The Kitchen Readings (19 page)

After Hunter's hip replacement, which is another story, his spine was declared a Superfund site. Pain was his game. He would brag of his tolerance of it, tolerance assisted by all known and some unknown chemicals. When pain eclipsed his pharmacopoeia, the Doc went to the docs.

I had recently had spinal surgery, and Hunter asked for a referral. I was glad to help. My surgery had been a complete success. Tests, diagnosis, and good patient-surgeon chemistry resulted in Hunter having a “spine replacement,” as Hunter told his friends.

The surgery, while complex and successful, led directly to a very difficult “withdrawal.” Anita, Juan, and Deborah shared
watches over the operation and the ensuing withdrawal. I would get updates they issued from the clinic in Vail. The essence of these dispatches was that the surgery was a technical success but that Hunter was suffering significantly. This had resulted in a decision to induce coma and to transfer the patient to the Intensive Care Unit, not because Hunter needed intensive care but because the unit had solid doors, which would protect the other patients from Hunter's screaming outbursts of rage when he briefly awoke from his enforced sleep.

Withdrawal is a phenomenon that most good hospitals have experience with. The Vail Clinic had seen its share of patients with hooch complications. A 5 percent, ten-proof IV solution works in most cases. The MDs told me that 5 percent was not enough with this particular patient, but that rules were rules. They also told me that it was not merely the alcohol that was causing Hunter's problems. A list of drugs, many unknown to me, were blamed for the “kick.” Pills in all shapes and sizes were the cause of my friend's hinky freak-outs. The coma was not induced merely because of alcohol, but so what? Cleanse the man.

Two weeks after the surgery I was sitting in my office when Doc called. He wanted me to be his first visitor outside the family. I agreed to drive to Vail over the next two hours. I walked into the hospital and was immediately routed to the ICU Deb had already warned me the IV wasn't working. I had brought a bottle of port that I knew HST liked. What I didn't know was that the feeding tube—critical while Hunter was in a coma, but now removed—had made swallowing an Olympic event. I poured a glass of port, hoping to alleviate at least part of the withdrawal pain. HST thanked me and lifted the glass to his lips. He dropped it and it shattered on the hospital floor. What next?

Hunter ordered Juan, Anita, and Deborah from the room. He raved to me that Juan only wanted his money, that Anita was depressed that she was the wife, nurse, housekeeper, editorial assistant, and future widow of an old and decrepit journalist who believed that he was soon to expire or require 24-7 care. Now it was me, HST, and his beautiful blond nurse. Hunter whispered in my ear, “Get me out of here!” I replied “Spring you?” Hunter said, “No, take me to a bar.” I told the nurse that the Doc wanted me to take him to a bar. She said it was against doctor's orders but it would probably do him a world of good.

Okay.

The wheelchair-bound Hunter asked to be dressed in scrubs like the nurse. She agreed, and we dressed him. No small task: spinal surgery, chemically induced coma, his first visitor, a sympathetic RN.

I lifted him while the nurse garbed him in scrubs. The nurse gave HST an injection in the thigh. “What's that?” I asked. “Haldol” was her answer. “Haldol? Jesus, we use that in my jail on psychotic inmates. It's a chemical Rip Van Winkle. He'll be a noodle in a chair with wheels, with me in charge.” “It's a very small dose,” she replied. “Hot damn!” the Doc exclaimed. “Let's go!”

I pushed him out onto the streets of Vail. In a car with suspension and shocks, these streets feel and look like glass. Now two voyagers on foot and wheel going uphill, we found the road pocked with potholes. It was ninety degrees, and I was sweating like a lord. HST was vibrating in the wheelchair like an astronaut just after liftoff. His voice was in tremolo, and his teeth were chattering.

The first liquor license that we came to was fortunately ADA-compliant. A three-switchback ramp led to an outdoor patio
with umbrella tables. “Want to sit outside?” I asked, assuming that two weeks indoors at a hospital would have Hunter yearning for sunshine. I forgot the Doc's vampire syndrome; he feared sunlight. “No, let's go inside.” Once we were settled at a table inside, Hunter lit up a Dunhill. Instantly, a ponytailed waiter materialized and announced, “There's no smoking here.” I took over. “Look, dude, the guys been in the hospital for weeks, and this is his first cigarette.” I simultaneously peeled a twenty from my wad and offered the mordida. Ponytail looked left and right, swished the twenty from my fingers like a snapping turtle, and returned with an ashtray. We ordered drinks. After the delivery of HST's Chivas and my gin and tonic, Hunter pulled out a pipe and a Bic. Shit. Well, in for a penny…

But before he could light the pipe, his chin was on his chest. He was nodding. Jesus. “Hunter! Hunter!” He lifted his head and met my eyes.

“Want to go back?”

“Yeah. Better take me back.”

I overpaid for the untouched cocktails and started pushing the chair. HST was slumping farther forward, and I feared that he was going to fall on his face. I grabbed him by the collar of his surgical scrubs. The chair had a seat belt, and I cinched him up just before total unconsciousness descended. Back inside the hospital, six of us used a blanket to gently return Hunter to his crib. He was snoring. I drove back to Aspen.

At about eight o'clock that night I was dining in Woody Creek at the home of a friend. My cell phone lit up. It was Anita calling. “Bobby, I'm in the valley following a limo that has Hunter in it. He called it to drive him home from Vail. I may need some help getting him into the house.” I told her I was five minutes away and to call when they got to the house. She phoned a little later
and said that with the help of the driver and Cleverly, Hunter was back at Owl Farm and grinning.

After weeks of physical therapy, stretching, and a commitment to mobility, Hunter was recovering from a major overhaul that he could barely recall. We all celebrated his return and did what we could to support him physically, mentally, and intellectually. Reflecting on his accepting the necessity of the surgery and the inherent pain, before and after the procedure, reinforced my belief that Hunter wanted more out of life—or at least, more life.

When he asked me to ride with him in his Jeep Grand Cherokee a few days after his return, I balked, but he convinced me that it would be a short test-drive in his quest for eventual automotive independence. He promised to stay on Owl Farm property. Against my better judgment, I got the car from the garage. He groped his way to the driver's door, hand over hand on the roof rack, and into the seat. I got in beside him, and he put it in drive. With feet numb from the days in bed and spinal swelling, he floored the accelerator. Wheels spinning, we bounced into the large field behind the house. He could press down on the accelerator, steer, jump two-foot logs, and mow down fence posts, but somehow he just could not move his right foot to the brake pedal. We careened over a pile of rotting cottonwood logs, through a wire sheep fence, and across two irrigation ditches before I could reach over and turn off the engine. I yanked the keys out of the ignition. “Switch seats or stay here as long as you want!” I bellowed. He grinned, thanked me, and complied with my order. “Mission accomplished,” he said with a smile.

I drove back very slowly, recovering from my terror and let him out at the house. I parked the car back in the garage and gave Anita the keys and told her it would be a while before the Doc could drive. It was.

I told Hunter not to go to Honolulu. He'd been invited there to be the celebrity host for a marathon on Oahu, but he was still recovering from spinal surgery. His gait was unsteady and unbalanced. Hobbling from the kitchen to the bathroom was a fifteen-minute round trip. I often watched him discreetly piss in the kitchen sink with his back to the crowd in order to avoid the trek. Sometimes he asked me to stand behind him as a human cloak. Oh yeah, you gotta love the stench of urine on dirty dishes. Juan, much later, confided that his father had done this even when he was healthy.

Nonetheless, the packing of suitcases commenced. Five-star digs, Pacific Rim hero worshipers, Gollywood stablemates, sun
instead of ice, wanderlust, and grins trumped my Jesuit logic and intuitive concern that argued against this postsurgical maiden voyage of Hunter, the shipwreck that I loved and worried about. His medical crusade was boring and draining, and respite was worth the gamble. And gambling man he was. An audience broader than the kitchen, a reaffirmation of his cachet, and the challenge to show us that transoceanic travel was still an arrow in his quiver kicked him into gear and he spurred his gang of sherpas onward. In the end, paranoia was the only serious threat to his journey, and paranoia lost out. With baggage more properly suited to a nineteenth-century steamship circumnavigation, Mr. and Mrs. Thompson left for the islands.

The first phone call evoked a flood of “why didn't I put my foot down?” guilt. Hunter had snapped both tibia and fibula, just below the knee, in a slip-and-fall on the marble floor of his tropical paradise bathroom and he was being put back together and encased in plaster in the orthopedic section of the Honolulu Valley Hospital. Setback? Understatement.

I like facts. I like to garner facts. The facts are neither sad nor happy, they just exist.

Hunter wanted a microwave oven in his suite. The major counter space was in the bathroom, with deluxe slick marble floors. At some ungodly hour of predawn, Hunter craved Top Ramen soup. He nuked it, reached into the oven for it, grabbed it, burned his hand on it, dropped it on the floor, took a step, went upside down, landed without grace, snapped two bones, and never got any soup. Just the facts, ma'am.

Anita provided the play-by-play. “Bobby, we're flying Honolulu to DIA, then to Vail and the Steadman clinic. I'll call you from there.” But Anita's next call came from Honolulu. She recounted the checking of baggage, pre-boarding the United
jumbo, first-class seats, row 1, A and B, Hunter's failure to find comfort and his insistence on deplaning. Post-9/11 stomach acid for UAL and TSA. The baggage went round trip to Denver and back.

A few days later, Anita, thinking logically, booked six seats in the center section of a wide body. Hunter could lie down and find comfort. One problem, the FAA says you cannot lie down during takeoff and landing. Scratch plan B. Plan C was an air ambulance dispatched from L.A. and guaranteed by Sean Penn's Gold Card. The flight crew loaded Hunter and Anita aboard the jet and headed east toward the Vail airport and the Steadman-Hawkins Clinic.

There was trouble mid-Pacific. Hunter was not comfortable and chucked water bottles and sandwiches into the cockpit. That sort of thing is verboten in the world of Learjet jockeys; those guys aren't used to having stuff thrown at them in mid-flight. At a scheduled refueling stop at Van Nuys, the crew told Anita that Hunter was going to be dumped out of his stretcher on to the tarmac for his horrible behavior. He could find his own way to Vail. Anita begged the crew to relent. The pilots took pity, and the flight continued.

Meanwhile, I was on the phone with Juan, who was en route to Vail. I said I'd meet him at the clinic. Anita had been up for five days and once Hunter was settled in at Steadman-Hawkins, she checked into a ski lodge for a well-deserved nap. I met Juan in the clinic lobby. You could hear Hunter clear down the hall, and it was agonizing. Acknowledging that the goal was to get Hunter to Owl Farm when the orthos were done assessing his condition, Juan, with a real life and a real job and a very real family, sought my permission to return to Denver. I would stand watch and coordinate from Vail to the farm. There was no sense
in both of us watching NFL games in the lobby all Sunday afternoon.

Juan gave me the phone numbers of Anita's lodge and a limo service and went back to Denver. The staff at the clinic told me that X-rays of Doc's break showed clean fractures, no dislocation and no need for surgery or admission. They sedated him and recast his leg from ass to toe with thirty pounds of plaster. Later, during the second games of the afternoon, I was told by the staff that Hunter was ready to go, and that they were ready for him to leave. Those who had to attend to him would shed no tears. He would not be missed. As he emerged from anesthesia I could hear him shouting from his room. I walked down the corridor and went in. His mood was foul, and the staff was the target of his invective. I told him to behave and that I'd get him home.

I called the limo service and arranged a pickup at 5:30
P.M
. I called Anita, awakened her, and picked her up at the lodge. The “luxury limo” was a van—granted, it was a large one—waiting at the clinic's back door.

I informed the folks in the white suits that all was ready and asked how they would get Hunter from the bed to the van. “Don't worry,” they assured me. “We know how to do this and we really want him out of here.” Five minutes later, four guys in full bio-hazard suits, including face shields, showed up with a gurney. Enduring curses and threats from Hunter, they lifted him from the bed to the gurney and wheeled him to the exit. Lifting his butt and broken leg, they placed him in the van. Anita boarded, and I got in my car and followed the van to I-70. We were on our way to Woody Creek.

We'd traveled one mile west when the van signaled to exit. More trouble? I followed it to the parking lot at McDonald's. I
approached, and Hunter said that he wanted grilled cheese sandwiches. This item isn't on the McDonald's menu, so Anita taught the Bulgarian manager and Mexican cooks how to make them.

With a new cast, a bag of comfort food, and Owl Farm on the horizon, Hunter was once again in control of his environment, a basic requirement for Doc. My only problem, and Hunter's, was how we were going to get him and his cast from the van into the house. I called Deputy Joe DiSalvo and he agreed to borrow a wheelchair from the hospital and meet us at the farm. I called Cleverly. With grunting and screaming, we got Hunter into the chair, up the stairs, and into the kitchen, where he saw his four-foot-high stool on wheels. “Get me into the stool,” he commanded. None of us thought the stool or Hunter was stable enough, but he demanded, and we complied. Once in place and safely home, he looked at his TV, which had been on for ten years, and said, “Hot damn! The Broncos are on
Sunday Night Football.
I'll take them and give three.” Joey, Mike, and I took the bet, won, and never got paid.

 

The broken leg in Honolulu was a milestone in the downward spiral of Hunter's health. Hunter had become more and more sedentary over the years, but because he was gifted with the physique of a natural athlete, the accompanying atrophy had been gradual and subtle. The break was a large and immediate change in his life. Hunter had always been perfectly happy to be waited on; he was great at being lazy. For many years that seemed okay, because not getting off his ass was his choice; now he had no choice. He loved riding motorcycles. He loved shotgun golf, jumping into the Shark and flying down to the Tavern. He loved chasing women, literally chasing them, with the women running, and Hunter running. Now he was stuck in a chair and, worse,
there was the regimen of physical therapy. To say Hunter wasn't one for regimens of any kind would be a massive understatement, and the therapy was painful hard work as well.

The situation Hunter found himself in would have depressed the most stoic of individuals, and I don't think Hunter was ever described as stoic.