Once Nick and Kara had sobered up some, they
climbed into Nick’s car and drove, just drove with no real direction in mind.
Oddly enough, they ended up on the same road
where Nick had witnessed the incredible sunset the night before. This time when he parked the car, he was
surrounded by billions upon billions of stars winking down at him like they
knew some secret he wasn’t aware of.
He sat back, enjoying the silence, as Kara sat
beside him, now wearing his red hooded sweatshirt, the hood pulled tightly
around her face so only her eyes nose and mouth peeked out.
“It’s nice to be able to just sit here without
saying a word. Most of the girls I know
never stop talking,” he said, pulling the seat latch so that he could recline.
“I know the type,” Kara said, pulling her seat
latch too so that they lay side by side, staring up at the sky.
“Sometimes I just want to tell them to shut up
and enjoy the silence,” Nick said with a small laugh.
“Why don’t you?”
“I dunno.”
He shrugged.
Turning in her seat, Kara gazed over at Nick,
taking in his profile, from the top of his wild blonde hair to the bumps of his
collarbone just below the collar of his t-shirt. She guessed he was handsome in a brotherly
sort of way. Or maybe a best guy friend
that you always had a crush on but never dared tell so you could stay
friends-sort of way.
Reaching out a hand, she tugged on his arm,
making him turn to face her.
“How come you haven’t made a pass at me?” she
asked, a serious look in her eyes. “I
mean, we’ve been together all day long, I’m vulnerable, you’re just passing
through…”
“I haven’t made a pass at you because you
would turn me down flat.” He pulled her arm to him, pushing her palm out flat
and tracing his finger along it like he was a palm reader.
“You don’t know that for sure. Why don’t you try your famous ‘I’ve only got
twenty four hours to live’ line on me and see how it works out?” She grinned, enjoying how soft his hands
were.
“Nah, I don’t want to,” he said, crinkling his
nose up as he folded her hand into a fist, cupping it between his hands.
“Oh come on, Nick, why don’t you just want to
give it a shot?”
“Because that line doesn’t seem so funny
anymore,” he said, letting go of her hand as he shifted in his seat.
“Why not?” she asked, reaching out to tweak
his nose with a smile.
“It’s not funny anymore because it’s true.”
Kara’s mouth parted, and her eyes widened as
she searched his face for a smile or a laugh or anything to let her know that
what he had just told her was nothing more then a stupid joke… but there was
nothing.
Nothing but his sad blue eyes and the moon
reflecting in the darkened centers opening the door to his soul.
“I don’t know what to say,” she whispered.
He smiled.
“That’s what everybody says.”
- - -
Looking back, he wasn’t sure when he truly
knew that something was wrong with him. Sometimes it seemed like he had always
known that he wouldn’t live long, and maybe that was why he had been so
determined to stuff so much living into so little time.
He guessed he would never know.
The headaches started right before he began to
promote Now or Never. At first, he thought they were from his
mother’s assault on him. Then he thought
they could possibly be tension headaches brought on by the stress of breaking
away from his bandmates and beginning his solo career.
The violent pains would hit him at the
strangest times, slamming around in his head until he felt like his teeth would
rattle. When he would complain, the
powers that be would fill him full of Tylenol with codeine and push him onto
the stage for the interviews and performances.
He knew that he sounded like an idiot as the reporters tossed question
after question at him and he would fail to respond, trying to cover it with a
goofy smile that made all the girls scream.
But the loopy feeling of the codeine beat the searing pain in his head
that would often blind him once he would take the stage, the band pulsating
behind him as he ironically sang the words to the song “Help Me.”
By the time he took off on his first solo
tour, things were slowly getting worse.
He had begun to tremble in the morning, and he started to have weird
tingling sensations in his right leg that caused him to trip occasionally.
His short-term memory had never been the
greatest, but suddenly he couldn’t remember things that he had discussed with
people just hours before, and he began to forget words to some of his songs,
having to have a teleprompter with the words installed below where he stood on
stage.
He knew there were discussions going on
backstage that he was drinking or on drugs, and at one point, his assistant
Greg confronted him about the issue.
“Nick, do you need some help?” Greg approached Nick backstage after one of
the concerts, wearing his usual tattered Abercrombie and Fitch cap and black
horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like Drew Carey.
“What do you mean?” Nick asked, wincing as he
bent down to tie his shoes.
“Well, I mean, look at you, man, you can’t even
tie your fucking shoes without pulling some face. The most simple things seem to be stressing
you out, man, and I’m just wondering, what’s going on?”
Sitting up, Nick wiped a hand across his mouth
and tried to smile. “I’m fine, Greg.”
“You’re on drugs, aren’t you?” Nick was surprised by the bluntness of Greg’s
words. It had been his experience that
people only talked about you if you had a problem – not
to you.
“No, I’m not on drugs.” Standing up, Nick grabbed for a t-shirt and
pulled it on.
“Then are you drinking?”
“No.”
“Then what the hell is going on, Nick?”
“I wish I knew.”
***
Brian came to Nick’s performance in San
Francisco in March, casually lounging backstage before the show, ribbing Nick
about not being able to get front row seats to his best friend’s concert. The two of them clowned around until the show
started, when Brian took his seat amongst the squealing girls, shouting right
along with them as Nick took the stage.
Brian was disturbed by Nick’s appearance
onstage, his lack of connection with the crowd as well as the way he seemed to
stumble every so often on his feet, as well as on the words to the songs. Nick had never been the most coordinated
person Brian had known, but he had never missed a lyric.
After the show, Brian made his way backstage,
flashing the pass with Nick’s picture on it to the big guy working the
doors. He wandered from room to room
before finally finding Nick in the bathroom, throwing up blood before
eventually blacking out.
When Nick came to, he was lying on a ratty cot
in one of the backstage rooms, a cold cloth pressed to his forehead, his mouth
dry. He could hear Brian yelling in the background at somebody, “What the hell
is going on? I want somebody to tell me
what is the matter with him.”
Nick smiled wanly to himself, thinking how
nice it was to have somebody in his life that cared.
“Nicky.”
Now Brian was kneeling by his side, turning over the washcloth to the
cool side before placing it back on Nick’s forehead. “Why didn’t you tell me
something was wrong?” he asked.
“I didn’t want to bug you.”
“I’m going to take care of things, Nick. We’re going to figure out what’s wrong. Okay?”
Brian smiled, punching Nick lightly in the arm.
“Okay,” Nick whispered, closing his eyes. “Okay.”
***
Brian had taken matters into his own hands,
setting up an appointment for Nick at a well-respected clinic in Boston that he
himself had gone to when he first began having the reoccurring problems with
his heart years before.
They boarded the plane early the next morning,
arriving in Boston late in the afternoon.
Brian escorted Nick to the clinic, waiting for hours while they went
over Nick from stem to stern, doing x-rays, EKGs, EEGs, MRIs, and numerous
other blood tests, scans, and probes, before sending them back to the hotel to
await the results the following day.
Brian tried to get Nick’s mind off of things
by taking him to the movies, but the movie sucked, and Nick was tired, so
halfway through, they went back to the hotel and went to bed.
Brian stayed up all night, sitting in a chair
in the corner of the room, watching Nick sleep.
He couldn’t remember how many times he had shared a room with Nick over
the years, and in all those years, Nick had always been the one to sleep like a
log the whole night through. Where Nick
dropped, Nick slept, never moving until it was time to get up.
Watching him now, Brian was disturbed at the
way Nick’s body twitched and jumped, moaning every so often as he flipped from
front to back and back to his front again.
Something was very wrong.
Brian and Nick returned to the clinic the
following afternoon for a consultation with the doctor and possibly some more
tests.
Nick sat on the table in the room, dressed in
the pale blue gown, his legs swinging back and forth furiously.
“What if I’m dying?” he said, gnawing on his
fingernails, as he glanced nervously around the room.
“You’re not dying,” Brian said, thumbing
through a magazine.
“What are you, a doctor? How do you know I’m not dying.”
“Look at you – you’re the picture of
health. You’re probably just suffering
from exhaustion or something.”
“You don’t puke up blood when you’re
tired. What if I’m dying?”
Brian finally shot a hand out to still Nick’s
legs as they pumped wildly back and forth.
“Stop it already – you’re not dying.”
Just then, the doctor knocked on the door,
entering, a serious look on his face. He
shook both young men’s hands before pulling up a stool and sitting down a large
folder in his hands, containing the results from Nick’s tests.
He tried to focus on the positive first, going
through the results of the EKG and EEG and then moving on to some of the
bloodwork. After a few minutes of
talking, the doctor paused, rubbing a finger over his upper lip as he studied
the paperwork before him. “All of those
tests aside, Nick, I’m afraid that we have found something serious that needs
to be discussed.”
Nick could feel his body tense as he broke the
eye contact with the doctor and began playing with a loose thread hanging from
the sleeve of the hospital gown he wore.
“Nick, you have a brain tumor.”
As he said the words, the color drained from
Nick’s face, and his legs began to swing back and forth again.
“So what does that mean?” he said, looking
over to Brian, as always, for answers.
“Well, Nick,” the doctor continued, “what it
means in most cases, depending on the size and accessibility of the tumor, is
that we do surgery to remove the tumor, and then we can do radiation to treat
it.”
Brian nodded at Nick.
“But… in your case, we have found that there
are multiple tumors that have begun to form, and in addition to the mass of the
tumors, we also have the problem of the location of the tumors. They are in an inaccessible location for us
to operate. Trying to remove them could
mean any number of things, from possible paralysis to death.”
“What are you saying?” Brian asked in an
irritable voice, as Nick turned his attention back to the loose thread.
“What I’m saying is that, I’m sorry, there is
nothing we can do.”
“Am I going to die?” Nick said, looking down
at the floor so he didn’t have to make eye contact with anybody in the room.
“Yes, Nick.
You are going to die.”
***
Brian and Nick sat at the table in the hotel
room, silent. Curtains drawn, the hum of
the air conditioner in the background.
“What do I do?” Nick finally asked.
Brian sat, stone-faced, across from him,
drumming his fingers on the table. “We
get a second opinion.”
And so they did. Over the next month, they got a second,
third, and fourth opinion from respected doctors all over the country, and the
prognosis from all of them was the same.
He was going to die.
***
Brian and Nick went to see the rest of the
guys one by one, starting with A.J.
For some reason, Nick thought it would be easy
to tell A.J. the news. He was counting
on A.J. to crack one of his jokes, pull him into a hug, and tell him that they
would fight the son of a bitch tumor that had invaded his brain.
But that wasn’t what happened. As soon as the words left Nick’s mouth, A.J.
sat glassy-eyed and silent, staring at Nick, taking him in as if for the last
time before finally saying, “Nick… I don’t know what to say.”
***
Telling Howie hadn’t been any easier, with
Howie breaking down and sobbing in the living room of his house in Maine. Nick stared out the big picture window,
focusing on the fishing boats in the distance, nodding to himself when Howie
finally muttered the words.
“Nick… I don’t know what to say.”
***
And it just got harder by the time they
knocked on Kevin’s door.
Just days before, Kevin had signed the papers
for his divorce from Kris and was riding on cloud nine after bailing from the
marriage that had caused him so much misery.
Brian and Nick sat on the deck on Kevin’s
Kentucky cabin, listening as Kevin went on and on about his new girlfriend Anne
and how perfect they were for each other.
He was anxious to get married to her and start a family, and he wanted
Nick and Brian to be the first to know that he planned to ask Anne to marry him
that very night, now that the divorce was final. When he finally came up for air, Brian spoke.
“Kev, Nick has something he needs to talk to
you about.”
“Oh shit, buddy, I’m sorry. Here I am going on and on about Anne, and you
came here to talk to me about something.”
Nick smiled.
“It’s okay, Kev. I’m happy that
you’re happy.”
“I am, man, I really am.” Slapping Nick on the leg, Kevin smiled
broadly as he tipped back a beer and glanced up at the blue sky.
“Kevin… I’m dying.” Nick spit the words out and then paused,
waiting for Kevin’s reaction.
Looking back down at Nick, Kevin had a small
smile on his face as he looked over to Brian and back to Nick. “Is this a joke?” he said, pointing at them
both. “Because if it, is it isn’t funny.”
“Kev, I wouldn’t come all the way to Kentucky
to tell you I was dying as a joke.”
This time, when Kevin glanced over at Brian, Brian
nodded to him, letting him know that what Nick said was true.
“When?” Kevin’s voice became serious.
“Couple of months.”
“We’ll get a second opinion,” he said,
slamming his beer bottle down on the deck, anger in his voice.
“We already did, Kevin,” Brian broke in.
“And a second, third, and fourth opinion,”
Nick finished.
“Fuck that, then we’ll get a fifth opinion,”
Kevin said, standing up, pushing his hands through his hair.
“Kevin, there isn’t anything they can do… I
have a brain tumor. I’m gonna die.”
Kicking at the beer bottle, Kevin sent it
sailing off of the deck as he paced back and forth before finally turning,
tears pooling in his eyes.
“God, Nick… I don’t know what to say.”
***