How to describe Rochester, Minnesota? It is essentially cancer town. There is one massive hospital complex called the Mayo Clinic, the thirty thousand people who work there, and everything else in the town exist either to support or supply it. Rochester is simultaneously something out of a bizarre sci-fi-we-destroyed-the-Earth future and the most ordinary middle-American town. It is kindness incarnate, almost frighteningly so. Everyone knows that everyone who comes there is finding out if they’re sick, already sick, getting better from being sick, or too sick and will probably die. The whole town is like one palliative care unit. The waitresses are grief counselors. They serve you hamburgers and hold your hand as you weep for your son, daughter, mother, father, wife, or husband. All the sales people, the street cleaners, the airport shuttle drivers have an eye out for the wounded. There are wig stores on every corner. In the one upscale restaurant you see people in wheelchairs hooked up to their IVs having dinner or sitting outside stealing a smoke on the street. In the Marriott Hotel every room is filled with a sick person or a person hoping not to be sick. If you have been in massive denial up to this point about illness and how many people, for example, have cancer, this would be the end of your denial. If you were afraid to take in the inevitability of illness visiting your body, this would be your “holy shit” moment. I cannot say if cancer town was a comfort or a horror. Like everything in America it was huge and consuming. I was wary. It reminded me of going to Disney World and dropping acid. Things were going very smoothly until I suddenly realized that we were inside a totally perfect consumer bubble and that even the horse’s shit was being collected in little pans before it hit the ground. All unpleasantness had been removed so that the people could be happy, happy, happy. On acid I began to panic that I would be forever stuck in this happy land and that just entering it meant they had laid siege to my mind. As I began to have the worst bummer trip of my life I remember feeling grateful for the anxiety because it defied this world of Pluto and Donald Duck, this world of animated automated amputated America.
But I was not tripping now in Rochester. The diagnosis was so out of the blue, so shocking it had propelled me unwittingly into a kind of trance, and as I made my way through the homogenized, sanitized, Muzak-singing world I was grateful to be overwhelmed by beige.