Cancer Drive

by Jim Washburn

Cancer is uncontrolled, invasive growth; the replication of cells without regard to the whole organism. I just looked up cancer on Wikipedia. The article is accompanied with hideously vivid photos of various tumors pulled from human bodies. You get the feeling that just looking at them could cause the stuff to metastasize through your eyes. The cancer-ridden flesh and organs look worse even than the sheep’s thalamus gland I once mistakenly ordered in a restaurant in Roquefort. Total vampire country, by the way, Roquefort. You’re so busy looking at the cheese wheels in those caves you don’t notice the bats hanging from the ceiling.

Chris Gaffney

I was thinking about cancer in my last column. I still am. Remember that I wrote last month about my friend Chris Gaffney who’d just been diagnosed with liver cancer? Remembering him is all we can do now. He passed away on April 17, leaving a great big hole in a lot of folks’ lives that no one else can fill. If you didn’t get a chance to appreciate him while he was here, YouTube is suddenly awash with videos of him. Check some out (his version of Johnny Bush’s “Pardon Me, I’ve Got Someone to Kill” is always a nice way to start your business day), see if the Gaff doesn’t move you, too, and send some money to the www.helpgaff.com website, because even though Gaff’s moved beyond help, his widow needs help with the glut of medical bills their cornhole insurance refuses to cover.

I’ve another friend who’s just been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Maybe it’s a disease that’s just identified more today, or maybe society’s more willing to talk about it. All I know is that for most of my life, we never heard dick about prostate cancer, and these days it’s the number one man-killing cancer in the U.S., outstripping even lung cancer.

This would worry me more had I not come across a 2003 study from Australia finding that men who masturbated frequently in their 20s are less likely to get prostate cancer. In my twenties I so surpassed their definition of frequently that today I might very well be a walking antidote for the disease.

What I hear from a friend who had a cancerous prostate removed last year, is that, along with copious oodles of pain, when you’re minus a prostate you’ve got to learn to use new muscles to stop from pissing yourself, which is akin to learning to chew food by wiggling your ears.

Nietzsche said, “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” But I’ve learned from experience how that which doesn’t kill you still hurts like a son of a bitch.

I feel for my friend, who now may be facing such prospects. There simply aren’t any good choices. Have it removed? Try to shrink it with chemo? Each can carry tremendous downsides, and there’s no clear path which one’s right. Where do you turn?

In my friend’s case, it’s to Eddie Vedder’s Into the Wild soundtrack. Have you ever found that at particularly traumatic junctures of your life, there’ll be one album that speaks to you so strongly it becomes the constant-rotation soundtrack for all you’re going through? It might be Pet Sounds or it could be Perri the Squirrel; when you’re flailing in quicksand you grab at whatever’s handy, and sometimes it’s strong enough to pull you through.

I figured that was the case with my friend and Eddie’s album, since he had a copy to give to me, but couldn’t actually give it to me without first playing big chunks of it on his truck’s CD player. After six songs I got the suspicion—and he copped to it—that he wasn’t so much introducing me to the album as he was loading up on the songs so he could make the six-minute drive home without it. Eddie’s done a good one there.

Speaking of driving: I have a theory on toll roads. Uncontrolled growth that’s bad for the greater organism is cancer, right? So it might be argued that sprawling housing tracts sprouting in our last uncovered areas without regard to the overload they place on water resources, waste services, traffic, and other crucial infrastructure is cancer. (Please don’t forget, however, that we here at FourStory advocate for more and better low-income, affordable cancer.)

Whenever some part of your body grows, the rest of your body responds to it. So when a tumor is growing, it sends a message to your central control system, where Hemo the Magnificent goes, “New growth? Needs nourishment!” and causes capillaries and such to form specifically to service your tumors. In the larger world, toll roads remarkably spring up to feed new development that isn’t served by existing roads. You’ll hear any number of reasons promulgated to justify toll road construction—“It’ll alleviate congestion on our existing arteries”; “It’ll pay for itself”; “It’ll piss off surfers”—but look at the money and interests behind them, and you’ll find developers there.

It’s not a new idea. Early in the last century, Henry Huntington had a knack for running his Pacific Electric lines to barren tracts of land he had conveniently bought up on the cheap. Huntington Park, Huntington Beach and other burgs he didn’t bother naming after himself all started to look like good places to live once they were connected to L.A. via the Red Cars, and property values soared.

That was back when greed was fun, when California had so many untapped resources that unbridled self-interest often ended up serving the public good. In retrospect, the Red Cars were a tremendous idea: non-polluting railways that put most spots in the Southland within easy reach of anyone with a nickel.

Would that they were here now. Earlier this week, I drove my sister up to see our dad in L.A. He lives on Barham near the Warner Brothers Studios, an hour’s drive when there’s no traffic, except there’s always traffic, and some days that’s amounted to a four or five hour round trip. I don’t always show up in a good mood.

So when I head up again tomorrow, I figured, what the hell, let’s take public transportation the whole way. As far as I can gather online, going one-way will involve three buses, a train, a subway, a half-mile on foot, and about four hours and fifteen minutes of total, hobo-like relaxation. I’ll let you know how it works out.

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