The one sharp experience was the slight widening of the surgeon's eyes when first he saw my throat.
Go on, I thought. Tell me that the cure of cancer depends upon its early recognition! Ask me if I haven't read the advertisements of the Society! And ask yourself, you smooth-faced blue-eyed son-of-a-bitch, if you have checked the area behind your own uvula lately!
What I said was, "Just noticed it today."
I came, I meant, as soon as I could. I wasn't a dumbbell. I didn't let that gob grow inside my neck, week after week, in secret fear. I did what you told me to do.
He said, "Well, well," and injected me and clipped off a hunk and told me to come back on Monday at twelve o'clock. I went onto the street again.
It wasn't bothering me any.
Nobody could catch it from me.
Another cab slid to a stop on another pile of metropolitan offal. I got in. The radio was talking about Babe Ruth, who had recently died of throat cancer. And metastases.
I thought of telling the driver to turn off the lush woe.
Life's ironies amuse cynical people—who are, after all, sentimentalists, for only sentimental people would bother themselves to beget so foolish a self-defense as cynicism.