Doug Clark: ‘Three Liver’ Charley has a nice ring

A cell phone rings. Across the table the man I’m having lunch with jumps like he’s been goosed.

“That’s not mine, was it?” he asks, fishing into a pocket to retrieve his phone.

Dark screen. False alarm. Drat. The jangling culprit belongs to a tan-suited businessman who is bustling past us and on his way out of the Spokane Club bar.

Charley Schlesinger, 59, puts down his mum phone, leaving it on the table just in case. He grins a slightly sheepish grin, but that’s OK.

The moment has shown me more than any 10 interviews could about what it’s like to wait around for a liver transplant.

A half-hour earlier, just after we sat down, Schlesinger had tried to explain his relationship with his cell phone.

“This goes to bed with me,” he said, extending the device under my nose. “It goes to the can with me. When I get The Call it kicks in a whole series of events in my life.

“I have to beat feet to Seattle.”

The hell of it is that this is surgical déjÀ vu.

Schlesinger had a liver transplant in 1999. The liver is like a bouncer in a bar. It deals with the undesirables or, in science speak, the toxins that come along.

Schlesinger’s bouncer was sick. Hepatitis C.

The transplant got Schlesinger back in fighting shape. He went back on the air with Jazz with Chas, the public radio show Schlesinger has hosted (with minor interruptions) for 34 years.

He returned to his job as one of Spokane’s premiere gumshoes. (Sorry. Charley thinks “gumshoe,” one of my favorite words, went out with the 1930s. He prefers the term “private investigator.”)

But mainly the new liver allowed the gravel-voiced Schlesinger to continue his role as a Spokane fixture, loved and appreciated by people like me.

“I used to be colorful,” Schlesinger observes. “Now I’m just interesting.”

Schlesinger’s health took a turn last March. A cancerous spot was found on his new liver.

Surgery in May got rid of it. But this is a cancer with perseverance, a cancer that comes raging back to put you in a box.

So Schlesinger was offered a rare opportunity to earn the nickname “Three Liver” Charley.

He jumped at the chance.

“Absolutely,” he says. “I have a strong drive to keep on living.”

And so Schlesinger began attending to the many details that must be attended to before he is rolled into another operating theater at the University of Washington Medical Center.

Supported by Sue McClelland, the love of his life for 16 years, Schlesinger packed his suitcases, rented a house in Seattle and loaded his iPod with 75 days worth of tunes.

Which brings us to the meat of it.

My own gumshoeing tells me that each year roughly 5,000 people will receive a liver transplant.

During that year, some 17,000 people will be waiting for a liver.

And 2,000 people will die hoping and praying for The Call that never comes.

Today the topic is liver. I could write essentially the same thing about heart, lungs and pancreas transplants. It would all lead to the same point:

The sobering statistics will turn upside down if more of us became organ donors.

This can be done easily the next time you renew your driver’s license. Or do it sooner by visiting OrganDonor.gov and following a few easy directions.

This is a rough subject, I know. Someone must die for Schlesinger to get a healthy liver.

But organ donation adds meaning to our mortality.

It is the right thing to do.

Ask Charley Schlesinger. He’s living proof.