Emergency room

Down the hall there was a little boy screaming. It lasted the better part of four hours. I stared at the pattern on the linoleum floor while Steve nodded off on the gurney. He'd sleep in two minute intervals for a while then wake up for fifteen or twenty and we'd have another conversation. He was hurting all over this time. Grouchy, but apologetic.

On the way to the emergency room, a girl crossed Eighth Avenue in front of us and after she'd almost gone, he said,

"I wish I could still walk like that."

There was a long silence and then he added, "but it's too late for me."

My arm instinctively turned off the radio and we crossed over the train yard, surrounded on all sides, by the lunch time traffic.

"If they drain this fluid off when I'm there," he said, "maybe you could take a picture of that. Maybe it would stop some motherfucker from drinking himself to death."

The next light came and I studied a familiar profile, sleeping on the bus stop bench by the offices of our daily newspaper. It was seventy-four degrees and the man on the bench couldn't take off his winter coat because someone would've stolen it, in a matter of minutes.

I tried to relax my jaw and said, "Maybe ".

The message on my answering machine the day before was cryptic. Could I come by sometime tomorrow? He didn't say Hey I need a ride to the hospital. Or hey, my liver is about to make my stomach explode.

He said "Hey, Sue could you come by tomorrow if you've got time? "

In the message, he was very drunk. He didn't know how to hang up the cell phone and the ensuing conversation between he and another man gave me great pause. It was a five-minute dialogue that I could have gone my whole life without hearing. I couldn't begin to describe it here.

His voice has changed dramatically over the last two months. Sometimes it heaves like the old garbage disposal under my sink. Rocking gently between homelessness and alcoholism, death and now a subtle form of hopeless regret, he would talk for the next nine hours, seven of which were spent in the emergency room, waiting patiently for a double shot of arrogant indifference. I foolishly believed it wouldn't happen but Steve knew better. He laid it all out beautifully, before we even got there.


(In memory of Wayne E. Frampton, who died in an abandoned car, on the morning of Saturday, February 25, 2006. He was fifty-five years old.)