Oklahoma by Bradley K. Rosen
“Drugs, in the 1970’s, they was a sign of the times”
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Summer warm sun through the kitchen window. My dog laying asleep in the heat on the back porch. My mother’s in her apron standing over the stove. Fried onions and beef liver. I suppose there are a few, but I never met a kid who ever liked the taste of liver. Me pinching my nose so I wouldn’t have to taste it as much. My Mom, she always served her fried liver with her Brussel sprouts. I never liked the taste of them much neither. When she put them together on a plate like that, to a kid, it was a double whammy.
Her eyes a blue of sky before it meets the horizon.
“I’m not going to eat it Ma.”
“Just try one bite kiddo,” she said. “It’s good for you.”
I love my mother so much I had to give it another shot. But I couldn’t get it down. Choked and gagged and spit it back into my napkin with tears in my eyes. The feeling I had not known yet what to call it from somewhere deep within me.
Failure.
I am so sorry Mother.
Fifty years later and I still don’t like liver. Specially the one I got inside of me. The one I got inside of me that isn’t doing so good. It’s all scarred up and cirrhotic. It’s worse than that. It’s got the cancer in it.
Six months. Five years. A liver transplant. Ten years. Twenty. Fifteen percent survive. Eighty five percent survive. It’s all on the internet. It’s all in the math. I hate doing the math.
All the arbitrary terms. All the numbers. I am only a number of one. I am only one of a kind. Living a life no one has led before me or will do so ever again.
My mortality. I am not really close to coming to any kinds of real terms with it as yet. Nothing intelligent anyway. Hell, I only found out about it last week. I can’t seem to help but to think about it pretty much every damn second of every damn minute of every hour those arbitrary numbers have allotted my time on this here earth. And as a result of all that thinking I have to come up with at least a couple of reasons why I can justify them reasons why I got cancer in the first place. Thing is I need to figure it out before I drive myself crazy judging myself too harshly and start labeling myself out to be some kind of drug crazed irresponsible dumb as rocks burned out hippy bachelor alcoholic ex musician that almost made the big time loser.
Drugs, in the 1970’s, they was a sign of the times. I mean they was everywhere back in them days, the heroin and the cocaine and all them other drugs. Especially down there in the suburbs of Los Angeles. All them hippy peoples that came before me in the 60’s, somehow for me, they had given us a kind of permissions. All of our heroes did drugs. The Rolling Stones’ and the Crosby Stills and Nash and Young’s and the Pete Townsend’s. Even the Beatles. They sang about it all the time and put all them ideas into them songs with them lyrics like, “Hope I die before I get old” and shit, some of them died, but me and my friends, we wasn’t stupid and we saw their dyings as examples and told ourselves that we were smarter than them and that we weren’t going to make the same mistakes. That we was going be more responsible about doing them drugs.
We played our own parts in the song, “Your the Reason God Made Oklahoma”, and though none of us ever had been to Oklahoma, that is when everything became our Oklahoma. Oklahoma being our personal metaphor. Our summation of the world and everything we knew in it. Our land, our musical, our reasons, our Toto’s and Auntie Em’s and Scarecrow’s and Cowardly Lion’s. Because lord knows because we knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore that made us even more bound and determined to learn as much as we could of the world. To do it right. At least in my crowd. To be drug professionals. To live out our Oklahoma.
Drug professionals.
We were livers.
We loved life as the most precious miracle that could ever be afforded to a bunch of molecules that had the chutzpah to be assembled together on this here planet. And we were bound and determined to revel in it. To live life in the fullest and most complete ways that we ever could think of as possible. To experience life in all its ways of flesh and blood and sex and thought in the midst of war and repression and injustice. To look at life from every perspective and different angle that we could get a hold of. And that meant that we was going to use drugs.
It is one of my first memories as a child, going inside myself and feeling the mysteries of my physical and ethereal being, of being alive and cognizant. Lying in the green grass on my back and looking as far as I could into the back of the blue as blue sky above me, I remember wondering if and how all of it could really be real. Life, it is not an easy thing to figure out. And figuring it out, at least making an attempt of trying to figure it out, it is at least one part of what makes us worthy to live in it.
But as life goes, my friends, they fucked up. People still fucking ended up ruining their lives, or worse yet, people died trying. I don’t have enough fingers and toes left on my body to be able to name them all. But I don’t think it would be correct for me not to at least name a few.
My friend Joey. Red hair as long and unruly as Robert Plant’s. He shot up some LSD. Mixed a couple of tabs of blotter in with some water and drew it up into a syringe and stuck it in his arm. Flipped out. Never was the same. Spun. Probably wasn’t the lysergic acid diethylamide as much as it was the strychnine that they put in that blotter acid to preserve it. Nasty stuff. Was in and out of mental hospitals his whole entire life. Ended up committing suicide.
My buddy Franz. Pretty near one of the best musicians I ever knew in all of my lives. He was a bass playing funny ass kind of quirky fellow. Wore a mustache and black high top Converses. He always drove around in VW vans. The ladies used to love him. Or at least that’s what he always told me. That the ladies always loved him. His mother, she found him face down on the top of the water in his swimming pool at home. Home being his Momma’s house. He hadn’t lived there for a couple of years. Overdosed on the heroin. Don’t know why it was that had to choose to go back home to his momma’s house to die. I don’t think he ever would have wanted to have seen his momma cry so sad like that.
Pepper. Pep for short. He just up and died not thinking about much. No rhyme or reason to it. Wasn’t careful. Was at a party. Another overdose. More heroin. Another bad decision. Unprofessional. Fucking died for it. Gave up all this beauty and wonder and grace.
And Brent. Big, good looking guy. Had muscles on his body I don’t know if he ever knew they were there. I ain’t saying he overdosed or nothing but he sure as hell took a handful of Quaaludes before he got on his Norton 850 Commando motor bike and tried to ride it home. Hit a telephone pole. I didn’t go to his funeral. Didn’t want to. Fuck, I was the one that had sold him the ludes.
One of my greatest sins.
All men.
Sorry Mother.
Sex, and drugs, and rock ‘n roll.
And me. And somewhere, somehow, I made it out.
Almost.
The Hepatitis C. Sneaky little bastard. The Hepatitis C I found out about ten years ago. Deal is, you can live with it for thirty years and you might never know you got it. Or where you got it from. Makes me sick to think I have been carrying around a thing like that for thirty years.
Evil fucking cowardly virus.
I started getting all itchy, started getting them sores all over my body. Went in to the doc and he told me he wanted to run some tests. Stuck a needle in my arm to see if I had ever stuck a needle in my arm. Took out some blood to see if I had shared somebody else’s blood that had the Hepatitis C. I figured I might as well tell him how I was once a casual user. I didn’t like telling him. Felt in a way like I was a traitor to everybody I ever knew. That I was betraying all those people that had died. But them docs, chances are they ain’t never going to call no cops, and they can’t tell nobody else about it unless you want ‘em to. They got that generous oath that keeps them running around fixing everybody up mums the word.
Oklahoma.
I could get real good Japanese philosophical and save my face and tell you that I caught that Hep C from when I got a blood transfusion when I wrecked my big brother’s bicycle into a tree stump. I was eleven. The bike stopped on a dime and I kept going. The inertias of me over the handlebars and then ten feet more in a kind of forward momentum that racked my forehead into another tree stump. I got knocked out unconscious. There was blood to blood. They gave me a transfusion. Gave me blood that could have had Hep C in it. Back before they knew what it was or to test for it. Lots of people that never did drugs at all, they got it that way. I suppose there may have been a chance.
But if I am going to be man up about it, I know it for the truth that I probably caught the Hep C from shooting up the heroin. Or maybe the cocaine. I could have snorted up that virus with a shared a dollar bill with somebody that had a cut in their nose while I had a cut in mine. Sounds ugly but to us, back then it really wasn’t. We were just exploring our paths through our certain ways of light.
And the thing is, I would do it all over again if you would let me.
Not the Hep C part, but everything else. The laughing and the conversations that went all day and all night that changed the ways I think and breathe and react. Our Oklahomas. The feelings that we all belong, that we are all a part. That perhaps we had come a little bit closer to figuring out why we were here in this place on this earth. On why it was that we were worthy.
We was careful. Used the bleach to clean out the needle every time we shared one but Hep C, it’s a good hider. And it’s mean. The way it silently and quietly eats away at your liver. The way it’s got that fucked up name that goes along with it.
Hepatitis.
Unromantical. No beauty in it at all.
At least if you was hearing it for the first time the AIDS, it sounds like it could be trying to help someone. Aiding and abetting. Like it was a nurse. Or the Lou Gehrig’s, it sounds like a hero. Like a famous baseball player.
Not Hepatitis C. The first time you hear it, it sounds dirty. Sounds yellow. Sounds unclean. Sounds like somebody forgot to wipe off their knife after they cut up some chicken in the kitchen and left it in your soup.
AIDS, they got them red ribbons, and Breast Cancer, they got all them pink t shirts.
Yellow. Hep C, we got them yellow skin and eyes.
Hep C don’t got no ribbons or t shirts.
Dirty blood. Dirty needles. Suppose them AIDS people and us, we got that in common. But Hep C it don’t have in it anything as sadly beautiful and innocent as sex. The first six rows of gay men and women at Broadway during the AIDS epidemic that were lost. There isn’t anything as beautifully sad as the first six rows. We will never able to get back the first six rows.
I may get misunderstood here. I shouldn’t really talk about such things. Like I was an ape. About which disease is nastier than the other. Of which one sounds better or worse. Like them diseases is all in a race. All them diseases, they all suck beans and rotten tomatoes that have fallen off perfectly otherwise healthy vines to rot on the warm hard dust of the earth. I know that. There really isn’t nothing right in trying to make sense of it at all. It is hard. But I am trying to be worthy and so I try.
Hepatitis C.
Weird how people start treating you different after they find out you got it. Start not hiring you for jobs, start not asking you out to the movies anymore. Start kissing you on the cheek different. People that you used to have sex with for years, they stop having sex with you at all, even after you had told them, even if you was planning on using protection.
But they can’t tell you about it. They hide all that stuff. It is a secret. Fucking Hep C, the biggest fucking cowardly lying secret of them all.
It’s even worse when somebody doesn’t know you got it goes on to give you their humbled opinion about what they think about people who do. It was actually one of my friends who said it. Someone who I cared about and knew that they cared about me. It was during a dinner we was all having one night. She said it casual, as if she was asking someone to pass her the potatoes.
“Oh you don’t want to date anybody with that,” she said. “People with Hepatitis C, they have sores all over them and they smell bad.”
Those are the kinds of things that people say that stick around in your ears for years.
God, I hope I don’t go around smelling bad and nobody is going to tell me about it. Makes me walk around and throw my nose under my armpit all the time when I don’t think people is looking. Truth is, you get so used to the ways of your own smell that who’s to say if you can really smell yourself at all. But just thinking you might smell is enough, and you start letting all them things get under your skin and start to get to eroding at your confidence. And because of the sores you go to airports with long sleeved shirts on even in the middle of summer and you are going to Hawaii. You have to sit real close to complete strangers on planes and shit, you know you can’t transfer the disease around as easy as that. That it has to be blood to blood. But still, it fucks with you, because you giving it to anybody is the biggest fear you ever had ever on this earth. Even spending the night over at somebodies house freaks you out, ‘cause even though you know it doesn’t make any difference you want to tell them to wash the sheets from the guest bed after you leave, but you can’t and so you yank them off the bed anyway and act like you are doing them a favor by saving them the thirty seconds it takes to strip a bed. You end up telling a lie.
Them girls you used to like to talk to, you can’t talk to them like that anymore. You just can’t swing the bat the same as you used to. You just can’t bear the talk after a second or third date when you have to tell them you have Hep C. About the blood to blood. They may even like you enough that perhaps they really don’t care at all that you have it. But you know you have it. And that, that changes everything.
The unromantical disease.
You believe they can see it in you, even though they never had no way of knowing and it gives you a sliver of a glimpse of what it must feel like to be judged even before someone meets you for the first time.
It is always there. It is always inside you. You the invisible leper.
All the time, all the time, you know that virus is in you, knocking and punching away at your liver. You just want to pretend sometimes that it isn’t in there. That you are just the same as everybody else. So you do, you slip, and you forget about it, for an hour or two. You have a beer. Not like you used to, never like that. But one every now and then. To make an attempt to forget, and to be like everybody else again.
But never again, never anymore. It has taken yet another one of your biggest pleasures away from you. And then it all stops to matter as much as it once did because they tell you that you have cancer.
Six months, five, ten years. Arbitrary numbers. Memories of youth distant and past. The realities of all the things in my life and what they have meant to me. The consequences. The glory. The beauty and grace.
A blue as blue sky before it meets the horizon.
The Oklahoma.
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Header image courtesy of Amoxi.
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Bradley K. Rosen was awarded a Bachelor of Music from the University of Oregon in 1998. He played for twenty five years as a professional rock musician before settling down in the Portland area. He still plays drums in a local rock group and plays timpani with two community orchestras. He has recently finished his first novel, The Bunkie Spills and is currently working on his second novel, which involves a taxidermied cat and nine lives. His work may be found in the anthology The Frozen Moment (Publication Studio), as well as in The Portland Review (Fall 2013 Issue 60.1).