June 1997
Nothing To It
That was my son Mark’s favorite expression, and it perfectly defined his upbeat, self-assured personality—even in his last days battling leukemia
I WAS FLYING BLIND. NOTHING IN MY EXPERIENCE gave me a frame of reference for this journey. My son Mark was dying of acute leukemia, and the two of us were racing across the margins of the Chihuahuan Desert east of Van Horn, searching for the new top leaves of the creosote bush, which when brewed into a tea were considered a cure for the disease by some Mexican curanderos. I had learned this in a letter from a man who was doing twenty years on a drug charge in federal prison. I have received hundreds of letters from people in prison, but they always wanted something from me. This guy just wanted to do me a favor. Mark and I both knew that it was the longest of long shots, but long shots were all we had.
The trip was in early March, about six weeks before Mark died. It was long and arduous, and it sapped what little strength he had left. The letter had explained that the two of us had to leave a “gift of water” for the creosote plants. We flew from Austin to Dallas to Midland, then drove 125 miles to an isolated place within sight of the Davis Mountains, two liter bottles of Evian in the seat between us. Mark slept almost all the way, racked with fever, chills, and nausea. After collecting three bags of leaves, we spent the night in a Midland motel, the kid so sick that I wondered if he’d make it through the night. I was awake until two in the morning, talking long distance to friends and family, trying to figure out our next move.
Mark’s condition was diagnosed in July 1996 at a cancer clinic in Atlanta, Georgia, the city where he grew up after his mother and I divorced and where he had lived since his own divorce in early ’94. He had undergone six intensive doses of chemotherapy, whose powerful toxins destroy cancer cells—and good cells as well. I suspect that one day we’ll look back at this wretched procedure the way we look back with revulsion at frontal lobotomies. But chemotherapy was the only treatment available for Mark’s type of leukemia. It wouldn’t cure him, but it could possibly put the cancer into remission long enough for doctors to perform a bone marrow transplant.
We had searched without success for a bone marrow donor for nine months. Unfortunately, no one in our family was a match, and neither were any of the 2.7 million people on the National Bone Marrow Registry. Among Caucasians, a match exists for a given patient about 80 percent of the time; among minorities, the figure drops to about 50 percent. One doctor speculated that finding a match for Mark was so difficult because there are traces of Native American blood in our family, but he was just guessing. Anecdotal evidence suggests that genetic tissue typing for bone marrow produces unexpected results. In 1993 Anne Connally, the daughter-in-law of John Connally, turned out to be the world’s only perfect match for a sixteen-year-old Japanese girl, who is alive and doing well today because Mrs. Connally was tested and added to the national registry in 1990.
In January and February of this year, Mark’s family and friends had staged testing drives in Atlanta, Little Rock, and Austin, adding another 1,500 people to the national registery, yet still there was no perfect match. We were desperate. Even as we slept, even as we prayed, the clock was ticking. After my wife, Phyllis, and I ran a full-page ad in Texas Monthly pleading for help, people called from all over the country, volunteering to be tested, extending their support, and contributing money to the Leukemia Society of America. Rosalind Wright, a sister of Austin writer Lawrence Wright, telephoned from Lexington, Massachusetts, where she had rallied thirteen tribes of Native Americans and personnel from a military base to get tested. A friend in California who is a Buddhist monk sent a seed blessed by the Dalai Lama with instructions on how Mark was to ingest it. The pilgrimage to the desert was only one in a series of things we tried.
The worst day of my life—worse even than the day Mark died—started early the next morning, when I drove Mark to Midland International Airport for a flight back to Atlanta. Until then I hadn’t realized how far the disease had progressed. He was so weak that I doubt he could have walked unassisted to the gate. I helped him into a wheelchair and pushed him. He had eaten almost nothing for a week, so we stopped at the coffee bar; I bought him a Coke and a banana, and he was able to keep them down. For two days he had said almost nothing. A question that needed a response got a nod or a shake of the head. Looking at him then, as pale and weak as a newborn puppy, I couldn’t help but remember that a year before, Mark and I had worked out together at my gym in Austin, both of us fit and seemingly invincible. As recently as Christmas 1996 he had looked reasonably strong and cheerful. But now you could almost see his life leaking away.
When it was time for him to board the plane, we hugged and kissed, knowing it might be our final good-bye. I was close to tears. Watching my son shuffle slowly down the ramp to his plane, his hairless head bowed in agony, his clothes hanging off his emaciated frame, a kid who had just turned forty but looked ninety, I kept thinking: Why him? Why not me? When a child dies, “Why?” is the last question to go away.
DURING OUR YEARS TOGETHER, we said a lot of good-byes, Markie and me, but one in particular sticks in my mind. He must have been around ten—a bright, resourceful, resilient, uncommonly stubborn kid—and he was dogging me to take him along on a business trip to New York. I explained that I didn’t have time to show him the sights, but he wanted to tag along, and I couldn’t say no. Our first night in the Big Apple, in a hurry to make an appointment, I gave him $20 and a key to the apartment where we were staying, then dropped him off in Times Square. I remember asking him, “Will you be okay?” His cocksure reply was, “Sure. Nothing to it!”
My cab hadn’t gone half a block when the stupidity of what I’d done slapped me upside the head: I’d deposited my ten-year-old son in the geographical center of the evilest, most sinister square mile in America. I threw open the door and raced back into oncoming traffic, but by then he’d been swallowed up in the crowd. For the next few hours, I was nearly sick with fear, imagining what might have happened. But when I got back to the apartment, there was Markie propped up on the king-size bed, a cat on his lap, eating a bowl of ice cream and watching a John Wayne movie. “Are you okay?” I asked, badly shaken. “Sure,” he said, grinning at me as though we were co-conspirators in a plot to overthrow the world. “Nothing to it!”
Because he grew up a thousand miles from where I lived, I saw him only a few times a year until he completed high school, in May 1975. A week after that he moved to Austin to attend the University of Texas, and for the first year, he slept in my large walk-in closet. I wasn’t married at the time, so we hung out together, shopping, cooking, eating, listening to music, having adventures. My dad had passed on to me an appreciation for cooking and eating, and I handed it down to Mark. Before long he was cooking gourmet meals that took three days to prepare and five hours to eat. I nicknamed him Maurice. Later, after he married Helen and moved into the professional world, Maurice’s seated dinners became legendary in Dallas and Little Rock. Journalists and politicians (among them Bill and Hillary Clinton) jockeyed for invitations. For one of my birthdays he whipped up a five-course dinner that included rack of lamb, dove breasts wrapped in bacon and sautéed in wine sauce, roasted ancho peppers with salmon and goat cheese, and an unbelievable dome-shaped dessert with layers of crushed Heath Bars, fudge cake, ice cream, and toasted butterscotch crust. Naturally, Maurice had selected the appropriate wine for each course.
Sometimes we wrote songs, Markie strumming his guitar and me jotting down the words. We could compose an entire opera in an afternoon. When my friend Sue Sharlot graduated from UT law school, we wrote a number for her graduation party called, “All You Gotta Do Is Know the Law, Then Boogie Til You Puke!” Another all-time favorite was “Beat Me Like the Bitch I Am!” We wrote alternate lines, laughing so hard we could barely get the words out: “Reel and rod me / Marquis de Sade me / Makes me feel so fine / But beat me like the bitch I am / And tell the world you’re mine!”
We were never like father and son—more like brothers or best friends. He always called me by my nickname, Jap, never Dad or Daddy. He found it easier to express his love than I did, and in his effortless manner he taught me to express my love too. He also taught me to appreciate his favorite expression: Nothing to it. It was a manifesto of the indomitable spirit, an attitude that recognized no limit. I just naturally assumed Markie could do anything he set his mind to, and I guess he felt the same about me. Together, we thought of ourselves as unconquerable. And for many years we were.
IN GREEK, “LEUKEMIA” MEANS “WHITE BLOOD.” Mark had M-5 leukemia, the most severe type of adult acute myelogenous leukemia, in which immature white blood cells called blasts take over the bone marrow and prevent it from making enough normal white and red cells and platelets. The blasts overwhelm the mature white cells that fight infection, the red cells that carry oxygen, and the platelets that help blood clot, spilling into the bloodstream and infiltrating organs and glands until the process of life shuts down. M-5 is particularly nasty and extremely resistant to chemotherapy.
Scientists don’t know what causes leukemia, only that there are different types that react differently to treatment: Children’s leukemia can be cured, for instance, while adult leukemia is almost always fatal. Victims of chronic leukemia sometimes live for years because the blasts are more mature and progress more slowly, but eventually the production of immature white cells quickens, and chronic leukemia progresses into acute leukemia.
