"Gosh what a depressing book," Marsha says. "About two writers. Barely able to make ends meet. They write for small literary mags that don't pay much, if anything at all. Middle-aged, or thereabouts when they meet. The girlfriend of one introduces the one, Irv, to the other, Leonard." Charlene takes a sip of her diet Sprite and says "I know the type." "Well I don't have to tell you neither of them is a catch, but they get their share of women somehow." "Somehow," Charlene echoes. "The story follows them through their lives until they get to sixty-something. No chapters, hardly any paragraphs, no breaks, the book just pushes forward in one headlong 220-page dash." "I hate books like that," Charlene says, "Where is our pizza anyway?" "I do too, ordinarily, but this one kept me pretty riveted, if riveted is something you can be in a moderate sense. It was like a long monologue. Amazing how the narrative moved through time. Before you know it, everyone was old and looking back to the time when the book began. Anyway, it turns out that Leonard gets dementia from Lyme disease and Irv's wife has some sort of crippling thing going on herself. Like Lou Gehrig's disease, I forget what they call it." "Amylsomething-something sclerosis, or something." "Right. Actually, it's never specified, but it's pretty horrible. The woman is wheelchair bound, a total invalid, and Leonard, who otherwise sounds like a pretty selfish bastard, has to take total care of her, and by doing so attains a certain level of sympathetic humanity, although he insists on writing about everything, including his wife's illness, the details of which can be, not just gruesome, but pretty damn embarrassing. Wait a minute. Did I say Leonard? Actually, it's Irv that takes care of his invalid wife. Leonard is the other guy, the guy with the dementia from the Lyme disease whose wife is taking care of him. I know it's a bit confusing. That's a theme of the book, by the way, a recurring motif, not the confusion about who's who, but how these guys, especially Irv, use their lives as material for their fiction." Charlene played with her straw, stabbing at the bubbles in her Sprite. "Tell me about it. On second thought, don't. But otherwise go on, I'm listening, even interested, though I doubt I'll ever read this Magnum Mopus." "I'm giving you a bad impression, I'm afraid, but it's quite good, really. Though, like I said, depressing as all hell. The way it's written, very casually, almost chatty, that's this guy's style, everything I've ever read by this guy he writes like this. Seems unedited. Maybe it is. I'm sure it's harder than it looks to write like that. It has to be. Or everyone would do it. Rambles all over the place, backward and forward in time, going off on tangents." "Why do I ever order pizza in these places," Charlene says, shaking her head. "A hundred thousand pizza places in Brooklyn and I come here to order pizza. Serves me right. How can you eat this crap?" Marsha shrugs. "I don't know. It's not so bad if you think of it as something else, not as pizza." "Go on. About the book, I mean." "Well there's not much more to it than what I've told you. Irv's wife has this ALS, Lou Gehrig thing going on and Leonard has dementia and is being nursed by his wife and Irv and the wife exchange letters and eventually Leonard gets to be too much for Tessie, that's his younger wife, to care for on her own and she has to commit him to a nursing home and it's not such a good one since he never made much money, certainly not with his writing, and only a small amount as an adjunct professor when he still had his wits about him. The book ends with Irv visiting Leonard in the nursing home and trying to communicate with his old friend and of course it's difficult because of the dementia and ironic that these two guys devoted their whole lives to literature, to words, to communication and here they are, unable to have a simple conversation, cause everything in Leonard's head is all jumbled up and he's paranoid and forgetful and etc etc. Like I said, it was just horribly depressing, the kind of thing you don't like to think about…how life ends, the way we fall apart little by little." "I'd rather get hit by a bus. Boom. All over." "Yeah, but the question is, when do you step off the curb and let the bus hit you? That's the problem. Cause we tend to make compromises one after another. We lose this, but we still have that, etc. etc. etc. until we're in a nursing home sitting on a wet diaper." "Jesus, this conversation is as depressing as this pizza which is not really a pizza though I still haven't figured out what else it can be that will make me feel better about eating it just yet. By the way, did you hear that Tommy Ramone died." "Really, that's too bad. None of those guys lasted long, did they? He was the last one, wasn't he?" "Last original founding member. There are some Ramone-come-latelies still around, I think." "What of?" "Cancer. Cancer of the bile duct." "Bile duct cancer. Damn. Who even knew there was such a thing? Who ever thinks of their bile ducts?" "I know. Sucks, right? I guess you can get cancer of the anything." "From the minute I got up this morning, I kept imagining that my left hand was weak, that my leg was tingly, or I was stumbling a little when I walked, you know, as if I were showing the first signs of some debilitating disease. I quizzed myself on names of people from my past, or rock bands, or world leaders, the meanings of words, TV shows, the capitals of cities, just to see if I could remember them, to make sure I wasn't suffering an incipient dementia. I half convinced myself I was. Now I'm going to add bile duct cancer in there. I wonder what the symptoms are anyway?" "Christ, do you really need books like that in your life?" "Point taken. But somehow, yeah, I think I do." "What for?" "I don't know." Marsha thought about it for a while as she pulled a piece of cheese as far as it would go. "To remind myself, I guess." "Of what?" "That there are a lot of things out there that suck but that at least in the meantime they aren't bile duct cancer." "Okay, so this pizza isn't bile duct cancer. Yum." "Right. There's nothing to complain about." "Not yet anyway." "No, not yet." There was a silence as there is when a line of discussion has naturally come to an end and eventually one of them brought up a new subject and the conversation went on from there in an entirely unrelated direction.
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