“Hey, Bro, It's Me, Mortality Here.”

Celebrated alt-rocker Chuck Prophet talks to me about his battle with lymphoma and how it felt to be visited by the specter of death for the first time ever.

Illustrations by Abner Clouseau

All right, it’s time to switch things up. As I mentioned in my first post, my idea for Healings is that, hopefully, it’ll be more than just about me—that we will start to incorporate new stories and voices in an effort to paint a much broader and deeper picture of how we all deal with illness and recovery. Can we get there? I dunno. I’ve got so much more to say! And will resume saying it next week. But dammit I’m determined to try.

To that end, this week’s installment features a Q&A with revered alt-country singer-songwriter Chuck Prophet, who did battle with lymphoma just last year. For me, Chuck’s as synonymous with living in San Francisco as Mission burritos and tech shuttles. Twenty-odd years ago, when I was music editor at SF Weekly (my first job!), it seemed like the longtime SF resident and his band were playing somewhere in the city every week, except they were also playing all across Europe, too. The dude’s put out dozens of acclaimed albums and written hundreds of songs, including tunes that have been recorded by heavy hitters like Springsteen, Alejandro Escovedo, and even Heart!

You don’t stick it out in the music business for as long as this guy has without developing a certain resilience or, as Chuck puts it below, without feeling “a little bit immortal.” But leave it to cancer to blow all that up. For a lot of us, being diagnosed is the first time we come face to face with a fact most humans prefer to avoid thinking about—ahem: we all die—and that experience is very hard to shake off. I’ll let Chuck explain it below. Enjoy!  

You wrote about this in your Substack, but for the folks who haven't read that, what's the story of your diagnosis?

I went in for what I thought was a routine colonoscopy, and they were like, “Okay, you're gonna go under now, and here's your oncologist, she's the best, she's so good.” And she said a few things to me and then it was just good night—I was out. And when I woke up, the oncologist started talking to me. She was like, “Charles, how have you been feeling?” I feel fine, lady. Then she said, “Have you lost any weight recently?” And I said, yeah, thanks for noticing. Then, “Do you have a family history of cancer?” And I’m thinking, why are you asking me all these questions? “Well, we found a mass.” And it slowly occurred to me that we were talking about cancer. And then I’m thinking, this lady is kind of a witch! Doesn't she know that tomorrow I'm getting on a plane, I'm going to Austin, I'm going to be playing some sold-out shows? What’s this lady's problem? Then they said they wanted to do a few more tests, and they rolled me into another room, and did a CT scan and PET scan, and then they sent us on our way. 

I made the mistake of going into the patient portal the next morning, and it said “Cancer” and it showed all the different places on my body, like my chest, in my abdomen. And that was the beginning of a pretty hellish 12 days, because nobody would comment on it. My general practitioner wouldn't comment because they didn't have the scan. So nobody was talking, and I had some dark, dark nights, for 12 nights or so. And then finally they were able to get me an appointment with another oncologist and he said, “Well, you’ve got lymphoma, at stage 4.” And I'm thinking, you know, I don't think that sounds good. 

But eventually he said I had one of the more treatable lymphomas, and he laid it all out: “This is what we're gonna do, we're gonna do six months of chemo and a thing called Rituxan.” And from there I just followed directions. Going into chemo is like going into a nail salon. You just sit there and stare straight ahead, maybe bring some snacks and something to listen to. I had six months of treatment. And then a few months went by and we had a follow-up and they told me that I'm 100 percent in remission. But I'm gonna be having checkups every six months or three months. I feel pretty grateful most days. I think the experience, if anything—and it may be too soon to tell, but I think it's possible—it made me a nicer person.

I dunno, you've always been pretty nice, as far as I can tell.

I can be an asshole. It’s who I am. But I think [this experience] does tap into your empathy and your mortality. It's like, “Hey, bro, it's me, mortality here.” That's something I just wasn't accustomed to, having that guy in the room all the time.

Yes. That's a really good way to put it. So when you first found out and you're in this waiting period—is that when the mortality guy showed up? 

Yeah, absolutely. 

I had a similar thing, because I went into the hospital thinking, Oh, I've got kidney stones, maybe something with my appendix. They did the scans, the biopsies, all that stuff. Then I was discharged from the hospital, and there was still this waiting period, similar to you. Some people at the hospital had said the word “cancer,” but other people were like, “Well, we don't actually know, you’ll have to wait.” It was so weird, being in that limbo. It’s like, I've got what seems like cancer, but it's not officially cancer yet.

I describe it as having a wooden stake of fear just driven through my heart. I don't want to diminish the love and care I got from my wife and my family and stuff, but ya know—you’re alone ultimately. There are certain places in life when you find yourself alone. Pain is one of them: You’re alone. You’re alone in your head. 

On a scale of one to ten: When you first found out, how scared were you?

I was scared! Like an eight, a nine, a lot of fear.

And when they told you it was treatable, where did it go from there?

It all just kind of lifts, mostly all of it. You just look around and you think, Modern medicine, they got this. People gave me practical advice: Don't, don't google it. I mean, what am I going to find, some out-of-date information on some daily news website? I prefer to let these A students guide me.

One of the reasons I don't like googling is because of what you said about the misinformation. But the other reason is that I’m scared about what I might find out. Is it the same for you?

Absolutely, yeah. You gotta get through the day, right!? You gotta get through the day and try to be present for the people around you. Look: You know it’s not healthy. There are certain things I know aren't healthy for me. Having been in recovery for crack, for alcoholism, I know what's not healthy for me, and that would be going around googling about lymphoma. 

I’m glad you brought up your recovery. Is that experience something that informed your experience with lymphoma?

Absolutely. I mean, if I didn't have a relationship with my higher power, then all those things that I do that are unhealthy would still…yeah, sobriety has really helped me to be present. It’s helped me in a number of ways.

I think about what it would have been like to go through this experience before sobriety. It would have been a disaster.

Yeah. Ya know, those early days of sobriety—those are some dark times, when you sober up. Because you’ve spent your whole life up to then taking your feelings and burying them, and then all that stuff comes back at you. And it can be in the form of anxiety attacks or whatever. In terms of my serenity, I'm in such a better place than I was 23 years ago when I got sober. 

I keep coming back to the idea that you mentioned, of mortality being in the room for the first time. Is that the first time that you felt that way in your life? Did you ever have that experience when you were using or with another illness in your life?

No, not really. I’ve always felt pretty immortal. I mean, I’m a pretty arrogant guy, a risk-taker. I don't know how to describe it. But I've always felt a little bit immortal, a little bit lucky. But I was never confronted with mortality in quite the way I was when I got that diagnosis.

I want to ask you about chemo itself. What did you think it was going to be like, and how does that compare to what it was actually like?

Nobody warned me. My initial treatment, I got home that night, and I stayed up really late. I was watching a Woody Allen movie and I was howling, man, just howling. And the next day I was like, “Man, this is going to be a breeze.” I had no idea that three days later, right on the money, I would just collapse with the blues in a way that's hard to describe. You can't get comfortable, it's just the blues, because you've been poisoned, man, with like rat poison. And so you just throw yourself on the bed, you can't get comfortable in any kind of way. But like everything, it passes. This, too, shall pass. And then you get to the point where you can kind of predict it. I did all right those six months. Honestly, I feel like I did. I don't think of myself as being a particularly strong person, but I feel like I did okay.

During those six months, were you pretty much off the clock the entire time, as far as playing shows and stuff goes?

Yeah, around the fifth month, I was able to predict when I would be suffering from the chemo. So we were able to book a month of Sundays—outdoor shows that seemed pretty COVID friendly. After our first gig, my guitar player James DePrato turned to me, and he said, “I don't know what people see up there, but that's not a sick person.” And I thought, okay, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. 

Have you written songs about this experience?

No. But I mean, everything's about it, you know? I do have a song called “It’s a Good Day to Be Alive”: “It's a good day to call your mother/ It’s a good day to see a movie/ About a killer with a sensitive side/ It's a good day to be alive.” Yeah, it's gonna come up.

Right. As a creative person, I think to myself, “I’ve got to translate this experience into something.” But I think a lot of times, once you stop trying is when it comes up.

Even this conversation—I'm surprised how much this conversation flows, because honestly, I don't feel particularly articulate about this. I don't feel like I have anything original to bring to this. You know, I don't feel like my experience was any different than tons of people's experiences. But here we are, you know, talking about it. And I'm kind of surprising myself.

It's a scary, scary experience. And to your point, lots of people have had it, are having it, and it's hard to know how to move through it. It's hard to talk about.

Yeah, it's hard to even say the word, you know? I had a friend call me, a musician. We hadn't spoken in ages, and he mentioned something about the c-word and what he'd been through. And I'm like, Yeah, we can't even say the word.