Daniel Rose - Larry's Kidney, Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China

“It’s an honor thing, I gather, some Asian way of displaying loyalty,” Larry says, mopping his brow not very effectively with the Coke bottle. “Or subservience or something. You tell me-you’re the China hand.”

“Larry, I’m not a China hand. I’ve been here four times total, and the last time I was thrown in jail, for God’s sake.”

“Mary’s got to hear this story,” Larry says. “You were clowning around in some forsaken outpost in Tibet, right, drunk on barley beer? Offered to sell some Chinese soldiers a basketball signed by the Dalai Lama, something like that?”

“Larry, do you mind if we don’t revisit that adventure? It still gives me hives.”

“Did they waterboard you? Mary’s gonna love this.”

“I think we’ve established that she doesn’t have great command of English, Larry.”

“At least tell her about the sadistic soldiers blowing smokes rings in your face.”

“Larry, no one in this country wants to hear stories from the past. It’s all Great Leaps Forward, haven’t you noticed? Besides, she can get the whole traumatic tale off my Web site if she’s curious.”

“Well, all I can say is, it’s beyond me how you’d be willing to come here again. I’m amazed you’re not freaked by the Chinese after that, Dan.”

“Who says I’m not freaked?” I say. “I thought I was lost to the world, and vowed that if I got out, I’d never step foot in this country again.”

Larry takes in this confession with the seriousness it calls for. “I guess bottom line is you want to make sure to avoid a jail cell this time around,” he says.

“You could say that, yes.”

“Okay, so help me find my trousers. You ready to go?”

“Go where?”

“The airport, I keep telling you. I forgot most of my luggage at the terminal. In the excitement of meeting Mary and so forth, it slipped my mind. Or maybe this is the first time I’ve told you. See, that’s my mental impairment again.”

“Larry,” I say.

“Yes, Dan.”

“What mental impairment?”

Larry looks me in the eyes for perhaps the first time since I entered his room.

“I’m pretty sure I told you about my mental impairment, Dan.”

“I’m pretty sure you didn’t,” I say, looking back in his.

“Well then, there it is again, case in point: my impairment. As you may have noticed, I tend to babble a bit. Misplace things, get confused, what have you. Our task is to determine whether this is the natural result of the dialysis, which scrambles my blood chemistry, or if it has to do with the disability suit.”

“Larry,” I say.

“Yes, Dan.”

“What disability suit?”

“Okay, I’m not going to quibble,” Larry says. “Maybe I already told you about it and maybe I didn’t, but long story short, what do you think’s funding my trip?”

“So wait, I may have heard something about it on the grapevine: Is this the disability suit for getting hit in the head by a falling icicle?”

“No, it is most definitely not,” Larry says, offended. “The icicle suit was the one I filed on behalf of my mutha, the settlement of which was nuffing compared to my own disability suit, for being rear-ended by a truck.” His anger settles down a bit. “I can see where it might be tricky to keep them straight, however,” he adds generously. “For the duration, if you wish to refer to either as the icicle suit, I have no quarrel. Any case it was a quarter-million-dollar settlement, after lawyers’ fees. Sweetest words I ever heard come out of a jury foreman’s mouth: ‘We find the plaintiff cognitively impaired.’ But the downside: Cost me twenty-two IQ points, and Dan, as you know, my claim to fame has always been that I’m the dumbest member of Mensa-I had the lowest IQ you can have and still be a member. But now I can’t even seem to locate my toofbrush.” He raises his voice. “Mary, do you know what I did with my toiletry bag?”

On her knees in the bathroom, Mary holds up the bath mat, nodding hopefully.

“Never mind, dear, go back to work if that’s what you want, or better yet come in here and rub my neck…”

Mary gears up to run toward us while I gird myself for a bear hug.

“Mary, you are in for a treat when I take you home to America,” he says. “You may think you’ve seen good basketball in this country with the Dalai Lama’s team, but just wait till you see the Miami Heat. You’re gonna meet my friend Shaquille O’Neal. I’ve had lunch with him half a dozen times, on account of my cousin on the other side of the family is his accountant. We’ll get center court seats for all of us together, Dan in the middle ’cause how many people could I ask to delve into his life savings like this, not a peep of complaint-”

Mary is at full gallop. I brace myself just in time for an onslaught of bosom.

“Cuzn Dan!” she cries.

You cannot push a cow’s head down unless it is drinking water by its own will.

First order of business is getting Larry back on his dialysis routine. No time to waste: Without a working kidney, it’s imperative that he be hooked up to a blood-cleaning machine at once to keep him alive till we can locate a replacement kidney. Bright and early next morning, Mary leads Larry off to hook up with her uncle, who’s made an appointment for him at a dialysis clinic. This frees me to begin the process of procuring a kidney, but before I can start, I have to do some remedial work-locating not only the luggage but also the passport Larry’s managed to misplace, both a drain of precious time when we’ve allotted ourselves only a week in-country. Yuh-vonne pitches in, taking me to the airport where we find the luggage, manning the phone with her little rhinestone headset from my hotel suite to find the right offices to replace his passport so that he can legally be here.

Noontime finds Yuh-vonne and me sitting on a hard wooden bench with the rest of China, in a gleaming but ill-lit hallway at a police station where we hope to get the forms to get the forms to pay the five-hundred-dollar U.S. penalty and replace his passport. How can the insides of China be so gleaming when the outsides are so dusty? Maybe it has something to do with those brooms everyone is always wielding that look like something snapped off a tree. It’s a mystery that makes my eyes droop, and soon I’m dozing in and out of sleep while Yuh-vonne passes the time by translating aloud from the binder she claims is my fact file.

“‘Beautiful lady smooth bottom of he shirt’…”

It’s an interesting translation.

“‘She take fingertips and stroke he belt’…”

“Wait a minute, it says this in my fact file?”

“No fact file!” she informs me. “Chinese chicken-choking book!”

So I see. Chinese porn is hidden inside the binder. Should I take umbrage that she’s defiling my dossier? Yuh-vonne smiles with her little bitten lips and continues reading.

“‘With great skill her fingertips undo the latch on belt, the key on belt’-what you call the handle that attach?” She looks at me brazenly.

“Buckle?” I say.

“Yes, buckle! ‘And then she does zippery part’-what called the zippery…?”

“The fly?”

“No fly!” She looks vaguely offended.

I peer down at the page, all those lovely squiggles. “Yes, fly, I’m sorry, that’s what we call it…”

Satisfied, Yuh-vonne coyly covers her smile with her hand and continues. “‘He gorge is’-how you say, like a desert?”

“Dry? His throat is dry?”

“‘Then she put mouth on he…deek…’”

Suddenly my cell phone rings. Was I daydreaming just now? I scramble to fetch it and hear a semifamiliar voice.