Red-blooded man

by Paul Kandarian

I’m such a bloody rare type. No, really.

Last year, I was on my way home from a film shoot in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and at the airport, there was a Red Cross setup there where you could donate blood. For the life of me, I can’t ever recall having given blood before. Maybe I have, but it would’ve been a long time ago.

Actually, I do remember in 1971 stopping someplace in Bristol where they took blood (not sure if it was the Red Cross or not), but I did so looking for money. I’d heard that alcoholics and other down-on-their-luck types could sell blood for money, and as a college freshman I figured that was me.

They turned me down. I told my dad what I’d tried and he raised holy hell about it. He was a liquor salesman, so maybe he knew what that scene was about, I don’t know, but he was some kind of mad.

But this time, at the airport, I did it out of largesse; just a need to help others. I signed up, went into the bloodmobile outside the terminal (it really should be run by TSA given their vampiric personalities that drain souls) and rather quickly, that was that.

I also signed up at the Red Cross to get reminders to give blood. And on one such notice, I found out my blood type, which really meant nothing to me until I looked into it. And this is where it gets interesting, and puts pressure on me to keep doing it: my blood type is B-negative, the second rarest there is, representing less than 2% of the population.

B-negative red blood cells can be given to both B and AB patients, while we can only get blood from other B-negative donors or from 0-negative donors (universal donors).

And since my type is rare, the Red Cross is really in need of it. Which explains why when I walked into my most recent donation station in Marion, the nurse doing the draining was positively excited to see me, saying she sees B-negative types maybe once a month if that.

Also cool while giving blood this time: they check your vitals, and apparently the thought of being stabbed by a needle and bleeding into a plastic sack didn’t faze me. My resting pulse rate was 56. Which is much, much lower than Hannibal Lecter’s 85 when he was eating a nurse’s tongue. Sorry, I just think of life’s moments in great movie lines, and if you love “Silence of the Lambs” like I do, you’ll get the reference.

This whole spirit of giving is not my normal MO, to be honest. I mean, I’ll hold doors open for people, I always say “please” and “thank you,” I’m deferential when needed, I just go by the golden rule, basically, or my version of it: I’m not a jerk to you if you’re not a jerk to me. But if you are a jerk to me, or more importantly, to someone I love, buddy, you ain’t never seen a bigger jerk than me. Small point of personal pride, that.

But the volunteer thing? Not so much. The closest I came was doing shows for a nonprofit I used to be with, Creating Outreach About Addiction Support Together in Rhode Island, where we’d do original productions about the disease of addiction and the impact it has on families.

Those shows were jarringly truthful, raw, and necessary, and I loved doing them, playing the father of an addict, which mirrored my real life: my son is in long-term recovery for addiction, doing well now. So doing that work – getting people to think, to act, to heal – was essential and so, so rewarding to me. We’d have talkbacks after each show, and people opened up their hearts to us and each other, sharing tales of grief and anger but also the occasional triumph, and it was by far the most satisfying part of the show and my life as an actor.

It feels good being helpful to people. Granted, we’re all helpful in some way, as a parent, a child, a wife, a husband, a doctor, a store clerk… you get the idea, we are all helpful either out of innate responsibility or part of the job.

But when that help involves something as elemental and crucial as blood? Being helpful takes on a whole new, really urgent, and essential meaning. I have something inside me that very few people have and that many people need. And giving it to help is a no-brainer. I mean, it grows back! Can’t do that with a kidney or a liver, or that tongue that Lecter snacked on.

Helping others helps you feel good. And if I may, in this case, pretty bloody good at that.