“Oh Garcia,” the pretty nurse scolds, “don’t say piss, say urine. Urine is much nicer.”
Garcia tells her he is sorry and will call it urine from here on out.
Willey is clicking his tongue again and the nurse goes over to see. “What do you want?” she says to Willey. He is the most wounded of us all. He has lost everything from the neck down. He has lost even more than me. He is just a head. The war has taken everything.
He clicks three times. The nurse knows he wants the stuff sucked out of his lungs, so she does it. Garcia’s radio is playing in the background. She slurps all of the stuff out, then walks out of the room. Now Briggs is getting the whiskey bottle out of his top drawer, taking big gulps and cursing out the rats that are still running under the radiator.
Someone please help me understand this thing, this terrible thing that’s happening to me. I’m a brave man and I want to be brave even with this wound. I want to understand how I can live with it and with everything else that happened over there, the dead corporal from Georgia and all the other crazy things.
I find a place on the side of the hospital where the old men sit. The grass is very green and they feed the birds from their wheelchairs. They are the old men from the First World War, I am sure of that, and I sit next to them and feed the birds too. I just want to slow down, the whole thing has been moving much too fast, like some wild spinning top, and now I am trying to catch my breath, I am trying to figure out what this whole terrible thing is about.
I read the paper every morning and it always says the war is going on and the president is sending more troops, and I still tell people, whoever asks me, that I believe in the war. Didn’t I prove it by going back a second time? I look them all right in the eye and tell them that we are winning and the boys’ morale is high. But more and more what I tell them and what I am feeling are becoming two different things. I feel them tearing, tearing at my whole being, and I don’t want to talk about the war anymore. I feed the birds and the squirrels. I want things to be simple again, things are just too confusing. The hospital is like the whole war all over again.
The aides, the big tall black guys who spit and sit on the toilet bowls all night, they’re doing it again, they’re picking up the paralyzed drunks from the hallways, they’re wheeling them along the halls to the rooms. Now I see them strapping the men into big lifts, hoisting the drunken bodies back into their beds. And the aides are laughing, they’re always laughing the way people laugh at a sideshow, it’s all pretty funny to them. We are like a show of puppets dancing on strings for them, dancing to maddening music. They’re wheeling all the guys in from the halls because it’s late and it’s time for all of the bodies to be put back into the beds, for all the tubes to be hooked up, and the drip of the piss bags to start all over again.
There’s a train in the Bronx, somewhere out over the Harlem River, and it sounds so good, it sounds warm and wonderful like the heater back home, like the Long Island train that I used to hear as a kid. Pat, the new guy, is crying for help. He’s puking into the cup again and he’s cursing out everybody, he’s cursing the place and the nurses, the doctors. He’s asking me if I still have my Bible and he’s laughing real loud now, he’s laughing so loud the other men are telling him to shut up, to be quiet and let them go to sleep. It’s a madhouse, it’s a crazy house, it’s a wild zoo, and we’re the animals, we’re the animals all neatly tucked into these beds, waking up every morning puking at the green walls and smelling the urine on the floor. We’re hurting and we’re praying that we can get out of this place. Somebody, give us back our bodies!
And each day I train in an exercise room that is very crowded with broken men, bodies being bent and twisted, put up on the parallel bars. Our therapists, Jimmy and Dick, train us hard. We put on braces and crawl on the floor. We’re pissing in our pants and crawling into the bathtub. We’re jumping up and down the curb, learning how to use our wheelchairs. There is a big wheel in the corner and they’re strapping a puny guy with glasses to it. I’m watching the clock and the kid is trying to spin the big wheel around. There are machines like the wheel all over the place, and there’s pain on all the faces. Some of us are trying to laugh, we’re talking about the beer that comes into the hospital in the brown paper bags. But you cannot mistake the pain. The kid with the long hair is in the hallway again, the kid who looks in and never does anything but look in.
Now I’m grabbing the weights, twenty-five-pound weights, I’m grabbing them and lifting them up and down, up and down, until my shoulders ache, until I can’t lift anymore. I’m still lifting them even after that, I’m still lifting them and Jimmy is talking about his model airplanes and then he and Dick are lifting me up to the high bar. There are newly invented machines sold to the hospital by the government to make the men well, to take all the Willeys and the Garcias and make them well again, to fix these broken bodies. There are machines that make you stand again and machines that fix your hands again, but the only thing is that when it’s all over, when the guys are pulled down from the machines, unstrapped from them, it’s the same body, the same shattered broken man that went up on the rack moments before, and this is what we are all beginning to live with, this is what the kid standing in the hallway is saying with his eyes.
It’s early in the afternoon. I’m standing on my braces, holding on to the parallel bars. My mother and little sister have just come through the doorway. It is the first chance for them to see me try to stand again. My mother is frightened, you can tell by the look on her face, and my sister is standing next to her trying to smile. They are holding each other’s hands.
My legs are shaking in terrible spasms. They’re putting thick straps around my waist and around my legs and now my arms start to shake furiously. My mother and sister are still standing in the hallway. They haven’t decided to come into the room yet. Jimmy is strapping my arms along the pole and my big oversized blue hospital pants are falling down below my waist. My rear end is sticking out and Jimmy is smiling, looking over to my mother in the corner.
“See,” says Jimmy, “he’s standing.”
I start throwing up all over the place, all over the blue hospital shirt and onto the floor, just below the machine. Jimmy quickly undoes the straps and puts me back in the chair. My sister and my mother are clutching each other, holding real tight to each other’s hands.
“It’s really a great machine,” Jimmy says. “We have a couple more coming in real soon.”
I turn the chair toward the window and look out across the Harlem River to where the cars are going over the bridge like ants.
3
FOR ME it began in 1946 when I was born on the Fourth of July. The whole sky lit up in a tremendous fireworks display and my mother told me the doctor said I was a real firecracker. Every birthday after that was something the whole country celebrated. It was a proud day to be born on.
I hit a home run my first time at bat in the Massapequa Little League, and I can still remember my Mom and Dad and all the rest of the kids going crazy as I rounded the bases on seven errors and slid into home a hero. We lost the game to the Midgets that night, 22 to 7, and I cried all the way home. It was a long time ago, but sometimes I can still hear them shouting out in front of Pete’s house on Hamilton Avenue. There was Bobby Zimmer, the tall kid from down the street, Kenny and Pete, little Tommy Law, and my best friend Richie Castiglia, who lived across from us on Lee Place.
Baseball was good to me and I played it all I could. I got this baseball mitt when I was seven. I had to save up my allowance for it and cash in some soda bottles. It was a cheap piece of shit, but it seemed pretty nice, I mean it seemed beautiful to me before Bobby and some of the other guys tore the hell out of it.
