Authors: Nate Allen
A Change of Needs (24 page)
The absent-minded professor as Jake came to think of him, because he usually started their appointments by asking him how his wife and daughter were, knew his business, and he confirmed to Jake that in fact they were over-detecting and over-treating the disease, and that he would follow him if he chose to wait, and monitor him. Jake had not been seeking someone to tell him what he wanted to hear, but an honest perspective, and while the last thing the doctor would always say was that “
Ideally we’d like to remove it …but I don’t believe that’ll be necessary just yet.
” He had now found an ally in his battle.
From there on out it was as if he was Sherlock Holmes and the case of
The Eighteen-Per-Cent Solution
, or
dilemma
as it were, set out to prove his prostate innocent …the innocence project of Jake’s prostate, before its proposed execution. Prostate cancer is the Rodney Dangerfield or Vanilla Ice of cancers …considered curable, it doesn’t get any respect. What’s often not revealed in that discussion is how
curable
is defined in that sense …
a
ten-year disease free period
is considered cured, until that one molecule of cancer that slipped out the backdoor as the knife was being wielded or the laser irradiating the gland resurfaces, angry at the initial onslaught, its home in the gland now gone and thus relocated and colonized elsewhere, and it has typically brought friends with it …more cancer. What is also less publicized about the statistics they promote for the high success rates is that they are very doctor dependent …the average SAT score may be 1000, but not every student is making that grade, and likewise some doctors are more experienced and have better results than others and no one seemed to know their own individual statistics, or were prepared to share.
Lastly, and perhaps what was central to this for Jake was the fact there is also little said of the consequences that follow treatment, incontinence and impotence, and Jake was uncomfortable with the idea of stuff coming out of his penis when he didn’t want it to, and nothing coming out of it when he did. You’ve heard the word
cock
a number of times, it’s a sexual phrase, but in many respects prostate cancer is more about
pussy
and the fact there wouldn’t be any in his future. Despite the propaganda, sex as he knew and enjoyed it was all but a memory after either treatment. Radiation or surgery …it amounted to a sexual lobotomy, and if you’ve gathered anything about the man during the course of this tale, it’s that he was a sexual being and he
loved
pussy
, a lot of it, and if you remove that from the equation,
that
man would cease to exist.
And so he did the unthinkable, which was nothing, but it was well thought out, not out of denial but awareness, not because he was uninformed but because he was educated. That decision was not an easy decision to arrive at, to live with the knowledge that something inside of you is conspiring against you, but he appeared content with his choice. It’s not a decision that’s widely advocated, about 5% of cases, mostly elderly men who opt to go the “
Watchful Waiting,
” or “
Active Surveillance,”
route. But he had searched himself for the meaning between
living
and being
alive
, and he saw it as trading one kind of waiting for another, waiting for it to possibly progress and worsen vs. waiting for it to come back. Besides, it was his cancer, and if it were anything like him it would lack ambition and have a hard time finishing what it started.
He was essentially saying that it wasn’t going to be a problem, but the knowledge it was there, and potentially meant to do him harm might be difficult for the Obsessive/Compulsive man, except it changed him instead. The
static
that had always lacked a purpose, a reason for its existence, found one in the cancer and in the process had strangely given it balance. But this is not a story about cancer, or those personal choices, only how it was a piece of the puzzle that both clouded the picture, and yet brought clarity to it as well.
At first there was a great need to tell others, but that
soon
passed. There’s only one thing worse than telling people bad news and having them not care, and that’s having them pretend to, and the cancer’s appearance on the scene had been like a
litmus test
for friends. It had shown the true colors of some folks, some people ran towards him …and some others ran the opposite direction as fast as they could. He hated to break it to Nicole, it seemed extremely heavy for the casualness of their relationship, but she was in that group of people that ran toward him, and she would be there waiting for him in the weeks to come.
She came to see him the weekend before Christmas, and for the man who felt his sexuality and masculinity threatened she would give herself to him in a most loving and reaffirming way, erasing all doubts to his value as a man, or her feelings for him. In the morning she awoke to find him staring at her as if studying her. “
What is it?
” She said, halfway embarrassed, halfway concerned. “
Nothing
,” he replied reassuringly, moving the hair from her face as if posing her, “
I’m just sketching a mental picture of you, now pretend to be sleeping so I can finish it.
” If Rae was the woman he would have designed for himself, Nicole was the woman the people who knew him best would have designed and desired for their friend …and he couldn’t help but notice the resemblance.
She didn’t
know
about Rae, but she
knew
in that way women do. She had appreciated his honesty and respectfulness of her. What concerned her more was the path he seemed to be leaning towards with his health. It bothered her and she told him so, told him she would still be there, you won’t find a kinder, more wonderful gift in the entirety of this tale.
For single adults with children, meeting the kids is like a teenager meeting the parents, except in reverse order, it’s the last thing you do relationally. After the informal screening process that occurs, it’s an indication of a relationship moving in a more serious direction when you invite someone into your child/children’s lives, and Nicole did just that. It was Christmas, only a month after he had learned of his illness, they had been regularly involved for four months now. It was that point where grownups do those things, and the point at which he had historically bailed, become the “
asshole that didn’t show up at the picnic with her friends, the Holiday dinner with the family, or who simply stopped calling,”
it was that inevitable moment of truth, and he didn’t blink, but politely declined.
Her intuition told her that he probably would, but it was on a proverbial
check-down list
as she was heading towards a conclusion of her own. It wasn’t as easy as it usually was for our man, but these were difficult times and while he wanted to be selfish and keep her in his life, that ace in the hole, he couldn’t mislead her.
When all was said and done he
wanted
to see the woman he had grown close to and extremely fond of, but he
needed
to see the woman he loved. And he and Rae had made plans to get together the holiday weekend. It would be the first time since the diagnosis. It was the last time he’d see the woman he called “pebble.”
She left sometime during the course of the next evening while he slept. He found a note the next morning, it would appear she had brought it with her. Unusual perhaps, but like the individual who had deservingly asked for a promotion, yet anticipated its courteous refusal she had come prepared to tender her
resignation
.
It read:
I was optimistic for a time, there were some nice moments and the potential was there. You’re good for a woman’s ego you know, not a pretty boy but a beautiful man. I appreciated the honesty, it’s rare these days. She’s a lucky woman, I hope what you have with her is what you need it to be. My grandmother would say this to friends when they parted, so I say it to you now,
“May you go in a good way, and love and happiness follow.”
Take care of yourself. Don’t bother to call, we both know you were never really here …even when you were.
And the
rolling stone
gathers no
pebble
… She didn’t sign it …just a red lipstick kiss. Chunk wept when Jake eventually shared it with him, and a guy called “Chunk” don’t weep. If he’d known at the time how things were going to unfold he probably would’ve tried to knock some sense into his friend, but he was in such a fragile state it might have ruined the boy, he was already
fractured
. She had brought peace to his life at a troubled time when he needed it, and he would miss them both. To be sure, you could find the note alongside that yellow barrette …and his other amorous keepsakes.
As for the woman, he wouldn’t know where to file her, “
N
” or “
P
” …and maybe he wasn’t ready to. He didn’t have the accompanying sense of relief this time, but began to tremble, an indication perhaps of the uncertainty in the decision he had made, or that had been made for him… As if the low fuel indicator on the dash had lit up telling him he had 15 miles left in the tank and he was 30 miles past the last station that boasted
“Last Gas For 60 Miles.”
You do the math. We’ve all heard there’s a difference between being alone and being lonely. It wasn’t apparent
just
yet, but that difference is somewhere about here.
.
He told himself he was making the trip to Raleigh because he needed to get out, but it was Christmas …where was there to go? Rae was supposed to have called earlier that day to let him know when to come by, they had communicated back and forth about it for weeks, but when she hadn’t …well, we’ve been there before …and some mechanisms, some de-
vices
don’t need much oiling and it could not have gotten any worse, until of course …it did, …when he saw the unfamiliar car in the driveway.
He became that guy, that guy that does the thing many of us would’ve thought about doing but wouldn’t have the nerve. And he did so understanding the consequences, or maybe misunderstanding them as much as one can in that moment of temporary
sanity
. He stopped his truck in the middle of the street and paused for a moment, staring at the house he knew to be holding secrets like an oversized heart-shaped box, its lock now broken. He then proceeded to walk up another man’s driveway to confront a wife about being with someone other than her husband, someone other than him. What
the
fuck?
If there’s been any justice done to the telling of this tale, there’s no need to try and explain what was going through the man’s head at that moment, it would probably be easier to say what wasn’t. They’d been intimate in ways few people ever are. In retrospect he had kept so many secrets, as much as anything he just needed her to know that he knew who she really was, and that he had for some time.
He studied the car, a Porsche 914, candy-apple red, nicely restored and in typical fashion he committed the plate to memory. He paused to look in the carport window. He could see them in the dimly lit kitchen, barely a breath’s distance between them. He had been there in that moment with her, had been that
guy
, he knew what she intended to happen. It was her
play
and he knew how it ended.
Who knows if a heart makes a sound when it breaks, but he could tell you. His eyes became moist at the sight …and then he had that “
thought,
” that
thought
which was “
unthinkable
,” that thought he hadn’t allowed himself to “think” because it meant that in that month’s time he had been driving
himself
to doctor appointments and making decisions about his health,
quality
of life, of
life
and
death
…of her and Nicole, that she’d been thinking about the diagnosis as well and
perhaps
come to the decision that if he wound up not having any value to her as a sexual partner, then he had no value to her as a man, as a friend, and she was already
interviewing
his replacement or had hired a “temp.” It wasn’t just that he might
need
her …it was that she
wouldn’t
need
him if he couldn’t help her with her “needs.” It was “unthinkable” in that way a parent won’t allow themselves to think of their child dying, as if simply thinking about it might somehow superstitiously make it come true, because if it were
more
than a thought the
reality
would be unbearable and unspeakably “cruel,” …like Merriam-Webster
cruel.
And somewhere deep inside the man that lonely, ostracized and once unattractive child felt an overwhelming anger and familiar pain. He
couldn’t
have been that wrong about her. Only weeks before they had shared
another
loving and unforgettable experience …and he had the
ink
to prove it.
So he stepped to her door, that
boundary
he had crossed thirteen months prior, only now he had the attitude and appearance of a man intruded
upon
and
not
the intruder. He then began to pound the door as if it somehow represented Timothy, Tony and the half dozen other men she’d slept with …
aside
from her husband since their involvement began, knowing there would be a swell of anxiety inside by doing so. Rae answered it surprised and alarmed at first to find Jake uninvited, looking prodigious and surly like that
mangled dog
come in the yard. He’s a sizable man and the fella inside looked understandably concerned, but he wasn’t the object of his ire, she was. He was swollen with emotions, sober yet inebriated by a dangerous cocktail of anger, betrayal, and immense disappointment and hurt. Inflamed …and at the heart of it all was the friendship, fidelity among the unfaithful, about the “love” that existed between them …
or the apparent absence of it
…but he wouldn’t get past her.