Wine on Ice, Part 3
The Cliff Room, Cancer, and Sombreros on the Mesa
When they told me I had cancer — and before I was led into the muddled forest where the wild things are inscrutable chemotherapy strategies, radiation assaults, and outlandish collateral damage — I sold my car and booked passage to Australia, there to float above the largest living thing on the planet. That trip to the bottom of the world ended with me in a coma somewhere in Bali, waking up at an unheralded dawn, strapped to a gurney, naked except for the sort of diaper in which Jesus and Gandhi died. I was in Singapore, and why had the nurses hidden my wedding ring? And then all the other things I missed suddenly, desperately — my passport, my cash, my youth, my health. But then, my wife appeared with some luck and some true friends who saved what is now the rest of my life.
I learned to walk again in Santa Barbara — to take to the alleys and the backstreets, avoiding the rare hill and identifying the sunny side of the street. Or I took the bus. There is much to be learned on the bus. Here, it is democratic and popular with the poor, working men and women, the disabled, tired cyclists, and hopeful pilgrims like myself on their peculiar way to the oncology floor at a hospital called Cottage. The drivers are invariably helpful and happy. People leave the front seats empty for the elderly and the indisposed. There is an unarticulated comradery among the riders. Maybe the same brotherhood exists among owners of BMWs, but I doubt it.
I went down to the ugly depot and caught the number 13 to the Mesa, there to meet with my mad philosopher at the Cliff Room, sandwiched between a fine used book store, a Taco Bell, a sushi restaurant named Ichiban’s[CQ], a liquor store, and a tapas bar. Inside, it’s as dark as it should be, so I paused by the jukebox to let my corneas do their job. There was a deafening hair band playing on said machine. Since no one else was in the bar, I asked the bartender if he would turn it down. He did. I ordered a glass of house red and a tumbler of ice. He brought it over, and I pulled out the New York Times but kept my right eye on the door.
