Liver

I hated liver until I got much older; late thirties, when a cushy job made gourmet cooks take over my menu, and Ma’s hash grinder showed up in an antique show, not a kitchen drawer.

(There’s not enough ketchup in the world to erase the memory of that godawful instrument.).

By then, liver had become a discovery. A bartender at Runyon’s introduced it to me, Linda. I knew her by her maiden name and by her first two married names, but I lost track after that.

This was under her first married name. I quickly declined the offer of the dinner special—liver and onions; she insisted I try it. I declined; she insisted, coquettishly. I declined. She said I liked steak, right? I was about to decline, again, but noticed we had attracted some attention, so I relented.

She was right, of course. It was wonderful. Thick, tender, juicy; it bore no resemblance to anything in my history named, “liver,” or anything of the liver family, or anything near the liver, like the spleen, the bile duct, the…I don’t know, the small intestine.

My knowledge of and familiarity with things liver-ish might have stopped there, but I knew I had a liver; I knew there was cirrhosis of the liver, which mysteriously had decimated many of the Lowe’s and their in-law’s, their neighbors and their good friends; and I knew that certain people in my life who cared very deeply about me half-expected me to trip over my liver one night on my way to the bathroom.

I never thought much about liver cancer, though.

Now, I do.

It seems I have liver cancer. I found out two-and-a-half-years after a massive stroke failed for some reason to kill me. And, my liver cancer appears to have nothing to do with my old habits, chief among which was the volume consumption of beer.

I have liver cancer the way a non-smoker has lung cancer. I have liver cancer because itinerant cancer cells roaming the planet happened upon a warm, cozy, hospitable, safe place in my liver to settle down, grow old and be happy.

Well, maybe not so safe. Warm, hospitable and cozy.

I’ve decided (with the consulting help of a surgeon, a few doctors, a bevy of nurses and one pending granddaughter due next month) to make it not so safe for a tumor.

“What the hell, I just busted my butt learning to say, ‘February,’ and, ‘Real Estate Agency,’ and to type, ‘alliteration,’ and, ‘communication.’ You think I’d lay down for a liver cancer that doesn’t have anything to do with my beer-drinking, which I don’t do any more, anyway?”

That’s the attitude I wish I could have, anyway—bold, defiant, devil-may-care, I guess, heroic.

My actual initial reaction, being brought up Irish Catholic, was, “Wow, whoever you are, I must have really pissed you off. You let me have two-and-a-half-years to sort of patch things up after the stroke—which I admit I fundamentally caused—and then you hand me this? A tumor? In my liver? What are you, a Sadist? Nurturing some kind of God complex, are we?

“Okay, withdraw that last remark.”

I talk to myself a lot, and play back the tapes, as if I were thinking.

When I first realized the stroke had not killed me, I was puzzled. Figure: I lived a great life, fruitful, useful, even entertaining. I left a lot of smiles in my wake, precious few frowns. I was ready. Sixty-two years was all right, 20 more than some: 20 less than others. I was never going to see Hobart, Tasmania, anyway.

The puzzlement, though, morphed into anger, when I realized what—well, I had more or less abdicated, really, but I didn’t see that right away—I had given up, in exchange for just living.

I could see not being able to walk, that was a fair trade. But not being able to speak? Me? Are you kidding? All right, the guitar goes. But, the writing? Are you crazy. Me? Why? I’ve been writing since before I knew what the scribbles actually were.

Then, about a year-and-half in, the Worm turned. It was amazing. By that time, I had walked. I knew the rudiments of pronunciation (though, I couldn’t apply them yet). I had re-learned the language enough to write letters.

I was having one of those conversations with myself, where every word is clear, at least in your head.

“You know, if you were anyone else, you would have given ten of your years to be Ed Lowe for just one. Just one. And, you had sixty-two. Sixty-two years as Ed Lowe.”

Yeah. I know. It’s hard to believe.

“And now, you have Ed Lowe’s girlfriend (thanks to the liver tumor, his wife, cagey bastard.)”

Yeah. I know that, too. Hard to believe.

“You have Ed Lowe’s memory. You have Ed Lowe’s children, and Ed Lowe even paid their tuition.”

True.

“So, what’s the problem?”

I guess there is no problem.

“Damned straight, there’s no problem.”

The Editor

I guess there comes a time when you have to look at your life, define what’s important and what isn’t, and get rid of what isn’t while you’re still wondering what made it loom so in the first place.

I never wanted to loom. I suppose I never I wanted to be loomed over, either, and that’s inherently a problem for the people who want to loom, because a loomer isn’t anything without at least one loomee.

In newspapers, they got away with avoiding excessive looming as long as the paper was small and manageable. Editors were editors, photographers, photographers, and reporters, reporters.

As soon as the newspapers got big enough to divide people into, “management,” and whatever was, “non-management” (It couldn’t be, “labor.” Photographers, reporters and artists would go crazy if they found out that guys they suddenly called, “management,” suddenly thought of them as, “labor.”).

I saw, and got caught up in, the transition from one to the other, and thought I would escape by declaring myself a, “columnist.” I didn’t actually declare myself a columnist, I just came back from any assignment with a story, whether it was the one I was assigned to or not, so that my member of management who had assigned me wouldn’t be embarrassed. It worked, and I was named columnist.

As columnist, I was able to assign myself three times a week. Some weeks were nerve-wracking, some were easy, depending on how lucky I was or how lazy. But I had conquered the looming. I was both management and (not “labor,” but we’ll call it that, here) labor—the loomer and the loomee.

An editor colleague (all right, a superior) noticed me around 1979 and set off to loom over me. I fought, until he demanded that I call the office every hour. One, two, maybe three days, and I confronted him. “What are we doing?” He said that he might someday have a column assignment for me and he wanted to be sure he knew where I was (this was in the days of pay phones, so I was calling from bars, and it was getting to me. Bar etiquette said a beer-in, a beer-out.).

I said, “Fine. Make me a general assignment reporter, again, and I won’t have to pretend that this three-columns-a-week [stuff] is important, any more.”

This was a mistake. I should have known—I did know—that he hadn’t made me a columnist, somebody higher than him had, so I was asking him to do what he could not do. I had just made an enemy for life.

He once asked me to write about Gov. Mario Cuomo’s plan to close Robert Moses State Park. I said, “You don’t want me to do that.” He said he did. He wanted me to write a column, as a resident of The South Shore, about my reaction to the plan. He thought I would write about Piping Plovers and seagulls. I was a fan of Mario Cuomo, but I felt this was a cheap trick. I wrote a column that began, “Ain’t nobody closing no Robert Moses State Park.” At 7 am, a panel truck pulled out of B & B Fish and Clam with a sheet across its transom that read: “Ain’t Nobody Closing No Robert Moses State Park.”

Cuomo was livid. He had his office call me all day. I never had spoken to a governor. He called my home and asked how I was going now to gain access to him. I said, “I never had access to you before. I’m a run-of-mill citizen.” Now, the newspaper and the governor were ticked off at me. I just wanted to be left alone, to be my loomer and loomee.

The editor and I separated, because I went into the Long Island edition, and he became the editor of The Queens Edition. I stayed as a loomer-loomee, while he amassed more people to loom over, eventually becoming the Editor of The Long Island Edition.

There, he asked me to consider an idea of my then wife’s: “The Fathering Series,” to alternate weekends with another series, “The Mothering Series,” about our respective relationships with our children. I had two girls from a earlier marriage and two boys from a current one.

I said, “As long as I own it.”

He said, “Well, you can’t.”

“Then, fine. Get somebody else.”

“Well, we’ll talk about it when it gets closer.”

“All right, but that’s my position. I write a series about my kids, you get to run it, and then it’s mine.”

Major dispute. Back n’ forth, me saying, “I understand. I really do. So, get another guy who doesn’t have this hangup.” Him saying, finally, “You know, we can make you write for Saturday.”

“You can make me write for Saturday?” I said. “Is that what this was all about? What about ‘making’ me write well? Can you do that? What about, ‘making,’ me write about my relationships with my children? Can you do that, too?”

I won, I thought, and I wrote a bi-weekly “Fathering” series for the next four years, when my wife said my writing about our marriage was getting in the was of our pending divorce. I agreed, and stopped. The irate editor said my stopping was his decision. I looked at him. I walked away.

Two years later, Tom Stites, a former Newsday editor, called from Kansas City to say congratulations on the book that Newsday was publishing with his company on the Fathering series. I hired a lawyer. After a year, we wrested a copywrite citation from Newsday. I had won again.

At long last, the editor became The Editor. So. he had to do it. I quit. Now, it amuses me.