I'm Not Gonna Lie Page 11

  It all caught up with them. My grandfather died when I was twenty-seven. He had a weak heart and was short of breath all the time. Finally, he had an angioplasty. The doctors told him not to walk until he recovered, because he could clot. He didn’t listen. Or he misheard. Or he didn’t understand. “Yes, they said walk. I’m sure. They told me to walk.”

  The first day back from the hospital he walked, he clotted, the clot got loose, he went to his room, lay down, and died. Boom. Just like that. Poor guy.

  People fear what they don’t understand. So, rather than deal with my bed-wetting, my grandparents ignored it, insisted that I drank too much water, and let it go at that. I don’t blame them. They didn’t know.

  It reminds me of people who continue to drive their cars after the warning light comes on. The light appears on the dashboard glowing bright fire-engine red and they ignore it. What do they think, that the car is gonna run forever and that the blazing red light doesn’t mean anything? Then when the car breaks down, they say, “I’m so pissed off. I have to replace the entire transmission. I can’t believe it.”

  “Wow. Really?”

  “Yes. It turns out I was driving the car for three months without any water. No water at all. Bone-dry. Piece-of-junk car.”

  “Didn’t the red light come on?”

  “Yeah, but I thought that meant service soon.”

  Same thing happens with our bodies. We are equipped with warning signs: pain and lumps and knots and bulges and bleeding and, yes—

  Wetting the bed.

  • • •

  I kept wetting the bed through elementary school, into junior high, and into high school. I tried to control it—and sometimes I did—but I knew that wetting the bed as a teenager was not normal. By then I was too embarrassed to tell anyone. I dealt with it. I covered it up. It became my dirty little secret.

  The first time a doctor noticed something a little unusual was in high school, when I took the physical for the baseball team. I’d had physicals before and always passed, no problem, and nothing ever came up about my bed-wetting. I always felt uncomfortable, though. I was worried that somehow I’d get busted.

  Senior year my high school brought in a doctor to conduct the physicals, a bored-looking older guy with a salt-and-pepper beard. He wore a sport jacket and a button-down shirt and draped a stethoscope around his neck like a tie. I’d say he was dressed a little fancy for our school. He conducted each physical slowly and deliberately, as if he had nowhere else to go, ever, which, looking at him, was probably true.

  This guy was wasting our time. We were athletes, eighteen years old and in peak condition. Getting a physical seemed stupid and unnecessary, not to mention humiliating. We began by stripping down to our underwear and stepping onto an industrial scale. The doctor held a clipboard and wrote down our weight, then pulled up a metal tape measure attached to the back of the scale and scribbled down our height. Then he put his clipboard aside and listened to our chest with his stethoscope. Last, he told us to drop our drawers. We looked up to the ceiling as he cupped our balls and asked us to cough while he checked for a hernia. I was tempted to say, “One more second and you have to buy me flowers,” but I thought it was probably a good idea to shut up while he had my balls in his palm.

  Then we went back into the locker room, put on everything but our shirts, and came back out so he could take our blood pressure. This was the most boring part, because it took the longest: two minutes. We took this opportunity to fuck around—rag on one another, laugh, call one another out. The bored bearded doctor paid no attention, ignoring us as he went about taking our blood pressure.

  I took my place in line and waited as the doctor nodded his approval to all the other guys on the team and dismissed them. I watched them head into the locker room to finish getting dressed. Finally, my turn. I stepped up to a chair that had a desktop attached and sat down. I stretched my arm out on the desktop and looked away as the bored bearded doctor wrapped the blood-pressure cuff around my arm. He squeezed the bubble tight, waited, then released it and watched the meter rise and fall. “Hmm,” he said. He seemed alarmed.

  “What? What’s the matter?”

  “Your pressure’s a little high.”

  Time stood still. All he said was, “Your pressure’s a little high,” but his words sounded ominous and as if they were coming from far away.

  It felt like an eternity before he spoke again. “I want you to go outside,” he said. “Sit down for a few minutes and then come back in. I’m going to take your blood pressure again.”

  “Shit,” I thought.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I stood up slowly and, head down, went outside. I knew everybody was looking at me. I was the only one on the team who hadn’t passed the blood pressure test. I kept my head down, as if I’d flunked an exam or gotten caught screwing around in class.

  I found a seat on the bench near the dugout. I didn’t know where to look, so I studied the grass in front of me. I didn’t know how, but I knew that somehow my high blood-pressure reading was connected to my wetting the bed. I also knew that I was I too scared to mention anything about that.

  After a while I went back inside, took my place in line again, and stepped up for my second blood-pressure test.

  The doctor wrapped my arm in the blood-pressure cuff and squeezed the bubble tighter this time, I thought. He seemed to be moving in slow motion. The two minutes felt like twenty. Finally, he released the balloon and squinted at the meter. “It went down a little,” he said.

  I felt a huge wave of relief.

  “But . . .”

  “What?”

  I thought he was about to say something else, but he stopped. He nodded slowly. “Nothing,” he said. “You’re all right.”

  Of course, I wasn’t all right.

  Kidney disease creates high blood pressure.

  That’s one of the signs.

  But the doctor didn’t allow himself to consider that worst-case scenario. Or maybe he looked at me, saw a healthy-looking eighteen-year-old kid, a baseball player, and thought, “There can’t be anything wrong with him. What are the odds?”

  I put on the rest of my uniform, grabbed my glove, and went out to the outfield to shag flies.

  I escaped.

  But just for the moment.

  • • •

  I dismissed the doctor’s reaction. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t pursue it. I didn’t say, “Man, I’m eighteen years old, an athlete, and I have high blood pressure? What’s with that?” No. I didn’t go there. Besides, who would I tell? My grandparents had conditioned me to tough it out, to battle through pain or discomfort and ignore any potential warning signs. I’ve never figured out if my grandparents didn’t trust doctors or if they were afraid of what they would find out if they went to a doctor. Maybe a little of both. Anyway, I kept moving forward, continued pushing on.

  By the time I reached my twenties, I wet the bed less frequently and then almost not at all. But by my late twenties, I started to feel fatigued at the end of every day. Every morning I woke up tired no matter how much I’d slept. I chalked that up to overworking. I was busting my ass, going on the road, working at club after club, honing my act. It paid off. My career started to catch fire. Late-night talk shows began to notice me. Then, in 1991, when I was thirty, the booker from The Arsenio Hall Show called and offered me a spot. A big break.

  As I sat in the green room waiting to go on with Arsenio, I felt unusually warm. Sweat pooled under my arms, on my neck, and then I felt that the back of my neck was drenched. I stood up. My knees felt rubbery. I took a step and the room started spinning. The door flew open and the stage manager burst in, shouting back at a thin, metallic voice that squawked at her through her headset. She pointed at me, then wheeled her arm in a circle like a third-base coach waving in a runner. I was on. I followed her to the stage, despe
rately trying to keep my balance. She steered me to my spot on the stage. Lights above me flicked on, their high beams drilling me, baking me. Rivers of sweat poured off me. I heard Arsenio’s introduction and the audience’s applause and I began my set. I somehow made it through, the distant sound of laughter and applause bouncing vaguely around me. I went straight home after the show, stripped off my sweat-soaked clothes, and took my temperature. I had a high fever. I drove myself to the doctor the next day, and he gave me his diagnosis: pneumonia. He prescribed antibiotics, and in a couple weeks I was back to normal. Normal, that is, for me.

  What the doctor didn’t realize was that pneumonia can be a side effect of kidney disease.

  He would have found that out if he had done a full blood panel.

  Which, of course, he didn’t.

  • • •

  SEVEN years later.

  I’m constantly fatigued, due, I’m sure, to my ferocious work schedule. I refuse to complain or cut back. I live to work.

  One morning I wake up with a dull pain in my lower right side. I pop some Advil. The pills have no effect. I pop some more. The pain persists through the day, making it hard for me to walk. I work through the pain, hoping that it will go away. Basically, I approach the dull pain in my side the way I always approach pain and discomfort: I ignore it.

  After a while, the pain lessens but I start to become fatigued. I drag my ass to Canada to play some club dates. A friend tells me about some supplements he heard about that increase your energy, which happen to be illegal in the United States. I find them for sale in bulk in a bin at a Canadian pharmacy. I buy a bagful, down a couple, and feel my energy amp up instantly.

  I go to Las Vegas to play a weeklong gig at a major hotel on the Strip. I keep taking the supplements, but lower the number. My appetite decreases. I find that I’m constantly thirsty and I have to pee seemingly every five minutes. One night, I finish my first of several sold-out shows—a challenge, because I have to pee the whole time I’m onstage. I rush to the bathroom in the club, the crowd’s applause breaking like a wave at my back, and position myself at the closest urinal. I start to pee and I gasp.

  My piss is purple.

  At first I think I’m pissing blood, but I realize I’ve never seen purple blood. “What the hell is that?” I say.

  I move in tighter to the urinal to make sure nobody can see what’s happening. I look away, hoping that maybe I’m hallucinating; maybe it’s something in those supplements, but I’ve cut way back on those. I think maybe it was something I had for dinner, but I don’t recall eating any purple food, can’t even think of any purple food. . . . Wait—eggplant, plums, grapes, licorice, cauliflower . . . have I had any of those? I look back down. . . .

  And I’m still pissing purple.

  “Damn, I’m pissing purple.”

  Of course, it’s obvious what I will do the moment I finish pissing purple.

  Nothing.

  I do nothing.

  I don’t tell anyone.

  I don’t go to the doctor.

  I should have gone to the doctor. I know that.

  But I have shows to do.

  And I think I had some baba ghanoush the other night. It was probably bad. Tainted baba ghanoush. Yeah. That’s what caused the purple pee. Must have been.

  After a couple of days, I stop pissing purple. Just like that. No more violet whiz. That must mean everything’s okay, right?

  No. Of course not. Purple piss must mean something. And that something cannot be good. Doesn’t matter. I ignore this warning sign, this bright, flashing, blinking, deep purple indicator light. I pretend that I never saw it.

  I finish playing Vegas and hit the road for a series of club dates in Texas. San Antonio. Houston. Austin. I’m killing every night.

  And every day I feel like I’m dying.

  The pain in my side returns.

  Only worse.

  The dull ache becomes a constant, jabbing pain. It feels as if someone has stabbed me in the side with a butcher knife.

  The fatigue returns.

  I spend my days soaking in baths to soothe the pain, or zonked out in bed trying to sleep.

  I stop taking the energy supplements, replacing them with a regimen of Advil.

  I keep working. Half the time when I perform, my head’s in a cloud, my words blurred by the pain that burns my side. The audience doesn’t notice.

  Then one day I tear my Achilles tendon.

  I limp for weeks, the injury refusing to heal. Back in Los Angeles, I go to a wound care center. They extract some of my blood, spin it, make a serum, and apply it to the tear. My Achilles heals.

  But I can’t stand up.

  The pain in my side is so severe it bends me over.

  Finally, I do what I should have done years before.

  I go to the doctor.

  I see the same doctor who diagnosed my pneumonia seven years earlier.

  When he sees that I can’t stand up, he looks at me with what I see as deep concern.

  He checks me over completely.

  He takes a full blood panel.

  I come back the next day for a follow-up visit and to receive the blood work results. Walking like a ninety-year-old caveman, I follow a nurse down a corridor past a row of examining rooms, and into his office. I sit in a leather chair across from the doctor’s desk. A few minutes later, the doctor comes in holding my chart. He closes the door behind him and sits at his desk. He absently flicks the corner of my chart.

  I feel like shit.

  He looks like shit.

  He may look even worse than I do.

  “I have bad news,” he says.

  “So much for the foreplay,” I think.

  “You have kidney disease, and it’s pretty advanced.”

  I squirm in the chair, the leather squishing as I try to find a comfortable position. I’m biding time, trying to digest what the doctor has said.

  Kidney disease.

  “Sure,” I think. “Why not? Of all the crap that’s happened to me, why the hell not? Why wouldn’t I have kidney disease? Makes perfect sense. Of course.”

  He lowers his voice, clears his throat. “You’re going to need a transplant before you’re forty-five.”

  I’m thirty-eight.

  “Okay,” I say, exhaling softly. “So I have seven years—”

  “It doesn’t work like that. You’re going to deteriorate every year. I’m going to be on you now, watching you carefully, checking you, measuring your kidney function, but you’ve got to start thinking about lining up a donor now. You will get worse and worse. I’m going to prescribe medication for you today, right now, but it’s going to get a lot worse.”

  I wish I had gone to him sooner.

  I wish he had noticed the kidney disease seven years earlier, when I came in with pneumonia.

  I wish . . .

  Well, it doesn’t matter.

  Getting angry, getting depressed, getting even . . .

  Those emotions don’t help.

  Dealing with it.

  That can help.

  Which is what I did.

  • • •

  I made it until I was forty-four. I survived that season of The George Lopez Show. I made it through in one piece, upright . . . barely. At my last examination the doctor told me that I had a total of eighteen percent function in both kidneys.

  As I lay in that hospital bed before my transplant, a million thoughts swirled through my mind. The first words that came into my head were, “Well, this is where the rubber meets the road.” I’d never said that before in my life. I’m naked, scared, about to go under the knife, and suddenly I became an old white guy. Then I thought about dying and about all the things I hadn’t yet accomplished. But mainly I thought about how lucky I was and how precious time is. Time is a gift. Es
pecially if you’re over fifty. People waste too much time on nothing. I hear people saying all the time, “I’m thinking about going to Hawaii next year.”

  Why wait? Go this year. You don’t know what’s gonna happen next year. Do not assume you’re going to live to a ripe old age. You’re already pretty damn old. Grab things now.

  I also thought about how my fear of doctors nearly killed me.

  Listen, this is not a self-help book, not even close, but help yourself to this one piece of advice:

  If you’re afraid of doctors, get over it.

  If you hate physical exams, or colonoscopies or prostate exams, get over it. I’m not gonna lie: When that doctor shoves his rubber-covered finger up your ass, it’s gonna hurt, unless you’re used to it. But if he finds something that shouldn’t be up there, like a half of an apple or an old iPhone or a tumor, you’re gonna thank him.

  I also thought about all the warning signs I saw that I did nothing about.

  You have to learn to accept this fact:

  Your body is your best friend.

  I know. You’re thinking, “Hey, my best friend lives in Wisconsin.”

  No, he doesn’t. He lives inside of you. Your best friend in Wisconsin is not gonna know that you’ve been hacking in your sleep.

  Don’t do what I did. Don’t ignore those warning signs. See a doctor right away.

  And never ignore purple urine.

  GOLF LESSONS

  THE moment I turned fifty, I started contemplating the future. Let’s face it: At my age, you need to make choices. Lifestyle choices. I started thinking about things that never would have entered my consciousness ten years ago, even five years ago, foreign concepts such as “slowing down,” “drinking less,” and “having sex once a week.”

  I even toyed with the idea of retirement.

  Not immediately, but possibly in ten years. I could definitely see that. The road’s a grind, man. Performing in clubs, finishing a set at two o’clock in the morning night after night, flying to the next city, trying to get your bearings, fighting jet lag, keeping your energy high, and then starting all over at another club in another city until another two a.m. It’s wearing me down at fifty. It could kill me at sixty. I can see how retirement might be appealing. As unbelievable as it may seem, I can foresee a time in the not-so-distant future when I might give up performing.