Archive for November, 2005
Wednesday, November 30th, 2005
The dreams have been sort of strange.
They started the very first night after the docs told me it was malignant melanoma. I usually dream pretty vividly, but I don’t usually remember everything or for very long.
I remember everything from the first night’s dream.
I was in full uniform, with badge and handcuffs and weapon and extra ammunition and everything else that goes with being a cop. I was back at my high school, Robert E. Lee in Midland, Texas. We were in an auditorium, but not the one I remember from high school more than twenty years ago. This one, instead, was large but square, had only two doors, both on the same wall, no windows, and no stage doors.
A man, and I think he had a gun of some sort, had taken a pile of hostages and put himself on the wall between the two doors. The Midland Police Department was there and they wore their mid-1970’s uniforms, the uniforms of my childhood.
For whatever reason, those policeman couldn’t get the situation in hand. For whatever reason, they called me. And somehow, though I live twenty or twenty two hours away, I got home pretty quickly.
Because of my work in theater and because I had graduated from Lee High, I was the only one who knew there was a catwalk above the auditorium. It began over the stage, but then extended out into the house, all the way to the back of the auditorium. And though the auditorium was different from reality, the catwalk was exactly right.
Going out in the house meant it also went out over where the bad guy stood.
You see where this is going, right?
I went into the catwalk and in spite of all the gear clanking around (ever notice how loud cops are when they walk unless they’re taking special care?), managed to get directly above the bad guy without him noticing. Luckily for me, there was an eight inch by eight inch hole in the catwalk.
I slipped the barrel of my Glock 21 through the hole and fired once. The bad guy looked a little surprised, then slumped to the floor and the dream dissipated.
“What’s that mean?” I asked my wife.
She looked at me incredulously, like she does so often when I say something stupid, and said, “Are you serious? You can’t figure that out? You don’t feel like maybe you’re being held hostage right now?”
Uh…yeah…that’s what I meant.
In that dream, and in the others I’ve had since I got the diagnoses, I’m always in trouble or danger. The accoutrements are all different and don’t really matter. I mean, I haven’t seen a Midland cop in twenty years, I haven’t visited Lee High school since 1995 and haven’t been to Midland since 1997. Those little pieces, the window dressing, don’t matter at all.
What matters is the jeopardy, the fact that I’m in danger. I’ve had a pretty good life, never had a giant problems or disasters. I wasn’t molested, never been shot or stabbed, never had a serious disease. Even my heart attack a few years ago was fairly mild, though it scared the shit outta me.
The cancer makes the heart attack look like a mid-afternoon respite at Johnny’s Barbeque in Midland. And speaking of my favorite barbeque place, what does it say that in the very first dream, mere hours after getting the diagnosis, I dreamt I was back in my hometown, back where I grew up and always felt safe?
But what matters more to me than the danger is the fact that in all the dreams so far, I’ve always gotten out of it. Whether by being Supercop or an Indiana Jones style hero or whatever, I’ve always saved myself and gone on with life.
And I gotta say, I look pretty cool in Indy’s hat.
Posted in The Cancer Chronicles | 1 Comment »
Sunday, November 27th, 2005
An odd thing, to be told you have cancer.
It was a simple thing. I had a bit of swelling on the right side of my neck. Like an infected lymphnode, or swollen glands from a cold or flu. Went to the doc, got some antibiotics, swelling went away. A few weeks later, it came back and I got some heavier duty antibiotics. Swelling went away.
Then it came back.
In early September, sitting in a bar in Chicago with novelist Sean Doolittle, I can remember him eyeing the swelling and making a subdued comment. No problem, I told him. Gonna get it checked out when I get home.
A bit after that, I went back to my doc. I’ve never seen a man’s eyes as big as his when he saw the swelling. It was blueberry-sized, maybe a bit larger. Pressing so hard against the nerves in my neck I had to take a few days off from the Sheriff’s Office. He gave me some steroids and hooked me up with a surgeon. Said surgeon didn’t seem overly concerned. He gave me lots and lots of statistics about how a swelling in that area almost always meant nothing. In fact, he rescheduled my surgery for two weeks after the original date because he was going to be out of town.
Not worried at all.
The surgery went fine, he said he got the entire lymphnode and everything looked clean. A few days later, my regular doctor called and asked me to come in. He casually mentioned that I should go see an oncologist.
“So there was a problem?” I asked, slightly confused and now suddenly sweaty and hot, my gut tight as a snare drum.
“The biopsy came back as malignant melanoma.”
And with that, I was ushered in to an entirely new world. One of stage 3 cancer and Interferon treatments and early diagnosis and 80 percent recurrance rates and endless weeks of weakness from chemo and — worse yet — pity from people around me.
The pity is not the worst. The worst, obviously, is the possibility of dying way sooner than I’d like (but isn’t that a possibility pretty much every day? In a world of random shootings, heart attacks, drunk drivers, strokes, etc.) But seeing the eyes of people who suddenly don’t know what to say is more than a little disconcerting. They roll out all the platitudes. “Jeez, dude, I hope everything comes out okay.”
Uh, yeah, me, too!
“You’ll be fine, don’t worry about it.”
Uh, yeah, no problem, won’t worry at all. It only kills how many people a year? But, yeah, I won’t sweat it.
Honestly, I’d just as soon they shut the fuck up. If you’re not sure what to say, don’t say anything.
But in the midst of the maddening, superficial words, there were two friends who made me laugh my ass off. I called Sean, the novelist I mentioned earlier, to let him know what was going on. He had had my new novel for a little while, reading and critiquing it. When I got him on the phone, I basically got this from him: ”Dude, you have cancer? Wow, that’s too bad because you’re novel sucks, too.”
(A disclaimer: the conversation didn’t go exactly like that, but that’s the funniest way to tell the story…writer’s license and all that.)
The other was a guy I’ve gotten to know decently well only in the last few months. Ben Atkinson, a sergeant with the Princeton Police Department. He and I talked quite a bit about what was going on with me. He took me to lunch one day and told me straight out he was worried about me. Worried about the depression I was going through in the two or three days after the diagnosis. Standing in the parking lot after lunch, he said, “I’m just worried,” and mimicked putting a gun in his mouth.
Uh…what?
Yeah, cops have better access to the easiest way to kill themselves than most people. I have, with me or in my house at all times, my service weapon. But the reason it made me laugh is because Ben doesn’t realize what a coward I am. I would be waaaaaaayyy too scared to ever kill myself. For one, my pain threshold is way too low. Hell, I stub my toe and I’m down for six months. Secondly, I’ve got too much to do before it’s time to naturally check out.
But the fact that he’d thought about it and jumped in feet first to make sure it didn’t happen touched me pretty good.
My doctor made me have a PET scan, which is a multi-hour test where you can’t move at all and are strapped to a table and then slipped into a machine, sort of like ground sausage jammed into the casing. That test was to take a look, head to toe, and see if the cancer had spread.
It came back negative. No spread, no indication of any cancer anywhere.
The Interferon treatment I have to do is cautionary. The oncologist says let’s take the drugs, do the protocol. It will soup up your immune system and make sure that if there is a handful of cancer cells anywhere in my cranky little body, they’ll die a horrible, horrible death.
Hey, better them than me, right?
Posted in The Cancer Chronicles | 6 Comments »
Friday, November 4th, 2005
The stack of books — my novel 2000 MILES TO OPEN ROAD — was a beautiful thing.
Call it twenty books. Stacked in nice piles of three or four each, spread out over a beautiful Arts and Crafts style table, a nice splay of matching bookmarks, a glass of water, a poster announcing my arrival and signing, giving a few critically praiseful words about the book.
A great display at the Crystal Lake Barnes and Noble.
Until the idiot chick with the coffee. Until the idiot chick with her mother, a cup of coffee each, and a bag of donuts or bagels or some crap.
Let me say this: those kinds of appearances, where there is no particular reason for you to be at the store, where there is no discussion of writing in general or a panel exploring great crime fiction or even a reading from your book, are odd. It’s always like you’re not quite supposed to be there, like you don’t quite fit it. There are lots of readers, lots and lots and lots, but they are general readers; few of them are specifically crime fans. They are there for the magazines or the romances novels or the latest non-fiction political assassinations parading as journalism.
It’s different at mystery/crime bookstores. Those people are specifically mystery fans and so you start on the same page as they do. Usually you’re there for a specific event: a reading or a discussion or whatever. Because of that, you never feel like a shirt two sizes too small on fat man.
Anyway, the staff at this particular Barnes and Noble did an amazing job of making me feel comfortable. I didn’t have a reading or discussion, but I had the book to sign and every few minutes, they’d make an announcement over the store system, letting shoppers know I was there.
When I do signings like that, I keep an eye on the mystery section. Again, in a general bookstore, most customers aren’t going to be interested in whatever you’re selling. Maybe I’m a failure as a salesman, but I simply can not sell, much less pitch with excitement, a gritty, bleak crime novel to someone thumbing through Pico Iyer’s latest travelogue. Don’t get me wrong, I love Iyer’s work, but his fan base and mine are on different mailing lists.
I know writers who can sell any book to anyone in any section of any store. That’s not who I am.
So I keep my eye on the mystery section and when someone wanders into it, I’ll head over, novel in hand, introduce myself, and pitch them the book. Usually, because we’re both into crime fiction, we’ll end up talking for a little bit, discussing favorite authors and techniques and books and whatnot. Most times, they’ll take my book and give it a look or two, many times they’ll buy it. Sometimes, they shrug, never touch the book, and head to the bathrooms.
(A quick aside, the worst moments during these kinds of cold-call sales are when I approach single women. Picture it this way: your sister or your mother or daughter is trolling a bookshop, looking for something to juice up a long road trip. While she’s looking, a man she’s never met, hiding behind a full beard and without a store namebadge, holding a couple of books, comes up to her and starts talking. “Hi, my name is — ” kind of stuff. She looks around, unsure of what’s going on, unsure of who this guy is, to make certain A) there is an employee or a cop somewhere near and B) an escape route even closer.)
So last Sunday, I’m trolling the mystery section of the BN, managing to sell a few copies of the novel, and when I get back to the table near the front of the store, a woman and her daughter (call Mom late 30s and daughter mid-teens) are at my table.
Cool, someone interested in the book.
No, someone who stopped at my table because it was simply on the way to their next appointment. These two ladies stopped long enough to pull a friggin’ donut out of the bag from the in-store coffeeshop. They emptied their bag, left it sitting on my books (not on the table but on the books themselves), spilled quite a bit of their coffee on my bookmarks, then strolled toward the front door as I returned to the table.
“Excuse me,” I said, holding up the stained bookmarks so they could see.
Both ladies tossed me a glance, then without even a dismissive shrug, left.
All I wanted to do was grab the stained bookmarks (and no, they don’t cost me much but that’s hardly the point), chase them down in the parking lot, and jam the wet paper into their faces. Stain my bookmark with your coffee? I’ll stain your face with my bookmark, how’s that?
An ugly impulse, wanting to bang these cheap chicks around for fouling up five or ten bookmarks. But really, it wasn’t about messing up the marks, it was about the lack of concern that they’d messed up the marks. It was about the balls it took to leave the donut bag on my books, to stain the bookmarks, then ignore me when I pointed it out, as though it simply wasn’t their problem.
That was what it was about.
But I played nice. I chuckled (probably more to save face with the sales clerk standing next to me) and shrugged them off. I planned to simply toss the stained bookmarks, but the lady who’d stood in line to buy a copy of my novel said she’d take them. So I signed them for her.
Her name was Christina and, unlike the other two, she was cool. Enjoy the book, Christina.
Posted in Random Thoughts, Writing | No Comments »
