Henry Flesh (1948-2005)

In more than a dozen installments of Kingdom of the Sick, three of which are reprinted here, he reported the medical logistics and emotional landscape of dying. He preferred of course to view this work as a chronicle of recovery and survival, but it was not to be. The columns describe loneliness, fear and pain. They are hopeful without clutching delusions; sober without sinking into self-pity. In short, they are brave.

Before I ever met Henry in person, before he got sick, I envied him. His articles were often windows onto a busy and colorful social life: nights out with gangs of costumed party kids and Israeli fashion designers, underground sex parties, elegies for personal friends like the independent filmmaker Sarah Jacobson, with whom he underwent chemo at St. Vincent's. Henry was easy to like. It was no wonder he had so many friends. After dropping out of Yale in the late 60s, Henry pursued an artist's life in countercultural communities from London to Morocco, California to Crete. His first published novel, Massage, came relatively late in life, but won a Lambda Literary Award for best book from a small press. A passage can be found in the audio archives at Salon.com.

Henry was working on his third novel when he died. It was a satire of hypocrisy and greed in the indie arts world, based on his soured relationship with his old friend and publisher, Johnny Temple of Akashic Books. It was an experience that left him sad to the end.

It's funny how you remember the little things. The only time I visited Henry at the Weill Cornell Medical Center, I noticed that he had covered the painting on the wall with a towel. That is absolutely the ugliest painting ever created, he said. It hurts to look at.

I walked over, peeked under the towel, and laughed. The sweet and talented motherfucker was right. We miss him already. Alexander Zaitchik

April 21, 2004

"Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place." Susan Sontag, in Illness as Metaphor.

My entry into Sontag's "kingdom of the sick" was marked by a dull terror. One day I was an ambitious novelist and editor, as socially active as I was hardworking, a 56-year-old man who had hitherto known no major affliction. The next I was primarily defined to some by the disease that I'd just discovered I had: mantle-zone non-Hodgkins lymphoma, an extremely serious blood disorder that is potentially life-threatening.

I was given the news that I was ill at 11 a.m. on November 25, when my doctor called to say she suspected I had leukemia (a diagnosis later changed) and that a bed was awaiting me at St. Vincent's Hospital. Without warning, I'd been transported into that other worldalthough my shock on hearing her words was so great that I couldn't grasp at first how very much my life had changed. All I could do was grab whatever I thought I would need during my hospital stay and toss it into a duffel bag. I looked plaintively at my cats, then called a neighbor to ask that she take care of them during my absence. A friend arrived to help me, and we headed out my front door.

The numbness I was feeling stayed with me for half the taxi ride to St. Vincent's. I think I babbled inanities to my friend much of the time, though I'm not quite sure what I said. I realize, however, that at some point, as we neared the hospital, a sudden feeling of an almost preternatural calm came over me. I am, certainly, not a religious personhaving been agnostic for most of my lifeyet as we drew closer, I saw with a startling clarity that I had to accept what was happening to meto take it all in and absorb it, then, as much as I could, try to right things I thought had gone wrong: rifts with my family, serious disputes with some friends. The misunderstandings that now seemed petty. To some extent, of course, my resolve arose from stunned feelings of regret and sentimentality. Yet it came, too, from an incontrovertible sense of what I needed to do in order to survive.

I couldn't have foreseen then what was to come in the months that followed: a stay in the hospital that lasted five weeks; the countless consultations with countless doctors; the removal of my enlarged spleen; the rounds and rounds of chemotherapy and other drugs; the stem-cell transplants that I will undergo later this year. But I do know the tenacity that came over me that first day has been with me ever since. I intend to keep it there.

May 18, 2004

It was clear from the moment I was wheeled into St. Vincent's emergency room that I had entered a new world. There I was, lying on a cot, being fed medicine intravenously, surrounded by numerous other patients, many even sicker than me.

I lay there for hours, alternately terrified and bored, attempting to grasp what was happening. It was suspected I had leukemia, and that seemed to me unbelievably portentous, like I could die at any second. Despite my fears, as the hours passed into late afternoon, I grew increasingly hungry, for I'd eaten nothing that day. Finally, at 5, the kind nurse who had been taking care of me offered to go outside to get me something to eat. Her generosity made me feel infinitely better.

Still, it was an extremely alienating experience. I was cut off from all that was familiar, dressed in one of those horrible hospital gowns that never fit properly, with tubes in my arms that made movement difficult. I was given pills round the clock by frazzled, overworked nurses, some gentle and compassionate, others cold and distant.

I was most disturbed by the behavior of some of the night nurses and nurses' aides. I remembered a story about the late photographer Mark Morrisroe who, suffering from AIDS, was repeatedly hospitalized near the end of his life. One night he was convinced he was going to die and so, infuriated by the brusque behavior of many of those tending him, scrawled on a slip of paper, "The night nurses are killing me." Then he stuffed it up his ass, hoping his nemeses would be blamed if the worst occurred.

I knew just how he felt. There was one aide, "Mrs. Jasper," who particularly offended me. She'd come into my room to take my temperature, change my bedpan or give me pills, invariably greeting me with a clipped, coldly unpleasant, "Mr. Flesh!" I dreaded her shifts.

I had a roommate who was dying and was usually sleeping or drugged. One night he soiled his bed twice. The second time, Mrs. Jasper entered our room and furiously shouted at him, "Mr. Rodriguez!" before pushing him aside with a snarl and churlishly changing his linens. Mr. Rodriguez only groaned.

"You realize," I told her when she came to my bed, "that we're human beings who just happen to be sick." She gazed at me with ill-disguised hostility, saying nothing.

The next day Mr. Rodriguez mentioned that he'd heard what I'd said and was grateful. I felt better, too, knowing that such gestures of defiance were necessary if I were to make it through all the shit coming my way.

October 1, 2004

After falling ill last year and experiencing everything that came afterwarda month in the hospital, the removal of my spleen, many rounds of chemotherapyI felt that my sex life was over. There I was, middle-aged and riddled with lymphoma, hardly the best calling card for dating. My feelings of sexlessness were compounded by the disappearance of my hair, which seemed to be another signifier of a lost potency. I felt gelded.

I tried everything I couldengaging in halfhearted flirtations, fantasizing timidly, watching pornbut nothing worked. My desires had vanished. I attempted to see this as a blessing, a relief from the curse of a persistent, distracting randiness, but something was wrong. A crucial part of my life was missing.

Eventually, as my recovery progressed, I started going out more. Indeed, as if to distract myself, I attended more parties and visited more clubs than ever before. Though I met quite a few attractive men, I couldn't make even the slightest effort at getting to know them in a more intimate way. A lack of compulsion on my partnot to mention a sense that there were no erotic possibilities left for meheld my actions in check.

I'm not sure how or exactly when, but something shifted subtly. I'd notice, for instance, a shapely thigh or tight butt on some kid, and allow myself to imagine erotic adventures. One evening, several weeks before I was due to return to the hospital for my first stem-cell transplant, something more concrete occurred. I was celebrating my birthday with a group of friends at a new club that holds an amateur striptease competition in which the winner receives $300.

One of my companions was a comely young Russian named Sasha, whose charms were patently plain even to a person with my ravaged libido. "Should I try?" he asked me when the contest was announced. "Why not?" I answered, instantly titillated.

Sasha performed one of the most brilliantly slutty strips I've ever seen, spreading his ass cheeks lustfully as he humped the wall. To no one's surprise, he was the winner. But then, so was I: That night, at long last, my latent lusts came to the fore.

They came to full fruition a few days later during Fashion Week, at an after-party at the Maritime Hotel. My conquest (another Russian, this one named Yuri) spotted me across the runway during the show, then subsequently grabbed me at the party. How could I resist? He was extraordinarily nice, wonderfully handsomesweet and luscious.

When I recall that night, everything seems infinitely glamorous, perfectthe consummate counterbalance to my second stay in the hospital, a preparatory antidote to the long-dreaded stem-cell procedure that I am about to endure.