1978
All those weeks, head wound in so many bandages he couldn’t angle it to rest, face half covered, tubes everywhere, bruises and needles, and a permanent throb deep in his right hip that kept him up most nights. He’d never been so fucked up. His body was a painful storehouse of organs and bones; he couldn’t make it do anything more than fart. Finally he was feeling better and would they connect a phone in his room? Would they, hell! No phones were allowed in this particular room, this treatment room, they said, as though he was getting any decent treatment here.
“That being on whose say-so?” he asked.
“That being the rules,” one of the clan of nurses told him. They were all in cahoots, these nurses—tribal, sisterly. This one was into her forties, a give-up-on-looks kind of a woman who was getting fat and letting her hair go gray, which would be all right if at least she’d be kind and motherly, which she was not.
“What the hell sort of rules stops you using a phone?” he said.
The nurse shrugged and wrote something on his chart.
“What are you writing there?”
“Nil by mouth.”
“Oh ha ha. You gonna starve me, too? Starve me in this phoneless prison? Watch me through the window like a goldfish in a bowl?”
He wanted to tell the nurse how once he’d seen an actual, real goldfish sick in a tank with something called “swim bladder” disease. The fish swam pathetically upside down, making slow circles with its one working fin, and that he was like that fish now. On his back, unable to use all his limbs, floating through his days. But would she care? No, she wouldn’t care that he was sick like a fish. He’d been shut down, made to comply by virtue of his body that stank and itched under the bandages and didn’t do one damned thing he asked.
“A phone is a basic necessity,” he insisted. “You could allow me that much.”
The nurse gave him a sideways glance. “You want me to wire it in myself?” she said. “With my phone wires and all my workman tools that I keep right here on my person?”
She was wicked, he decided, another ugly one past her prime. She was looking at him with that superior look he hated so much. It didn’t seem right that an ugly woman could act so haughty. “Who you want to call anyway?” she said.
“Who you want to call,” he said in a singsong voice, mocking her.
When finally—at last—the arm was cut loose, he was at least allowed paper and pen, so he tried writing a letter. By then, he was desperate for some pot and had the feeling of a castaway scrawling a help message in his own blood and hoping the bottle is found before fresh water runs out. He needed Bobbie—needed her right now—to bring him weed or else he really would go crazy in the glaring desert of this hospital and all its nasty nurses, many of whom he would have found difficult to cope with straight even at the best of times, let alone when he couldn’t stand up to pee.
Using his bent knee as a surface, he started the letter in messy left-handed scrawl, the best he could do with his right arm mummified. He hated the plaster cast that housed his broken arm, and lately he’d been hating the arm, too. It itched and stank and hurt and made him want to bash the plaster off and gnaw away the bone at the shoulder. His left arm was pretty useless, too. It was like a weak, emaciated twin that couldn’t even hold a pen at a useful angle. He did his best, pissed off at how long it took and how sore his hand was from the effort and from all the needle holes and bruises and gummy areas where tape had been ripped off and reapplied. His left hand was being abused here at the hospital. No wonder it didn’t write well.
He pressed the call button at his bedside. “Someone gonna come help me with this thing?” he called out. “Someone going to give me a little help here?” But all that happened was a nurse stared at him through the window, saw what he was doing, and walked away. Was he surprised? No. They seemed to enjoy taunting him. They probably liked watching him struggle with the letter.
Writing it was hard, but folding was worse. Folding was a bastard. It turned out you needed two hands to fold a letter. He struggled, stuffing the letter into an envelope, and spending extra time on the address so it was legible. Task completed, it was only a matter of convincing one of the nurses to help him mail it. He got a hold of a weekend staffer who didn’t know him and told her that the letter was for his mother. Could she get a stamp for him and post it? His old mother, dying in Kentucky of emphysema, smoking those Salems—could she be a nice girl and post this letter to the dying old woman?
“Emphysema, huh?” the nurse said. She had one of those whiny sympathetic voices that spoke every sentence with pain and reluctance, as though all of life’s communications were bad news. He thought she should quit her job as a nurse and work in a mortuary. With her long face and big teeth, she looked half vampire; a mortuary job would suit a girl like this.
“You’d be good with the dead,” he said. It just came out like that before he had time to think. She squinted at him and showed the big teeth again, so he said, “I meant the dying.”
“Oh, thank you!” She smiled. She had a yellow incisor that reminded him of a rat’s tooth.
“My mother would love you,” he said. “She’s dying.”
“Your poor mom, emphysema is just a nasty one, huh?” she said, drawing back at the word emphysema as though at spiders in a garden shed.
He said, “Oh yeah, hell on earth. Coughing all the time, spluttering, nearly drowning in her own spit—”
“Oh dear!”
“That’s how my old mother spends her time. She should call it a day—it’s that terrible—but she wants to carry on, to struggle through all the terrible pain. Bravery? Madness? You decide. What’s your name tag say there? Cheryl. That’s sweet, Cheryl. A pretty name for a pretty girl.”
Cheryl blushed, then said, “I think she sounds brave. Very brave, bless her.”
“Maybe, but it isn’t as though she is doing it willingly, is it? She didn’t stare into the face of hideous disease and say, ‘I’ll take that on!’ So how is that brave?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Kirtz—”
“Craig. You call me Craig, sweetheart. And I’ll tell you what, you wouldn’t find me gurgling away like that at her age, my lungs full of water. She’s tough, that’s for sure. I wanted to be with her at the end, but look at me.” He nodded down at his body with all its plaster and bandages. “Not much use to her, am I? Woman reaches an age when she needs to rely on her grown son, her only child, and look at this. Damned shame, isn’t it?”
The girl looked sad now and he regretted that he’d caused her to put on a sad face because she looked even more like a rodent with her mouth twisted down like that.
“Don’t go crying on me,” he said. He knew he’d overstepped the mark. Not by inventing a mother, or even a dying mother, but by describing the loneliness of the old and the dying. Nobody wanted to hear about that, not even him. Not even when it wasn’t true.
“Oh, no. It’s just that…” the girl began, her buck teeth resting on the dry ledge of her lower lip, her eyes seeming suddenly larger and wetter than before. She was one of those hugely tall girls, a kind he especially did not like, stretched out like Gumby, with a narrow oval face and a helmet of bobbed hair. Hard to imagine a woman like that had tits, he thought, but he’d seen it—and this was true—women exactly as ugly as this with nice tits, some with real nice ones, though admittedly you wouldn’t ever think it. “I wish there was something I could do,” she said, finally.
“Well, there is one thing, if you don’t mind,” he said. He nudged the envelope her direction. “I have a birthday card here for her. Would you mail that for me, Cheryl?” he said. “Cheryl, would you do me that favor?”
“Of course I will.” She took the envelope from him. It was only a slim half sheet of paper, with none of the size or bulk of a birthday card, and he watched as she felt it carefully in her fingers. He sensed her confusion at how light it was, almost as though the envelope were empty.
“I couldn’t get out to buy her a real card,” he said, looking ashamed. “So I drew her a picture.”
“Oh.” The girl was holding the envelope carefully, as though it were the envelope they use to announce the Miss America pageant winner. She looked down at it, then at Craig, her face earnest. “Well, that will mean even more to her,” she said finally, though he sensed the strain in her voice. She didn’t really think his pretty picture would please his mother at all. Surely Cheryl was lying.
“Do you think so? Really?” he said.
“Oh yes. Mothers love their children’s drawings.”
It was too much; he almost laughed out loud. “Even though I’m fully grown?” he managed.
She hesitated, but then said, “I think so, yes.”
“And it was done with my left hand, which to be quite truthful, is hardly good for writing my own name.”
He watched her face carefully and saw some doubt, either that an incompetent drawing by an adult son in plaster might be so welcome, or that he was fully lying to her. He opened his mouth in a small gasp. “It’s not good enough, is it?” he said, as though this possibility had just occurred to him and was crushing.
“I’m sure it is fine,” Cheryl said, recovering quickly. “Better than fine.”
He needed to get her out of the room before he cracked up. But he couldn’t resist, no he could not. Suddenly he lunged toward the letter. “No, no it’s no good!” he cried out. “Give it back to me. Give it here!”
But she clasped the letter against her belly. “No, let me post it for you. I want to. It would be my privilege,” she said.
He gave her a smile, or as much as he could smile given all the bandages on his face. He thought how his head was like a monster’s head, and his smile was a monster’s smile. “And maybe bring me back a beer?” he said, knowing that she would. “Just a little one. A Michelob, maybe? A Bud?”
She looked sternly at him, so he winked at her. Winked with the one eye, and it kind of freaked her out. “Well, okay,” she said, “but just the one.”
“Thank you,” he whispered. “There’s a thirty-two-ounce bottle at 7-Eleven. You’ll see them there at the bottom of the cooler. Grab one of those big boys for me, darling, okay? You can do it on your break time. I’ll wait.”
She nodded, then backed away hesitantly.
The envelope didn’t even have Kentucky in the address. It was marked with the local zip code, and she could have looked down at any time and called his bluff. In fact, he was kind of hoping she would notice that it was a local letter. He liked the thought of confusing her. If she came back and asked why it was for Maryland and not Kentucky, he’d fuck with her mind and say it had been addressed to Kentucky. It had said Kentucky right there on the envelope, couldn’t she read? That would blow her away, make her think she was taking too many drugs, although she probably wasn’t taking any drugs and that, certainly, was among her problems. He imagined her standing at the blue-and-silver U.S. postal box, the one tacked onto the wall at the entrance of the hospital, sucking on her tooth and being confused by the address, and it made him laugh just thinking about it.
“Thank you,” he said as she slid out the door. And then, wistfully, he added, “I wish I could meet a girl like you.”
HE KNEW IT was Bobbie, not June, who got the mail every afternoon from the little silver-and-red mailbox at the end of the drive. The pleading note was to persuade her to come to the hospital in the morning instead of going to school. That, or she could leave school quick at the bell and come to the hospital by four o’clock. He needed her here, then out, before her mother arrived. And he needed some pot.
He thought she owed him at least that much—a little visit and his weed. But nothing happened. He waited for her to turn up but she failed to arrive, day after day, until it began to piss him off, the way she made him wait around for her. She thought she could do anything she liked with him now that he was in the hospital, and that was an insult if he’d ever heard one. It made him so angry that by the end of the week he began growling, actually growling like a dog there in his hospital bed, whenever Bobbie’s face sprang into his mind. He’d been so sweet in his letter, telling her he loved her. He loved her. He’d written it the fuck down and asked—no begged—for his pot. Did he get anything out of all his efforts? Hell no. And now his mood was on permanent pissed off. A few days later, when the rat-toothed girl poked her head through the door and asked if his mother had liked his drawing, he told her to go to hell. Her chin whipped up, as though someone had slapped her on the ass, and she said, “I beg your pardon!”
“She died before she got it,” he said.
“Oh!”
“Sorry I swore. I didn’t mean it. It’s all the drugs.” But Rat Tooth didn’t come around again even though he’d apologized and his mother had died and his body was a like a chest of broken toys.
So he worked on a different one, a candy striper, some do-gooding volunteer, to lend him five bucks in quarters and park him next to the phone where he could get something done.
“I need to call my mother. She’s in Kentucky, dying of lung cancer,” he said. For some reason, mention of dying mothers was surprisingly effective, a master key that turned every lock in a woman’s heart. It got them to break hospital rules, which was surprising because people died all over hospitals and you’d think the employees would get used to it. The candy striper took the bait and said she’d be back in ten minutes, and she was, too, with an orderly in tow. The orderly unfastened him from the machines, slapping the brakes off the bed. She was a good woman, the little candy striper, a volunteer from the high school, still young enough to be unbitchy. She wheeled him through the hall to the pay phone, his lap full of quarters, and he said, “You make me feel so good!”
“Glad to help,” she said.
“I feel just like one of those little handicapped kids being taken to the state fair!”
Her face changed at this remark. “Oh,” she said.
He rang Bobbie on a weekday, just about the time she would walk into the house from the school bus. He could picture her there in the kitchen, its windows darkened by the heavy autumn foliage outside. He imagined the slam of the porch door, then the sound of the metal doorknob and the rattling of the back door as she came in. She’d think the phone was her mother and grab it before thinking.
But just when the phone began to ring, one of the nurses showed up, asking what he was doing in the hall, and he was pulled from his reverie.
“I’m waiting for the orderly to bring me to X-ray,” he said.
It was another of the bitch nurses, not the normal heifer-shaped variety but a slender brunette about his age with a nice face and way too much attitude. “I’m going to check that,” she said, angling her hip away from him and launching her comment over her shoulder.
He watched her walk away. “Is a man not allowed to make a phone call in this place? It isn’t the morgue, is it? You think you’re working in the morgue? We’re still alive up here, you know!”
“No beds in the hall,” she said.
“What do you think? I flew here? I wheeled over with my two strong arms? Listen, sunshine, one of your side put me here. That’s how I got here!”
“And that’s how you’ll get back, too,” she said, flicking her hair, smacking her lips, big bows of pink recently doused with lipstick. She was so confident with that agile body, leaning into the double doors, glancing only briefly at him, looking down her nose. He watched her push through the doors.
“Oh, you are so pretty,” he called, forming the word so that it came out hard. “Pritt-ee,” he said, menacingly.
She held up her hand, fingers outstretched. “I’m coming in five minutes for you.”
By now his reputation had swept through the team of nurses; they all knew about him and gave him a hard time. Ballbusters, the bunch of them, taking advantage of the fact he couldn’t walk. It was the fault of that Esther, with her hard metal face and skinny estrogen-deprived frame, those dirty white stockings on her bark-colored legs, she’d done this to him. Set them all against him.
“Bunch of lesbians!” he called at the nurse. But the nurse didn’t turn around, which was typical, which was exactly what he had learned to expect. “Sadists!” he yelled. Still no reply. Then he remembered he still had the phone in his hand. If Bobbie had answered, she’d have hung up by now. He slammed it back onto the receiver and dug though his pile of coins, dialing all over again. He hung on anxiously as it rang and rang. He made a bitter sound, feeling the vibration deep in his throat. If all he had was five minutes, he’d let it ring for five minutes. But Bobbie didn’t pick up. He waited and waited, until finally the lesbian nurse came through the double doors with an orderly, a look on her face like she meant business.
“We’re rolling,” she said, and despite all his protests, they wheeled him back to the room.
He tried a bunch of other times, whenever he could convince someone to move him. But it was as though Bobbie were avoiding him. This he could not understand. What had he done to her? She’d driven them into a goddamned forest and gotten away with it—he was the one who should be pissed off.
He thought he would have to resign himself to living un-stoned in the hell that was the hospital, but then, one day while the nurses were ignoring him, preoccupied with some old fart who broke his hip falling on pickle juice in his kitchen, June came to see him and it suddenly occurred to him—June! Why hadn’t he thought of her in the first place? She could disconnect him from all the machines they leashed him to, push out the clunky, horrible bed, and park him next to the phone. All he had to do was distract her for a few minutes afterward, send her on a mission somewhere, and he’d have time to get Bobbie on the phone.
“Hey babe, unhook me here, will you?” he said casually, as though this was a routine thing he’d been doing right along.
“You mean, from all the monitors?” she said, as though he were asking for death itself.
“Yeah, it’s easy. I do it all the time.”
“But I don’t know how,” June said. He watched her brow furrow, then a nervous licking of lips. He wished she wouldn’t do that thing with her tongue.
“I’ll talk you through it,” he said gently. “Unhooking is the easy part. It’s the re-stabbing that sucks. We’ll leave that to the death squad.”
She unplugged him, at first cautiously, as though she thought the machines breathed for him, then with more confidence. He talked her through how to prop open the double doors and then, while the staff was preoccupied with the pickle-juice man, June wheeled him into the hall. “How about you call the radio station and give them a progress report for me, will you?” he said. “And use a different phone—I need this one right now. Use one on another floor. And then, how about getting some Burger King takeout? We need some decent food in here. This place is all soup and fruit and shit.”
He watched her walk off. She was so padded out she looked like a piece of furniture you could sit on, but she was very useful, he had to admit. A useful, nice lady who didn’t mean him any harm. Given this, he thought he might grow used to how fat she was. He watched her waddle down the hall and he felt honest gratitude. At least she didn’t give him shit like all the others. She was patient, maternal. She brought him cake instead of kicking him in the ass like the nurses always did.
He dialed the phone, keeping watch on the activities of the nurses on the other side of the ward as he did so. He felt a tide of luck moving his way and, sure enough, Bobbie answered on the third ring. She probably thought it was her mother.
“So I guess you made it home okay,” he said. “You going to ask how I’ve been? Go on, say it. Say, ‘How have you been, Craig?’ ”
She didn’t say anything and so he said, “Don’t you want to know what it is like being stuck in this hole with tubes everywhere, even in my pecker?”
Still no answer. For a second he thought she’d hung up. Then he heard, “Mom says you’re fine. And that a lot of those tubes are gone.”
“She mention that I’m blind now?”
“Half,” she said.
“Is that not enough for you?” He felt a fury in him, that big panting angry wolf that followed him around. Sometimes he could almost feel it hovering. But he needed to focus. He needed some pot and Bobbie was his only hope. “Look, you going to give me some help here, babe? I’m all broken to pieces, so maybe you can see it in your heart?”
“Don’t you have doctors?”
“Doctors, fuck. What I need is you to take some of my money that you’ve got—I’m giving permission now to use some of my money, do you hear? And you’re going to get a taxi to my house and tell whoever answers the door that you need to get me some clothes, okay? You’re going to get me the stuff I need, then come back here to the hospital.”
She didn’t say anything, and he imagined her standing by the back door in her kitchen, the cord winding around her middle, or crossing her breasts, or curling around her long sun-blushed arms. He’d liked her better when she was younger and he could circle her white belly easily with two hands and when the whole of her breast fit into his mouth, but he liked her now, too.
“I’m not hearing ‘Glad to help you out, Craig, after all you’ve been through.’ Why is that? Why don’t you want to make up to me after ditching me in the car like that? I didn’t tell on you, you know. The police are around here all the time, but I haven’t snitched.”
She took a long breath and he waited for that and then, finally, heard her say, “I can’t go to your house. I’m not allowed to be seen there, remember?”
“You can this time. I’m saying you can. Because it isn’t like I’m with you. You’re just being the postman, picking up a package, so what? What I need is the reefer that’s in my closet. It’s in the lining of my winter coat. Bring it here quick. That’s all I’m asking, bring me the coat. Also, my radio. I’m being soft-rocked to death in this damned hospital and the crappy transistor your mother bought me is a piece of shit.”
“I can’t go to your house. They’ll see me.”
“Oh Christ, don’t be so dumb! It doesn’t matter who sees what—”
“I don’t want to get in trouble.”
“It’s just clothes—”
“But the pot—”
“Cut me some slack! It’s a coat as far as you know, okay? The pot is in the lining, about which you officially know nada. It’s in the lining because I have to hide it from my roommates. They always steal my good bud. It’s hidden, see? Nobody will know a damned thing.”
“But they’ll see me. Whoever answers the door—”
“—won’t care! They won’t ask anything. They’re assholes. They can not think.”
“I can’t get there. The police might come.”
“What police? There are no police. I said you could use some of my money. Get a taxi!”
“I don’t have any of your money.”
His heart was pounding; he wanted to yell. He listened as the phone beeped a warning that he was almost out of credit. Please insert coins if you wish to continue, please insert coins…“Hang on!” he shouted, then wrenched himself up, causing his pelvis to hurt like hell, and pushed in a couple of quarters.
He heard her say she had to go. “No, don’t!” he yelled, a little louder than he ought to have. “For fucksake, Barbara, use the money to get a taxicab, you know what a taxicab is, don’t you?” He imagined her with his money, buying all the stupid bullshit she liked—pastel T-shirts and makeup and toe socks, or pet fucking rocks—God, he hoped she hadn’t blown half of it already. “I’m not pissed off, okay? I respect what you did; it was almost professional. But you got caught. I caught you. If you want to steal from me, you’ve got to kill me. And try as you did to make it so, I. AM. NOT. DEAD.”
“I didn’t try to kill you!”
“Then I hate to think of what would happen if you had tried!” he said. He thought about what to say next, what would scare her. She’d always moaned about who might see them and what she should say and how she should act. She’d always worried about being in trouble that way. Well, he’d show her some trouble. “Listen, missy, you’re lucky I’m not talking to the cops—yet—because they do want to talk to me,” he said. “I’m not going to tell them you tried to kill me, but I know it, and you know it.”
He paused, letting that sink in. She’d be going crazy with the thought she might be arrested for attempted murder. “It’s really very simple. I want the pot—I mean coat—and I want my money, but you can use some of my money for transportation. Isn’t that simple? Isn’t that easy? So how about it? We’ll call it quits after that, no more arguing about you trying to kill me. No point staying mad at each other.”
She didn’t say anything and he felt it again, that anger, charging up from inside him. “Oh come on!” He wondered if she’d hung up, actually hung up on him. She couldn’t possibly hang up on him; he was the victim, the one in the hospital, institutionalized among an army of vicious nurses and remote, untalkative doctors who sleepwalked through their rounds. Besides, she’d never before done anything of the sort. He yelled into the phone, “Goddamn it, answer me! It’s not too late for me to go to the police, you know!”
And then he looked up, and there were the two cops that he’d seen before, almost as though he’d summoned them. He had no idea how long they’d been watching him barking orders at Bobbie about drugs, his hand curled so hard around the phone there were sweat marks on the plastic so that he even looked like a junkie. He’d seen these cops before, lurking in the hospital, staring at him through the window of his room: a freckled young Irish-looking one in a crisp dark blazer and a black guy with an open-neck shirt and acne.
“Are you for real, Salt and Pepper?” he said. Though he’d been avoiding them for some time by feigning sleep whenever they came around, he wasn’t entirely sure if he’d invented these two. Back when he’d first been admitted to the hospital, when he hadn’t really understood what was going on and people were sticking him with needles and prying through his skull and wheeling him down hallways to darker and smaller rooms, attaching him to machines, he’d seen them—or thought he’d seen them. His brain hadn’t been operating smoothly for quite some while. He had to admit that he was in an advanced state of fucked up. There had been times over the past week when he would forget words. Not dictionary words but common, ordinary words, words like pee, for example. He’d get only so far in a sentence, I need to…, and then draw a blank and finish the sentence with you know! A nurse would then race from the room to find a doctor, who blared a penlight in his eye and asked questions like whether he knew his own name and what the hell day it was, and he never knew the answer to that one because every day was the same to him now. It could be Tuesday seven times in a row—what the hell difference did it make?
He narrowed his vision on the cops now. “If you are real, are you looking for me?” he asked. He hadn’t been a hundred percent on that, either, whether the police were seeking him specifically, or whether for some reason they just hung around hospitals. Perhaps they were present in the wards all the time, like fuzzy dice hanging on the rearview mirrors of roadsters. It was hard to tell because time jumbled in his mind so that a day could be super-elastic and last forever or disappear altogether, plucked from his life without his ever having being informed, taken from him as his eye had been. For days, he wasn’t sure about the eye—had it really been removed? It had been, he’d finally understood, just as he understood now, as the police came toward him, that these cops were real.
“Hey, can you hang that up for me and call a nurse? I think I’m going to throw up,” he said. Since the removal of his eye there was always something draining into the back of his throat and it could be relied upon to provide a kind of emergency vomiting situation if needed. Leaning over the mattress, he moaned and writhed, making it appear that only the weight of his broken arm anchored him in the bed. Like this, he hawked up a sizable dollop of fluid; it made an impressive splat on the floor.
Sure enough, the head honcho, Esther, came rushing. She told the cops they needed to wait somewhere else. That she needed to attend to him now.
“Thank you, Nurse Esther,” Craig said. “I’m about to throw up again. I need my machines. These good folks will have to go away now.”
“Oh, please!” Esther scolded.
“What?” He let out a long moan, farted loudly, then began breathing in a shallow irregular way. He was actually very good at this, he decided. He was beginning to feel nauseous and light-headed. Now he really did feel terrible, his skin hot and cold at the same time. He could feel the sweat beneath his bandages, the deep ache low in his right buttock where he’d broken his pelvis. “I’m going out!” he called.
Esther let out a long breath, then turned to the police, seeming positively apologetic that she had to ask them to leave. “I would love for you to arrest him and take him away,” she sighed, “but I got to get him on a drip now. If he loses consciousness we have to revive him. That’s just rules.”
“But he is faking,” the black cop said.
Esther smiled. “I know.”
The police would eventually speak to him, of course, but he couldn’t figure out why that would matter. What was the great crime anyway? He’d driven his car off a road, nearly killed himself, but he hadn’t hurt anybody else. Altercation at a motel? The manager had stolen from him. And he couldn’t even remember who threw the first punch. Pot in the car? There was some pot in the car, but not much. Someone left it there, you know the radio biz. The porn in the trunk was legal. What the hell had he done wrong? Not a damned thing, so let them ask what they liked.