This All-at-Onceness

by Wittes Schlack, Julie

  I met him in the patients’ lounge a few minutes later, where he sat playing Solitaire.

  “You must be Duane. I’m Julie. I’m a psychiatric aide here.”

  He chuckled. “I must be Duane.” He nodded his head slowly and stroked his scraggly beard. “Yeah, man, that’s right.” His attention wandered up to the television attached to the wall, which featured two top women’s roller derby teams live from a nearby rink.

  Elizabeth the anorexic (commonly referred to as Thin Lizzy, first by the staff, then proudly by Elizabeth herself once she heard about it) had dropped her knitting and was watching the match. “Cream her!” she yelled. “Cream the bitch!”

  “That’s disgusting,” Duane said loudly. “That shit’s terrible, man. Violent. It’s terribly violent.” He laughed loudly, then laid out a new Solitaire hand.

  Leo, a regular, came into the lounge, sat down across from him, and silently offered Duane a smoke. Duane accepted, and they both inhaled deeply, then leaned back in their chairs.

  “You must be new here,” Leo said.

  Duane nodded.

  “Well, it’s not too bad,” Leo continued. “Beats the VA hospital, that’s for damn sure.”

  Duane wasn’t listening; he was focused instead on the cards lying in sloppy lines in front of him.

  “I’d go with the red queen,” Leo said, jabbing the card with one hand while deftly catching ash from the cigarette he held between thumb and index finger in the palm of the other.

  “You a card shark or something?” Duane asked.

  Leo smiled. “No, I’ve just played a lot of cards in my day.” He shook his head ruefully. “And I’ve played a lot of Solitaire since losing my wife and daughter.”

  Duane looked up, curious. “Oh yeah? How’d you lose them? Did you leave them in a buddy’s car? They fall out of your pants in the washing machine?” He laughed, a strange, high titter that was at odds with his raspy voice.

  Leo reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. “This is—was—my wife, Sherry,” he said, holding out a laminated picture of an attractive brunette in her mid-thirties. “And this,” he said, flipping to the next photograph in the wallet, “is our darling Alice.” An adorable blonde child, as fair as Leo was dark, smiled up from the plastic case.

  “So, did you kill them or what?” Duane asked.

  Leo shook his head and sighed. “No, they left me. And who could blame them? I was a drunk, a lazy, no-good, sonofabitch slob who took and took and took and never gave a goddamn thing but heartache.” He was enraptured by guilt. Duane looked at him, jiggling his knee restlessly, but listening. “The only thing I was good at was excuses,” Leo continued. “And Sherry, bless her, she kept forgiving me. She’d reach out with a healing touch, and I’d slap her hand. Little Alice would look to me for someone to respect, and I showed her nothing but sloth and selfishness—”

  “But what and selfishness?”

  “Sloth,” Leo answered impatiently. “You know, laziness. General laxity. Anyhow, it finally all came to a head when I forgot Alice’s birthday. I’d gotten fired that day, showed up to work drunk, and they sent me home—told me never to come back. So I figured, why go home? I’ve got a whole day ahead of me, and I’m drunk but I’m not drunk.”

  “Yeah, right.” Duane laughed appreciatively.

  “So I went to the bar, and I got completely pissed, blotto, drunker than a squirrel in a still.” He took a deep breath. “When I finally crawled home that night, there was a Dear John. Dear Leo, it said, I can’t watch you destroy yourself anymore. And I can’t let you destroy little Alice. I love you, but I never want to see your drunken face again. Hugs and kisses, Sherry.”

  Duane shifted in his chair, then straightened the cards. “So that was that, huh?”

  Leo nodded sadly. “That was that. I should’ve hung on to her.”

  “By the tits, right?” Duane once again erupted into that silly giggle, then laid down a black jack on the red queen.

  Leo lit another cigarette and picked up his newspaper, and they fell into a comfortable silence.

  It was all lies. Leo had never been married, never had a child. I’d spent several almost pleasant afternoons with him. He was intelligent and unmedicated—a good conversationalist, but also a pathological liar. He lied about everything. Not only did he have this totally fabricated life, but he’d lie about what he’d had for lunch, about the weatherman’s forecast for the next day. Leo had opted out of real life in favor of a warm, state-funded room—sometimes in the hospital, sometimes in a motel—and a life he could make up. He’d created this persona of the man who’d learned the important lessons in life the hard way, the tragic sinner who’d fallen from grace and now wanted only to share his wisdom so that others wouldn’t make his mistakes. He’d had stays in practically every hospital in the state and had been in our unit often enough, long enough, to act as its genial host. On most mornings, when you asked Leo how he was doing, he’d answer, “Top of the world.” But belying it all were the wife and daughter pictures he’d shown Duane. They were printed on fading newsprint and had come with the wallet.

  Carl, a compact young man with bulging muscles and the Parkinsonian gait of the over-medicated, shuffled over and asked me for a newspaper.

  Thin Lizzie, whose hearing was as sharp as her skeletal face, yelled, “Sucking up to the teacher, you big pussy?”

  Saying nothing, Carl ignored her and sat down. He ran his hand back and forth over his brush cut, and tiny flecks of dandruff fell to his shoulders.

  Lizzie, satisfied with her victory, resumed knitting and watching the roller derby. The closer she got to death, the more she cackled and crowed and lorded over people. Although only twenty-six, she’d stopped menstruating over a year earlier; now her papery skin was jaundiced and her breath increasingly putrid as her organs weakened from starvation. The hospital was trying to win legal guardianship so that they could put her on intravenous nutrition, but so far she and her mother had resisted. At this rate, despite our best efforts to police her at meals to make sure she ate, Lizzie was going to die soon, triumphantly in control to the end.

  Carl rebuttoned his cardigan sweater and picked up the Home section of the Springfield Journal.

  “Looking for some flower arranging tips?” Leo blandly asked.

  Startled, Carl looked up. His eyes, in a perpetual squint, seemed to be mesmerized by some distant but approaching horror. He didn’t answer, just looked down to check the buttons of his sweater.

  “We interrupt this program to bring you a special broadcast,” Walter Cronkite suddenly interrupted. “President Nixon—former President Nixon—is about to make his farewell speech to the White House staff. We bring it to you live.”

  “Eat shit and die, you crook,” Lizzie screamed at the television.

  Duane looked up sharply. “Who you talking to like that?”

  “Tricky Dick,” she answered, a little subdued. Lizzie wasn’t used to being challenged.

  “You don’t go talking about him like that! That’s my man. That’s the fucking President!”

  “Not anymore,” Leo corrected.

  “Bullshit,” Duane answered. “He can be fucking President for as long as he wants. He’s the President. He can drop bombs. He’s got his own damn plane. They cook him whatever he wants to eat whenever he wants it. The dude wants a BLT at two in the morning, he can have one. He can do whatever he wants. He can phone fucking George Allen and tell him what plays to call.”

  Leo hunched forward. “Now I don’t abide by that at all,” he said gravely. “He’s the President, he can run the country, fine. That’s his job. Was his job. But you don’t tell George Allen how to run the Redskins. That’s his job.”

  Conversation dwindled as Nixon, standing in front of a room full of staff and cabinet members, sweating profusely, began to speak.

  “I think the r
ecord should show that this is one of those spontaneous things that we always arrange whenever the President comes in to speak, and it will be so reported in the press, and we don’t mind because they’ve got to call it as they see it.” Mr. Ex-President was still referring to himself in the third person, and his speech had the slow, forced quality of someone heavily sedated. Behind him to his left, Pat stood glassy-eyed, with Julie and her fiancé and Tricia and her husband, flanking the apparently medicated pair.

  Lizzie put down her knitting, stood, and walked over to stand directly in front of the television. Normally this behavior wouldn’t be tolerated, but Leo and Duane just repositioned their chairs to see around her. Carl continued to look down at the newspaper in his clenched hand, as if afraid to look at the screen.

  “…this Office, great as it is, can only be as great as the men and women who work for and with the President. This House, for example—I was thinking of it as we walked down this hall, and I was comparing it to some of the great Houses of the world that I’ve been in. This isn’t the biggest House. Many, and most, in even smaller countries are much bigger. This isn’t the finest House. Many in Europe, particularly, and in China, Asia, have paintings of great, great value, things that we just don’t have here, and probably will never have until we are a thousand years old or older. But this is the best House…”

  “No, this is the Big House,” Duane chortled.

  “This is not a time for jokes,” Carl muttered. “He’s going down. He’s going down.”

  Nixon continued, praising his staff and, by extension, himself for their dedication, for all of their excellent service in the past five-and-a-half years.

  “…Mistakes, yes; but for personal gain, never. You did what you believed in. Sometimes right, sometimes wrong. And I only wish that I were a—a wealthy man. At the present time I’ve got to find a way to pay my taxes…”

  I could barely stomach it. “Poor, poor Dick,” I murmured to Phil, one of the other aides, “having to return to that hovel in San Clemente.” He and several patients had ambled into the lounge, having just finished a big bingo game in the dining room. They gradually sat down in a semi-circle in front of the TV, anchored by Lizzie in the middle, and watched raptly as Nixon looked up and fell silent for a moment. His gaze turned inward, and then, as if in a trance, he haltingly began to talk in what was clearly a deviation from his script.

  “I remember my old man. I think that they would have called him sort of—sort of a little man, common man. He didn’t consider himself that way. You know what he was? He was a streetcar motorman first, and then he was a farmer, and then he had a lemon ranch. It was the poorest lemon ranch in California, I can assure you. He sold it before they found oil on it. And then he was a grocer. But he was a great man because he did his job, and every job counts up to the hilt, regardless of what happened.”

  Carl abruptly stood up. “I’m not a little man.” His chair teetered on its back legs for a moment, then fell to the floor.

  “Nobody said you were, asshole,” Duane answered.

  Phil stepped quickly between them, but Duane had already turned his attention back to the screen, and now Carl, too, was staring at Nixon. His shoulders sagging, his face clammy, Nixon had the haunted, elsewhere look that so many of our patients had.

  “Nobody will ever write a book, probably, about my mother. Well, I guess all of you would say this about your mother: My mother was a saint. And I think of her, two boys dying of tuberculosis, nursing four others in order that she could take care of my older brother for three years in Arizona, and seeing each of them die, and when they died, it was like one of her own. Yes, she will have no books written about her. But she was a saint.”

  “My mother was a saint.” Leo issued a loud, shuddering sob, and Duane hesitantly patted him on the back, as if burping him. The other patients looked briefly in Leo’s direction, then back at the screen. It seemed as if everyone had inhaled and forgotten to exhale, as if their consciousness had fused in a state of breathless anticipation. Or recognition. Nixon was a liar, a self-made man, a paranoid sociopath, a pawn, a victim, a suddenly powerless bully. They knew him, they understood him; they didn’t know whether to celebrate his fall or fear it.

  Carl stood frozen, his clenched fists now held up to his temples. “My head hurts,” he muttered, but we all ignored him, bewitched by the spectacle in front of us.

  “Always give your best; never get discouraged; never be petty. Always remember others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Phil murmured.

  Some in Nixon’s audience were visibly crying, and their distress was starting to permeate the TV lounge. So when Carol, the head nurse, stuck her head in to say that it was lunchtime, I was relieved to start shepherding people out of there.

  Nixon had wrapped up his speech, Walter Cronkite offered a brief summary, and as I turned off the TV, I got what would be my last view of Nixon standing in the entrance to his helicopter, smiling at some invisible crowd, arms raised like crow’s wings and the fingers of both hands arranged, as always, in the V for Victory sign.

  And then it was over. The man who had personified arrogance and ruthlessness and senseless destruction was gone and so was my elation from the previous night. The end of his presidency left me feeling slightly hollow and cheap and all dressed up with no place to go. Nixon had been spat out, but the morning had followed its usual routine, and now there were lunch trays to be distributed.

  The period after lunch offered a brief reprieve. The patients went back to their rooms while nurses distributed the meds, and I retreated to the nursing station to catch up on charts. Carl appeared at the door.

  “I’ve got a terrible headache,” he said. “I need some aspirin.” He looked pale, and his eyeballs seemed to quiver like grapes suspended in Jell-O.

  “I’m just an aide, Carl. I’m not allowed to dispense any medication, not even aspirin. Why don’t you go back to your room and lie down, and I’ll get a nurse to bring you some.”

  He lunged into the nursing station and grabbed the edges of the desk I was sitting at. “My head is going to explode. I need some aspirin now,” he moaned. “I’ve waited long enough! Long enough!”

  His face was inches from mine, and I could smell his breath. It was sweet and spoiled like old baby formula. Then he yanked himself upright and screamed. He stood there, and his arms sprung out from his sides, and he kept screaming, a long, hoarse roar. Then he fell straight back to the floor and grimly began twitching and kicking and gurgling.

  It was a seizure—a hysterical seizure, one of the nurses later explained to me. Carl was not epileptic—“He just couldn’t stand the excitement,” she quipped. I couldn’t understand how she could be so cavalier. His synapses were literally surging with rage and panic. One minute he was seizing on the floor; the next he was up, calm, and grateful for the aspirin to ease the pain in his head.

  Carl had been my first solo admission, and after six weeks, he was still only inches away from the bedraggled, weeping man the police had dropped off in the middle of the night. The cop who brought him in told me that they’d picked Carl up at a bar, where he’d just broken one man’s nose and another man’s wrist.

  “Nag,” Carl had moaned when I’d asked him to spell his name for the intake forms. “My name is Nag, not Fag. They all call me Fag. They all laugh at me.”

  Now, at a “therapeutic” dose of Thorazine, Carl was a shuffling, subdued dybbuk—a square and hulking man built for vengeance, but made of clay. He would have no helicopter to whisk him away from the site of his shame, no calming California sun to restore him.

  With the fall semester of my senior year just a few weeks off, I also would be going soon, leaving this job with none of the certainty with which I’d started it. Before setting foot in the hospital, I’d believed that with the powe
r of my position, a clear mind, and helpful intentions, I and others like me could make the world a better, more sane place. But I was seeing that goodness and power were rarely coupled. Nixon was only a marginally sane man, and an evil one, both in power and out of it. My patients wandered in and out of their right minds; they engaged in simple acts of kindness and practiced devastating scorn, broke noses one day and were straitjacketed the next. Whether batty or lucid, they were not lovely innocents. I was sane but largely ineffectual, and to my profound shame, I was now frightened of Carl. The juncture of power, goodness, and sanity was nowhere to be found.

  After work that day, I walked through the parking lot and peered into the back seat of my car through the window. All clear. I got in, but even after I turned on the ignition and heard the soothing engine sound and felt the car’s steady vibration, I was sure that Carl would pop up from where he’d been lying on the floor and fill my rearview mirror with his face and scream.

  Then, like everyone else in his strafed and invisible life, I drove away.

  Working Average (1976-1981)

  On July 3, 1976, at 7:29 a.m., I dragged to my station in Fountain Hill Mill, past dozens of sewing machines and row upon row of middle-aged women in smocks and short puffy brown hair. Long tables were piled high with shirts, some without sleeves, some without collars, lying limp and menacing like stick hangman figures. Dirty canvas bins were everywhere, next to all the chairs, in front of all the machines, abutting all the aisles and straddling cracked and fading yellow safety lines. Clusters of knotted threads, piles of fabric shavings, wads of oily piping scraps already huddled underfoot. Jigsaw splashes of light entered through bare spots on the windows where the paint had fallen off.

  Mark and I had moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania, about six months earlier to join the industrial working class. I hated the place, with its small-town suspicion of outsiders, its grid of flat, graceless row houses abutting the sidewalks, its storefront lunch spots touting scrapple and ten varieties of baloney, its gun and ammo stores, its third shift dive bars serving nothing but Pabst and Schaeffer and pickled eggs.