The View from the Vue (7 page)

The nurse and I began to take off his clothes. As we did, dollar bills spilled out of his pockets and his underwear and scattered all over the bed. I seriously considered proctoscoping him. We gathered up the greenbacks and put them into an envelope with his name on it. Then we started him on treatment. I didn’t think it would do any good, but he fooled me and began to recover. As the days passed, his skin color lightened and he even began to become responsive. Finally he reached the point where we could talk to him and expect to get a reasonable answer. So I asked him where he had gotten all that money. He must have forgotten about it till that moment, because he suddenly looked panicky and clutched at his pajama pockets. I assured him that the dough was in the hospital safe with his name on it. “I’m just curious where you got all that money,” I said. “To be honest, you just don’t look like a guy who’d have over a hundred bucks in his pockets. But you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

The guy grinned at me. (Why did all Bowery Bums have only three widely separated teeth in their mouths?) “Don’t mind at all. Gimme a cigarette, ‘n’ I’ll tell yuh.”

I didn’t have any cigarettes, so I persuaded the bum in the next bed that it would be an act of charity and, in addition, he might learn how to get rich too. My patient lit up and began to talk. “I made it washin’ car windows,” he said. I guess I must have looked at him a little blankly, because he hastily added, “Y’know, down onna Bowery. When the cars stop fer red lights, I run out inna street ‘n’ wipe off the windas. Then I put out m’ hand.”

Now I understood. When you stop your car for a red light as you drive down the Bowery, these guys fly in swarms off the curbstones. They charge over, make a few passes at your windshield with a cruddy old rag, and then present themselves at your window, palm up. I myself had never paid one of these characters, first, because all they ever did was to streak the dirt across the windshield so that the visibility was worse than ever, and second, because I just plain resented having the bite put on me in that manner. So I told my patient that I couldn’t imagine how he had made all that money at his occupation.

“Y’d be s’prized, Doc,” he said. “I us’ally make ’bout forty bucks a day.”

“Come on. That’s a lot of windows.”

“There’s lotsa cars on the Bow’ry, Doc. Y’av’rage ’bout a quarter apiece, that’s own’y a hunnert-sixty cars a day. Takes jus’ a few hours, us’ally. Then I got the resta the day t’ spend it on drinks fer me ‘n’ m’ frien’s.” He dragged on the cigarette, and then continued, “B’sides, some guys even give a dollar.”

“What about the people who don’t give you anything?” I asked.

He smiled fiendishly. “Oh, I take care a’ them guys.”

I began to feel a little nervous.

He leaned over and stage-whispered at me, “Y’see what I do, Doc. I hang onna th’ car, ‘n’ if the guy don’ gimme nuthin, soon’s ’e starts up, I grab m’ foot ‘n’ yell, an’ then I holler, ‘I gotcher license number.’ Y’ be s’prised, Doc. Some guys gimme five bucks then. Serves the basstids right, too. I’d a been glad t’ settle fer a quarter.”

Maybe I ought to have been ashamed of myself, but thereafter, when I drove down the Bowery and received the unwelcome and unwanted services, I had no compunction about snarling out the window that if the guy didn’t move back, I’d be pleased to relieve him of his foot, and that whether or not he had my number was of little moment to me. I always did look for my erstwhile patient though. I figured I’d feel obliged to give
him
a quarter. But I never did see him again. I suppose that shortly after his discharge, his liver must have disintegrated once and for all.

Then there was Shoeless Joe. I don’t recall his real name, but I remember him as Shoeless Joe. He came in sick as hell with Klebsiella pneumonia, a very serious form of lung infection that primarily strikes people who are in some way debilitated. Joe’s clothes were in tatters and his shoes were virtually nonexistent. Therefore the nurse tossed the whole mess into the trash can. On such seemingly insignificant decisions and acts are based the mightiest of consequences.

Shoeless Joe proved to be a pretty tough debilitated guy, because within a week he was responding nicely to therapy, and within two weeks, he was well on the way to recovery. He turned out to be an interesting old fellow. He spent a few evenings telling me about his early life as a child and a young man in the Northern Florida panhandle. “Guess that’s why I grew up to be a panhandler,” he once chuckled. That warn’t no joke, son. If anything could be worse than being a Bowery Bum, it may have been being a Northern Florida panhandler.

Anyway, after a few weeks, Shoeless Joe was cured and ready to go out into the world again. We checked him over, wished him well, and figured we’d be seeing him again soon. How soon we didn’t know. When we returned from the clinic in the afternoon, there he was, still in his bed. I asked him what was the matter.

“Ain’t got no clothes,” he said and grinned. “Cain’t go out in m’ hospital pie-jamas.” I clutched my head as I remembered what had happened to his garments, and headed for the phone.

The ward social worker promised quick action, and by the next day she appeared with a full outfit of secondhand duds. Joe put them on and then he tried the shoes. That was the first time 1 realized how big his feet were. He could squeeze his toes and a little more into the 10’s that he had been given.

The social worker made a face as she watched. “Oh, dear,” she said. “We don’t have any used shoes bigger than these. I’ll have to get new ones for him, and that’s going to take some time.”

I really can’t explain exactly what happened next. I tried to understand it even at the time, and couldn’t. Apparently, the social service had quick and ready access to secondhand clothing: they obtained it from dead patients or from charitable agencies. However, to get a new, unused article involved the filling out of quintuplicate sets of forms which, for all I know, may have gone as far as the mayor’s office. Apparently, they were scrutinized by every welfare superintendent in the five boroughs in order to make absolutely certain that no expense was wasted; that somewhere in New York City there was not a usable secondhand item.

Boy, did they try to save money on Shoeless Joe. He remained in the hospital for five more weeks waiting for his shoes. At first I tried to find out where we stood by calling the social worker. One day the forms were held up in Mr. Bigshot’s office. The next day they were being stamped in quintuplicate by Commissioner Broadbeam. After that there was difficulty in locating a pair of shoes enormous enough to fit our patient. No wonder the social workers at Bellevue always looked so haggard. Finally, I just gave up. No one else was unhappy, why should I be?

Shoeless Joe was happy. It was still winter and he had continued access to his warm bed and his three squares a day. The kitchen help was happy, because when the truck was wheeled in with the grub, Shoeless Joe bounded out of bed and served all the customers with a flourish. Then, when they had eaten, he’d collect the trays. The aides and messengers were happy, since Shoeless Joe was only too pleased to help keep the records, or to pick up an item at the Central Supply station. Even the nurses were happy. Old Shoeless thought nothing of bringing a bedpan to an immobilized comrade and then emptying it and tossing it into the cleaning hopper.

Finally, one morning, the shoes arrived. At least the social worker swore she had left them on the ward. No one else ever saw them. The possibilities are two: either someone swiped them, or Shoeless Joe quietly tossed them into the nearest incinerator. In any case, S.J. remained with us for another week while the social worker hunted up another pair of Gargantua Specials. This time she delivered them personally to Joe and then watched while he put them on. But by now it was March, the sap was a’bustin’, and Joe was ready to be on his way. New York City sure did save on him. Hospitalization was not as expensive then as now, so at $40 a day for forty-two days, Joe’s shoes cost only $1,680. I must admit, though, they really were nice looking shoes.

One guy who was not really a Bowery Bum deserves to have his story told here. He was a pseudo-bum. He ran afoul of a camel driver, and ended up very dead.

“Camel driver” was a derogatory sobriquet given to some house staff members in some hospitals in and around New York City. By and large, camel drivers were found at smaller, non-university-affiliated hospitals, where they served as cheap labor. They were called camel drivers because frequently they hailed from one of the Arab countries, but this was not invariable, I have also met Chinese and South American camel drivers. To qualify for the title, it was necessary that the doctor (a) show total disregard for human lives and feelings, and (b) have had his training at a school of the caliber of The Deepest Bulgarian Royal Institute of Proctologic Acupuncture. Although it is true that all foreign graduates must pass an examination designed to test their medical qualifications, I strongly suspect that some New York hospitals may have been trafficking in illegal aliens.

My pseudo-bum arrived at Bellevue on one of those very special New York May afternoons. The day before it had been 60°. This day, it was 97° in the shade, and we all were trudging around the hospital with our tongues hanging out, canteens at our waists, and salt pills in our pockets. About two P.M. an ambulance roared up to the door and disgorged an unconscious Negro man, who was promptly zipped into a bed. His referral sheet, from Bronx Puspocket General Hospital had only one word on it: “Psicosis.” It was signed by the so-called referring physician. That was the extent of it.

The situation was obvious. One thing that a camel driver is very good at is dumping. This is a practice designed to keep one’s workload at minimal levels. You invent some reason why a patient cannot be admitted to your hospital, such as “no beds” or “psychiatric disease” or “communicable disease.” Then the patient becomes eligible for transfer to Bellevue, and you go back to sleep and dream happy dreams of oases and date palms.

In this case, I couldn’t fathom the reason. Did Dr. Driver mean “psychosis”? Or was this patient known to have been consorting with parrots, and therefore thought to have psittacosis? The question was really unimportant, because what the guy obviously was suffering from was heat stroke. His temperature was 107°. We tried everything we could think of to get it down, but we weren’t very successful. Or maybe we were too successful. By that night he was at room temperature, approximately 80°.

I found it upsetting that the lazy or stupid (though the traits are not mutually exclusive) camel driver had sent a man with heat stroke on a forty-five-minute ride in a metal ambulance in 97° weather, a procedure which must have fried the patient’s brain for good. I was even more upset when his family finally caught up to his whereabouts. His wife, the kids trailing behind, told me that her husband had been on a construction job in the Bronx, and that when he had fallen sick, the foreman had called for an ambulance to get him quickly to a hospital. It was a good idea, but it was unfortunate that the ambulance had failed to take him to a hospital.

The bummest bum of them all was a fellow I met one Friday night. Since interns worked alternate-night shifts, every other week, we’d work from Thursday morning till Saturday morning, in order to get the weekend off. Therefore, by late Friday night, we’d be more than a bit punchy. It was at this time, and in this state that I went down to the dining room for a midnight snack. There I met my friend Jim Barkley.

Jim was a surgery intern. He was a dour, laconic little fellow whose directness and brusque attitude annoyed many people. I liked him.

Jim was particularly dour and laconic this night, and I asked him what was the matter. He ran his hand through his hair and grimaced. “God damn shithead on my ward’s really buggin’ me,” he mumbled. I asked him to elucidate.

He leaned on his elbow and glowered in my direction. “There’s this guy, Mr. Watson,” he said. “Biggest pain in the ass you can imagine. Well, he found out the hospital rule that says any time a patient comes in and claims he’s been knocked unconscious, you’ve got to admit him for overnight observation. He’s had six admissions in the past two weeks.”

“So what, Jim? So you give the guy a bed overnight. What do you care?”

“I’ll tell you what I care,” he said. “The bastard doesn’t just take the bed. Oh, no. He bugs the nurses and pinches their boobs as they go by. Then they wake me up—if I’ve ever gotten to sleep in the first place—to do something about him. Do something about him! I’d like to kill the son-of-a-bitch.”

I was becoming aware of the full gravity of the situation. But Jim wasn’t finished. “Not only that,” he went on, “but he sneaks over to the other beds and there’ll be some poor guy with a new scar on his belly, and he’ll tweak him in the scar and then run back to his own bed.”

I had an idea. “Jim, why don’t you send him to psych?”

“You think I haven’t thought of that? Christ, I tried it a long time ago. You know what the shrink said?”

“No.”

“He wouldn’t make the transfer. Said Watson wasn’t nuts, just mean.”

I was feeling sorrier for my poor friend by the minute.

“Well, I finally shipped him out this morning,” moaned Jim. “Told him if I ever saw him again, I’d cut his balls off. So he went uptown to Puspocket and gave them the knocked-cold routine.”

“Well, how does that affect you?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you how it affects me. The camel driver up there shipped him down here a half hour ago. No beds, he said. That’s how.”

“Jim, we’ve got to get rid of him.” My righteous indignation knew no bounds.

“No way, Larry. He won’t leave no matter what I’d do to him.” Jim took a long swig of his coffee.

Suddenly I had it. “Listen, Jim. He was knocked cold. So let’s work him up.”

“What the hell do you mean?”

I began to talk faster. “He says he’s been knocked out. Therefore, he needs a spinal tap. Maybe he had a head injury—right?”

“He’ll settle for a spinal tap, Larry. He wouldn’t give a shit.”

“All right, you tell him I’m a new medical student and it’s my first case. That’ll shake him up.”