I met with Joey early on a Sunday morning at Starbucks in the IFC. I felt half dead to be up before eight o’clock on a Sunday morning. Even God rested on Sunday. But she was a former choreographer and dance was part of my three chamber heart: writing, dancing, and teaching. So I felt it was important enough to set my alarm and drag myself out of bed.
We were going to meet to discuss a potential dance – audio / visual - collaboration.
And as this was our first meeting, we spent the beginning warming up to one another. We discussed our checkered pasts, our failures, and our hopes. But for a stranger she trumped me in her transparency about her past. She had just broken off an engagement to a drug addict. She was fighting cancer and had just finished her last round of chemotherapy. And apparently, returning to smoking cigarettes alleviates constipation.
And she was point blank – “Doctor says I only have eight or nine months to live.” And then she adjusted in her seat and pushed her curly black hair back in her bandanna. Then she looked at my face to get my reaction.
“I am sorry,” I said finally.
She smiled. “Don’t worry. Everyone dies.”
I shifted uncomfortably in my wooden chair. “Wow. A collaboration with you has a strict timetable.”
She laughed. “Yeah a little. But I need the work. I want to pay my way out of this city. I want to leave it behind. I want to start over. I want to return to Malaysia. But a cancer patient doesn’t have a lot of job opportunities. Especially when the cancer is terminal.”
“Yeah, I can imagine.”
She was quiet but then added coldly, “Actually you can’t.”
“I guess maybe I can’t.” I scratched my head. “But what I can do is offer the opportunity for you to tell your story to others. I always tell people to write their story down. Document their lives. And you are a living example of: don’t let a tombstone be the only proof you were alive.”
She was quiet, “Okay, go on. What are you suggesting?”
“Write your life down. Not the mistakes of your past but from this point on. Change your karma.”
“You mean write my death down?” She said with a half sad smile.
“Okay, if that’s how you want to look at it.”
“Look,” she began. “I don’t mean to be rude. But I need help. I am selling everything I have. I just want to get out of here and get closer to my family and my cancer doctor. And I think writing my story down is a good. I am interested definitely. But how does that make me money? I have no money to eat.”
I was in disbelief. “What about your family? I mean, you have nobody to help you?”
“My family disowned me.”
“I am sorry. But you know I had a situation like this before in Boca Raton, Florida. I had a friend tell me almost the same story. The details were different. But the plight and suffering was the same. But my friend ended up being addicted to crack and they eventually ran off with a lot of my money and stole my car.”
She started putting things in her purse and began to stand, “Look, I am not here to be insulted. I am looking for opportunities. And if you do not want to believe me, you don’t have to. No one cares – and I wouldn’t assume you would either.”
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