IN SPRING 2014, I wanted to get far away from work so that I could put my head back together, so to speak. Flights to Cancun were cheap from Vancouver, and the eastern strip of the Yucatán Peninsula seemed to be just the place to go for R&R. I still thought my cloudy thinking came solely from pain-caused sleep deprivation. I had been getting less than three hours’ sleep a night, not enough to enter deep, slow-wave sleep, without which the memory suffers. I imagined that having nothing to do under a hot Mexican sun would lull me into prolonged slumber. I would enjoy a mindless vacation and regain my mind. I knew nothing yet about brain fog and little about hepatitis C, and I was certain that other than having an unrelenting case of fatigue, I was as healthy as a puppy. So I booked the flights and a stay at a resort near Akumal, Mexico.
The resort curled through lush, tropical forest along a white-sand lagoon on the Yucatán Peninsula about halfway between Playa del Carmen and the Mayan ruins at Tulum, with swimming pools, pyramid-shaped residences, restaurants, tiki bars, poolside bars, and beach bars. Part of the relaxation I sought was the sleep inducement of free-flowing liquor, which was included in the resort fee.
We arrived around midnight at the Cancun Airport. The cab that picked us up drove sluggishly along the Mayan Riviera highway and crawled slower than a snail through a Federales roadblock along the route. Finally, the cab turned into the resort’s winding entry road, which was shrouded with palm trees lit from below by spotlights. We shuffled up the grand staircase and past a wall of blue glass into the lobby. The desk clerk said we had missed the dinner buffet, so we strolled into a bar in the main building. A band played contemporary rock. About a hundred people milled about. A few were dancing, but most were drinking. The bar reached along one of the walls, where eight bartenders poured every color of alcohol, ceaselessly. I slid onto a stool and asked for a drink. It was the first of quarts of margaritas I downed at the resort. For someone like me who tends to avoid in-pool volleyball games and goofy poolside contests designed for kids, there wasn’t much to do. So I did what most visitors did most of the time at the resort: eat, swim, and drink. I must have drunk at least forty alcoholic beverages during our five-day visit.
When we arrived back home, I left my bags scattered on the living-room floor and walked out onto the deck that runs the length of our home. The phone rang, but I didn’t bother to go inside to pick it up.
Four days later I dialed my voice mail, and a message asked me to call Dr. Radev’s office. After a blurry week on the Riviera Maya, the threat of having hep antibodies had slipped my mind. I figured that since Dr. Radev was new as my doctor, her office probably wanted information about me they had yet to collect. I waited another few days before I called back. Exactly one week after the end of my vacation, I poured a morning mug of coffee and dialed the doctor’s number. “You called last week?” I asked.
“Doctor Radev wants you to come in,” a pleasant voice said.
“How about two weeks from today?”
“We can take you much sooner,” the medical receptionist said.
“When?”
“Today?”
“No. I can’t make it.” I sipped some coffee.
“Could you be here Friday morning or early afternoon?”
“How about Monday?”
“There’s an opening first thing in the morning. How about 8:45?”
“Sure,” I said. I was pleased that Dr. Radev’s schedule had so many open times, when I was used to having to book two weeks ahead for a doctor’s appointment. The spacious waiting room had been buzzing with patients the last time I was there. A lot of her patients must already have left for summer vacations, I thought.
I was wrong. I learned that Dr. Radev wanted me to come in as soon as possible because my situation was pressing. At 8:45 a.m. Monday, May 12, I sat in her examining room. Dr. Radev took a long breath, lowered her voice, and said, “You have hepatitis C.”
1964–1967
GROUPIE
DURING THE DECADES between the razor cuts and my father’s death, I avoided not only bloodletting but my father as well. In high school my strategy for this was to become a groupie. The pastime required a lengthy bus and subway trip that kept me away from home the maximum amount of time my parents would allow. On most days after school I would travel from Queens into Manhattan with a few other girls. We would gather in front of a midtown hotel and wait for Herman’s Hermits or the Moody Blues to show up. Then we would try to sneak into the hotel. A pack of doormen usually kept us out.
One night, returning from a round of rock-star stalking, three friends and I jumped onto a subway car. The theaters had just got out, so it was hard to find a seat. My friends reached for straps that hung from the ceiling. I was too short to grasp the swaying loops, so I edged through clumps of passengers to the floor-to-ceiling pole between the exit doors. A tall young blond guy clung to the same pole as me. As the train chugged and lurched, my head bumped his shoulder. He looked like Richard Chamberlain, my favorite actor, who starred in the TV series Dr. Kildare. We started talking. Kevin told me he was a musician. When the train stopped at his station in Jackson Heights, I raced out the door with him. My groupie friends looked on, dismayed. Kevin gave me a tour of his neighborhood that night, and within a few weeks we were going steady.
Because I had skipped third grade, I graduated from high school at age sixteen. I found a job as a file clerk for the head office of the Allegheny Ludlum Steel Company on Park Avenue. I was soon promoted to switchboard operator and then teletype operator. After work, sometimes I’d meet my friends in the East Village, where hippies would give us flowers or offer us a joint. While roaming through the area one day, I saw a For Rent sign on the window of a ground-level apartment. I rang the superintendent’s bell, and a scraggly-haired woman in coveralls stumbled out. When I asked her if I could rent the place, she gazed at my work attire and nodded. I exchanged that week’s pay envelope for a set of keys.
Back in Flushing, confronting my parents in the living room, I said, “I’ve got my own apartment. I need the thousand dollars you owe me.” They had held the money in trust from a settlement I had received after having been thrown to the floor in a car accident as a child.
“What? Not on your life,” my father said, making squishing sounds on the plastic-covered sofa where he sat.
“You’re too young to be on your own,” my mother said, also making squishing sounds.
“You told me you wanted me to leave when I graduated. I’m doing exactly what you asked.”
“You’re not getting the money,” my father said. He limped around the coffee table, scowling at me.
“It’s my money.” I backed away from him.
“Not on your life, you little slut,” my father said.
That inspired me. I said, “I need money to buy furniture. I guess I’ll have to stand on a street corner and earn it the way the sluts do.”
My parents gave me the money. In mid-October 1966, two weeks after my seventeenth birthday, I moved into the bachelor suite on East 6th Street. I decorated it with a thousand dollars’ worth of furniture. In those days a thousand dollars went far. I bought a table, chairs, dressers, and a convertible sofa to sleep on, and I splurged on a spiffy, curved-front TV, a hi-fi, and even a reel-to-reel tape recorder. I hung hand-printed Indian tapestries on the walls. Kevin came by to help me get organized. Being a newly independent hormone-filled teen, I invited him to spend the night. We fumbled at our early attempts at sex, but my hormones were happy and Kevin didn’t want to leave. I said I had planned to live alone, but he objected. I had been morphing from a miniskirted groupie into a Village-style hippie who wore waist-length hair and tie-dyed shirts. After a few more fumblings with Kevin, I figured I might as well do as the hippies did. Cohabitation