by Jaimy Gordon
I had a private room-we all did. Likewise a private bath and, as I said, a private closet. These lodgings weren’t fancy but neither were they like your common everyday hospital room, nor even like the clean ugly compartments in a new motel. Instead they kinda reminded me of servants’ bedrooms in swanky old Central Park West apartments like Grandma Schapiro’s, or in Monument Street brownstones like Grandpa Koderer’s, square airy rooms, neither small nor large, high-ceilinged, white-walled, with oak woodwork. And one large window, barred in a discreetly ornamental fashion, just like at Grandma’s.
To return to my private closet, its oaken doorframe had been blackened by a thousand coats of shellac, and the cracks in the plaster resembled the queen of spades in deep décolletage, looking at her icy self upside down in the playing card mirror. I had better sense of course than to tell them that. Bertie Stein, who lived next door to me, once whispered to a nurse’s aide that the tangled pipes and cracks and water stains on his ceiling were maps, drawn by trolls, of the royal palace. If Bertie said it, this was nothing but doper’s theater you may be sure, and even so there was sumpm in it: one floor up were the offices of all our dreambox mechanics, traceable by their rotten plumbing, if you left out about the trolls. Bertie got a little pill each morning for that indiscretion, Hollywood Bar blue, Stelazine it was called, which to me sounded just like the name of some babydoll-faced bride whining for a dope (meaning a Coca-Cola) in a Tennessee Williams play. Bertie even kinda looked like Stella Zeen, with his silky page boy, and soft co-cola eyes, and droopy little shoulders. So as usual Bertie got his dope, and took it too. Even if it made his head feel like a cabbage, to him any pill at all was better than no pill.
As for me, as long as I was here, I took my job to heart of being a bughead-for I saw right away that the others were better at it than me. I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody, and I meant to keep it that way. It was like I’d pitched my one-woman igloo at the South Pole, where nobody’d ever see it, and now and then I wondered if I might not as well be dead as be bopping around with the penguins down here.
Course I knew I wasn’t the only in the world. At Girls’ Classical I used to hear the rumors-what the hump, I spread some myself-about those two Popeye-jawed gym teachers Miss Swigart and Miss Dusterhof, in their size 14 lime-green gym-suits and pink eyeglasses, who had oversprung kneecaps bulging out a bit at the back and raucous altos like military macaws. At least Swigart and Dusterhof had each other, or at least they had the same address in the Vineyard Villas Apartments on North Charles Street. I never asked em-lemme die first-but I looked em up in the phonebook. I knew I might grow into a bird like that myself someday. I didn’t want to be in the same club with those gnarled dollies even if it was the only one that would have me for a member.
When I got to Rohring Rohring, my cut-up arms said sumpm loud and clear to the management, but then there were three hours a week with Dr. Foofer left to kill. I treated my dreambox mechanic to the changeless silence of the ice shelf. With all that empty space for interpretation, the old gas bag thought the worst of me, I could tell, and I was pleased. Still, at pharmaceuticals that might seed the brainclouds in my dreambox and really change the weather, I had to draw the line. I mean I didn’t even know what my own real weather was yet. So I tongue-rolled every little green pill and stockpiled them in the hem of my overalls, just in case I might as well be dead.
Then I made it into the Bug Motels (the name of our rock group): which was Bertie, Dion, Emily, O and me. None of us heard voices. None of us thought we were the Virgin Mary or Jesus either. I got asked into the Bug Motels one day when I saw that one more green pill and the bottom of my overalls would sag. So I palmed over to Bertie an M &M’s bag full of the things. “Holy godzilla,” he said, “good stuff. How much?” “Nuttin,” I said, and next thing I knew I was sitting at the Bug Motels’ table in the dayroom, bidding zero at O Hell.
Everybody said that Bertie Stein had had a brilliant mind before it got flattened under the influence of various drugs like a chihuahua under a garbage truck. He had pawned his genius sister’s viola, a Guarneri del Gesù, insured for $50,000, to buy a block of hashish the size of a small pound cake, and had smoked the whole thing himself, and so landed in Rohring Rohring.
Dion Dragoumis had been sent to the bughouse, so the story went, to save him from his old man. His file had come not from Juvenile Justice but from some anti-racketeering office in Washington, where he had begged an agent to hide him.
So how did being in Rohring Rohring hide him? Basil “The Blowfish” Dragoumis still had to pay his bills and knew just where the kid was. Even we could tell Dion wasn’t cut out to be a gangster, and at first we considered this a point in his favor. But soon we kinda wished The Blowfish would apply some muscle to the case.
Dion loved himself all day every day, until sumpm better came along. Then he would drop his old self just like that for his new self. No way he would love anybody else’s self-he could only suck it up and swallow it and make it his self. He took Bertie’s slinky walk for instance, and my skeptical snort. He was so handsome he was ugly, and his tailor would come by the Adolescent Wing with swatches of sharkskin and shantung rippling with silvery light, and ruffled shirts and pointy tasseled shoes. The rest of us dirtballs stared.
The bughouse is no democracy, but in a way the buggy majority rules. To us other Bug Motels Dion was a doomed and laughable sicko in his Liberace clothes: We never realized that he was on his way, we were the flops, until later. Dion was all but useless on mission for the Bug Motels, since he refused to carry anything in his pocket, not even a key or a dollar bill, for fear it would mess up the line of his trousers. But he wasn’t being bugged by the FBI, well maybe he was but he didn’t think he was, and we had to admit he looked like one of the Four Tops, so he qualified for the Bug Motels.
Emily Nix Peabody, refusal was her middle name, was eleven years old, weighed fifty-four pounds and losing, and wouldn’t eat for weeks, maybe months or years. Otherwise she was the pet of the place, Miss Dying Popularity we called her. So that was us on “the Adolescent Wing”-the east end of the sixth floor of Rohring Rohring-except for Mrs. Wilmot.
Why Mrs. Wilmot was still in the Teenage Ward after all these years, nobody knew. Wilmot was a skinny-shanked, potbellied old girl of around sixty, in a buttonless (or she’d have unbuttoned it) pink chemise, with skin like a wet brown bag sliding down her bones. Now that woman was crazy, which, come to think of it, did nothing for her prestige with us Bug Motels. Mostly what she did was sit on the bench just inside the entrance to the Adolescent Wing and pull up her dress and waggle the peapod, yes I mean her graypink coochie in its skimpy ring of grizzled whiskers, in full view of all of us.
Maybe they thought we teenage loonies needed some kinda callous on our sexual eyeballs and maybe it worked, anyhow it wasn’t sex we Bug Motels were conspiring on, at least not with each other, even though we had our beauty, O. And now I gotta tell you about O. Of all the girlgoyles I ever fell for, O was the most ridiculously urgent. She was a cross between Mary Hartline of Super Circus and the kind of drapette who would jump you at the bus stop and kick you in the shins and tear out your hairclips and throw your schoolbooks down the sewer. Her hair was like fiberglass snow in Hutzler’s window at Christmastime, mounds of ratted platinum, about fifteen pounds of it, frizzed on rollers, crackling with white electricity and a million shiny threads flying. She had on ballet slippers with little pink elastic bands over the arch like only a drapette would wear, and a sheath skirt that knocked her knees together so hard she had to scuff along pigeon-toed. Her eyes were big, dark, wet and ringed with blacking. She couldn’t see without glasses, which she didn’t even own, and she could hardly walk in that skirt, but she beamed agile violence, so that somehow I always thought of her walking like Mary Hartline upside down on a pair of jeweled daggers in her hands.
Every man O had known had tried to oink her-anyway she said so, that was her problem, that and working the Pratt Street bars from the age o
f twelve, for they had all tried and a lot of them had succeeded. And somewhere along the way she started to charge for it. And then, sumpm else happened, sumpm with a knife. O was a police case too. Probably everything she said was true, certainly she was the belle of the bughouse, where the dreambox mechanics told her: she had to stop thinking of men that way. Anyhow no suitor was too lowly for her chill, calm, slightly cross-eyed smile. Not even me.
You could go buggy from boredom in the bughouse, if you weren’t buggy already. But at least from fall to spring all five of us Bug Motels from East Six went to school. We really went, almost the way normal teenagers get on the bus and ride to school. And yes it was queer going to Girls’ Classical from the loonie bin, and even queerer to go from Girls’ Classical back to the bughouse every afternoon, but everything about a ritzy dreambox hospital like Rohring Rohring makes for strange combos.
A little yellow school bus just our size picked us up every weekday morning on the traffic island between trolley tracks at the Broadway entrance. If Mr. Nurse’s Aide Reginald Blanchard was the one sent to watch us off, and usually he was, we’d be smoking down the line of us like five twigs of kindling. Behind us loomed the ruby brick hospital, frilled with black iron lace like the fin de siècle society matron she was, and across six lanes of traffic was the livery stable of all the fruit and junk wagons left in the city, where a few late-sleeping ayrabbers (the lowest of the low except for us mental peons) were still straggling out the wide-open barn doors one by one behind their seen-it-all nags. Then the bus pulled up and we were off to our separate lyceums, Park School for Bertie, Mount St. Agnes for O, Faith Bible for Emily, Calvert Hall for Dion-I was the only one in public school, since Merlin wouldn’t have us think ourselves so grand, not even from the bughouse.
And at 4:45 we were all back on the traffic island, with tall red Reggie firing up our Luckies again, bending down the row of us with his lighter like a mother bird loaded with worm purée. And as we eyed that swanky Dunhill, inlaid with pearls and engraved not RB but lmcl, obviously cadged from some female ex-patient for favors large or small, we thought uneasily of all the ways Reggie wasn’t like a mother to us, for, all things being equal, he would rather please you than thwart you, but he had his price. Now he let us smoke, backs to the wind, while he turned up his own collar, and when we were through he delivered us safely back to Rohring Rohring, sixth floor, east end, the Adolescent Wing, and, wherever we had left it, our mission.
Even when you live in the bughouse, life needs a mission. Especially when you live in the bughouse. After all, here you’ve got no field hockey team, no terrarium for your reptile collection, no Broncos Marching Band, no Future Lawyers of America. We called ourselves the Bug Motels because we were a rock band, but we hadn’t gotten around to learning instruments yet. Junk food couldn’t be a project here. This wasn’t Camp Chunkagunk where you got a candy bar every two weeks when you turned in your laundry. We Bug Motels had pocket money and charge accounts, two restaurants, a snack bar and a gift shop with a six-foot-long candy counter in the basement. We rolled in malted milk balls, canned potato sticks, cheese and peanut butter crackers, pretzel rods, you name it. For a while we had the use of the doctors’ tennis courts in the afternoons and huffed around the sunless courtyard in parkas and gloves, but then it got too cold even for us. We needed a doper to refine and complicate our appetites and godzilla gave us Bertie Stein, not only an experienced dope fiend but a mastermind. Bertie funneled us into the Manhattan Project, the H Bottle, the Big Blue Bomb.
You know that quaint sort of old bomb that falls, like it’s raining lipsticks, out of bulky white airplanes in The World at War? Under the main hospital next door were a huge pharmacy and the fabulously rumored morgue, but Rohring Rohring’s eight stories sat on a warehouse, an underground dump for big stuff, distillation urns and sterilizer boilers and hundred-pound drums of industrial cleanser, and royal blue size H cylinders of laughing gas that looked just like those bombs. It was one of them, fixed nicely next to its twin H of oxygen in Robinhood green on a cart like you’d use to bus a cafeteria, that souled our mission.
Bertie Stein was featherweight and restless and sifted about the corridors of Rohring Rohring all day long in roachlike silence, slipping through cracked doors if he found any, trying every lock and tuning his junkie’s x-ray eyes on blank walls and dead-end corridors. One day he saw a silver cart loaded with nitrous oxide roll off the third floor elevator and take its place in a row of rolling bins of soiled linens, waiting for some dutiful flunky to wheel them over the catwalk to the laundry chute in the main hospital. Bertie crawled on his hands and knees between laundry bins and from the moment he goosenecked up for a closer look at that cart with its copper tubes and gauges and mixers and regulators, the funny gray enema bag of a gas reservoir dangling down and the dear little red clown’s nose of a mask with two horny valves sticking out of it, he had to have one for his own. For our own. And pretty soon that was our mission.
He reported to the Bug Motels: “The nature of this gas,” drawling it out farcically, gazzz, “is a cartoon with the picture gone. You know, like, Tom the Cat falls through the roof of the opera house and bounces around the orchestra on his rubber stamp head. He gets spitted on a cello bow, sucked up a flute, digested by a bassoon, ha ha ha, tenderized by a marimba mallet, hee hee hee, and finally he gargles the tenor’s high C by swinging from his tonsil. Ho ho ho, except there’s no picture so why am I laughing. I’m laughing cause I weigh nuttin and I got these pink and blue bubbles popping in my veins. And now I’m crying cause I just tasted the tragedy deep in the pillowy fizz. Good stuff you’re gonna say. So how come such good stuff is legal for totally square tooth mechanics? Cause they’re gonna torture you anyway so you’ll never know you had any fun, but we’ll cop us a tank before our teeth are rotten.” The picturesque logic of the bughouse-how could any self-disrespecting Bug Motel argue with that?
Bertie ya see had three traits which made him a great maestro of missions: all that Stein moolah, a mind bent on one thing only, and no fear of the consequences, so that if someone had to take a fall, why shouldn’t it be Bertie? And that’s how he had landed on the funny farm in the first place, by juvenile court order. He had seen the inside of every crumbling smelly youth joint in Maryland and the District of Columbia, and at least had breakfast there before his parents fished him out, over and over, and redeposited him in Rohring Rohring. This scary exposure had only hardened in his dreambox the wish to be changed from itself, by any substance obtainable.
For a week we had been sending Emily down there five times every afternoon in a bin of dirty hospital gowns to scope the landing, since at (presently) fifty-three pounds she made the least dent in its canvas bottom. Of course she couldn’t roll herself off the elevator much less back onto it. She had to peer out through holes we had poked in the side for the ten seconds the elevator doors were open, while up on the sixth floor we pushed the down button frantically to summon her back to the Adolescent Wing before anything funny happened. “Bombs away?” we’d whisper in code into the bin of pale blue bathrobes and sterilizer towels, when it reappeared. “Nuh-uh,” she squeaked back every time from her nest. And on like that for six days and then on the seventh the elevator came back empty. “Uh-oh.” Sumpm funny had happened. We looked at one another and shuddered and ran down the hall to play ping-pong. We had to look innocent-and besides, Dion pointed out, for once we had just the right number for mixed doubles.
“Three to two, my serve,” Bertie hollered, so the whole bughouse would believe in our alibi. “Is she dead?” O whispered. “Who da hump knows,” Dion said. “It depends if she went down the chute headfirst or sideways,” I whispered back. “Sideways… oooo,” O echoed in her spooky-flute voice; you could tell from the queer crook of her chin she was picturing Emily stuck between the third and second floors, with her head wedged at an uncomfortable angle. “Say, does it hurt to be paralyzed?” I asked.
“Aaanh, she was only fifty-three pounds away f
rom disappearing anyhow,” Dion said, “she wants to die, ain’t it?” “She was waiting for the birds to feed her,” I said, “least that’s what she told Dolores, who told Reggie, who told me.” “That’s a very beautiful idea,” sighed O, “that Emily is a saint, I’d never think of nuttin like that.” “Ya know, certain girls love death like I love D.O.A.P.,” Bertie observed, “like O here-you can tell from the eye makeup. To her every day is a funeral.” “Just cause you have to die before you get to wear makeup, Hebrew school creepo,” sneered O, glacially. “I don’t care if I do die. That’s why I’m here,” Bertie bragged, “and I won’t be wearing makeup either, I’m getting smoked, man, cause I figure I’ll be 98 percent tetra-hydrocannabinol by then.”
“Aaay, don’t worry, da stuff looks good on you,” Dion told O, “ladylike, I mean. Koderer don’t wear no black on her eyes, and she looks like Oliver Twist. In the movie, ya know.” “Ursie’s queer,” Bertie explained. I froze and O gasped. “Get oinked,” she said loyally, for she was a friend of mine, and as I was wildly in love with her I had never even let my hand brush her hand by mistake (lemme die first).
“I wear a little Clearasil over da zits now and then,” Dion said, “but nuttin on the eyes. Nino don’t recommend it.” Nino was his tailor. “I wonder if they’ll put any makeup on Emily,” O worried-meaning on her little dead white face. “Aaanh, Emily was a strange-looking bird at best. Makeup wouldn’t do nuttin for her,” said Dion. “I think Emily was cute, in a ugly sort of way,” O almost sobbed, in her spooky-flute. [Whap!] “Ace,” she added. O had a devastating serve. We volleyed on gloomily.