June 22, 2008

• Cancerboy: A reminiscence: Part Two

  

  This is a continuation of Cancerboy: A Reminiscence. PART ONE is below HERE. (The image is a “photoshopped” photograph made to look like an oil painting, created in 2004.)

  My roommate Joel was born in Southern California, but spent his early youth in Guam and Hawaii. His father worked for a shipping company directing and managing longshoremen, and this position took him around the world. By the time the family got back to Long Beach, Joel had already “seen the world”. He has an older brother, Dale, who is now a retired police lieutenant for the Westminster Police Force. Joel grew up in Long Beach when the family settled down, and was part of the “stoner” clique in his high school. He never was particularly ambitious nor did he stand out in a crowd, even though he has always been pretty tall. During the first couple of summers after high school, Joel found employment at the Disneyland amusement park in Anaheim as a “character actor”. The park had a parade back in the late 60s and early 70s called “The Main Street Electrical Parade”. Joel played a monkey from The Jungle Book and Winnie the Pooh, among other costumed characters in the parade.

  Disneyland eventually retired the Jungle Book monkeys because Joel and his coworker monkeys would nearly molest some of the more attractive young women in the crowd during thier scatterbrained “antics”. They woud maneuver their “tails” in phallic poses and do what they could to “cop a feel” when getting close to good looking gals for photos. The monkeys thought this was good clean fun, but some of the park guests complained. Joel spent three years at Disneyland, and then began a career which included many different jobs. He presently works as a parts salesman for a Honda dealership in the South Bay. Before that, he drove the parts truck for the dealership around town collecting parts from other dealers and vendors for use in the shop. He’s been on his present job for over 15 years, longer than any other he previously held.

  Joel doesn’t have any hobbies, although he is the type of person who has tried a few experiences, only to fail to keep up an interest. He was, at earlier times in his life, a bicyclist and a scuba diver. Probably he gave in to urgings from his more active friend Dave, who spends his afternoons following pursuits like bungee jumping. Although Joel was a bicyclist in the past, and owns bicycles, I haven’t seen him take a spin on a bike for the 15 years I’ve lived with him. He’s talked about scuba diving, getting his certification, the fun of finding undersea life, for years, but I’ve never seen him even go to the beach. He is content to watch television, flipping the channels endlessly, or to listen to his record and CD collection, or to read. He reads voraciously, mostly pulp sci fi paperbacks, and he remembers the plots of the books and the characters. He’s never really got into films, but those he likes he can remember clearly even having only watched it one or two times. He can still remember most of the films we watched together at that Long Beach film series. He is very good at “guessing” the end of a film, and his predictions astound me, since I’ve seen thousands of movies, yet still cannot spot a lot of the cliched plot turns Joel can when we watch a film together.

  When we moved in together I told him I knew what he “brought to the party”, but I was a bit more naive than I knew. I laid out the furniture in the living room, a wild mix of whatever styles either of us had in our previous living places. Our couch would be the 9 foot long uncomfortable ugly gold monster both of us had used at Bob’s, which we had moved out from where Joel had been living. A dirty old chair and the sofa bed that was in Bob’s living room also were placed along walls in our new living room. I added my lazyboy chair, a couple of bookcases filled with videotapes and vinyl records, and my entertainment center, which at that time included a 32″ tube television, laserdisc player, and both Beta and VHS players. We placed some of the artworks which used to hang in Joel’s family home, and some of Bob’s old rock and roll posters from the San Francisco music scene back in the 60s on the walls. I had the rock and roll posters framed. We first used Bob’s old washer and dryer until the dryer broke a belt, at which time I purchased a new washer and dryer. Joel had usually washed his clothes at laundromats, so he loved the convenience of having a washer and dryer in the house.

  We were astounded to realize that although our new home had three bedrooms, there was only one bathroom. We had to align our schedules so that we didn’t collide with each other in the mornings while accomplishing our “toilette”. Either Joel or I would awake first, use the facilities, and then go to work. I didn’t like the mess Joel would leave in the bathroom, with water all over the floor, so I kept getting up earlier and earlier, Part of why I get up at 3:00 am to shower and then take an hour nap before going to work, began because I wanted to make sure I was in the shower first. Joel works on the parts counter from 9:00am to 5:00pm, and I get off work at 3:00pm, so I would get home first, then spend a couple of hours watching a movie or television show before Joel came home. Then we would turn the TV to the news, and try to find shows which we both enjoyed. Or else we would play music. In the early years in our shared existence at home, I and Joel would sometimes have music nights where each of us would in turn play one selection from our collection we liked, followed by the other’s response. We welcomed our friends into our home, and frequent visitors included Jim, the other Jim, and Pete, an earlier member of Bob’s backyard buddies group. The other Jim was dealing drugs from his family home, where he took care of his ailing mother. Joel and I would drive over to his place most Friday nights, buy a little methampehtamine, and party till the sun came up. Before my ex girlfriend Pat left Southern California to go live with some guy she met at a bar sometime after we broke up, she came over to visit a few times.

  For the first year or so, Joel and I would share meals. A coworker of mine, Annie, had given me a lot of cookware and household devices as a housewarming gift when I moved into the new house, because Pat had taken most of the kitchen stuff after we broke up. But eventually I grew disgusted with Joel’s kitchen skills, or lack thereof. I also chided him regularly for only washing two or three pieces of clothes in the large washer I had purchased. I have a large wardrobe because I don’t like to wash clothes, and I usually only have one “set of loads” a month. Joel only seemed to have a few changes of clothes, so he was constantly washing. I began to find myself “retiring” to my own bedroom or the middle bedroom where I set up my computer right after Joel came home each evening. I just didn’t want to “be” with Joel most of the time. Although he was a slob, never picked up after himself, and didn’t seem to have any real interests, he had some weird “rules” he liked to spring on me, usually relating to his two cats, whose comfort he put before everything else. One of the things which really irked me, and which I discussed with other friends and with Joel himself, was his propensity for saying hello to his cats before even acknowledging me when he came home from work in the evenings. He brushed his lack of greeting me to the fact that he has always been antisocial, and is just not comfortable saying hi to people.

  We spent most of our time in our house apart, even though we lived together. First, our shared entertainment vehicle, the TV, only had regular broadcast channels. I didn’t necessarily want cable, and Joel didn’t seem to care. After we’d been together for about two years, I purchased a 60″ projection television and began subscribing to DirecTV satellite service when it first became available. Immediately Joel became a channel flipper. When Tivo became available, I got one of those too, so I could prerecord favorite movies off the Turner Classic Movies channel. I set the 32″ television in my bedroom, along with one of my videotape players. That way when Joel came home, I could either go to my bedroom, where I had the other TV, or to the middle bedroom, where I had my computer. I got internet service in 1997, and my new hobby took up lots of my time. I’d get disgruntled about Joel’s packrat ways, and I’d clean up after him constantly. I began to call us “the odd couple” in online correspondence with my newfound internet friends. By 2003, I was so tired of both Joel’s growing lethargy, and the neighbor’s kids, who yelled and screamed constantly from the moment they got home from school, that I decided to create for myself a “media room” in the center bedroom, complete with another bigscreen television, this one an HDTV. I spent the early aughts buying lots of electronic gear and spending lots of money I didn’t have on vacations around the country on my “internet lovesearch” so my credit cards were a bit overloaded. That didn’t stop me from using those cards to get my “new life” set up in my media room. I placed another big comfy lazyboy chair in the middle of the media room, and before long, I had transferred DirecTV service into the media room as well. I essentially had “moved out” of the main house, and had set up my own “rooms” so that I didn’t have to “live” alongside Joel.

  We both started our shared living arrangement as pretty big beer drinkers. Each of us could pack away a 12 pack (or two ) a week. As the years passed, I began drinking less, but Joel kept drinking at least a six pack a night. This further kept any endearment away from me. I used to be the bad drunk, but when I sobered up and he didn’t, I began to like Joel’s drunkenness less and less.

  My tolerance for letting Joel pile up newspapers and not clean up the “shared rooms” increased as I neglected to share the rooms. He wouldn’t clean, and neither would I. I would tell others that I hated my roommate, and would love to get out and live on my own. Our “temporary” arrangement was streching into nearly a decade as the calendar turned to 2004. High living costs prohibited our splitting up. Neither of us could afford to rent alone in Southern California. Neither of us were getting any raises at our jobs. So we stuck together, grinned, and beared it.

  In February of 2004 Joel went to his doctor’s to complain about constipation. The doctors found a large fist sized “mass” in his large intestine. Apparently, the cancerous growth had been sitting there growing steadily for ten years, which means Joel had the disease back before we moved in together. However, he wasn’t one to go to the doctor’s regularly, so he didn’t know about this until he went in for a colonoscopy ordered after his complaints to his doctor. He had to be scheduled for an operation to remove the cancerous growth, and spent over a week in the hospital afterwards. I visited him each afternoon after I got off work. He returned after his hospital stay a changed person. He tired more easily and became more lethargic. He was scheduled for chemotherapy, to stop the growth of the cancer throughout his system. The first round seemd to have been successful, and he spent six months on chemo, another six months off, then went in for a checkup and the doctors found the cancer had returned.

  This has happened five times now. For the first couple of years, Joel hardly noticed any of the usual side effects of the chemo. He kept his appetite, which was never voracious in the first place. His hair remained in place. His doctors kept ordering chemotherapy, he would go through it, be given a clean bill of health, only to find the cancer return, swimming around his lymph system. The doctors begrudgingly gave him three years to live.

  I’d ask Joel all the time if he wanted to go out with me. I liked to go to Las Vegas every year, so I asked him to accompany me. I asked him if he wanted to see films playing in the theater. I asked him if he wanted to go see the airplane and train museums with me, knowing he liked airplanes. He always begged off. Jim, my sometime roommate for most of the late 70s, once told me that he was disgusted with Joel’s promises to him to go someplace, until up to the last minute, when Joel would always beg off. Joel never could get up the gumption to do anything. He would “think about things” until the thing passed and he didn’t have to think about it. If he made a promise, it would most certainly be broken. I figured that he would at least try to formulate some kind of bucket list, but he stayed content as always, listening to records and flipping channels on the television.

  This past year the chemotherapies finally caught up with him. Joel weighs about 130 pounds, and is never hungry. He can’t keep any food down even if he were hungry. He spends most of his time in bed. There is a small pharmacy of pills he has to take on a regular basis. He has taken a real turn for the worse just this past couple of months. He was going into work as long as he could, but has taken most of the past month off, and is thinking about just going on disability. I shudder to think that he may never work again.

  I recently watched a movie called “Two Weeks” which is about the grown sons and daughter of a woman played by Sally Field gathering by her during the last stages of her cancer while she’s in hospice. I have been wondering exactly what Joel can expect during the final stages, at which ever time they arrive. The movie gave me some indication. It seems that eventually, the chemo is just hooked up to the patient full time. As the cancer spreads to  vital organs like the lungs and the liver, the pain increases exponentially, and a morphine drip has to be added to the chemo. The pain gets so intense that the patient eventually just sleeps most of the time, lulled by the morphine. Food is replaced by another IV drip, and the last embarrassment is the addition of a catheter. Eventually either the cancer, the chemo, or the morphine kills the patient. It isn’t a pretty way to die.

  I have only recently begun to think of the implications that Joel’s passing might have on my financial situation, but I leave this in Providence’s hands right now. It pains me to look at his frail body. He still has thinning hair, but in places his skin is “hanging”. His bones almost show through the skin. He looks postiively skeletal. I was going to take a photo for this entry, but decided against it. It hurts me to think about the pain he is experiencing. If he eventually needs full time care, he will probably have to be placed in a hospice. I can volunteer to be a caregiver part time, but I work all week long.

  This past Friday, his doctors told him he was too sick to take that week’s chemo treatment, so he’s been up and around for most of yesterday. It’s incredibly hot here in SoCal, so even if one is healthy it is difficult to beat the heat. Joel spent a lot of time in bed, but each time I emerged from my media room to go to the bathroom or go get a glass of water, Joel was on the couch flipping channels on the TV, which meant he was feeling a bit better. I told him I really need to get out and give the living room a good cleaning. He apologized to me for not having the energy to clean up. “I understand, Joel, don’t worry”, I told him. It’s hard to feel any animosity toward him right now. I don’t care how much vitriol I might have spewed at him in the past. I don’t want his final journey to be filled with images of me screaming at him for being a sloth. I’ve been forced to see if I really am as tolerant as I say I am, and this is proving to me that I can take a lot without breaking. I’ve always said I’m good in a crisis, and while this “crisis” has been steadily building for years now, it is nearing it’s conclusion I fear.

  Joel is my “last real friend”. My best buddy Tom died following a 20 foot fall at the age of 37 back in the early 80s. Bob perished at 47 of a heart attack while both Joel and I were living with him. Our mutual friend Dan, who lived in Toronto, but viisted California each and every year, staying with Joel and I when he was here, passed away after a long and bitter battle with lieukemia. I stopped seeing Jim last year after getting discouraged that he always seemed to be playing World of Warcraft and wasn’t interested in going out and doing anything else “right now”. I don’t see Liz anymore either and she’s currently in another relationship.

  Please pray for Joel and/or send him some positive energy. I always relate to him any good wishes he receives from my readers on the internet, and I’ve tried to get him hooked up to the internet more than once. He bought a computer a few years back, and he was online for a few moments, but like everything else he just couldn’t hold the interest. I just got another network modem and successfully hooked it up to my puter. Now the ball is in his court and he needs to get his computer hooked up. It’s a Mac, which I know nothing about. I gave him the phone number to the AT&T DSL help line. If he ever gets hooked up I’m going to invite him to start a blog on Xanga, but I’m pretty sure he’ll pass.

  • 7:46 am
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