Author Bio

GREG JENKINS

GIMME THE BREAD

Anytime I’m on the table to receive another dose of radiation, I let my thoughts go to the deer in my new neighborhood.  We’ve got plenty of deer, and thinking about them beats thinking about most other things.  It beats thinking about the radiation, for example, and the reason I’m receiving it.
       Lying on my back in the Radiation Room, my hands gripping the handlebars next to my ears, I muse on how the deer and I always meet at the same times every day. Once in late morning, when the sun looms high over the tall trees across the road, and then again late in the afternoon when I get back from the hospital.  Both times delight me, though in the afternoon the brown of the deer and the green of my rolling yard have a deeper, more somber tint. I like the deer, and they certainly perk up when they see me.  We’ve got a relationship, a symbiosis, that, for a moment anyway, makes all of us happy.
       I’ve tried to explain this to my boy Chester—about the deer and how we relate to each other.  The concept’s not that difficult, but he’s a very literal guy, and he doesn’t quite grasp where I’m coming from. “Deer!” he might squawk, as if I’d just announced I’ve been communing with a circle of leprechauns and fairies. “You got it,” I tell him. “Deer.”
       I call my son Chester “my boy,” but in fact he’s fifty-three years old. His head’s as round and bald and white as a hard-boiled egg.  His skinny eyes peer at me from beneath a pair of bushy eyebrows that look like caterpillars locked in a life-and-death struggle. Farther down, his mustached mouth tends to purse regardless of what’s on his mind. Habitually in a suit and tie, he’s a lawyer who deals in all sorts of legal minutia that no one else cares about or has even heard of, but I gather he does well enough. He owns a decent house, drives a decent car, belongs to Rotary—a decent club.  Since my wife and I split up decades ago, Chester’s been the only family I have, and on balance I’m OK with having him around.
       “Deer!” he’s apt to cluck at me, his mouth pursing in disapproval, his thick eyebrows twitching.
       “That’s right, Chester.  Deer.”

Before I’m permitted to enter the Radiation Room, I’ll be met by the two techs, a young man and a young woman, both in sea-green scrubs.  One of them—it could be either—will unfailingly ask me my birth date. It’s a hospital rule, I guess, a quick way to confirm my identity. I’m sure they know me and my birth date by now, but they’re bound to ask; I can count on it. Sometimes, to get ahead of the game, I’ll blurt out the answer before they can ask the question. They never react much when I state the year, but I can tell it wows them.  It’s as if I’ve referred to some early chapter in a history book, to an era when the newest, most cutting edge gadget was maybe a butter churn.
       Inside the room, I sit in a hard little chair and take off my shoes. The socks can stay, but take off those shoes; they might be dirty.  As I approach the table, I unbuckle my pants and drop them, along with my underwear, down to pubic level. I don’t have to drop them all the way, just to that level, and there’s an art to mastering the perfect pants drop—not too high, not too low. If I’m off an inch or two, the techs will make the adjustment. My shirt can stay. Once I’m resting on the table, I take hold of the handlebars and the techs maneuver my hips, making sure I’m lined up just so. Then they hustle the hell out of there so they can be clear of the radiation that’ll soon be coursing through my groin.
       Hulking over me is a monstrous metal-and-plastic contraption known as a Varian TrueBeam.  It’s a linear accelerator, which means it’s one doozy of a serious machine. A single glance, and you understand this baby’s no play toy. After a while, the beeping and buzzing noises start up, and parts of the machine move toward me, attached to robot arms: a square glassy screen, an oblong glassy screen and a big gray cone that does the actual blasting. For fifteen minutes or so these things come near me, rotate precisely around me, pause from time to time to do whatever they do, rotate some more, pause some more and eventually, without sign or ceremony, withdraw.
       A curious sidelight. While the process is underway, the techs cause rock music to play in the Radiation Room. No doubt this is meant to divert and relax the patients. Much of the music harks back to my salad days, so I’m fine with it, though I do find it somewhat weird under the circumstances. So on a given afternoon I may be getting zapped while listening to the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin or even Elvis; I always got a bang out of Elvis, even old fat Elvis in that huge sparkling white jumpsuit. But as I say, most of my focus isn’t on the music or even the TrueBeam, but on my newfound buddies, the deer.
       When a session ends, the techs come back into the room. One of them’ll tell me: “You can put your hands down now,” as if I’ve been under arrest. And I’ll release my fingers from the handlebars and bring my hands down to my sides.

Medically I’ve got some issues, but financially I’m in respectable shape; don’t ask me how.
       Not long ago I moved to this new house, this new neighborhood, closer to my son. It’s a comfortable wooded area with clean, ranch-style homes spread far apart and wide green yards and loads of wildlife. We’ve got squirrels, rabbits, foxes (not too sure how the squirrels and rabbits get along with the foxes) and of course the deer; they’re the most noticeable. I’ve seen as many as thirteen or fourteen together at once—they’re hard to count since typically they’re moving—and they feature both sexes, all sizes and various personalities. Yes, I’m convinced, based on careful observation, that different deer do have different personalities. Around here, though, they’re all basically tame.  The locals regard them as part of the community, and some go so far as to feed them.
       One day I decided to start feeding them myself. The more I did it, the more I enjoyed it. I still enjoy it. I love the way they cluster in front of me, watching me with those bottomless brown liquid eyes. Sometimes I give them oats, sometimes apples, sometimes corn. Oftentimes I give them bread, which isn’t tops for nutrition, but the deer relish it and it’s easy to work with. I wing the slices like Frisbees to the more cautious deer that hover at a wary distance; the bold deer come right up to me and take the bread straight from my hand. Sometimes I’ll have two or three of them scant inches away from me, jockeying left and right, vying for my attention.  More than once, a deer has deliberately poked her wet snout into my surprised belly.
       Chester, who occasionally hunts deer, finds all this abnormal, to say the least. I’ve heard him list reasons, as if to a jury, on behalf of hunting in general and hunting deer in particular. “It teaches discipline and patience,” he argues. “It puts the hunter in touch with nature. It gifts the deer with a kinder way to die than starvation.” Then there’s this gem: “Sometimes you’ve gotta thin the herd for their own good.” Uh huh.  With friends like that . . .  Well, we all have our own outlook, and I can tolerate his, though I don’t favor it, just as he doesn’t favor mine.
       Man, I don’t thin the herd; I fatten it up.
      
My medical problem kind of sneaked up on me. At a certain stage in life, all sorts of troubles sneak up on you. They see you, but you don’t see them, and by the time you do see them, they’ve got the edge on you.
       Early on, my doctor told me I had a “disease,” but it was so slow-moving that he didn’t even want to name it other than to call it a disease. This approach struck me as rather mystical, but I didn’t feel a pressing need to know about details that he didn’t feel a pressing need to share.
       “So what do we do about it?” I asked.
       “Nothing for now,” he said, “other than watch it.”
       And so for six months, a year, a year and a half, we watched it. But somewhere in the midst of all this watching, we learned to our dismay that the disease had abruptly put on speed and vigor.  (It was a fact that’d sneaked up on both of us.) Now, watching was no longer seen as a great option.
       Instead, the doctor presented me with two choices: have the ailing organ cut out of me, or have it radiated. I figured that since I’d been losing enough of my valuable assets as it was—my hair, my hearing, my faith in humanity—Door Number Two seemed the way to go.
       “Let’s do the radiation,” I said. And so the sessions, supported by a hard-rocking soundtrack, began.
       “When they do it,” Chester wanted to know, “do you feel anything?  Does it hurt?  Does it burn?”
       I told him no, I don’t feel a thing.
       “Huh,” he said, sounding almost disappointed.
       “Now Medicare,” I said, “when they get the bills, it probably stings them a little.”

Without much drama, the days slide by. I’m in the Radiation Room five days a week; off on Saturdays and Sundays to give my floundering body a chance to wonder what the hell’s going on. The odd thing is, I never get a progress report, an update, an overview of how we’re doing. Either the medical team doesn’t have that capability or they’re simply not willing to discuss it just yet.  I’m betting I’ll find out when the time is right, but Chester, my Philadelphia lawyer of a son, wants to dig.  Usually he’s alongside me when I meet with the doctor, and Chester is more than willing to lean in there with a cross-examination.
       “It hasn’t spread anywhere, has it?” he might ask.
       “Not that we know of.”
       “If it were to spread, where would it go?”
       “To the bones, most likely. The bones in the lower back.”
       And me with my back aching as though someone whacked it with a two-by-four!
       “You’re confident the radiation is working?”
       “Our track record is very good.”
       “How good,” boring in on him, “is very good?”
       “Ninety-five percent success rate.”
       Here we might see Chester’s mouth purse in a half-dozen different directions, one after the other, all of them expressing optimism. Personally, I’m more inclined to brood on that five percent failure rate. Once upon a time I used to bet on horses, and I’m aware that sometimes long shots do come in.
       Chester again: “When will we know for sure?”
       “We’ll find out soon.”
       Meanwhile I deal as best I can with the side effects. The weakness, the fatigue, the sudden scrambling trips to the bathroom for one purpose or another.  (Until recently, my go-to dietary supplements were vitamins and protein powder.  Now I lean on Imodium and Flomax.)  But I try not to brood on these small annoyances—though they can be hard to ignore. With an effort of will, I’m able to direct my thoughts to the deer, some of whom I’ve actually named.
       Name an animal, and he’s no longer outside you; he moves inside.
       He moves inside, and he takes up residence.

Strictly speaking, the deer I’m feeding this morning are all outside; they’re in my backyard. A whole slew of them.  Also in my backyard, standing next to me, is my trusty assistant Chester, who’s awkwardly holding several bags of bread.
       Some of the deer I recognize.  There’s Spunk and Buddy and Susie and Aloysius . . . They and their chums are facing me and my boy in a jostling semi-circle, three or four deep, and I can tell they’re hungry. When deer are hungry, especially for something as tasty as fresh bread, they can get fractious, as they are today. They might bump into each other, chase each other, rear up on their hind legs and throw some hooves at each other. It’s like a meeting of the Knesset. So I’m dishing out the bread as fast as I can—a slice here, a slice there. Sometimes I toss the bread; other times I pop it straight into a deer’s chomping mouth. You haven’t lived till you’ve fed a big-eyed fawn, still in spots and no larger than a collie, a morsel of bread straight from your fingers.
       With a squadron of deer in front of us, very close, very active, pushing toward us, Chester can’t help but notice them; they cannot be overlooked.  But, as usual, he has his own agenda.
       “Today’s the day,” he sings out, as if hoping for a job as local herald.
       “What day,” I come back at him, my voice flat.
       “The day the doctor gives us the scoop, the lowdown. You know—on your condition.”
       “Yeah, I know. Hand me a bag.”
       “Hand you a bag?!” His eyebrows appear to be at war with each other.  “You don’t care?  You’re not interested in, uh . . .?”
       “Would you please hand me a bag of bread?”
       He does, and I continue feeding my pals.
       Of course I’m interested in our next jaunt to the hospital and the news it’ll bring. But I prefer not to dwell on these matters. Today might be the day that someone far above my station has decided to thin the human herd by one slightly detached old man. How could I not be interested in that?
       I try to picture the doctor as we’ll sit down together in another hour or two and how he might go about disclosing that verdict to yours truly. Is there a formula? A protocol? I can see him now with his face all grim like Chester’s when he’s working up an especially thorny lawsuit. The doctor’ll fold his hands on his desk, hesitate for a blink or two, then look me dead in the eye and say: “Listen.  Please.  I, uh . . . I’m sorry, but there’s something I need to tell you.” And that’ll be lights out.
       Or, for all I know, he may adopt a different tack altogether. Maybe his style will turn out to be breezy and irreverent, like: “Hey. You’re no kid anymore, Bub, and your insides might as well be fish stew. So guess what.”
       In all honesty, neither method would sit well with me.
       Gradually I realize that Chester is speaking to me.  “Ninety-five percent probability you’re in the clear, Dad,” he reminds me and gives me a brisk thumbs-up. “I like your chances.”
       But the only comment I make is to the deer.  “Here, baby,” I say, dispensing more bread.  “Here, baby.”

Now, with a definite note of surprise, Chester says: “Whoa!  Look at that.” He’s pointing at a deer, a nubbin buck right in front of me, but I see nothing unusual about him. “Look at his ankle,” he says, pointing again.
       I do, and I see that the deer’s left rear ankle is swollen to three times its normal size. It’s as if he’s wearing a fat brown boot.
       “Oh, my God, Spunk,” I say to the deer. “What happened?”
       His spirit undimmed, the deer hobbles closer to me (I call him Spunk for a reason) till we’re almost nose to nose. I offer a slice of bread, and he devours it in an instant.
       “What am I gonna do about that ankle?” I ask Chester.
       “I dunno,” he shrugs. “You can’t take him to a doctor.”
       “I gotta do something. Jeez, that’s awful.”
       “Feed him. He looks famished.”
       He is famished. I offer Spunk more bread, and he practically inhales it. I give him some more, and then some more. Same response—the bread disappears.
       “You’ll be OK,” I coo at him, and I think maybe he will be. But who could say for sure?
       “Deer are tough,” Chester assures me.
       “Are they?”
       “They may not look tough, but they are. I know that from experience.”
       I sense he’s about to spin me a yarn about how he once shot a deer, but it didn’t die immediately, and he had to track it for untold miles through a dense foggy forest, following the blood trail—but I’m not in the mood for that crap.
       Turning to Spunk, I let my eyes fall on his fuzzy face. “Are you tough?” I ask him and watch as another slice of bread vanishes. “Huh?  You a tough guy?”
       Whether he’s tough or not, I can’t really say.  He probably is.  But this deer is obviously living in the here and now, his puffed-up ankle more my concern than his. Inwardly, I applaud his attitude.  I cheer his vitality. Gimme the bread, his eyes say to me.  To hell with the ankle.
       The Spunkster!
       So I feed him some more, him and the others, while Chester does his best to assist me.

At last I haul out my pocket watch and give it a squint. Replacing the watch, I nod at my Ford pickup, which has been washed, waxed and aimed at the hospital.
       “Guess it’s time we talk to the doctor,” I tell Chester. “You ready?”
       “I’m ready,” he says. “You ready?”
       “Doesn’t matter. It’s time.”
       As we walk to the truck, me humming “Jailhouse Rock,” the deer scatter, their white tails up in the air like little totem poles, and I’m already looking forward to seeing them next time. 
       All the next times.
       My boy reaches for his keys—he’s a splendid chauffeur—but I step in front of him. “That’s all right,” I tell him, jangling my own keys. “I’ll drive.”The southern third of my back throbbing in protest, I climb behind the wheel and fire up the V6. “Chester the Jester,” I razz him. “C’mon, get the hell in here. We don’t wanna be late.”
       “No big rush,” he says.
       He clambers in with a grunt and a sigh as my humming now ramps into outright singing.  “Warden threw a party in the county jail . . .”  While he’s still buckling his seat belt, I tromp on the gas.  “Prison band was there, and they began to wail. . .”
       As I drive, it occurs to me that I’ve already seen more summers than every deer in the world; more summers by far than the King of rock ’n’ roll. I take those things as a plus.
       Whichever way it goes at the hospital, I’ll deal with it.
       Gimme the news, Doc.
       Gimme the bread.