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

“May I ask why they’re erecting tents in the breakdown lane, with women standing by them waving flags?” Larry asks.

“Overnight restaurants,” Jade says. “Not very clean.”

“Do tell,” Larry says, bringing his palm to his brow. He now has a migraine on top of everything else. “You have no idea how bad this feels,” he reports.” Everything itches. Feel right here,” he says, offering the raised scar on his forearm, the fistula.

I make a conscious decision to suspend my policy of not touching him in order to put my index fingertip on the glazed lump. I get a buzz like a soft version of those shockers you conceal in your palm.

“Aches like hell,” he says.

Jade frowns with sympathy for his pain. “Larry is biting bullets,” she says, reaching around and taking his hand.

“I’ve had a lot of bad moments in my life, but this is the worst I’ve ever felt,” he says, chewing on a handful of anti-nausea pills. “This has me thrown, I have to say. This is the most nervous I’ve ever been.”

“Look, all you have to do is get through tomorrow and you’ll be in one of the best hospitals in China,” I remind him. “Movie stars. Saudi royalty. Maybe they’ll fix you up with some Chinese herbs.”

“No thanks. I’m a purist: straight pharmaceuticals for me.” His effort at a smile dies on his face. Between the driving conditions and being abandoned by Mary, he’s not far from having a panic attack.

“More and more bullets he bites,” Jade says, squeezing his hand.

“Oh, I miss my mutha. I miss my sister,” he says, rocking with anxiety.

To take his mind off the present situation and remind him what he’s accomplished in life, I try to get him talking again. “Jade, this is a guy with a heart a mile wide. Wait till you hear his saga about how he saved his twin sister from epilepsy.”

“I don’t know if I can rise to the occasion,” he says, taking little sips of air.

“Give us a treat, champ,” I say. “I’ve never actually heard the whole thing from soup to nuts.”

With a valiant effort, Larry lifts himself from his hunched position and begins to speak.

“The year is 2002. Judy has had epilepsy since she was born, sedatives to keep her down and amphetamines to bring her back up. As a result she never developed any interpersonal skills and limited herself to working more or less full-time at the DMV, then coming back to my condo, where she lived, then locking the door and chatting by phone with our mutha until she fell asleep in front of the TV. Three shows:

I Love Lucy. The Price Is Right. Little House on the Prairie. Occasionally she would break routine and go to dinner with some old people who considered her ‘pretty.’”

“Really?” I ask. It slips out, interrupting the narrative.

“After a certain age, anyone under forty looks okay,” Larry explains.

This strikes me as profound enough for me to shut up. But not for long. “What’d she spend her salary on?”

“Bathing suits, mostly. She found a shop that had bathing suits marked medium that were really extra-large. But she kept buying them, pretending she was a medium and therefore could keep on eating her fruit-and-nut chocolate bars. Only fruit she ever ate, incidentally. I think the store knew what they were doing and mislabeled all their ugliest stuff they couldn’t get rid of.”

“What’d she need bathing suits for anyway, when she had a water phobia?”

“Exactly,” Larry says. “So there we were living in Florida with all its physicians, and our mutha, Rivie, living outside Boston, the medical capital of the country with an arsenal of Harvard-trained doctors, and nuffing was being done. I decided I was going to do something about it. I got on the horn in my condo-nice two-bedroom with private balcony overlooking mini-golf course; I’m still upset that you never visited, Dan-and I did nuffing for two days but make phone calls. Long story short, eventually I’m in touch with a Dr. Finkelstein at NIH, Finkelsteiner, something like that. He finds Judy’s case interesting over the phone, would like to see her in D.C. in three to four months. Much too long. I call Cousin Burton-”

“Wait, you call Cousin Burton?”

“Dan, you gonna let me tell my saga? Burton was a good guy then,” Larry says with a mild expression, as serenely unconflicted as Mona Lisa. “By the way, thank you for not objecting to my going in and out of present tense. It makes the telling easier, plus my mind is misoriented. I don’t always remember what’s past and what’s now.”

“You’re welcome. Good to resume?”

“Good to resume. Long story short, when Finkleheimer gets a call from Burton, we’re good to go in ten days. But now of course Judy doesn’t want to proceed. Trufe is, she’s used to her disease, she’s fond of her disease, her disease serves her. She doesn’t have to apply herself. I say, ‘Judy cut the crap. I know you’re scared, but we’re going.’ Soon as she sees the place, twelve-hundred-acre campus, she does a hundred-and-eighty-degree change. Plus, she’ll be the star there. She likes nuffing better than to be the star of her little medical dramas. That makes her special. In no other arena in life is Judy special except through her medical condition. Bottom line, she goes. Comes time for the surgery, she’s in ten, twelve hours. Chatting the whole time. Most of the surgery, they’re mapping her brain. Only ten, fifteen minutes of actual cutting.”

Larry starts looking out the window, counting the restaurants in the breakdown lane. The babbling has helped: He’s seeming somewhat revived…but the story’s left hanging.

“And?” I say.

“And what?”

“And what was the outcome?”

“Oh! Never had another seizure. From the day of the surgery on. And by the way, just for the record, I appreciate how no one in the family ever referred to us as Punch and Judy, at least to the best of my knowledge, despite our occasional knock-down-drag-outs. That goes to the family’s credit, which is a very short category in my mind, but give the devil his due.”

“So, Larry, stay on track here. You changed your sister’s life!”

“But not necessarily for the better,” he’s quick to point out. “Because suddenly after the operation, she had no crutch. Her epilepsy had been the central component of her life around which everything else was structured. Everyone started telling her, ‘Oh, Judy, now you can go get your driver’s license, you don’t have to work at the DMV, maybe you can even get a boyfriend.’ All this terrified Judy. She didn’t want any of it. She just wanted to be babied by our mutha.”

“And then your mutha, I mean mother, dies.”

“Exactly. And no one came to the funeral, which I can never, ever, ever forgive the family for. That goes deep, Dan.”

“But, Larry, you could never decide on a date for the funeral. If you’d just chosen a date, I’m sure everyone would have come.”

“That remains to be seen, which it never will, will it? I’m still too upset to talk about it. Getting back on track, as you say, things took a downturn after our mutha’s death. Judy’s worked by this time nineteen and a half years, she quits six months before she would have qualified for pension. That would have given her a measure of independence, which was the last thing she wanted. She took to chatting with our deceased mutha on the phone and falling asleep in a chair, since our mutha had died lying down and Judy didn’t want the same thing to happen to her. Long story short, one day after a four-day weekend with no activity from her locked room, I grow suspicious. I punch the door down with my shoulder and find her expired in her La-Z-Boy, pills all over her lap, dressed in a black Speedo.”