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

“Why a black Speedo?”

“Trying to be the alluring dame in death she never was in life? Beats me. But I can tell you that she did not look good at all. In fact, I almost vomited. Never saw her in it before, I would have told her to throw it out. Judy did not exercise. At the end she weighed, I’m guessing two seventy-five, may she rest in peace.”

I don’t bother letting a silence surround this thought. I’m too mad at Judy for not donating her kidney to her twin.

“But you did what you could. Larry, you did a heroic thing.”

“Thank you, Dan. I rarely hear words like that. My need for external validation is bottomless-that’s why I got the three radio ham licenses, three state real-estate brokerage licenses, a pilot’s license, and I took the commercial airline pilot’s license test just to see how I’d do and got a ninety-two, which isn’t great for a professional pilot but not bad for a civilian-”

“Hush, Larry. Settle down. I’m giving you those words. You did good.”

Pause. He inhales a tiny space for himself. “Thank you, Dan,” he says. I hear his breathing become less raggedy, time it against my own. He is settling down.

The driving continues without letup. Jade in the front seat has her head tilted back, letting all this talk flow through her. It’s a comfort to me that she’s here for moral support. Larry sighs a few times to himself, then speaks again with a memorial tone.

“She was the most unhappy person I ever knew, Judy was,” he says. “She was unhappy not having her seizures. She missed them and what they did for her. And she was selfish, insofar as letting her kidney die with her instead of giving it to me. Yet I don’t blame her, poor thing. I blame her mental state. And I miss her. I still wake up and forget that she’s dead sometimes. I wake up and think I have to tell her something, but then I remember that she’s dead. And I think about my dad. Him I remember is dead.”

“Hush, Larry…”

“I got a short straw when I drew my dad. You know his sole advice to me when I tried to play Little League baseball? ‘Never swing, maybe you’ll get a walk.’ That was basically his attitude. Don’t try, maybe you’ll get by. If that isn’t the most pathetic advice a father ever imparted to a son, I don’t know what is.”

His words are beyond bitter-they’re just sad. “Hush, Larry,” I say…but he can’t stop.

“He never gave me any help in any way. So when my students want my help, I go out of my way to do everything I can. Black, white, Chinese, it doesn’t matter. That’s why I’m glad I teach at a second-tier school. Harvard students don’t need my help.”

“So something good came of your relationship. You were able to see him for what he was and rise above-”

“Sam I always saw for who he was. Maybe that’s why I always called him ‘Sam’ and never ‘Dad.’ From the age of four, I knew this was a very limited person. Sam came from an immigrant family, all he was was basically a manservant to his older brother, Irving, who owned the garage Sam worked in and who treated him badly. Gave him a hundred dollars a week and a box of chocolates for New Year’s. And Sam went along with it, thinking that was his function in life, to prop up his older brother and be subservient. One of my first memories was my mutha yelling ‘Yoo-hoo, Irving, see? I’m putting a dime here, only taking a warm Coke from the rack, not one of the cold ones from the cooler.’ I was only four, but I knew this was not right.”

He hardly draws a breath. These words are coming without air going in or out. The memories are so deep that the words are anaerobic.

“Sam never let anyone read in the house, you know why? Because he himself couldn’t read. He had the opportunity to learn many times, but he never bothered to. That’s what I don’t forgive. He didn’t have to be that way. He chose to be that way. The last time he tried to beat me with his belt, I was twelve. I said, ‘Do it! Do it in front of all these people!’ I was scared of a lot of people, but never of him. He never earned my fear.”

“Do you have any happy stories about your father?”

“I’ll try, see where they take us. Here goes: Low as my futha’s branch of the family was, there were a few sparks of glory. One of the cousins, Max, grew up to become professor emeritus of Harvard. Another cousin, Benny, started a famous perfume empire. Another cousin, Lenny, grew up to become the legendary Leonard Bernstein, maybe you’ve heard the name, though he was considered such an obnoxious little prick at fourteen that he got his face punched in and was thrown down some stairs. They still laugh at that one in that branch of Sam’s family, at the expression on little Lenny’s bloody face, obnoxious little know-it-all.”

Larry takes time out to swipe his nose with a hankie that may have been starched once, years ago. “There, was that happy? I can’t even tell anymore,” he says. “But you’ll notice that I use curse words very seldom, if you call ‘prick’ a curse word, so I guess all this is dredging up some pretty emotional material for me.”

“Umm, I’ve heard happier,” I admit. “Any others? What about the Little League you mentioned? Wasn’t your father a sponsor or something?”

“To a degree,” Larry says. “What happened was, Sam never did anything with me, but one day he gets the idea in his head that he wants to sponsor a Little League team. This enabled him to have the words ‘Sam Feldman and Son’ printed on the backs of our Cleveland Indians shirts and watch us parade around the field, making him inordinately proud even though there was no such entity as Sam Feldman and Son. He took pictures, you wouldn’t believe how many. But because he was a sponsor, I had to join the team. Hated every minute of it. I couldn’t bat and I couldn’t catch. Though there was one bright spot: The catcher grew up to become the drummer for the band Boston, which got pretty big in the late seventies, used to get me free tickets, which I’d scalp, made a little pocket change.”

“What about fishing?” I ask. “Didn’t you two like to go deep-sea fishing together?”

“True to an extent,” Larry concedes. “One thing we bofe loved to do was fish. So one day Sam tells me he’s going to take me out in a half-share boat out of Gloucester, that’s two of us and two rented out to some strangers. I’m a little kid, I’m looking forward to it. We get up early, before the sun’s up, drive to Gloucester, he’s got to go to breakfast at his favorite diner where he always goes, sits there telling his jokes, they don’t want to hear them again, but Sam doesn’t care, finally breakfast is over, we go to the pier, sign says boat left half an hour ago.”

I’m silent. I don’t know what to say. So Larry says it for me.

“A professor,” he says. “It’s hard for me to believe how far I’ve come sometimes. I haul out my CV sometimes and say, ‘Who’s that?’ It’s pretty impressive, I have to say. Problem is, I still see myself as my futha’s son.”

“You are your father’s son,” I say. “But you’re also more. You have to accept yourself as the accomplished grown-up you’ve become. You have to let go of the way he used to see you. It’s no longer valid.”

“It was never valid.”

“But to the extent that it was, you have to surrender the old picture you have of yourself.”

“I don’t do surrender, Dan.”

“Maybe that should be next on your to-do list. Saves a lot of wear and tear.”

Larry thinks about this as we find ourselves inside a traffic jam, locked among massive smoke-belching trucks. A tiny old lady on a bicycle weaves in front of us with a fishing pole in her teeth.

“Thank you for helping me, Dan. In case I haven’t told you. I’ll make it up to you.”