Bloodbrothers

by Richard Price

  "Hey, watch it. It's loaded!"

  "There's a holster sewn on down there."

  "Yeah. Don't fart. You'll get shot in the ass!"

  Everybody laughed.

  Banion felt for the holster and replaced the gun. He sat with his elbows on the armrests, his hands covering his face.

  "Banion, ah, you think we might get a drink on the house?"

  "You fuckin' guys." He wiped away his tears as Tommy and Chubby moved behind the bar and started serving drinks. He shook his head and laughed. "You fuckin' guys."

  12

  AFTER A DRAG-ASS WEEK and weekend made even more drag-ass by Stony's hunger to get started at the hospital, Monday came as a total shock. His first day at work was like nothing he expected, and by the end of the day he was completely blown out the back door. Devastated. That night it took all his strength to drag himself downstairs into Butler's waiting car.

  "You wanna do D'Artagnan's?"

  "Nah." Stony picked his teeth with his thumbnail, occasionally examining whatever stuck between flesh and nail.

  "Camelot?" Butler moved out on the street, leisurely following the curving road dwarfed by the gigantic high rises of Co-op City.

  "Nah, you wanna do some clams?"

  "City Island?" Butler suggested.

  "Yeah."

  Butler floored the accelerator and tore ass onto the Hutchinson River Parkway. "How'd it go today?"

  "The pits, Butler. Fuckin' blue Monday the likes of which I never seen. They got no jobs in the children's ward, so they gave me a gig in geriatrics."

  "What the fuck is that?"

  "Old people, very old people. The fuckin' joint is like the Greyhound terminal for death. An' all these scuzzies is waitin' with their bags packed."

  "Whyncha quit? You can do construction work witcher ol' man."

  Stony sighed. "I'll stick it out. There might be an openin' in the children's ward next week. If I split now I can't get nothin'."

  "So whadya do there?" Butler readjusted his rearview mirror.

  "I'm a lifter. I lift people outta beds, into wheelchairs, outta wheelchairs, onta toilets, outta toilets, into whirlpool baths, outta whirlpool baths, back into wheelchairs, outta wheelchairs an' into beds."

  "Hey, that sounds all right." Butler turned off the Parkway and drove across the bay bridge onto the mile-long strip of seafood joints and marinas of City Island. "Lobster Box?"

  Stony nodded in agreement. They drove slowly along City Island Avenue. The streets were packed with Puerto Ricans. "Geriatrics, hey?" Butler parked the car in front of a bayview restaurant.

  "I tell you somethin' though, Butler, the worst thing about that fuckin' place is all the help, all the nurses an' aides an' orderlies. They're all West Indians, man, an' you know I ain't a prejudiced dude, but I hate the fuckin' Bimis with a passion." They sat at a small red-and-white-checked table overlooking Long Island Sound and a parking lot. Butler lit his cigarette from the flame of the candle on their table.

  "Whatta you havin', boys?" A white-uniformed, middle-aged waitress in harlequin glasses stood over them, order pad in hand.

  "Dozen cherrystones and a Seven-up."

  "We got Sprite, orange and root beer."

  "A Sprite."

  She nodded to Stony.

  "Ah, gimme some steamers and a Coke."

  "Sprite, orange or root beer."

  "Some water with a lot of ice." Stony watched her walk away. "You know what I mean about West Indians? They're the fuckin' angriest, meanest, snottiest people goin'."

  "How 'bout Reggie Powell?" Butler leaned back in his chair, tilting it on two legs.

  "He's all right." Stony thanked the waitress as she brought over the water. "So they all suck except Reggie."

  "Chili Mac's West Indian."

  "Get the fuck outta here!" Stony looked shocked.

  "I met his old man once. He sounds like Harry Belafonte."

  "You're kiddin'!" Stony frowned and gulped down half his glass of water. The waitress brought the clams and steamers. They dug in. "I'll tell you what it is with them. Jamaica's a very heavy-duty place, very poor, especially Kingston. There's a lotta rough numbers goin' down there, some very bad scenes. Everybody's poor as a nigger, that whole colonial riff. They got these dudes, Rudies they call them; bad-ass lots, farm boys that came down to the big city, got stiffed and just hang around rippin' everybody off, an' they got these other dudes called the Rastafaries—you ever see them with those big rug heads? They walk aroun' with machetes tellin' everybody that Haile Selassie's God. They got a lot of these bad boys out in Brooklyn, that whole reggae number. I'll tell you something, the only good thing comin' out of Jamaica's grass." Stony methodically dunked the snout-shaped steamers in a bowl of clam broth and popped them in his mouth.

  Butler sat silent except for the slurping noises he made sucking his clams from their shells.

  "You know, and they come up here, an' some of them get into a bougie trip, X-ray technicians, registered nurses, white-collar office jobs, go uptown and see Rev Ike every Sunday. You know, money is honey and all that, and they hate niggers, New York niggers, street people. They're into this whole high yellow attitude, you know? An' they're closer to Africans than any cat you'll see on Lenox Avenue, but maybe it's that thing of comin' from an English colony. They think they're Limeys. An' when they got jobs in hospitals, uh! Fo-geet a-baht it! Brutal motherfuckers, not physically, at least not what I seen, but mentally, they got no respect for human dignity. They talk to these old people like they're six years old. Throw 'em around like sacks a rice. You know, an eighty-year-old dude who's paralyzed takes a dump in bed the fuckin' nurse comes in. 'Oh, Meestah Cohen, you a bod boy, now I got to clean you op.' But like really loud, you know?" Stony winced. "An' I look into this guy's eyes, right? The guy has a Ph.D., spent fifty years teachin' in some college somewhere. He wrote three books." Stony pushed his empty plate away, crossed his legs and lit a cigarette. "It's tragic, Butler. No sense of dignity, ach!" He bit his lower lip. "I gotta get the fuck outta there. You know what this fuckin' guy says to me? The guy's forty-six years old. He got Parkinson's disease, paralyzed from his eyebrows down. A goddamn courtroom lawyer, Butler. I come into his room, ask him if he needs to go, he mumbles, 'No,' so I says, is there anything I can get for you?' Forty-six-years-old, Butler, a vegetable, but I can see his brain is cookin', right? lie mumbles somethin'. I can't hear, so I says. 'What?' An' he mumbles it again, still can't hear him, so I put my ear to his mouth. You know what he says? He says, 'Can you get me justice?'"

  "Oh shit." Butler motioned for the waitress. "You got cheesecake?" He turned to Stony. "You want cheesecake?" Stony motioned no. "One piece. You want coffee? Two coffees."

  "An' I only worked a half day today. They gave us a four-hour training session this morning that was like somethin' out of "The Twilight Zone." We had to sit in this little classroom that had a dummy in a hospital bed instead of a desk. This nurse came in and showed us how to lift the dummy out of bed, how to put it in a wheelchair. Oh yeah, there was this toilet bowl in the corner of the room an' she showed us how to put the dummy on the pot. It was in-fuckin'-credible. The dummy's name was Mister Rubenstein, an' she was talkin' to the dummy in this Bimi singsong like, 'Now, Mees-tah Roo-bon-steen, eet ees time to go to de bathroom.' I swear she wasn't playin' with a full deck, you know? An' everybody was so fuckin' serious, except this spade cat sittin' next to me, MacDonald." Stony paused as the waitress brought the coffees and cheesecake. "This spade MacDonald, he was laughin' his ass off an' this nurse kept stoppin' an' sayin', 'Thees ees see-re-os beez-noss. Mees-tah Mac-Do-nold,' an' he would straighten out for a minute but when she showed us how to wipe the dummy's ass MacDonald totally fell apart. He lets out with a 'Shee-it, I ain't wipin nobody's ass.' We all fell on the fuckin' floor." Stony pinched his face and put his hands on his hips. " 'Mees-tah Mac-Do-nold, pre-haps you weel dee-mon-strate to os all every-ting I been sayin.' MacDonald's sprawlin' all over his seat like this." Stony slouched i
n his chair, slowly turning his head from side to side, his eyes half-closed and a lazy half grin on his face. "And this cat's wearin' dark blue shades and he's bald, right? The Isaac Hayes number, O.K.? He looks more like a dude that would put people in the hospital than help 'em out. MacDonald looks aroun' at everybody an' then he gets up. This fuckin' cat musta been eight feet tall, an' the nurse puts the dummy back in the bed an' she says, 'Mees-tah Mac-Do-nold, take Mees-tah Roo-bon-steen to de bathroom.' MacDonald bops over to the bed and throws back the covers and she yells out, 'Gently! an' tok to heem!' MacDonald does one of these numbers." Stony turns his head to show a hard smirk. "He stares at her for about thirty seconds, an' he turns back to the dummy in the bed an' he says, 'Hey! Mah man Rubenstein! You-all gotta take a dump?' An' this dummy's all dressed up in pajamas, right? He grabs the front of the dummy's pajama top wit' one hand an' he just drops him in the wheelchair. I'll bet he's the only cat who can do the Memphis Glide while pushin' a wheelchair." Stony jumped up and pretended he was pushing a wheelchair, walking with a dip and bop shuffle around the small table. "The nurse is havin' a shit fit, man, she is beyond words. MacDonald takes the fuckin' dummy wit' two hands, raises it over his head an' throws the dummy down on the pot. The head falls off, one of the arms falls off. I almost had a heart attack from laughin'. The nurse is screamin' her ass off, an' MacDonald just looks at her an' says, 'Aww, stuff it, bitch! Ah quit!' An' he bops outta the room like he just finished shootin' hoops. The fuckin' room, everybody's dyin'. The hip people are on the floor. The straight an' narrows are havin' the horrors like they need the wheelchair. The nurse, Mrs. Churchill, that was her name, Mrs. Churchill, she's chasin' after the dummy's head which was rollin' all over the room. The rest of the dummy fell on the floor. Excedrin headache number two-o-two, you know?"

  Stony finished his coffee. "Just remember, Butler, no matter whatever else you forget in your life, always remember that when you're wipin' an old guy's ass, always do it gently and make sure the strokes are all upwards towards the spine. You got that?"

  Butler belched into his napkin.

  "This afternoon, they assigned us one-on-one to lifters who've been there a while, so they could show us the ropes, right? I got assigned to this guy Reynard, a very hip spic about twenny, twenny-one. The cat's goin' to hairdresser school on the sly. I tell him what happened in the classroom. He cracked up. He says to me, 'Churchill's the meanest fuck in the whole place.' He takes me down to the locker room. There's nobody around. He opens his locker and whips some bad shit on me, we split a big jay sittin' on this bench. He says, 'This'll make it easier,' then he takes me up to geriatrics. I got a mean buzz on. We're walkin' through the halls in baggy whites, all these people in wheelchairs or staggerin' aroun' in their bathrobes. I realize right away gettin' stoned was a big mistake. I'm comin' down with a bad case of the horrors. I start trippin' out on death, an' what's it all mean, an' I'm gonna do myself in before I get on this stage, an' I'm really fuckin' scared, Butler. See, Reynard, he's been there two years, so like he's immune, you know? He can function like he's at an office somewheres an' I don't wanna tell him what I'm feelin', right? Anyways, he takes me into this long room with maybe twenty beds. All I hear is moans and gags an' screamin'. There probably ain't one guy in this room who got six months to live, all old, old." Stony rubbed his nose with the heel of his palm. "An' I'm blitzed outta my skull, right? I don't wanna look right or left, up or down, I just look straight ahead at the far wall, an' all these guys are yellin' out, 'Hiya, Reynard, hiya, Reynard,' but like babies, you know? So I'm just walkin' with my eyes straight ahead, an' all of a sudden I trip over somethin' an' almost break my ass. I look down, an' I swear, Butler, I scream like a cunt. There's this fuckin' leg layin' in the middle of the floor. Reynard laughs an' he picks it up. It's an artificial leg. He puts it next to this guy's nightstand an' he says, 'Be cool, baby.' I just flipped. I said, 'Reynard, I gotta get outta here.' He says, 'Don't sweat it. You'll get used to it,' and then he tells me the first day he was workin' there he got so sick he puked all over this old guy's head. Then he asks me if I want more grass."

  Stony raised his eyebrows. The waitress dropped a bill face up on the table. "More grass I need like a third nut, you know? So Reynard takes me into these private rooms down another wing, the rich vegetables' ward. He introduces me to all these guys, runs down their schedules with the john, the showers, physical therapy, occupational therapy, the whole shtick. Half these guys looked like they needed gardeners instead of doctors. He's tellin' me some of the life stories of these cats when we're outside the rooms. One guy was the head of the psychology department at Yeshiva University, that guy I was tellin' you about before with the sixty-two Ph.D.s. Another guy played baseball with the New York Highlanders, that was the Yankees before they was the Yankees. This guy, forget about it. He looked like a scrotum. He was all wrinkled and scrunched up." Stony screwed up his face as he talked. "He had these old team pictures all over the room, baseball players with handlebar 'staches an' striped beanies. I swear, Butler, I don't know what I'd do if that was me. If I was a fuckin' professional athlete reduced to that. I didn't wanna ask which one a those guys in the pictures was him because I didn't think I could take it. Another guy's that lawyer I was tellin' you about—'Gimme justice'—you know, I'm lookin' at these guys an' I can see how you really gotta keep it in your head that there's a mind workin' in all that busted machinery there, you know? I really can understand how somebody workin' in a hospital for a few years can blank on that, but you look into those eyes, the whole fuckin' story's in those eyes, man. They are real fuckin' people, man, an' they are in fuckin' agony, an' those fuckin' spies and Bimis come there, man, an' they're treatin' 'em like potted plants or like infants with brains like BBs, an' those eyes are screamin', man, they're screamin' I AM. I'm a doctor. I'm a lawyer. I'm a fucker. I'm a baseball player. I'm a goddamn human being, an' all they get is 'Oh Mees-tah Roo-bon-steen, you make in you bed a-gain, you bod, bod boy.' It makes you wanna vomit, Butler, it makes you wanna vomit."

  "That's the way it goes." Butler eased himself away from the table.

  "Butler, if I ever got like that, and I asked you to check me out, would you do me the solid?"

  "If I had the strength, I'd probably be suckin' wind myself by then."

  13

  TUESDAY, 8:00 A.M. Stony sat on the narrow locker bench scraping crud from the corners of his eyes. He had half changed into his hospital whites. The other orderlies were dressing, drinking from hip flasks of Old Mr. Boston apricot brandy and bullshitting around in general.

  "Hey." Reynard discarded his wet-look vinyl jacket and opened his locker next to Stony's. "We late, man, we only got time fo' some quick tokes." He removed a white Baggie from his locker.

  "Uh. No way." Stony shielded himself from the dope. "I almost jumped out the window yesterday."

  Reynard lit a joint, took three long wet sucks, ground out the burning end and put the roach back in the Baggie. "You on you own today, baby." Reynard struggled out of his street clothes. "But you need some help, give me a yell."

  They punched their time cards under the gridded wall clock and walked through the beige, glazed-tile corridor past a vast stainless steel kitchen and scattered stainless steel food carts toward the elevator. Reynard slapped five to every other guy they passed, shouting and laughing, taking his ease. Stony knew Reynard would never become a hairdresser.

  "Mr. Plotkin?" Stony braced himself as he walked into the pale green room.

  A small, hairless, toothless, blind man sat on the bed, smiled beatifically as if touched by the voice of God. "Yas?"

  Stony could see his eyeballs moving under his shut lids, his wide gum-grin stretched from ear to ear. His white gown was too big for him and hung off one skeletal shoulder in a parody of a 1945 movie goddess. Stony clenched his teeth. "Enjoy your breakfast?"

  "Yas I did. Who iss dis I yam talkink to?" As if he was on the phone. He kept smiling nervously, jerking his head in the direction of Stony's
voice.

  "I'm the new lifter."

  "Vere is Reynard?"

  "He's around, I'm helpin' him out." Stony moved the wheelchair into position, locking it with his foot. "I'm gonna take you to the john now."

  "O.K." In a singsong.

  Stony cringed for a moment before slipping his arms under Mr. Plotkin's armpits. He was surprisingly light. When Stony lifted him high enough and the blanket slipped away, he saw why. Plotkin was legless. Stony gasped. Plotkin laughed. Stony held him at arm's length, afraid of the smooth stumps. He deposited him in the wheelchair, replaced the blanket, unlocked the catch and wheeled him down to the huge white tile and stainless steel bathroom. He dumped him on the pot and stood there while Plotkin grunted, plopped and farted for ten minutes, smiling all the while. Stony unwound a wad of toilet paper consuming half the roll, lifted Plotkin with one hand across his chest and wiped his ass, his head behind Plotkin's back, almost in the bowl. Stony held his breath the whole time. His eyes were screwed shut. But somehow he still managed to get a lungful and an eyeful in the scant ten seconds the whole operation took.

  "Misteh leefteh, you ah colid boy?"

  "Nope. I'm Italian." Stony wiped the cold sweat from his face. He was chilled with disgust.

  "You are vhite boy? Vhat you do dis for?" Then he whispered, "Dis a chob for der niggers."

  ***

  "Come in here, please." The black nurse beckoned to Stony in the hallway. Stony's heart sank. It was ten-thirty. Hour and a half until lunch. Ten ass-wipes to go. "Meestah Beckahmon vomited all over heself," she said, ushering him into the room. "Please clean him op. I have to go get sheets and a gown. I be back in five minutes."

  Stony stared at a cadaver rigid in his bed. An oatmeal-textured catastrophe lay on his chin, chest and blanket. His eyes burned into Stony like a black fire. "Hey look, that's an orderly's job. I'm a lifter." Stony pointed to the name-and-job tag on his breast pocket.