Hollywood Animal (113 page)

I ate lots of green vegetables, fish, and very little meat.

Swallowing was still extremely difficult at times but I forced myself to drink quarts of the juices.

Dr. Strome also put me on a regimen of multivitamins and antioxidants.

I noticed that if I was really tired, my cravings weren’t as bad … so I started purposely trying to tire myself.

I went on an hour walk in the morning and walked for another hour at night.

My leg and back muscles started to hurt.

I started reading every book I could find about cancer, smoking, and alcoholism.

I discovered that Hungarian men had the highest death rate from cancer in the world … Hungarian women ranked second among women worldwide.

I discovered that it would take me many years before I could say that I had beaten either of my addictions. I’d been smoking for forty-four years and drinking for forty-two—not one day had passed in all those years when I hadn’t had something to smoke or something alcoholic to drink.

Now, suddenly, just like that, I had stopped both.

My books told me that there was no way anyone could do that without suffering … that I would have to
suffer
my way through this for a long time … that I would have to conquer my body’s cravings with my mind.

I couldn’t watch the television news at six o’clock each night because that time of night was tied in to cocktail hour for me.

It was the time of night I’d always had a couple of stiff gins or Jack Daniel’s.

Instead of watching the news, we’d have dinner early at that hour. I’d eat as fast as possible and leave the table because sitting there made me crave a drink and a cigarette.

I couldn’t even listen to my favorite music, I noticed, because my favorite music—Dylan, Bruce, the Stones, Cohen, Otis, Johnny Cash, Sinatra, Billie Holiday—was all soaked with booze and cigarette smoke.

All those years I’d spent listening to that music while I was smoking and drinking … and now, when I heard it, I desperately wanted to smoke and drink again.

I’d developed allergies as well. I’d never had them in Ohio before but now, suddenly, my eyes and nose were dripping, my wound of a throat filled with nasal drip as I tried to hawk the stuff up.

It felt like I was drowning in my own snot.

· · ·

I read a book by Stephen King called
On Writing
, in which he wrote honestly about his own addictions: he chain-smoked and drank a case of beer a day and he had such a bad cocaine habit that when he looked down, blood dripped from his nose. And he’d beaten all three of his addictions.

I read the book three times. It helped me.
Thank you, Stephen
.

I wasn’t able to completely focus on either my reading or a movie. I often drifted off. At other times I suddenly got so restless that I immediately had to walk around.

“
Sitzfleisch!
” my father had said so often to me.

“
Sitzfleisch!
” I’d said so often to young writers.

“
Sitzfleisch!
” I said to myself now … but I couldn’t do it.

Hollywood was not the kind of place where people wanted to work with a cancer victim … so we didn’t want anyone to know I was sick. Nor, if my cancer came back, did I want the press keeping a gossip column death watch.

So Naomi told everyone who called that I couldn’t talk because I’d just had two benign polyps removed.

A friend at the
Plain Dealer
told me that the paper had learned I was being treated for throat cancer at the clinic … but had decided not to report it.

I had four little boys who were most of the time doing something that they shouldn’t be doing … that they could hurt themselves doing … and I had no voice to yell at them with.

I saw them going too fast with their bikes and I couldn’t yell at them to stop doing that. I saw them get too close to the lake and I couldn’t tell them to back up. I saw them trying to retrieve a ball from the pond and I couldn’t yell and tell them to forget the ball.

I cursed myself for robbing myself of my voice.

We went to a baseball game at Jacobs Field that featured all the old Indians stars of the past. I saw Bob Feller and Al Rosen and Herb Score and Steve Gromek and Rocky Colavito … and as I saw them limp and shuffle onto the field, I felt tears in my eyes. I knew I wasn’t crying for them. I was crying for me.

I suddenly remembered the day my father took me to the Indians-Yankees game when I was a boy. I smiled through my tears as I saw my father in his trench coat and beret, sitting in the stands reading his book as I watched the game. When I remembered the book he was reading that long-ago day, I felt like laughing.

Crime and Punishment
.

Of all books
.

Naomi and I went to Cleveland Heights with some movers and cleaned my father’s house out.

I took some of his coats and hats for myself and I took the chair that he’d bought from the Volunteers of America and that he sat on when he wrote all of his books and articles.

I am sitting on my father’s chair now as I write this book that will reveal his sins to the world.

I kept all of my father’s Hungarian novels that I found in his house. On the first page of each one was a green sheet that said, “EX LIBRIS—István Eszterhás” and a painting of the Hungarian flag with the Holy Crown of St. Stephen in the middle of it.

I thought about my father as I sorted through his faded and dusty things and I realized that the first script I wrote after his Justice Department hearings,
Original Sin
, was about how the past doomed two lovers … and the ending of the second script I wrote after the hearings,
Sliver
, showed a woman disregarding the fact that her lover was a murderer … because she loved him.

My father died, I reflected, like his hero Lajos Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot … old, half blind, poor, and alone—not in Turino, Italy, but in Cleveland, Ohio.

I found a small plastic statue of Jesus which Father John Mundweil had given me for my first Holy Communion. I gave it to Naomi, who put it on her nightstand.

I found an old
Playboy
magazine featuring a mostly nude Suzanne Somers, one of my father’s favorite actresses. I took it. I don’t know why. It is on the coffee table in my office now, atop an old
Time
, with its Man of the Year cover of the Hungarian freedom fighter.

I found an old passport belonging to my mother among my father’s things … as well as my mother’s Arrow Cross identification card, complete with swastika-like arrow and cross symbols.

I found his old trench coat. I kept the trench coat and put it in my closet. It hangs there not far from Bill Macdonald’s Renegade jacket.

· · ·

Sitting on the front porch with Naomi and sipping the cold lemonade she had made me, I said, “I’m sorry, Guinea. Forgive me. I love you more than anything in the world. I haven’t been treating you right. I’ve been rude to you at times, cold, distracted. I just wanted to tell you how much I love you and that without you, I couldn’t be doing any of this.”

Naomi kissed me and said, “I forgive you.”

She bought me a present for not smoking and drinking: a 1997 Cleveland Indians American League championship ring, given only to team members and Indians’ executives.

I wore my Wahoo ring proudly.

Steve stopped smoking, too. He was already a two-pack-a-day smoker, and stopping was very difficult for him but he did it. Now we were cheering each other on.

I asked him how he quit and he said, “I told myself that if I quit, Pops, you’d live, and if I didn’t, you’d die.”

My neighbors … even strangers … were a blessing. They’d recognize me at a Giant Eagle or pumping gas and say “Welcome home!” or “You’re not one of those Hollywood people anyway!” and “Are you writing?”

I wasn’t writing … partly because I couldn’t focus and partly because every time I sat down to write, my cigarette cravings became excruciating.

I remembered how I’d looked forward to moving here and eating all the ethnic meats and sausages that I loved so much.

I couldn’t eat any of it because:

I remembered the dream I’d had before we moved here about jogging by the woods each day.

I wasn’t jogging, but I was walking at a pretty fast clip and there was little doubt I was living out my dream.

Joey hit a
horun
in his Little League game and as he ran around the bases I heard myself trying to yell
“Attaboy, Joee!
” but it came out as a soft croak and nobody heard me but me.

On a hot summer day during my morning walk, I gave up and sat down on the curb and started to sob.

I was sweating like a pig. Bugs and mosquitoes were attacking the tube in
my
throat. I was having trouble breathing. My feet and legs ached and cramped. I was shaking. I felt like I was going to throw up. My heart felt like it was going to explode. Every centimeter of me craved—
desperately craved
—a cigarette and a cold beer, two cold beers, three cold beers and a shot of tequila and …

I sat there and sobbed, the tears hitting the pavement in front of me.

And suddenly, inside my own head, I heard myself saying, “Please, God, help me. I can’t do this anymore without you.”

I knew as I heard myself saying it that this was the first time I had spoken to God since I was a boy on Lorain Avenue.

As I sat there, I prayed, really
prayed
for God’s help. I said the Our Father and the Hail Mary and a Glory Be and then I said them over and over, begging God to help me overcome my addictions.

I begged God to keep me alive so I could help my little boys grow up. And I made God a promise. I promised Him that if He helped me through my misery, I would do everything in the time remaining to me to help others to stop smoking.

I sat there staring at the ground and praying a long time that day and when I got up I felt a renewal of strength.

I wasn’t shaking anymore. My heart beat normally. The bugs and mosquitoes had eased off my trach.

I still craved the cigarette and the cold beers and the shot of tequila … but I’d asked for God’s help, not a miracle.

We started going to church regularly. We picked the parish nearest us—Holy Angels—and took all the boys with us each Sunday.

I still couldn’t speak, of course, and I could tell from their looks that our fellow parishioners knew who I was.

I knew how oddly it must have struck some of them: the author of
Basic Instinct
and
Showgirls
holding hands with his children and
praying
each Sunday. Wasn’t this the same guy who’d told teenagers to sneak into that X-rated movie?

Naomi went to Holy Communion each Sunday but I didn’t.

I viewed God as a newfound friend. I didn’t want to be presumptuous. I didn’t want Him to think I was trying to suck up to Him.

On my walks—I was walking three miles a day now—I was praying throughout, asking God to show me the way, asking for His help.

I started doing what I’d heard Johnny Cash did to begin each day.

First I said, “Good morning, God.”

Then I said, “Praise the Lord!”

At home, we taught the boys catechism and prayed with them before they fell asleep.

One Sunday in church, as Naomi went to Holy Communion with Luke in
her
arms, I got up behind her and went to Holy Communion, too … the first time since I was a schoolboy at St. Emeric’s.

“Body of Christ, Joe,” Father Bob Stec said, giving me the Host, and I put the Host in my mouth and swallowed it with my ravaged throat.

I felt an inner glow all of that day and I felt God’s love surrounding me.

A dark and deeply cynical voice from a cold and dark place inside me said, “Now that you’ve found God in Cleveland, will you find
Elvész Prezli
alive here, too?”

Marshall Strome took my trach out and my new voice sounded weaker and higher and thinner than Brando’s in
The Godfather
.

If we got lucky, Dr. Strome said, my voice would sound louder and lower over time.

The bar I’d liked so much, the Coyote Moon Café, the place where Naomi and I had discussed death and dying before we’d moved here … burned to the ground.

I was sure God had burned it down just for me.

Dr. Strome had been looking at my throat every week. Everything had looked good to him.

Suddenly, three months after the surgery, he saw something in my throat he didn’t like. He thought it was another growth.

I needed to have surgery again immediately.

I was at peace this time. I hugged and kissed the boys the night before and made love with Naomi.

I prayed and felt at peace, my fate in God’s hands.

I told Steve and Suzi not to fly out again … but to lead their lives.

As I was wheeled into the operating room, I heard the Supremes blasting again.

It made me smile. I’d never much liked the Supremes.

I fell asleep saying the Our Father and thinking about making love on the beach on Maui with Naomi.

It wasn’t a new cancerous growth. It wasn’t a growth at all. It was granulated tissue from the previous surgery.

I was
fein
. Marshall Strome didn’t even have to tell me. I knew the moment I saw his face.

I was cancer-free.

· · ·

“You’re not smoking or drinking, are you?” Dr. Strome said.

“No, sir,” I said. “If you remember, I made you a promise.”

“I remember very well.” He smiled.

This occurred to me: Was it possible that I had conjured God because an afterlife had suddenly become a very important concern to me? Was my ego too large to make peace with an afterlife of rot and worms? Was I the nearly satiric evidence of “foxhole religion”?

I had the feeling that I didn’t know this sober, clear-eyed, and lucid person that I had become.

I had the feeling that I had to get to know myself again.

I had this thought, too:

I started flooding my brain with nicotine and tobacco when I was twelve … and I started flooding my brain with alcohol when I was fourteen …