Chapter 48: Two Memoirs; Past and Present

In his first memoir Kevin Heldman, an award-winning journalist who had seldom written about himself, told the story of coming of age in the Therapeutic Community, a euphemistic name for the often terrifying places where troubled teenagers are sent to somehow get their lives together.

He wrote: In 1982 I was 16 and destroying my life. Or my life was falling apart, depending on how you portion out the responsibility. Me and my dysfunction didn’t just hang out at home fighting with my parents. I propelled myself and I got yanked. I was placed in treatment, the system, institutions. You get a new life, a subculture, an enemy. You get war stories. You get to hear people all day say, “I’d be dead or in jail if not for this place.”

I came of age in the TC, the Therapeutic Community. A TC is where I had to wear a diaper at seventeen, as what they call a “Learning Experience.” It’s where you call your fellow residents “Family.” Where residents wear crocodile masks (to correct phony tears); where boys were dressed in women’s clothing, in clown outfits, as hobos, superheroes, and donkeys (required to say “hee-haw” before and after each time they spoke). It’s where residents had to sit in a playpen all day wearing a pig nose.

The goal of the TC, as I experienced it, was to re-socialize you, to make you excessively normal through a highly structured, Puritanical penitence system where labor was both salvation and punishment. Discipline was public, grossly exaggerated, and intended to shame and ridicule, and it came from both staff and peers. TCs were 18- to 24-month programs characterized by isolation from the world, unrelenting surveillance, and intensive confrontation. It’s where you had to dig your own grave outside, scrub the parking lot with a toothbrush, wear a cardboard penis around your neck for sexual acting out, wear tape on your mouth for breaking a speaking ban.

That story, “My Rehab: Coming of Age in Purgatory,” appeared in 2013 in The Big Roundtable, the precursor for The Delacorte Review. While the form was a departure for Kevin, he had been telling similar stories for years: living rough on the streets of London; getting himself committed to a psychiatric hospital to report on life on the inside; an investigation on the secretive world of Japan’s prisons. As our editor, Mike Hoyt, once wrote about Kevin in a profile in Columbia Journalism Review: he did not see the glass as half empty or full, but instead focused on the detritus floating in the water.

His memoir written, Kevin went back to doing the kind of work he had always done: writing about the Albanian underworld – here and in Tirana – and spending months on the streets to tell the story of New York’s most benighted neighborhood, East New York.

Then he got sick. Kevin’s cancer diagnosis was not his first brush with a life-threatening illness; his first wife, Sumi, had died of cancer, sending Kevin into a tailspin that ended with his leaving journalism to become an EMS technician. But this was different. This was about him. During Sumi’s illness he could care for her, as well as the people his ambulance was summoned to save. 

So Kevin did what writers have always done to impose some order on the universe: he wrote. Once again, the subject was himself. But rather than take notes for a down-the-road-let-me-make-sense-of-it-all retrospective, Kevin decided to write, and publish in real time. A memoir in the present tense, via Facebook.

“Right now I'm writing a memoir that has a beginning, a thousand different middles and no end.

I'm writing about my cancer in real time and every two weeks, sometimes every day I have a different memoir,” he wrote to me the other day. 

“I haven't lost the plot but I've lost the main character. My point of view changes so much I don't even know who I really am at this point.

“One day I'm brave and two weeks later I get a PTSD shock that puts me down in my bed for a week.”

“A memoir asks will the real Kevin Heldman please stand up. I can't, I've lost Kevin Heldman; now I'm simply a generic cancer patient.

“My life is not my own anymore-- my life story is whatever cancer says it is.

“How can you have free will with Stage 4 cancer, every week something happens and every week there's a different Kevin Heldman

“Here I was two years ago [ attach photo]. A simpler time. It was August 2019 when I was  diagnosed with cancer on my birthday

“COVID wasn't here yet. I just started chemo and was strapped with a chemo pump and a pic line that went to my heart. And I said to myself I got this. And I did.

“I rode the subway-- now I can't.

“There was no pain, no complications. I did pull-ups, boxed, shot baskets at the park, fought off some lunatic who attacked me in CVS.

“I thought cancer was easy for me, thought I beat it already. Was skeptical I even had it.

“Then multiple realities set in.

“COVID soon came and it was hell for the country and hell for me, twice over. My cancer and chemo and infections came and showed me what they're capable of doing.

“My country was being destroyed outside. Inside, my body was being destroyed.

“My whole life changed. Pain came at me hard, COVID came at me hard, complications and hospitalizations came at me very hard, Trump came at me hard.

“I cried for the first time in 18 years.

“I didn't know how to live  anymore.

“Tidal waves of drama and trauma came at me over and over.

 “I couldn't breathe, couldn't make it to any figurative dry land, there was none-- I was out there just treading water, waiting for life to throw more at me.

“I had no idea what to do except tread water and wait--I didn't know what was happening to me, I didn't know if I should act like I'm dying, like I'm living.

“I just woke up each day pushed around by cancer.

“I had no free will anymore, cancer was running my life.”

That is true, up to a point. Kevin’s treatment was long and arduous, culminating in a stem cell transplant. He is not so naive as to be unaware of the toll, physically and emotionally. And yet, he did not stop writing. And while it feels too fulsome to suggest that this somehow saved him, I have known and admired Kevin long enough to know that each time he wrote, each time he posted another dispatch, it reminded him of who he was before he got sick, which is who remains today. Irascible, intense, difficult, passionate. Always looking for a story.

I asked Kevin to send me one of his dispatches. He chose this one. This time he chose joy.

Ah, thanks Yahweh, אֵל, Elohim, karma, the universe, modern medicine...

No cancer found today on PET scan.

Doc said I could go out, report in the field, take an airplane to Japan to see my family. Benign 2 lesions I had biopsied in my chest and stomach the last time shrunk, decreased in size--- thank you Dr. Falchi, thank you Wei Chen, my partner and caregiver. My oncologist and I bare backed hand shaked 4 times (no gloves, no fist or elbow bumping). I love him.

Falchi and I were like two giddy boys, half ass hugging and hand shaking and kind of jumping on each other a little.

We are more than friends and he wants me well after seeing me close to death so many times.

I remember, it was all almost too much-- I had systolic blood pressures of 60, my heart rate was once 230, I had 4 nurses, 4 doctors leaning over me, pumping liters of saline into my body to try and raise my blood pressure but not drown me.

I was drifting off, constantly hallucinating, in septic shock 4 times, pneumonia maybe nine times, norovirus, herpes in my eye trying to blind me.

Near the end I was running out of energy, felt myself fading away.

But we made it.

I fought like hell.

Wei Chen fought like hell for me.

My doctors and nurses fought like hell for me-- so did my friends who became my family; so did all of you here who generously followed me, who generously let me write for them, who generously read me.

Dr.Falchi remembered it all as we kept on shaking hands over and over.

Thank you Memorial Sloan Kettering.

I'm f*cking alive again.

                                                                ***

With the ongoing uncertainty over a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, we wanted to share with you a story that explains so much about what motivates Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the Empire Strikes Back, Noah Sneider, a foreign correspondent for The Economist who was then based in Moscow, shows how history so profoundly shapes the man who keeps the world guessing.