Danny

In a hospital for contagious diseases, Camden, New Jersey, 1948-49

And other places at around that time

Danny could not remember actually going to the hospital.  He remembered being there, of course.  He couldn’t figure it out, though.  He didn’t feel sick except for a sore throat that seemed to have closed in increments until swallowing became uncomfortable, then difficult, then painful.  He could handle that.  He hadn’t even cried.  Not once.  And what was all that grown up chatter over his head about something called diphtheria and why did he have to stay in bed?  That everybody told him to stay in bed and lay there quietly seemed a little unreasonable considering that he was the only one in the entire ward.  Isolation, they called it.  People – masked and robed – came to poke and prod, but there was no one to talk to.

** 

“I seem to remember you asking me to tell you some more about my mother.  She was a fun woman.  Always telling jokes.  She had a real crowd of girlfriends.  They would stop over every morning and have coffee with her.  A couple of them were on welfare so they didn’t work anyhow.  But she worked every day as a cook at the hospital that I was in when I was a little kid.  I was telling you about that.”

**

He didn’t know much about hospitals, but he knew that sometimes people went in one way and came out another.  He’d heard stories.  Sometimes the endings were good, sure, but not that often.  They couldn’t fool him.  Danny wasn’t even sick and he had no intention of staying in that ward all by himself.  He wasn’t dead yet.  No angels he’d ever heard of wore peaked caps and stiff, white uniforms.  Hospitals were not Heaven.  Angels, even if they were utterly silent, must at least be good company.  They had to be.  Maybe if he found someone to talk to, he would feel safe.  “Contagious” was in the same category as “diphtheria” – he understood neither, and so neither had anything to do with him.

**

“And I remember when my mother left us.  There was a terrible fight and name calling and all of that and everybody was in tears and everything and I remember seeing my mother going around the corner.  She was leaving with my brother ‘cause he was from her first marriage and she took him with her.  I just felt dejected because she didn’t want to take me.  It took a long time to feel that she liked me at all.  I remember that I was in my twenties before I even started really, really liking her.”

**

It must have been assumed by everyone but Danny that if Danny had been told not to get out of bed, then he would not get out of bed.  Someone came to feed him, to take away his tray, to take his temperature and for no other reason.  But to Danny, his imprisonment inside his room could not stand.  It was a ridiculous rule and so arbitrary that, surely no one would care if he stepped out for just a moment several times each day as long as he was in his bed for meals.

There was a girl in the room down the hall.  Danny never said if she was a pretty girl or a nice girl.  Those things didn’t matter at the time.  She lay in an iron lung.  Though daunted by the sight of that contraption, it did not stop him.  He went into her room to have someone to talk to.  And so they talked for no other reason than that if they were not together, each would have been alone.  It made sense.  Everything made sense except their being in the hospital in the first place, one to a ward.

**

“But my father never knew how to manage money or anything so we lived a horrible life.  Not a horrible life, but it was a poor life with him.  He would do stupid things, like…. He played pool all the time and gambled a lot.  He had no other vices that I know of.  Well, he had his girlfriends.  I used to meet them.  He used to stay at the pool hall half the night and come home and bring us sandwiches from the pool hall and wake us up.  We never had much of anything.  Different people used to take care of us while he worked.  I remember at Christmas time, we never got hardly anything from him, but we always knew to go to my mother’s house.  She would always have tons of things for us.  Especially clothes and things, ‘cause we always really needed those.”

**

In the fashion of institutions towards humanity, controls develop where nothing previously existed, like maggots in a cesspool.  Demands are made on the human character that would mold that character into shapes not inherent to it.  Hospitals subdue with the weight of impending cure or premature death and with the assumption of superior knowledge of what is best.  The cold efficiency with which its staff must function seemed always out of character with its presumed purpose.  The patient became the pawn.

**

“I lived with my father and my youngest brother for about two or three years and my youngest brother got sick and he went to live with my mother.  As usual, I felt out of place because I felt that no one wanted me anymore, you know?  And my father wasn’t that responsible.  He wasn’t a responsible person.  And finally, after about six or seven months, my mother took me, too.  They hated one another and we were forbidden to see him when we lived with her and when we lived with him, we were forbidden to see her.  It was just a mess.  It was just full of turmoil and you really didn’t know where your allegiances lay.”

**

Eventually, though, Danny had been missed and he discovered that for breaking even the most absurd of rules called for punishment both swift and sure.  No one said anything when he was rushed out of his friend’s room and down the corridor to his own room – his own ward.  No one said anything as he was placed back in his bed.  Nor was anything said when the nurse walked doggedly but speedily out of the ward and returned with a strait jacket.  Danny was thus imprisoned in himself in his bed in his ward in a hospital where he suspected that he had to keep still to die.  To keep still, then, was out of the question and if none of them would talk to him, it was all the more important that he talk to someone else.  Someone elsewhere.

**

“I can see her laughing now.  Like sometimes when she used to get really tickled, I mean REALLY tickled, she would start laughing so hard she would fall to the floor and start rolling around and holding her stomach and tears would be streaming out of her eyes and she would be gasping for breath! Everybody would just whoop when she started laughing, but you really have to stop after a point because she would absolutely go berserk laughing.”

**

What seems sensible to the madman is the very thing that makes him mad.  What seems sensible to a child keeps the world sane, but nobody listens to children.  Danny in his strait jacket got out of bed, probably in the same manner in which he got into the hospital:  he didn’t know how.  And so the boy in a strait jacket kept his appointment with a girl in an iron lung and they went on talking.

**

“I stole a candy bar once.  From the five and dime.  Probably the first time I ever stole anything in my life.  Anyhow, I put it in my pocket.  I was wearing knickers at the time. I hated them.  Knickers.  Well, I got caught.  I guess some guy saw me, but of course, I denied it.  Anyway, he searched me and the candy bar wasn’t there.  Later, I found a hole in my pocket.  The candy bar was in my pants leg all the time.”

**

The next time Danny got caught outside of isolation, he expected the same treatment that he had received the first time:  the silent treatment.  He got it.  But the thing that made this time different from the last was that the punishment escalated to fit this new crime.  He must not get out of bed.  He could not get out of bed.  He must not move.  He could not move.  His wrists were lashed to either side of the bed with leather restraints.  He could not think what the problem could be.  It occurred to him that it was not that he had been in his friend’s room, but that when they came to his ward for him, they had expected to find him dead, not merely out.  Somehow, this was reasonable.  They could not have hoped to find him cured.  He was not sick.  Or, perhaps someone had finally had something to say to him and been inconvenienced to find him gone.  Next time, he would wait.

**

“So, meanwhile, my father died and his funeral was a riot because nobody cried.  Everybody was sitting there just staring.  And I…. I really dug the man as my father, but I couldn’t cry at his funeral…”

**

One night, Danny was awakened by what he took to be a moan.  He lay awake and listened.  Sure enough, somewhere down the hall, someone was moaning, quietly but persistently.  If this was what he had been waiting for, if Death was a moaning from down the hall, then he would have nothing to do with it.  In. a moment of terror, just when the moan turn, careening, into a scream, Danny found himself out of bed – he did not know how – and running, bent double, down the hall to the nurse’s station that he had had to sneak by every day on his way to his friend’s room.  He did not know why he followed the nurse to whence the screams still came, but he ran toward the screams with the nurse and stood in the doorway, breathless, as she went into the room.  There was someone in one of the beds.  Like him, whoever lay there was alone among dozens of empty beds.  And there was blood everywhere.  Was she dead?  Had it not been his time?  The nurse left the room and, afraid to be alone there, he returned to his own room.

It did not seem long before the nurse came to him.  

“A woman is different from a man,” she told him.  “She can have a baby grow inside her.  Every month, her body gets ready for the baby to grow inside her stomach, but if the baby does not come, her body will go back to normal again.  That is what happened to the girl down the hall.  Do you understand?”

He was astonished.  Someone had spoken to him, even though he had no idea what she was talking about.  Someone had spoken to him besides his friend in the iron lung and whoever it had been who first told him that he must stay in bed.  The next time would be on the day they all said goodbye.

**

“…but I remember my father’s death hit me like a week after the funeral.  I was on my way home from school and I started crying.  But…uh…I just went on and I went up to my room and locked the door.  I stayed there about three hours weeping and weeping and weeping and weeping, you know?  I don’t remember the outcome.  Whether I was discovered or not.  That’s how that goes.

“I’m rambling.  I guess you noticed that.  You know, you can think up things here and there.  Change names.”

 

[for Daniel Alexander Joseph Martin de Porres Sloan, who taught me to dance and who came to my 21st birthday party dressed as the Easter bunny]