I walked in my crib around six a.m. and fell on the couch. Troy beat on my door five minutes later.
“Yo, it’s 6:05, cut the light off in the hallway when you leave and twist that bottom lock.”
“No, Dee, my old head. You gonna meet him today. Put these on.”
Troy tossed a set of scrubs at me.
“Are you fuckin’ serious?”
I tossed them back. He caught them and shoved them in my chest, saying that I needed them just in case a machine broke and blood squirted all over the place.
“Blood? Why the fuck would blood squirt on me?” I asked.
“Because it’s a renal dialysis unit!”
“What the fuck is renal dialysis!”
Troy explained it as being a place where they treated people with kidney failure. I still didn’t get it so I Wikipediaed it.
In medicine, dialysis is a process for removing waste and excess water from the blood, and is used primarily as an artificial replacement for lost kidney function in people with renal failure. Dialysis may be used for those with an acute disturbance in kidney function or progressive but chronically worsening kidney function therapy. Kidney injury is not usually reversible, and dialysis is regarded as a “holding measure” until a renal transplant can be performed, or sometimes as the only supportive measure in those for whom a transplant would be inappropriate.
“So you mean to tell me that it’s like an oil change?”
“Exactly, and that shit come from high blood pressure, diabetes, and all that shit niggas get, so we gotta watch what we eat on some real shit, man. Niggas be getting they toes chopped off and everything!” Troy said. My quick burst of knowledge on kidney failure had woken him up. After I told him a little about his job, he dropped all of this I’m an expert shit on me. Troy couldn’t have me knowing more about his job than him. I loved when my brothers flexed their smarts. I was mostly around people who only cared about a bunch of dumb stuff, dudes who were proud that they weren’t smart.
“So what you do? They let you work with patients without being a college grad?”
Troy whipped into a parking spot, explaining how he’s a reuse guy. A reuse guy basically takes the artificial kidneys (dialyzers) off of the patients’ machines, cleans them on an even more flashy machine, and then stores them so that they can be used by the patient again during their next treatment. Each dialyzer got fifteen to twenty-five uses and the patients were treated three times a week.
“Damn, that’s a good job, Troy; why you wanna sell smack?” The clinic he worked at was nice from the outside. They had grass and a nice bench under a tree, plus there was a Subway sandwich store across the street. Girls with fat asses in tight nurse pants with elastic bottoms and Mickey Mouse print waved at Troy and walked in. I’d take this job over mine any day.
“Dee, I make eight seventy-five a hour as a grown man.”
“Damn. Okay, well yeah I forgot, let’s do this.”
We walked through the double doors and around the back to the room where Troy processed the dialyzers. On the way, we passed a group of patients waiting in the lobby, mostly black and elderly. Troy’s room was neat and clean like him.
“You wanna see what I do, Yo?”
“Sure,” I said. Troy put on some latex gloves and opened a small fridge. He stuck his arm in and pulled out a bloody cylinder that was about twelve inches long.
“This is a dialyzer, Yo. Watch this!” He screwed a tube of water to the cap and turned the faucet on. A pool of blood spilled out, almost filling the sink.
“That’s fucking gross, man!” I said, taking two big steps back. “How in the fuck is it so much blood in there?” I couldn’t stop staring at the blood.
“These are full of special fibers that hold a large amount of fluid—think about those dumbass paper towel commercials where one towel soaks up a ocean. This the real shit!” he said, taking the caps off of the dialyzer and washing some meaty chucks of fat off of the tips. Then Troy hooked it up to a machine and hit start.
“Yo, I’ma go see if my old head here!”
Troy left me in his office alone. I played on my phone until he came back in around five minutes later.
“Yo, he here.”
I followed Troy into the main section of the clinic where treatments occurred. Twenty patients reclined in huge beige chairs scattered all over the floor in a circle. Some laughed, some slept, some moaned. I walked past them and their identical set-ups—a tube of blood connected to their arms running into refrigerator-sized machines, flushing through the dialyzer and then circling back into their bodies.
“Why they arms so fat?” I asked. Troy said that normal veins are too small to undergo this type of treatment so surgeons stuff their arms with huge fake ones called fistulas.
“Troy, my boy!” said an old black guy tucked in the corner. His hat was Kangol and it draped over his small face. His skin was leather. He had two gold teeth, one on each incisor, and they shined brighter than the floors in the clinic. He was wearing a Rolex on the arm with the fistula.
Troy introduced us. “This is Dee, Mr. Pete, he helping out with that thing.”
We exchanged hellos and Mr. Pete said, “Boy, have a seat!” Instantly, he started rambling. One of those ladies in the scrubs walked by. “Baby, you in for it, his crazy self gonna talk your head off.” I didn’t care; I liked listening. I was always a listener.
Pete said Troy was a stand-up guy. He said that people with open mouths had closed ears. He said the streets were as fucked up as his kidneys and lower back. He said crack fucked the game up but I’m on the tail end so I won’t make any real money anyway. He asked if I had lead-paint poisoning and I told him no. He said I probably did and just didn’t know it. “Everybody born in the eighties got lead!” He said fancy cars are dumb as the niggas who drive them. He said R & B is dead and rappers are crack babies. He asked what my mom did for a living. I couldn’t answer because he instructed me to get him some ice in the same breath. The nurse said, “No! He knows he can’t have ice!” He said come closer. I rolled forward and he said his kidneys don’t work but she knows his dick does. I gave him a pound. He kept going and going. He didn’t stop—race, class, religion, the streets, cops, sex, money. Three and half hours went by and I didn’t even know it. I left the clinic and headed back to Troy’s office as the nurse started to disconnect Mr. Pete from the machine.
“Yo, he loves you!” Troy said, loading the sink with a bunch of bloody dialyzers.
“How you figure that?” I said.
“Because he didn’t ask you to leave, you’ll see. He’s gonna bless us. You should stop by sometime and see him too. He knows everything!”
I said I would.