| About the Author |
Palmer Owyoung is from the San Francisco Bay Area and currently resides in Singapore. Home and Monet are both excerpts from his forth coming novel Halcyon Daze, which will be available in paperback in March 2003. You can find out more or download a free e-book version by going to his website at www.palmerowyoung.com. You can contact Mr. Owyoung at powyoung@hotmail.com.
His second novel The Dominatrix
and the Hitman will be available
in the summer of 2003. |
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I once had this regular who was a doctor. He worked at the UCLA Medical Center and he had this terminal patient, a 15-year-old boy, who had Leukemia. Despite years of chemotherapy, experimental treatments, opinions, observations, poking and prodding from specialists and experts, the boy was going to die. He knew this from the beginning, but his parents had a lot of money and understandably they did anything they could to keep him alive. He faced enormous odds bravely and graciously. He had lost all of his hair and couldn’t have weighed more than 105 pounds when wet. The most serious problems that the majority of boys his age had to contend with were broken hearts and pimples, but still he seldom complained.
I know all of this because one day my regular asked me to visit him. He explained to me that the cancer had entered its last phases, and that the boy wouldn’t have much time to live, a few days, maybe a week at the most. All that they could do at that point was to ease his pain. One night he’d had a long and candid conversation with his doctor about all of the things that he would never get to do in life, all of the things that he would never get to see. Although through the Make a Wish Foundation he had gotten to meet his favorite rock band, U2, there was still one thing that he felt he had to do before he left.
Some of the nurses and other staff that had gotten to know him just fell in love with him, so they all chipped in to pay for me. The problem was that he had grown up in a strict Methodist family and they knew that his parents would never approve of such a thing, and of course there was hospital policy. So the nurses pretended to give him a medication that would make him sleep throughout the day, and well into the evening, hoping that his parents would leave a little bit early. It worked and they left at about 7p.m. that night, so they snuck me in about an hour later, after visiting hours were over. Although he was extremely weak, he had been resting all day in order to prepare for me.
When I’d arrived, the nurses had taken him out of his hospital gown and dressed him in a pair of jeans and a sweater. He even wore cologne. He had a Dodgers cap on to cover his bald head and his clothes hung off him like they were four sizes too big. Despite his gaunt appearance, I could see how handsome his face was. He had these beautiful blues eyes and a brilliant white smile. He would have gotten to be a handsome man.
The doctor brought me in, introduced us and left. This was the first time I’d ever done anything like this. I had done outcalls to people’s houses, but never a dying kid in a hospital.
“What’s your name?” I said.
“Charles,” he answered barely above a whisper. He was visibly nervous and sat on the bed with his hands folded in his lap, fidgeting with them restlessly. Charles’ eyes were averted downward, and he wouldn’t even look straight at me.
“Do you like the Dodgers?”
“Yeah, they’re my favorite,” he said, finally looking up.
“I saw Nomo pitch last weekend against the Giants, he was amazing.”
“The Tornado, really, you saw him pitch?” He said with excitement.
“Yep, box seats.”
“Wow, I watched that game on television, that guy must throw the ball at 100 miles per hour!”
“They clocked him at 105.”
“Did you see Piazza hit that ball into the stands in the 9th inning?”
“Yep, Leiter was pitching and I was watching him and I thought he was going to cry or throw up when he saw it go into the stands.”
“Ha ha, wow I would have given anything to be there.”
“Maybe we could go to a game sometime?”
“Okay, when I get out of here we’ll go to a game.”
I just smiled, he knew that he would never leave this room, but still he spoke about the future. We spent almost four hours talking that night about baseball, girls, how he wanted to be a pilot when he grew up. He said that he wanted to fly because there were so many places to see in the world. Angkor Watt, Macchu Picchu, Quetzaltenango, the pyramids of Egypt.
The doctor told me that Charles had insisted that they lower his medication so that he would be clearheaded when he saw me. He was in pain the whole time, but he never let on for a minute. We just kept talking, and for a while it seemed like he’d forgotten that he was dying. That night Charles just seemed like a young man on the verge of life and I couldn’t help but smile at him. I lay there in bed, his skinny arms wrapped around my body. He kept burying his nose in my hair because he said that it smelled like strawberries.
At one point Charles got really quiet and said, “I’m not afraid of it you know? I’m not afraid of dying. I like you because you don’t treat me like everyone else around here. Like I’m something fragile, breakable. I can talk to you like a normal person. Everyone acts like they’re walking on eggshells when they come to visit. My friends came to see me a few weeks ago and they wouldn’t come close to me, like I was contagious. When the doctors first told me that I had cancer I was terrified of dying, but now I understand it, I accept it. I just feel bad for my parents. I know that they’ll miss me a lot. They’re well meaning, not bad people, but I think that they just take life too seriously sometimes. “
He was getting tired, so I let him take my clothes off. I thought that his eyes were going to pop out of their sockets. His mouth was wide open and he had an ear-to-ear grin on his face. Other than the Playboys and Penthouses that he’d borrowed from his father’s collection, he’d never seen a grown woman naked before. His body was full of bruises and sores so he didn’t want to take his sweater off and only removed his pants, revealing the skinniest pair of legs that I’d ever seen. He lay on top of me and we did it. He cried afterwards and I held him. Charles was so exhausted that he could barely move. He fell asleep soon after and for a while I just lay there in the darkness holding him, listening to him breathe. I got dressed, kissed Charles on the cheek and left. The doctor had given me the money they’d collected before I went into the room. So I threw it at one of the nurses as I ran out of the hospital. I cried the whole way to my car. He died two days later. I will never forget that kid and how brave he was for as long as I live.
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