Edward doesn’t even bother to put the rest of the swill on my bed table. He just hands over the coffee, which I have to hold in my left hand because of my bandaged knuckles. Edward rolls his eyes, looking at my wrapped-up hand, but he doesn’t say a word about it. He just bustles around, straightening things up, then says, “You going to shower, young Richard? Or do you want to wash up in bed?”
I have to think about it. It’s actually a big decision, believe it or not. It’s a huge hassle to get clean around here. But it’s kind of a point of pride for me to get up, every lousy day, and let water run all over my body. I don’t know why—I don’t sweat anymore, and I don’t think that I stink. But it’s my own little baptism, I guess. Or just my own tip of the hat to normal. So I usually do it.
And here’s the weird thing, that I’d hate for my old high school buddies—like, all three of them, popularity not being top of my résumé—to know: I only like Edward to give me my shower. And, yes, he’s gay. (No, he never told me this—it’s just pretty obvious.) So what does that mean? I could worry, I suppose, about this showering preference, but I don’t. Because I know exactly where it comes from.
See, back in one of the other hospitals when I was about fifteen, I got bed-bathed once by the prettiest nurse on the onco-surgo floor. One of the 18 percent of non-fat nurses. Young. Cute little freckles on her nose and a body that strained against that polyester uniform material in all the right places. And she was sweet. Anybody can guess where this is leading, for sure. Humiliation nation, that’s where. Seems a bit funny, now. Seemed like absolute end-of-the-world then. Anyway, I’m lying on my back, tied down by IVs and chest drains and all kinds of hospital bondage devices, and there she is, running a warm soapy washcloth over my feet and calves. And she’s just chattering away like they do to keep you from being embarrassed—telling me some silly story about her best friend’s baby shower where there was the cutest set of onesies and the most adorable teddy bear. And her hair is kind of honey-brown, long and curly, and she keeps having to push a strand behind one ear. (“Why don’t nurses wear caps anymore?” my mom asked once, pointing at all that gorgeous hair. “Isn’t that unsanitary?” Who cares? I thought. I crave her bacteria.) Now usually, the nurses stop the washcloth just above the knees or so and ask if you want to wash your own private parts—or they just ignore that whole area. But this is one thorough bather. Some head nurse has told her to wash me up, and by jiminy, this girl is going to wash, bless her.
So she keeps on chatting—“there were the sweetest bouncy seats and little blue blankets,” blah de blah—and that washcloth is climbing up my thighs like a warm tongue. Or what I imagine one of those would feel like—imagination being all I’ve got to go on. And, of course, I get a boner like the Washington Monument, and that stops the nurse flat. She can’t help but let out one totally unprofessional giggle and a nicely complimentary (I like to think) “Whoa there!” And then she steps back, puts the washcloth very gently into my hand, and she says, soft as she can, eyes down on the floor, trying not to smile, you can tell, “Well then, Richard. Tell you what. I think I’ll leave you to finish up here alone.” She closes the bed curtains really tight behind her as she flees my little hormonally charged tent. “You just ring when you’re done.”
Well, what are you going to do? I’ll tell you what I wanted to do. I wanted to beg and plead and bribe her to come back. I wanted to ring the emergency buzzer and force her to come back. I wanted her to understand that this was a medical emergency, by all that’s holy. Take care of me, nurse, please.
But, no. Wasn’t going to happen, I knew that. So I did what she told me. I finished up alone.
So now I try to avoid all such incidents. Although I don’t even know, really, how well ole Bingo works anymore. I mean, I was relatively strong, even post-op, at fifteen. Now, at the advanced age of seventeen-going-on-eighteen, I’m a mere ghost of my former horny self. Still, I think it’s wise to only let guy nurses bathe me. It’s better, all around. And Edward is usually the only guy on mornings. But that’s cool, because he’s about 6'4" and probably goes close to three hundred pounds: another strong one. And he’s fast and gentle and he doesn’t chatter at you. Gives a nice efficient, no-fuss shower.
Anyway, I’ll skip the stupid problems of even getting into the shower when you’re all weak and wobbly and the horrors of sitting your bare ass on one of those little white plastic bathing stools where your balls always get squinched into one of the idiotically placed drainage-hole perforation things. It’s pathetically comic, for sure, but it gets a bit old as a daily event. What’s important is that, while I’m in there, hunched on that silly stool, shampoo on my fuzzed-over (grown back from bald, like, three times now) head, with Edward scrubbing my back (the dude wisely ignores all the dangling-down parts), I hear a loud voice in the hall. It’s yelling, “Hey, where’s King Richard the First, goddamn it? Somebody tell him his old uncle’s here to visit, will you? Tell him it’s time for trick or treat.”
And my whole day changes. Because I’d know that voice anywhere. That’s my Uncle Phil, my mom’s no-good, black-sheep, crazy-ass baby brother. And, all of a sudden, this particular Halloween brightens right up.
4
I YELL OUT, RIGHT from the shower room, “Hey, Uncle Phil, in here.” And Edward just has time to throw a washcloth over my crotch, and then the whole steamy little room is full of Phil, who smells like bacon and marijuana smoke and outdoors air—sort of like my idea of paradise, in other words. I try to sit up tall in my chair and I try, I don’t know exactly, to puff up, make myself look bigger and stronger, and I know I have a big old grin on my face when Phil first catches a glimpse of me.
Phil’s sneakers slide right out from under him, and he ends up sitting on his ass on the wet floor. For a second or so, the man puts his face into his hands and slumps there, still as a statue. That’s when I get a real-life view of my hero: he’s a couple years younger than Mom, so that makes him just over thirty. But he looks middle-aged, sitting there with his head bowed. He’s got a perfectly round bald spot on the back of his head, like some alien-created crop circle lurking in his mess of brown curls. And he’s—well, I got to say it, he’s dumpy. He’s got a round pot of belly plopping over the fancy silver buckle of his cowboy belt. But the guy’s got spirit, you know? Because after giving in to just that tiny bit of wimpiness, he rallies. Phil looks up and he’s got even a bigger smile than I have, even if his eyes are all teary. And he flips onto his knees and does this little knightly bow in front of my chair, swinging an imaginary hat off his head and bowing at the waist. “Your humble servant, King Richard,” he says. “Kneeling at your royal feet.”
That’s Uncle Phil, all over. Always has some game going on. I mean, I think that’s him. I don’t really know a whole lot about him. Mom kept him at arm’s length—or more like five arms’ length—for most of my life. I’d just hear the stories she’d pick up over the phone from her mom in Jersey, where Phil moved back in with Grandma, right after I was born. Over the years, they piled up, those phone-call tales: Phil lost his license again; Phil called from the city lockup; Phil got some girl pregnant; the girl went and got an abortion; Phil went and sat outside the clinic, crying like a lost dog; Phil dropped out of community college, three credits short of a degree; Phil got married; Phil got divorced; Phil got fired; Phil got sued; Phil got in a bar fight; Phil got thirty-one stitches; Phil this; Phil that. When I was little, I just heard his name churning through those late-night phone calls. I’d lie there in my bed in the dark and listen to my mom’s reactions. She was always half laughing, half crying. She’d keep saying things like, “Oh no. Not again. Unbelievable. Is he crazy?” And on and on it would go, until it all kind of meshed in with my dreams. I secretly thought my uncle Phil must be the coolest guy ever.
I finally met him a couple of times when I was older, around thirteen or so. Bang, one day he just showed up at the New York City hospital where I was an inmate, said he wanted to cheer me up. And he kept on
showing up, on and off, ever after. Always brought some forbidden present: green slime in a tube, Fritos when I wasn’t allowed to eat even Jell-O, magazines with bare-chested babes on the cover. Once, an entire badminton set—like anyone was going to let me set up the net by the nurses’ station and belt birdies all over the hallway. Mom always told him to get lost, and she swore she didn’t know how he found out where we were, said she sure as shit didn’t tell him, but she also always had a smile on her face and she always hugged him, hard, before smacking him upside the head and calling him the world’s biggest jerk.
Now, here in the steamed-up shower room, everything seems all backward. Because when Uncle Phil does his “your humble servant” thing and gets on his knees in front of me and is damn near kissing my feet, I get the whole view of his little bald spot—and right then, I get something: I know he doesn’t know it’s there. He hasn’t got a clue. It’s one of those stealth baldnesses, the kind that you can’t see yourself without two mirrors, so you live on in happy ignorance unless a mean girlfriend or barber points it out. And somehow, I figure that makes us sort of even: me all puny and sick, and him getting old and bald and not even realizing it. Because I won’t ever have to go through that, will I? Once, I made a list of all the things I won’t have to worry about—getting a job, having ungrateful kids, divorce, wisdom teeth, cholesterol—and now I can add potbelly and comb-overs, and in its own weird way, that’s cool with me.
Edward is looking on in what I hope is amusement, but he does have work to do and he can’t hang with us all day. “Hey, man,” he says to Phil. “We don’t usually welcome visitors in the shower. You want to wait in the lounge until King Richard here is robed and ready to receive callers?”
And Phil, who can really get into a scenario, backs all the way out the door, bowing and sweeping his pretend hat across the floor and tripping all over his feet. “Verily, my liege lord,” he says. “Anon.”
When the door swings shut behind him, I feel like Edward deserves an explanation, and I try to think of how to explain Phil, but it doesn’t matter. Because Edward just starts pulling a clean T-shirt over my head and says, “Maybe you want to wear jeans today? Instead of your usual granny pants?” He holds up the ratty pair of gray sweats I usually put on because who cares what covers your ass when your ass sits in a wheelchair or lies in bed all day? And I nod and he goes off to fetch a pair of clean jeans from my room. I mean, he got it, right off, that I want to look, like, human and normal for Uncle Phil. Really, Edward’s a prince among nurses, and if I had my way, they’d double his pay.
When he gets back and we’ve wrestled my sorry self into my jeans, I actually take a minute to look into the shower room mirror. Don’t usually bother but, I don’t know, I’d kind of like to look okay today. And, dressed, I look like a skinny bald scarecrow, but that’s not really so bad. Short-to-the-point-of-nothing hair is sort of in style, and everybody’s jeans are three sizes too big, so that’s okay. Granted, my face is not a sight for sissies. No eyelashes, skin like chalk dust. No problemo. I’m feeling okay, all kind of buzzed, full of energy. Edward stands over my shoulder while I look, trying to reach down and rebandage my hand. But I hold it up to the mirror and say, “Hey. Leave it alone, okay? It looks cool. Tough, right?” The knuckles are all blue and there’s an impressive mess of half-open cuts all along there, kind of oozy and gross. And actually, the bruising runs right up to my arm, and there’s a very flashy blackish sort of zigzag going up from pinky to wrist. Looks like a negative of lightning, like a prison tat. I love it.
Edward is muttering that I should have had my arm x-rayed, could have broken that little bone.
“Let it go, man,” I say. “No intervention. Okay?”
“Right. And if you get an infection in there, who’s in trouble? Me, that’s who.” He glares at me in the mirror. “Flesh-eating bacteria, Richard. Staph. Strep. MRSA. C. diff. There’s nasty stuff out there. No sirree. I’m treating that hand.” And he just starts slathering antibiotic cream all over it and has it rewrapped in gauze in about four seconds.
I hold it up in the mirror again. All wrapped like that, I decide, it’s still cool. Like Rocky the morning after. I can live with it.
I get rolled back into my room, and Phil’s lying on the bed, his dirty sneakers right on the clean sheets an aide put on there while I was in the shower. I see his eyes go right to the bandage. So, of course, I got to tell him all about it. How the devil himself came into my room, and how I punched out his lights. Sent him reeling right on back to hell. Doused his flames with a good right hook.
Phil laughs and laughs. “That’s my boy,” he says and holds up his own right hand. The knuckles are permanently bruised, looks like, and there’s a big bump on that same little pinky wrist bone. He shakes the hand around like a dust mop. “This puppy has been busted about eight times. Lots of sore jaws on lots of big, mean Jersey jerks, let me tell you.” He jumps off the bed and leans over me, both his hands up in fists. Then we do that sort of fake boxing thing—the one with punches that never land. I get out of breath real fast, just holding my arms up. But it’s fun anyway—two tough dudes just messing around.
***
Later, I give Phil a tour of the place, because he seems honestly interested. Maybe a bit too much so; maybe some of it’s a kind of twisted nosiness, because I can’t get him to understand that gaping at the patients and gasping are not exactly acceptable in Miss Manners’ Rules of Hospice Etiquette. But I try to really show him the place, try to make him see it. Because he’s the only one I know who seems willing; most folks try not to look or just refuse to see. Mom, for example, pretends that it’s any old hospital ward, like we’ve been in and out of a gazillion times before. In and out of. See? That’s the key: all the other hospitals had a way out, and I walked, eventually. But this place, it’s like No Exit, a pretty cool play they made me read in some English class. And most people are all for not seeing—not letting themselves see—that this is different, a whole nother world. A whole universe, and it’s important, in some way I can’t really get at in words. I mean, it’s the Last Stop, and that alone makes it Big—significant, you know? Me, I’m dying to show it off—ha ha.
I start at the back end of the hall. “Family lounge to your right,” I say. Phil’s pushing my chair, but he keeps stopping, leaving me to sit still while he steps off to look inside places. So off he goes, into the family lounge. It is not much, let me tell you. One wall has kitchen-y stuff— coffeepot, microwave, fridge, and a counter with a mess of straws and Sweet ’n Low and sticky plastic spoons all over it. And there are a couple of lumpy couches where people can sleep. A round table in the middle of the room, with a chess set and decks of cards. Bathroom in the corner. Dusty old plastic flower arrangements all over the place. Pictures of lakes and streams and oceans and waterfalls— somebody must think water is soothing or something—on the walls. But, trust Phil, he gloms on to the TV set and the stack of DVDs next to it. He picks them up and starts shuffling through. I know what he’s reading, and I watch his face. The titles are all, like, Good-bye Is Not Forever, Easing the Ending, Beyond the Far Horizon, God Doesn’t Make Mistakes, et cetera. Believe me, I checked them out the day I got here, hoping for entertainment. Ha. Although I have got to say, God Doesn’t Make Mistakes really confirmed the SUTHY diagnosis: six years of chemo, radiation, a zillion surgeries, loss of a couple major organs, watching your mom age twenty years in twenty months—if that’s not some kind of mistake, if that’s part of the Big Dude’s plan, well, then, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Enough said.
Anyway, Phil is shaking his head. “What pathetic crap,” he says. And then he brightens up. “Tell you what, kiddo. Next time I’m in, I’m bringing some good old-fashioned porn. Slip Debbie Does Disney World inside one of these lame covers: surprise! Make some guy’s night.”
We proceed along the hall. Doesn’t take long. There are five rooms on the east side of the hall to our left, three doubles and two singles. Each room is a different colo
r, all of these cheesy pastels. And each one has its own individual wallpaper border up near the ceiling, all of these dingy flowery things. Right out of 1970s home decor magazines, my mom says. They’re supposed to make the rooms feel cozy or something. Un-hospitalish, I guess is the concept. But trust me. They don’t. You can’t mistake a hospital room for anything else in the whole world. Except maybe a jail cell.
Anyway, right now, two double rooms are empty. One of the singles, 306, right across from me, has a woman in a coma in it. Her walls are light blue, and her border is, sweartogod, little flying cherub babies, with wings and fat toes, sort of hovering over her, looking down. Pretty disturbing. I tell Phil, in the customary hospice whisper, what I heard about her: She was in a coma after a car accident for years and years, ventilator, feeding tubes, the whole shebang, kept in place by her husband. Then the husband dropped dead and her daughters, finally, got to have all the tubes removed and the machines turned off. Plugs pulled, zappo, end of story. Right? Wrong. The woman kept right on breathing. Although they can’t expect her to go much longer; you only get into hospice if your prognosis is under a month. Phil goes right into the woman’s room and puts his face an inch from hers. He stares until I hiss, “Phil, that’s rude. Get out of there. Come on.”
Then he takes up his wheelchair post, scratching at his stubbly cheeks. “I hate to disappoint anybody, but that lady is stone cold dead, man, breathing or not,” he observes. And off we go.
Next, there’s the two old guys in 304. Yellow walls, rose border. These two never have visitors, have no story that I know of. Nada. Now, to me, that’s sad. Couple of times, late at night, I rolled on in there and watched TV with them. The one by the window, he likes to have soccer on the tube, so that’s what I put on. Can’t follow the game, myself, but he seems to like it, curses one team, cheers the other. The other guy, I don’t know. Doesn’t say a word, just coughs. Phil leans into the doorway, gives the guys a jaunty little “howdy” kind of wave, but they’re both sound asleep.
Somebody Up There Hates You Page 3
