Hollywood Animal (112 page)

Yet Naomi stayed in the hospital with me and slept on a cot in my room every night, going home only occasionally during the day for a few hours.

Dr. Strome decided to take the feeding tube appendage hanging from my nose out … and put me on an IV diet.

The doctors were pleased with my progress, even though I was losing a lot of weight on my IV diet.

I was walking the halls with my IV cart for twenty minutes to a half hour each day.

Dr. Strome felt confident that he had gotten all of the cancer out—felt, at this point, that I wouldn’t need radiation or chemotherapy.

Naomi started going home on more afternoons to see the boys and sometimes brought them in to visit me.

Steve and Suzi went back to Oregon and California.

My Fisher-Price Magna Doodle was my voice now. I got very good at scrawling and erasing quickly on it. I kept it in my lap as I fell asleep each night. The last thing I wrote on it each night was “I love you” and held it up for Naomi.

A doctor who hadn’t examined me before looked at my tanned, bare chest and asked with great concern: “Have you been out in the sun lately?”

I wrote, “Yes, I’ve been in California for thirty years.”

I refused to wear my hospital gown. I went bare-chested and wore shorts. It made me feel better somehow. Maybe I was trying to pretend I wasn’t really sick. Maybe it was my ultimate act of denial.

I learned that if I could convince my nurse to shoot my Ativan directly into a vein rather than through my IV
… I could fly!

I felt like someone with an iron grip had his fingers around my throat and neck.

They put a breathing tube in my throat which had to be taken out twice a day, cleaned, and put back into the hole. The nurses taught Naomi how to do it.

Every time the tube was taken out or put back in, it set off a coughing fit … but it was like the cough couldn’t get out normally because so much of my larynx was gone.

Once I coughed the whole tube out right at Naomi. It flew out of my throat and hit her in the face.

This wasn’t what she had signed on for, I knew. I remembered the beaches on Maui and the beaches in Malibu, the limos and the red-carpet premieres in L.A., the luxurious hotel suites and all the fancy meals in fancy places.

Well, we were still in a luxurious suite … at a hospital … and she was eating a fancy meal prepared by the private chefs to a Saudi prince, but …

I was spitting a phlegm-coated breathing tube into her face.

She didn’t even complain. She cleaned it off, kissed me on the cheek, and put it back in as gently as she could so it wouldn’t make me cough.

As I was walking with my IV cart, one hand holding on to the cart, the other holding on to my Fisher-Price Magna Doodle … in case I needed to converse
with
someone … a male nurse stopped me. He was holding some index cards and a felt tip pen.

While he held my Magna Doodle, I autographed all the cards for him. I signed about a dozen but I would have gladly signed a thousand: he was the nurse who brought me my shot of Ativan each night.

A nurse from another wing of the hospital ignored the “Absolutely No Visitors!” sign and walked into my suite. She recognized my name, she said, not from a movie or a book or a magazine, but from my father.

She had taken care of my father here after one of his strokes. “Your father is such a charming man,” she said. “I just had to see what the son is like.”

She asked me how my father was doing and I wrote
fein
, thank you, just
fein
.

They took me off my liquid IV diet and let me eat applesauce, cottage cheese, French fries, yogurt.

Every swallow was excruciatingly difficult, but successful.

It took me an hour to sip and swallow half a glass of water.

George Harrison, the Beatle, whose company had made
Checking Out
, was dead … of throat cancer. His cancer had metastasized from his throat to his brain … a common spot, along with the lungs, to which throat cancers travel.

Babe Ruth, my great hero, died of throat cancer, too. He was a libertine and a glutton and an alcoholic and he chain-smoked cigarettes and cigars. No wonder he was my hero. No wonder he died of throat cancer.

On the day that I was released from the Cleveland Clinic, Marshall Strome told me once again that if I smoked or drank, I would die.

For a while I would have to come back to the hospital once a week, he said, to be examined.

I’d have the tube in my throat for at least another month.

I had lost forty pounds since my surgery. I’d gone from a size 42 waist to a size 36.

Almost as soon as we walked out of the clinic, I began having severe nicotine and alcohol cravings. I was using the anti-smoking patch, but my cravings continued nevertheless.

I wish I could say that I was overjoyed to have survived and to be back home … but I was badly depressed and jangled. My nerve endings were raw.

I felt myself to be half asleep and acutely restless at the same time. My heart
raced
sometimes and at other times seemed to be skipping beats. I was nauseous sometimes and had occasional gastrointestinal cramps.

I looked at my beautiful boys and my lovely wife and it was almost as though my cravings were blocking them out … all I could think about was having a cigarette or a drink.

My hands shook and I sweated out at night and I saw myself in vivid detail going down to Medic Drugs and buying a pack of Salems … and then driving over to the Coyote Moon Café and having an ice-cold beer and a shot of tequila.

I spent my days in agony, still feeling like I was in acute withdrawal from my dual addictions.

I still got the shakes and the sweats and I was profoundly depressed, writing few messages for Naomi on my Fisher-Price Magna Doodle.

This was no kind of life for a vibrant and beautiful still-young woman.

Maybe everyone would be better off, I thought, if I just crawled into a bunch of leaves under a tree, and died.

Naomi turned to me one day with great affection and great concern in her eyes and said, “Please, my great friend,
don’t let me down!
”

I got home from the clinic on a Monday and asked Naomi to call the nursing home … to ask them to tell my father that we would be visiting him on Friday.

I couldn’t tell him myself, of course, because of my Fisher-Price Magna Doodle.

That Thursday the nursing home called us to say that István Eszterhás had died in the night.

On the morning I heard that my father was dead, I needed a drink and a cigarette more than I’d ever needed them in my whole life … and I couldn’t have them.

My father’s funeral was held at the Louis A. Bodnar Funeral Home, across the street from Nick’s Diner, a block from where I’d grown up on Lorain Avenue.

The week before my throat cancer surgery, I’d left instructions with Gerry Messerman that if I didn’t make it through the surgery, I wanted
my
services to be held at the Louis A. Bodnar Funeral Home.

I asked Louis Bodnar to take my father’s wedding ring off his hand. He gave it to me and I put it on my finger, right above
my
wedding band.

· · ·

Gerry Messerman came to my father’s funeral, to the funeral of the man he’d represented on war crimes charges.

I even asked Gerry to be one of the pallbearers and Gerry even accepted.

Steve and Gerry and I (with some others) took my father to his grave.

A woman my age showed up at the funeral home and said I had slept with her one night when we were in college.

I hadn’t seen or spoken to her since … almost forty years ago … but she said she’d seen my father’s obit in the paper and wanted to come by to express her condolences.

Gerri sent a tiny bouquet of flowers to the funeral home with a note that said, only “From Steve and Suzi’s mother.”

I didn’t exactly blame her. “Joe is my son,” my father had told her, “but you are not my daughter.”

Right back at ya …
even in the grave.

My father had died alone, surrounded by strangers, not his family. I hadn’t been there to hold his hand like I had held my mother’s.

And, as it turned out, I had literally exacted Jessica Lange’s
Music Box
punishment upon him: he had never met or seen Joey and Nick and John Law and Luke.

Costa-Gavras had said to me, while we were working on
Music Box
, that every son needed to kill his father … and if that was right, then maybe I’d finally killed István Eszterhás, author and Hungarian nationalist and alleged war criminal … killed him for what he had done and not done, killed him for loving me and lying to me.

I am exacting the final part of Jessica Lange’s punishment upon my father right now … with
you
, as you read this book. I am exposing what my father did just as Jessica Lange exposed what her father did in
Music Box
.

What I am referring to as “Jessica Lange’s punishment” is, of course, a literary conceit and a personal evasion.

I
created Jessica Lange’s character, Ann Talbot.
I
told Ann Talbot how to punish her father. Cutting him off from his grandchildren and exposing him to the world were my ideas … not Ann’s.

If what Costa-Gavras said was true, if every son needed to kill his father, then it meant that I would be killed five times by five boys … and what they would do to me would hurt me five times as much as I had hurt my father.

If, that is, I lived long enough …
heh heh heh
… to see my little boys grow into men.

My father’s housekeeper came up to me at the funeral home and handed me a piece of paper. It was a new will my father had made out in the past month with the housekeeper as his witness.

In this new will handed to me at his funeral, my father directed me not to bury him here … not to bury him in America … but to fly his body back to Hungary and bury him there.

It was the final giveaway, I thought, as to how he felt about America. He hated America, I was convinced, as much as I loved her. Because America had defeated his Hungary, his
Nazi
Hungary, in the war.

He had lived in America for more than fifty years …
hiding
all that time in his strudel ghetto among other Hungarians who were also hiding from deportation … and these were his final words to the nation that had given him shelter and his son success.

Even dead, he wanted nothing to do with America. Even dead, he wanted to go back to Hungary … like he’d always wanted to go back to Hungary.

He could finally do it safely now …
dead …
because the Hungarian government didn’t prosecute dead people for their crimes.

He said nothing in this new will, I noted, about disinterring my mother and flying
her
body back to Hungary along with his. He wanted my mother’s body left in Cleveland. He wanted to go back to Hungary
without her
.

It convinced me that my mother had been right: he hadn’t loved her.

He wanted to be free of
her
, too, along with America,
back in Budapest, alone
.

I refused my father’s final, dying request.

We buried him at Calvary Cemetery in Cleveland, right next to my mother … the wife he wanted to leave behind in death.

I viewed it as maybe my father’s final punishment.

I hadn’t let him meet or see his grandchildren and I was going to write a book exposing him … and now I was putting him into the ground of the America he hated.

There were about a hundred Hungarians at my father’s funeral. I couldn’t speak very well to any of them because of the tube in my throat.

The only time I cried was when they sang the Hungarian national anthem at the end of the ceremony.

I thought I could hear him accompanying them on his violin.

My father willed his violin to Steve and the violin that was mine when I was a boy to Suzi. Neither of them played the violin and they didn’t know what to do
with
them. They took them to Gerri’s house in Tiburon, where the violins are on a shelf in the basement.

Back at home after the funeral, I cursed myself for what I had done to myself. I had maimed myself. I felt like a freak when I tried to talk. I saw people’s heads swivel my way when they heard my raspy croak. I saw little kids nudge each other and stare.

Once upon a time, I had had such a good voice that a lot of people told me I should go into broadcasting. Now, thanks to my own actions, I had cut my own throat as surely as Marshall Strome had cut it to save me.

I felt a constant, overwhelming physical craving for a cigarette … centered almost exactly at the spot in my throat where the surgery had been done.

I had an intense physical craving in my mostly gone larynx for mentholated smoke … for smoke hitting my larynx and then moving down into my lungs.

It felt like a nearly sexual need.

My long hair, down to the middle of my back, was driving me crazy. It kept getting into my trach or into the hole in my throat along with the bugs and mosquitoes.

“Above-the-title hair,” the columnists Liz Smith and George Christy had called it.

But I went to a barbershop now in the town of Chagrin Falls and had it cut off. Short. Very short.

I stopped highlighting my hair, too. I turned grayer—in spots whiter, in spots snow-white.

Besides going to the barbershop, I was going to the grocery store and driving my pickup truck and going to the bank and, one spring day, with the trach still in my throat, I went to play baseball with my little boys.

It wasn’t a smart thing to do. Joey hit a line drive back at me that was headed for my throat. It could have shattered my trach, but I snapped my head sharply out of the way.

I visualized a
Plain Dealer
headline on the second page of the metro section: “SCREENWRITER KILLED BY THE GAME HE LOVED.” The subhead read: “SON’S LINE DRIVE KILLS DAD.”

In an effort to ease my cigarette and alcohol cravings, I changed my diet completely:

I became a near-vegetarian and drank juices all day—carrot juice and grapefruit juice and cranberry juice.