Trane was at that point where the musical ideas that were exploding in his head were being played out on the bandstand with Miles. The ideas would come so fast and so furious that often times he’d forget that he was playing with other cats, and the sound would just jump out of his horn. After one particularly long solo by Trane, he was walking with Miles off the bandstand during a break in the set. “Miles,” Trane began, “I know that I’m taking all this time during my solo, but I can’t seem to stop. The ideas are happenin’ so fast and my fingers are just flyin’ and I’m tryin’ to keep up with all of them. How do I stop?”
Miles looked at Trane and with all the love that Miles could ever muster said, in a voice that could be described as a kind of marbled grit, “Take the horn out yer mouth.”

There are days when I wish the syringe I was holding in my hand was filled with junk instead of insulin; there are days when I order a club soda in a restaurant and for the briefest of seconds I actually taste Chivas Regal. There are days when I know that a taste of sweet reefer would make this picture better, or book deeper, or food more delicious, or laugh sillier and I’d be able to make a whole lot more sense out of my life than anything else. And those aren’t days I’m feeling particularly bad. I still can’t go by a liquor store, a drug store, a hospital, certain locations in New York City and elsewhere and not be seduced by my history. But so far, I’ve managed not to dance to that tune.
Now, however, at age sixty plus, I feel that I have a kind of foundation, a hedge, against this mad and beautiful refrain that’s been playing in my head ever since I was old enough to walk to a melody that has the confluence of all that I experienced growing up, grooving to my very own originality.

But now it’s time to take the horn out of my mouth. This tune’s over.

###

LOVE ADDICTION/BOOKSTORES & HEIDEGGAR...FROM CHAPTER IX: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

In 1991, while managing Astor Place Books in Greenwich Village, one evening I found love, though I didn’t know it at the time. I was standing by one of the computer terminals and cash registers when a voice said, “Excuse me.” Since the register was on an elevated platform, I had to look down to see who spoke. There was a young, pretty, Asian woman.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“Do you have Being and Time, Zein and Zeit by Heideggar?”
“I might, but I only sell that if I know the person is on medication.” I responded.
She smiled and said, “I’d prefer that in German but would take it translated too.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Katsuho,” she replied.
I left the platform and brought her to the back of the store to the Philosophy Section and talked to her while we walked. She had an easy laugh. I walked her outside and we smoked a cigarette together. I found out she’d come over from Japan to study film and knew no one in the city. I liked her moxie and asked if she wanted to go out for a cup of coffee sometime, and she said she would. As I said, I’d not been with any woman since Jean had left, and that was the first time I’d been without a woman in the picture for many, many years. What was even stranger was that Katsuho was twenty years my junior, and even though I know that it is quite the male trophy to have a younger woman, it had never really been my thing. I’d joke to friends that the last time I was with a twenty year old was when I was sixteen.
Slowly, I began to fall in love with her, and that was strange. Usually, the chemical reaction with women was swift, instantaneous and, if it wasn’t and, if I wasn’t desperate or mood altered, I would not hang around for too long. This time it was a slow burn and a long simmer. Though our age difference was large, we were close in temperament, desire, values, likes, and neuroses. I was struck with how much she knew and dug so many of the same things I did: jazz of a certain period, a love of the jazz divas, literature, basketball and baseball and boxing, and, of course, me. I don’t say that lightly. And even though she came from a fractured home, she was much more emotionally balanced and certainly smarter than me. Her art was more nuanced than mine, and she taught me a great many things about subtlety. With Katsuho the years of my childhood, which I couldn’t quite remember, were being lived for the first time.
Needing more money, I found a gig in Williamsburg as an assistant to someone I never liked much, Carlos Pagan. He had started his own program there after being bounced from the program he founded with Martinez, Project Return. Martinez, who was then the Commissioner of Substance Abuse Services for New York State, had awarded Pagan with the funds to begin a small program in Brooklyn. I tried to work with him for a time, but the same issues we had over twenty years before that got in the way. It was not time wasted though, I was back in the drug field and had made many contacts. One of them, the “Drug Czar” for Mayor David Dinkens, introduced me to the point person for The Hazelden Foundation, who was opening up a facility in New York City. I was hired to be the Coordinator for their Physicians-in-Residence Program. This was an initiative, funded by The Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation, to educate junior and senior residents in primary care medicine from all the major teaching hospitals in the metropolitan area about the disease of alcoholism and chemical dependency. It was my job to coordinate this, serve on the academic and public relations committees, and secure lecturers for the many facets and issues that affected medicine, disease, and treatment. I worked my ass off, and was very good at getting this program up and running. I was on a year grant and after the year was over, and the program established and well-oiled, my services were no longer needed.
My right knee had been giving me trouble and I went to see my orthopedic surgeon and friend, Dr. John Waller, who referred me to a knee specialist at Lenox Hill. He told me that I would need a little orthoscopic surgery and I had to go to Bernstein for the pre-op physical. After my blood work and an EKG he called me into his office.
“The operation is off,” he informed me. “I don’t like what I see on your EKG. I want to run you through some more tests at the hospital. Go home, I’ll schedule them, and I’ll call you.”
Later that night, after I told Katsuho about the operation, I felt a weight, like someone standing on my chest. I tried to shrug it off, but the next morning it was still there. I called Bernstein. It was July 3. He told me to get over to Lenox Hill as soon as I could. He’d be waiting for me. I smoked a cigarette while waiting downstairs with Katsuho for a cab.
When I got to the emergency room at Lenox Hill, I was ushered into the examining room. There I found a friendly face, one of the residents who I helped educate at Hazelden. He asked how I was feeling and hooked me up to some machines. He came back a short time later and said I’d had at least one heart attack, maybe two. He saw my expression. He went away for a minute and came back with a syringe. “I’m going to give you a shot of morphine; it’ll take away some of the dread.”
On July 4, the head of the cardiovascular department had come back from vacation on Bernstein’s request and performed a quadruple by-pass.
When I woke up I felt like I was on the tundra; the ICU was that cold. The next thing I felt was pain. A lot of it, even though the morphine was coming with regularity. I don’t remember how long I was in the ICU, but when they moved me into a private room Katsuho was there. I looked at her face and for a second felt more frightened for her than I was for myself. I could see the fear and uncertainty in her eyes and then we both adjusted. Neither of us had ever faced that kind of mortality, though I, because of my diabetes, lifestyle, hospitalizations and amputations of years past, certainly came close.
The next few days were difficult as anyone who ever had their chest cracked like a chicken, rewired and strung back together could attest.
My parents flew up from Florida. They all but ignored Katsuho, even when they took her out to eat. But, like I said, she is very smart and very insightful. She did her best to not take their behavior personally.
There was nothing much for me to do upon my discharge except to pick up a prescription for pain medication and go home. Katsuho, who had given up drinking soon after we met, knowing I couldn’t because of my past history, now began to educate herself on preparing different foods that would make a difference in my health. I, not having a clue when I could go back to work, went back on welfare and food stamps to make ends meet. And they just met.
Katsuho and I grew closer, and except for going to AA meetings and enjoying the company of the few and selected friends I’d made there (as well as Joey from The Cedar), we were a very self-sufficient couple. Our tastes were simple; our expenditures modest, while our love and our dependency on each other grew.
Almost a year after the heart attack, now free of pain and pain medication, I went looking for a gig. I called up some people I knew in the substance abuse field and the field of medicine and landed a job with Dr. Mack Lipkin, the head of the primary care division at NYU Medical Center. He had a position for an administrator for a grant that got funded for a year. I grabbed it.
One day, shortly after I began working again, Katsuho told me that her student and work visa was running out and the only way she could stay in America was to get married. I had not thought about marriage. Certainly I’d never thought about it recently. But I told her to pick a date. On July 3, a year to the day I was told that I needed further testing for a likely heart condition, we got married in a civil ceremony at City Hall. I didn’t bother to tell my family.
And it was wonderful. I never thought I’d ever enjoy being married. Because of her love of Breakfast At Tiffany’s we bought our wedding bands there. I never thought I’d ever love her so much as I did. And I loved looking at and touching my wedding ring. That plain gold ring that I wore was comforting, a kind of hedge against the madness that I felt outside of the marriage.
“Success” can fuck with an addict, too. I’d taken note of that all through my travels and travails: just before an addict was ready to graduate from a program it wasn’t unusual for him to shoot dope. He’d be venturing, or was about to venture, out of his element. Perhaps, the addict was “noticed,” treated too well. If I knew that was happening to me, I didn’t notice it. However, I did know that the year was almost up at NYU and I’d have to get another job. That alone was enough to unnerve me. What an addict also doesn’t like very much is change. Any change. Even the slightest change is enough to throw him into a tailspin. That I knew.
I sent out a bunch of resumes to private schools, thinking that with my background and credentials I’d be a good candidate for certain schools. I believed that not only could I teach many subjects, but I could counsel some students as well.
Finally, I landed a job on the upper west side, near the famed Dakota, in a private high school. It had a student population that, for the most part, had been bounced out of the traditional public and private schools in the tri-state area. I was hired to teach academic courses and counsel those who were thought to have a substance abuse problem. I noticed very early on that most of those kids had also been diagnosed with ADD and ADHD, a very difficult psychobiological constellation. I convinced the headmaster that what was needed, as well, was to bring an AA meeting into the school and he agreed. Initially I liked my job, and Katsuho and I were getting on with our lives. She, after not being able to secure a job in film, which she was passionate about, worked for a Japanese production company that did shows about New York City, which were shown in Japan. Around 1999, I began to experience trouble with my teeth and gums, which had plagued me most of my life. Diabetics are prone to that, too.
What I was also “prone to” were all the old tapes, voices that circulated in my head. Teaching these youngsters in the private school was frustrating for me because I needed some kind of validation for what I was doing. I didn’t receive enough back from the students intellectually or emotionally to feel I was on solid footing; I didn’t receive enough accolades or “pats on the back” that I thought I deserved. And now that I had a “legitimate” reason to seek pain medication for my abscessed mouth and inflamed gums, I embraced the opportunity.
It was always easier for me to “show” love toward someone when there was a barrier, in this case Percocets, between me and the other person. I thought I was demonstrating affection, Katsuho felt my artificially prescribed distance. I tried, the best I could, to modulate my use of Percocets, but some days were worse than others, psychologically. After months of being on them, my upper teeth had to be pulled and a denture put in place. I felt embarrassed, humiliated, and old. How could Katsuho, or anyone else, want to make love with me without my teeth, having diabetes and amputations were bad enough? Jesus Christ. Who the fuck would want to kiss a half a mouth?
But she did. And we hung on and went on in much the same way we had when we first met, except she was now getting upset by two things: my constant complaints about my job and my emotional ties to my parents. Katsuho had tried, like so many other significant friends and lovers from my past, to pry me away from my parents and brother. I resisted tooth and nail. Each time Katsuho and others would point to my misery while being around them, the walls would appear and the screw tightened. I’d nod my head in agreement, but I’d resist with all my might. She never got demonstrably angry. She had a hard time with anger, both her own and somebody else's. But she did make her feelings known to me. Unfortunately, although she had my attention, what she said never truly registered in this defensive brain of mine. I thought that after two years of working in the school, a change of venue was needed. What was really needed was a change of attitude and insight, but I always choose to fix the outside first.
I left the job at the school for a job that paid much more, but I was ill suited for it. And so a few months after I took the gig, I was looking for another. And “another” wasn’t easy for me to come by. It took awhile before I landed something that involved counseling high school students. By this time Katsuho had changed jobs as well: she was now translating Japanese into English for two anime concerns.
My new job was working for a program that was an offshoot of the Board of Education and involved, once again, substance-abusing students. During my orientation, I decided that this program was a joke, a Mickey Mouse attempt at getting kids off of drugs. I was placed in a hip-hop high school, located underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, adjacent to One Police Plaza. Very quickly I began to think to myself, “Just go in every day, do the very least amount of work and take the money and the benefits and go.” I had developed what would be diagnosed as a diabetic ulceration in my amputation site, which was painful. Not excruciating, but painful. However, I used this newfound alibi to once again obtain every and any pain medication from doctors and podiatrists that I was playing at the same time. Very often I was able to obtain multiple prescriptions and fill one with my insurance and pay cash for the others, claiming I had no insurance. Each visit to a doctor was another “score.” I was now taking pills to work and taking more when I got home. Katsuho would look at me sitting on the couch and wonder what world I was in and what she could do about it. Our lovemaking drifted off as I floated out. Finally, she confronted me and I reluctantly went to see my orthopedic surgeon, who was a strict no pain medication guy.
He had known me since my original amputation operation and thought that he could operate and fuse together the part of my foot, which had never healed in order to ward off further ulceration. That summer, I had to stay in bed for six weeks and crutch around for the next two. But it was successful. If only one’s mind could be fused that way.
What we were unsuccessful in addressing was the twists and turns our marriage and our lives were taking. I hung onto the job for the next year and was in my office when the first plane hit The World Trade Center on 9/11. We didn’t know what the hell had happened, but went out back, directly under The Brooklyn Bridge to see the fire and the cloud of black smoke coming out of the first tower. We watched as the second plane made a slow turn and preceded, slowly it seemed, into the second one. The concussion and resulting explosion was enough to knock us back against the doors. We watched, transfixed, as this orange ball exploded. It seemed the sky was rinsed of reason. We hurried back into the school and got the kids out. By that time the police had cordoned off all pedestrian traffic going south and we walked, thousands of us, back to our homes. We were eerily silent. It reminded me of Goya’s pilgrimage paintings. A man walking beside me who had either a cell phone or transistor radio of some kind turned his head to me and in a voice entirely devoid of inflection, informed me that the first tower fell. We turned our heads back and continued walking.
Katsuho, who had been following this on T.V. that morning, was anxiously outside waiting for me. The next weeks were hard on us all, but Katsuho was especially devastated by what had happened. She’d been born in Nagasaki and almost coded in her DNA was what took place there; 9/11 awakened in her something, which was lying dormant. In the weeks after 9/11 she could not go out of our apartment without taking three different kinds of documentation lest she should not be recognized should she be incinerated. She tried to give blood that day and the day after, but there was no one really to give blood to, and the lines with people waiting to do exactly that were filled to capacity.
The opened wound that was festering in New York City, the country, and indeed in parts of the world, would slowly scar over, but the wound that was inside me and bore inside Katsuho as well was growing wider. We tried to pretend for awhile that things would get better; we tried to do the same things that we had loved to do together, but it didn’t have the same balming effect on us. I’d begun to feel that she was drifting away and that was enough to set my defensive gears in motion.
At the end of that school year my supervisor that the program would be cut the following semester informed me. Since I was one of the last to be hired, I was the first to be cut. I protested, but to no avail. Desperately trying to hang on to what had been pulled away from me I did what any self-serving lunatic would do: I went down to see my parents.
Katsuho, trying to keep our financial lives afloat had glued herself to her computer working on translations. Sometimes I’d find her staring into the screen unable to find the next word. Her senses and being were becoming burnt out. But I could only think of myself.
Down I went into the belly of the beast. The first day I was there and the first night I was alone in my motel room, I picked up a cigarette and a drink. I’d been slowly prepping Katsuho for months in advance, discussing the possibility of drinking again. I interpreted her quiet fatigue to mean she entertained the possibility. And the truth was that it was she who could have really used a drink.
Katsuho was lying on the couch trying to work a script she was translating and barely acknowledged my arrival back home. I was incensed and told her so. There was no immediate response from her. I slept on the couch that night and remained angry with her for days. I acted like a “terrible” two year old. And while we got through that storm, our relationship was just about over.
One evening, soon after, we went out for a walk to talk about our marriage and how we could begin again. When I took out a cigarette she asked me for one. She hadn’t had a cigarette in many years, since my heart attack. She took a couple of drags, turned, ran a few steps, and vomited. Unbeknownst, to either one of us, her body had decided to reject me.
I began classes to get my hack license and drive a cab. After class each day I’d come home, go to The Cedar, drink, and wait for Katsuho to come home from work. She’d decided to go into a new career, woodworking, and was now apprenticing with a private craftsman. I was the other side of just having a few drinks, and sitting on the front stoop of The Cedar. She took one look at me and rushed past. I felt the inside of my body quiver. I purposely waited a beat, not to appear too frazzled, and went after her. Inside of my apartment she was already packing. I made some attempts at asking her to stop, to tell me what was going on, all the usual stupid things one says to a person who you really know needs to get away from you. She closed her bag and flew out of my apartment like it was on fire. And it was.

pgs 195-199: From Chapter IX: JUNK SICK: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015