The River (auto-fiction about cancer)
Fictional memoir/auto-fiction about my childhood best friend's father's death
*This post is paywalled. It’s a story I wrote half a decade or so ago about my childhood best friend’s father’s death in 2013. I edited and revised and honed it over many years. Free subscribers can read half of it. I encourage you to pay to read the rest and other paywalled content. Only $30/year or $5/month.
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I was sitting in my apartment, my little shoe box studio in North Oakland, the residue taste of the blackberries I’d just been eating, that acrid sweetness on my tongue, thinking about the literary agent who was currently reading the revision of my literary YA novel, The Other Path, when my cell phone throbbed, vibrating.
The phone did a wild dance, arcing in a semicircle on my blue-tiled counter. My apartment was illegal, a 500-square-foot rectangle with white plaster walls, an exposed heater, a messy, rank bathroom with one miniature window (no screen), and a queen-sized bed in one corner, across the room from the counter, which the phone buzzed on top of. Between the bed and the counter was a Maplewood desk, which I did all my writing at, on my ancient PC. Above the desk was a mammoth black-and-white poster of a young Bob Dylan. The poet-songwriter eyed the viewer, short cropped hair, harmonica hanging around his pale, thin neck, acoustic guitar under his arm, one eyebrow raised.
Grunting, I hurled my body off the edge of my unmade bed. It annoyed me that I had to make the great investment of trudging the ten feet across the pool-table-chalk-blue carpet to reach the counter. I hoped the phone would stop ringing by the time I reached it. I loathed phone calls. Texting was easier, less personal; you could respond whenever you wanted to: a minute, an hour, a week.
Arriving at the edge of the cracked counter, I stared down at the shaking phone. It was still jerking, like some diminutive mechanical salmon out of water. The screen displayed a phone number I didn’t notice. But the area code was one I knew well: My hometown, Casitas Springs, in Southern California, an hour north of Los Angeles.
I snatched the phone and pressed “accept.”
“Hello?”
“Michael?” It was an older woman’s voice, one I recognized but could not pin down.
“Yes,” I said. For some odd reason my heart began fluttering, anxious, as if trying to escape the protection of my body.
The woman sighed. “I thought you weren’t going to pick up. It’s Terry.”
I knew immediately. It was Anne. She was the wife of Terry. They were my childhood best friend Eric’s parents. About a year before, Terry, 65 years old, had been diagnosed with Squamous Cell Carcinoma and the brutal cancer had taken a hold of him and not let go. They’d tried every treatment they could think of, taking him to a top-of-the-line center in Seattle, trying Canada even, and plenty in LA. They’d received second and third opinions. Chemo. Radiation. It had slowly gone away, dissolved, or so they’d thought. About a month ago, it had returned with a vengeance, this time metastasizing to his brain. The outcome looked grim.
“Hi Anne,” I said, swallowing the lump in my constricted throat.
For a moment neither of us said a word. I glanced at my Dylan poster, his serious, intense gray eyes seeming to hold some youthful wisdom.
I heard her slow, even breaths. I imagined her at home, in Casitas Springs, in the house they’d moved to a few years back, behind the elementary school, her blue plastic house phone cradled between her cheek and shoulder, trying not to break down.
“He’s gotten worse,” she said. “They say he has about a week, maybe two. Will you come down and see him?”
My heart started pounding. It was so loud that I felt as if I couldn’t hear anything else around me. I pulled the phone away from my face for a second, swallowed, forced myself not to cry, gathered all my stoic courage, took a long, deep breath, waited a beat, and then picked the phone back up.
“When?” I said.
“As soon as possible.”
I nodded, as if she could sense this movement. “I’ll be there. Let me get back to you in an hour. Can Jenny come?”
“Of course,” Anne said. She waited. “Thanks, Michael.”
I felt the rushing urge to weep, held it back, and said, “I’ll call soon.”
We hung up.
I leaned against the counter’s edge, lost in thought, eyes lackluster and loose, unfocused, staring at the rug, trying to pull some sense out of this whole thing. How could this be happening? Eric and I had grown up together. We’d met when we were 10 years old, in 1993, a little after my folks had moved from Ventura, on the coast, to Casitas Springs, 12 miles inland, near the Topa Topa Mountains. We’d played Little League together. He’d even voluntarily been held back one whole grade, doing seventh grade twice, to attend the private Episcopalian K-8 elementary school I had gone to my whole life, so we could be together, best friends. We’d gone to Baja, California, with my parents, between eighth grade and freshman year, smoking pot for the first time, making out with girls for the first time, testing the boundaries of innocence.
Between age 10 and when we’d ended our friendship in search of the ravenous social hierarchy which encircles and ensnares teenagers in high school, Eric and I had been like brothers. My parents had been second parents to him. His parents had been second parents to me. Terry and Anne had represented the duality of parenthood for me then, in those years, the opposite of my folks. Terry was a 6’4, 280-pound hulk with wide, thick shoulders and a wave of dark curly hair. His father had been military. He himself worked as a career counselor. In his massive, calloused hands, he perennially carried a rolled-up newspaper with which to either point at us kids when we dared to cross him or break a rule, or, sometimes, with which to bash the dog in the nose, for the same.
But Terry was a good man. How many mornings had he driven Eric and I to school, on Highway 33, from rural, mountain-cold Casitas Springs to urban, coastal Ventura, lecturing us on the lessons of adulthood, telling us about how he was teaching us to be men? I remembered him, his hulking presence, his demanding, powerful attitude, his opinionated lessons, that swagger and manly giggle of his when he disagreed with something, and his potent, omnipotent, God-like voice when we crossed him, Lord forbid. I recalled a thousand mornings sitting on the hard wooden pews at Casitas Springs Community Church when we were kids, my butt numb from sitting and listening to the preacher, Terry watching intently, making sure he sucked it all in.
And now, all these years later, Eric and I no longer the sacred brothers we once were, all grown up and in our early thirties, Terry was dying. This truth ached so deeply, ate so brutally into my bruised heart, that it threatened to corrode my beating organ entirely, leaving nothing but a smoldering red clump of destruction, like some ancient Greek ruin.
Three days later Jenny texted me: “I’m here.” The complex of illegal units I lived within had a wooden gate that only residents could enter and exit. I stood from the seat at my desk, pressed “print,” allowing the 5-page letter I’d written to Terry to curl out into a small screed, and started towards the gate.
I opened my door and stepped outside. It was late November, fall, and the air temperature was cold. Red, orange and yellow veiny leaves were all over the ground and a few scuttled lightly across the asphalt due to a breeze. The lingering scent of rain from last night was still in the air. I heard cars swishing back and forth on Alcatraz Ave, the street I lived on.
Opening the gate, there stood Jenny. She was short, 5’2, with dark thick hair, bobbed short, and brown eyes that could often see right into my very soul. She wore a flower-print dress which flowed down just past her knees. I could tell she’d been toying with crying. Though she’d never known Terry, she knew what he meant to me. Her eyes were full and wet, brimming with compassion. I knew that look.
Before I could say another word she tromped forward, into my arms, and leaned her cheek against my shoulder bone. I felt the patter of her heart. I wrapped my arms around her tighter, as if by holding her as close as possible to my body I could escape some of the ensuing pain. When we sluggishly disentangled tears streamed silently down both of our cheeks. We used our thumbs to wipe the tears away and then I jerked my head and she came inside the apartment.
We got into my red Honda 2000 CR-V and began the six-hour drive down south, via Highway 101, the path I always took when going to Southern California, home of my youth.
It was a mostly quiet trip. Jenny half slept, half stared out the window as I drove, going slow, not needing to hurry to face this reality. I had the letter, sitting in the back seat. In it, I said everything I’d ever wanted to say. There were some anecdotes, about Terry lecturing us on those drives to school. There was some reference to memories of going to church. One memory of Terry having to unscrew the hinges of a door which Eric’s sister, in a fit of teenage anger, had slammed and locked. There was the mention of my sobriety, how that was my biggest gift to Terry, that I’d gotten sober, years ago, and was on a good path. This was the truest gift I could ever give him and I knew that.
As I drove, Jenny sleeping again, her head softly bobbing up and down, I recalled the river rafting trip Eric, Terry and I had gone on in the American South Fork River, in 1996. Eric and I were 13 years old. The memory was hazy but there was one moment which stood out brilliantly, like a diamond during the day on a sidewalk, reflecting the sun’s glare, blinding you.
Eric and I had been separated, being put on different inflated baby-blue rafts. Terry and I were in the same raft. We were told we were going to hit a pretty rowdy rapid, one that, if not done properly, had the power to flip us. I remember with exacting, virgin vividness the tightening of my gut, the rumbling of my heart, the shallow breaths. Terry seemed unfazed, as always, ready for anything.
When we hit the awesome, roiling rapid, white water fiercely rising and crashing, broiling under a rock and spilling back up at us, this maze, this current of hydro power, we dug our yellow oars into the green rushing river when our guide yelled at us to do so. We were fine around the first turns, but then we hit the biggest, gnarliest section, like some mini tidal wave in the ocean, and the boat flipped.
What I remember is being shucked off and thrown brutally into the water, hard, like suddenly falling through the cracks of some nightmare. Then I was aware of floating down the rushing green expanse, cold, shivering, alone, my oar gone, the boat way back now, upside down, a series of screaming voices encircling me, but somehow distant, vague.
That’s when I recall seeing Terry, also floating, his orange life jacket holding him buoyant, his curly dark hair half in his eyes, plastered to his face. He yelled to me, trying to swim across the quickening, maddening current.
“Michael,” he screeched, lucid arm arcs pulling himself toward me, slow, that current moving us fast.
I started swimming towards him, too. I peeked ahead for one second and saw there was another big rapid coming. I heard loud, wild voices behind us, warning us, something about, “Swim to the left, to the left.” But I was swimming to the right, towards Terry.
My heart was a machine gun firing off rounds like crazy. The shivering of my body felt like a convulsion. Terry and I finally got close, in the center of the moving green, but it was too late. We started to go over the falls. Terry was maybe four, five feet away from me. He reached his massive, muscled arm out and tried to snatch me.
“Grab on, Michael.”