Glamour, Interrupted Page 2

  He answered my questions and remained calm. “Let’s not overreact, we need to take one step at a time. We need you to get an ultrasound.”

  A foreboding Eastern European nurse did my ultrasound a few days later. The Heifer of Hungary had the thickest ankles I’d ever seen, the body of a Turkish masseur, and all the warmth of a Martha Stewart Christmas card. It didn’t seem to matter to her whether I had kidney problems, malaria, or irritable bowel syndrome.

  She tossed me a paper gown, threw me down on the table, and slapped ice-cold gel on my stomach. With a yawn, she waved the ultrasound wand over my body. And then, after a quick glance at the monitor, her eyes widened. Suddenly, she wasn’t daydreaming anymore. She grew very serious as she waved the wand over my stomach again, and then again, and again….

  Then she opened the door, and yelled down the hall in husky Hungarian. A man in a lab coat ran in and stood beside her, nodding as she waved the wand and pointed at the monitor. By this point, I was figuring that I either had the most gorgeous kidneys known to mankind, or else I was a medical miracle, born with a third kidney. But they were still jabbering, and I was starting to sense that whatever was on the monitor was definitely not good. He was pointing, and she was pointing, and they were babbling away in a foreign tongue and finally I couldn’t stand it any more.

  “What is it? Did you find anything?” I blurted.

  The nurse looked down, apparently noticing me for the first time. She said, in broken English, “You speak your doctor.”

  I was worried, but I didn’t want to believe this was something catastrophic. It couldn’t be. It didn’t fit in with my plans to champion great causes, like going on a hunger strike with Brad and Angie until the Starbucks in Malibu starts recycling their Frappuccino cups. OK, I thought, something is wrong but it’s minor—maybe a benign tumor—and when the doctor calls me, he’s going to tell me everything is fine.

  In my dreams, this is how I imagine the doctor telling me I have polycystic kidney disease: First, he orders in tea service from the Peninsula Hotel, with cucumber sandwiches and strawberry tartlets. He takes a 10 mg Valium—the blue one—and grinds it up with a spice mill with Percocet and Darvocet, and puts it in my Darjeeling tea. Then, he dims the lights and lights a few Diptyque candles. Finally, with a nice soft Norah Jones song playing in the background, and Dr. Phil sitting beside me holding my hand, and with the smell of a fresh leather Hermès tote put under my nose as smelling salts, the doctor very softly says, “Steven, you look stunning. I mean, your outfit today is just so dandy, GQ just called and they want to do a ten-page shoot with you. By the way, you have a little kidney problem. Not a biggie at all. A tiny tiny tiny little wee nothing kidney problem. Your kidney is sagging and we have to take it out and put a new gorgeous lifted one in. You’ll stay at the Four Seasons and there will be just a tiny little procedure, almost like fixing an ingrown toenail. It will be beautiful. There will be an aromatherapist nearby.”

  That’s the way I would have liked it broken to me: gently, without any scary medical terms. But that’s not the way it actually happened. This doctor may have been the most sensitive doctor on the planet but as I sat across from him in his office that summer, and heard him say the words “polycystic kidney disease,” I felt like I’d been socked in the solar plexus.

  “It’s a genetic disease,” he told me, as I sat there, stunned. “There are fluid-filled cysts in your kidneys that are growing so large that they will eat away at your kidneys until they finally fail. You were born with PKD, but the disease usually doesn’t show up until you are in your thirties or forties.” Nearly half a million people in the United States have PKD, he explained, and it is the fourth leading cause of kidney failure. In a normal person, the kidneys are the size of small fists. My kidneys were the size of grapefruit.

  “From what I can tell from your ultrasound, you are probably going to need a kidney transplant in the near future,” he told me.

  “But I have two kidneys, don’t I?” I asked. “So, if one goes, I still have a good one, right?”

  “I’m afraid this condition affects both kidneys,” he said. “Both have cysts all over them.”

  His words had hit my brain and my eardrums, but it hadn’t hit my heart yet. It was seeping through my body slowly. This is a dream, I thought. This isn’t happening. It’s just not happening.

  It just didn’t seem real. Often, people who have PKD experience pain in their stomach and back, a result of pressure from oversized kidneys. But the only visible symptom I had of my disease was the high blood pressure. I didn’t feel dehydrated, I wasn’t in pain.

  I pulled it together enough to look the doctor in the eye. “OK,” I said. “What do we do next?”

  “I want you to see a kidney specialist,” he said, “His name is Dr. Moss. Give him a call, and we’ll take it from there.”

  I thanked him and walked like a zombie out to the car. I turned on the ignition, and pulled out into the midday traffic of Beverly Boulevard. Inside me something had died: In my mind, I heard a thud, like something had crashed and broken.

  I didn’t cry at first. I just drove toward home, thinking about what he had said. I was too numb for fear. The words kept echoing in my head—I HAVE A DISEASE. I had to say it again, out loud, to believe it: “I have a disease!” Emotion overtook me, as if I had been knocked over by a wave. I pulled my car over to the side of the street, and I sat behind my steering wheel and wailed.

  CHAPTER 2

  An Enzyme Kelp Glycolic Oxygenating Facial

  Can’t Cure Everything

  I was certain that by the light of day, my kidney disease would have vanished along with the previous night’s dreams. My cozy bed, my safe place, would heal me. All my pleading to God—Let it be over when I wake up—would work, and the previous day would never have happened.

  But I woke up the day after my diagnosis with a sense of dread. My eyes opened and the real world came into focus. There had been no reprieve. My entire body immediately began to ache, from the pit in my stomach to the pounding in my head. The crying I had done the previous day turned out to be the easy part: The shock had been a cushion. This was real pain.

  I managed to get up and crawl to the bathroom. I had a shoot that day, and I had to collect myself. But I was so lifeless that I looked at my toothbrush, threw it in the sink, and sank to the floor. Everything that the doctor had said disappeared from my brain except for those two ugly words: kidney transplant. The weight of these words kept smacking me in the face.

  My pooch Stinky came in and curled up with me, but I just lay there, thinking. It was less the proverbial cliché of why me, and more of a simple, primal Why? Why dear God, why now? I’m too young for this to happen! Did I somehow bring this on myself? Have I been an unworthy person? I felt like crying but I couldn’t summon any tears. I rocked back and forth on the floor until I put myself in a trance. The words—adjectives, questions, worries—disappeared. My mind was blank. All that was left was pain seeping through every cell in my body like strychnine.

  After an hour, my haze began to clear and I stood up. I looked at myself in the mirror, and my heart fell: I had so much tenderness for the person I saw. He wasn’t the firecracker on the red carpet with a microphone: This creature before me was just a child, a very wounded and afraid little boy. You poor baby I thought. I’m so sorry for you.

  I splashed my face with cold water. I went through the motions of showering and getting ready to face the world. The sun was beaming down on Los Angeles with its brilliant light, but inside my house it was like a funeral parlor. Physically it felt like so much effort just to move, as if my legs were lead.

  As I headed out the door, I felt emotional numbness beginning to creep over me, as if I was slowly freezing over. I had no choice but to bury my feelings: The fact that I was falling apart had to be put on hold. There was work to be done. It was as if I’d put yellow police tape around my feelings that said, SCENE OF AN EMOTIONAL MASSACRE. KEEP OUT.

  By no
on, the numbness had grown into fierce denial. And denial was comfortable, like wrapping myself in a fluffy white bathrobe. It was easier to keep reality out, to act as if nothing was wrong, until I reached a point where even I believed that disease hadn’t rung my doorbell.

  I did what any of my favorite celluloid divas might do: I covered up my pain with concealer and industrial-strength waterproof mascara. I went out to do my television interview. And for the next few months I hid the scarlet letter D for disease underneath my designer glad rags, and didn’t tell a soul that I might be dying.

  Some people self-medicate with Scotch on the rocks: My elixir for pain is classic Hollywood movies. I fell in love with them as a child, swept up in the high drama and even higher glamour. It was pretty heady for an eight-year-old to know what words like “chiffon” and “silk charmeuse” meant—even if my classmates didn’t appreciate my use of the phrase “ermine stole” in playground conversation.

  One of the jewels of my DVD library is the revered Camille, starring Greta Garbo as a Parisian courtesan who is secretly dying of consumption. Garbo made illness look so chic: She was brave and noble because she kept her illness a secret in order to protect her loved ones. As the days passed, and I stayed in the disease closet—not telling my loved ones my own dark secret—I began to think of myself as the heroine of my own version of Camille. When you are in the kind of mind-set I was in, your brain travels to dark corners. In a sick way, to entertain myself, I fantasized about my death scene: I was Garbo, with incredible lighting, in a beautiful peignoir, lying on my deathbed on satin sheets, attended by my devoted maid and Robert Taylor.

  I had decided that if I didn’t say the words kidney disease out loud, it wouldn’t be true. Instead, I would go about my life in the usual way. Nothing would change. I wouldn’t be a sick person. And, like Camille, I was also terrified that telling the truth would cause mortal pain to the people around me—especially my mother.

  My parents, Benjamin and Amelia Cojocaru, are survivors. As children in Romania, they lived through the Holocaust (my grandfather was in a labor camp), emigrated to Israel and then to Canada, worked in sweatshops, and eventually managed to raise a family in Montreal. Even though they’ve soldiered through hell and back, I’ve always thought of them as incredibly sensitive, high-strung people. After all, we come from a long line of melodramatic, hot-blooded, emotional Eastern Europeans: If there was Kabuki theater in Romania, my relatives would be in it. Everything was always heightened in our house:

  When I was ten years old, my uncle in Israel died—my mother’s sister’s husband, a man my mom absolutely adored. My aunt pierced the silence of our sleep by calling at five in the morning to tell us that he had passed away. When my mother heard the news, she imploded. There was shrieking, blood-curdling yells, hysterics. She physically hurled herself against the walls, and slammed her fists against the floor. It was single-handedly the most terrifying moment of my childhood.

  If that was how she reacted to the death of someone who wasn’t even a blood relative, I could only imagine what might happen if she found out that her beloved son—her little prince!—had a life-threatening disease. Revealing my diagnosis would be like putting a knife through her heart. I thought that the magnitude of this tragedy was so great that she wouldn’t be able to cope with it. My parents were elderly now, they lived for their children—perfect son and perfect daughter (my older sister Alisa)—they had worked their fingers to the bone to have some peace in their retirement, and here I was about to tell them that their son needed a kidney transplant. These were supposed to be their golden years, a time of serenity, a time to get tipsy on mango mai tai’s at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. Instead, after everything they’d been through in their lives, it had come to this? It seemed like a cruel twist of fate.

  In August, not long after I was diagnosed, I went home to Montreal for a previously scheduled family visit. At my parent’s house, all issues are discussed, bickered about, and solved at the vast black lacquered, faux-Asian, dining room-table-cum-family court. This visit was no different. My mother put out a spread of homemade desserts—almond cake, cheesecake, honeycake, sponge cake, and a chocolate torte—and we sat around the table, catching up.

  “My son! Mr. Hollywood. Don’t they have hairdressers in Hollywood?” my dad said.

  My mom chimed in. “You look like a girl! Can’t you get a nice clean haircut, like George Clooney?”

  Alisa tugged at my sleeve. “Oh my gawd! What kind of jacket is this? It’s stunning! When you don’t need it, give it to me!”

  My sister Alisa knows how to work my nerves, but together we partner in rolling our eyes at our over-the-top family. We take the foibles of our highly-strung parents with a grain of salt and good humor. This is our bond.

  But the glue of our relationship is not having the same eyes and gorgeous poufy lips; it’s our passion for accessories. My sister may dress like a walking Britney music video—to the horror of myself and my parents—but an oversize Chanel bag completes her…just as it does me.

  “It’s Dior Homme,” I said, pulling away from my sister’s grasping, vermillion-painted claws. “And don’t touch it until you’ve sterilized those fingers.”

  “Fancy!” my dad said, reaching for a second helping of honeycake. “How much?”

  “Around five hundred,” I muttered.

  “Are you crazy? What? Five hundred? I wouldn’t give two Romanian lei for that. I used to support three families on that. After your grandfather’s stroke, who do you think paid the bills?”

  “Oh no, not this saga again.” I rolled my eyes, looked at Alisa, and we erupted into giggles. My family fit comfortably: Trivial annoyances aside, we were a solid, loving family. I looked around at their dancing eyes, so elated that the prodigal son had returned home, light and upbeat. But inside, I knew that I was a fraud: I needed to tell them what was really going on with me.

  It physically hurt to talk to them. I needed them so badly that I wanted to curl up into a fetal position and cry, “Solve this for me! Cure me! Make me better! Take it away!” I knew that I should let them in, but I didn’t have the courage. I didn’t want to shatter this moment and bring them pain. The truth was that I was a wimp who couldn’t deal with telling them.

  Instead, I began to choke up. “Excuse me,” I said, and bolted up from the table, trailing cake crumbs behind me. I ran to the bathroom and barely managed to shut the door before the waterworks started. I felt so sorry for my loved ones in the other room, whose lives were very soon going to be torn to bits. It killed me. I sat there in the bathroom, looking at myself, seeing disease in my eyes and thinking, This is too much. But I took a deep breath, came out of the bathroom, and put my happy face on.

  And I sealed my mouth shut. In the months that followed, I failed to tell my parents my diagnosis at least a dozen times. I also didn’t tell my friends or my coworkers, but for a very different reason: Sick doesn’t play in Hollywood. Illness is never bathed in good lighting; it doesn’t get its own trailer on the movie set. Just like aging is not acceptible, disease won’t get you a reservation at The Grill. It’s too real, too raw…It’s a downer, man.

  I was afraid that once I confessed, Hollywood would never look at me the same way again. I have a million BFFs in Hollywood, but our friendships are very one-note, based on the following exchange: I’ll say, “You look fabulous.” And then they’ll say, “No, you look fabulous.” Then I’ll add, “Your hair! My God! Who is doing your color?” And they’ll say, “Oh! Your hair! It’s so perfect flowy, very London ’68. Do you have a new hairstylist?” And then, “That bag!…”

  Cardboard cutout friendships are the currency of Hollywood. It’s all performance. The schmoozing and pumped-up camaraderie are just business: It’s all part of a certain language, a certain social dynamic. So you don’t expect anybody to care. I was convinced people would treat me like I had the plague. As they would say in polite company at a table on the Terrace at the Hotel Bel Air, my situation was “unpl
easant”—a Hollywood euphemism for anything yucky, smelly, grotesque, or unattractive. If I went public with my disease, would the A-list turn its back on me? Would I be completely abandoned? I couldn’t face that. I was terrified that my career was over.

  Instead, I went back to my frivolous life as if I didn’t have a care in the world, commuting to New York and going on live television to feast on celebrities’ fashion faux pas. Being on camera and laughing with all 750 of my teeth was the best medicine: It saved me. During those minutes when I was in the glow of the television lights, I didn’t have bum kidneys. I was kooky, happy-go-lucky Cojo.

  I was so deeply in denial that I also wasn’t doing a thing to address my disease. It was September, and I still hadn’t called the kidney specialist my doctor had referred me to: In fact, I hadn’t spoken to Dr. Goode at all since our meeting that summer. I had intentionally kept myself clueless about PKD: Information was just a click away on the Internet, but I preferred to stay in the dark. A lot of people want to learn all they can about their disease, and doctors recommend that you educate yourself, but I was roundly ignoring that advice. I didn’t want to know how badly my body was being beaten; I didn’t want to know how quickly it was deteriorating. The gruesome details seemed too depressing.

  But increasingly, there was a voice inside that was pestering me. No matter how hard this is, it admonished me, you have got to get out of this denial. Wake up! You’re gravely ill! You need a new kidney, or one of these days you are going to collapse, maybe on live television. Steven, you need care. Maybe they can do something.

  As the months passed, my numbness began to melt away. My romantic vision of noble silent suffering a la Garbo wasn’t working out. The truth was that, despite all my best efforts to freeze it out, my disease was eating away at me all day long, tearing away at my interior lining. That internal voice of warning was getting too loud to ignore. I began to slowly realize that it was self-destructive not to see a doctor, and the longer I waited, the crazier it was.