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WHEN I MENTIONED in my blog that I can no longer eat, drink, or speak, a reader wrote, “That sounds so sad. Do you miss it?” Not so much really. Not anymore. The new reality took shape slowly. Understand that I was never told that after surgery I might lose the ability to eat, drink, and speak. Eating and drinking were not mentioned, and it was said that after the first surgery I might be able to go back to work on television. Success in such surgery is not unheard of. It didn’t happen that way. The second surgery was also intended to restore my speaking ability. It seemed to hold together for a while, but then, in surgeon-speak, also “fell apart.” In both cases the idea was to rebuild my face with bone and flesh transplants from my legs to restore an acceptable appearance. Both surgeries failed because microsurgery to reattach blood vessels broke down. Dr. Neil Fine had done an exemplary job both times, but the neutron radiation was there ahead of him and the tissue could not hold. In the second, a vein was used to carry blood from a healthier area into a more threatened one. Dr. Fine instructed nurses and interns how to listen to this vein, and I listened in myself: a soft pulsing flow. One day it could not be heard. The transplanted flesh would die and had to be removed. Both of these surgeries eventually resulted in catastrophic bleeding of a carotid artery.
I was flat on my back for long periods after the surgeries, to avoid stress on the sutured areas. Muscular degeneration took place, and I graduated from intensive care to the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago to learn to walk again. At the start they winched me out of bed in a sling. I eventually walked well enough, but never again with the happy stride of the ten-thousand-steps-a-day period.
Neil Fine was a human being, a caring man. He had a national reputation and was known as a perfectionist. I could tell he was disappointed that his best efforts had failed. He and Dr. Pelzer came to me with a third idea, which they felt might be safely attempted. By now there was no pretense of “restoration,” and the goal became simply to repair the opening in my chin. Both of my fibulas and both of my thighs had already been plundered. It would be necessary to transplant tissue from elsewhere. Fine proposed what he considered a very conservative approach. Chaz and I flew to Houston to get an opinion from Pierong Yu, a surgical specialist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. He proposed moving a flap of tissue from my right shoulder and rotating it to fasten under my chin. This had the advantage of preserving its existing blood supply. We returned to Chicago and had a long, serious talk with Fine and Pelzer. Fine did me the honor of being absolutely honest. Yu’s approach would be the one he himself might attempt, he said, but after two surgeries had failed, he preferred to be very conservative on the third attempt.
Surgery at MD Anderson worked better than we’d dare to hope. Dr. Yu was a master. In a mirror I saw myself looking familiar again. But after a little more than a week, that surgery failed, too. Radiation damage again. A fourth surgery has been proposed, but I flatly rejected the idea. To paraphrase a line from the orchid collector in Adaptation, I’m done with surgery. I should actually have stopped after the first, but then I had no idea of the troubles ahead. If I’d had no surgery, the cancer would have continued to spread, and today I might probably be dead. Since removing the cancer was the primary objective of the first surgery, it’s unfair to call it a failure. I’m very aware of what Dr. Sisson told me long ago: My cancer is very slow growing and insidious. The bastard is quite likely lurking somewhere as I write. I’m sixty-nine, but in excellent health. I’m happy and working well. I would be obscurely pleased if something else carries me off before that insidious cancer wins its waiting game.
During the entire period of my surgeries, I was Nil by Mouth. Nobody said as much in so many words, but it gradually became clear that it wouldn’t ever be right again. There wasn’t some soul-dropping moment for that realization. It just… developed. I never felt hungry, I never felt thirsty, I couldn’t be angry because the doctors had done their best. But I went through a period of obsession about food and drink. I came up with the crazy idea of getting some Coke through my G-tube. My doctors said sure, a little, why not? For once the sugar and a little sodium wouldn’t hurt. I even got some tea, and a little coffee. I couldn’t taste it, of course.
I dreamed of tastes. I was reading Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, and there’s a passage where the hero, lazing on his riverboat on a hot summer day, pulls up a string from the water with a bottle of orange soda tied to it. I tasted that pop so clearly I can taste it today. Later he’s served a beer in a frosted mug. The frosted mug evoked for me a long-buried memory of my father and me driving in his old Plymouth to the A&W Root Beer stand (gravel driveways, carhop service, window trays) and his voice saying “and a five-cent beer for the boy.” The smoke from his Lucky Strike in the car. The heavy summer heat. Night after night I would wake up already focused on that small, heavy glass mug with the ice sliding from it, and the first sip of root beer. I took that sip over and over. The ice slid down across my fingers again and again.
One day in the hospital my brother-in-law Johnnie Hammel and his wife, Eunice, came to visit. They’re two of my favorite people. I described my fantasies about root beer. I could smell it, taste it, feel it. I desired it. I said I’d remembered that day with my father for the first time in sixty years. They’re Jehovah’s Witnesses and interpreted my story in terms of their faith.
“You never thought about it before?” Johnnie asked.
“Not once.”
“Could be, when the Lord took away your drinking, he gave you back that memory.”
Whether my higher power was the Lord or Cormac McCarthy, those were the words I needed to hear. And from that time I began to replace what I had lost with what I remembered. If I think I want an orange soda right now, it is after all only a desire. People have those all the time. For that matter, when I had the chance, when was the last time I held one of those tall Nehi glass bottles? I hardly drank it when I could.
All sorts of memories now come welling up almost alarmingly. It’s all still in there, every bit. I saw Leap Year, with its scenes in Dublin, and recognized the street where I stayed in the Shelbourne Hotel, even though the hotel wasn’t shown. That started me thinking of Trinity College nearby, where I remembered that McHugh and I saw the Book of Kells in its glass case. And then I remembered us walking out the back gate of Trinity and finding a pub where we were to join two of his brothers. And meeting Kitty Kelly sitting inside the pub, who became legendary in our stories as the only whore in Dublin with her own coach.
“Are you two students?” McHugh’s younger brother Eugene asked them innocently.
“I’m a working girl meself,” the first said.
“Her name is Kitty Kelly,” her friend volunteered. “I’m her coach.”
I walked into Leap Year with the Book of Kells and Kit Kelly’s coach and Eugene McHugh far from my mind. The story itself had long since fallen from our repertoire. But it’s all in there in my memory.
When it comes to food, I don’t have a gourmet’s memory. I remember the kinds of foods I was raised to love. Chaz and I stayed once at Les Prés d’Eugénie, the inn of the famous Michel Guérard in Eugénie-les-Bains. We had certainly the best meal I have ever been served. I remember that fact, the room, and specific people at other tables, but I can no longer remember what I ate. It isn’t hardwired into my memory. Yet I could if I wanted to right now close my eyes and reexperience an entire meal at Steak ’n Shake, bite by bite in proper sequence, because I always ordered the same items and ate them according to the same ritual. It’s stored in there for me.
Another surprising area for sharp memory is the taste and texture of cheap candy. Not fancy imported chocolates, but Red Hots, Good & Plenty, Milk Duds, PayDays, Chuckles. I dreamed I got a box of Chuckles with five licorice squares, and in my dream I thought, “Finally!” With Necco wafers, there again, the licorice were the best. The peculiar off-purple wafers were space wasters. As a general rule in candy, if anything is black, red, or green, in that order, I like it. In my mind I went to Cracker Barrel and bought paper bags filled with licorice, root beer, horehound, and cinnamon drops. But the last thing I want to start is a discussion of such age-old practices as pouring Kool-Aid into a bottle of RC Cola to turn it into a weapon. Returning to the original question: Isn’t it sad to be unable to eat or drink? Not as sad as you might imagine. I save an enormous amount of time. I have control of my weight. My blood pressure and cholesterol would make Nathan Pritikin cheer with joy. Everything agrees with me. And so on.
What I miss is the society. Meals are when we most easily meet with friends and family. They’re the first way we experience places far from home. Where we sit to regard the passing parade. How we learn indirectly of other cultures. When we feel good together. Meals are when we get a lot of our talking done—certainly most of our recreational talking. That’s what I miss. Because I can’t speak that’s another turn of the blade. I can sit at a table and vicariously enjoy the conversation, which is why I enjoy pals like my friend McHugh so much, because he rarely notices if anyone else isn’t speaking. But to attend a “business dinner” is a species of torture. I’m no good at business anyway, and being forced to listen to a lawyer for much more than half an hour must be a violation of the Geneva Conventions.
When we drive around town I never look at a trendy new restaurant and wish I could eat there. I peer into little storefront places, diners, ethnic places, Asian noodle joints, and that’s when I feel envy. After a movie we’ll drive past a Formica restaurant with only two tables occupied, and I’ll wish I could be at one of them, having ordered something familiar and reading a book. I never felt alone in a situation like that. I was a soloist. When I moved north to Lincoln Park and the Dudaks’ house, Glenna Syse, the Sun-Timesdrama critic, told me about Frances’ Deli on Clark Street. “They make you eat your vegetables,” she told me. There were maybe a dozen tables inside, and you selected from a steam table the day’s dishes like roast chicken, lamb stew, lake perch, and the veggies, although one of them was rice pudding. You want roast chicken, here’s your roast chicken. It was so simple it almost made you grin. You didn’t even have to ask for the bed of dressing on which it slumbered. Frances’ has moved into a larger space across the street but nothing much else has changed. Nobody will look at you funny if you bring in the Sunday paper and spread it out. And breakfast? Talk about the breakfast. If a place doesn’t advertise “Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner” and serve tuna melts, right away you figure they’re covering up for something.
Until 2010 there was a place called the Old Timers Restaurant across the street from the Lake Street Screening Room in Chicago. I loved that place. No fuss, no muss, friendly, the owner stands behind the cash register and chats with everybody going in and out. I’ve ordered breakfast at lunchtime there. “You’re still serving breakfast now?” I asked. “Hey, an egg’s an egg.” This sentence, in a Web review, perfectly describes the kind of place I like: “A Greek-style chow joint replete with ’70s wood paneling, periwinkle padded booths, a chatty waitstaff and the warble of regulars at the bar. Basically, if you’ve ever had it at any place that starts with Grandma’s, Uncle’s or any sort of Greek place-name, you can find it here.” Yes. The Old Timers was busy, popular, and needed. In the summer of 2010, it closed without notice and was replaced by a high-rent Einstein Bros. Bagels. Formica eateries are the lifeblood of a city. On Lake, between Michigan and Wabash, Chicago has opened a dead zone.
What’s sad about not eating is the experience, whether at a family reunion or at midnight by yourself in a greasy spoon under the L tracks. The loss of dining, not the loss of food. Unless I’m alone, it doesn’t involve dinner if it doesn’t involve talking. The food and drink I can do without easily. The jokes, gossip, laughs, arguments, and memories I miss. I ran in crowds where anyone was likely to start reciting poetry on a moment’s notice. Me too. But not me anymore. So yes, it’s sad. Maybe that’s why writing has become so important to me. You don’t realize it, but we’re at dinner right now.