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

Mere mention of the name transforms Larry. Suddenly he looks less like a box turtle than a snapping one, neck recoiled, capable of inflicting real damage. “Dan, that is so far from anything I would do.”

“I know, but there’s no discounting the fact that Burton is one of America ’s leading doctors, after all. You sure know how to pick your enemies.”

“Any case, whatever you do, do not tell Burton where we are. He would like nuffing better than to put the kibosh on this, just to get back at me.”

“I don’t think medical professionals operate like that, Larry.”

“I hope you’re right, Dan, for his sake. Because he may think he wants me to die of renal failure and just fall off the end of the earth, but he definitely wants me to live a long life. He has no idea how much he wants me to live a long life.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nuffing, Dan,” he says, becoming benign again. “Here, have a peanut butter patty, these ones are my favorite.”

“You didn’t bring any of the sugar-free chocolate chips, in your condition?”

“Sugar-free is for sissies, Dan.”

“Then there’s the ethical question,” I continue, declining the treat. “All the docs in the family are opposed to ‘shopping for body parts,’ as they put it, maybe even from a prisoner. What’s your position on that anyway?”

“My position? Here’s my position: This nonprisoner needs a kidney. Execute someone of my blood type!”

“But seriously-”

“I’m dead serious.”

And he is. This is such a horrible thing to hear him say, so against every principle of decency I’ve been brought up to believe, that all I can do is pretend it came from someone else-I can’t see the speaker anyway-and change the topic.

“So aside from Mary being, uh, not petite, what’s your assessment of her after a few hours?” I ask him.

“Other than the fact that she lied about her size and her age, which I take as a girl thing, I find myself more comfortable with her than just about any woman at home,” comes the voice behind the wall of Mary. “Is she perfect? No. Her English is subpar. She keeps trying to check me for lice, but that might be cultural. Despite her being kind of a clean freak, as you can see, I think we have enormous amounts in common.”

“So you like her?”

“I do-uu,” he says with surprising ardor, peering at me over his shades and opening his eyes so wide I’m startled by their Paul Newman blueness. No wonder that women have always been eager to help him. “She gets my jokes,” he continues. “Don’t ask me how, but she laughs at the right time. She insists on hand-washing my socks. It’s like being in Sho gun. If only she’d put out, everything would be great.”

“You’ve come halfway around the world and haven’t consummated?”

“Didn’t you notice the separate single beds? It’s like Donna Reed in here. But we have an awful lot in common. Did I mention that she hand-washes my socks?”

There’s a pause during which I’m hoping Larry’s regretting his words because of how chauvinistic, politically incorrect, and generally hideous they sound. But apparently he’s not regretting them, because toward the end of the pause he cranes his head around to send Mary a lascivious wink.

“Dan made good use of my spare bedroom, I’ll tell you that,” he says.

“Hey, Larry made good use of it, too,” I tell her defensively. “When I came back from a weekend away, the door was busted down and there was a picture of my bed on the front page of the local paper under the headline ‘Biggest Bust in Two Years.’”

“Which made us even-steven in the drug department,” Larry says. “Dan stole my Valium. I allowed an associate of mine to stash a little dope under his mattress in his absence. Not that I would ever partake myself, Mary. As I may or may not have told you, I never touch the stuff, because: One, I like staying in control. Two, always a bad idea to invade principal. And three, dealing it back in the seventies was strictly business.”

I reflect that Larry is pretty straight, when it comes right down to it. No drink, no drugs, no unisex salons. He tried a joint back in 1970, fainted. He doesn’t even chew gum-behavior unbefitting a businessman, in his opinion. That’s why he always keeps a sharp crease in his pants. Have I even seen him wearing a T-shirt, or shorts for that matter? Of course not. According to Larry, who’s gonna respect you if your knees are showing?

Larry turns to me and adds some confidential information. “Best art thief in the business, incidentally.”

“Who was?” I ask. “Your ‘associate’?”

“Moishe the ringleader,” he says. “Moving dope was just a sideline compared to his interest in art. Speaking of which, they’ve never solved the Gardner Museum heist, you know, Dan.”

“I don’t want to know, okay, Larry? Let’s have a rule that you not tell me anything I can’t repeat in court, okay? Besides, we’ve lost our audience.”

Mary has slipped back into the bathroom to resume scrubbing, leaving Larry with a frontal sheen of sweat in her absence.

“Did she even understand a word we were saying?” I ask.

“A couple here and there, maybe,” he says. In silence we watch Mary as she continues sanitizing.

“Are my eyes getting worse, or is there really a step in the threshold going into the bathroom?” Larry asks.

“That’s to keep out evil spirits,” I tell him.

“Oh, that’s right, I forgot for a minute,” he says. “Because evil is so dumb it doesn’t know how to crawl up a step.”

We continue watching Mary while I refrain from reminding Larry that a sardonic attitude will not help us while we’re at the mercy of this splendid nation. “What’s with her heavy coat on a day like today?” I ask him.

“It’s a gift I sent her last month,” he tells me. “Warmest coat L. L. Bean sells. She was thoughtful enough to bring it here so she could model it for me. It’s minus-forty degrees where she lives. The North Koreans think they’re getting someplace good when they escape their homeland, apparently, but it serves them right. Minus-forty, the same temperature as Moscow, plus it has one of the biggest open mine pits on the planet. Not very appealing. Anyway, the poor dear has to go out in minus-forty-degree weather to send me an e-mail, plus avoid falling into the pit. Even the thought of her going out in that abusive situation makes me shiver.”

Larry has always been openhanded to a fault. In this he takes after his father, Sam, the lovable but illiterate garage mechanic, who would stand there between hospitalizations passing out silver dollars to the children. The less he had, the more coins he passed out. Though Larry had numerous bitter issues with his father and would be loath to acknowledge any resemblance to him, he does basically the same thing. The less, the more. During the recession of 1990-91, hard times for his Tuxedo Band-Aids (first aid for black-tie affairs) or whatever product he was pimping back then, Larry never showed up at a family member’s house without some pricey secondhand offering in the trunk of his Studebaker Avanti. He specialized in bulky items: dehumidifiers, microwave ovens, even, during one dubious venture into gaming that I forbade him to tell me about, pinball machines. It isn’t exactly a dirty secret per se, but it’s worth noting that almost every member of our clan has a pinball machine in his or her cellar, vintage mid-seventies, obtained in ways none of us wants to hear about. Larry never drove up anyone’s driveway empty-trunked. Air conditioners, too-something we could certainly use right now in this airless hotel room.

“It must be ninety degrees in here,” I point out. “Couldn’t she just model the coat for you and then take it off?” I ask.