The stars may have been shining in Berkeley that late summer’s night, but I couldn’t see them. I was doubled over in my backyard, puking, with the gut-searing spasms of a chemo patient.
This was not how my life was supposed to be. Only six months earlier I had been following a well-ordered routine as a history grad student, up every day at 7 a.m. to walk the exact same route from my apartment on the Southside to the University’s outdoor pool. By 7:30, I’d be slicing through the crisp water with an even crisper stroke. From there, I’d head over to Doe Library, arriving precisely at 9:00. Afternoons were spent teaching undergrads, and more nights than most I fell asleep in my boyfriend Noah’s arms.
My routine gave me structure and comfort – the way I imagine a strait jacket might feel to someone who is not struggling to get out.
The first hint that my tidy life was in danger had come earlier that year when, on my nightly route home from the library, a man had stuck a pistol into my ribs, demanding my near-empty wallet (I was only a grad student!) and my cheap watch (ditto). He nuzzled the gun deeper into my side, roughly pushing me in the direction of People’s Park, a dark hole known for drug trafficking and violent crime.
No good can come of this, I realized as I quickly assessed the situation. A moment later I saw a car approaching and ran toward it, screaming for help. ”Stop or I’ll shoot!” I heard the gunman shout as I rolled over the car hood and landed on the pavement, more disoriented than hurt, as the sedan sped away. When I looked back to where the gunman had stood — no one. Into the park, disappeared.
For a few days after, this bungled assault sat with me as just another pedestrian example of urban crime. Lucky for me it hadn’t ended badly, and I returned to my regularly scheduled program. As it turned out, however, that wasn’t the last of it.
Unconsciously at first, then deliberately, I started taking different routes to and from campus, randomly making my way to the pool, to class, to the library. It was as if my well-ordered life, with its promise of comfort, predictability, even safety, was now in jeopardy.
A month later came the testicular cancer diagnosis – and with it the required removal of the offending malignancy. With no routine to fall back on, the morning of my surgery proved to be a complete improvisation. Up before dawn, I lingered in the shower, holding both testicles for the last time. It felt like I was saying goodbye to a lover who had betrayed me, but whom I still loved.
Once dry, I freaked – not about the diagnosis, not about the surgery, but about getting dressed. I put on sweatpants and a sweatshirt (no, too casual); then dress khakis and a button-down shirt (too schoolboy); then jeans and a pullover (that wasn’t right either). Mastery of my domain had been reduced to the sartorial and ridiculous choice of what to wear to the hospital.
Ninety minutes later my sense of being dragged into a vortex deepened as I pulled up to the U.C.S.F. Medical Center, high on Parnassus Heights, enveloped in a swirling fog. By noon it was all over (the procedure anyway), and I was in my room, when suddenly Noah was standing above me with a spray of lilacs. Instead of being overjoyed to see him, all I could think was: “Here I am lying in a hospital bed, with a fake testicle and a catheter, unable to even lift myself out of bed with the pull bar hanging above me.” Obsessively trying to connect the dots of causation, I suddenly understood that my so-called well-ordered life had been an illusion.
I had read The Maltese Falcon earlier that year, drawn to its story. But now Dashiell Hammett’s words about how capricious life may be took on new meaning:
“The life [Flitcraft] knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.”
I started to more fully grasp the lesson that had begun with the foiled mugging. Like Flitcraft, I was witnessing my own “falling beam.” I’d had no control over the gunman, but at least I had been able to choose flight. Facing a cancer diagnosis, my control had been reduced to jeans versus khakis. What might blind chance deliver next?
I was only too soon to find out.
Once home, I was determined to live my daily life as I had once known it, resuming my routines as best I could. A month later I was back doing morning laps, hibernating in the library, and spending time with Noah. From the outside, it was as though nothing had happened.
Then my early-stage disease was reclassified as Stage 2, and with the new diagnosis came weekly chemotherapy, which threw my routine completely out of whack. As my schedule fell apart I felt myself spiraling into chaos and I tried to take control wherever I could. Like an anorexic, I felt I could regain my sense of power and mastery by deciding what went in my mouth, embarking on a high-fiber, low-calorie, sugar-free, nearly organic, lean protein diet that I thought might improve my odds (but left me starving!).
By week four of chemo, even though I hadn’t yet lost a strand of hair, I went to my hair cutter and had her shave it all off. Then, I dumped Noah in the most perfunctory of break-ups. (If there were a chance that Noah would leave me, I decided to be sure to do it first.)
And that’s how I came to be puking in my backyard, completely adrift, and alone.
I didn’t have to be a member of Alcoholics Anonymous to know its first principle: “Admit you are powerless.” And that’s just what I did that night. The journey that had started with a gun in my ribs was ending with nothing less than a new understanding of the world. On that dark night, I came to see that I could not master the world about me, that it was time for a new way of thinking. What that was I wasn’t sure. But in that moment under the starry sky I finally understood that in order to hold on, I would have to let go.
Steven Petrow lives in Hillsborough, N.C., and is the author of “Steven Petrow’s Complete Gay & Lesbian Manners” (Workman, 2011). Follow him on Twitter @stevenpetrow and on Facebook.