Pronoun Problems: A Novel About Friendship, Transgender and (eventually) Ninjas

21 - Unfulfilled Dreams and Maybe Cocaine

October, 1994

The week before our nuptials, I remained in our apartment while Samantha stayed with her parents in the San Gabriel Valley. She would be personally overseeing all of the final preparations for the wedding, while I would be lying in the fetal position on the couch, clinging to life.

It was all Doug's fault. In the waning days of the first season of The Has-Beens, he had developed the most ferocious cough I had ever witnessed. It was so bad that he literally coughed himself unconscious in the middle of The Room.

It was astounding. Doug coughed. And coughed. And coughed. And then he just kept coughing. His face got progressively redder, his coughs got progressively weaker. And then his shoulders drooped as he slumped down in his chair. His chin was on his chest, cushioned by a layer of neck fat, and his eyes were closed.

He still wasn't breathing and we all looked at each other, worried and uncertain.

Did Doug just die? And if so, do we get to go home early?

We turned our attention back to Doug, waiting to see if he'd start breathing again and wondering how long we should wait before somebody did something. Although what that something would have been is hard to say.

But Gabe wasn't alarmed. He had, we would learn, seen this a few times over the previous few days. In fact, the day before in their shared office, he had seen Doug lurch forward and slam his head into his desk, breaking the bridge of his glasses which were now held together by Scotch tape, Revenge of the Nerds style.

"So who's got a pitch on page twenty-four?" Gabe said nonchalantly, his unlit cigar bouncing in the corner of his mouth.

Moments later, Doug twitched back to life, inhaling sharply. He took a few breaths and his skin regained its normal pastiness. "Sorry about that," he said. It was a strange thing to be apologizing for, but Doug was nothing if not considerate.

"Do you think maybe you should go home?" I suggested gingerly. This was partly out of concern, but mostly because I was sitting right next to him.

"It's OK," he assured me. "I'm not contagious."

I'm not contagious is one of those strange, compulsive lies that people tell, the immunological equivalent of insisting, No, you didn't wake me! after being jolted out of REM sleep by a three a.m. phone call, the drool still wet on the pillow. I didn't trust Doug's self-diagnosis — he was a genius, but he wasn't a doctor — but I didn't want to insult him, either, so I surreptitiously scooted my chair another six inches away from him, which I reasoned would create an effective buffer between myself and Doug's savage airborne pathogens.

I wasn't a doctor, either.

I came down with an upper respiratory infection three weeks before my wedding. I suffered painful coughing fits in which my throat would lock up like I had displeased Darth Vader. It was terrifying, those interminable seconds when I could not draw a breath, but it happened so often that it started to feel like a normal part of my day.

Wake up, have breakfast, cough until almost dead, shower, nap...

Recovery was slow and it wasn't until the Wednesday before the wedding that, thanks to some industrial strength antibiotics that I think are now illegal, my cough was finally on the mend. I still felt like crap, but at least it was improving crap. I was also rather depressed. These were the final days of what the married men I knew wistfully referred to as "freedom" and spending them alone on the couch, swaddled in my grandmother's afghan, eating microwaved Trader Joe's Chicken & Bean Mini-Tacos and watching infomercials for exercise machines and telephone psychics seemed utterly pathetic. I felt I should do something.