We made an emergency appointment at the Long Island Jewish Hospital with a doctor that my oldest sister knew. I had an abscess that was about to burst due to an aggravated condition of Crohn’s disease where my intestines had perforated the intestinal wall.
I remember the nurses putting tubes down my throat in preparation for a first operation. There was danger of peritonitis. After a week, I required a second operation to remove the diseased portion of my large intestines. This time I awoke with a tube down my throat draining brownish yucky stuff into a jar. I remember being stuck with needles. I felt violated on all sides.
When I finally was about to be released from the hospital, I woke up like Gregor in Franz Kafka’s book “Metamorphosis.” I was hanging beneath my bed. I didn’t know how I’d gotten there. The entire room spun away. Many doctors entered and injected me with needles as my head spun around the room. The next day they performed a spinal tap, stuck another needle in my spinal canal to check for cells that might indicate a brain tumor.
Doctors could find nothing wrong. It took a second week in the hospital to recover from the psychotropic drugs. The sick monster had found me.
A semester of school passed. I remained home. My mother bought me a Siamese Fighting Fish and I was captivated by its neon blue fins inscribing circles inside a bowl with colored pebbles. During that time, I knit several cable sweaters, counting my stitches. When I felt strong enough, I returned to school, and took a poetry workshop with Muriel Rukeyser and also signed up for a class at the New Dance Studio on 45th Street across from what was then known as “Needle Park” on Broadway. Before class, I’d get coffee and go across-town to the Gotham Book Mart in the Jewelry District to read poetry.
In 1971 after I graduated from college, I moved to Chicago, where I worked in a punch press factory near O’Hare Airport to help round out my college education. In about nine months, I received a phone call from my oldest sister.
“You’ve got to come home. Daddy’s dying. It’s cancer.”
First he was in Long Island Jewish Hospital and then transferred to a hospice near Yankee Stadium. The first time I entered, I noticed its pea green walls and nuns moving briskly through the corridor with trays of medication. One evening he grabbed my hand and sat up. I wondered if he had managed to lick his cancer the way he had prevailed over so many things in his life.
“They’re taking pictures from a room inside a room. If you don’t get out of here quick, they’ll get you, too.”
“But Daddy. There is no room.”
He turned his face to the wall. “Even you are doubting me.” I told him I loved him. The next day he died.
Negative for a Fellini Film
They transferred you from a hospital
with six floors
to the terminal cancer ward
with one corridor
a door at each end.
You lingered for three months
at one exit
flashing your blinker
to tease the highway patrol.
They wouldn’t give a sick man
a ticket.
When I visited the ward
I couldn’t bring roses
or a paperback.
I could hardly bring myself.
Your intravenous
was a jungle vine
from a Tarzan movie
snapping beneath your weight.
My eyes reversed
in their sockets
to hide what we knew.
You grabbed my arm
and slapped me.
“The doctors are taking pictures
from a room inside a room.
When the reel is finished
I’ll be through.
Get out,” you gasped
from your lagoon of crocodiles.
“They’ll get you too.”
–to be continued