Free How I Got to Be Whoever It Is I Am by Charles Grodin Page B

dinner party. The reason the host chose to sit me next to him
     was that the man had been told by a prominent doctor that he had six months to live because of a malignant brain tumor.
    The host, knowing my experience with Julie and her brain tumor, sat me next to him. The man told me what had happened to him,
     and all I said was, “If you walk across the street to another hospital you may hear something entirely different.” Amazingly,
     he seemed completely taken aback by what I said. Well, he walked across the street and many more streets, and twenty years
     later, he’s alive and well.
    When it comes to a serious medical diagnosis, never assume that what someone tells you, no matter who it is, is the final
     answer.
    One last thought on doctors. Some but not all let their patients know they’re due for something. Every conscientious doctor
     should do that. Then, if something happens, it won’t be because the doctor didn’t do his full job.

The Woman in the Hotel
    W hen I was around twenty and studying acting in New York, I lived in the building I described earlier that is now a homeless
     shelter.
    I had a job working as a night watchman on the Brooklyn waterfront for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. I worked from midnight
     to eight at Todd’s Shipyards. My job was to patrol, in full uniform, empty warehouses and call in if I saw a fire or anything.
     I wasn’t armed, and somehow I happily never considered what “anything” might be. I was paid $1.62 an hour. I was paid a dollar
     an hour for guard work in Manhattan.
    One day, before I got together with Julie and was living in my room with no window, I was walking through the lobby of the
     building (I wasn’t in uniform) and was approached by a woman who seemed about fifteen years older than I was who also had
     a room in the building. I had never seen her before, but she walked up to me, said hello, and told me her therapist thought
     it would be good for her if she had sexual relations, and I seemed like a clean-cut young man. Nothing even remotely like
     that ever happened to me before or since. I told her it was true. I was clean-cut, and I agreed to come to her room later.
    I went back to my room, thought about it, and something told me maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. I didn’t have a girlfriend
     at the time, but it all felt too strange, so I knocked on her door about a half hour before the appointed time. She answered
     it wearing a dressing gown. I explained I had to go to work. She nodded, and that was that.
    Years later, I ran into her on the street, chatted a moment, and made a date. This was in a period when Julie and I were separated,
     but I still had some hope we’d get back together. She came to where I was living, and…
    About a month later she called to tell me she was pregnant. I had taken precautions, but nevertheless there it was.
    I have seldom been so distraught. In my brief encounter with this woman it was clear she might have had more than a few emotional
     issues and had even been institutionalized, but even now, growing up in the era that I did, I believe if you get a woman pregnant,
     you should marry her. I was unable to dissuade myself from that belief, even under those strange circumstances. It also meant
     the definitive end of my marriage, which had already ended, but I hadn’t fully accepted it.
    I walked the streets of Manhattan for weeks in a terrible state. Then, one day I got a call from her saying she wasn’t pregnant
     after all, just “late.”
    I actually went to see her to look at her face-to-face to confirm that it was true. I completely believed her and moved on
     with my life, although for a long time when the phone rang, which it hardly ever did, I feared for a moment it was her saying
     there was a baby. Thankfully, that call never came.
    Many years later I found myself in bed with a beautiful actress. When I brought up the subject of birth control, neither of
     us had any. I got dressed and, I hope