by Paul Hoover
Before he was taken away, Emmanuel asked Raphael to honor his mother’s request that her eyes be donated. Sure enough, there was a permission form at the back of the chart—she had willed away her eyes. The nursing supervisor was in a tizzy because it was a coroner’s case, and she wasn’t sure they would allow it. To settle the issue, I called the coroner’s office, and a guy who sounded more like a Mafia hit man than a doctor said hell yes we could take out the eyes, she wasn’t shot in the face, was she? We should stop calling with these fucking infantile questions.
The Ophthalmology resident on call came to the unit right away, since eyes will spoil if not removed within an hour of death. Under his arm was a Styrofoam container the size of a shoebox. A red label on top of it said EYE BANK in large letters, with the address on LaSalle Street below. The resident asked if I wanted to watch the removal, but I waited outside the room, nervously pacing. Fifteen minutes later, he emerged with the box, handing it over with a smile. Holding it gingerly, I hurried down to the street and hailed a cab. The driver, a handsome black man named Gabriel Swan, didn’t refuse the fare, but he didn’t want the box up front with him, either. I placed it on the backseat, and he headed away, closely watching the object through his rearview mirror.
Romona was sorry she’d missed all the excitement, but she’d been busy dealing with Normal Cane and Desiree Hawkins, a station clerk on the eleventh floor. Everyone knew that drugs had been missing in massive amounts, but they couldn’t figure out where they were going. One theory was that someone on the unit was ordering drugs that weren’t required for the patients’ care and selling them on the street. Now it looked like Desiree, a large white woman with broad teeth and a tough manner, had done just that. Romona said Desiree had been hospitalized with a drug overdose that night. Needle marks were found on her arms, and, of all places, on her vagina. Barbara shuddered when Romona reported this last detail.
“You mean she actually shot it into her, her…?” she asked, unable to say the word.
“That’s right,” Romona said, her red lipstick looking especially lopsided. “She thought no one would look there.”
“Ick!” Barbara said.
“So it was Desiree all along,” Ed exclaimed. He admired Cane’s style, but having accusations aimed at him hadn’t been pleasant. I felt relieved, too.
“Let’s go up to see her,” Ed suggested, and after break we did. Desiree was in a private room on the tenth floor, perhaps to keep her away from other patients. Cane had suggested guards outside her door, but the nursing supervisor said forget it.
The room was dim when Ed and I entered. Head back on the pillow, she appeared to be asleep. The television was on, and its blue light played over the bed. It gave her face a psychedelic look.
“Desiree,” said Ed. “Are you awake?”
She turned her head slowly toward us, and I realized she was still drugged. When she saw us, her smile broadened like a highway.
“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” she said, “come in, you two.”
“Thought we’d come and see how you’re doing,” Ed said.
“I’m doing just fine, and the sight of you two makes me horny.” She turned sideways in bed and leered at us. Desiree often said things like that, and a couple of interns had taken her up on it. There had been some stories about bed use in empty rooms.
“Come closer,” she teased, but when we did, she reached out with a quick hand, cupped Ed’s balls, and gave them a jiggle. The undertaker blushed so hard I thought his ears would blink off and on.
“Hey!” he said. “Let go.”
“Haven’t felt something like this in three days,” she said. “Feels good.”
“Maybe I should leave,” I suggested.
“Stay where you are,” she said. “You’re next!” But she wasn’t serious. Desiree did a lot of things for show, and it was especially funny because Ed had been her supervisor. Here she had been stealing the drugs, selling them on the street for heroin, and Ed was getting the blame. Now she had the nerve to grab him by the balls, and he couldn’t even get mad at her.
What was it about Desiree’s obscene behavior that made me philosophical? On one hand, she was completely vulgar. While on duty, she would step into the back room at every opportunity for a cigarette and a drink from her purse, and orders would pile up on the desk. More than one nurse had asked to be transferred because of her, but somehow she always managed to land on her broad feet, no matter how serious the infraction. Maybe it was the purity of her vulgarity that charmed us, and finally even the nursing supervisors were persuaded. Desiree was an institution. She was a breath of rich summer in a bad alley, but if anybody knew who she was, it was Desiree Hawkins. In a time of anxiety and identity crisis, when every other person you passed on State Street was a psychiatrist, that was worth a lot. That’s why, when she placed her hand on Ed’s crotch, I thought, This is a philosophical issue. This has to do with identity, being and nonbeing, and the will to power. Someday she would drive over a Hollywood cliff in a Cadillac, eyes dilated like skies. Meanwhile, there was something almost normal about her manic behavior, since we both permitted and expected it.
Desiree was telling us what the bastard Cane had said to her, when her eyes went back in her head. Only the white parts flickered below, like night lights on a bumpy road. She threw her head back on the pillow, arched her back as if in orgasm, and made low choking noises in her throat. Ed and I looked at each other oddly, dumbly, for what seemed like seventy-five years before we realized what had happened. A padded tongue depressor was taped to the wall near the bed. These were present when the patient had a history of grand mal seizures.
We leaped into chaotic action. Ed grabbed the tongue depressor and made a poor effort at getting it into her mouth. Desiree thrashed and bucked.
I found myself in the hall calling for a nurse. I must have yelled pretty loud, because everyone at the station looked up in alarm, and in no time at all Gwyneth McCarthy, the charge nurse, was in the room shoving Ed out of the way. No arrest was called, but the intern, Tim Pagel, and resident, Dr. Bernstein, got there fast. Bernstein told us to pull the bed away from the wall and to surround it. This way, we could restrain Desiree from hurting herself on the bed rails, which were already up. Bernstein stationed himself at the head of the bed, where he manipulated the tongue depressor and gave orders. I took charge of one of her powerful legs and Ed took the other, while the intern and Gwyn handled the arms. She was unbelievably strong. We were tossed around like sailors in a storm. Ed took a kick in the chest and bounced off the wall, but gamely he came back for more.
On Bernstein’s orders, the aides brought pillows, which we used to line the sides and head of the bed. Then a nurse entered the room with some Valium in a syringe. The resident shot it into her hip with difficulty. The first ten milligrams didn’t do any good at all. After five minutes, Bernstein gave her another ten, then another. Those didn’t help either, so he gave her even more. The resident was beside himself, and Pagel was no use. This was his first week on the job, and he looked scared.
Bernstein was complaining of the blood on his fingers when Allen Kranz, the hospital’s single hippie resident, came in the door. Desiree wasn’t his case, but he’d been walking down the hall and seen the commotion. He had long curly hair that was held with a rubber band in back, a mystical medallion of some kind around his neck, and a ring on every finger.
He held out his arms in a gesture that looked vaguely prophetic and said with great command, “Stop what you are doing! Stop it right now!”
“What’s the meaning of this, Kranz?” said Bernstein.
“You’re making a mistake. Take your hands off her and she’ll be all right.”
“Look at this blood,” Bernstein said. “If we don’t hold her down, she’ll bite off her tongue.”
“Take the Zen approach,” Kranz said calmly, taking the tongue depressor out of Bernstein’s hand. “Everyone loosen your grip until you’re barely touching her, like fog on a
beach.”
He held out a hand to illustrate what he meant, and Gwyn McCarthy turned to me and mouthed the words “fog on a beach.” Everyone thought Kranz was a little strange because of the way he dressed, but he was also incredibly smart, so we did as he said. To our amazement, the less we pressed down on Desiree, the less she resisted. Almost immediately, she began to subside into less serious seizures. Kranz didn’t bother with the tongue depressor. He placed his hands lightly on each side of her face and stared contentedly out of the window, as if he were thinking of going sailing.
Soon Desiree was almost normal. Bernstein left the room, shaking his head. Ed, whose attitude toward hippies was somewhere to the right of Mussolini, had gained real respect for Kranz. What he loved was the spectacle. It was like sitting in mass on Sunday morning, hearing tales of the saints, the grand and theatrical miracles.
It turned out that Desiree had overdosed on purpose. Luckily, just before she fell asleep from the alcohol and heroin, she’d made a call to a staff psychiatrist. Dr. Grabart, an undesirable man with an ill-fitting wig, was known to sleep with his women patients. He had apparently had an affair with Desiree, and she called to tell him what a jerk he was. It was the middle of the night, and more in irritation than in a spirit of mercy, he called the police. When Desiree didn’t answer the bell, the landlady let them in. Desiree was sprawled on the couch, bottles of pills from Metropolitan spread around her, and an empty syringe clutched in her hand. The pills were reported to hospital authorities, and after her recovery she was quietly fired. We all felt sorry for her. There was a little good-bye party with coffee in Styrofoam cups, and a cake one of the aides had made. A few weeks later Desiree showed up on the unit in an Easter ensemble from the fifties. Everything was white, from the skirt and jacket to the pillbox hat with attached veil. It was her way of telling us things were working out for her, but the nylons were torn in back, her fingernails were dirty, and the lipstick was smeared.
Not long after that, she did commit suicide. The coroner found that she had eaten a peanut-butter-and-rat-poison sandwich. This would have killed her within five minutes, but to make sure, she covered her face with a clear plastic bag, tied it shut with a long piece of string, and attached both ends of the strings to her wrists. When she fell unconscious, the weight of her arms pulled the bag even tighter around her face. When the police discovered the body days later, her face was black beneath the plastic, like that of an African god.
16
I HADN’T SEEN MY parents in quite some time, even though they lived only 150 miles away. Weeks would often go by before I opened their letters, and sometimes I didn’t open them at all. Now, because of events at the hospital, I wanted to lie down on their couch in the sunny living room and fall asleep while a Big Ten basketball game was being played on the black-and-white television. I wanted to eat some of my mother’s chicken and dumplings, then sit with my father on the porch, watching cars pass on Route 31 in the distance. It would be a nice change of pace from lugging corpses.
Rose had a theory about why I never got in touch with them. He said it was guilt. I really wanted to be in Vietnam getting killed like all the rest. Not contacting my parents was a way of dying.
“When’s the last time you talked to your parents?” I asked.
“Last year sometime.”
“Maybe you think you ought to be dead in some rice field.”
“The difference is, I’m no CO, man. If I was a CO, I’d want to be dead in a rice field.”
“Fuck you, Rose. You’re a fake.”
“What do you mean, a fake?” he said, fingering his long black hair, which he always kept nice with Prell and conditioner.
“You’re a fake hippie. You do all the right things like writing poems and casting your cock in plaster, but you don’t really believe in anything.”
“That’s not true. I believe in the Hobbit, the Rolling Stones, and Richard Brautigan.”
“Well, that just goes to prove it,” I said. “That’s all fake shit. If you were for real, you’d have said J. D. Salinger.”
“You’re fucked up,” he said with a smile, and gave me a fake karate chop to the stomach.
We decided to be friends, and I had the day off, so Rose dusted off some mescaline he’d been saving for a rainy day. It reminded me of a blood-brother ceremony—you know it’s going to hurt, but at least you’re doing it together. I had one acid trip to my credit, but it hadn’t gone well. My legs seemed to lose all their feeling, and I scooted around the apartment on my backside, while Rose and Penelope tried to talk me down. Another time I snorted some angel dust, a horse tranquilizer, and felt I’d been absorbed into the wall I was leaning against. The cells of my body were as loose as smoke, mingling with the atomic particles of wallpaper.
It was a nice day, so Rose and I headed for Lincoln Park. Families were touring the zoo, and a young working-class couple was fishing in the lagoon. A couple of hippies were throwing a yellow Frisbee for their dog to catch, but it was clumsy. Suddenly they flung it hard in our direction, and I knew I was high when the plastic disk struck me between the eyes. I’d forgotten to put up my hand to catch it. Rose missed the whole thing. He continued walking, gawking at the park as if it were television, a smile slapped onto his face. It reminded me of the time we were stopped by a cop while smoking a huge joint and he popped it into his mouth. When I got back to the car from getting my ticket, his teeth were green from eating it.
At Lonnie’s, an outdoor restaurant on Clark Street, we ordered a hamburger and beer, but after a couple of bites I made the mistake of looking at it—a quarter pound of flesh on a sesame-seed bun. Its purple pinkness astonished me; it was as if I’d taken a bite from the side of a cow. When Rose heard this, he put down his hamburger, took a pen from the pocket of his jeans, and began to write all over the paper tablecloth. I could read some of the magnified script as it orbited toward my plate—it was all about the animal nature of man, man the killer and eater.
I liked Rose, but things were changing around the old dump. Edgar was somewhere in Europe, and Carlo had come up with a new scam. He’d been awarded a lectureship in the Art of Social Change by New Left College. He now wore a full-blown Afro, beads, and a dashiki, and had moved to the college’s suburban campus, where he was quite a hit. New Left had only one department, which they called Revolutionary Arts, and you could get credit for life experience. For instance, if you went to church as a kid and challenged the Sunday-school teacher, you could get four hours’ credit in the Spirituality Today class. Nobody attended class, of course, because that was too uptight. Tuition was required, but otherwise you could do what you wanted. Carlo said the Revolutionary Arts Department was cochaired by all college faculty and that decisions had to be unanimous. That was no problem, since everybody thought the same way. Decisions just came to them, like the weather. The faculty agreed with Rousseau that education should be nonspecific. Nothing should be learned by rote, and facts themselves were unimportant. What mattered was the development of a personal stance or attitude in the world. The dean of the college, Marlin Winesap, was impressed with Carlo’s anarchic personality, and he wanted that communicated to the students. It didn’t matter that Carlo had no degree, not even from high school. His prison experience was training enough. As for the hierarchy implied in the existence of a dean, Winesap said his position existed, like good government, only to do away with itself. The happiest moment in his life, he told Carlo, would come when the students and faculty dragged him from his air-conditioned office with sauna and wet bar and set fire to the administration building. Unfortunately, he said, shaking his great mane of white hair, the level of education at the college was not yet that advanced. The problem was how to instruct the students without using corrective teaching methods. It was wrong, perhaps evil, to ask them to revise their behavior. One could not revise his breathing or the way he walked across the room. That came spontaneously from the soul. Where could they get students with enough fire?
“I co
uldn’t believe that shit,” said Carlo. “Ol’ Winesap got down on his hands and knees and crawled around the office like a fuckin’ dog. He said the world was turning to stone, fuckin’ stone, man, because there was too much logic.”
I asked him how much he got paid at New Left College.
“It’s on commission,” he said. “Twenty percent of new tuitions we bring in. Plus all the white pussy a youngblood needs.”
It was obvious that Carlo liked his new position, but the suburbs began to change him. We saw him less and less. The last time he came around, he was wearing his academic dashiki and had two white transvestites on his arm. They were going out for pizza, they said, and wondered if we’d like to go along. No, thanks, I stammered, but Randy went with them. He reported later that the transvestites, who wore blue denim miniskirts and platform shoes, were commodities brokers from Winnetka. In spite of their conservative politics, he’d found them intellectually stimulating. I guessed that Carlo had learned to deal with the drag thing in prison, and Randy confirmed it. That evening Carlo had confessed to doing some male hustling when he was sixteen years old. One night he was picked up in a limousine by a guy who drove him to a cemetery and asked Carlo to make love on his former lover’s grave. The fee was two hundred dollars, but he refused it. The situation was too weird, since the chauffeur was the man’s current lover, and would be watching from the driver’s seat, headlights blazing. Randy and I shook our heads at each other. We felt Carlo had made the correct decision.