And let me be clear about this: that man scares the bejesus out of me, even when I’m not dreaming about his daughter. That man is so mad, so furious, so sad and so, I don’t even know how to say it, so, like, nuclear-blasted by his daughter’s dying that he gives off toxic fumes. No lie, the man glows orange and smells like rotten eggs. Pure sulfur, I swear, running in his veins. And he hates everybody. He’s a lawyer, Sylvie says, but I don’t know—he seems more like the fucking Godfather to me.
And this is the guy who just stomps on into my room and leans over my bed on Cabbage Night itself. Talk about vicious tricks. I am more than a little stoned and a little horny and beyond exhausted, so all of this has what you might call a nightmare quality about it. Worst case dreamland scenario, come to life. First, the man rattles the metal side of my bed. He leans over and hisses, “You awake, wiseass?”
And I let my eyes open. His bloodshot eyes are about six inches from mine, and he’s breathing dragon breath all over my face. I put one hand under the sheet, on the red call button, just in case. Here’s the thing: you’re helpless in one of these beds. It’s a goddamn crib. Like you’re a baby. Talk about sitting ducks. So your only means of help is the call button. “Yes, sir,” I say. “I’m awake.”
He leans in even closer and he says, “Then listen up, asshole. You stay away from Sylvia. Leave her the hell alone.” His eyes go all watery and he says, “Do you know how tired out she is after your little prank? She collapsed in her room, and the nurse could hardly get a blood pressure. It was like—like, nothing. Scared the crap out of me. You little prick.” He reaches out a hand and grabs the front of my T-shirt, still the Black Sabbath one. “I don’t know what kind of lowlife bitch raised you or why your parents aren’t even here, but I’m filling in for them, okay? And if you go near Sylvia again, you’ll—”
But he doesn’t get to finish, because I sit up, roaring. And I just start screaming and swinging. Because no one, and I mean no one, calls my mom a lowlife bitch. I get in one good fist to his mouth before nineteen people run into the room and pull the man away from my bed. It wasn’t much, but I had the satisfaction of seeing blood curling down his lips before Edward, the huge gay nurse, shoves him out of my room, hard. See, Edward doesn’t like this man a bit because of an earlier shoving incident at the nurses’ station, which I heard all about. Stories like that fly up and down the hallways like demented bats. Any kind of excitement, any slice of good gossip, I mean, that’s our daily bread. And that day, the day of the incident, there was yelling and cursing and security called and all kinds of good shit to liven things up. Anyway, let us just say that Edward is not a fan of Sylvie’s old man. And that’s fine, because you want Edward on your side, trust me, and I’m pretty sure he’ll always be on mine. Edward’s got my back.
And then Jeannette sits with me for a while, cleaning up my knuckles, which just split wide open on the man’s teeth. She wraps gauze around my right hand, sighing and tsking the whole time, muttering under her breath. I try to explain and only get as far as saying, “He said my mom was—” and she hushes me with a pat on the shoulder.
“I know, honey. You just lie back now and rest. Your heart is going like a hammer. I don’t like that. Just shush now.”
And I fall asleep with her hand soothing my forehead, and it’s almost like having my mom with me. Even though I’d been so happy that Mom wasn’t going to be here for a while, now it seems like I want her. I don’t know; it’s real complicated, isn’t it? Families. Teenagers and parents. It’s all very strange.
Here’s the thing. It’s one of the parts of hospice that drives everybody crazy. Families. In the regular hospital wards, they keep some kind of check on how many family members can show up at one time and bother you, and there are some sort of visiting hours and times when no one’s supposed to be there, so you get a little time off. (Except for the Puerto Rican families in the big hospital in New York. Man, no one could keep those people out: grandpas, great-grand-somebodies, seventeen aunts with three kids each, never mind the parents and siblings— everyone came, carrying some kind of food in aluminum containers, smelling like garlic and spice and onion—the whole familia showing up day and night. Best damn meals I ever had, whenever my roommate was PR or Dominican or some other kind of Spanish dude. Or, come to think of it, an Orthodox Jew—then all kinds of stuff from the deli showed up. A feast. Here’s Richie’s free advice to all: if you’re going to be in a hospital for a while, claim you need to eat kosher. They can’t manage that in the institutional kitchen, so they order out. Brisket, bialys, corned beef on rye, noodle pudding, all of that.)
But here it’s a whole different story. No rules about visiting hours and limiting the invaders. Here, as they like to remind everyone, they’re “treating the whole family.” Great, so it’s, like, mad crowded in some rooms, and even at midnight there are people parked all over the place, bored and impatient and stressed and total pains in the ass. Nonstop. Like living in the subway. It stinks.
Okay, back to topic: my mom, the story, short version. Whenever I’m in the hospital, my mom comes in on her lunch hour and late every night and she sleeps in my room on the fold-out or cot or whatever she can round up. I mean, she’s kept up this routine, on and off, since I was eleven and started hanging out, way too much, in hospitals. Some of those stays were, like, months and months. Some just days. But she’s always been right there, curled up on some lousy cot, all night, every night. She’s got to keep working, so she can’t hang around with me all day. My mom had me when she was my age exactly—seventeen. And there were only us two, and she worked two jobs—whatever she could get, and luckily she’s good with numbers and can keep books and stuff like that, but sometimes it was just cashiering in Price Chopper. She worked her butt off, always, and she kept us in health insurance totally on her own.
But my mom took a leave of absence from both jobs just recently, when the word terminal kept popping up on my charts and when, finally, the word hospice became part of my permanent temporary address. My mom, who never even got to sit her butt down and rest on Sunday all of my life, my mom took leave. My mom took what her prick of a boss calls compassionate leave: as in, no paychecks. I mean, how fucking compassionate is that? But she says she doesn’t care about that. What matters is that she’s been with me day and night now. And I swear she looks sicker than me, and she shakes and cries and has to go out for a smoke every half hour. At night, when she comes back in, I let her kiss me good night like I’m two years old, and then she falls asleep and I look at her curled up on that crappy couch, her cheeks all sunk in and her eyes all puffy, and I think I’m going to lose it. And sometimes I do, the only fucking time the sadness comes through and I want to kill anybody who hurts her and, yes, I’m aware that nobody else on earth could hurt her like I’m doing right now. And that’s the worst of all. That’s SUTHY with a vengeance. It just sucks, all of it.
***
Deep breath here. Let it go, Richard. Deal. Three more deep breaths. Count backward from one hundred. Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight. Ninety-seven. Ninety-six. Ninety-five. Ninety-four. Ninety-three . . .
Okay. So, this week, I got a reprieve. My mom got the flu. Big-time fevers, hacking cough, the whole bit. Maybe some nasty kind, pending blood tests. And that’s one thing even hospice can’t allow for its visitors. Flu. Crazy, right? I mean, we’re all dying anyway, but they can’t be allowed to speed up the process with a friendly push from a rogue virus. Don’t even ask. None of it makes any sense, and it makes my head hurt to look for logic.
When I heard that Mom was really sick, at first I was scared. Funnily enough, I was worried about her health—and that’s a very strange turnaround, let me tell you. But suddenly, it hit me: I was going to have a week without parental supervision. I was going to enter adolescent nirvana, the week everybody dreams about when they’re seventeen, the week the folks leave you home alone. Sure, they call eighteen times a day—but calling ain’t seeing, is it? Calling ain’t supervising every minute. Call
ing can’t see the beer can pyramid behind you and the half-fried pieces of bacon stuck to the kitchen ceiling where your friends had a weird kind of tossing contest. Calling is just a tiny Band-Aid on teenage wreckage.
So, yeah, Mom’s called me constantly this week—and called. And called. And called. And she said that she was getting a little better each day, so I could stop worrying. But I also knew that my time of relative freedom was short.
Naturally, I was going to be as bad as I could, while I could. That was the plan. But we all know what happens to the best-laid—as well as the most half-assed—plans of mice and men, don’t we? Absofuckinglutely.
3
I WAKE UP ON Halloween feeling really down. I had a dream—one where it was Halloween morning, long ago. It was like one of the best days of my life came back, like it had just been tucked away behind my eyelids all this time, waiting for me to relive it. This time of year was always my favorite: the best kid-holiday in the world, followed directly by the buildup to my birthday, November 12—I mean, that is kid heaven. In the dream, things were just like they had been, once upon a time. I was maybe eight years old and totally, insanely excited about my werewolf costume. This was about three years before the real monsters marched into my life. Surgeons, oncologists, radiologists, all those guys with knives and poisons and lethal rays. This was in the good old days, when monsters were fantasy.
Anyway, in this dream, just like in real life, Mom had sewn strands of brown yarn onto a brown turtleneck sweater and brown corduroy pants and even onto a pair of old brown work gloves. Then she taped yarn to a pair of brown boots so I’d be hairy all over. And she’d let me get one of the coolest masks ever—blew a big part of her paycheck at the Halloween store in the mall in Albany. We always made a special October trip up there. That place, it was my idea of paradise. They kept it kind of dark, with blue and green lights flashing around and tapes of screams playing all the time. And it was full of all kinds of masks, all hanging on the walls. I used to believe that the creatures lived inside those walls and just stuck their faces out to let me know they were there. And there were long capes and swords and suits of armor and . . . and everything way too expensive, but Mom always let me buy something incredibly cool, every year. That year, it was the werewolf mask. It had a long rubber snout and an open mouth full of fangs and a red tongue. Spiky wolf-ears and long gray-black fur sticking up on top. I loved it and would barely take it off, even to eat. So there I was, jumping around our little apartment, completely crazed about taking the whole costume to school for the playground parade we’d have in the afternoon. And my mom was laughing at me as she packed the outfit into a plastic bag. “Calm down, kiddo. You just have to wait a little bit, Rich-Man,” she said. And she leaned over and ran a hand over my hair.
And then the dream shifted and it was the parade, and in dreamworld I swear I saw every kid in my third grade class: their faces, their costumes. Every single one, just like they were when we were all eight. Sharp as day, I could see their faces. And I could smell the inside of my mask—sweaty rubber and Snickers from my breath. It was all perfect: we were outside on this clear crisp day, leaves crunchy under our feet. We were allowed to howl and screech, as long as we stayed in line. And I knew, like you do in dreams, just know things, that Sylvie was ahead of me in line, only one person away. Like she’d just showed up for the parade, like she was a new girl in our class. And she turned her head and it was Sylvie like I never saw her, except in some pictures tacked to the bulletin board in her room, maybe: Sylvie with long black hair and sparkling brown eyes and dimples in chubby cheeks. Sylvie in a witch costume, pointy black hat that she’d painted stars and moons on and a long black dress that dragged on the ground. And I could see that she was going to trip on her witch-skirt, so I ran up behind her—oh, man, am I a chivalrous werewolf—and picked up the edge of her skirt and marched behind her, her grinning over her shoulder at me the whole time. And then there was a great big wind, and everything—poof—blew away. And I was left with a tiny scrap of black stuff in my glove and most of the yarn gone from my boots.
I mean, that’s enough to break anybody’s heart, just that: the perfect Halloween, blown away in one second. Dreams, these days, can do that. Break my heart. But there’s worse to come: I wake up and there’s Br’er Bertrand. He’s some kind of clergy-nerd. I don’t know his denomination and, anyway, I call all of the religious types Br’er Whatever. Even the women. To me, that has just the ring of contempt that I wish to convey to the representatives of Somebody Up There without being totally disrespectful. Some of them laugh.
Bertrand is sitting by my bed, has probably been there for hours while I was innocently asleep. In a sneak attack, there he’s been, mumbling over my rat-ass soul. I groan and turn my back, hunching over in the bed, fake-retching. But he keeps on muttering.
“Get out, dude,” I moan. “I told you, I don’t want to talk to you. Leave me alone. I’m sick.” Worth a try, I suppose, even though I know that this Br’er is not easily discouraged. And I have a deep suspicion that my mom asked him to check on me while she can’t come in. Him and about nine different counselors and whatnot. She isn’t missing a trick, flu or not.
So I’m not a whole lot surprised when the man goes, “No, Richard. God hasn’t left you, and neither will I.”
I roll over and open one eye, all I can bear. Bertrand is about thirty-five years old and he’s the slobbiest man I ever met. I mean, his black coat and white collar always look like someone finger-painted scrambled egg all over them, and he’s pale and pasty and big-time fat, and he’s got fingers like short white worms. And bright red hair sticking up out of a bright pink scalp. Sweartogod, it’s like having some pudgy, grubby clown show up at your bedside first thing in the morning. In the Real World, no one would put up with this, not for three freaking seconds. If this was a hotel, somebody would call the manager and have the guy tossed out on his ass. Somebody would scream for the cops and the men in the white coats. Headlines would read: LUNATIC INVADES PRIVATE ROOM, INFLICTS UNWANTED PRAYER WHILE GUY SLEEPS. CRUCIFIX AND BIBLE USED AS WEAPONS.
But here? No. Here, on Halloween morning no less, the lunatic sits in a green plastic chair, his butt cheeks squeezing out either side, and smiles up at me in my high bed. And there is fuck-all I can do about it. I’m helpless in my steel-rail cage.
So, ole Bertrand looks up from his black book and says, “You created a very nasty scene last night.”
I just glare.
“First of all,” he goes on, ignoring the death ray stare I’m aiming at his pink skull, “it is risky business to invite Satan into your life, even in play. Satan does not play. He’s waiting, every second of the day. Your costume and your attitude yesterday afternoon were foolish.” He shakes his head and shafts of orange hair shift on his scalp. “Why, I have to wonder, would anyone in your position risk bringing evil into your life? Why, I wonder, would you invite that poor sweet girl to join you in your folly?”
I open the other eye. Double death ray glare. “Hey, you know what, Br’er?” I rasp out. “You’re right. Absolutely correct. You’re a genius. You guessed it, and it actually happened. Yes, sir, the devil himself visited my room last night. Breathed fire and brimstone right into my face. And you know what I did? I punched him in the face.” I hold up my bandaged knuckles. “Beat his butt, fair and square. So my soul is safe, man. You can go save somebody else. I think that wily Mrs. Elkins—you know, that old broad in room 301?—she’s been running drugs from her room. Crack, heroin, all kinds of shit. And there was a séance in there the other night, stroke of midnight. Ouija board, black candles, inverted pentagrams, the whole nine yards. She’s, like, invoking demons right and left. You better talk to her.” This is actually very funny, if you know about Mrs. Elkins—she’s, like, ninety-two and hasn’t been conscious even once since I’ve been here. She’s tiny and wrapped in white sheets all the time; she’s like this little cocoon thing attached to her bed. I mean, no one would look in there and think huma
n being, not in a million years. Except that her son—so presumably she once had a kid, ergo was a living, breathing woman who had sex and everything, it simply blows the mind to imagine that—wanders around here, impatient and cranky. Anyway, the notion of Mrs. Elkins as a one-woman devil-worshipping drug cartel is pretty brilliant. But I don’t really expect Bertrand to appreciate my wit.
He doesn’t. Luckily, he gets mad, all huffy. That’s the best that can happen: if you piss them off, they leave. Although later, they often feel bad that they let a dying kid annoy them and they come back, all contrition and penance, even worse than all self-righteous, like they need you to give them absolution. But, for now, this Br’er shakes his head and puts his finger in my face. “You’re treading very thin ice, son,” he says. “Very, very thin.” And then his fat butt wobbles out of my room and I get about eleven minutes’ peace before Edward shows up with my breakfast tray.
Now here’s another thing: like I told you, I don’t eat. And I told the food service people that, too, and then I told them again. I made it very clear: don’t even bring the slop to my room. But three times a day, up shows a tray. Full of all sorts of disgusting crap. Today, it’s chartreuse scrambled eggs, greasy sausage, soggy toast, vitamin-laced pudding, green Jell-O, custard, and this stuff that’s called thickened juice, i.e., fruit punch that you can spoon up, like some kind of cruel mockery of a Slurpee. But, praise be, there’s also a cup of hot coffee—and that’s my only salvation. I allow myself to put sugar and milk in the coffee, too. My one concession to caloric intake.
Somebody Up There Hates You Page 2
