Time Collapses

I keep noticing these days that all points of my past are the same distance from today as today is from yesterday. That’s how it feels, like I was married yesterday. Feels like yesterday I was in bed with the girl who wrote poems about razorblades slicing through tongues. Yesterday I was divorced, wasn’t I, and wasn’t it yesterday too that I rode the yellow bus to school? The other kids on the bus stuck gum in my hair, stabbed me with No. 2 pencils, leaving lead in my back, and called me names. I was physically attacked, yesterday, by a jeepload of high school jocks. I crashed my motorcycle yesterday, breaking my jawbone and dislocating my foot. My father made me take off my clothes yesterday and sit by the window facing the yard and street where people could be seen walking by, and yesterday, too, I drank black tea with good Hyejin at a café in Greenpoint. Oh, what a dashing nose she had! I loved her nose. I sucked on it yesterday and loved on her legs. I loved her umbrella. I slobbered on her while she said, “Eat my pussy, Johnny” in a voice impossible to forget. It was I who taught her those words during a snuggle-time language lesson. I was eating my name as Hyejin ate hers. We were eating our names in Time—I was the six, she was the nine—together, in harmony, and life was good.

I licked it, loved it, ate it, and on the very same day my dad died. It happened yesterday, same day Chelsea and I married, and same day Sukja and I drove south on a summer trip to Florida where I was presented with a buffet of names not my own. I had entered the story of my childhood where the two dogs, Dirty and Cleany, have a party only nowhere on that cake was my name. All the portions were foreign and though the cake looked delicious—I have always swooned over Sukja’s looks—the taste was wrong. The taste tasted like lies, like cruelty, like artificial strawberries that I chewed up to make somebody else happy. I force-fed, forcefully digesting descriptions of Johnny as narrow-minded, selfish, foolish, arrogant, intolerant, entitled. “No, I want you to think about what you just did,” was a sentence I sometimes heard from her, and with each new bite of this cake I felt my life clouding over, something I valued leaving because I wanted to believe, can’t help it, I’m a believer wannabe.

Then came cancer. The day after my first chemotherapy infusion my lover drove north to visit a medium to find out if her mother had a message to deliver from the beyond. After that I rarely saw her and, in my nights, missed her. A word, a touch, anything would have done wonders. In truth, Sukja came to my apartment a few times (following her memoir workshop up the hill, to be sure), and visited me once in the cancer ward when I was getting blasted with oxaliplatin. On that day I was so happy. I felt so special to have a Korean woman come in to see me. The importance Sukja carries with her wherever she goes rubbed off on me some in front of Yeonjoo, Angelotti’s awesome nurse practitioner. Yeonjoo of the undiluted Korean accent had been my informational guide from the beginning, ever since I entered this very special world of chemotherapy treatment. I had never expressed to Yeonjoo that I was fond of Koreans, so seeing Yeonjoo seeing Sukja coming in to see me was a moment. Even though Sukja was local and did not have the Korean accent, her presence gave me the sense of being internationally connected. Yeonjoo now saw, I saw, that I wanted to be of her kind.

For Sukja entered like a wind. In jeans Suk slouched down into the spare brown cancer-comfy chair nearby. She brought her feet up out of her sandals and propped her calves on the arm of the chair, looking scandalous and sexy. I took a picture with my smartphone. Suk met the incredible African American woman administering my drugs, a woman who’s been at this for over thirty years, then went out, in typical Korean fashion, to find some soup somewhere for me to slurp on. When Sukja returned with my clam chowder, I again felt important. I saw Yeonjoo seeing Suk glide along above the partitions as though she were on a skateboard. I paid close attention to the way they acknowledged each other’s Koreanness. I happen to be a person who prefers Korean women above all other people of the earth. I’m prejudiced that way.

Sukja and Darah were there for me during my surgeries and office visits, and Sukja often researched stuff with me in mind and made calls for me for doctor’s visits. There were times, though, that I felt abandoned and like nobody cared if I lived or died. I was spiraling into a black hole. Should I get a dog to love me? Should I go to AA meetings to be around other people? I texted Sukja, saying I needed voices in my life. I texted that I needed to go out and meet people as though my life depended on it, but doing stuff was hard while on the chemo drugs. I texted that I would cross my fingers, close tight my eyes, and hope the agonizing sensation passed before dawn. I apologized for wanting to be loved, saying also, one night, that I knew I was “quite ridiculous.”

“I agree 100% with the last sentiment,” she texted, and said, “Your soul is evolving, which is what we’re here for. Cancer is not a disease.”

“I’m gonna walk up the hill to the dumpster. The brokenhearted ostomy-pouched dumpster diver hits the night.”

“Good idea, if that will warm your heart a little. Enjoy it, Johnny!”

I knew nothing I could say truthfully could move her, could make her care for me how I cared for her, so did my best to let it go, but could not. What I yearned for was so close yet so far away. I didn’t care that she didn’t care. All I wanted was permission to love her, to do things for her and for her daughter. That’s what was important. If I wasn’t good for anything else, I at least could mow her yard and fix the leaks. I took out her trash. I liked churning the compost pile, digging into her shoulders with my claws, releasing the tension in her neck. I know her pressure points by heart. I don’t even have to think about it. My fingertips slide right there, straight to where they are needed. “You have my life in your hands,” she says upon relaxing into my strength, which is true.

I looked forward to planting a garden come spring: tomatoes, zucchini, cilantro and beets. I liked being the ear for her sad. I liked being the ground for her discontent, a place for her grapples, and monologues about her health that began just as soon as I was diagnosed with cancer. I chaperoned Suk and her daughter into the woods where they dared not go alone. When I am with them, that’s when I’m really chewing my name, chowing it up, when I make Darah laugh, or talk her down from an angry, when I adjust her water to the right temperature, or let her kick me in the face repeatedly for the sheer joy of it with the bottom of her clammy foot. At bedtime, I play guitar for her, sing, “House of the Rising Sun,” Darah’s favorite song to hear while slipping from the waking world into the dreamy mysteries of sleep.

The power Suk held over me was uncanny. When she gave, she gave all, which resulted in a sense that she could take all, not only what she gave, but more, something reaching into my vulnerable spaces. Should I slip, no matter if in innocence or ignorance, all could be lost, as all interactions were and are conditional, subject to accounting. Like the unkempt coon we encountered in the woods, an engrained defensiveness kept Suk forever poised to bite.

Through the moonlight I walked to the Aldi dumpster from which I pulled five 4-packs of Starkrimson pears. The pears had not fully ripened and were contained in fancy plastic packaging. I scarfed a 3-pound bag of crisp apples grown in Washington State. I pulled up two 3-ounce packages of Mexican style chile peppers, and what’s this? Oh, a value pack of “Thick & Quilted” baby wipes, 72 wipes in each repository. I now owned 144 wipes, nothing I could ever use, but Suk and Darah loved them—score!

Back in the apartment I put the food away, obsessing still over what I wanted but realistically, I mean, if a person who’s been a part of your life comes down with cancer and your wish is to get rid of them so that they don’t hold you down or cramp your style in any way, how do you do it? You can’t just show them the door. You must do things in stages, wean them off you, make it seem like you guys had no chance together in the first place, say things about how you are more like a brother than your significant other, or come up with some other imaginative process through which you can save your self-respect. You can change things that happened in a different time because all we really have is the moment.

A piece of advice: if you want your friend who is going through chemoradiotherapy treatment to feel bad, text this: “If you die, only your body will perish. We are spirit, johnny,” or dave or harold or cynthia or susan. Be sure not to capitalize the person’s name. That will help rub in the point that they are not important in life right here in the middle of the night, not to you or anybody else. Go ahead and die, why don’t you, it’s all the same, your soul is evolving, this is how it is meant to be, go ahead and die and feel good about it if that will warm your heart a little.

In the meantime, before Death, take refuge in the knowledge that Time is like Las Vegas! What happens in Time stays in Time. Despite the fact that you are suffering, in Time you also sing songs with pretty girls while getting drunk on tequila. You walk through nature in Time, feeling connected to the earth. In Time you climb mountains, in Time have great fun with friends. In Time you travel through Europe and Mexico and, of course, lap up the elixir sluicing out of Hyejin’s delicious pussy. In Time, Hyejin looks up at you with lips bruised from so much kissing and says, “I want to eat it. Will it make me pregnant?”

Item: it may sound moronic, but if smoking gives you lung cancer, might an obsession with tail drive a cankerous caterpillar down into your cocoa canyon? “If you understand tumor biology,” Yeonjoo my nurse practitioner told me, “for tumor cell to survive, you have to entice all the blood supply to that tumor cell, so usually the tumor is a very vascular.” Could this be why more men farm cauliflowers in their MacArthur corn cob pipes than do women? Because when their dingdongs go boing, blood rushes not only to their weenies, but to the whole general area, including the rectum? Ask a guy what it feels like to raise the steeple, and he will say, if he thinks about it long enough, and tries it out, that the sphincters and rectal muscles are involved.

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