Health Proxy by Robert Roth
A Non-review by J. Stefan-Cole
The forward calls Robert Roth’s reflective book, Health Proxy, Yuganta Press, a "collage of consciousness." This is a good description. Like a remembrance of things worried over. Such as questioning if he did the right thing at the deathbed of a friend—Pete Wilson—dying of AIDS.
It becomes pretty clear pretty fast Roth is the not optimal guy to invite to your final curtain, at least not without a back up in place. What are the emotional complexities of a deathbed obligation anyway? What’s the code of behavior?
Excluding squeamishness, or a sudden qualm—like some right wing religious scruple against death with dignity that dictates a person must hang on by no matter how cruel a thread, the question becomes what happens to the living at the final moment? We tend not to factor in future feelings. Perhaps for good reason. You only have to loose a favorite cat or fish or bird to start wondering just how much more you can take. How about a sickly child? Best not to think about it. Dying can be a long gruesome process, each passing unique. Beyond, it’s the right thing to do, even the noble thing, Roth’s introspection forces questions like: how much does our superpower society prepare us for death? Or sickness. For life. We prefer to sweep such downer topics under the rug. Aside from bedside plants and well-meant utterances what can we really offer the dying?
Depressed yet? Now jump into Robert Roth’s head. He weaves between the well and the fatally unwell. Part One takes place during the height of the AIDS epidemic, but there is a breast cancer and a Hep C and a murder or two (later in the book, within a slightly different context). Roth hung by his friend, but at the last moment blinks, leaves the hospital, fails to hold hands for the last grasp. And genuinely wonders what difference it would have made, not only to the dying, but, importantly, to himself. This is a valid question, if one that lacks—etiquette.
“As a health proxy you are a conduit for the other person’s wishes. You are not supposed to act according to what you think should be done but what the person you are representing would want done…if they were capable...” About not holding Pete’s hand, Roth is haunted. That he might be even more haunted if he had is his point. And would Pete have known one way or the other, or cared? At that point? What does it mean, dying? Some turn rubbery at the sight of blood, never mind face to face encounters with mortality. There is something nerve deep funny here.
The dying are not saints just because they are dying. A person isn’t grand just because he sticks around. Roth is a little like Sheriff Bell in the Coen brothers’ movie of Cormac McCarty’s novel, No Country for Old Men. Tommy Lee Jones’s cragged sheriff meditates on the pointlessness of his job, and the good he meant to do, mostly finding he comes up short. He’s not about to chase down Javier Bardem’s serial killer, knocking people off like flies at a picnic. Is this cowardly? How many problems is an introspective cop in a nowhere Texas border town supposed to solve? It’s a no win set up.
Part Two—two pages long—called Manna, is about Roth’s father’s death and the prisoner from Riker’s Island lying comatose in the next bed. Part three is almost upbeat by comparison, Roth’s world sans the peering Grim Reaper. He turns out to be a guy stricken with all manner of conscience. And regret: for old love, mother’s love, father’s love, lack of new love (“One lover said I was the only person she knew who was working towards the end before the beginning.”), the demise of radical politics, the loss of a way life artists once lived on the cheap in a friendlier (at least real estate-wise) New York City, a reward system that has largely left him out.
For twenty years he delivered the NYU newspaper that nearly nobody read. He dropped heavy bundles to locations all over downtown, and then retrieved nearly as heavy bundles a couple of days later. A Sisyphean job with lousy pay, no benefits, zero security. New York University is a mega corporation, his job was a loophole. He writes of professors chatting up the prole delivery guy. Lines like: Hot off the press, huh? Ha ha. Roth would answer with an erudite challenge and ask the surprised profs if they wanted to contribute to his literary magazine, And Then, which he and his partners independently publish.
He examines behavior. “One friend in a need to impress someone he was in love with brought obituaries of close friends of his to show how important his friends were.” He touches the kernel: friends who bail out preemptively if they think they might be hurt, fixed patterns and reactions, emotionally stiff responses, contortions to make the world fit preconceived ideas. Even him: “My whole life I have not allowed the full force of experience to affect me. I have always been too numb, too frozen by life-shock.” A shaming memory of his father paying for his passport before a trip to Israel, pretending he forgot the money rather than admit to having none, his father’s hurt disappointment, not about the money but the ruse, which has been played out before.
He turned sixty without sounding mournful or jaded; tired maybe, but I have the feeling he sounded tired at six. There is free floating anger and neurotic angst, but freshness and warmth. Without the usual markers of children and a normal working life, a man whose parade of friends is his family, he seems timeless. Having brushed radicalism, and danced his hippie moment, he’s kept an ironic but never jaundiced eye on the world around him as investment brokers move into his Greenwich Village mouse-infested tenement, renamed and slightly renovated. His is a healthy rancor at the sanitized lifestyle of invading Yuppies, at an educational system that wants everyone “to wind up in essentially the same place.” There is resentment: “I see the rationalization, the guilt trips, the strange ways in which people’s values increasingly merge with those of the dominant culture. I resist this in my own way. But it can take the form of a sour internal gripe.”
Robert Roth serves up the artist in the Norman Mailer sense of heroic, against the odds, no cheap shots. Not a tepid salesman of the self, but one to expose the good the bad and the not so pretty.
© December 2007 J. Stefan-Cole
