The Other Tumor

Other than some ambivalence that coincided with my crappy eight year marriage to a man who prided himself too much on being a child to ever consider being a father, I have always wanted kids. Not in a desperate, at any cost, steal someone else's kind of way, but it was certainly part of the life plan, such as it is. Actually, that's about it. Have kids. That's the only thing I can say I'm definite about.

After my marriage ended in late 2005, I found myself unceremoniously thrust into the new world of dating. Since I had not been single since the mid-1990s, there had been a lot of change. Email, cellphones, text messaging and the horrible myspace, this stalker facilitation tool created from pure evil rather than binary code. Communication and time had collapsed into a kind of social blackhole and it was now possible to know everything there was to know about a person, grow to hate them, and break up in two weeks. It was kind of awesome and scary at the same time. In short succession, I dated the following:

Puppet Guy

Since my soon to be ex-husband lacked the wherewithal to actually find his own apartment and move out once he decided to leave me, we were living together in a 300 square foot studio with two pitbulls for two months. This was not going to prevent me from turning the page, so I promptly started dating the first guy I met. He was the opposite of Aaron: short, brown, verbose, wealthy, and highly educated. He had a degree in neurobiology from Stanford, drove a Porsche and was in his first year at USC's Keck School of Medicine. All good, one would think, at least on paper. I was apprehensive when PG mentioned that he was undergoing fairly intensive psychological therapy stemming from an abusive childhood (new rule: never date someone with an unhappy childhood). I reasoned that this could mean he was exceptionally in touch with his emotions and thus able to communicate well, but in actual fact it just meant that he was really, really fucked up. Lo and behold, two weeks into our tryst he busted out a stuffed bear named Marvin that he used as an avatar to talk about his feelings. In the third person. Using a special voice. He was also a self-loathing racist and a crappy tipper, but the bear was enough.

Gay Guy

Gay guy was really cute, 25, an artist, and had amazing taste in furniture and vintage clothes. Suspiciously good, in fact, but it was the persistent exposure of his morning hard on to his gay best friend that was the kicker. Still, I have to thank GG for the amazing group of friends I met through him, and to sympathize with his wife who is obviously the last to know.

Expedient Rich Guy

Also 25, pathologically insecure, decent looking in a Hollywood douchebag kind of way, and the monthly recipient of briefcases full of dirty twenty dollar bills from his drug dealer Dad. My wretchedly low self esteem benefitted from his constant attention, and years of poverty were washed away in a shower of Prada sunglasses, $300 bottles of champagne, and a two week trip to Fiji complete with personal chef and private pool. 

Then came a long drought. I finished mourning my marriage, acted like a total tramp and thoroughly enjoyed it, and then finally felt calm enough to really find someone. This took a while, and then he seemed to appear from nowhere right in front of me. John lives across the street from me, and sometimes I would see him in front of his house when I was walking his dog, sometimes I saw him with his 8 year old daughter, but more often I saw him at my local dive bar. I guess we had actually met in March of 2007, but I don't remember it. John's presence was something that I gradually became aware of, mostly because people I knew kept pointing out to me that this guy was hopelessly in love with me. He seemed pretty square and kind dull, but maybe this was the opposite that I was looking for. My friend Mikey pushed me into accepting his advances, and on Hallowe'en we agreed to go out. 

Things moved really fast. The first night we went out John told me he loved me. He was gentle and attentive and mature and a parent and financially responsible and he made me feel safe and loved. He told me that I was his soulmate and promised that he would never leave me. 

Things were volatile at times, and inconsequential disagreements had a way of spiraling into something needlessly serious. Most serious to me was a baseless lack of trust on his part. He had a horrible high school friend, a long ago ex-girlfriend who was still in his life and epitomized the worst of Los Angeles: shallow, materialistic, self-absorbed, and deeply, deeply fucked up and unhappy. Their friendship at this stage in their lives seemed to be predicated on the fact that they made each feel better by dint of not being each other. This woman instantly identified me as a threat and set out to assassinate my character as best she could. She drunkenly threatened me at the bar one night when John wasn't there, and my restrained response was to give her the finger. John couldn't believe she would act that way, and accused me of provoking her. It took a dozen witnesses, including other high school friends and bar staff, to convince him otherwise. this should have been my first clue to run.

We overcame this and other differences and things seemed to be progressing when I found out I was pregnant in mid-June. I have been on birth control religiously for the past 14 years, and this was an unexpected and badly timed, if not unwelcome, turn of events. I could not have forseen that John would have a complete and total meltdown. He said I was reckless and irresponsible, called me stupid, and accused me of getting pregnant deliberately. I had gotten myself pregnant, I was ruining his life, this was the worst thing that ever happened to him. He was a victim, he was given no choice in the matter, I had trapped him, played him, and I was to be punished to the furthest extent he could muster. No comfort, no kindness, no compassion, no support, no help. He would be there for the child--emotionally and financially in every way--since it was not their fault, but he would hate me forever and take every opportunity to inflict cruelty on me until I was as abjectly miserable as humanly possible.

It Could Always Be Worse

No matter how dire your current situation, people have the tendency to offer this helpful platitude. It could always be worse. Yes, but I find the reverse is often true as well. It could always be better. I suppose this is the old "glass half full/glass half empty" test. In the words of my dear friend Rob, the glass is half full of piss.

As I write this, the vessel of my body is full of all sorts of things. Blood and guts, obviously. Half a raisin bran muffin from the Coffee Bean. 70% water, apparently. A 17 week old female fetus. And some kind of lurking presence inside my head that is gradually destroying my hearing and my balance and causing me strange neurological impairments. 

My grandfather died in January of 2004 and we were devastated. He was 92 years old, but it still came as a tremendous shock. He had lost none of his mental acuity and though he was legally blind, he was still physically strong, walking every day and doing some kind of weird calisthenics that had been recommended by his doctor and resembled Richard Simmons-type activities without the music or the fagulosity. Anyway, he had lied to us for who knows how long about the colon cancer that was killing him. He entered the hospital at the beginning of January for surgery, and the surgical site quickly became septic, killing him within weeks.

I saw him after his operation and before his death. He was white and papery and suddenly so very old as he lay in the narrow hospital bed. He held my hand and told me that he loved me and that he and my grandmother were very proud of me. One time, not long before this, he said "Sometimes we wonder why you do the things you do, but mostly we wonder how you can be so daring." He died a couple of weeks later, surrounded by his wife and his children and their children while I was back home in LA. 

I flew up to the Vancouver the day before the funeral so fucked up by grief that I couldn't regulate my body temperature. My mum, my dad, my sister and I arrived early to the service and decided to have a drink at some horrible sportsbar with incompetent bartenders, badly poured drinks, and slackjawed locals desultorily poking buttons on video poker machines. One drink somehow took much longer than it should have, and we got to the church just as the service was to begin. We were told that we had only this last chance to "view the deceased," and for some reason I felt compelled to look. My mum came in with me, although I knew she had no desire to look at her father this way. He was so tiny, so pale, and so corpse-like. I'm not sure what a fine example of the embalmer's art is supposed to look like, but this seemed like a sick joke. His face was waxy and skewed in some way, as if put back together along a bad seam. At least we could tell he wasn't there any more.

They wheeled him  out, and the priest proceeded to deliver a sermon touting the benefits of intolerance. He admitted that he didn't know my grandfather very well, and then suggested that we all go and see Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ." We weren't allowed a eulogy (not enough time, he said, and not in keeping with Catholic funeral tradition), and the wake at my uncle's house afterwards was a pretty grim affair. 

The next morning, I woke up partly deaf in my left ear. The tumor, which had been there for who knows how long, had announced its presence.