Hiding from my father,Who was drunk in the den
Of our house in Don Mills, Ontario,
Canada’s first planned community.
One night the Devil
Appeared in my bedroom.
The Devil has some personal hygiene issues
Which we need not get into.
The Devil offered me the same deal
He offered Robert Johnson
At the Crossroads.
He said, “I will make you
The best guitar player ever.
You will make strong men cry
And you will make women wilt
With their desire for you.
The songs you write will haunt
Mankind forever.
It will cost you your Soul.”
I thought about it.
“Well . . . what would it cost
If you just showed me how to play
An F7?”
Afterwards, Carmel drove me back downtown; we parked the car and went out for a drink and a bite. I didn’t eat much, despite having not eaten much all day. Indeed, it was perhaps the only time in my life when a female dining companion was given the opportunity to point to the remaining eighth of quesadilla on my plate and say, “Are you gonna eat that? Because . . .” I didn’t eat much, but I drank some. Then we walked out onto the street, sat down on a bench and Carmel— whom, I should mention, is a very attractive young woman— said, “I guess I’ll grab a cab.”
“You could always spend the night with me at the hotel.”
Carmel cast her eyes downward. “I don’t think that would be such a good idea. You see—”
“Okay.” I kissed her and put her in a cab. As I stumbled away into the night, only then was it impressed upon me that, indeed, something was very, very wrong.
HAVING GIVEN a rasping, panting house concert in Ottawa, having delivered a half-assed pass and then not worried one bit when it was deflected, I drove back to Toronto the next day. I felt reasonably fine, although my hands kept seizing up, the muscles constricting, so I could keep only one on the steering wheel at a time, the other requiring stretching and bending. I was scheduled to go out to dinner with an old flame, and when she called me at home in the middle of the afternoon, I reiterated my intention of supping with her. Roseanne listened to me for a little less than a minute. “Paul,” she said, “stay right there. I’m coming to take you to the hospital.”
“All right.” I had already considered going to the hospital, you see. I packed a bag, including a night kit and a book. Then I added another book, because I entertained, very vaguely, the idea that I wouldn’t be coming out for a long time.
The emergency triage nurse put a stethoscope to my back to listen to my breathing. She called over a nearby paramedic. “I can’t find the left lung,” the nurse said. The paramedic announced that she could hear it, albeit very faintly. “Don’t worry,” she told me, “it’s there.” If you want to be hustled over the hurdles in an emergency ward, it’s a good idea to have something very wrong with you. In no time I was sitting on a hospital bed, dressed in the undignified backless Johnny shirt.
I was wheeled down to X-Ray, where a nice young man rendered an image of my innards, blasting the rays through my back. “Just wait here,” he said, ducking through the door, “until I make sure I have it.” A second later he called, “Paul! What have you done?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean . . . they’re going to want to keep you here, I think.”2 Back in my emergency cubicle, I waited. The woman in the cubicle next door wouldn’t lie on her bed, choosing to curl up on the floor and call out loudly for drugs. After some time, a young physician came in and reported that a lot of fluid had accumulated around my lungs. “We’ll try to get rid of some of it,” he said, “so you’ll be more comfortable. Then we’ll try to figure out why it’s there.”
“Okay.” I didn’t call anyone. I didn’t want to alarm people, I suppose, and at that moment, I couldn’t really think of anyone to alarm. My most recent romantic relationship had busted up. I had an ex-wife, one adult daughter (the other still a teen), friends I figured would come to my aid. But, hell, it was probably just pneumonia, exacerbated by my severe tulip allergy.
When a new doctor, Dr. Tran, came in, he informed me that there were many reasons I might have fluid around my lungs, the most common two being infection and cancer. “Infection is eight times more common than cancer,” he said. He left, then returned a short while later with a tray full of equipment, vials and litre bottles and lengths of tubing and assorted needles. He and an aide made me sit up on my wheelie hospital bed. They placed a table beside it so that I could drape my arms across it and lean forward. Dr. Tran tapped and thumped my back with his thick fingers, marked a spot with a pirate’s X for freezing. “Little sting like a bee,” he said as the needle carrying the anaesthetic pierced the skin. He didn’t say anything before he drove the two-inch draining needle into my back. He didn’t say, for example, “Now it will feel like a rabid wolverine ripping through your flesh to suck out the life-juice.” A warm sensation spread across my back as fluid o’er-spilled the puncture. Dr. Tran showed me a test tube full of light brown fluid. “It looks like this.” He angled the needle again and pushed it hard. Before long he had collected three litres of the stuff, which looked suspiciously like beer. English bitter, of which I have had my share, and for a second I thought that perhaps at some point, in my haste, I had dumped a few pints down the wrong hole.
As painful as the ordeal was, every second it went on I felt lighter, better. They left the bottles of fluid beside me for most of the evening, and I spent the night in the emergency ward. They asked if I wanted painkillers; although my back was sore, I felt right enough. They asked if I wanted something to help me sleep, but I thought I’d be able to manage it drug-free. I was exhausted, spent. I still couldn’t think of anyone to contact. I text-messaged a woman I’d known, briefly, the previous autumn. “I’m in the hospital.”
“Yikes! What’s wrong?”
“If I’m lucky,” I punched out with my thumbs, “it’s pneumonia.”
I WAS discharged from the hospital, having had, as I say, more than three litres of fluid removed from the cavity surrounding my left lung. What I’d experienced was, to give it an impressive scientific name, a “massive pleural effusion.” The high honcho doctor, head of Respirology, had come into my hospital room to tell me it was “obviously very serious,” but he said it would take them a few days to figure out why, exactly, the fluid had accumulated. So home I went, supplied with some killer antibiotics, and in a few days I was feeling pretty good. Indeed, when my friend Shaughnessy called, checking up on me, I said, “You know what, Shaughn, I’m half-inclined to believe in God. Because, face it, I was kind of at a low point. I mean, there’s no work . . .” (the Canadian television and movie industry, which is where I’d long made my pin money, was moribund, with nothing being produced) “. . . my career as a novelist
