Maggie Brown & Others

by Peter Orner

  Another night a guy having a bad trip started bouncing on the seat so hard his head bashed the top of the cab. His girlfriend was passed out next to him, but every time he bounced she’d wake up and shout, “What? What? What?” She had a pretty snub nose and was wearing sweatpants. Neither of them could tell me where they wanted to go. So I drove in circles, mooning over the girl in sweats, until the guy came down enough to drop them at the bus station. Mostly, though, I sat in the Kroger parking lot and watched the shoppers push their carts out of the swinging doors and listened to the sound of those wobbly wheels struggling across the potholes in the pavement—and went back to reading.

  Then, in February, it was always February that year, just as I was about to leave for my shift, Len called from Chicago. He’d been calling a lot that winter. He liked hearing stories about the cab. He thought now that I was becoming hard-boiled, I’d have something to write about aside from being a lonely horndog.

  “How many horndog stories can one person write?”

  “Lots,” I said.

  But that night Len said he wanted to talk in person.

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “You’re four hours away. It’s snowing like all get-out. I don’t have a car. And I have to work.”

  “You got a cab,” Len said.

  He’d been my boss at a summer camp. He was one of those people who pop up randomly and change everything, and you can’t imagine any story of your life, lame as it might be, told without them. Len was one of the first people to notice something, anything, in me. It was only a summer camp in Wisconsin. How to express the significance of the place and of Len in particular without sounding ridiculous? My job was to entertain rich kids from the suburbs while their parents went on vacation. But for Len, after so many years working in psychiatric wards (good training for any administrator, he’d say), camp had become a kind of gracious calling. Part hippie, part drill sergeant; his mission was to instill in us that rich kids or not, these noxious little fuckers were, at their core, human. If, by the end of the summer, we could make them a little more so, we’d have accomplished something. “Because don’t forget these world inheritors will go forth into the universe and become CEOs and heart surgeons and white-collar criminals. Imagine, my kittens, if they were a tad more decent, a smidgen more compassionate. Imagine!” Len would stand before us during staff meetings in the push shack and exhort, his protruding stomach lording atop his skinny legs. His wild, shoulder-length hair, chaotic beard, and big white teeth. All camps have their characters, and our leading man was Len. There was something of the werewolf about him, and even when he said something completely banal, like “We work hard so we can play hard,” I’d think, Yes, that’s it, that’s the key, why hadn’t I thought of that? “Seize the day,” Len would say. “Set yourself up for success, gentlemen.” He’d raise his monstrously thick eyebrows. And the whole time he’d be sucking on one of the cigars he kept in a constantly replenished stash (along with the bourbon) in the bottom drawer of a desk so strewn with the junk of summer—flippers, softballs, Frisbees, confiscated candy, confiscated porn, spent cans of Off, bags of charcoal—we never saw the top of it. Smoking was forbidden, except in the trees behind the rec hall, but Len’s loyalty to camp was so strong that even when he was breaking the rules, and he spent his days breaking camp’s rules, it was his way of respecting—loving—the institution for instituting the rules in the first place.

  And on days off, Len would take me and a few other carless counselors to gamble at the casino in Bad River. It was from Len that I learned how losing all the money I had could be not only a full day’s entertainment but also honorable in itself. The least you can do for a Chippewa, Len would say, is hand over a lousy twenty-five bucks, no? What’d they give us, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Illinois? Canada? I stole my own cab and drove across I-80 through the snow.

  Len may have been HIV positive for years before he finally became so frail he had to be hospitalized. He never told me this; I put it together later. When he called, Len always made a point to say he had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which was probably technically true. Because camp was always—always—on his mind. It wouldn’t have done to employ a man with AIDS (no distinction would have been made at that time between being HIV positive and having the disease itself), not at a boys’ camp in Wisconsin in the mid-’90s, no matter how much of a beloved character of an assistant director he was. For years, he’d felt the need to hide it. If I only had Hodgkin’s, whoever this asshole is. It’s not having Hodgkin’s that’s really fucking things up. Now it no longer mattered, at least as far as camp was concerned. He was done. He’d never get back up north. The summer before the winter I drove the cab to Chicago was the first one Len had missed in eighteen years on staff. He called me to relive past summers. Not the specifics, because all summers were the same. That was the point of camp. You didn’t go up to camp because anything new ever happened. You went to camp because history repeated itself. The lake will always be too frigid in June to put the docks in the water. But how are you going to put the docks in if you don’t get in the lake? And always some joker who shows up in a wet suit will get howled right off the beach. The camp dog, not the dead one, the new one, will always bite a nurse from Scandinavia. A stoned junior counselor from Kansas City will always, always, hit a tree in front of Saul Q’s, and Saul Q will always run out of his cabin in his tighty-whities and squeal about how the drug culture’s ruining camp. Totally ruining it! And years ago, before anybody’s time, there will always be a kid whose name nobody remembers who drowned off the point. Pulled down by a mysterious current having something, who knows what, to do with the camp’s shady past as an illegal logging operation.

  The drive to Chicago took hours longer than usual because of the heavy snow and ice. By the time I pulled up to Rush–Presbyterian–St. Luke’s it was three thirty in the morning, and I found Len drinking coffee and shooting the shit with the security guard in the lobby. Gone the potbelly, gone the crazy hair. The man was gaunt.

  “What?” Len said. “You drive from Tashkent?”

  He introduced me to the guard, an old man with an abnormally big head and a bushy mound of curly hair. Reminded me of Henry Kissinger.

  “Ted,” Len said, “this is a grad student. A grad student, this is Ted. You ever met a grad student before, Ted?”

  “Never so up close,” Ted said.

  Though he was still wearing flimsy hospital slippers, Len had decked himself out in his old camp clothes: fleece jacket, camouflage pants, and, slung across his now-skinny shoulders, his red Duluth pack. A couple of years ago, cleaning out the basement, I found that red pack in a puddle of water. It had been lying there so long that when I knelt to pick it up, the thing came apart in my hands.

  “I thought I was supposed to break you out of here,” I said.

  Ted guffawed. “He tried to give a hundred bucks to every nurse on the floor. He tried to give me a hundred bucks. I told Daddy Warbucks here he’s free to come and go. He wants to be locked up, he can call the 12th District precinct captain. And besides, I told him, the hospital only steals direct from insurance. Or is it the insurance that steals direct from—”

  Len slugged the dregs of his coffee and shouted at me, “Lead the way!” And he bolted out the door into the night. I shrugged at Ted and followed. Fat chunks of puffy snow were still thumping down. Gingerly, Len moved toward the cab, watching his step, but even in this new slowness, there was the old sense of half-baked purpose.

  “Where’re your boots?” I asked.

  “Camp,” Len said. “My boots are at camp. In the closet of the Big House, second floor, the cedar closet—you want to know something else?”

  “What?”

  “The guard back there.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He’s a Ted, but he used to be a Trish.”

  “That guy?”

  “First sex change in the history of Indiana. You don’t believe me?”

  �
�Head like Henry Kissinger,” I said.

  “More like Kissinger’s mother. Imagine. Henry Kissinger had a mother. And Ted told me he’d rather be Ted, but there are a lot of days he still gets as sad as Trish used to get on her worst days. Wrap your brain around that, master’s degree. Does this hearse have heat?”

  “Barely.”

  “Keys?”

  I wish you could hear the sound of Len’s voice, which in its heyday was a combination of chuckle and growl. And he always spoke a little under his voice, as if to pull you into a common conspiracy. That night, as we crept through the snow—now Len drove like he walked, with timidity laced with determination—up and down the unplowed streets, his voice was so hoarse there were times I couldn’t hear what he was saying. We drove through the dawn before ending up at the White Castle on West Madison, where we must have had at least thirty of those little square burgers between us for breakfast. Then Len drove himself back to Rush. He died a month later. I took the bus back to Chicago for the funeral. I’d been fired from Iowa City Yellow Cab. When I brought the cab back to the garage the day after that last night with Len, Ovid Demanaris said I was lucky he wasn’t pressing my balls in charges. I gave him two hundred of the three hundred dollars Len had stuffed in my shirt pocket, which satisfied Ovid because it was equal to the amount of cash I might have grossed that night had I been on the job (a figure I couldn’t have grossed in two weeks of dreams) plus the wear and tear on the car, because, Ovid said, based on the mileage, I’d driven to hell and gone.

  Len would have thought the funeral a complete hoot. It was a full-on camp reunion. He was fifty-one.

  As much as Len talked, and at camp he talked and talked and talked, I always thought that at root, beneath the ceaseless cascade of stories, exhortations, bullshit, sayings, advice, encouragement, teasings, there was a silence. He rarely got personal, and when he did, it had more to do with something he wanted us to understand than something he wanted to tell us about himself. Len’s sister, his only sibling, had been killed by a drunk driver. He often mentioned her, ineffectually, to scare us off driving wasted on northern Wisconsin’s deer-infested back roads. He’d tell us about his father, a born-again Christian and successful trial lawyer who’d once argued (and lost) an abortion case before the United States Supreme Court. But this was only so Len could say that he, not the loss of an epic case, had the distinction of being the greatest failure in his father’s life. And we knew that in the off-season he worked in various psych wards and hospitals across the Midwest. He said the secret of his longevity in the loony business was that the nuttier he acted, the more the inmates trusted him. They knew it was an act (a lot of their act, Len said, is an act), but they appreciated his effort to meet them halfway. Nobody else ever much tried. At Hennepin County in Minneapolis he’d been named an honorary schizophrenic in a solemn ceremony. The entire ward chipped in for a plaque. WE SISTERS AND BROTHERS OF LYSSA, HEREBY PROCLAIM LEONARD CAHILL OFFICIALLY DEVOID OF SANITY. SINCERELY YOURS, DR. MENGELE.

  Though he had only been in Chicago for a few years—he’d moved there for treatment; he’d stopped working in the off-season to save his energy for camp—Len seemed to know every side street on the Northwest Side. As we slunk along through the snow, in that muffled silence, I don’t think that Len, sensing the end, was fulfilling any sudden need to unburden himself. That wasn’t why I’d been summoned. He knew unburdening wasn’t possible. He knew that certain things we carry to the grave, or in Len’s case the crematorium. It was more, I believe, about his own voice, hoarse and unrecognizable as it was. Sometimes in order to hear your own voice you need someone else present, even if that person isn’t necessarily awake. And I confess, tired out from the drive from Iowa, I spent a lot of that sacred night in and out of consciousness.

  —and so somehow I graduate from Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin, in June of what, 1970, 1971?—with a degree in, you guessed it, psychology! Appleton, you know Houdini grew up there, right? His greatest escape was getting the dodge out of Appleton, Wisconsin. Anyway, I start hitchhiking, I’ve got some vague notion of reaching New York City. I’ve got about as much clue what I’m going to do in Manhattan as a porcupine in a car wash. One of my rides takes me off course, and I end up in Northampton, Massachusetts—at this point without a dollar. One of those stories, they used to even be true— there was a time when you could be a person in this country without a single dollar. And I start snooping around for some work. I hear they’re hiring at Northampton State Hospital. I didn’t even know what “state hospital” meant. I’m a kid from Minnetonka, Jesus fanatics for parents, what do I know about state hospitals? I think it’s a hospital hospital. I get myself hired as night attendant for four and a half dollars an hour. At first it was pure drudgery, Cuckoo’s Nest sort of stuff, bedpans and force-feeding, doling out meds like gumballs. They taught me how to restrain people with restraints and how to do it without restraints. Believe me, you have a choice, use the restraints. But the long and short is I had an aptitude. I put people at ease. I almost said east. Be a nice thing to put people at east. I told nun jokes, Polack jokes, rabbi jokes, Irish jokes, homo jokes—boy, did they love the homo jokes on the ward—Chinese jokes. Rented an apartment in town and worked six nights a week at Northampton, I learned the regulations concerning shoelaces and nail clippers, I learned the drugs, the -zines, perphenazine, fluphenazine, chlorpromazine, otherwise known as Thorazine, the miracle drug! And yeah, like some kind of bleeding-heart rookie, I thought to myself these drugs never seem to take away the anguish in the eyes of these people. You hearing me? Not anguish, exactly, it was a kind of exhaustion that was beyond being physically tired. That’s what it seemed to me then. An exhaustion that sleep could never chase away. And it would have been easier to take if they’d moaned out loud, but they didn’t, they only do that in movies; these people on the ward at Northampton were quiet. God, it would have been better had they moaned and cradled themselves and sobbed. The only time I ever saw that was when a relative visited, then they turned up the volume on the batshit. Then they really amped up the bonkers—

  “Hey” —nudging me—“hey, you even awake?”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m asking. You hearing this?”

  “Sure, Len. The loons were exhausted, I get it.”

  Anyway, two, three weeks in, a couple of state troopers from Springfield bring in a kid, wild kid, flailing, kicking, calling the cops cunts and murderers. And I’m excited, I haven’t really had a real live one yet. Me and another attendant get him in a jacket, stuff a pill down his throat. Lock him in the padded intake room. The troopers give him a few licks on their way out, but that’s it. Eventually, the kid calms down, and after that, he sleeps maybe fourteen, fifteen hours. But the following night, during my shift, he starts up again, and again we’ve got to restrain him. A doc on duty gives him a shot, and soon he’s right as rain, docile as a baby. It was only then I got a decent look at him, and I’m telling you the kid was angelic. He had this golden hair. What do you call it, flaxen? Is golden hair the same as flaxen? Writer? Hello? Anyway, my first thought was, and it would have made my late mother proud: Jesus Christ. The Redeemer’s what, a thousand years late, but he’s finally on the scene. You think I’m kidding? Later on in my storied career I met a lot of Christs. They haunt the wards. A new guy—and I met some women Christs, too—creeps up and starts blessing you and all that and you know. He cometh again. She cometh again. But this one, this boy, he only looked the part. All he wanted to do was kick you in the balls. But wasn’t Satan the best-looking angel? My God, one look at that kid, and I was gone—

  Since the year Len died, 1997, I’ve been carrying around, from rented apartment to rented apartment, a manila folder filled with notes. The folder itself has begun to disintegrate and will soon go the way of Len’s backpack. For longer than the eighteen years that he worked at camp, I’ve been deluding myself that I’m going to make a novel out of Len, the novel I’ve long been contracted to write for a publ
isher that alternates between forgetting I exist and sending me threatening emails demanding the return of a long since spent (tiny) advance. He was, as I’ve said, only my boss at a summer camp, and yet I remain a disciple. My book would celebrate and spread the gospel, far and wide, of Len’s irreverent humanism and induce people to run to the nearest casino with no intention or even desire of winning any money. Because I loved the man. The want wasn’t entirely delusional. I wanted people who never knew Len to remember him. Does this make any sense?

  —broke the lock on the cabinet in the nurses’ station and read his file and find out he’s been busted for, among other things, jerking off on a city bus in Springfield, Massachusetts, and then wiping his syruped hand on a cop’s blue shoulder. Only twenty-two and already pages of arrests, including two for heroin possession, another five or six for weed, bad checks, assault, some more lewd and indecent behavior, which in my opinion should always be in the eye of the beholder, theft (liquor, a watch, more liquor). Also, there was a nonexpunged juvenile record, and I’m telling you I’m reading this stuff like it’s biblical, this list of transgressions. He’d been rendered what they called “incorrigible.” There was chronic truancy (apparently record-breaking), vandalism, breaking and entering, more assaults, including one with a deadly weapon, another theft, a bike, a stereo. But in the winter of 1971, the kid gets a kind of reprieve, or at least it’s not exactly jail time as he’s known it before. The judge accepts his court-appointed lawyer’s Hail Mary that his client might well be a lunatic, and so he sends Dominic—his name was Dominic—to Northampton State for a minimum four-month observation period, extendable (unlimited) upon a doctor’s—