Doc in the Box (5 page)

“But they always call one for me up in chemotherapy,” Mrs. Turban said.

The receptionist shrugged. “Well, I’m too busy,” she said. I doubted that. I’d seen the open paperback romance on her desk.

Next, a dignified old man with a four-legged cane hobbled up to her desk. He wore a white shirt and an old narrow-lapelled suit that was too big for him. “I’m
here for my prescription from the doctor. He’s supposed to give me some pain pills.”

“We can’t do that. Your primary care physician will have to do that,” she said.

“But I called here and you said the doctor would write me a prescription.”

“I said no such thing,” the receptionist said. “It must have been the person who answers the phones while I’m at lunch. She told you wrong. You’ll have to go to your primary care doctor.”

“But I came here by bus,” the old man said, about to burst into tears. I was grinding my teeth, listening to this conversation.

“You can stand there and whine, or you can get on the phone and do something about it,” she said. “There’s a pay phone down the hall.”

“Can I have change for a dollar?” the man asked, resigned.

“No. I’m not a bank. You’ll have to use the change machines in the cafeteria. Follow the yellow lines down the hall.” She left him to shuffle and stump his way through the endless hospital corridors. I followed him out and gave him my pocket change. When I went back to the waiting room, the inner door opened and Georgia came out, looking pale and shaken. “Get me out of here,” she said.

“Me, too,” I said. I couldn’t wait until we were out of radiation oncology. Even the air in the hospital hall seemed fresher. The atmosphere was certainly less poisonous.

“What a vision of hell. Are they as nasty inside as they are outside?”

“Worse,” Georgia said. “I’m stuck in a
M*A*S*H
rerun. They joke around like I’m not there. I’m lying
on a chilled table with my mutilated chest exposed to complete strangers and they’re swapping jokes and talking about their hangovers. It’s like I don’t exist. It’s horrible.” For a minute, she seemed about to cry. But she didn’t. I couldn’t get used to this new Georgia, who was so often close to tears.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if someone goes postal and takes a machine gun to that place,” I said. “It’s the meanest department in the hospital. They were really nice in X-ray, and the chemo nurses are angels. But this place seems to attract every sadist in the hospital.”

“Well, if anyone loses it and starts shooting, a jury of their peers will give them a medal,” she said. “Especially if I’m on it.” That sounded more like the old Georgia.

“Do you know who I am?” the massive man demanded. He was irate that he had to stand in line with the rest of us at Uncle Bob’s Pancake House. Breakfast goers were lined up out the door into the parking lot, but this guy was the only unhappy one. He was about the size of a rhino and just as mean. I figured anybody that big had the stamina to endure a ten-minute wait.

“Who is he?” I asked the brunette behind me in line. She shrugged. “Beats me.”

Her twelve-year-old son was shocked by this ignorance. “Mom! Don’t you recognize him? He’s with the St. Louis Blues. That’s the hockey team,” he added in case we were too dumb to recognize that, too. “He’s …”

Before we could learn his name, the rhino’s voice grew louder and more insistent, drowning out all other conversation: “I SAID, DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?”

The hostess was seating a party of four in the back room. Marlene, the waitress, appeared to deal with this emergency. “No, sir,” she said politely, “but we
can call some people at the state hospital who can help you find out.”

The rhino angrily charged through the crowd, rudely shouldering his way out the door. “Sorry,” Marlene said, but she wasn’t really. The crowd cheered his departure. The Cardinals’ Mark McGwire would have been recognized immediately, but even he would have had to wait in line at Uncle Bob’s. Everyone did. The line was a handy place to gossip, network, or eavesdrop, depending on who you were. The mayor stood in line at Uncle Bob’s. So did aldermen, congressmen, police, city attorneys, assorted crooks in and out of office, and lots of hardworking citizens.

For me, Uncle Bob’s was a combination office and family substitute, and you could find me there most mornings. If there was no line out front, Tom the cook had my one egg scrambled before my car was even parked. Marlene the waitress popped in two pieces of wheat toast and poured my decaf coffee by the time I took off my coat. That had been my breakfast routine for the last eight years. Readers who couldn’t get through the
Gazette
switchboard knew they could reach me at Uncle Bob’s most mornings, and the waitresses took more accurate messages for me than Scarlette, our department secretary.

It was another ten minutes before Cheryl the hostess could seat me, plenty of time to find out what caused the crowd this morning. St. Philomena’s Catholic Church had a Recognition Day for students and parents, then gave the kids the rest of the day off. All those proud parents and their offspring had worked up an appetite picking up their achievement certificates.

“No booth for you today, Francesca,” Cheryl said. “It’s too crowded. I’m gonna have to stick you at the little table in the corner, but it’s in Marlene’s station.”

Marlene was my favorite server, a generously proportioned woman with an innocent Irish face and a wicked comeback for everything. Today she barely had time to pour my coffee and plop down my plate. I buried my face in a murder mystery. I’m an addict. I read five a week.

A few minutes later, Cheryl the hostess came over. “There’s a call for you,” she said. “You can take it at the front desk.”

It was Georgia.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“Nothing,” she said. “I just don’t want to call you at the
Gazette
. You know the phones are bugged there. Listen, can you pick me up an hour earlier for my radiation appointment?”

“No problem,” I said.

“Are you sure? How are you going to get your stripper story finished?”

“I worked on it at home on my laptop. It’s nearly done. I just have to ask Leo a couple of questions.”

“Good. I need to buy a wig. I’ll be losing my hair in another week or two. I want to have my wig styled and ready.”

“Sure, I’ll be glad to go with you,” I lied. I’d hate it. But I couldn’t tell her that. The woman’s hair was going to fall out, and I was whining because it made me feel uncomfortable. She needed me to be with her, and I would. Friends don’t let friends go bald alone.

“Is an hour going to be enough time?” I said. “I can leave earlier.”

“I have dyed blond hair in a wedge cut, like every other woman my age. How difficult can it be?”

I thought it was going to be very difficult. I hung up, dreading the wig appointment. It wasn’t even ten o’clock, and the day was already in a nosedive.

By the time I sat down again to cold coffee, Marlene’s tables had cleared out enough that she could join me on her break. She poured me a fresh cup. Then she sympathized about Georgia’s hair. To lighten things up, I told her the story about the missing stripper, Leo D. Nardo. But Marlene didn’t laugh. “Monday night was the last time anyone saw him,” she said. “This is Thursday. If he doesn’t show up for work today, I’d say it’s time to get seriously worried.”

“Oh, come on, Marlene. This is a stripper. An absolute airhead.”

“Francesca,” she said, “if a man said that about a woman stripper, you’d be indignant. You’d say he was discounting her because she was a woman in a marginal profession. Men deserve equal treatment.”

“But it’s different.”

“Why? Male and female strippers are both in businesses that attract a lot of weirdos.”

“But he’s …”

“He’s a sex object. He just happens to be a male sex object. But he deserves equal treatment. How do you know he even went anywhere with a woman? Does he have a girlfriend? Did anyone see him with a special admirer that night? Did he have any money with him so he could take a sudden trip or get a hotel room for several days?”

“Just his tips,” I said.

“How much is that—a couple hundred?”

“More than twelve hundred dollars in cash,” I said.
“In a blue nylon gym bag.” Even as I said it, I knew it sounded bizarre.

Marlene stared at me like I was thicker than Uncle Bob’s knotty pine paneling. “A guy built like a Greek god who’s been dancing nearly naked for a room full of screaming women walks out at one
A.M
. with twelve hundred dollars in untraceable cash, and hasn’t been seen since—and you don’t think anything is wrong? What’s the matter with you, Francesca?”

She was right. What was wrong with me today? Might as well go to the
Gazette
, where I was expected to be wrong. I wasn’t disappointed. I’d hardly reached my desk when my editor, Wendy the Whiner, came over wearing a wrinkled suit that looked like it had been swiped from a Goodwill donation box. “Charlie’s been looking for you all morning. I didn’t know where to find you,” she said, accusingly.

“Where you’ll find me every morning, at Uncle Bob’s looking for stories,” I said.

“He’s not happy with you,” she said, with satisfaction.

Charlie’s door was open, and he was sitting at his vast, empty black desk in his huge sterile office. I’d always suspected his chair was built up to make the sawed-off little hairbag seem taller. He was smiling, a bad sign. His blue suit was styled to hide his paunch. His red tie matched his nose.

“Sit down, Francesca,” he said. “You’re late. Most people start work at the
Gazette
at nine
A.M.
”

“I do, too, Charlie,” I said, still standing, because I knew it irritated him. He hated any reminder that I was considerably taller than he was. “I was at Uncle Bob’s.”

“You count eating breakfast as work?”

He counted expense account lunches as work, but I didn’t remind him of that. “That’s where I meet readers, Charlie, and they tell me stories for my column.”

“Well, see if you can eat your breakfast on your own time in the future,” he said. I figured I could ignore that as bluster. He was too eager to deliver his bad news. The man was practically wiggling in anticipation like a puppy. Either that, or he had to use the john.

“In order to have a closer link with our readership,” he began, with a solemnity usually reserved for Vatican Square, “we at the
Gazette
want to publish something with the common touch. Of course, we thought of you.”

I knew this was insulting. I just wasn’t sure how.

“We are doing a compendium of St. Louis recipes. We’d like you to write the foreword and contribute a recipe.”

“I don’t cook, Charlie,” I said.

“What do you mean, you don’t cook? You’re a woman, aren’t you?”

“Cooking isn’t a sex-linked gene. That is an incredibly sexist statement.”

“I figured you’d try to hide behind that EEOC stuff,” he said. “So I’m offering you this choice: if you find a recipe too offensively female, you can do a Dialog St. Louis page.”

Oh, my god, not that. Anything but that.

Charlie must have seen the look of horror on my face. It was why I don’t play poker. “It’s your decision, Francesca. If I don’t have your recipe by tomorrow, I’ll expect you to begin working on the next
Dialog St. Louis. That subject is: The Information Highway.”

Trust the
Gazette
to go down that well-worn road where no reader wanted to follow. Charlie had been sold on something called “public journalism” at a newspaper conference he attended in South Carolina. Nobody was quite sure what public journalism was, but we could recognize it by its catch phrases: “solution-oriented stories,” “focusing on community resources,” “deliberative conversations,” “citizen commitment.”

We knew what that meant. Expensive and time-consuming investigative reporting was out. Blather by city planners, sociologists, and other experts was in. The
Gazette
would no longer attack corruption in City Hall, the state legislature, and the school system. Advertisers found that so upsetting. Instead, the paper would discuss what a fine future the city would have if we all pulled together. Public journalism turned a newspaper into a Miss Manners’ dinner party. Unsettling topics such as deadbeat dads, killer kids, and alcoholic moms would not be polite. So they were never mentioned in any Dialog St. Louis.

Its appeal to management was immediate: public journalism was cheap and noncontroversial. It was also shallow and stupid, and
Gazette
readers, at least those old enough to remember its glory days when it was one of the first papers to fight against the Vietnam War, resented this drivel. The last Dialog St. Louis was “The Importance of Teaching Phonics.” Another featured this controversial subject: “Should St. Louis Parks Have Separate Paths for Bikers and Bladers?”

The
Weekly Reader
was more controversial.
Smarter, too. And it had more circulation. Charlie failed to realize public journalism was practiced by Podunk papers. I’d do anything to keep my name from appearing on that page of pablum. Even find a recipe. But I wasn’t lying to Charlie. I didn’t cook. Some would say I didn’t even eat. Breakfast was usually a scrambled egg and toast at Uncle Bob’s. Lunch was something pale and gray out of a
Gazette
sandwich machine. I ate well if I went out for dinner, but I did that less and less since I’d split with Lyle. Instead, I’d stop for pork fried rice or order up a pepperoni pizza. Maybe I could publish “Francesca’s Top Five Food Delivery Phone Numbers.” Sometimes, I just opened a can of tuna and ate it over the sink, or dredged pretzels through peanut butter. Wouldn’t that make a
Martha Stewart Living
layout?