Crush

by Laura Susan Johnson

  Bootsy opens the door for my atonement. I volunteer at the animal shelter down the road, cleaning cages, walking dogs, helping socialise semi-feral cats, and I begin what will become a very long process of forgiving myself.

  Ray moves to Reno and I lose touch with him completely. I'm twenty-two when I graduate UCLA and go to work full time at their station. I begin doing the AM campus news and eventually I find myself replacing a DJ who is fired over a money dispute, and becoming the host of an awesome late night show, four nights a week, three hours a night, playing long-lost hits from those archetypal '80s groups that have huge fan followings, but somehow are never on the radio: the Specials, the Runaways, the Smiths, the Cure, Joy Division, the Boomtown Rats, English Beat, the Pixies, the Violent Femmes, Modern English, the Cult, the Clash, the Ramones, the Human League, Squeeze, Lene Lovich, Gary Numan, Elvis Costello, Adam Ant, and Kate Bush. You'd think by now they'd be categorised as "classic" rock, like Blondie, the Talking Heads, U2, R.E.M., the Pretenders, Heart and the Police.

  Over a year, the show becomes popular enough that it's purchased by the network and broadcast on their University of California affiliate stations all over the state.

  With this new job, I get a substantial raise. I use my new clout to plug the animal shelter every day, giving the names and descriptions of adorable, deserving cats and dogs who are waiting to be adopted. The shelter says it's getting great results.

  It isn't the illustrious career I fantasised about in high school and when I first came here. I'm not a famous anchor for CNN. I'm not winning primetime Emmys or Pulitzers or Nobels. But I'm happy anyway. I'm doing things I love to do.

  Well... I'm almost happy.

  ten:

  jamie

  (high school and after)

  It's easy to convince yourself of anything when you're in as much pain as I've been in. Little by little, I get used to life without him. During the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, I accompany Stacy on almost every date she goes on with Ray. To say I feel like a third wheel is an understatement. I want to scream when they make out in front of me. I feel stupid when we're in a restaurant and the chair next to mine is vacant. A void forms between Ray and I. To be honest, he's been distant since his sister started spreading the gay rumours about me. He acts like he can't stand me.

  When he dumps Stacy the summer after our sophomore year, it's a relief to me, I'm sad to disclose. I give her my shoulder to cry on, hoping she'll find a better guy, but I also pray with all my might that she'll stop insisting that I come with her on dates because she feels sorry for me. Truly, I'd feel less left out if I stayed home.

  We keep going to The End to sing, and the whole town comes to expect a weekly performance. They even give us a band name, Old Reliable. Because we can always be relied upon to sing something they'll love.

  My grades hover at a steady low B average. My dyslexia improves, and I pass English, algebra and biology. There's no chance I'll ever get into calculus or physics, but I'm thrilled to be able to read and solve moderate math problems and name the organs in the human body, and I decide I want to be a doctor for people, instead of a vet.

  "What about becoming a nurse?" suggests Lloyd.

  "A nurse?!"

  "What's wrong with being a nurse?"

  "I'm a boy!" I laugh.

  "So? Lots of men are becoming nurses now. It's a great career, very respectable, very responsible."

  "I don't know..."

  "Some of the nurses who cared for you when you were so sick were men." Lloyd does not enjoy talking about the day we met, so I know he's serious about this. "You'd make an excellent nurse, Jamie."

  For my first experience in preparation for my new career, I take a part-time position taking care of an elderly couple in town, Mr. and Mrs. Stolper. It doesn't pay much, but the experience will look good on a résumé. I want to help people. I want to earn my place on this chunk of dirt. Maybe, just maybe, I can get out of my own head by focusing on the problems of others.

  My philanthropic ideals will be smacked silly by reality soon enough.

  He's ninety-three and pretty sharp mentally, a real go-getter, while she's eighty-nine and sorrowfully senile. I work for them after school until 9pm, and two weekends a month, cooking, cleaning, doing errands, etc.

  One night I get a call from Lloyd. He tells me Tammy called a couple of days before, asking about me. "Give him a call, son," says Lloyd.

  Ever since the pastor at the church told Lloyd that I'm suspected of being gay, Lloyd has been a champion for my accepting and loving myself for who I am. That's who Lloyd is. He loves me no matter who I might be. He's my hero. He's the angel who came to me and lifted me up out of a deathbed. I don't know why God spared me. I don't know why I didn't die behind those locked doors. I love Lloyd so much that I remember to thank God for him in my prayers every single night.

  "He'd love to hear from you," Lloyd encourages me, but I can't concede it. All this time later, he's calling? It's probably another prank, someone who's noticed things between us somehow, in school, in church, in town, doesn't matter, and they're hoping to torment me because they have nothing better to do. Tammy's busy. He doesn't have time to bother with calling me. He has a life. I'm the one who needs to get one.

  I try to forget it, but I can't. I want to hear his voice, but I can't bring myself to call him.

  I keep remembering that awful day when he screamed at me for touching the soccer ball.

  He hates me.

  Months go by. One night, I can stand it no more and I dial the number Tammy gave to Lloyd.

  It's been disconnected.

  It's time to let him go.

  After graduation, the Stolpers ask me to become a full-time live-in, and I leap at the opportunity. It doesn't take long for my altruism to be t-boned by an annoyance at their everyday habits that worsen with each passing day. After six months, I come to the sad realisation that I'm a human being, not a saint, and a human being can take only so much.

  They're semi-rich, but you'd never know it the way they live. They own a small chain of home improvement stores in and around Sacramento and Stockton. They have one hundred and seventy thousand dollars (I've seen their bank book). Mr. Stolper's as anal as you could ever imagine someone being. He wants breakfast on the table at seven sharp, lunch at noon and dinner at five. If I'm one minute late or early, he gets really ruffled. But he admits he loves my cooking. When I met him he weighed about a hundred and fifteen. He weighs one-thirty-four now. They're so tight-fisted that it's a wonder. He won't buy anything unless it's dirt cheap. Even their coffee is awful. I like boiled coffee. It satisfies. But all they have is instant.

  And I can't sleep well. It's really noisy with traffic and the ambulance goes constantly through here, we're right close to downtown you know. Across the street there's an apartment building and in one of them there's a bunch of drunkards. Their kids are out playing till twelve or one o'clock every night, kicking a ball while the folks are inside with the blinds pulled, drinking I imagine. The kids scream and yell until I'm so nervous I think I'm going to scream. Eventually they go home and I'm able to sleep, but it seems the alarm is going off a minute after I close my eyes.

  Sometimes their daughter Doris helps me with whatever she can. Mrs. Stolper smells musty, like an old, wet dog, even after we bathe her. I'm always so glad when Doris brings her four-door car to take us out shopping or to the doctor because I can get in the backseat and not have to sit up in front by the old stinking thing. Ugh, they live like tramps, and all that money. If you saw their cooking utensils, you'd puke.

  I miss Lloyd's company, and his health is not as good as it used to be. I'm tempted to ask them to let me go back to part time, but Doris acts like that will kill her.

  Christmas arrives and they don't give me a gift or a card. After all the things I go through to have his breakfast on the table and eating at seven, and his lunch at twelve and his dinner at five, not one thing do they give me, not one thing. I shoot my
mouth off politely to Doris, telling her that I'm thinking I might not be the right person for this job. Besides I should probably be in college. That evening the old lady comes up to me and says, "Here, this is for your Christmas." I open the card. They've given me five dollars. I say, "Aw, no. I don't want that."

  She shoves it into my hand again. "Yeah, we want you to have it." So I guess Doris told them I'm not going to stay, so they're trying to butter me. But it's too late now, Muvvins. The little pee-on's done got his mind made up. I don't have to live this way, nose to the grindstone day in and day out, unable get a decent night's sleep and staying tensed and nervous wondering what I'm going to put together for them at mealtimes. I feel a twinge of guilt when I walk away, but hey, he'll find someone to replace me, maybe someone who cooks even better than me. He's gonna have a time finding one who'll work as hard as I do though, because he isn't going to put out the ducats.

  After I quit, I complete my prerequisite courses and enrol in the two-year associate nursing programme at Sacramento Community College. I figure there is better than decent money to be made taking care of people who can't care for themselves, and there are much more generous people than the Stolpers. No sense in being a 24/7 slave when I can just punch in, pull an eight hour shift and punch back out for better money and more dignified treatment.

  It's tough, nursing school. It's like boot camp with some of the instructors. It takes almost two years and I feel like dropping out more than once, but I get through by telling myself that quitting everything I don't find easy isn't going to get me anywhere.

  Stacy is at the same school, enrolled in the Respiratory Therapy program. I graduate when I'm twenty-one, and Stacy and I go to work at Saint Paul's in West Sac. I don't have my own car, so we arrange to have the same shifts most of the time and I ride with her. When she's off, I borrow Lloyd's car.

  They've got a strict dress code for nurses at St. Paul's, either all white (really, who came up with that?! Why should anyone have to wear white where you can get blood, shit, piss, puke or all of the above splattered on you at any time?!) or solid, dark colours. Stacy and I dress alike even here, preferring dark navy blue, forest green, maroon or dark turquoise/teal.

  I think my cortisol level shoots through the roof my first year. The nurse to patient ratio on the cardiac telemetry/med surg overflow floor is one to sixteen. From the first moment, I am terrified of losing any patient put into my care. Each time I enter a patient's room, I dread finding him/her laying there, turning blue, because I couldn't be there every minute of my shift, even though I know that's impossible when I have sixteen patients in my charge. I know how our healthcare system operates, and I know how doctors, administrators and HMO bureaucrats are. When something goes wrong, it's the nurse who is hung out to dry.

  Before my first year is over, I am asked to become a charge nurse, which means even more responsibility, and more stress. I head off the otherwise guaranteed weight gain with a strict diet of one small meal a day. Lloyd worries about my thinness, naturally, but when I tell him I need to be slim and quick and light on my feet in order to meet the demands of my work, he backs off.

  I usually work graveyard shift, and every morning when I come home, I tell Lloyd stories that are either horrific or hilarious.

  Like the one about a sixty year old lady with terminal cancer who is catastrophically overdosed with tincture of opium. A Nurse named Rita misreads the dosage instructions. The small bottle says, "Six drops every two to four hours for severe pain". Rita gives the woman six dropper-fulls. Within a few minutes, the woman's pulse rate is down to twenty, and her respirations are down to three a minute. They cannot revive her, and when I hear about it upon my return from a couple of days off, I say to my supervisor, "I'm just glad it happened on my night off. I don't know if I could have stood it."

  I know I sound like an asshole, but I mean what I say. This woman was dying, but if I were her family I would sue. They were cheated of their opportunity to say goodbye the way they were supposed to.

  I tell Lloyd about one incident that leaves a particularly foul taste in my mouth. A fifty-nine year old man who has had bypass surgery is transferred from ICU to our less critical telemetry floor. During the evening, his tele alarm begins to signal that he is skipping heartbeats. The pattern looks funny every twenty or thirty beats or so, and I tell his nurse to keep a sharp eye. He goes back into normal sinus rhythm for a while, but abruptly the tele alarms chime that he's in full-on v-tach. I run to his room and he's just lying there, supine, his eyes fixed upward. I punch the code button and scream, "Code blue! He's symptomatic in here!"

  No-one seems to act all that concerned, so I scream again, "Get the crash cart! He's coding!" I tilt his head back and yell at him but there's no response. I start pumping his chest with my fingers laced together. Finally people are arriving. "Come on, you guys, get with it. Get the back board and the paddles!" The doctor arrives, just sort of strolling, you know? I can't believe this bunch! They're just standing there, staring vacuously. "Come on! Help me! He's a full code!"

  Things finally begin moving, and before all is said and done, they've shocked the shit out of him, literally. They've opened his chest and pried apart his sternum, and they've worked him over for almost a full hour. But he's gone. He lays there afterward, a huge hole in his chest, with an unsightly indentation in the flesh surrounding. I feel nauseated for days following. It happened the Friday before Easter. I still call it Bad Friday.

  Not all the tales are grim. I tell Lloyd about the Turd-pedo, or the Turd-tanic episode. It happens on a day when I have to wear all white for once, because I've neglected to do my laundry on my prior days off. Oh well, I think to myself, so I have to wear white today. What could happen? I bring a big pasta salad in to work because we're having a potluck for someone's birthday or something. I get report from the departing nurse about a pitifully demented old man who hasn't shit in four or five days, in spite of their efforts with stool softener, milk of magnesia, and laxative suppositories. They forget to mention that the poor impacted old coot has also been given an enema, and very recently. So, when I take one of the aides in to check to see if he's had a nice poop yet, we roll him onto his back. He cuts a deafening fart and an enormous black turd shoots out of him and thuds against the wall. When we try to flush it, it won't go down, and we nearly fall down laughing, "Well, I guess he's had his poop!"

  We roll him over again, his butt towards me, and before I can do anything about it, he farts again, and loose black shit sprays the front of my pristine, white smock. I laugh, because why cry when you can laugh? I can't go home to change—too far away. I'd like to borrow a light blue top from the surgery department, but there are none available, so I put a hospital gown over my soiled self and try to partake of the potluck, but the stench is so overpowering that my appetite is nix. Lloyd is in stitches at the sight of me when I get home that night.

  "Oh, Lord," he cackles. "Your stories are a million times better than my police beat!"

  In spite of the nonstop non-boredom of working in a hospital setting, I've been fairly ambiguous about the wisdom of my career choice. That is, until a recent day when I take care of a fourteen year old girl whose father has been raping her for three years. We don't know that at first. She is initially admitted as a suicide attempt. She's taken twenty Tylenol. We have to give her that awful Mucomyst, which smells like rotten eggs. The red flags go up when we find that she has PID, Pelvic Inflammatory Disease.

  We do all we can for her. We call CPS, social services and of course, the police, who interview her in her room.

  I take a Mylar balloon left over from a gift given to a patient who went home earlier and I write on a blank card, "I know what you're going through. My dad hurt me too. Please don't give up." I don't sign it. I wait until the others are doing rounds, and I leave the gifts in the girl's room while she's asleep. When she wakes, she stares at the balloon and reads the card. She doesn't smile, but I don't expect her to. I'm not sure the Head Sister would
approve of a nurse giving gifts to a patient, but as long as I don't call attention to myself, what's the harm of letting someone know you care?

  She reminds me of me.

  She is the reason I am now one hundred per cent sure I went into the right field.

  Stacy's had a few boyfriends since that flake Ray, and she still begs me to go with her on her dates. I'm glad to have to work some of those nights. My other excuses have been: "I've got a bad headache", "Lloyd's not feeling good", or "I'm on call at work".

  We've been employed by St. Paul's for about three years the night I feel generous enough to go to The End with her and this new guy she likes but isn't sure about.

  While Stacy's in the restroom and her date is hitting on another girl nearby, I am approached by a guy from UC Davis. He's cute, wears glasses, seems nice enough, but I'm not interested. I try to be, and I talk to him for about fifteen or twenty minutes. He suggests my going home with him, and I tell him I have to use the john. Instead I snatch Stacy's keys from her in passing and go hide in her car.

  When I tell her that her new stud is a philandering swine, she begins acting weirdly. Suddenly everything I say is outrageously funny or nauseatingly endearing or fiendishly clever. Her hugs last longer. Her kisses linger on my cheeks. She tries to hold my hand longer than is comfortable for me. One evening she coos, "Oh, Jamie, if only I could melt that ice around your heart!"

  I'm taken aback, and I try to laugh it off without cruelty. She beams at me through shiny hazel eyes.

  Oh dear. I'm forced to tell her that although I love her to death, I don't love her like that, that I wish I could, and that if I could, I'd marry her in a heartbeat and have a litter of children with her and treat her like the queen that she truly is. She's the best friend anyone could hope for. She's stood beside me through everything, always there for me. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was anything that would make it possible for me to be her best friend without her falling in love with me. Then I realise that being a girl wouldn't necessarily make the difference. By the time I'm done telling her the tragic truth, we're both crying. She preserves herself by separating from me for a few weeks, then she returns. "I can't be mad at you," she says, and we blubber even harder as we hug our reconciliation.