The Swan Song of Doctor Malloy

by Robert Power

  ‘We’ve arranged for you to work with Jose on a derelict housing project down by the tracks,’ he says, reading off a notepad, barely looking at me. ‘You can go with the Southside team in their truck. They’ll drop you off.’

  The ride across the Southside of town is like a trip through a war zone. A dry and cratered landscape of boarded-up buildings and potted roads. We stop abruptly and the driver points to a figure waiting on the other side of the road.

  ‘There’s the big boy,’ he says to me. ‘Off you go, pal.’

  Jose is an enormous man with wild hair and a long grizzled beard. He looks clownish in outsized denim overalls.

  ‘Good to meet you,’ he says, grabbing me by the hand. ‘Hot enough for you?’

  Unsure if he’s referring to the searing heat or the work, I nod and wipe my brow with the back of my hand.

  ‘Come on then,’ he says, ‘let’s see what they make of you.’

  I follow him as he turns and enters the open door to the burned, bombed-out derelict building behind him that serves as a shooting gallery for the Hispanic coke and heroin addicts. Figures shuffle around in the darkness, stirred by the intruders.

  ‘Who are you?’ challenges a shadow in the corner.

  ‘My name is Jose. I work for Project Safety. I’ve brought bleach and condoms. I’ve also got a doctor here from England. He’s on our side. He’s come to see how he can help.’

  There is talk and movement in the darkness. A man emerges from the depths of the building. He is like a scared nocturnal animal disturbed in its lair. His skin is pale and pasty. He winces at the brightness of the sun. His name, he says, is Ricky, but it could have been Lazarus. Jose hands over a plastic bag.

  ‘There’s bleach for cleaning your works with. Make sure you follow the instructions. The leaflets are in Spanish for the brothers. There are condoms in there too.’

  Ricky peers into the bag of treats like a small boy at a children’s birthday party. Jose tells him the mobile team call at Humble Park at two every afternoon to hand out bags and sandwiches. The man nods and retreats back into the shadows.

  ‘I’ll be back on Tuesday,’ shouts Jose.

  ‘Sure thing, okay,’ comes the muffled reply.

  All the while I stand close by Jose, observing the man at work, listening and taking it all in. Jose signals for me to move away from the doorless opening, wiping the beads of sweat from his face and forehead with a large handkerchief he produces from a pocket. He carries a lot of weight and is visibly uncomfortable in the heat.

  ‘I’m playing it cautious with these people,’ he says, the sweat still seeping from his pores, the sun high in the sky, the heat rising. ‘They’re getting used to me. Word has got around that I’m okay. That I’m one of them. Possession of syringes is bad news here. If they get caught they get a ticket and a court date. Maybe a big dollar fine. Miss the court and you get ten days in jail.’

  Jose tells me more about his life as we seek shelter under the awning of a nearby hardware store.

  ‘People always talk to me,’ he says. ‘It’s been that way all my life. There’s something about me puts them at ease. Perhaps because I listen, let them tell their story.’

  Jose is an ex-drug user, ex-dealer and Vietnam veteran. It was during his time at war he developed his heroin habit.

  ‘When we came back from Nam they spat on us and called us baby killers. All I got when I came back here was a two gram a day heroin habit.’

  After twenty years of addiction, Jose has been clean for seven years, trained as a drug and alcohol counsellor and been given a job as an AIDS outreach worker. I resist the temptation to talk about my own battles with the demons of drink and drugs. Today is not the time.

  ‘They call me “indigenous”. That means I’m some kind of spick or nigger and know all about shooting dope. I know the “vernacular” – that’s what they say, the “vernacular”. Them up at the university, they can write fancy research papers and travel round the world telling all their friends who I am and what I do.’

  ‘Like I do, I suppose.’

  He seems a bit taken aback by my response.

  ‘I didn’t mean any offence, mister. I don’t know you. I only know what I’ve heard on the news. And from people I respect, like Billy Priss and guys from the shopfront on Forty-Seventh Street. My principle in life is to think good about people until I know better.’

  He looks at me. I get the sense he feels he can trust me. And then he continues.

  ‘You know, sometimes they take me with them, to Washington or Denver, not Hawaii or Florence or Paris. And then they get me to stand up, tell them what it’s like. I can say anything. I can tell them a whore’s vomit smells of roses and dealers cut the dope with the bones of rhinos and they’d lap it up. You should see them argue amongst themselves, tearing each other’s work to pieces. But when I get up to speak, or a crack-head, a hooker, or any other dope fiend speaks, then they’re like children at the circus. All wide-eyed and open mouthed. And if it’s someone HIV positive, you’d think it was Jesus Christ speaking.’

  He looks across the parched, treeless ground, over the dried-out and burnt-up huddle of houses fenced in by the freeway. Not much moves. Not much is going on. Not on the outside.

  ‘It’s real hard. This job expects us to do everything we used to do before, except use drugs. We’re back out there on the streets, hanging out with the same old crew. It’s like putting your nose on the line, waiting for it to be chopped off. I’ll tell you this because it’s no secret and you’ll hear anyway. I’ve been drinking real heavy again, even tasted a line or two of heroin. But my people are looking out for me. “Hey,” one says. “Hey, Jose, we’ll buy you a beer, but you’ll get no heroin from us.” That’s to let me know the word’s been put out on the street no one’s to sell me hard drugs. “Where would we be if you messed up again?” they ask me. I’m their lifeline in all this. I’m their link to the straight world, to Billy and his teams.’

  He goes quiet. We are both quiet. The only sound is the buzz from the highway and the crackle of the heat. Then I notice a man standing on the other side of the road.

  ‘Sandro,’ shouts Jose, ‘what’s new, brother?’

  Sandro crosses the street. He’s a tall thin middle-aged man with a slight limp. He shakes Jose’s hand and nods to me.

  ‘I was at the meeting,’ he says. ‘Last night.’

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ I say.

  He looks me in the eye.

  ‘I got to thinking about all the things you talked about. And how everyone’s getting so excited. About your invention, I mean. I’ve been mulling it over and there’s something I need to say to you. And then, just now, I see you across the street and I say to myself go ahead tell the man. Tell him what you’ve been thinking.’

  ‘That’s great, I’m really keen to get any feedback I can.’ I think of Warren, the pool hall and those who really know.

  ‘I don’t think it’ll work.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I say, taken aback, ‘what won’t work?’

  ‘Your syringe. It won’t work.’

  ‘It’s been tested.’ I’m surprised at the defensive tone of my voice.

  ‘No, I don’t mean that,’ says Sandro. ‘Sure, it’s unbreakable. But I mean with us. I don’t think it’ll work for us. It might cause more problems than solutions.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘The way I see it is this. From my time on the streets, is where I’m coming from. Not from books or lecture theatres. Let’s dream we have needle syringe programs in this crazy country. I have your needle and syringe, your indestructible needle and syringe, and can only use it once. What happens when I can’t get new works? It’s late at night, the weekend, the exchange program’s closed or too far away and there’s no needles to be got. I try not to share. If I have a regular needle, not yours, then I’ll use that same needle and syringe over and again for myself. Two, three times. Maybe even more if I’m desperate. I’ll sharpen the needle when it ge
ts blunt, but at least I won’t be sharing. If I run out of syringes, and we always do, I might have no choice but to share an old-style needle that someone else has already used. And if I’m with a friend and we have only one of your one-use syringes we might both take a hit from it, half, half, before it locks.’

  Jose nods. ‘I can see what he’s saying.’

  ‘Oh,’ is all I can say.

  ‘So unless yours is the only syringe out there – and that’s not gonna happen for a long time, if ever – it might make it worse for drug injectors, not better,’ says Sandro.

  ‘But for immunisation programs. It can still be used for immunisation programs,’ I mumble, as much to myself as to anyone else. ‘But drug users need clean needles, even if it’s not mine.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Sandro, ‘even if it’s not yours, we still need clean needles.’

  ‘Thanks, thanks, Sandro.’ I’m in a bit of daze, trying to take on board this new information.

  ‘It’s just the way I see it, from what I know,’ Sandro’s walking backwards across the road, waving a goodbye. ‘Gotta go, places to be, people to see.’

  He disappears around the corner. I sit down on the walls. Jose senses my state of mind, my confusion, my deflation.

  ‘Is he right, Jose?’

  ‘Yes, Doctor, I do believe he’s right. It makes sense what he just said. But what you’ve done here is good and helpful. Even if it turns out we can’t use your syringe. We need syringe exchange programs and you’ve helped that cause. You being here. You speaking out. It will make a difference.’

  We stay quietly together for a few minutes, the buzz of insects close by and the freeway in the distance tripping through the silence.

  ‘So maybe we should have a beer.’ he says after a while.

  ‘Yeah, maybe we should. That would be nice,’ I say, still pondering the import of Sandro’s words.

  We’re out of the sunlight, into the dark of the windowless Wooden Nickel. We drink cold Mexican beer followed by shots of Wild Turkey. Jose’s mood changes as the afternoon turns to night and the whiskey takes its hold. He leans half on the bar, half on me. He looks aggressive. He looks angry and shifted.

  ‘I’ll show you some twist of the mind,’ he says, in response to an innocent question I ask about the drug scene amongst the Hispanics. ‘I’ll show you some twists of the mind. Here are some twists of the mind. Do you know how hard it is to kill someone? Do you?’

  He looks at me sideways, as if he’s never seen me before. His tolerance for drink is shot through. He’s way out of it. His head falls onto his arm, resting on the bar.

  ‘I told my Papa,’ he continues, trying hard to concentrate on the words. ‘I told Papa if he touched my sister one more time, if she ever told me he had come to her room at night one more time, I’d rip the head from his shoulders. And he did. He touched her. She cried and cried. And I held her and then I went to where he lay. On the old chair, the bottle of dark rum by his side. I hauled him up and beat him to the ground with all my strength. I hit him and hit him. I don’t know if he was awake or unconscious or asleep. But I know it’s hard to kill someone.’

  His head lurches forward, tired with the effort of remembering. His eyes are dulled, defeated by the memory.

  ‘I beat him to the ground and I strangled him until his face went blue. And then do you know what happened?’

  He looks straight into my eyes.

  ‘I’ll tell you what happened. He came back from the dead, wherever that is, and gave me a look from hell and smiled from one side of his face to the other and said, “You can’t even kill me.” You can’t even kill me, he said. And do you know what I learned from my old Pappy? It’s a twist of the mind and it goes like this, a twist of the lemon in your long drink and it goes like this. If you mean to kill someone, use a gun and shoot them clean through the head. I don’t mean if you think you want to kill them. I mean if you know you want to kill them, then there’s only one thing for it and that’s to shoot them clean through the head.’

  And, as if he needs to fire home the point, he aims at my temple with the index and middle finger of his left hand, makes a banging sound with his mouth, then blows off the imaginary smoke like a gunslinger from the Wild West.

  I sip on my beer, the glass barely touching my mouth. I’m getting sick of this stuff, this drinking business, this dwelling on sadness. From somewhere comes an image. Something in Jose’s story reminds me of an exhibition I visited the summer before in Durham Cathedral. I prod Jose in the arm.

  ‘Listen to me,’ I talk slowly but my words still slur a bit, ‘listen to what I have to say. What you’ve just said. It’s like an exhibition I once saw in a cathedral. A film was projected onto a large screen below a huge stained-glass window. Do you get stained-glass windows here? I mean real stained glass? It doesn’t matter. That doesn’t matter. I mean, if you have real stained glass or not. Well, the film started off with deep blue water. The entire screen covered with the deepest blue, and there was a bubbly sound, like air bubbles, like the sea breathing. And way down the bottom, deep down at the seabed, was a fragmented white image, like a mosaic. As it moved up to the surface it became clear it was a man’s body. After some time. It seemed like a lifetime. It was for him, I suppose. The man’s face broke the surface and he exhaled. He had a look of wonder on his face and fear or awe. Surprised at what he saw perhaps. At what he saw around him. He didn’t smile, but something in his expression made me wonder if he had seen it all before.’

  Jose is asleep, slumped on the bar. We are the only ones left.

  The image stays with me as we take a taxi back to town. The man deep at the bottom of the blue water. The pressure of so much water pushing him down. Fragmenting him, compartmentalising him, so he is barely distinguishable as a man. Yet he forces himself, something forces him, to the surface. Until gradually the mosaics of his body knit together. Slowly he emerges to the surface. He breathes. One long breath. His eyes are wide open. He looks around to see what is new and different in this world above the water, in this world where his body is whole, where he can breathe the air. And nothing is different.

  The Longstone brothers will have nothing to do with it. They are wild mountain men, huge bodies framed from boulders of the Rockies. But what Don offers them is beyond the limits of their wildness. Same goes for Don’s familiar, Fred, who is perched by his side, a tiny man with beady reddened eyes. When he sees the bottle on the table, he shakes his head and recounts how the last time he drank from it he tried to kill his girlfriend.

  ‘You can keep your Lucifer’s Elixir,’ he says, his eyes popping from his head. ‘You and the devil can drink together,’ he says to Don, who caresses the top of the bottle with the sensuous touch of a lover.

  Nor did Priss try any of the drink, or so I recall when I come to reconstruct the way the night panned out.

  Jose and I had finally left the bar and taken a cab to Priss’s place, where we drank more and took cocaine. Not Jose. No cocaine for Jose. The drink had done for him. And that’s how Jose came to be slumped in the corner. But I was steaming, secretly disappointed at the implications of what Sandro had said. So I insisted on more white powder, the whiter the better. Priss was not so sure. Even he’d had enough and was ready to turn in for the night, to snuggle up against his young wife. But he was a good host. He tried his regular dealer, a contact on the Southside, but no luck. So he told me about Don’s house and his ‘Museum’. We finished off the beers over one last game of pool. Then we wheeled out the Harley Davidson that was resting in the garage next to the little red Corvette. The huge guard dog shifted in his sleep. He knew where we two were headed.

  I must give it to him, Dr Drugs, he had forewarned me of the ‘Museum’ with its Satanism, armaments, and other surprises. But it was to be one of those days where I sought out the company of wolves, where I would venture deep into the darkest corner of the cave to find them. The more deliciously dangerous the better. The wildest side of wild, please, and then some mor
e. All the better to eat you with, I thought, after those first two grams of finest quality cocaine. After that first taste we are given a tour of the armoury, bristling with guns bought from the Israeli army to sell to the Chicago gangs, hidden away in a room behind the quiet exterior of this sleepy suburban house.

  The ‘Museum’ walls are lined with photos of the spirits of long-dead first nation Americans in war paint and headdress. A shrunken head sits in one corner, its lips stitched in silence, next to a brightly coloured glass bubblegum machine. And when Don, the Satanist, with the bust of his master above his head (mocking the ‘Last Supper’ on the wall opposite) produces the bottle from the cupboard and places it in the middle of the table, when the assembled group recoils in horror, when, with a smile, he refuses to say whose virgin’s blood has been mixed and diluted, when all the others say “No,” including Dr Drugs himself, I say, “Yes,” give me some, let me swallow it up, let me be changed. And as I gulp from the bottle of Lucifer’s Elixir, I know my heart will turn black, and it will all, once again, be a long time mending.

  Next day there is a minor hurricane in Chicago. The rain lashes the sidewalks, flooding the well-kept lawns. The men of the houses stay indoors with their womenfolk and sit it out. The troops postpone their triumphant march up Madison Avenue. But I am oblivious to it all. I stay in the darkness of the den (Jose having disappeared), the demons locked inside my soul. Most of the time I lie in bed, waiting for my own storm to subside, waiting for some equilibrium. I tell Priss and his wife I have a migraine, I need rest. I have travelled and worked too hard and too long, I mumble. They leave me alone, save to entice me with small meals and regular cordials. Priss looks sheepish, but says nothing of the excursion to Don’s place. He is afraid Charlene might get upset with him again, withdraw into her secret world, and that the wizened therapist from Lake Shore Drive would once more be at the door. All in all, migraine is the best solution for everyone concerned.