On the Waterfront…
In the movie “On the Waterfront” Marlon Brando plays a mob lackey, who’s job it is to just lean on guys, and be the muscle for the mob. In the beginning part of the movie, he lures Joey (who’s wanted by the mob for talking to the wrong guys and the mov thinks trying to unionize the dock workers) under the guise that he’s found one of his carrier pigeons, and that he’s going to go put him up in Joey’s coop, on the roof.
Joey, who’s been laying low, because he knows the mob has it out for him, trusts Terry (Brando) they grew up together, and so he says he’ll meet him up there.
In the next couple of scenes, you see that Terry’s lied to Joey, it wasn’t really his pigeon at all (because he lets it go) and a couple of mob guys secret themselves up on the roof, lying in wait for him. Later, you hear a blood curdling scream as Joey “falls” to his death. We know that the mob guys basically just did him in.
It’s unclear whether Terry knows what was going to happen, until later, when he falls inlove with Joey’s sister, and he tells her he thought they were going to “lean on him a little” but nothing more.
Why do I mention this?
Tonight, I feel like Joey.
A friend invited a bunch of us to come see his talk because he said he’d like to see some friendly faces in the crowd. I was the only one that RSVPed that I’d be there, despite being fairly busy, and not feeling so well with this Tamoxifen working me over.
I found another info page that mentioned that not only will you get cataracts, and have corneal changes, but you could get endometrial cancer (I knew that one) and uterine sarcoma (I knew that too, deadly once they find it, they usually slap an expiration date on you like milk) and liver cancer….(yes! Liver cancer!?) so I’m not in a good place with this med at all.
So, despite being busy, I made time out to go see this friend. When I get there, it becomes clear that it’s a reading of poetry and things written by cancer survivors, people who’ve lost children to cancer, care-givers and physicians, fathers, best friends…I fought the panicked feeling and sat there, unable to move…wishing I could get to my feet and leave. But, what of this friend, I kept thinking (what a sucker, right? It just goes to show you how loyal a friend I am, still trying to support a friend, when he had in effect, ambushed me, emotionally—a sort of emotional intervention, just when I was doing so well, emotionally.)
Finally, when one woman stood up and told a story about a friend whom had recovered from her difficult battle with breast cancer, to be then approached by this friend to hear that the cancer came back, and was untreatable this time…
I had to get out of there—I pushed my chair back and left.
Outside, I wondered what kind of friend I was…I never once thought “hey, what an asshole, not telling me what this was, or maybe saying—hey, it may be too heavy for you and shit.”
I came home with a lump in my throat, and a feeling of my own battle, back in my face…here, in this place, where it hadn’t been, until tonight.
I had left it “back there.”
I had moved on.
I had become a new me.
Yet, here it was again.
And here it will be again, maybe, some day, all of this reminded me: this is you, it happened to you, and it will likely happen again, someday. You didn’t leave SHIT behind.”
What meaning does anything have for me when I may not live to see the completion of what I start out to accomplish?
My real friends were mad, when I told them. My real friends knew better—and would have protected me from such an event.
To think I went in order to support this friend.
I went up to that roof.
And what I found waiting for me was two goons—fear and cancer—and they threw me off the roof.
I forgot to mention the best part; It turns out this friend wasn’t even there…he had had to have a small cyst removed yesterday, and didn’t send out an email until…I don’t know when. I checked my email 15 minutes before leaving, and there was no “hey, I won’t be there.”
I wish I could relive today all over again…it’s set me back so much in my emotional well-being. I’ve taken several steps back…who was I kidding? I was feeling so much better and in better spirits, and now this.
I just don’t think once it’s adulterated it can ever be wiped clean again. Can I go back to feeling that this new setting was really new? Can I go back to feeling like the new person I had become since getting here? Or am I really just the same old me, with a different wig on?
All I know is I answered the call to be at the side of a friend.
And this is what I was left with.
Or was it more like “Fight Club” where Ed Norton and Helena Bonham Carter are adicted to those group meetings where people just cry and feel sorry for themselves because they’re dying…is that why this friend goes to these? to be a crocodile, talking about how terrible it is to die, or to watch someone die?
Fuck if I don’t know this, already.
I hate these groups, and to have found myself unwillingly smack dab in the middle of one…I can’t even describe it to you, how it felt. A bit like I was sucker-punched, gut punched.
Yeah. A lot like being punched in the gut.
