Fugatives & Refugees

(a postcard from 1986)

Somewhere a man's hollering about devils and demons. From some other hospital room he's bellowing and screaming about how the niggers and fags are out to get him. You can hear him all over the third floor when he screams, "Get away from me, you cunt!" And his shouting just goes on and on.

This is Emanuel Hospital, the big medical complex at the east end of the Fremont Bridge. I'm here as a volunteer for a charity hospice. My job is to take people places, mostly relatives of dying people. Mostly, I drive visiting mothers from their motel to the hospital. After their son or daughter is dead, I might drive them to the airport for their flight home.

Today we're waiting for a man to die of AIDS while his mother sits beside his bed, holding his hand and singing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," again and again. It was his favorite song when he was a boy, she says. Now he's just bones and body hair, curled on his side under a thin knit blanket. A pump injects him with morphine every few seconds. His face has the slack look, yellow and dried, that means this is our last trip to the hospital.

The Mom is from Minnesota—I think. Maybe Montana. It's been my experience that nobody dies like in the movies. No matter how sick they look, they're waiting for you to leave. Around midnight, when I finally take his mom back to her Travelodge on E Burnside Street, when he's alt alone, then her son will die.

For now she sings "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," over and over until it doesn't make any sense. Until the words turn into a mantra. A bird's song. Just sounds without meaning. I look at my watch.

It's then the yelling starts. The rant about spies and niggers and fags and cunts. It's a man's voice, huge and hoarse, shouting from some room nearby.

A nurse comes into the room to explain. The shouting man has taken a drug overdose, they really can't sedate him because they have no idea what drugs he's already taken. The nurse says the man's in restraints, down the hall, but we're all going to have to tolerate his shouting until he wears himself out.

Still, the man's shouting about gooks and kikes.

With each shout the dying son jerks a little, winces, and his mother stops singing. After a little while, a few automatic injections of morphine, the man's still shouting about demons and devils, and the Mom picks up her purse. She gets to her feet.

She goes to the door, and I follow.

She's giving up, I figure, heading back to the motel. To the airport. To Minnesota.

As we're going down the hospital hallway, the yelling gets louder, closer, until we're right outside the man's room. The door's half open, and inside is a curtain pulled shut around a hospital bed. The Mom goes in. She goes through the slit in the curtain.

The man's shouting, calling her a cunt. Telling her to get out.

I go to look, and the man's naked in bed, his hands and ankles buckled to the chrome bed rails with leather straps. He's huge, filling the whole mattress, and wrestles against the leather straps until every muscle pops up, huge with blood and veins, smooth with tattoos of snakes and women in bright red and blue. His face flush, he yells for the "fucking" nurse. She should "fucking get in here." His hands and ankles strapped down, he twists and fights. The way a fish arches and flops on hot sand. The inside of each arm is poked with IV needles. The skin scabbed from old injections.

The Mom sets her purse on the edge of his mattress. She says, "What pretty tattoos."

I remember that because it's the only thing she said. Then she takes a tissue out of her purse, an old, crumpled tissue.

You can't tell anyone about a naked man without getting to his penis and balls. They're the only part of him not fighting. And not covered with tattoos. His genitals are just red, wadded flesh in the nest of his black pubic hair.

At this point, I've been volunteering around hospitals since I was fourteen. Where I grew up, you had to perform several hundred hours of volunteer work to be confirmed in the Catholic Church. About the only place to do this was Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. Fourteen years old and I was cleaning delivery rooms. No rubber gloves, and I'm tossing out afterbirths. Washing coagulated blood out of stainless steel pans, I loved it. My other job in the hospital was dusting shelves in the pharmacy. A few years down the road and this would've been my dream job—me alone with this smorgasbord of painkillers—but for now, it was beyond boring.

Me, I thought I'd seen everything.

Here and now, the Mom uses the tissue from her purse to lift the man's limp penis. It's about the size of a boneless thumb. She lifts it straight up and lets it flop back down. The man's balls are cupped between his hairy thighs. He squirms to get away from her, but he can't.

Both of us standing inside the closed curtain, I don't stop her. My job is just to drive her around. And wait. I look at my watch, again.

The man's red-faced and shouting about the fucking devils. The demons are touching him. He's screaming for help.

The Mom, her hand puts the tissue back into her purse. And when her hand comes out, it's holding a baby pin.

The man's screaming. He's screaming, "Fuck. Cunt. Nigger. Fag."

Again and again until it doesn't make any sense. Until the words turn into a mantra. A bird's song. Just sounds without meaning. I look at my watch.

And the Mom clicks the pin open.

The door to the room is half closed. It's hospital policy not to close the door to a patient's room all the way. Everyone on the third floor can hear the man, but no one's listening.

The Mom drives the needle into the man's thigh.

She sticks the needle in, and the man bellows. He squeals until his screams break into sobs. She stabs again, and he's sobbing and begging her to stop. He's sobbing until he's quiet.

By then I'm standing at the edge of the bed. I'm leaning in, holding my breath. We don't know this yet, but in that other room the mother's son is already dead.