San Diego Noir

Molly was a lawyer on the fast track at a small but powerful Los Angeles firm that specialized in environmental law and had won a couple of significant cases for the good guys. But being on the fast track meant she was a workaholic with no personal life, and when her health blew up on her, she moved back home, spending her final months in the pool house at her parents’ Rancho Santa Fe estate. I was living just down the coast in Pacific Beach and it felt entirely natural to devote a lot of time to somebody who had once been a good friend.

Also scary as hell. But we became close again, closer than we’d ever been, and had some fine times in those last few months despite everything. I learned a lot about dying with style from her.

I just I hadn’t intended to put it into effect quite so quickly.

Like so many great ideas, ours was born by accident.

Ever the overachiever, Molly had found herself a support group of other young adults facing terrifying diagnoses, facilitated by a La Jolla psychologist with a breathtaking coastal view from her sixth-floor offices. The only glitch was that Molly couldn’t drive because she had the occasional grand mal seizure. So I served as chauffeur and while the group met, I waited in the coffee shop on the ground floor with my netbook and my latte.

Early on, a few of them broke off and continued to hang out when the sessions ended, and I was easily absorbed into that group. The common denominator, beyond age and mortality, was a very black sense of humor.

The default clubhouse became Molly’s place, which offered privacy and space and a reasonably central location. One clear fall evening, with breezes off the ocean, glittering stars, and the occasional cry of a night bird or coyote, five of us sat on the patio outside her pool house. We might have been alone in the universe, nestled in this private little valley with its scents of eucalyptus, night-blooming jasmine, and money. Molly’s parents were probably home, but their Spanish-style hacienda was enormous and whatever wing they might have been occupying at the moment, we couldn’t see or hear them. The housekeeper’s lights were out over the garage, and as for neighbors, the property had been landscaped decades ago to assure that nobody else would ever be visible from Casa Donovan. Yes, that’s what it said on the sign by the locked gate down at the road. Multicultural to the max.

Ours was a pretty motley crew. Kenny Peters, an accountant with a rare and raging form of lymphoma. Adam Hillinger, a born salesman with multiple melanomas and an inability to go more than five minutes without sneaking a peek at his phone. Katherine Connelly, a third grade teacher and terrible exception to the rule that breast cancer doesn’t strike the young. Molly. And me, the token healthy person, at least for the time being.

Kenny picked up the lament he had apparently brought to group earlier, excoriating the insurance company jackasses who had restructured their formulary and denied him the incredibly expensive chemo that appeared to be his best—and possibly only—hope. Kenny always struck me as pragmatic to the point of fatalism, a man whose chest might be increasingly sunken but whose tone remained mild-mannered and calm. However, he and his employer had been paying premiums to this insurance company for his entire career and he was well and truly pissed.

“I want to line those malevolent morons up against a wall and shoot every last one of them,” he announced. Kenny wasn’t eating or drinking anything because the outdated chemo regimen that his insurance did permit had given him a charming blend of nausea, bloat, and hair loss. Food issues were one reason we didn’t meet in restaurants. Those gangbangers and military dudes who go for the cue-ball look would covet Kenny’s slick pate, if they could only skip the part where their internal organs were consumed by rogue cells and random poisons.

“There’d just be more bureaucrats lining up to take their place,” Katherine responded mildly. “Like one of those video games where you kill three aliens and another twelve rise from the dust. A kind of bureaucratic whack-a-mole. Shooting won’t stop them.”

My mind hurtled off in related directions: heads lopped off hydras, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, plants that die at the center and send out a hundred pups or runners at the same time.

Metastasizing cancer cells.

“It would stop some of them,” Kenny said.

It was tough to argue that one and nobody did.

“No reason to limit it to Western Health,” Adam put in suddenly. He was “between fumigations,” as he liked to put it, and had stopped on his way over to get a giant drink featuring caramel, chocolate, cinnamon, pumpkin, a whiff of decaf, and a mountain of whipped cream. He was on a lot of steroids just then and hungry all the time.