Cosmo (21 page)

And above all, you lose the irony of my role as celebrity endorser. I am in a particularly specialized position here, pimping the subs. Don't you think there've been enough cash-ins on my coffee-house mystique? I take this as a real blow, a real insult to my integrity – and perhaps a larger and more emotionally charged blow than someone else might feel – but you know I'm sensitive these days, man. You should read what Kelley's been saying about me. Hateful stuff. And this is after almost seventeen years of business, correspondence, even love. You know about our little ‘thing.' She's even claiming I arranged a swat team to raid her home in Cali, arrest her in her bikini and take her to an asylum (only half-true, after all). Thank g-d I'm strong, that I've got that molten core. Otherwise, I'd be a wreck.

I need time to think, Gary. We should talk about this. I'm too sensitive at the moment to decide whether we should continue building our campaign. We were on to something great (even with Dwayne involved) …

Sincerely,

L. Cohen

Date: February 25, 2005

To: Szychszczecin, Gary ‘[email protected]'

From: LNC ‘[email protected]'

Subject: Re: Advertising Arrangement

Dear Gary,

I've been accused of conspiracy, defamation, extortion. I've been accused of blowing it on extravagances – as if I've been living like Michael Jackson, for g-d's sake. I'm vulnerable from both sides – with Kelley on my left, and Neal Greenberg on my right – and now it seems I'm running out of friends. The Money's all gone, they're saying … gone. Anjani hasn't returned my calls to her hotel room. Sharon's similarly indisposed, in New York for backing vocal tracks. All the profits from the albums, the tours, the appearances: gone. As if I've been the one to mount a conspiracy or break the law …

So, for the purposes of maintaining our ties, the friendship between our families, please allow me to retract that last letter. The stresses, Gary, have been almost too much for one old man to bear. I wrote out of passion when a cooler head should have slowed my hand. Maybe it's all the mustard: thinking on veggies and toppings. Please forgive me, friend.

So I'd be happy to advertise anything you want. If you need a song, or an appearance, I'm yours. Let me warm my joints by the crackling fires of SUBWAY CAFÉ. Let's raise a toast to the fine coffees and herbal beverages that warm the mouths and bellies of your literate, romantic clientele. By all means, let's throw on a little jazz, read a snatch of poetry and stare at the moon.

Yours, in humility, and in good faith.

L. Cohen

Date: March 9, 2005

To: Szychszczecin, Gary ‘[email protected]'

From: LNC ‘[email protected]'

Subject: Re: Advertising Arrangement

Dear Gary,

My apologies for not returning your emails and calls sooner. I've been extremely busy over the past few days and weeks attending to legal matters in California (as well as a nasty cold – I feel a bit devastated, to tell you the truth: as if pulled apart, frazzled, despite my new tan).

Instead of stringing you along any further – more than I already have, to my discredit, and remorse – I'll simply come out with it: I am going to have to decline any continued participation in an endorsement deal with your restaurants. Believe me – it has nothing to do with you, or with the direction you've taken the SUBWAY franchise, or these new plans to open the café line. I've decided to pursue other Money-making ventures, is all. I hope you can forgive me for wasting your time. And please let your father know that this is, of course, nothing personal.

Now equipped with a tighter, more competent legal staff, I've made some important choices regarding my career and financial options. Last year I made the ridiculous (but understandable) decision not to promote Dear Heather, but that was before all of this legal nonsense. I haven't made a public appearance in, what, twelve, thirteen years? And yet there are websites and fan clubs and message boards devoted to tracing my movements, for fans to follow me around and stake out my home. People are rabid for my anti-Money messages from the last forty years (people who eat at SUBWAY and people who do not – it really doesn't matter, in the end).

So, first, we're putting out a new album. I am still sapped for songs, but Anjani's been sitting on a store of great tracks – we're going to get them into shape, record and release them as soon as possible. Co-written, of course, by me. Anjani's returned from her trip, no doubt appeased by my decision to seek better counsel and to put my shoulder to the wheel. The record will be out (we hope) sometime in 2006, if you're at all interested. Should sell enough copies to help us start climbing out of this pit.

Second, we're getting the band back together! I'm not sure when, or exactly how, but I've decided to lighten up and put aside my reluctance to tour. If all goes according to plan, we should be able to book a world tour by 2008. Can you imagine how fast tickets will fly? You'd be surprised at how eager some of these fans are, how rabid, from Dublin to Toronto to Dubai.

Third, I'm back to the scribbling. A way to deal with the nightmares of our post-Moneyed world. No exaggeration, Gary. Poetry saves, despite what I've said to you about art's inability to relieve the grinding pressures, the terrors of poverty and old age. I'm even drawing pictures. Pictures! I sent around some feelers and I've already got a bite from a publisher – one of the first to publish my work, back when things were happy and young. You should see a collection by next year. I've already got a title:
Book of Longing
, a testament to my time of crisis, to when the world turned against me, and all I had was hope. You and your dad will surely be thanked in the acknowledgements.

I'm also in the process of filing a civil suit. Don't worry – I won't bore you with the details, won't jeopardize our relationship by involving you in its intricacies or confidentialities. But rest assured, Gary, that I will see some measure of justice, if only to sleep happily at night knowing my suffering has been considered and heard. Word has begun to leak; Maclean's is asking about the story. I think I may go public, blow it wide open, before Kelley or Greenberg can start besmirching my name.

Which brings me back to us. Once again, thank you for your kindness, your generosity, your fealty. Know that I am resolved to pay your franchise back for every gratis sub that I ate while thinking all my money had vanished – and it was many, many subs, over many days. My garbage bins are still overflowing with white, green and yellow paper! I started to feel a bit strange last week – a bit insane, to be honest. I'm happy to be back to my regular soups, my dicing, my local grocers. It felt as if my brain were overheating – I was even dreaming of stabbing Dwayne, of reaching across the counter and grabbing one of those green-handled knives … how absurd …

Not to insinuate that your product is unhealthy, or foul-tasting, or soul-destroying. Far from it – it kept me afloat when everything in my life began to lose meaning. It was a kind of loneliness, Gary, but you were there to give me solace, to provide a comfort in my confessions. I saw strange things while thinking of subs. The world seemed composed of a cruel geometry. I woke in the late mornings to the dim notion that everything – the clock, the table, the heaps – were arranged by some unseen hand. That everything around me was put there, so to speak; even the shapes crawling toward senility (or another sub) seemed part of the palette. Yet whoever or whatever assembled it all was obviously insane, or painting while asleep. I felt – and please don't take this the wrong way – often trapped in a slasher film, its plot beating an illogical metronome. The pulse of trees cried for more weeping, a weird mandate for blood. It was a daze, and I marched through the city convinced of its falsehood and intemperance. A geometric mess.

No wonder I wrote of public transit, and shapes, and toppings. No wonder. Though terrible, I realize now that I will miss this time. A time when you and your father seemed my only true comrades. I can safely say, and without exaggeration, after so much falsehood and exaggeration, that I love you, young brother, as no other. And I will miss the bizarre picture of me in a SUBWAY polo, visor pulled low over my eyes, squirting more mustard onto Nine-Grain bread.

I hope you find who and what you're looking for, Gary. And I wish you all the Money in the world.

Yours, always,

L. Cohen

LAST WORDS

 

 

 

T
he doctor points to an X-ray of my lungs, circles an area near my trachea. The office air goes queer – pressurized, headachy – as she opens her mouth to speak.
Tumours
, she says, delicately, as if invoking the name means invitation.
Here and here and here
, tapping the photograph, signalling the first signs of a cancer that may spread from my lungs to my throat and to my brain.
Or not
, she adds, careful;
we can't predict the process of the disease
. So, they might otherwise head south, passing through my capillaries to leech into my stomach, my liver, my pancreas. They may shrink, or they may just stay put, grow to the size of ripe plums in my chest.

Who knows? Once you've got a weed, I'm thinking, the whole lawn is lost. I've spent enough time gardening, knees and hands stained with soil, to know how the whole grisly show operates. One arrogant yellow bloom pokes its tufty head out of so much healthy green, and then there's a legion. But these weeds aren't happy yellow dandelions, won't fade to spidery white filaments that blow to bits at the end of summer. And I can't simply rise and retire, put away my tools and abandon the manicured fight. No, the next few months will be shadowy, elusive, spiked with the brooding talk of tumours: morbid entanglements of
humour
and
tomb
.

The doctor has a beautiful smile, I think. All laugh lines and condolences. Like my wife, Katherine, seemed when she was most happy: as if in some other universe, her knees pressed into the supple earth, dappled sunlight falling through her straw hat as she looked up to me with a squirming worm on her spade. The doctor's hand rests comfortably over mine, her wedding ring cold and hard against my knuckle; her eyes say I'm sorry. We make another appointment, give a tentative yes to chemotherapy, to waiting lists, to making an informed decision.

I leave the clinic and walk to my car. I buckle my seat belt, slide the key into the ignition, and watch the skies clear and the sun finally peer through the clouds: two weeks of rain and fog and now this radiant white light, this delicious, stirring warmth. Yes, I have cancer, stage four, terminal. Before the summer is over I'll be dead. I've been living with the pain and the sleep-wracking coughs and the fatigue for many months – bottling it, explaining it away – but now there is no more room for postponement, for avoidances, for
maybe it's something else
. I have not smoked a cigarette in fifteen years, but twenty years of smoking have finally caught up. Strange now, to think of cigarettes, relics of an older, brighter world …

The next week passes in what I assume is a sort of numbed disbelief. I'm informed of treatments, my chances with chemotherapy, and I inquire attentively and uselessly into an encyclopedic parade of drugs and curatives and chemicals, acting as if understanding or knowing the names of my treatments will make them any easier to endure. We talk about irradiating and breaking apart the black cells. We talk about the chance of returning, after a long period of baldness and weakness, vomiting and agony and clinical hell, to a regular and functional lifestyle. We talk about support groups and therapists, organizations to help assuage what some patients describe as an unbearable sense of loss – lost opportunities, lost potential. I find myself online for hours and hours, spending a bright and breezy Sunday morning on this, the last June 1st of my life, toying with alternative avenues, holistic or naturopathic healers outside the realm of traditional medicine, and retching in the wastebasket beneath the desk.

I don't
feel
tremendously worse. I have classes to teach, a semester to finish. Life goes on as if nothing were different – it's just charged with a kind of tremble, quieting me, leaving me withdrawn and dizzy. I carpool to my high school in the early morning, roam through the linoleum staff room, place my bagged lunch in the fridge and shoot the shit with younger colleagues.
Get that cough checked out
, they say, laughing.
Sounds terrible. Sounds like death
. The words recited in the clinic –
tumour, chemo, cancer
– are not mentioned, though they're there, beading like drops of black dew on my tongue, wanting to share the news, to say the names. I drink weak coffee and read the
Star
, and then it's off to teach uninterested teenagers their mandatory English classes, reciting this week's exam review for
Macbeth
or
The Lord of the Flies
or another book that makes them drift, bored, to their cellphones. I wonder what they think of me, of my remarkable slenderness, my steel-grey hair, the thick glasses I'm forced to wear and the droning bass of my voice. The rattling cough that forces me to pause and wince every few minutes. Then I drive home, a pile of marking in my briefcase, and after downing what food I can stomach I sit in my living room, my Grade 10s' unmarked essays awaiting my important, ridiculous decision.

The house has never felt so quiet. It might seem a natural effect, this blanketing silence, given that I live in the southern, shaded recesses of suburban Burlington, Ontario. Yet years ago – decades maybe, now that I think of it – it seemed there were dozens and dozens of kids in the neighbourhood. Halloween was a bustling carnival, and street hockey was more common than traffic. Screams and hoots would linger long past sundown in warmer months. But now all those kids have moved away. It's a borough of retirees, of morning strolls, of indoor dinners and closed curtains. I've known this kind of silence for almost ten years (ever since Katherine passed, leaving the house to its settling weight), but it hits me now, the resounding emptiness. The soundproofed consistency of my mortgaged walls.

After dinner and marking, I sit and close my eyes and allow the silence to take over. It's so heavy, a stuffing that clogs the halls, prevents passage. I turn off the fans and take the batteries from ticking clocks, ensure appliances are unplugged. Then I sit, eyes closed, listening. Sweet, full and endless. I lose hours and hours.
Last hours
.

Another few weeks. Another round of painful appointments, a depressing prognosis. There's blood in my mouth, bright against the tissue that blots my lips, as ominous as the clots wiped away by Hemingway's ruined bullfighter. My arms are pricked to pieces, sore and achy, and I'm losing weight. One late June afternoon, exams almost over, I drive to a convenience store down the street from the clinic. I need bread for sandwiches, cream for my coffee. While putting my bag and carton on the counter, I ask for a pack of Player's Light, king-sized. The request slips from my lips before I know what I'm doing – as if I were dreaming, or insane. As if the secret smoker inside me had been merely biding his time, waiting for his chance to pounce. A small pack means twenty cigarettes. I buy a Bic lighter and leave, feeling like I've gotten away with something. Back in my car I rip open the plastic, tap down the tobacco and light up.

And here it is, after so long – the first catch in the throat, the instant head rush and buzz, the total-body pleasure so complete I have to pull over to avoid a collision. I watch the smoke twist and cavort, in love with itself. It's ecstatic. I let myself cry for the first time since the diagnosis, and the tears are strangely heavy, making soft
pat-pat-pat
noises as they land on my seat belt. The sunlight in the smoke. The burning shaft between my fingers. Chest pain, earthy and immediate, and severe. I pull onto my street with the cigarette in my mouth, and there, in my driveway, sucking the butt down to the ash and soot of the filter, greedy, I reaffirm my commitments.

 

I'm not a young man. There's no real tragedy in my death; at sixty, one must have no illusions of sprightly vigour, of blossoming talent. Nor can one maintain hopes for a romantic end, the hard-and-fast burnout, all that sentimental sap. I'm realistic: I had imagined my remaining years as a grinding decline. Next year would be my last as a teacher. I looked forward to retirement, to the time devoted to books or travel, a map of Florence tucked away in my desk drawer. I figured I'd have another decade before enduring the true indignities of old age, the weakening moan of muscles and joints. I imagined the routine of the old-age home, the feeding tubes, the slide into death that would come, if I was lucky, like a sigh in my sleep. Sweet-hearted nurses, charmed by my politeness, the pictures of Katherine around my bed, would come to hold my hand and stroke me gently on my bald head while they watched my chest rise and fall and finally come to rest. That was the death I expected, even hoped for. One long, laboured rattle, and then –

Aside from my dashed expectations of a later, slower end, the thought of losing fifteen years of solid reading comes as a profound disappointment. Up until the cancer, I read compulsively, savagely, each book dog-eared and broken on my shelves: another addition to my accumulated frustration. It's the books, the reading, I'll miss, if I miss anything at all. Thank God for the cigarettes, I remind myself. They're the best way to distract me from all that missed potential: the covers never broached, the words never read.

For I have returned to cigarettes, it seems, in earnest – returned like a prodigal boy, so long lost to the horizon, crawling upon my knees toward that stiff pillar of a father. I smoke while I perform my end-of-days inventory: something to soothe the pain of recollecting, sorting and filing. I have so many books. Thousands upon thousands, on towering shelves, in messy piles, sealed in boxes and stored in heaps in the crawl space. I've planned garage sales and trips to the second-hand shops to get rid of the titles I'll never read, but some selfish hand reaches out to stop me whenever it seems I've gathered the guts. There is no
me
without books; they're everything I remember from childhood, from maturity, from facing down the doom and loss of these last few years as a
widower
, that other wretched word (ah, so close to
window
– like one cruelly shut, one letter short of escape). All that's happened to me has been coloured, permanently, by my reading. And even here, facing the pages of my rambling library, I realize that cigarettes were there in the beginning, too, enhancing and souring and murdering in decades-long plumes of pain and bliss.

I was nine years old the first time I put a cigarette in my mouth. It was the same week I'd read my first adult novel, a Gothic romance of ghosts and ancient debts.
The Italian
, or
The Castle of Otranto
– something I probably couldn't follow. I was in the park across from my parents' home near Toronto's Christie Pits. An older kid's discarded, half-finished smoke landed on a blade of grass of few feet from where I sat and read. After he was out of sight, I stooped, retrieved the cigarette and sucked at the burning ember in a sad worship of whatever it was I thought the kid possessed. I coughed, and spit, and wobbled home to wash the taste from my mouth, careful to avoid my hard-smoking parents who obviously wanted me to wait at least a few years before I took up the habit. And yes, I felt shame; I felt filthy, detestable, but there was still a buried impulse on my tongue telling me that it was an agreeable sensation. A taboo had been transgressed. It has forever been the same feeling, only diluted by time and repetition. This is why I buy cigarettes today like some men buy pornography: demure, nervous, terribly excited.

For years, I'd smoke the previously enjoyed: the still-burning butts from off the street. Or my friends and I would steal half-killed Marlboros from our parents' ashtrays, meeting beside monkey bars and slides to get nauseated and green. High school meant drinking, of course, so we'd drive through our sleeping Toronto neighbourhoods, Little Korea and Portugal and Italy, suddenly free, a bottle of rye passed around a borrowed car. At the University of Toronto, Trinity College, we smoked over endless drinks, tapping our ashes into tart trays in lecture halls, or we shared a smoke with our professors in their offices. I smoked incessantly, budgeting my scant savings to pay for another pack of Lucky Strikes. My fingers and teeth were stained yellow, my clothes and bedding and books all tarnished by the scent. As soon as I was old enough, I flocked to college bars, gulping down pints of beer and filling ashtrays with my addiction. No night was too dark, no disappointment too acute, when I knew I had the comfortable weight of a full pack against my thigh. I read somewhere that having a full supply of smokes was like knowing you had a loaded gun resting heavy and murderous near your heart. They were like that, sort of: a defence mechanism, an escape route from the socially awkward, a solution to all threats of boredom or that last rumination or heartache at 3 a.m. But they were more tender, too; I came to think that their smell, lingering on my fingers despite all fragrant scrubbing, was my own. I was in love with smoking and told my other twenty-something friends so in no uncertain terms. Everything would be all right, I said, only half-joking, if cigarettes and I could keep up our delirious affair. Nothing could pull us apart; I could tolerate no intervention, no love triangle between tobacco and myself.

Reading was the only occupation that kept pace with every deadly, mashed-out butt (and only barely). Two addictions growing in almost perfect tandem. On one of the last days of high school, ubiquitous cigarette kissing my hand, I sat in the park where I first inhaled nicotine and groped through the collected works of Robert Frost, falling recklessly, destructively in love with poetry. I say this with full sincerity; I felt the stirrings of true commitment, of a lifelong heartache. The bees and the flowers and the long grass, knowing New Hampshire and Vermont and every willow and buttercup and bumblebee, old roads and snowflakes, summer dust and oozing sap. I decided that I would write, or try to write, to make poems with the same wry cunning, a wit and emotive power leaping from heart and mind to pen. After I consumed Frost in his entirety, my days of exploration began. I read
The Divine Comedy
while leafing through E. E. Cummings. I read Sidney and Milton and Shelley, piecing together my own aesthetics, my own defence of poetry. I felt alone and religious and desperately sad. Prose came like a great and sobering blow, a grounding, a shot from Hemingway's rifle and an orgasm from Leopold Bloom (how I lined them up, my modern heroes: Joyce and Fitzgerald and Faulkner and Woolf, bullets in a revolver, cigarettes in a little tin). Language spread its warm, absurd rays over all my adolescent thoughts, and I felt the way we all long to feel: moody, lonely, lovesick and explosive with the prospects of tomorrow.