Biting the Bullet

It was long ago, and I'd been out of work for quite a while, and I was spending a lot of time trying to sell my resume to someone and waiting for the phone to ring.  I was fed up with trying to live on a trickle of free-lance money doing articles for local magazines. Fed up with trying to stand on my head and sing Yankee Doodle Dandy. I was living with my girlfriend in a rented house on Reardon Street.  Most of the past weeks I had been able to cover my share of the rent and groceries, but on the first of the month, when my old student loans had to be paid, things were tight.

 "Don't get discouraged," said all the books on job hunting, "You have to stay with it, keep sending that resume out, keep reading the classifieds, get out and see people, sell yourself, sell yourself" And that’s what I did, to the best of my ability. It’s the way you do it, keep writing, keep sending out your work. Keep sending out your applications. No takers. Not only was a recession going on, but I didn't have a very good product. There were too many holes in my resume, too many career shifts. Maybe I didn’t want to wear a suit and tie any more. Maybe I just wanted to ruin my future for once and for all and have done with it. Be a failure.

So one morning I went down to unemployment to pick up my check. I had been on the dole for twenty eight weeks, and I was pretty fed up with that too, standing there in the line every week with all my fellow deadbeats, manufacturing our stories as to where we'd been looking for work lately.

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All for the Sake of a Flat Rate

       
Boy it doesn't feel like Friday night," said Hal the dispatcher, looking at his call board. 

       "No, number 37, there's nothing going on right now. He looked at the clock. 

       "Oh yeah, KC1352 the Citywide time is 7:26 pm, seven twenty six PM, gentlemen. . . .ah, and ladies. Sorry Rose, sorry Maria." 

        Citywide #37 hung up his mike. That was that. No harm in asking. He was all keyed up to do a little work, and here there was nothing going on. The town was dead, the cab stand at the Lenox was dead, the sidewalks were empty. Not a soul in sight with money in their pocket and an urge to travel. For a half an hour he'd been number three, stuck behind a Checker and a Black and White. RELAX he said to himself, letting the air out of his lungs, and the starch out of his shoulder muscles.   The city was taking a vacation, floors were getting swept, the trash baskets full of printouts were getting emptied, and lights were going out. Another day, said the city, clustering its reflecting mirrors near the horizon, catching a last look at the sun setting' behind the Belmont hills. He sat behind the wheel again and waited. To read the full story, click on this

Martinelli

 I like to sit in back next to the window during report so I can space out when I need to.  There’s usually a lot of chatter about regular meetings, new regulations, and patients I don’t have any responsibility for.   That day I was looking down into the courtyard where three threadbare alkies were having one last cigarette together before going inside for a meeting. 

Martinelli was the highlight of Laura’s report.   “Patient count down to twenty-one, Mr. Martinelli is now over in seven lower,” said the head nurse.  She means well, a willowy blonde as nice and vacant as they come.  She comes and goes, from meetings to conferences, from report to report, fulfilling the administrative basics, but I don’t think she has the foggiest notion of what happens on this ward when she is not around. Even when she is around, but in the office doing the paperwork.  No idea who was doing their share, who was sloughing off, and what a certain good friend of hers was getting away with.

       

 Martinelli’s bed had been stripped and made up new, his name tag was already off the roster, and there was nothing to remember of him but his back as he lay on that bed day in and day out. It bothered me that I never said boo to him the whole week he was here, even though he was my patient for three days straight. It didn’t make me happy. It bothers me when I can see my life in the macro lens and see that I’m nothing but a bit actor in this big absurdist play.  You aren’t Jesus Christ ministering to the masses, you’re an aide, you act like aides do; you’re busy, occasionally brusque. You’re a face and a voice to guys like Martinelli, you wake them up in the middle of a nap to take their temperature, you want to know whether they’ve taken a shower that day, you bug them about tests and whatnot.

        

And OK, you try to be decent, hang out, fake data, turn the other way when you catch the diabetics buying candy bars in the hospital store, but a hospital is a hospital and the lights are always going off and on and no one is ever explaining why. The pills and orders are coming from everywhere and nobody, not Pete Callahan, not the head nurse, and certainly not the doctor cares about you.  We all ignored him when he was here.  He was a diabetic, I think, and he was here to  have some tests done.  He could have spent three years lying there in that bed and as long as he got up for meals, took a daily shower, and gave us an urine specimen at five, nine and eleven, we would have let him rot. 

But the poor guy knew that the only way you get attention in this world is to become a problem. Charge at the wall, jump out a window, slash your wrists, sing loudly in the ward after midnight.  Get transferred over to seven lower where they deal with the suicide attempts.

 “Do you want your dinner by your bed, Mr. Martinelli?”  Said Bonnie that previous afternoon.  He was lying in his bed in his pajamas, face down.

”Mr. Martinelli?”  She said, “Dinner is here. Would you rather have it here or down in the day room?”

So Martinelli turned on his side and looked at her with this terrifyingly intense and blank look, got up and rushed past her, knocking the tray from her hands, going off at a dead run down the hall.  The head nurse said it looked like he was on his way down to the front desk when he suddenly swerved and charged, head down, at the corner where the ward meets the corridor.  There was a terrific thud and a yell when he hit, and he went down as if he’d been hit with a sledgehammer.

Well, now you’ll get attention.  Oh the psychologist will be in today or tomorrow or the next day to see you and ask you who the President of the United States is and where you are and if you aren’t too far gone out into the ether you’ll have to fill out a seven page MMPI inventory and look at a lot of ink blots and meanwhile you’ll be sitting in the day room with two aides assigned to do nothing but watch you and the other self-destructive people on special ob. If you’re good and the Doctor likes you and you don’t dramatize too much, you’ll get off special observation day after tomorrow and you might even get 9:30 to 3:30 grounds privileges next week.

Martinelli. if you knew what all the aides know you might have spared yourself all the trouble.  Pretty soon you’ll have a psych diagnosis and your file folder will be a little thicker, consults will be out all over the place, and the secretary will be working overtime typing up your history. Better you could have got up off the bed and tell me what was going on with you.  I just ran my hand over the corner where you hit, and there’s not a mark.

A fair weather hero

 "Are you leaving here?" Janet said, "Are you giving up on us?"

I was.  She would go to the meeting at city hall alone.  I loaned her two bucks for carfare, and our spokesperson was off to give the city council hell.  All alone.  Last of the Mohicans.  She expected more from me. Another fair weather hero all for fighting the Long Beach redevelopment authority and saving this old hotel.  Now here Doyle was losing his nerve, going all quiet and non-committal on her.   

"I can't go."  I said,  "Got to teach a class." "Got a meeting," I added, gilding the lily with fools gold. The meeting would have gone on without me.  We stood by the front door in the sun. I spoke under considerable psychic strain, as if I was delivering a passel of lies to a roomful of skeptical reporters.  I knew that there was always more I could do, more I could have done, but you have to stop short of the cliff. You have to say no to frenetic activity, say no to a doomed insurrection. I am not going to let it distract me from doing my job.   I AM GOING TO KEEP MY LIFE TOGETHER.

Last night at two I woke up and knew it was over, I had to get out .  It was a dead hotel and the little flames of life inside it were guttering out, one by one. Not enough oxygen in this place to sustain human life.  I turned the bedside light on, got to the Olivetti and said the hell with it.  3:30AM, when you start thinking of killing yourself for no good reason, than it's just something going around like the flu.  It's time to get out.  I NEED TO TOUCH NORMAL LIFE AGAIN.   It was just me in room 308, Janet down the hall in 317,  Jerry in 212, and a squatter named Jenkins up on the fifth floor. 

She motioned at the empty lobby, maybe seeing if there was any support there. They were now just names on a petition I had helped draft a month ago and carried around from room to room.  Official scribe. Only four of us left in those sixty four rooms, and the office door had been closed and bolted for the last two weeks. We still had the full complement of high-back chairs in the lobby,  two rows of dignity facing each other.  If I look close enough and long enough I can almost see the ghosts. The daily gathering of the refugees. Doctor Redmond's down on the end next to the window, talking about his trans-Atlantic crossing in the Iberia and the day they lost the anchor.  Maude is sitting across from him nodding off, Louis in in the corner under the reading light, looking as fierce and ignorant as ever, rereading his holy bible, ready to do battle with me on doctrinal issues.   John is there too, sitting next to the window leaning off to starboard, his eyes closed, honest sincere and innocent as a baby. His head propped up on his huge fist. John was from South Dakota.  A lot of the old guard at the hotel was from the Dakotas. They migrated to Long Beach in the fifties and sixties to get away from winter. Killing time in the Hotel Buffum among the potted palms, moving from chair to chair as the sun moved across the sky. Kelly is here too, talking to Jackson, laughing. He's got his bottle in a paper bag, is wearing his iron gray herringbone jacket with the flaring lapels.  He gave the place a little class while he lasted, hard to see this dapper fashion plate as someone who had lived out of his car for five years.

The sane sound-thinking reasonable people went first, when the notices went under the door.  Oh yes we love our cockroach-infested old hotel, but it is time to leave before the sheriff arrives. The aging anarchists stayed on, the campaigners against injustice, the campaigners for a little moving money, and a little more time.  And while we met and talked and sent out our petitions and talked to reporters, the old hotel emptied out. They went down to the office one by one and made their deals.

I hugged Janet and we fogged up her heavy lenses for a minute or so, and she went off to either have a drink with my two bucks or to stand up before a bunch of uncaring politicians and give them hell for the Buffumites. This reporter had told us he would be there for the hearing, but I doubted if he would show. It was a classic lost cause. I was off on the Greyhound to teach a class of sunny surfer kids the elements of a sentence, the mechanics of a paragraph. I was trying to talk myself into acting sanely, trying to remember that I had another life. I had obligations.  So, in the end I decided to go quietly, like everyone else did. Live to tell the tale.  These are the tornados that begin as gentle breezes, as quiet currents that tug at you lovingly, and you look up at a great translucent peaceful sky and relax; you go with it, you remember some favorite songs consonant with noble struggles. You forget that you are just passing through this world.