Аманда Палмер - The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

I DON’T WANT TO GO THROUGH THIS .

I felt my eyes sting and took a giant breath.

I DON’T WANT TO GO THROUGH THIS .

I DON’T WANT TO GO THROUGH THIS .

I DON’T WANT TO GO THROUGH THIS .

He hit the dashboard so hard it frightened me.

And he started to cry.

He wiped his eyes and sounded so weak, and so tired.

I don’t want to go through this, Amanda .

I breathed in and out again. I put my hand in his and kept my eyes on the road.

I know .

I know .

I know .

There was nothing else I could say.

I didn’t want to see him like this, I didn’t want to fuck up, I didn’t want to say the wrong thing.

And I felt dark and selfish. I didn’t want him to be sick. I didn’t want him to fall apart.

I wanted him to take hold of me and help me. He always had.

But this was it. He was breaking down in front of me. Which, I realized, was the ultimate act of trust and love.

He was asking me to see him.

Not as my mentor, not as the guy with all the answers, but as himself.

Human. Afraid.

He’d been taking care of me all my life.

It was my turn.

I hadn’t really talked about Anthony to the fans before. He was the magic friend behind the curtain.

My close friends all knew The Anthony Deal, but now I had to talk about him on the blog and to Twitter. It was a shitty reason for introducing someone ( Dear Everybody, meet my lifelong best friend and mentor! He’s dying, probably! ), but otherwise there was no way to explain why I might have to postpone all the upcoming shows.

Launching the Kickstarter gave me a new level of pride in the fanbase, but the outpouring of support they showed when I told them about Anthony and his cancer was astounding. They truly held me up, sending me love, but more than that, sharing their own stories and pain, past and present: parents with cancer, wives with cancer, teachers with cancer, children with cancer. I didn’t feel alone.

Neil and I had been about to head to New York, but instead we canceled our move and rented a house in Cambridge, near Harvard Square, so we could be on hand. Neil offered to cover the whole rent there, and for the first time, his wanting to help didn’t send me into a fit of anxiety. The money, and who was covering the rent, didn’t seem to matter as much as the cancer, which was all I could think about. Neil was paying, I was paying, whatever.

I rejiggered my schedule and tried to leave town only when necessary to deliver the remaining house parties, then came home to drive Anthony to and from chemo when it was my turn in the carpool. I got used to the routine: pick him up, drive to the hospital, take a parking garage ticket, walk him up to the ninth floor, wait for his treatment to start, bring him a sandwich, sit and wait while they prepared and administered the chemicals while Anthony lay in the hospital bed, go get the car four hours later, drive him home.

Neil joined the carpool, too, and sometimes we’d drive in together. Then we’d sit in the treatment room or go for walks to the hospital cafeteria while Anthony dozed off.

First they said he had six months , I complained. Then they said it was a sixty percent chance that the chemo would save him. Then the guy today said it was more like a fifty-fifty chance. What exactly are they basing that on? I mean, if his type of cancer is that rare… doesn’t it sound like such a perfectly random bullshit number? Fifty-fifty? Really? They expect us to take that seriously?

Neil was silent. He’d spent the entire night before researching T-cell leukemia online. Then he said, I don’t know. If we believe the Internet, it’s much worse than that. More like a five percent chance, darling. Who knows what the truth is. I think fifty-fifty means what it means. He might survive, and he might die. And they don’t know .

Somewhere inside, I had no doubt he would survive. He had to survive: he was Anthony.

We picked him up, we drove him in, we sat, we waited.

The chemo made him tired.

Sometimes, sitting next to him as the clock ticked, I’d start feeling confused and guilty about the choices I was making. I’d finally released my Kickstarter record, and instead of touring, promoting, and connecting with the fans, I was staying at home, sitting in a hospital, watching a bag of chemicals drip into my friend’s arm.

But then I’d look at him, sleeping there.

Fifty-fifty.

Anthony.

He had loved me more than enough.

He had loved me way beyond enough.

I would give him everything.