Nick
So, to be
blunt about it, my first night in the transplant unit basically sucked
balls. I felt like shit and would have
gladly slept through it, but the nurses coming in and out to check vitals and
change IV bags in the middle of the night ruined any chance of that. I don’t think Cary got much sleep either. She was a light sleeper to begin with, so
whenever I got woken up, she woke up, too.
It was a long, restless night for both of us.
I had a lot
of time to think while I was lying awake in my hospital bed. I thought about the phone call from my mom,
her hysterical words echoing through my mind.
She was upset, understandably, about finding out I was sick from the TV
and hurt that I hadn’t told her myself.
Of course, she made it all about her, so that I was the one trying to
console her, instead of the other way around.
Talking to her made me feel shittier than I already did, like I was the
world’s worst son. It didn’t make me
feel any better to remind myself that she wasn’t exactly in the running for
World’s Best Mom, either. It just made
me feel sort of sad. Sad because I’d
disconnected myself from my family a long time ago, replacing them with the
guys and a string of girlfriends. Sad
because, even though she said she wanted to fly out and see me, I didn’t really
want her to. It was sad, but true: I would rather go through this alone than
deal with her bullshit.
But I
wasn’t alone anymore. It wasn’t like the
first time, after I was diagnosed, when I’d lain around my hospital room
feeling sorry for myself and missing Lauren.
I had Cary to keep me company now.
It comforted me to look over at the window seat, which folded out into a
cot, and see her sleeping there. Being
in the hospital still sucked, but at least it wasn’t so lonely this time
around.
The guys
were there for me, too. They came to
visit on the second day. I had just
finished the blandest breakfast in the world – dry toast and plain oatmeal –
when I heard a knock on my door. I
looked up, and there was Kevin in the doorway.
“You up for some company?” he asked.
“Yeah,
dude, come on in,” I replied, beckoning him into my room. I was surprised to find that it wasn’t just
Kevin, but all four – four?! – of
them. “What are you doin’ here, B-Rok?”
I asked, grinning, as Brian brought up the rear. “Aren’t you supposed to be in Atlanta?”
Brian
grinned back. “We thought we’d spend some
time in the LA house.”
Of course,
he’d brought his family out because of me, but I didn’t protest. I was glad to see them all. Their visit brightened what was otherwise
sure to be another long, boring, miserable day.
It worked out well, because with the four of them willing to hang out
and keep me company for a few hours, I finally convinced Cary to go back to the
condo to shower and change and get some rest before she came back. “Call me if you need anything,” she said,
bending over to kiss me before she left.
“I’ll be back later.”
I saw Brian
and AJ look at each other as she walked out the door. Once she was gone, Brian said, “So… you still
usin’ her as a cover-up, or is that the real deal now?” He was smiling.
I
smirked. “It’s the real deal. We’re… together, I guess.”
“You
guess?”
“Well… I
mean, we haven’t really had much opportunity to, like, date and stuff, with all
this shit going on. But she’s staying
with me and sleeping with me, so… yeah, we’re together.”
“Good for
you,” said Brian, nodding in approval.
Apparently he’d changed his tune since the tour, when he thought she was
just another gold-digger. “She seems
like a real sweet girl.”
I nodded,
too. “She is.”
“Getting a
little clingy, though, huh?” AJ spoke up.
“She didn’t seem too keen on leaving.”
Before I
could say anything, Howie came quickly to my – Cary’s – defense. “Oh, like you’d be any different, if Rochelle
was in the hospital,” he replied, rolling his eyes.
“Yeah, she
ain’t clingy. She just can’t get enough
of me. I mean, look at this… can you
blame her?” I joked, gesturing at myself.
I didn’t look much like the Nick Carter who had graced the covers of
albums and magazines, tucked into bed with an IV line coming out the neck of my
hospital gown. Not exactly sexy…
The guys
chuckled. “So what is this you’re
getting?” Kevin asked, pointing at the IV.
“Chemo,
round five. Only eleven more doses to
go.”
The black
caterpillars over his eyes scrunched up.
“Damn…”
I
shrugged. “Yeah… sucks, don’t it?”
“You been
feelin’ okay?”
“Not
really, but I’m alright for now. I’ll
try to warn you before I blow chunks all over you,” I said, grinning in AJ’s
direction. I knew that would freak him
out. Sure enough, he made a face and
took a step back. “Hey, you guys can,
like, sit down, you know,” I said, gesturing to the chairs on either side of my
bed. Brian and Kevin took those, while
Howie and AJ sat back on the window seat.
“So…” I looked around at them, eager to change the subject. “What’s been happenin’ on the outside?”
“Been learnin’ lines,” Kevin drawled, scratching at his
mustache. “I’m flyin’ out to Kansas
tomorrow to film that movie I was telling you about, The Casserole Club.”
“Oh yeah…” I remembered him
telling us he’d gotten a lead role in an independent film, months ago, on our
Fourth of July yachting trip. “That’s
cool, man. Have fun.” I smiled, and really, I was happy for him,
but on the inside, I was wicked jealous, too.
I wished I were flying to Kansas the next day – a wish I’d never wished
for before, but hey, anywhere’s better than the hospital. I wished I were filming a movie. I’d been working on a short film of my own
with Lauren, before we broke up, but between the break-up and the cancer
diagnosis, I’d never finished it. Now I
wondered if I’d ever get the chance.
It was equally hard to hear the others guys talk about the things
they’d been doing. When Howie said he’d
been writing songs for his solo record, I thought about the material I’d been
working on for a second solo album of my own, a project that had yet to get off
the ground. When AJ updated us on his
wedding plans and Brian filled us in on how his big tenth anniversary party had
gone, I wondered if I’d ever know what it was like to be that in love, or to
make that kind of commitment to a woman.
“Sorry again that I couldn’t make it,” I told Brian, who waved me
off.
“Yeah, it’s not like you had anything more important to do,” he
replied sarcastically, rolling his eyes.
Then he smiled at me and added, “Promise you’ll make it to our
twentieth, though.”
“I hope so,” I said, and I meant it with all my heart, but deep
down, I knew better than to make that promise.
Ten years seems like a long way into the future when you’re living day
by day, check-up to check-up. It had been
easier to stay optimistic outside the hospital, but with the chemo taking its
toll on me again, I found myself wondering if I’d ever really escape this
cancer hell.
“Hey, not to make you feel worse or anything, but have you thought
about the cruise at all? The fans have
been chirpin’ me, asking about it – is it still on, is it off, will Nick be
there? I know they’re tryin’ not to be
too pushy, but they’ve already shelled out all this money for it, and they just
wanna know…” Brian trailed off with a shrug,
looking apologetic for even bringing it up.
But I understood. “No man,
I get it,” I said quickly, stopping to think for a second. I really hadn’t given the cruise much thought
until then, so I was startled to realize it was less than three months
away. “Honestly… I think you can count
me out for this one,” I finally said, hating the words that were coming out of
my mouth. I’d been looking forward to
the cruise ever since we’d first tossed the idea around. I loved the ocean, loved a good party, loved
the idea of being on a big boat filled with women who adored me. But I knew that even if I felt up to it by
December, my immune system wouldn’t be.
The doctors told me it would take one hundred days or more for my immune
system to return to normal. Until then,
I would be vulnerable to infections that could potentially kill me; the last
place I should be was on a cruise ship surrounded by people who wanted to get
close to me. At the same time, it killed
me to admit it.
Brian looked disappointed, but he nodded. “I figured.
One of us should call Jenn and tell her it’s off, then,” he said,
looking back at Howie and AJ. “I know
she’s been wondering, too; she just hasn’t started houndin’ us about it yet.”
“You don’t have to cancel it completely, you know. I mean, it’s already scheduled, and people
booked months ago… Might as well go
ahead and just do it without me this year.
Hopefully I’ll be up for it next year…”
Brian, AJ, and Howie exchanged looks. AJ was the first to shake his head. “No way, dude. We’re not going without you.”
“Yeah, and if you don’t go, half the fans will probably cancel
their bookings anyway,” Howie added, grinning.
“We could just make Kev go in his place,” Brian joked, then shook
his head. “Just kidding…” He smiled sadly at me. “AJ’s right; it wouldn’t be the same without
ya, Frack.”
That smile he gave me made a lump rise up in my throat. I swallowed hard, forcing it down, and
managed a smile back. “Yeah, I guess it
ain’t much of a Backstreet party without Nicky C. on the boat. Ah well… just one more thing the fans can
blame on me.”
Brian laughed. “Don’t you
know? It’s always your fault, Carter.”
“Yeah, yeah… I know.”
***
Brian, Howie, and AJ came back day after day, even after Kevin had
left LA for his movie shoot. Their
visits were like an antidote to the chemo treatments I was getting. While the chemo made me feel like shit,
joking around with them made me feel better.
Even when I wasn’t up to joking or even talking, it was nice to have
them around. Plus, it gave Cary a chance
to freshen up and take a break from the hospital each day, which I knew she
needed, even if she’d never say so.
We settled into sort of a routine, and as the days passed and my
treatment schedule lightened up, I started feeling more optimistic about my
road to recovery. Then, on the morning
before my transplant, I woke up to a sight that sent me spiraling back into a
dark depression: a bunch of blonde
hairs, scattered across my pillowcase.
My own hair, which had come loose from my scalp as I slept. After months of fighting it, fate had finally
conquered my good luck: My hair was
falling out.
“Fuck… fuck fuckity fuck,” I swore under my breath.
I tried to rant quietly, but I guess not quietly enough. Cary suddenly sat up in her window seat bed
and looked over at me with concern.
“What’s the matter?”
“Look at this…” I held up
the ball of hair I’d scooped off my pillow.
“It finally happened.” Just to be
sure, I raised my other hand to my head and tugged lightly on a thin lock of
hair. It slipped out with hardly any
resistance and hung limp between my fingers.
I sighed and shook both clumps of hair onto the floor.
“Aww, Nick.” Cary gave me a
sympathetic look. “I’m sorry…”
I shrugged. “Whatever. It’s just hair, I guess.” I knew it was just hair, but it really did
bug me. My hair had always been such a
big part of my appearance; it was like a trademark. Hell, to some, it was practically my
identity. Nick Carter… the blonde
Backstreet Boy. I couldn’t imagine
myself bald. “Guess I shoulda kept using
the ice…”
“I doubt it would have helped this time. The drugs and doses you’ve been getting are
just stronger. It was bound to happen
sooner or later,” Cary said. I think she
was trying to reassure me, but it didn’t help make me feel any better. I just felt defeated, now that it seemed like
the one battle I thought I’d won had been called too soon. For awhile, I’d been all Braveheart about it,
thinking, “You may take my life, but
you’ll never take… my hair!” But it
turned out, I hadn’t beaten anything, not even the baldness. I was a big, bald loser.
Well, I wasn’t bald yet, but I was going to be, and Cary helped me
decide it might as well be sooner than later.
“You know, when my mom’s hair started falling out, she ended up just
shaving it all off,” she told me. “That
way, she wouldn’t have to deal with losing it a little at a time. Much less mess and stress. It was like a clean break – literally.”
I could see her point. There
was already hair all over the floor and my pillow. I didn’t want to keep finding my hair
everywhere, to have to lie in it and feel it coming out every time I touched my
head, ‘cause that’s pretty nasty. I
decided Cary’s mom had the right idea.
“Yeah, alright… we should shave my head.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah… let’s do it.”
Cary didn’t want to be the one to do it, though, so I called AJ
and got him to agree to it. He seemed
pretty excited for the job; for him, it was sweet revenge for all the cracks
I’d made about his receding hairline.
Payback’s a bitch.
He showed up at my hospital room with a pair of scissors, an
electric razor, and one of those cape things they drape over you at the hair
salon, to keep the cut hair from getting all over you. In typical AJ fashion, it was even
leopard-print. “Where the hell did you
get that?” I asked him, snorting with
laughter at the sight of it.
“Rochelle,” he announced gleefully, as he sauntered across the
room and spread all his stuff out on my bed, happy as a clam. He was wearing a surgical mask, as all
visitors had to when they were around me, now that the week of high-dose chemo
had basically destroyed my immune system, but I could tell he was smiling
underneath it. “You better get out that
iPhone of yours and get your girl over there to film,” he added, nodding at
Cary. “We’re gonna document this shit.”
“Fuck you, Bone,” I said, but I went along with it. Really, I didn’t care; it made it easier to
treat the whole thing like a big joke, like I was doing it on a dare or because
I’d lost a bet, and not because I was just speeding up the inevitable.
“You film,” said AJ, pointing at Cary. “You Tweet,” he told me. Then his eyes got all crazy above his mask,
as he held up his clippers. “And I’ll
shave.” As soon as Cary turned the
camera phone on him, he started cackling, waving the razor around like
Leatherface with his chainsaw.
“Oh God,” I said, grabbing the phone from Cary and bringing it
right up close to my face, so my bugged-out eyes would fill the whole
screen. “AJ got his hands on a
razor. You scared? I’m scared.”
“I’m coming for you, Nicky…” AJ taunted in a sing-song voice,
stalking towards me with the razor still buzzing in his hand.
I turned the phone to film him, then handed it back to Cary, who
turned it back on me. I heaved a big
sigh and said, “I guess it’s now or never.
Ain’t no turning back now. Let’s
do this.”
Cary recorded the whole thing, as AJ made a big production out of
draping the leopard-print cape over the front of me and circling around my
chair, snipping bits of my hair off with scissors until it was short enough to
completely buzz. We had fun with
it. First he gave me a mullet, cutting
just the front and buzzing the sides, so it was longer in the back. “SPHYNKTER!” I shouted into the camera,
laughing as I remembered how ridiculous I had looked for the “Just Want You to
Know” video. Next he completely shaved
the sides, until I had a mohawk. He
tried to spike it with gel, but instead of standing straight up, the hair kept
coming out between his fingers.
“And that, boys and girls, is why we’re doing this,” he said to
the camera, holding up one sad spike of my hair. “You ready to go full-on Moby?” he asked me.
“I was thinking more Right Said Fred,” I replied. “I’m…
too sexy for my hair… too sexy for my hair; hair’s going to leave me…” AJ and Cary laughed. “Wait, wait, hang on,” I said, cracking
myself up, too. I pulled up iTunes on my
laptop, and within minutes, “I’m Too Sexy” was playing while AJ finished buzzing
off my mohawk.
“Lemme feel,” Cary said, coming over to run her hands over my
head. She did that for a few minutes,
and then she asked AJ, “Are you gonna shave it completely?”
“I came prepared,” he replied, whipping out a bottle of shaving
cream. Before I knew it, the stuff was
slathered all over my scalp, and AJ was standing over me with a regular old
razor.
“Don’t nick me, dude,” I warned him.
“I won’t nick you… Nick.”
He laughed, and I groaned. “Hold
still,” he said, and I did, while he carefully shaved off the last stubble of
my hair. Cary had filled a basin with
warm water, and when he was done, she washed off the rest of the shaving cream
with a washcloth.
“Smooth as a baby’s bottom,” she joked, running her hand over my
head again before she handed me a mirror.
I laughed, but when I looked into the mirror, my smile faded. I hardly recognized myself. The blue eyes staring back at me were the
same, but the face around them looked puffy and pale, and my head… I’d never
seen it completely without hair before; it was weird. For the first time, I saw myself for what I
really was, for what I had become: a
cancer patient. I felt sick to my
stomach, and this time, I knew it wasn’t from chemo.
“Whaddya think, Nick?” asked AJ.
I wanted to be honest and say “I think this sucks,” but when I
looked up and saw that he was still filming on my phone, I swallowed hard and
forced a smile, knowing my reaction was going to be seen by thousands of
fans. “I think I know why my parents
called me Charlie Brown as a baby. I
mean, damn, this is one big, bald head,” I joked, rapping my knuckles against
the side of my head. It felt really
weird, just touching bare skin instead of hair.
AJ laughed. “You should get
it tattooed,” he said, and the rest of the video was just him and me throwing
around different ideas for what I could tattoo across my scalp.
“Tweet me your ideas, and maybe I’ll be brave enough to use one of
them,” I told my camera phone, before I stopped the recording. I uploaded it to Twitvid, and the tweets
started pouring in. I read a bunch of
them to pass the time and even laughed at some, but they weren’t enough to
distract me from the sad reality that had become my life.
Get better soon,
Nick! the fans tweeted. We can’t wait to see you back onstage!
But as I read their words of encouragement, I remembered my sickly
reflection and wondered when and if I’d ever take the stage again.
***