There exists a debate in our country over the levied penalty when one murders another. Some side with capital punishment, an eye for an eye; there is a biblical sensibility to this, which I can understand. Some hold out for life imprisonment, not wanting to tread too heavily on the toes of the perpetrators. I can understand erring on the side of caution. But, as it turns out, the actual penalty for murder can be as low as five hundred dollars and a letter of apology.

I am speaking about asbestos—using fibers to employ someone’s own body to kill them for you. It’s like poison, but slower and more painful. And though this method may take a while to kill, it is the easiest way I know to get away Scot free. You probably wouldn’t even have to go to criminal court.

Here’s how this works—you inhale, or get your victim to inhale a single fiber of asbestos; this pernicious fiber sticks to the soft inner lining of your lungs; there is a gestation period where your body tries to fight the foreign fiber but can’t so it concedes; and finally you develop a terminal cancer of the lung and peritoneum/ pericardium called mesothelioma. Then, eighteen months later, on average, you die.

Chemical, concrete, and building companies, among others, used asbestos and asbestos products until as recently as two years ago for insulation and brake pads and other useful everyday goods. You may be thinking, asbestos has been banned in this country for a while. Well that’s not entirely true. There were mines (until 2002) in California that continued to produce asbestos and ship it around the world. To insulate and kill our neighbors.

Asbestos is a supple material, which gives off dust as it crumbles, like when you nail something into your walls, or go into your attic to look for that winter sled or whatever. That’s when the fibers are dangerous, when they are airborne. And it is still all around us, for instance, say you Iive in an apartment in West Hollywood built between 1940 and 1970. There is probably a sign on your building you pass every day, warning you about the hazardous materials that nest in your walls. That’s asbestos. Scientists have known since the mid-nineteen tens, and so by the way have its producers, that it is not just harmful to health of those in contact with it, but straight up fatal. That’s right, numerically it looks like this: 1910’s. But asbestos’s use was still widespread in the USA until 1972(when it was “banned”), and it continues to be used around the world.

Mesothelioma cells do not play fair. They are almost undetectable until it is too late to do anything about them. The tumors may be so tiny the doctors describe them as smaller than the size of taste buds. They spread through your chest cavity, finding and covering the surface of every major organ in your thorax, making a galaxy of cancer constellations.

On average, Mesothelioma takes 30 years to gestate in the body. When cases of this cancer started to pop up, and when it was determined that there was no, no, absolutely NO way to develop this cancer without asbestos, the companies who made it did the only sensible thing a company could do. They declared bankruptcy. They went bankrupt in droves. They did so to hide their assets, cut their impending losses and avoid their legal comeuppance, which by the way would have been solely monetary.

Since mesothelioma litigation began, the largest settlement paid out was a pittance when compared to the freedom to live. The smallest settlement, nothing. The government allows, even promotes, the idea that the worth of a life can as little as five cents on the dollar to kill you slowly. And I have to mention it’s not just the lung tumors that kill you, it’s staph infections from having your organs removed when your immune system is nearly gone. It’s the incontinence that chemo brings with it, the domestic tortures of knowing that you won’t live to see your child marry or know grandchildren, leaving a husband or a wife or a son or daughter to cope and try and make a go of it without you. But at least they’ll have five hundred dollars, and if that check clears before your funeral, they might be able to buy you a nice suit to be buried in.

As you may have guessed, my interest in this subject is deeply personal, as my mother is currently staring at her own protracted death due to asbestos, and more specifically, at those merciless business men who would rather have my mother dead than not turn a profit. My hate for these men knows no bounds. It is acid, it burns me. My rage for these people is as hot and as blistering as anything I have ever and will ever know. It dwarfs my feeling/knowledge of what love is. And that is amazing to me because I have loved and it was beautiful. And now I hate and it is enormous.

With the help of amazing, almost prophet-like doctors, my mother has managed to live four years. She was diagnosed February 6th 2001, when she was forty-four and I was seventeen. No memory in my life is more clear to me than laying face down on the cold tiles of a handicap bathroom in a torrent of my own vomit, unable to move, paralyzed by the fear that my mother, still in surgery, would die on the table, or worse yet rot away to bones and skin before giving in to the cancer like her mother had five years before. I thought selfishly, “I’m not ready. I need things. I need my mother. I need.” I stood up, eventually, out of my pungent sick and looked at my face in the mirror. I was still crying, though I had heaved my stomach dry, I could still make tears. And I thought, I have to tell her.

I looked like the Axel Rose rehab out takes as I continually charged the doors of the recovery room and broke the lines of nurses that kept me from my mother. My father sat, watching me, on the bench out side the doors and the blue of his eyes was gone. Replaced almost instantly with something metal. He died too on that bench. My family died, even though we’re all still alive.

Hours after the completion of the surgery, finally I was allowed into the back chamber where my mother was sedated but waking. They removed her entire reproductive system, resected her bowel, sliced away, peeled and removed as much of the peritoneum as they could, cut off her remaining organs and tried to burn away the remaining cells on non removable parts with lasers. This is the painful part. The doctor equated the pain from removing the peritoneum with that of removing the gums without anesthetic.

I stood at the foot of my mother’s bed looking at her laying with the vacant gaze of morphine, looking at me but not knowing me. She was bloated and they had already filled the new cavity in her stomach with chemo. She recognized me. She said “Brian” in a way I had never before heard. She said it like a child-the pitch grating and thin, afraid and disoriented but somehow chemically devoid of emotion. I told her to pay attention to me. I told her that she needed to listen. And I could see her effort to break the morphine coma and try. And I told her she had a terminal cancer. She said, “No. I have cancer.” She was shocked but couldn’t intone it the way we do when chemically unaltered. So it came as a kind of sad declamation. Her eyes were wide and she couldn’t cry or move. She couldn’t really move her hands. The nurses didn’t like that I got her excited, but I didn’t care, this is my mother. And I looked at her and we were defeated. All our plans, all our dreams each for the other were poisoned. And though I didn’t believe it at the time, I gave her no choice but to live. I have never offered another option. I am not ready. And neither is she.

It’s four years later. I have written this play as a living tribute for and about my mother and in an effort to raise awareness about this disease. It’s possible to deliver agitprop through the theatre, but to do so it should be disguised through the play’s action. There is not an incredible amount of asbestos talk through out the play, rather it’s about young people dealing with the disease and death of their parents through love and life, maybe our best weapons.