We're Going to Need More Wine - Gabrielle Union Page 0,92
friend he needed.
RAY STUDIED DANCE IN COLLEGE AND THEN GOT A JOB DOING ENTERTAINMENT on cruise ships. He was fully out by then, and he would send me letters from random places. Dusseldorf, Ibiza, Nicaragua. He was wild, living out the adolescence he didn’t have in Pleasanton. When he talked about guys, my know-it-all controlling voice would kick in, lecturing him about safe sex. He told me he met a Canadian guy, and pretty soon he wanted to just settle down in one place with him. He moved to Santa Monica.
Sookie moved to New York to work for Urban Outfitters. My first-ever trip to New York was to visit her in her little walk-up in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I was twenty-two and got lost on the subway. I remember going into a bodega to ask for directions and thinking I was going to be shot.
Living on different coasts, Sook and I didn’t see much of each other throughout our twenties, but when we did it was as best friends again. As my career took off, she and Ray would joke about knowing Nickie Union, not Gabrielle. They were very aware of the difference between Nickie and Gabrielle. They appreciated Nickie and went out of their way to say that was who they wanted to be friends with. They wanted to make sure I didn’t get lost.
There was this magic time when Sookie and I literally ran into each other in Vegas. It was early 2006, and it was like seeing a mirage. Neither of us knew the other would be there, and we glommed onto each other for the whole night.
She had a secret. The year before, in July, she had felt a lump in her breast. She was thirty, had just started a new position at Urban, and was moving into a new apartment. She didn’t want to admit she had a lump. She made a doctor’s appointment for September, but when the doctor canceled it she never rescheduled. Life, as John Lennon said, is what happens when you’re making other plans. It would be six months before she had a diagnosis: advanced metastatic breast cancer.
She made Ray call me because she couldn’t talk about it. He was sobbing.
“Stage four?” I said. “Out of how many?”
“Four.”
She was afraid to tell me, the same exact way Ray was afraid to tell me he was gay. And I was angry. “How dare you not prioritize yourself?” I wanted to yell at her. “Because now I am going to be without a friend. How dare you be so selfish?” We always internalize the things that happen to other people in terms of how it will affect us. I had literally just run into Sook in Vegas, and then she goes and gets cancer. I wanted to ask her how she had time to go to Vegas and didn’t have time to go get that lump checked out?
As time marches on and you look back, you realize how easily this can happen. Like, “Oh, I’ve got this weird twinge in my thigh . . . but I gotta go to work.” When you are busy, you don’t think you have the luxury of taking time off to sit in a doctor’s office.
We all do it. Nobody wants to even go to the emergency room with a cut. “Okay, I can’t get the bleeding to stop. Fuck. I suppose I have to go.” You knew five hours ago you needed stitches, but you were just hoping. In her case, it turned out to be stage IV metastatic cancer.
I didn’t have that perspective at the time. I needed to be useful and control the situation I secretly felt she had created by not taking care of things earlier. Initially she didn’t have enough insurance to cover everything, so that gave me the way to go into fix-it mode. “If money is the only thing standing between life and death,” I told her, “we’re gonna get the fucking money.”
I desperately thought I could save her life. You want to get into Sloan Kettering? Hold on, let me call my publicist and make sure you get in to see the doctors at Sloan Kettering. The Young Survivor Coalition looked like the best organization connecting young women with resources and a path to life, so we were gonna go all in with the YSC. I would become their best celebrity friend. If we had the right amount of money, the right amount of connections, the right amount of