This evening, for some reason, I had the hiccups for a while – too much salt on the salmon for dinner, I don't know; something. A bit bothersome; they took a while to go away – and while I had them I flashed back on a strange, affectionate but excruciating memory.
Ted used to have a bunch of friends who were musicians come together at his house in the Valley to perform obscure musicals. This happened once a year, around his birthday – I remember us all performing the brilliant but peculiar She Loves Me (I had an especially funny couple of solos in that one as, I think, the obnoxious bass who runs the business), one of the Wodehouse musicals, and various other historical oddities. Ted would organize everything, rehearse us separately a few times in the weeks beforehand, and then manage the evening, playing piano, conducting, and putting together a complicated party/performance/workshop for about twenty people that left everyone elated, at the ease of putting something together and the electric challenge of making something interesting out of recently sightread music and comedy.
But, of course, this was the late 1980s, or perhaps the early 1990s. Ted got sick – very sick – and his mother moved into his house to take care of him. And it was nearing his birthday: he had not put on a show the previous year, as he had already not been in the best of shape; and on this, what was obviously going to be his final birthday, it was out of the question for him to do anything. He was thin, spotted with KS lesions – and, worst of all, he had the hiccups: he had had them for two or three months already, they were a minor side effect, and the doctor's couldn't manage to stop them, couldn't keep his diaphragm from spasming every minute or so, for months. And months.
It was agony to watch him: he looked so tired, so haunted – bad enough to be very sick and obviously dying, but the hiccups kept him from physically relaxing, from spacing out, as they went on through the night, every night.
We organized a performance for him, done in his living room, as usual; one of the women organized the music, a man took charge at the piano, and as we weren't as good as Ted at putting together a whole show it was a revue of different tunes, some favorites we'd done before, or isolated songs from here and there. It worked; he was obviously deeply touched, and his mother kept exclaiming, isn't that wonderful!, trying to convey some relaxed happiness to her son as he lay on the sofa in that sunny suburban LA living room, with a blanket over him and a towel around his pillow.
It was a good thing to do, and we enjoyed it, and he was so grateful that we had done this thing – an admittedly amateurish but heart-felt reflection of all the work he had put into creating his party-shows with, and for, other people. But it was a bit shattering to watch, and wait, for the next, inevitable hiccup, the obvious pain and exhaustion tied to it –
I hope that, at some point that day, however briefly, he forgot his body and its torments, in the music.
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