“Well sometimes I think I’m Truman. I think the whole world is watching me. My life has been created to someone else’s expectations. Everything is a facade. The walls are plywood and the furniture is papier-mache. And then I think that if I could just run fast enough, I’d get around the next corner and find the back lot of the film set. But I can never run fast enough. By the time I arrive, they’ve built another street… and another.”
6
Muhammad Ali has a lot to answer for. When he lit the flame at the Atlanta Olympics there wasn’t a dry eye on the planet. Why were we crying? Because a great sportsman had been reduced to this— a shuffling, mumbling, twitching cripple. A man who once danced like a butterfly now shook like a blancmange.
We always remember the sportsmen. When the body deserts a scientist like Stephen Hawking we figure that he’ll be able to live in his mind, but a crippled athlete is like a bird with a broken wing. When you soar to the heights the landing is harder.
It’s Wednesday and I’m sitting in Jock’s office. His real name is Dr. Emlyn Robert Owen— a Scotsman with a Welsh name— but I’ve only ever known him by his nickname.
A solid, almost square man, with powerful shoulders and a bull neck, he looks more like a former boxer than a brain surgeon. His office has Salvador Dali prints on the walls, along with an autographed photograph of John McEnroe holding the Wimbledon trophy. McEnroe has signed it, “You cannot be serious!”
Jock motions for me to sit on the examination table and then rolls up his sleeves. His forearms are tanned and thick. That’s how he manages to hit a tennis ball like an Exocet missile. Playing tennis with Jock is eighty percent pain. Everything comes rocketing back aimed directly at your body. Even with a completely open court he still tries to drill the ball straight through you.
My regular Friday matches with Jock have nothing to do with a love of tennis— they’re about the past. They’re about a tall, slender college girl who chose me instead of him. That was nearly twenty years ago and now she’s my wife. It still pisses him off.
“How is Julianne?” he asks, shining a pencil torch into my eyes.
“Good.”
“What did she think about the business on the ledge?”
“She’s still talking to me.”
“Did you tell anyone about your condition?”
“No. You told me I should carry on normally.”
“Yes.
“Not really. Sometimes when I try to get out of a chair or out of bed, my mind says get up but nothing happens.”
He makes another note. “That’s called starting hesitancy. I get it all the time— particularly if the rugby’s on TV.”
He makes a point of walking from side to side, watching my eyes follow him. “How are you sleeping?”
“Not so well.”
“You should get one of those relaxation tapes. You know the sort of thing. Some guy talks in a really boring voice and puts you to sleep.”
“That’s why I keep coming here.”
Jock hits me extra hard on my knee with his rubber hammer, making me flinch.
“That must have been your funny bone,” he says sarcastically. He steps back. “Right, you know the routine.”
I close my eyes and bring my hands together— index finger to index finger, middle finger to middle finger, and so on. I almost manage to pull it off, but my ring fingers slide past each other. I try again and this time my middle fingers don’t meet in the middle.
Jock plants his elbow on the desk and invites me to arm wrestle.
“I’m amazed at how high-tech you guys are,” I say, squaring up to him. His fist crushes my fingers. “I’m sure you only do this for personal satisfaction. It probably has nothing to do with examining me.”
“How did you guess,” says Jock, as I push against his arm. I can feel my face going red. He’s toying with me. Just once I’d like to pin the bastard.
Conceding defeat, I slump back and flex my fingers. There’s no sign of triumph on Jock’s face. Without having to be told I stand and start walking around the room, trying to swing my arms as though marching. My left arm seems to hang there.
Jock takes the cellophane wrapper from a cigar and snips off the end. He rolls his tongue around the tip and licks his lips before lighting up. Then he closes his eyes and lets the smoke leak through his smile.
“God, I look forward to my first one of the day,” he says, rolling the cigar between his forefinger and thumb. He watches the smoke curl toward the ceiling, letting it fill the silence as it fills the empty space.
“So what’s the story?” I ask, getting agitated.
“You have Parkinson’s disease.”
“I already know that.”
“So what else do you want me to say?”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
He chomps the cigar between his teeth. “You’ve done the reading. I’ll bet you can tell me the entire history of Parkinson’s— every theory, research program and celebrity sufferer. Come on, you tell me. What drugs should I be prescribing? What diet?”
I hate the fact that he’s right. In the past month I have spent hours searching the Internet and reading medical journals. I know all about Dr. James Parkinson, the English physician who in 1817 described a condition he called “shaking palsy.” I also know it’s more common in people over sixty but one in seven patients show symptoms before they turn forty. Lucky me!
Jock ashes his cigar and leans forward. He looks more like a CEO every time I see him.
“How’s Bobby Moran doing?”
“Not so good. He seems to have relapsed, but he’s not talking to me. I can’t find out what’s happened.”
Jock thinks I should have stuck to “real medicine” when I had the chance instead of having a social conscience more expensive than my mortgage. Ironically, he used to be just like me at university. When I remind him of the fact he claims to have been a summer-of-love socialist because all the best-looking girls were left wing.
Nobody ever dies of Parkinson’s disease. You die with it. That’s one of Jock’s trite aphorisms. I can just see it on a bumper sticker because it’s only half as ridiculous as “Guns don’t kill people, people do.”
I spend a week convincing myself that I don’t have this disease and then Jock clouts me around the head and tells me to wake up and smell the flowers.
My reaction normally comes under the heading “Why me?,” but after meeting Malcolm on the roof of the Marsden I feel rather chastened. His disease is bigger than mine.
I began to realize something was wrong about fifteen months ago. The main thing was the tiredness. Some days it was like walking through mud. I still played tennis twice a week and coached Charlie’s soccer team. But then I started to find that the ball didn’t go where I’d intended it to anymore and if I took off suddenly, I tripped over my own feet. Charlie thought I was clowning around. Julianne thought I was getting lazy. I blamed turning forty.
In hindsight I can see that the signs were there. My handwriting had become even more cramped and buttonholes had become obstacles. Sometimes I had difficulty getting out of a chair and when I walked down stairs I held on to the handrails.
Then came our annual pilgrimage to Wales for my father’s seventieth birthday. I took Charlie walking on Great Ormes Head, overlooking Penrhyn Bay. At first we could see Puffin Island in the distance, until an Atlantic storm rolled in, swallowing it like a gigantic white whale. Bent against the wind, we watched the waves crashing over rocks and felt the sting of the spray. Charlie said to me, “Dad, why aren’t you swinging your left arm?”
“What do you mean?”
