June disappointed John. It had been a humid, storming May, but June was worse. When he had been in his early twenties, those first years when he still had four fingers on the ledge of adolescence, it had been a month of seeing friends home from college, waking early to hit the golf course, and finding beer gardens. But those times had faded away leaving him wondering how everyone else had made a transition to busy summers of going to cousins’ weddings, the spouse’s family reunion, and coaching little league. Even the flow of sick people to the hospital slowed during the summer to let people take their vacations and talk in the hallways of summer plans.
But he knew that he was different even before all his rowdy friends had settled down. The last time he had felt that he belonged somewhere was smoking pot under the large shade trees of Eastern High School. Through good weed and bad, his pothead buddies had always been there.
Then the were not the same as him, when, during an argument on his sixteenth birthday, his mother decided he was old enough to know that she had given him up for adoption. “I was alone, John,” his mother had told him, “and you was a very colicky baby, so don’t tell me how you need your fucking friends. You cried all the time and I had no one to help me. I kicked your father out because of his drinking and other women. Your grandparents disowned me. Twenty-four hours a day I took care of you. I did everything, but it wasn’t enough.
“So I had to give you up,” she said, hesitating because she had realized that she had said too much in anger.
Dykes had been listening to her as he leaned on a kitchen counter with arms crossed. He held his arms tighter, but did not look up. For an instant, he could not process what she had said. He tried to figure out how she could have put him up for adoption and him still be there. He felt her words, though. He couldn’t speak.
“That actually brought me and your dad back together. He helped me through the one-year anniversary of giving you up. You must not remember the woman who adopted you. You never talked about her, but she had you until you were three. She died and we got you back. You talk about having a terrible life and all the things I do to you, but I’ve been through a lot. You’re sixteen now and need to take some responsibility for yourself because I’m done.”
After the secret was out, his parents often reminded him of all the hardships that they had to go through for him, but all he could picture was how nobody wanted him.
A bunch of kids, mostly boys, no older than ten, zigzagged their bikes down the street making noise. John watched. The he spied on a family bounding by in an undulating fashion as the two little boys rode their bikes ahead and then back to their parents as their dad called out to them.
The street below his window cleared and hard rain spangled the pavement. Dykes poured a glass of cool-aid and threw some vodka in it. It burned his throat. He thought of his two miserable years then until he met a girl, Donna. Even now, he could feel exactly how it felt to be in love with her. He was so happy with her that he became a fun guy. Being fun, he developed lots of friends. He went out and partied until he did not have any time for her, so he dumped her.
Bigger, he thought, as miserable as you think you are, you are truly lucky. I know no one. I don’t even have those old bitties in the kitchen to keep me company. Bigger’s description of his bachelor life ran through his head and it sounded like a slap in the face. Thoughts of the scenes where he picked up women believing that one of them would be his salvation made him wince. He knew he could not recapture Donna’s love that had comforted him like someone checking his temperature with the back of her hand. These women were not Donna and he had thrown Donna away, anyway.
The women themselves may not have seen, but he had been pathetic. Those that had been there when he had been the drunkest had seen. In the morning, he felt ashamed, not for the one-night-stand, but that he had let himself fall into the same stupid pattern that would get him nowhere. He was so ashamed and exposed that he could barely talk to the woman as he drove her to her apartment or car sitting in a bar parking lot. Then there would be the tormenting silence as she opened the door and got out of the car, waiting for him to say something. And Bigger idolized his life.
“Not even Bigger can tell my feelings. I do everything I can to show people how miserable I am. I bare all, but nobody sees me.
“How in the hell do I get out of this?”
Chapter 20
In spite of the fact that everyone believed that Mr. Annunzio was haunting the hospital, Mrs. Annunzio remained in the psychiatric ward because she continued to have visions of her dead husband. Her doctor, Dr. James Young Simpson, had a theory that her hallucinations were linked to her diet and that her sickness was caused by an allergic reaction to food. “Her hallucinations,” Simpson told a colleague as he stood next to Mrs. Annunzio outside the psychiatric patients’ dining room, “always correspond to the time periods just before breakfast and lunch and an hour after breakfast and lunch. Why before and after? I am treating her aggressively with drugs so I really don’t need to know why, but I am doing a lot of research on it. It will get published for sure.”
“Excuse me, huh?” Bigger asked of the two doctors as he adjusted his white hat on his frosty head. “I have to put this cart right where you are standing. If I don’t put it exactly there, someone will call down and complain.” Bigger nudged the cart into them when they didn’t move. “Come on. The staff up here insists that it be in the same spot everyday with 23 napkins stacked in two piles lengthwise on top. Please? They are probably calling my supervisor already.”
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. It’s him. It’s him,” Mrs. Annunzio screamed. She beat her breast. “It’s him, right there.” Bigger let go of his cart and hurried toward the door before he had to help restrain the lady. Two large nursing assistants grabbed Mrs. Annunzio, put her in a hold, and took her to a padded room.
The two doctors got up from behind the food cart where they had been crouching. “We may never find the cause,” Simpson said shaking his head. “The answer may just be too complex.”
“Doctor, please come give her a sedative. She is starting to feel her grief.”
Bigger jumped into the elevator and punched the door shut button. Dykes was in the elevator and looked up. “Biggs.”
“Dykes. What ya up to?”
Dykes scribbled a signature on an invoice. “I am signing all these invoices for the supplies I dropped off for each department.”
“Ah, Dykes, the people that you deliver to are supposed to sign those.”
John scribbled on another invoice. “I didn’t feel like talking, so I am just signing them.”
“With your name?”
“That wouldn’t make sense, Biggs. I am signing them H.R. Pufnstuf. Nobody reads the signature anyway. Christ, everyone around has others sign an invoice or a form. It makes them feel official or that they are holding other people accountable, yet nobody has noticed that I sign all my invoices either Mary Eddy or the mayor of Living Island. It’s all bullshit. It makes me want to go on a killing spree.”
The door opened on the ground floor. “Good talking to you, Dykes.”
Going down the hall, Bigger watched a stout, well-dressed lady fumble with the keys to her office. She held an armful of folders and a book bag with more papers. Bigger knew she had something to do with patients’ rights or something and knew she always gathered up armloads of paperwork to take home and bring back the next day. Bigger took the time as he walked toward her to debate if he could become a Patients’ Rights Coordinator.
“Hey, get your butt over here and open the damn door for me,” she said.
Dan, the audio/visual specialist/ union representative/ self-appointed employee advocate witnessed the whole scene as he came in the opposite direction. “Bigger,” he called out, “Employees have rights. You don’t have to accept being talked to like that.”
“Yes, I do, Dan.”
Dan looked at Bigger. Bigger glanced back at him then dragged his eyes to the woman. “Coming, Mom.”
She plopped her load on her desk. “I have a job with a lot of responsibility, Bigger. Its not just some low paying job my mother had to get me.”
“Oh,” he said.
“I have to get all this work done. Being the Patient’s Rights Coordinator requires that I work a couple of hours after I get home, which is late. It requires it just like your father’s job requires him to go to all those faculty parties.” She turned on the computer that she never used. “I actually envy you, sometimes, Bigger. I wish I could just wad up my paper hat and throw it away at the end of eight hours and be done, but I can’t.”
“I gotta go, Mom.” Bigger turned and went back to work. Behind him he could hear his mom talk about how she wished she could dye her hair and look like a freak, but she needed to be professional. He decided against being whatever it was his mom was.
Chapter 21
Joe sat naked, sweating in the humidity of the mid-July evening and watched Susan towel off after her shower. He watched her dry her breasts and philosophized how boobs were globes of ecstasy to men, but just another body part or something to women. It made him mad. What really pissed him off was that having those breasts around all the time was un-glamorizing them for him, too. He was close to not even looking up from the TV to watch her get dressed.
“You should come with me,” Susan said. “The meetings are starting to make great progress. They really are. I think this meeting is really going to get things going for the union.”
“It will never work, Susan.”
“You don’t believe anything will ever work.”
“So?”
“Including us.”
“Oh, God.”
Joe got up and got a beer from the fridge. Then he put his pants on. He did not like to have a fight without his pants on. “This is how things are going to work out, baby. Whether we end up with a union or not, the employees are going to pull in one direction and the nuns runnin’ this place are going to pull in the opposite direction just for spite. Stalemate. So then the nurses are going to go for themselves because they will think of it first. But everyone will try to fuck everyone else over for more. There is going to be talk and talk and talk and no decisions.”
Susan twisted so that she presented her back to Joe. He zipped up her simple, black dress. He liked the way it hung loosely to above her knees after hugging her breasts and showed off her strong, tan legs. Because she was attractive, people thought that she was not living up to her potential working as a housekeeper. As if the low paying jobs were reserved for ugly people. Susan had chosen the dress to look good so that people at the meeting would know what she looked like in real life, but when she looked in the mirror, she contemplated changing into slacks so that she wouldn’t look so nice that people would call her a flake.
Mostly, Susan wanted people to like her for who she was inside. But there was a part of her that wanted to be recognized as desirable and be singled out as special. It was that part of her that picked out the dress. “I’m going to change.”
Joe grabbed her by the arm and kept her from going back to the bedroom. “Do you want to know why I know that there is only going to be lots of talk and no action? Because that is what goes on now.”
“Dan has some great ideas-”
“Dan doesn’t know shit. He has one of those fantasy jobs that is given to stupid, lucky people. He gets paid lots and does little. He will always have a nice home and fly somewhere for vacations, but he doesn’t know his butt hole from a donut hole. The only world he knows is what can be watered by his sprinkler system. He doesn’t see that the paper pushers make all the decisions; they try to steer St. Jude’s in one direction and it makes us workers furiously work in any direction, but that one. What does that do? It makes the administration go even more punitive. The result is everything remains lousy. So why labor to have things lousy when we can do nothing and have things lousy.”
“Don’t be so bitter and lazy.”
Joe sat down and tapped the bottom of his beer. “I’m not lazy. Things could get better if one person would listen to another’s problem and say, ‘Well, I could help you with that no problem. I was only sitting here jerking off anyway.’ Like Seuss wants me to go help Louise in the cafeteria twenty minutes earlier than I do now for lunch. I ain’t doing nothing, anyway.”
“So you’re going to do it?”
“Nope. I told him I was too busy. I am not going to be the one. What do I get out of it? Only more work. What I do won’t make a difference.”
“But you just said it takes just one person.”
“I don’t care.”
“The union will make the difference, Joe. Look at the United Auto Workers. They don’t take guff from anybody. Do you want us to just let management do whatever they want?”
“No.”
“Because things will be better and better for them and worse for us.” She rapped Joe on the shoulder with her hairbrush. “And don’t give me your conservative crap about the free market system and demand determining our wages. I not picking up and moving just to go to a hospital that pays more.”
Joe took the brush out of her hand. “I didn’t say that.” She was ready to leave. He kissed her on her cheek as she bent down to him and then gave her a goose. “If the union happens, I will take every benefit it will provide, but it won’t happen. And all you optimists are going to cause havoc and make my life worse.”
“Bye, honey.”
Joe listened to her back out of the driveway, then turned up the TV and lit a cigarette.
Chapter 22
William Petty, the new acting administrator of Saint Jude’s Health Facility and Hospital adjusted his bronze bust of the economist Adam Smith and sat down at his new desk. He posed as if someone was painting his portrait for posterity. Fifteen years out of college, he was young and virile and a doer. He was out to transform health care at whatever his personal cost as long as it benefited his career.
The nuns had informed him that the employees were in the process of forming a union, so his first official communication was a letter to each employee warning them of the dangers of unions. He had told of how unions took dues, made all members indentured servants to the mob and had closed down several hospitals with their tactics. He was confident that his letter would be effective. He was confident that because he was enthusiastic, his employees would see that he cared about them and would not form a union.
If that didn’t work, he would crush them like so many testicles under the high heel of a dominatrix.
“Bill,” Betty called out. “The union representatives are here for their appointment with you.”
Petty leaned back in his chair. “Thank you, Betty. But before they come in I want to say something. My first few weeks as the CEO of this hospital have been very hectic ones. I couldn’t have made it without you. I really needed you sitting in on meeting with me and letting me bounce ideas off of you.”
Betty bit a hangnail. “Great,” she said.
“Its nice to see that at least one person knows her place as an employee. You are not like those ungrateful union bastards trying to blackmail me.”
She opened the door and said to the group of six waiting, “Its time.”
They filed in so that they formed a semicircle in front of Petty’s desk. Dan, Susan, the nurse with bacon and cigarette breath, and three others stood with nervous assertiveness. They parted easily for Petty’s secretary, so that they stood three deep beside Betty who had her steno pad in hand, already filled with notes.
“So, you are the leaders of the potential union, eh?” Petty eyed them up like a telemarketer with an elderly lady on the line.
Susan shook her head, letting her long blonde hair, normally up for work, shimmer from side to side behind her. Wanting to look her bes
t, she wore the same dress she had worn for most of the union meetings. “No. We are just the people that have begun the initial steps of forming a union to show that we weren’t all talk. All we did was get the information from the National Labor Relations Board, talked with the union people and set up meetings.”
Petty relaxed back in his chair.
“We have continued as leaders because no one stopped us or took over for us, yet.” Susan found herself enjoying having Petty listen to her, so she continued. “However, we found that people were willing to be lead and that being a leader isn’t that hard.”
Dan cleared his throat, afraid that Petty would take offense to that.
“All you have to do is act and forge ahead. Instead of thinking and discussing and rehashing bombastic bullshit, we did nothing the last few month except what we needed to do to get what we want.”
Susan, remembering what her lawyer told her many a time in juvenile court, tried not to give more information than what was asked for, but wanted this man to listen. “Unsure of many things, we did them anyway. So we are not the leaders. As soon as somebody more qualified comes along, we are going to step aside. But we are the ones you have to deal with today.”
Petty eyed them up again and then put his hands behind his head. “You may go now, Betty,” he said.
“I would, Bill, but as chapter president of the union, I feel that I should be here.”
Petty jumped up.
Chapter 23
It was the first cold autumn day, the first miserable day of keeping the windows of the Butt Hutt shut. Up to this day, the smokers had kept the heater on high and the windows open, but now there was no denying the smell of ashtrays. Not that the room ever smelled good. Even in the summer, when people smoked outside, they would come in surrounded by the smell of cigarettes. The smell force field was about the size of an elevator car and would shock the non-smoker accustomed to a smoke free environment. But for every anti-smoking fact, the members of the Butt Hutt club could tell you of a relative that smoked everyday of their lives and lived to be eighty-six. Or lived to be sixty-six and that was good enough for them.
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