DAVID X

At twenty-one, I was diagnosed with brain cancer. I felt some relief at knowing why I had been experiencing fits of insanity and rage, but the whole cancer deal was a bit terrifying. For the first time in my life, I was given the chance to practice what I preached: to smile through the rough times, and to laugh when the river was by all means traveling too swift and deep.

I learned that the deep, guttural laughs that are needed to get through a Stage III cancer diagnosis are a type of mystic magic. People may not understand the madness my mother and I share when we talk about our journey from waiting room to waiting room. One man in particular managed to hit the chord of hilarity that my mom and I needed during the roughest part of my treatment. Starting the day we met him, Mom and I talked about David X on all of our trips back and forth from St. Vincent's Hospital in Indianapolis to our home in Noblesville.

The first time I saw David was seconds after one of my first radiation treatments. I still had bushels of bronze wavy hair trickling down my back. However, hair was the last thing on my mind – instead it was the brigades of radioactive waves warring on both my brain and its cancer, and questions of my own ability to be able to read and write again.

My worries halted when David X rolled in. He had to have only been ninety pounds, and I had lost enough weight at this point that he and I could have shared a pair of jeans. The afternoon David entered our lives, my mother and I shared the waiting room with two empty wheelchairs, a few worried caregivers and a hospital bed that cradled the shriveled peach body of an old man. From around the corner, Mom and I heard the massive doors buzz open. A hospital attendant attempted to navigate herself and David X's wheelchair through the labyrinth of us worn but friendly folks. I was a bit taken aback by the crowd, as the waiting room typically only held myself, my mother, and Days of our Lives (Stephano was back from the dead again!).

The first thing I heard him say was along the lines of, "Oh . . . I'll just . . . Phhhhfft." Like a spidery crab of sorts, this wisp of a man managed hobble himself and his cane out of the captivity of the chair. Without a moment for breath or even consideration, he decided it was his turn, and hobbled past the intimidating red sign reading "DO NOT GO FURTHER, RADIATION IN PROGRESS!"

Seeing him flow by me was like discovering a sweet chocolate stream with a stripe of warm honey flowing in a valley of vegetables. I laughed, and not the ironic laugh I had become accustomed to using in order to disguise my fear from family and the few friends that weren't terrified of me.

It was true happiness. This man was more damn stubborn than me!

He was quickly apprehended and told to wait his turn. His energetic stagger was reduced to a painful limp that wrinkled his face. I offered him my hand, but he just eyed me, briefly opened and closed his mouth, crumpled himself over his cane, and then lowered himself into a chair.

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It started in strands. It was about fifteen treatments in. My hair began to let go, and my illness wasn't hidden anymore: I had cancer. I shaved my head and hid the taboo with a long-dead grandmother's brown and golden speckled scarf I have cherished since my early teens. That summer was the hottest I can remember. The lake's water level dropped, it rained little, and I only allowed myself to pass tears in the shower. I hid my head from the sunshine, and I couldn't swim for fear of a seizure and a true drowning.

Pills became meals and meals became pills.

At this point in treatment, my mother, more than me, had become friendly with David X. She sat with him while I was latched in my radiation mask. I would get brief glimpses of his life only in saying "hello" and "goodbye." For a week or so I observed him performing the ultimate survivor's task: guzzling down a can of Ensure. We were always too thin, we needed calories, but everything in our systems, the chemo, the radiation, the stress, the cancer, told us, "Nuh uh, you ain't eatin' that." But David X did. He chased it with canned tangerines. Kind of made me want to vomit, as did his body odor, but I could hardly stand to smuggle myself and my mother out of the waiting room without hearing him bitch (he was a very talented bitcher) about how the government was treating him: a Korean Veteran and recipient of the Purple Heart. Bush and crew were denying the existence of his condition and trying their damnedest to deny him his right to some good-time, lovin' insurance.