I climb four simple stone steps and I sweat.
Jay and Guy heave me up, one stone step at a time like I'm wounded royalty. I disappear. They strain.
"Sorry about that" I smile trying to lessen the spectacle,
"sorry for having to lean so heavily on you but lucky for you, I'm skin and bones."
There's no hiding it. I've lost body mass. My progression is naked for all to consider.
"Not at all, not at all, it was easy, it wasn't a problem" offers Jay.
"Really! Actually VERY easy. Don't worry Charlie. No worries" chirps Guy.
And I let the spectacle go. I let it go with ease which is surprising to me because I've always felt rattled watching the disabled lifted.
I let go of my indignity -I made it - and now I make conversation -the recent past gone - pop!
Here I am.
I adjust my stance and see Kate - I see her fear. She snatches it away and replacing it with her charming apple cheeked smile.
"You look great!"
"I take a hundred vitamins. I should loo
k great. My skin has never been rosier."
"You know you should tell Guy what you're taking. He has this thing about his skin. I think it's silly but he'd probably love suggestions, I mean healthy skin suggestions."
____________
We gather in a loft in a tired building on West 26th Street near 7th Avenue.
We lie on the creaky wood floor and move about and sip tea and follow guided writing instructions and yawn and stretch and feel protected in the cave-like loft - unreachable -a delicious escape.
When it's time to read my piece I hand my stapled papers to Guy and ask him to read them because my tongue gets too tired trying to articulate more than a paragraph of words.
I ask Guy because Guy has a lovely British accent. (He's from Bermuda or Jamaica or New Zealand?) I can't remember but it's satisfying to hear his rounded vowels and cutting consonants making their way through my personal rants.
________________________
After lab, Mattie drives me home and I find CAR waiting in my apartment. She sips red wine and listens to NPR. It's Saturday night, I sip wine and watch Car saute and simmer. We make plans.
She's brought paint supplies to paint my bedroom green but I am zonked.
My mother has had a stroke and I am on tender hooks.
My mother is at the hospital now.
We sip wine.
CAR hangs new curtains in my bedroom. They're from her dining room
CAR is funny.
She hangs three of the curtain panels up and without a sigh of angst decides she's lost the fourth panel and will have to send it to me later. But the fourth panel lies clearly in the middle of the living room floor.
I tell her she hasn't left it behind it "there it is" and she picks it up without a second thought and finishes the job.
I appreciate her creative will and I like her taste. Her taste is different than mine. Her taste can be more obtuse yet refined. I enjoy mixing things up.
The curtains look Hollywood-ish and extravagant but functional. I'm an actor - I like my apartment dressed in different ways. So I will enjoy the Hollywood drapes (for a while).
___________________________
The next day we buy an end table from Pottery Barn. I need a table with drawers near my couch and my bed. I have become quite specific about what my needs dictate. And every week I seem to need or crave some very specific prop, a plant, an umbrella-cane stand, a pencil jar.
The Pottery Barn salesman is very young and cute and probably gay asks how many end tables we want... "a hundred?" He thinks this funny and because he so droll and sassy, it kind of it is.
CAR thinks that I look particularly handsome today and that the salesman is interested in me but confused by my walker. This is great news to me but I kind of doubt it.
The price for the table is $160 but there is a $30 delivery fee and delivery is mandatory.
This drives me CRAZY.
"Then the price is $190 not $160!" I rant to the childlike salesman.
CAR has to calm me down at check out like I'm the quick-tempered bread winner of the family.
__________________________
We eat at La Caridad on 78th and Broadway. We have a feast of fried plantains, pork chops, chicken, rice and beans and avocado salad. My neighbor Bruce knocks on the window.
_______________________________
We take a pedicab through the Park. The air is perfect. The driver (from Africa) begins a patter I've heard before. "Old money on the east side, new money on the west side. Only the rocks are indigenous, Ghost Busters was shot there, etc."
Mid-ride, CAR spots a bouncy short man with shiny dark hair walking with a black teen ager. He is cocky and super short- weirdly short.
"I think that's Tom Cruise" I say.
CAR is not convinced. "His body is too weird."
"I know! I think Tom Cruise has a weird body, or, that's what I've heard."
Tom Cruise and I are the same age and I have known this since he did RISKY BUSINESS and I have often insanely compared my career to Tom Cruise's because of our nearness in age. And so today I glumly consider my life versus Tom Cruise's. I am down - way down. And Tom Cruise with his short odd body and terrible movies and money and stardom... hums along.
______________________________
We watch the Oscars at Jackie's. We watch on Jackie's dated color TV in her spotless empty apartment. CAR has carried glasses of Prosecco over but Jackie has prepared coffee and croissants.
I choke on pop corn. I have to spit up. I can't breath. My adrenaline guns.
Jackie and CAR wait it out. I picture dying in Jackie's apartment.
____________________________
The Oscars seems lifeless to me but I get weepy when Sandra Bullock wins.
______________________________
The next day we meet COLE at the Moonstruck diner on 23rd and Ninth. I insist we sit in the middle, not near the window. I have very specific likes and dislikes and CAR allows for this.
We talk, we blab, we gossip. Car says she feels like we're on a TV show and I know exactly what she means.
And then I choke on the salad. I have to spit up. Cole and Car sit in silence. I can't get air down my throat. I imagine an ambulance and sirens surrounding the Moonstruck Diner. It passes. I notice Cole barely touches her food.
________________________________________
I haven't been to the Moonstruck in years. I used to go all the time. They still know me there. A waiter appears from another section to say hello.
"I haven't seen you in a long time? How are you?"
And because I've made this reappearance with my walker it occurs to me that he is saying hello to me - that he is talking to me because of my frailty and my long walk down the middle of the diner must have alarmed him.
"Oh. I'm hanging in there. Doing the best I can."
He kind of blushes. He is genuine. He looks like he's really fond of me - of our history together.
I barely remember him. I instantly reassess my past and consider that the odd New Yorker might have an affection for me - because I've stuck around so long - seemingly lost - I have unknowingly become part the local fabric to some New Yorkers. I feel famous.
The waiter leaves and CAR says, "that was nice. That was REALLY nice"
"Well, I've been around here for years. The odd waiter, the stoop dwellers- they know me."
___________________________________
CAR and COLE and I drive to the plant district to buy some trees for my apartment. I have this idea that If I look at healthy green, I will become healthy green.
Cole pulls up to a store. CAR runs in to see if it's viable. I can't walk around so we have to chose a place wisely. Cole and I wait in the running car while CAR runs up and down the sidewalk. A cop comes from behind and stuffs a ticket through Cole's window for $125. I am so livid that I almost cry.
________________________________________
CAR and I spend the rest of night clearing space in my apartment and she does all my laundry. I haven't done it for weeks. I empirically lie on the sofa and CAR sweats it out picking up dry cleaning, cooking dinner, gathering groceries, wiping down counters, petting the cat.
When we begin decluttering,
CAR wants me to follow the rules she's learned on the website FLY_LADY. When you come upon some thing your supposed to either move it, save it, or toss it, or ... something like that. The rules were too hard to follow. I can't remember the right phrases. We get through it without Fly_Lady.
_________________________________________
After dinner (which was delicious), we sit on the sofa and get into a heated discussion about my attitude - about help - and about my vision of the role I played with this disease.
I tell CAR a story about my father's wake.
_____________________________
An old couple, the Tates (let's call them the Tates because they look like central casting from the New York Ad world circa 1965) the Tates came to the wake. I hadn't seen the Tates in maybe thirty years. They lived in Connecticut but now live year round in Naples. My mother told me Mrs. Tate has agoraphobia. This is why we haven't seen her in her thirty years. So it WAS nice of her to come to the wake. Oddly enough, Mrs. Tate's a psychiatrist.
When Mrs. Tate approaches me she is soft and warm and also odd. She asks me where the years have gone. She can remember me quite clearly thirty or even forty years ago. She tells me that we have to appreciate each day, every moment, be grateful for today. This makes good sense but Mrs. Tate is being so tender and kind and I begin to wonder if she is talking to me or talking about the loss of my father?"
It's too much for me so... I ask,
"Where's Mr. Tate?"
Mr. Tate spins around from nearby grips my hand firmly and smiles, "Charlie! So sorry to hear about the Gherigs!! And you didn't even play baseball!!"
Ugh. (By the way dude, I DID play baseball. Four years in the Bantam league).
I was so angry. I was so angry with my father. The Tate's were my dad's friends not my mother's. My father told them. Funny. My father and I never discussed it.
I tell them "Don't worry about it! I feel great! And you know what? I'm not sure what I have... because there is no accurate way to diagnose these things! So don't worry about it" I said.
I might as well have been bearing my teeth. I was flushed and pushy.
"Good for you! GOOD for you!" say Mr. and Mrs. Tate.
________________________
"Charlie" CAR says. People don't know what to do? They don't know how to act."
"Well people should mind their own business. THAT's the right thing to do. Don't bring it up unless I bring it up."
"How can you be so sure that that's the right thing to do? Some people want to have it brought up, some people want to feel sympathy and empathy. You talk as if it was your fault. That you don't want to be faulted or blamed for the disease.
Is that what you think? Do you think that this is somehow your fault?"
"CAR, people look away when they see me. Because it's too hard to look at."
_____________________________________
The next morning CAR gets up and races around my apartment finishing chores, making last minute adjustments and then she brings me coffee in bed. I'm certain she'll miss her bus at nine thirty but CAR wants to do one more load of laundry. CAR is driven. It's impressive. I don't see how she can swing it.
She manages to get out of the apartment by five (or ten) after nine. It seems doubtful she'll make it. I tell her I'll stand by my phone and look up things on the web and she can call me in case she misses her bus and needs alternative travel plans.
But in about twenty minutes CAR calls and says, "I'm on the bus."
This is incredible to me. But I say, " this is bad because this will reinforce your tendency to do things at the last minute. You'll think you can get away with it."
"Not a chance" she says " I once missed a flight three times on the same day.
But anyway, I made it. I'm on the bus. And the cab driver was really cool. The cab driver told me my fortune on the way over. And he was right!"
"What he did say?"
"I'm sitting on a crowded bus so I can't really talk about it right now but I'll tell you later."
We hang up and I look across the room and see CAR's bag leaning against the toile chair.
I wonder if that's what the cab driver told her.
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