Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

I am far away from anything familiar to me. How strange Tuscany can be to a small New Yorker. Maybe the rain, my wet clothes make me nervous. I often fear meeting new people. I have never met George and Katy before. Our mutual friend, Harold Schimmel, with whom George served in army intelligence in Verona, described them as gods of a modest mythology. Schimmel is a poet, old friend of mine from Cornell, who settled finally in Jerusalem, where he writes in Hebrew. Katy is pregnant again. Schimmel presented her as the empress of pregnancy. I don’t know at that time that George, Katy, Jingle, and I will be friends forever. The house looks very old under grey sky — terra-cotta tile roof, cracking stucco. Next to the door is a dark fresco George has painted, Madonna and child. I climb the hill and stand by the old, crooked blue door. A kid, maybe three years old, barefoot, in tattered shirt and pants, not Paolo nor Elio, I don’t think, arrives to stare at me. “Un Ameri(h)ano an(h)orra,” he aspirates the c’s like a good Tuscan. “Dio senza (h)ulo.” Translated roughly that means, “Another American, God without an asshole.” I knock on the door, and Katy opens and laughs, even before I tell her who I am. That big laugh over the years becomes very familiar, great waves of good will and savvy. Katy will be with George forever. George, voluntary contadino, small and magnificent, smoking a Parodi, beret settled on his head like a crown, sits at the kitchen table in diffused light from the open windows. A piece of paper, some colored pencils — earthen hills, pitch green cypresses, a farmhouse, all emerge on the paper in front of him. George is fixing to spend the next fifty years correcting in pencil, tempera, watercolor, oils, fresco, the space, the hills, the trees and farms and buildings of the “crete,” a landscape that was one of his major passions. He is always the contadino Americano, prince of the “crete,” regal peasant, avatar of totally domestic genius.

Great! The prostate goes blooey. That’s one of the disasters of late life for a guy, perhaps a tax on longevity. Dr. Shandra Wilson, the urologist who examines me, asks me to drop my pants and bend over. “Let me get a feel of that humongous prostate,” she says. Okay, a woman urologist. Women have to suffer male gynecologists. Dr. Wilson is trim and lively, her face softly equine. She is quick, smart, and willing to answer questions. “Is “humongous prostate” a bad thing,” I ask. “Not necessarily,” says the doc. “Some women have big breasts, some have small.” A cute way to dodge the question.

Dr. Wilson snips out a biopsy and fetches a cancer. Great! Prostate cancer. I’ve lived long enough to get it. The skinny on this C is that it develops slowly and at my age I will probably die of something else before the cancer kills me; that is, if it’s not too aggressive. If I need to treat it, there are several options. As Rudy has had done, I could have tiny radioactive pellets implanted around the tumor. There’s a cryogenic option that freezes it out. And there’s what they call “watchful waiting”. You check your PSA regularly, and jump in with the broadswords if it suddenly peaks.

“The bad news,” Dr. Wilson says, “Is that the tumor is cancerous.” I don’t know why, but this feels like the punch line of a good joke. I hold back the guffaw. “The good news is that your cancer is very aggressive, a nine on the Gleason scale. (The scale goes from one to ten, in measuring the boisterousness of the cancer.)” I thought that was even funnier. Nine is up there. Here I am, the same mook I always was, only now with cancer. Whoops. Death comes out as cancer’s valet. “This is good news, because you have to do something about it. No watchful waiting for you. I don’t think it has metastasized yet, but it’s at the margins and easily can. So you’ve got to get rid of it.” The prostate does not get a lot of attention in one’s life, unlike breasts in women. Skillful partners can use it to enhance sexual pleasure, but usually the guy doesn’t walk around with prostate on his mind. Who even knows what it looks like?

My buddy, Eric Mayer, from way back in grade school, member of our New York Bullets Social and Athletic Club, has been a radiation oncologist forever. He lives in Santa Fe now, and consults briefly with Dr. Wilson. He agrees that the pellets are not a good option. Radiation tends to mush up the prostate, and makes it clumsy to operate on later. Neither of them thinks the cryogenic approach works. So here I am, sitting on a nasty prostate. There are a couple of surgical approaches, laproscopic and conventional butchery. Dr. Wilson describes laproscopic as if it will be a lot of fun for her, like a video game, a Star Wars kind of thing. Eric, who was a dependable second baseman back in the day, and a formidable street hockey wing man, prefers the conventional approach. Laproscopic is a milder procedure, and recovery is quicker. It magnifies the small area where the knives are cutting by twenty times, and is very accurate, but it doesn’t allow the surgeon to see the environs, and whether there has been metastasis into nearby lymph nodes. In either case I’d have to be catheterized for a couple of weeks. We all agree they should rip me open.

Avrum, my oldest son, comes up from New Mexico to encourage me through the procedural dance. The super competent nurse who preps me for the OR tells me that I am lucky. The traffic of gurneys, the babyshit beige walls, the wasted patients on oxygen, the minacious technological apparatus, and the sharp antiseptic smells, all make this one of the last places I would come to try my luck. My luck, the nurse says, is that Dr. Wilson is the best, a brilliant surgeon. After the anesthesiologist applies her oblivion potions, I’m not present to witness the brilliance. What I hear next is, “It’s all over now.” I was in the OR for four hours. I’m being wheeled somewhere, and settled there until my room is ready.

One of the most brutal aspects of a hospital stay is the multiple blood draws, and the web of I.V.’s they want to install. It’s like a needle hotel. My veins are slippery and evasive, challenging for the inexperienced phlebotomists that whiz around to vampire me. Avrum cringes on the vinyl settee as one of these young women jabs me and roots around in my forearm for ten minutes trying to trap a vein for an I.V. that has popped out. I learn from this how poorly I’d perform under torture. They call in the head nurse with the vast experience, who sets the I.V. in my upper arm. This seems to work, except that it pops out easily if I make any move at all and sets off an earsplitting alarm that eventually brings the floor nurse rushing in to reset. Now I’m held captive by needles and tubes and slowly bubbling liquids, and regular noises ominously ticking my moments into the technology. I’m expected in this chamber to recuperate.

The nurse’s assistant, happily named Hope, when she is assigned to sponge me down, settles me by the sink and slaps me with the washcloth. “Now sit still, you little pooper,” she says. The duty nurse scolds her for calling me “little pooper”. I’ve never been called a “little pooper” before. It seems affectionate. When my friend, Yvette, comes to visit, Hope rushes into the room and pretends to look for something, but is really checking out this pretty woman who is visiting her little pooper.

Rafael, my son from Portland, comes to take over on the day that Avrum leaves. His girlfriend, Jacinta, comes with him. She’s a remarkable woman, a Mother Teresa orphan from Calcutta, who has pulled herself up by her sandal straps, traveled out into the world, and become a registered nurse. She checks my catheter, and other ongoing discomforts, the first girlfriend of any of my three sons to ever look at my stuff, what remains of it.