After a couple of days he phoned me. “Jesus Christ, they’re killing me! I’ve never seen a place like this. No doctors anywhere and nurses don’t give a damn and just these fruit orderlies running around like snobs and happy that everybody’s sick and dying. What the fuck is this place? They’re carrying the dead out by the dozens! They mix up the food trays! They won’t let you sleep! They keep you awake all night fucking around with nothing and then when the sun comes up, they wake you up again. They throw you a wet rag and tell you to get ready for breakfast and then breakfast, if you want to call it that, arrives around noontime. I never knew that people could be so cruel to the sick and dying! Get me outa here, Hank! I beg you, pal, I beg you, let me out of this pit of hell! Let me die in my apartment, let me die with a chance!”
“Whatcha want me to do?”
“Well, I asked to get out and they won’t give me my release. They’ve got my clothes. So you just come on down here with your car. You come up to my bed and we’ll bust out!”
“Don’t you think we better ask Mona?”
“Mona don’t know shit. Since I can’t fuck her anymore she don’t care. Everything about me swelled up but my dick.”
“Mother nature is sometimes cruel.”
“Yeah, yeah. Now listen, you comin’ on down?”
“See you in about 25 minutes.”
“O.K.,” he said.
I knew the place, having been there 2 or 3 times myself. I found a parking spot near the entrance building and walked on in. I had the ward number. It was the stink of hell all over again. I had the strange feeling that I would die in that building some day. Maybe not. I hoped not.
I found Mick. The oppressive helplessness hung over everything.
“Mick?”
“Help me up,” he said.
I got him to his feet. He looked about the same.
“Let’s go.”
We went padding down the hall. He had on one of those chickenshit gowns, untied in back because the nurses wouldn’t tie them for you, because the nurses didn’t care about anything except catching themselves some fat young subnormal doctor. And although the patients seldom saw the doctors, the nurses did—in the elevators, pinchy pinchy! oh hee hee hee!—with the smell of death everywhere.
The elevator door pulled open. There sat a fat young boy with pimples sucking at a popsicle. He looked at Mick in his gown.
“Do you have a release, sir? You have to have a release to get out of here. My instructions are . . . ”
“I’m on my own release, punk! Now you move this thing down to the street floor before I jam that popsicle up your ass!”
“You heard the man, son,” I told him.
We moved on down, smartly, and straight through the exit building where nobody said a word. I helped him into the car. In 30 minutes he was back at his place.
“Oh fuck!” said Mona. “What have you done, Hank?”
“He wanted it. I believe a man should have his own wishes as much as possible.”
“But there isn’t any help for him here either.”
I went out, bought him a quart of beer and left them in there together to fight it out.
A couple of days later he made the vet’s hospital. Then he was back. Then he was at the hospital. Then he was back. I’d see him sitting on the steps.
“Jesus, I could sure use a beer!”
“How about it, Mona?”
“All right, goddamn it, but he shouldn’t!”
I’d go get him a quart and he’d light up all over. We’d go inside and he’d show me photos taken when he’d first met Mona in France. He was in his uniform. He’d met her on a train. Something about a train. He’d gotten her a seat on the train when the brass had wanted to kick her off. Something like that. The photos were of 2 young and beautiful people. I could not believe that they were the same people. My guts hurt like murder. They gave me some kummel they said Mick couldn’t have. I made fast work of the kummel. “You were a very handsome man, Mick.” There he sat, puffed out of belief, all chance gone. “And Mona. What a babe! I still love you!” I said. Mick really liked that. He wanted me to know that he’d caught a good one. I think it was about a week later I saw Mona outside the apartment house.
“Mick died last night,” she said.
I just kept looking at her. “Shit, I don’t know what to say. Even all puffed up like that I didn’t think he would die.”
“I know,” she said. “And we both liked you very much.”
I couldn’t handle it. I turned around and walked into the apartment house entrance, right past apt. #1 where we had had so many good nights. He wasn’t in there anymore. He was gone like last year’s Christmas or an old pair of shoes. What shit. I made my way up the stairs and started in. The Coward. I drank, I drank, I drank, I drank. Escapism. Drunkards are escapists, they say, unable to face reality.
Later, I heard, she went to Denver to live with a sister.
And the writers keep writing and the artists keep painting but it doesn’t mean too much.
I was always rather indifferent to politics, but before the election, I couldn’t help but see some of the fools while turning toward the race results. Horserace results, I mean. They all said Nixon was in. Which I felt was a little worse than Humphrey, but when Wallace won by a landslide I was as stupefied as the next. And when he was sworn into office, things began to happen. Le May stated that unless the war were won within a month or the enemy surrendered he might have to H-bomb N. Vietnam, maybe China. Maybe Russia. “A man’s got to be a MAN!” he stated. “He’s got to show his guts! Old Teddy Roosevelt knew how to handle bums!” Wallace simply grinned. He grinned simply. “Atta boy, baby!” he said. “Wow!”
They set up machine guns in the black districts and rapidly began solving the housing problem. “I’m not a racist,” said Wallace, “but I figure if a man is poor or black, it’s his own fault.”
Le May grinned, “Yeh.”
Layoffs began everywhere. One man had to do the work of two at half the wages of one man. The relief rolls were closed down, old age pensions terminated. The police force was tripled, new concentration camps and jails were built. At any hour of the day or night you could hear machinegun fire. Blacks were only allowed on the streets between sunup and sundown, and they were restricted to designated areas. An underground product hit the market: WHITEWASH, a white coloring to cover black. A white man’s wig and a bit of WHITEWASH and you had a bit of a better chance. But most Negroes refused to use it. The Mexican and Indian population received similar treatment, though not as harsh.
There were 30 million unemployed and aged wandering the streets. When a man or woman or child fell dead of starvation or were murdered by the police or troops, they had what were called “A” cars—“A” for assholes who didn’t know HOW to survive, baby. The “A” cars patrolled the streets constantly, working something on the order of street sweeper machines. Only instead of sucking up leaves and paper, various trash, the “A” cars sucked up the newly dead bodies of women, children, the aged, and various unfortunate men. “We must keep our cities sanitary,” President Wallace stated. The bodies were burned just like the books in the library. Not all the books in the library were burned, but a good 85 percent. A good 95 percent of paintings and statuary were destroyed as being “decadent to a good American Society.” All editors of left-wing newspapers were tortured before hundreds of thousands of spectators in the baseball and football stadiums of America.