Naked (10 page)

If the hospital had any kind of volunteer-training program, I never knew about it. Neither did I meet anyone else introducing
themselves as volunteers. I met briefly with the coordinator, who studied a list of absent orderlies before saying, “Napier’s
out sick, you can fill in for him. Report to Building Seven and ask them to send you up to Banes.”

I was led to an infirmary, where a nurse named Banes paired me up with Clarence Poole, a plum-colored orderly who carried
a transistor radio upon his person at all times. Clarence’s nose lay practically flat against his cheek, causing him to look
like someone from a Picasso painting. In an effort to divert attention from his face, he spent a great deal of time maintaining
his hairstyle, a luminous Afro the size of a medicine ball. It was Clarence’s job to show me the ropes, and my first order
of business was to accompany him to the snack machines, where he bought himself an RC Cola and a bag of salted peanuts. I
watched as he then proceeded to stuff the nuts down the neck of the bottle. He did it with great concentration, as if he were
force-feeding a goose. After explaining that the mixture needed a few minutes to steep, he took a seat and began fluffing
out his hair with a long-handled pick. He had just raised the bottle to his lips when Nurse Banes handed us our first assignment.
Tucking his radio into the back pocket of his uniform, Clarence led me across the grounds to an ivy-covered building that,
except for the bars covering the windows, resembled the sort of dormitory one might find on a respectable college campus.
Up close these buildings were quite nice until you went inside. This was a women’s ward, and the first thing I noticed was
the stench. It was an aroma I grew to associate with all locked wards: urine, sweat, cigarette smoke, dirty hair, and cheap
disinfectant, all marinated in an intense, relentless heat that never varied with the seasons. The women lay on iron cots
and called out to us, begging for attention and cigarettes, as Clarence opened the door. “I have information that can save
lives!” someone shouted. Everyone spoke at the same time: “She made me pee myself,” “Tell the nigger I control all the music
on his radio,” “Call the embassy and have them ship the olives by plane!”

Clarence would say only, “Later, baby,” speaking as if these were young girls waiting outside the stage door for his autograph.
He checked the numbers on the cots and paused before an elderly woman who shifted fitfully, her shoulder-length hair the same
muted yellow as her soiled pillowcase. He prepared the gurney and unstrapped her harness. “I’ll take her up top and you get
the feet,” he said. “Come on, granny, you’re going for a ride.” When the sheet was lifted, I was shocked to discover that
this woman was naked. I had never before seen a naked woman and hesitated just long enough for her to lurch forward and sink
her remaining three teeth into my forearm. The woman then twisted her head and growled, tugging at my flesh as if she were
a bob-cat or wolverine, some wild creature used to hunting down its meals. Clarence raised his radio and then, thinking of
the possible damage, removed one of his shoes and rapped the woman across the head until she let loose and sank back onto
her pillow. Her teeth had broken the skin, but Clarence reassured me that he had seen a lot worse. A tetanus shot, some iodine,
no big deal.

Our day proceeded, everything from a mongoloid teenager with an ingrown toenail to a self-proclaimed swami who had fashioned
himself a turban of urine-soaked towels. Clarence and I carted them to the infirmary and later returned them to their wards.
“Shipping and delivery is all it is,” he said. “That’s all there is to it except when they got shit on their hands and smear
up the cart.” The patients moaned, whimpered, and shrieked. They cackled and hooted and drooled in a drug-induced stupor.
Clarence took it all in stride, but I had never imagined such a world. A bedsore would eventually heal, but what about the
patient’s more substantial problems? A regular hospital, with its cheerful waiting room and baskets of flowers, offered some
degree of hope. Here, there were no get-well cards or helium balloons, only a pervasive feeling of doom. Fate or accident
had tripped these people up and broken them apart. It seemed to me that something like this might happen to anyone, regardless
of their fine homes or decent education. Pitch one too many fits or spend too much time brushing your hair, and that might
be the first sign. There could be something hidden away in any of our brains, quietly lurking there. Just waiting.

“Spare me the details, Dr. Freud,” Lisa said, sitting in the front seat of the car as our mother drove us home that afternoon.
She had spent her day on the maternity ward, offering patients a selection of ladies’ magazines and paperback novels. “God,
I hope I never get that fat. Some of them looked like they’d swallowed a portable TV.” She wore a crisp red-and-white-striped
uniform and studied her reflection in the rearview mirror, rehearsing her smile in hopes of meeting a cute intern. Lisa didn’t
understand what I was talking about, but my mother did. Every night, rattling the ice cubes at the bottom of her highball
glass, my mother knew exactly what I was talking about. Health, be it mental or physical, had never been her family’s strong
suit. The Leonard family coat of arms pictured a bottle of scotch and a tumor.

After his shock treatments my grandfather returned home, where he spent the rest of his life coring apples and baking pies.
His children gone and his wife hypoglycemic, there was no one around to eat the pies, but that did not deter him. He baked
as if the entire U.S. Marine Corps were stationed outside his front door, drumming their forks against tin plates and shouting
in unison, “Dessert! Dessert!” Four pies in the oven and he’d be rolling out flag-sized sheets of dough for the subsequent
crusts. Twice a year we visited my grandparents’ house, where I recall pies cooling on every available surface: the window
sills, the television set, even the dining-room chairs. The man never said a word, but neither did he take another drink.
He just baked, dying, finally, of a stress-related heart attack.

I worked at Dix Hill all that summer and then again the following year until, at age sixteen, I took a paying job as a dishwasher
at a local cafeteria that had a practice of hiring outpatients. These were both current and former Dix Hill residents, grown
men who would occasionally weep in panic at the sight of a burned casserole tray. They’d get behind and take to hiding in
the stockroom or, even worse, in the walk-in freezer.

I went off to college and volunteered for class credit at a nearby state hospital. At Dix Hill I had functioned as an orderly
without keys. I’d had responsibilities, whereas here I was nothing more than a human cigarette machine. Two evenings a week
I would visit the fetid, stagnant ward and make small talk with women who wanted nothing to do with me. I was studying Italian
at the time and would attempt to practice my verb conjugation with a paranoid Tuscan named Paola, a patient in her late forties
with a perpetual black eye and a pronounced mustache. Some nights Paola could be very charming and helpful, while others she
seemed truly possessed, overturning the television set, attacking her fellow patients, and tossing lit cigarettes at the nurses.
I might spend a few pleasant hours with someone and return three days later to find she had no memory of it. At Dorothea Dix
I went from one ward to the next, while here I spent all my time with the same group of people, week after week, and none
of them seemed to be getting any better. LaDonna still sat in front of the television set, boasting of her personal relationship
with Lee Majors. Charlotte continued to whisper into a plastic cup and hold it to her stomach in order to communicate with
what she identified as her alien fetus; it was maddening. I wanted to slam their heads against the wall and scream, “Stop
acting like an idiot and get better, god-damnit!” Then I’d notice the bruises covering their bodies and realize that someone
had already tried that approach.

On my last night at the hospital, a fellow volunteer was taken hostage by a wiry, manic patient who held a knife to the woman’s
throat and demanded freedom. The police were summoned and gathered in the snow-covered yard to negotiate her release.

“I want a girl,” the man shouted. “A prettier girl than this one. I want the prettiest girl you can find and I want her dressed
in a bikini. Then I want you to put us up in a motel in Akron for… I’ll let you know when we’re ready to come out. Then I
want a trailer with curtains and a water bed and a truck with four new tires. And a winter coat with a zipper instead of buttons.
And I want an outdoor grill, the kind with a hood.”

The police captain agreed to all the demands, signaling to the four officers who were creeping up behind the wishful patient.
“And I’m going to need a fish tank. And a blow-dryer for my hair, and then I want a set of matching goblets and some nice
mugs for my coffee.”

The officers took him from behind, and even as they dragged him toward the waiting police car, he continued to voice more
requests.

I returned to Dix Hill ten years after I’d first volunteered. A friend of mine had been dating a man who had turned spooky
on her. They’d been eating in a popular Raleigh seafood restaurant when he’d taken a sudden urge to pelt the neighboring table
with a side order of hush puppies. The manager was called, and a fight ensued. It turned out that this fellow had been institutionalized
once before, at a state hospital outside Pittsburgh.

A guard led us through a familiar series of locked doors, and the young man emerged. His face was bloated from the drugs,
and his tongue protruded from his mouth, thick and lathered as a bar of soap. My friend was hoping he might be cured with
bed rest and willpower.

“The restaurant manager had it coming,” she said, taking his hand. “That bastard will get his soon enough; the important thing
is that you’re getting better.” She petted his bruised knuckles. “You’re getting better now, Danny. Can you hear me? You’re
getting better.”

Shortly before I graduated from eighth grade, it was announced that, come fall, our county school system would adopt a policy
of racial integration by way of forced busing. My Spanish teacher broke the news in a way she hoped might lead us to a greater
understanding of her beauty and generosity.

“I remember the time I was at the state fair, standing in line for a Sno-Kone,” she said, fingering the kiss curls that framed
her squat, compact face. “And a little colored girl ran up and tugged at my skirt, asking if she could touch my hair. ‘Just
once,’ she said. ‘Just one time for good luck.’

“Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but my hair means a lot to me.” The members of my class nodded to signify that their
hair meant a lot to them as well. They inched forward in their seats, eager to know where this story might be going. Perhaps
the little Negro girl was holding a concealed razor blade. Maybe she was one of the troublemakers out for a fresh white scalp.

I sat marveling at their naiveté. Like all her previous anecdotes, this woman’s story was headed straight up her ass.

“I checked to make sure she didn’t have any candy on her hands, and then I bent down and let this little colored girl touch
my hair.” The teacher’s eyes assumed the dewy, far-away look she reserved for such Hallmark moments. “Then this little fudge-colored
girl put her hand on my cheek and said, ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I wish I could be white and pretty like you.’” She paused, positioning
herself on the edge of the desk as though she were posing for a portrait the federal government might use on a stamp commemorating
gallantry. “The thing to remember,” she said, “is that more than anything in this world, those colored people wish they were
white.”

I wasn’t buying it. This was the same teacher who when announcing her pregnancy said, “I just pray that my first-born is a
boy. I’ll have a boy and then maybe later I’ll have a girl, because when you do it the other way round, there’s a good chance
the boy will turn out to be funny.”

“‘Funny,’ as in having no arms and legs?” I asked.

“That,” the teacher said, “is far from funny. That is tragic, and you, sir, should have your lips sewn shut for saying such
a cruel and ugly thing. When I say ‘funny,’ I mean funny as in…” She relaxed her wrist, allowing her hand to dangle and flop.
“I mean ‘funny’ as in
that
kind of funny.” She minced across the room, but it failed to illustrate her point, as this was more or less her natural walk,
a series of gamboling little steps, her back held straight, giving the impression she was balancing something of value atop
her empty head. My seventh-period math teacher did a much better version. Snatching a purse off the back of a student’s chair,
he would prance about the room, batting his eyes and blowing kisses at the boys seated in the front row. “So fairy nice to
meet you,” he’d say.

Fearful of drawing any attention to myself, I hooted and squawked along with the rest of the class, all the while thinking,
That’s me he’s talking about.
If I was going to make fun of people, I had to expect a little something in return, that seemed only fair. Still, though,
it bothered me that they’d found such an easy way to get a laugh. As entertainers, these teachers were nothing, zero. They
could barely impersonate themselves. “Look at you!” my second-period gym teacher would shout, his sneakers squealing against
the basketball court. “You’re a group of ladies, a pack of tap-dancing queers.”

The other boys shrugged their shoulders or smiled down at their shoes. They reacted as if they had been called Buddhists or
vampires; sure, it was an insult, but no one would ever mistake them for the real thing. Had they ever chanted in the privacy
of their backyard temple or slept in a coffin, they would have felt the sting of recognition and shared my fear of discovery.

I had never done anything with another guy and literally prayed that I never would. As much as I fantasized about it, I understood
that there could be nothing worse than making it official. You’d seen them on television from time to time, the homosexuals,
maybe on one of the afternoon talk shows. No one ever came out and called them a queer, but you could just tell by their voices
as they flattered the host and proclaimed great respect for their fellow guests. These were the celebrities never asked about
their home life, the comedians running scarves beneath their toupees or framing their puffy faces with their open palms in
an effort to eliminate the circles beneath their eyes. “The poor man’s face lift,” my mother called it. Regardless of their
natty attire, these men appeared sweaty and desperate, willing to play the fool in exchange for the studio applause they seemed
to mistake for love and acceptance. I saw something of myself in their mock weary delivery, in the way they crossed their
legs and laughed at their own jokes. I pictured their homes: the finicky placement of their throw rugs and sectional sofas,
the magazines carefully fanned just so upon the coffee tables with no wives or children to disturb their order. I imagined
the pornography hidden in their closets and envisioned them powerless and sobbing as the police led them away in shackles,
past the teenage boy who stood bathed in the light of the television news camera and shouted, “That’s him! He’s the one who
touched my hair!”