Single Player: Humor, Love, Breast Cancer and a Gaming Girl... (5 page)

“Hey? Yah. Um, I have to get to work actually, just got called in so we’ll just catch up later. Good match by the way, awesome KDR. I aspire to have your numbers PrettyPanties.” Then, he’s gone and I’m left to do the damn pondering thing. FRICK! FRICKIN’! FRACK!  FRAGGLE FRICKIN’ ROCK!

This is the point at which I’ve always called Ashton in for help. He’s my go to guy when I’m in the throes of trying to break down the male psyche.

I suddenly remember that we’re in a battle of our own at the moment and so I do the bold thing and hold the phone in my hand willing it to ring. Oddly enough, that doesn’t work. So instead I shout into the universe in a vain attempt at willing him to call me. “PLEASE CALL YOUR BEST FRIEND, ASHTON RILEY STEVENS! I need you.” Again I wait… and… nothing. Oprah’s tell it to the universe plan can suck it because it’s not getting me the results I was promised. Not. Even. Close - OPRAH!

It’s only seven o’clock and because I know Ashton has a gig downtown tonight I’m not going to start panicking, yet. I take a moment to work out the timeline of his night trying to determine the estimated time he may show up.  Right about now he’s probably doing a quick sound check.  Then he’ll have a beer at the bar with some hussy, followed immediately by his set that will take about two hours with one break included. Add all of that together plus the time he’ll hang out after the show with the hussy from earlier or if he’s lucky an even newer, smuttier version of the other model and year will appear, and that puts him stumbling in my door at about… three am.  THREE A.M is equal to EIGHT HOURS from NOW! How in the world am I supposed to just sit here patiently and wait to see if this ridiculous argument of ours is going to end tonight for the next EIGHT! FREAKING!  TORTUROUS! HOURS?! (I apologize for the overuse of exclamation marks but I am feeling really! Really!  Exclamationy!)

Like a fat cat to a fishy treat I go running to grab the laptop from my room. Times like this make waiting for it to power up feel life threatening. The Google icon glows at me in welcome and I’m already able to feel my pulse beginning to slow down.

Once I’m on the internet I click open my Favorite’s folder and am immediately met with a big decision: will I visit Victoria’s house of Secret’s or Playboy? Hmm?  Playboy wins by a slim margin tonight for the sole reason that sometimes I just need the articles as much as the sexy lingerie to feel better, and tonight’s an article kinda night.

The pretty lace panties’ that barely conceal the models do their intended job and calm my frayed nerves at once.  To most women this would seem irrational, but for me, these ladies have always represented the soft kind of motherly femininity that I’ve always yearned for and never received on a consistent basis. I realize I’m grown up now and that I should be capable of understanding that they ARE NOT, in fact, giving out motherly vibes but, let’s also keep in mind that I should be able to safely wonder out onto the simple landscape of my front yard and am incapable of that as well. So… back to the articles and pantied ladies.

Skimming through the current choices of useful reading material can sometimes be distracting, what with all the unnaturally-large breasts peeking out from behind the headlines but not tonight. Tonight, almost instantly a caption catches my eye and it reads:
How To Have a Friend With Benefits and Not Destroy the Relationship
. I will give a brief summary of its contents here.

Number One: be clear and precise with what the expectations are for the relationship before attempting the “benefits” portion of the friendship (I feel this to be self explanatory. However, if you do not, this may not be a good idea for you to consider, just a thought.) Number Two: Play it cool. Meaning no date nights or personal texts about gushy feelings, think light and breezy (I can do light and breezy, I run from feelings! I represent breezy! I’m a freaking palm tree!). Number Three: still see other men or women to keep it from becoming a traditional relationship between just the two of you (that part’s going to be tricky for me unless you count my seeing Mrnotsosmall, then I should be good to go). And, last but not least, the golden rule that’s never to be broken in this sort of arrangement… Number four: Do NOT under any circumstances tell her/him that you are beginning to have feelings for them if your goal is to keep this friendship intact and ongoing.  This phrase, these feelings, will be a time bomb for the beneficial outcome of your special “alliance” and mark my words, WILL DESTROY IT like the nuke that it is. Do not enter into this contract if you think there is any chance of this happening for either one of you. It will end B…A…D...L...Y. Badly. Twitter would read: #Don’tdo#4, #feelingsRbad, #FWBholdthefeelings.

As I finish reading the article I realize that never in my life have I been more certain of wanting something the way that I want this. When this thought hits its intended target between my eyes I fall over into a stunned, silent, shock. I want to sleep with Ashton. Not friendship sleep.  Not spooning sleep. Not you-make-me-feel safe and not alone sleep. I want his SEX! Just thinking this in my head feels wrong because it’s
him
but it also feels so, so right
because
it’s him. I mean, come on. Those rules are the description of our relationship. This will be a no brainer for the both of us and then I can have the sex! (I heave a heavy sigh just thinking about ‘the sex’. I’m positive it’s something I’ve missed out on that’s sure to make me feel alive and human and in a non-electronic, non-pretending sort of way at that).

Tonight when that big bag of steaming hotness comes over, I’m going to lay out the plan for him. Just put it out there. Matter of fact, to help things along I’ll make out a list of the rules and print us each out a copy highlighting the golden one at the bottom with the biggest, brightest, yellowist highlighter I have (they say size matters, but I wouldn’t know. Seems logical, though). No need for any more land mines in my life, I’m all set in that department. This is going to be fantastic. The shock I’m going to see on his face alone is almost more than I can bare. I can’t wait to tell him what I’ve decided! EEK! Ashton loves sex so this is totally a win-win for each of us because well, again, he loves having the sex and I’d like to have a bunch of the lovely sex with him! And this right here, my friends, is why Playboy is so awesome. I can’t even begin to imagine how this could go wrong. It’s fail proof! 

So, for now, I just have to sit here and wait patiently for him to show.

One-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand…

five

The breast cancer is back, and man did it show up at worst possible time. Now Ashton’s just going to have to wait for all the sex he doesn’t know that we’re going to have.

Okay, I don’t really have breast cancer. Well, at least not at the current moment. I don’t today and I never really have. Here’s the thing. When my Dad, Cal, first got The Breast Cancer I was at the ripe old prepubescent age of eleven. I had no information as of yet about my young and changing body other than I was waiting to get my boobs.  My father and I hadn’t yet had “the talk” and we hadn’t had it at school yet either. That talk was saved for the middle of our fifth grade year when the adults felt it was a more appropriate time for us to receive the information about what was going to start happening to our developing young bodies. Anyway, unfortunately for my father and I, the cancer showed up right before school started in August, before any of these “talks” had the opportunity to happen.

Here’s how things went down. I was coming out of my room one day and overheard my dad talking to my Aunt Joanie about his “condition”, to which I was previously informed very little about. What he was telling her sounded pretty terrible, especially to my young, impressionable ears. There were percentages and survival rates being discussed and it didn’t sound like the odds were in his favor.

It’s important to keep in mind that I had no mother, so when my Aunt came to town it was a really (stress the really) REALLY, big deal! To hear Aunt Joanie crying both upset and scared me. Before, when the cancer “was just a problem he had,” I wasn’t worried. I didn’t know there was a possibility of a bad outcome in his scenario, because he hadn’t said! Now, Aunt Joanie was crying and all I ever wanted when she was around was her undivided, loving and contagiously happy attention. She’s the person who taught me how to braid my Barbie’s hair and how to paint my toe nails and finger nails after buying me an amazing child’s size manicure box full of colors and clippers. She’s also the reason I love to sew. Her mission in my life was simple, teach me how to be a girl and add some much-needed estrogen to the testosterone-abundant cloud that I was living within. Whenever she was around that’s how it was: she happily taught, I happily learned.

So imagine how devastated I was when I came down the hall and heard my lovely, cheerful Aunt Joanie crying.  This was when I first began to understand that what was happening to my dad was not just a “problem we’d get through” like he’d explained to my brother and I one afternoon when he sat us down and told us about the cancer. And thus this was where my fear began to take root. It was the little mustard seed that could. This kernel would eventually spread its ugly roots deep into the core of my life and lead me to where I am today, trapped inside myself and the complex ecosystem known as my fear.   

Now imagine you’re in the first week of fifth grade, terribly thin, a bit on the nerdy side and lacking an abundance of healthy female role models in your life.  Then picture this: you’re getting ready to climb into your big fluffy canopy bed, surrounded by walls covered with beautiful Victoria’s Secret models and you feel something warm run between your legs. Thankful for the en suite bathroom your father had the foresight to provide you, you quickly get to the bathroom only to find a dark, slimy trail of blood running from your pink and white polka-dotted cotton briefs. What do you do?

I’ll tell you what I did. I shoved a bunch of toilet paper inside my hemorrhaging underwear, went to bed and cried for several long hours before mercy finally came along and gave me over to her friend sleep. The next morning was Saturday and I should have woken up and ran to the living room to watch cartoons as I always did.  Instead, I woke up with dried blood all over my sheets and crusted on my thighs and then, because things were already going so great, I had the joy of hearing my dad get sick for the first time. This was the day that I would learn what cancer really was… a cruel and brutal beast, a daddy killer. Dad’s first chemo appointment was the day before and it became apparent on this day that he was not going to breeze through it the way he’d intended.

Instead it proved to be the monster that made my energetic father vomit all day and into the darkness of the night. It became the fiend that would steal his natural joy that had been so similar to my Aunt Joanie’s,  joy that ran through their sibling DNA like the threads that weave through an intricately woven tapestry of happiness.  It was absolutely not the time to tell my ailing father that I too had “the cancer” and was going to probably die with him.  It would devastate my Aunt Joanie, my brother and my best friend Ashton. They’d all been through enough already and now both my father and I were going to die from breast cancer. Our shared fate was unfathomable to my eleven-year-old mind.

Then suddenly a week later the bleeding stopped and I thought maybe I was in remission, a new term recently added to my cancer glossary. Apparently that’s what my dad was shooting for. The morning I woke up with clean underwear relief surged through me with the power of a tsunami wave coming ashore. During the course of that week I’d thrown out all the underwear I couldn’t scrub clean, hid the clothing I was still working stains out of in bags under my bed, and anything else I could do to keep this horrible news from my ailing father.

Imagine my shock a month later when I started to bleed again, this time… at school. Walking to the cafeteria I heard a couple of the meaner boys from my class laughing and cutting up behind me. Like I was taught to do I ignored them, until I caught the words, “that looks like blood or diarrhea on her butt,” before they broke out into another round of overzealous guffaws. Immediately I knew what they were seeing because now that it was brought to my attention I could feel it as well. It was me they were laughing at and the cancer was back. Maybe it had never left and was growing bigger inside me. Here, on the walk to the school cafeteria was my very first encounter with another kind of bully, the bully heretofore known as: The Panic Attack. 

Running, of course, was my first instinct. They were on to something when they discovered that whole fight or flight instinct thing in us humans, it’s a dead-on analogy.  What I’ve learned about myself over the years is that I will always run when faced with a situation that scares me, and this bleeding from my innards was definitely able to be filed away under the category of: this situation scares me.

When my teacher couldn’t find me after lunch and I didn’t show back up to class she began to panic as well.  The Panic began to spread like the bitch that it is and soon the entire school was on lockdown. After they searched the other classrooms for me and made several announcements over the school-wide intercom system for me to report back to either my classroom or to the front office, all of which I heard and then vigorously ignored, my father was called. He showed up at the school minutes later, bald and pasty after a month of heavy chemo, panic stricken and sweaty with fever. 

The local police department was called in and I was located within minutes by the K-9 officer and his dog.  Blood was something the shrewd shepherd was taught to sniff out and I was an easy target, seeing that I was about to bleed out. The K-9 officer called over the female deputy and she very carefully coerced me from the stall I had been holed up in since going missing. After an hour of crouching on the toilet lid to hide my position, and my dangling feet, my twig-thin legs were unsteady and cramped as I finally exited my hiding spot. To this day I have no idea what my plans were to escape. I only knew that I didn’t want to be found. I didn’t want to face my family with the devastating news of my cancer and impending death.

My dad rushed to the restroom as soon as he overheard the call come through that they’d found me. I’ll never forget the obvious relief on his face as he entered the dingy room and looked into my weary eyes. As sick as he was he looked genuinely happy and all because his little girl was safe. Unfortunately I now had no other choice than to ruin everything he believed to be true because my safety was only an illusion. So here in the filthy girls’ room of the fifth grade hall was where I would have to deliver my tragic news. Actually, it was really quite fitting considering our lives were literally, “in the toilet”. 

Before I was able to speak even a single word my father wrapped me up in his loving arms, cradling me with his wool sweater, and surrounded me in his special brand of fatherly warmth that in turn seeped through to my sad soul providing comfort in only the way that a father could. 

“Why are you hiding baby girl? You sure gave me and all these other nice people quite a scare.” The officer left us alone when she thought I was afraid to talk in front of her, but really I was just embarrassed about the stain of dried blood all over my butt.

“Oh daddy, I have terrible news. The worst news of all other news and I just didn’t want to tell you.  I didn’t want to tell anyone… well, because… I’m dying.” I sobbed, my tears soaking through his cozy sweater onto his pasty, white skin. The weeks of hiding and scrubbing and praying on my knees to cure my affliction had finally caught up to me and now I was ripping off the band aid that had been covering up my ugly confession. 

“Shh… shh…” why back rubbing is so soothing when mixed with this shh-ing sound I’ll never know, but it’s comparable to a Jedi mind trick when my dad does it, wiping away whatever current turmoil I’m in and leaving me able to organize my thoughts again. Once I was calm enough to talk he asked, “Tell me why you think you have cancer CeeCee?”

“It’s so embarrassing dad… I didn’t tell you because it’s so gross but, I’ve been…” Almost too soft to be heard I finished with, “bleeding.” Then my dad, the man who always soothes my soul in times of sadness started… LAUGHING! OUT! LOUD! The ridiculous LOL-ing you see as a sentence enhancer everywhere!

Well guess what? You will be surprised to learn that this did not make me feel better! At least not immediately, but then, as I sat staring in shock at my sickly father, who was currently bent over, tears streaming down his face, hands on his knees supporting himself, something miraculous happened. I realized I could laugh even in the face of fear.  My dad still had cancer and I believed that I did too at this point but yet, it wasn’t stopping my dad in this moment from having a good, hard, much-needed laugh.

From the absolute absurdity of it all and with nothing left to do but follow, I began to laugh as well. And to my surprise, the LOL-ing felt amazing. To this day, I’ve never had a better laugh. I’ve been hoping for one, but there’s not a single moment that has compared to date. 

It felt like we were laughing for hours when in actuality it was probably more like five minutes before my father finally wiped the happy tears from beneath his sunken eyes and began to give me “the talk” right there on the floor of the girls’ room. Oddly appropriate, I think. I hugged him within an inch of his life after that talk.  Chemo had nothing on this hug. I quite literally almost squeezed him to death. Best hug… ever. I miss
that
specific hug. It was a once in a life-timer.

My dad, the hero, then took off his big, squishy man-sweater, wrapped it around my soiled bottom and, holding my small hand, took me to the office where he could explain to my very kind principal what had happened. At first she looked like she would weep when he told her about his cancer (no one at school knew until today), then she wore a small grin when he explained what I was thinking (the grin was not a mean one, it was one of understanding and relief). After that day I always felt a certain bond with Mrs. Winiford, one I was sure she shared with no other student, and from then on school became a bit more bearable. 

Now, back to present day. Through the years this story has become legendary amongst my closest friends and family. Whenever I freak out, have PMS, get lost… I am mocked with, “Oh no Cecilia! Your breast cancer’s acting up again.” In some very obscure way though, my period now soothes me.  Every single time I have my “girl-time” I think fondly of my dad, that squishy sweater and that moment the two of us shared that I’m pretty certain has never been replicated between two other souls on this planet. So there it is, that was how I came to call my period “the breast cancer” and now I have “it” at the exact wrong moment in time. 

***

Turns out it doesn’t matter that I’ve been rebooting my ovarian operation system for the last three days, because Ashton’s officially bypassed our longest time apart and still counting. We’re on a full Ashton blackout over here and as you can imagine neither I nor Master Chief are handling this friendship stonewall very well.  Late at night I’ve been trolling my foyer almost (hear the almost) tempted to step out onto the patio so I can scream his name like a mama wolf calling her baby home but, because I am aware of how extreme that move is, I’ve held back, until tonight that is. Tonight I have to do something major because of the seven panic attacks I’ve had in the last three days, surpassing my recent record of five in a week by a good, solid, unhealthy margin.

Master Chief and I are sitting in front of each other on the living room floor staring into one another’s eyes, communicating through our tried and true system of dog-to-human telepathy. He’s willing me to put his leash on him and walk his P.O’d hairy hiney down to Ash’s favorite bar, grab his sorry butt and bring him home where we need him. During this conversation it’s been brought to my attention that my poor Master’s been stuck going boom-boom on the small patch of grass I call a backyard, and for a dog his size, that’s no good. He makes gynormous booms.

Never before in the last three years have I been forced into a corner this tight. Before panic attack number eight can take me down, I pick up the TV remote, turn on my game console and put Call of Duty in, hoping for an adrenaline release that I can control. All my guys are on, and I can’t help but think that at least I still have them.  The gaming gods are clearly on my side tonight so I put on my headset, set up the Eminem playlist on my stereo and pick my weapon, an MP-5 with an acog sight.