Between the Bylines Page 12

  “Really, there’s nothing exceptional about my life, like yours,” she responded. “I have my good friends I’ve made at work that I’m close to. I’ve never been much of a big party person or big drinker. I love my job. I love helping people. I get great gratification out of it. But really, Douglas, I’ve lived a pretty nondescript life. I did march for the miners during their strike against Margaret Thatcher’s union busting in 1984 and 1985. I’ve never met famous people like you have so many times. Well, I have now met George Foreman. I’m just one of the faceless plebeians on earth that puts in an honest day’s work and comes home and takes care of chores, reads the papers, watches the TV news, listens to the BBC on radio and attends movies. I guess if there’s been anything exceptional about my life it’s that I’ve been blessed with pretty good health.”

  Former pro fighter Dave Centi, who became a legendary bar bouncer, is shown ringside with Doug before a championship fight at the old Olympic Auditorium, once located at Eighteenth Street and Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles.

  I remember that evening marveling how Gillian cut such a healthy figure, and I uttered a phrase of hoary triteness that turned out to be hauntingly prescient: “If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything.”

  April 2000 (The Diagnosis)

  I didn’t notice any ominous signs, and Gillian never mentioned the discomfort she had been feeling for several months.

  It was I who had been ailing in early February, and I spent almost a week at a Torrance hospital after coming back from covering the Super Bowl in Atlanta between the St. Louis Rams and Tennessee Titans.

  I hadn’t been feeling well since we had returned in early January from our trip to Syria, where halfway through it I was afflicted with a severe case of food poisoning.

  I still was in a weakened state when we flew from Damascus to London before returning to Long Beach.

  I spent the final week of January in Atlanta at the Super Bowl that was staged on the last day of the month. Midway through it, I came down with what I thought was the flu. I was bedridden for four days, managed to make it to the game despite having a fever and returned home on February 1 with a 101-degree temperature.

  Gillian picked me up at LAX and drove me to nearby Hawthorne to the office of my family doctor, the family doctor who a few months earlier had declared there was nothing wrong with Gillian despite her rectal bleeding. He wisely decided to hospitalize me, but he originally misdiagnosed my condition. He thought I had a gall bladder infection and that I might have to have the gall bladder removed. But more comprehensive blood tests were done, and it was revealed I had Hepatitis A, which is curable and not potentially life threatening like Hepatitis B and C.

  As I look back to that time when I was sick and Gillian would break away from her studies to visit me at the hospital, neither of us had the faintest idea that she was the one who was seriously ill.

  By the end of February, I had regained my health and was back writing my column. Gillian seemed to be spending all her time concentrating on the final class she was taking at Long Beach State—physics—before she would take the California state physical therapy exam.

  Life was normal and pleasant for the next couple of months.

  But it would change forever on that Easter weekend that we were planning to spend with my parents and sister in Fowler.

  On Friday morning, a few hours before we were set to depart, I noticed Gillian was lying on the bed next to her office desk, busily working on a physics assignment.

  In the past, she always had been seated at the desk, and I found it odd that she had chosen a new spot to study.

  “Why’re you lying on the bed?” I wondered.

  Gillian looked up at me, and I still can remember the grimace that covered her face.

  “My bottom hurts so much…it’s painful for me to sit,” she said.

  At that precise moment, the phone rang, and it was my sister, Ginny Clements.

  I told her about Gillian’s discomfort, and she voiced alarm.

  “You get Gillian to a doctor immediately to have it checked out,” she said. “Do you realize those are dangerous symptoms? Let me talk to Gillian.”

  Gillian informed my sister about her rectal bleeding.

  “Yes,” I could hear Gillian saying with exasperation. “OK…Yes, we’ll see a doctor. We’ll have it checked out.”

  She handed the phone to me.

  My sister had a frantic tone in her voice.

  “You gotta get her to a doctor, today!” she demanded. “This is nothing to fool with. She’s bleeding. That’s not good.”

  I immediately called my family doctor, and he lined up an afternoon appointment with a gastroenterologist in Inglewood—and that day would mark the start for Gillian of a ceaseless stream of dark revelations she would hear from doctors during the next year and a half.

  “I think I feel a mass up there, and you definitely need a colonoscopy,” the gastroenterologist told Gillian.

  And so, on Easter morning, April 23, 2000, a day we had planned to be in Fowler visiting my family, we were at the Torrance Memorial Medical Center, where Gillian had her colonoscopy.

  I was waiting outside the room where the procedure took place, and I never will forget the grave look on the face of the doctor who performed it when he opened the door and came out.

  He was a tall Asian gentleman and spoke in a hushed tone.

  “It’s not good,” he said.

  I remember a bolt of adrenaline knifing through me, and I sighed deeply.

  “What do you mean?” I managed to respond.

  “She has a very large mass,” he said. “It’s probably cancerous.”

  “Is it life threatening?”

  He grew silent.

  “Just make sure you get her the best doctors you can, and do something immediately,” he said.

  “Do you think it’s spread?”

  “I don’t know. Just make sure she sees an oncologist as soon as she can.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was listening to the doctor’s words, but they weren’t computing with me. My Gillian, my beloved Brit, had a large mass, an ominous mass? At thirty-three, she faced major surgery? How could this be? Was this all real? Was she going to die from it? How could someone I thought was so healthy be in such a predicament?

  I went to a nearby pay phone and called Gillian’s parents in Hartlepool. I wept as I spoke, just as I had when I informed them of Gillian’s miscarriage two years earlier. Gillian’s mother, Mary, said she’d come over to be with her daughter. I phoned my parents, and they were saddened by the news, as was my sister, who said she’d also come down and spend a few days with us for support.

  When Gillian emerged from the room about a half hour later, she wore an expression of resigned despair, which I would see often in the coming months. With her extensive background in the healthcare system, she understood the difficult medical challenge that she now faced.

  “This is going to change my life forever,” she said simply.

  “Why didn’t you tell me how you’ve been feeling?” I wondered.

  “I was embarrassed,” she said. “I thought I had hemorrhoids. Remember when we were in Lake Arrowhead last weekend? You didn’t notice, but I used the lobby restroom several times even though we were upstairs watching TV in our room. I didn’t want you to find out there was any trouble.”

  I noticed her eyes tearing up and could feel her anxiety.

  I warmly embraced her.

  “You’re going to be all right,” I said. “You’re the toughest fighter I’ve ever known—and, as you know, I’ve known a lot of them. Whatever it is, you’re going to beat it. You’ve always come out on top in your competitions—either in the classroom or in the dojo. And you’ll come out on top in this one, too.”

  I gazed into Gillian’s large brown eyes, and the usual glow had been replaced by a somber wariness. Clearly, she was frightened.

  Gillian seemed to already know she had colore
ctal cancer.

  Chapter 20

  I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. My feelings for Gillian kept getting stronger after each trip I took to England in 1996 instead of subsiding. I wasn’t even fooling around on her when I was at home! This was in such a contrast to what had been my lifestyle, my persona, my laissez-faire attitude toward women since my divorce, if not before it. I never thought I would have a strong emotional attachment to a lady again, since I figured the many romantic indulgences I had been involved in over the years would have built up an impregnable barrier in me against such an occurrence.

  Love? Please! An ephemeral phenomenon inspired by beauty, need, money, status, sex, power, ad nauseam. For me, at least, love had become nothing more than a brief interlude, and I had become a stern cynic on the subject going back to the breakup of my marriage and then having such sentiments strongly reinforced by the breakup I had with Karin R., which happened right before I met Gillian, and the breakup I had a few years earlier with Karen D., for whom I also had great fondness.

  Karin R. and I had actually come close to getting married in late 1991. But those plans went awry because I still retained the grave fear of being trapped in another suffocating alliance. In fact, it was less than a week before I was set to marry Karin R.—she already had picked out a gown—when I abruptly called it off, a decision that resulted in Karin R. straying out on her own even though we continued to see each other on occasion until I became seriously aligned with Gillian.

  I now look back on those long-ago days when my testosterone count was at dizzying heights and when I celebrated birthdays instead of mourned them and when the limitless tomorrows conspired against conventional reasoning and inspired in me a false sense of immortality.

  One of the few virtues—and, believe me, there aren’t many when you consider the physical deterioration and total loss of even the barest vestige of innocence—of growing old is to have a clearer perspective of the past and be able to analyze in depth who the person was that inhabited your body, mind and soul in younger times.

  I have no idea who that guy impersonating me was who was once such a maniacal weightlifter that he spent more time at Fresno State studying the measurements of his arms, chest and neck than he did studying textbooks. I have no idea who that guy impersonating me was who suddenly went from going into a depression losing $50 at the blackjack table to routinely making large wagers on sporting events, including $13,000 on the 1985 three-round brawl between Thomas Hearns and Marvelous Marvin Hagler—which he lost, to go with the $13,000 he lost the previous day on an NBA game. I have no idea who that guy impersonating me was who, during an eight-hour train trip between Paris and Munich, engaged no fewer than sixteen women in conversation, according to his traveling partner Mike “The Hammer” DiMarzo, who kept close tabs on such important minutiae.

  I know I was that person, but it’s now hard to comprehend it since I’m so radically different. Such unrestrained and reckless behavior is now totally alien to me, but that certainly wasn’t the case during the 1980s when my workload was light.

  I spent a good portion of my idle time during that period doing nothing more compelling than betting, exercising and frolicking in saloons and nightclubs. And I had a lot of idle time in those days, writing a mere three columns a week for the Herald Examiner (I’d knock out more when I was on assignment at a major sporting event).

  The Showtime era of the Lakers was at its height then, and the team’s games at The Forum became an integral part of my social activities.

  I had become a friend of the team’s sybaritic owner, Jerry Buss, who usually brought a gaggle of well-endowed ladies barely out of their teens to the Lakers’ home games. Buss was, indisputably, the Hugh Hefner of the sporting world.

  Although I wasn’t a member of Buss’s private posse that scoured hither and yon to find ladies worthy of Buss’s affections—I dubbed the group the Seven Dwarves in the Herald Examiner—I did become a regular in his private box at Lakers games and on occasion joined him and his entourage at post-game soirees at various Los Angeles and Beverly Hills nightclubs.

  Doug did some behind-the-scenes maneuvering to have Gillian welcomed at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, the former home of the Los Angeles Lakers (see above the Marlboro sign).

  Which meant I often had pre-game dinners at Buss’s table at The Forum Club, which meant the young ladies I brought to the game wound up meeting all sorts of celebrities, like Sean Connery, Jane Fonda, Robert Wagner, Bruce Willis, Hulk Hogan, Beau Bridges, Rick Dees, Ed Asner and many others who were guests of Buss, which meant I had no problem whatsoever finding women to attend Lakers games with me.

  I mean, an opportunity to attend such a glamorous attraction in that glittering Showtime era of Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and James Worthy was a lure few women would resist—and it certainly gave me a considerable advantage in my frenetic endeavors with them.

  The 1980s were a most memorable time for me in so many ways, and—like so many others in America—they brought cocaine into my life. I never had been a drug guy, even when the marijuana craze commenced in the 1960s. I tried it once with my childhood friend Lloyd Koski and his friend, singer/songwriter the late Dobie Gray, one evening in 1971 at Gray’s Hollywood apartment. I detested it.

  At the gala premiere of the 1980 James Caan film, Hide in Plain Sight, at the Fox Village Theater in Westwood, Doug shakes hands with Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss. The venerable LA-event emcee Variety columnist Army Archerd is in the background.

  A couple months after I left my first wife, I was at one of my favorite spots in those days, the Stardust Lounge in Downey, with my first cousin, Steve Krikorian. We were drinking heavily, and in the darkened tavern he suddenly pulled out a small capsule with a tip attached to its cap. Suddenly, that tip was covered with a white powdery substance—and he stuck it under one of my nostrils.

  “Take a whiff,” he said.

  “What is it?” I wondered.

  “Just take a whiff.”

  I did, and suddenly my whole body was immured in euphoria. Wow! I had never felt so good.

  “What is it?” I asked again.

  “Cocaine,” he said.

  Fortunately, I never became addicted to the drug, but I did my share of it during the next seven years, and unlike liquor, I always consciously looked forward to using it. But cocaine had a couple unsettling side effects—it made me drink too much alcohol, which led to appalling hangovers that often extended beyond a day, and it made me sexually impotent, which led to some embarrassing moments.

  In fact, in the spring of 1986, I wound up being nothing more than a hapless bystander because of it in what could have been a ménage à trois experience of pleasurable remembrance rather than one of wistful frustration.

  At the time, I had been taking out a tall, attractive young lady I shall call Zee—she was a five-foot-eleven twenty-one-year-old—I had met at a popular tavern in the Long Beach area, where she was a waitress. The owner liked me and urged Zee to go with me to a Lakers game. She did—we saw the final one that season when the Lakers were eliminated from the playoffs by the Houston Rockets on a last-second shot by Ralph Sampson—and she wound up meeting that evening at The Forum such people as Pat Riley, Magic Johnson, Jerry West, Chick Hearn and Jerry Buss.

  She was totally overwhelmed by the thrilling Showtime ambiance, and for the next few months she accompanied me to many of my favorite watering holes around Long Beach as we engaged in a lot of booze-driven merriment complemented by occasional usage of drugs.

  Well, one evening, Zee surprised me by bringing a twenty-one-year-old girlfriend of hers over to the home—she also was quite slender and also five-foot-eleven—and we all went out and hit the usual saloons, drinking, dancing and partaking in cocaine.

  We returned to my home near 1:00 a.m. and, high from booze and drugs, wound up going skinny-dipping in my pool and then, somehow, wound up in the shower together, whereupon the two ladies began getting quite sensuous
with each other, to my prurient fascination.

  They urged me to become an active participant, which I did to some extent, but the wicked cocaine once again had prevented me from having an arousal. Finally, in frustration, the ladies encouraged me to depart the scene so they could continue their sexual frolic without interference from a person unable to perform. And I reluctantly repaired to the couch in the nearby den, glumly listening to their moans and groans as I downed another screwdriver (the cocaine had been used up).

  I gave up the drug for good in November 1988 after I once again failed in my manhood, this time with a young German-born cocktail waitress I had coveted for more than two years. We came across each other one Monday evening at a Long Beach tavern, the Captain’s Quarters, and went on to visit a few more places around town. We also snorted several lines of cocaine before returning to my home, where we wound up in bed. She reacted to my incapability with disdainful contempt, uttering a shattering comment that even questioned my masculinity. “And here all along I thought you were a stud,” she sniffed.

  Former middleweight champion Michael Nunn gets the point from Sugar Ray Leonard (right) while Doug (left) and Lakers owner Dr. Jerry Buss (second from right) get the joke.

  I never used cocaine again after still another humbling incident with it.

  Chapter 21

  While my fondness for Gillian never wavered during my frequent trips to London, I did on occasion have second thoughts about what I was doing, especially when the long journey left me worn out and sleep deprived. Was I that much in love with Gillian, or was I flattered that a lady twenty-three years younger had a fixation on me? Was there some sort of unconscious allure—glamour?—for my involving myself in such an intense international romance?