like a car wash, I think, it’s just like a big car wash, and I am being pushed and shoved through with the rest of them. I am being checked out by Tommy and hosed off by the woman. It is all such a neat, quick process. It is an incredible thing to run twenty men through a place like this, to clean out the bodies of twenty paralyzed men, twenty bloated twisted men. It is an incredible feat, a stupendous accomplishment, and Tommy is a master. Now the black woman is drying me off with a big white towel and shoving me back into the hallway.
Oh get me back into the room, get me back away from these people who are walking by me and making believe like all the rest that they don’t know what’s happening here, that they can’t figure out that this whole thing is crazy. Oh God, oh God help me, help me understand this place. There goes the nurse and she’s running down the hall, hitting the rubber mat that throws open the big green metal door with the little windows with the wire in them. Oh nurse please help me nurse, my stomach is beginning to hurt again like it does every time I come out of this place and my head is throbbing, pounding like a drum. I want to get out of this hall where all of you are walking past me. I want to get back into my bed where I can make believe this never happened. I want to go to sleep and forget I ever got up this morning.
I never tell my family when they come to visit about the enema room. I do not tell them what I do every morning with the plastic glove, or about the catheter and the tube in my penis, or the fact that I can’t ever make it hard again. I hide all that from them and talk about the other, more pleasant things, the things they want to hear. I ask Mom to bring me Sunrise at Campobello, the play about the life of Franklin Roosevelt—the great crisis he had gone through when he had been stricken with polio and the comeback he had made, becoming governor, then president of the United States. There are things I am going through here that I know she will never understand.
I feel like a big clumsy puppet with all his strings cut. I learn to balance and twist in the chair so no one can tell how much of me does not feel or move anymore. I find it easy to hide from most of them what I am going through. All of us are like this. No one wants too many people to know how much of him has really died in the war.
At first I felt that the wound was very interesting. I saw it almost as an adventure. But now it is not an adventure any longer. I see it more and more as a terrible thing that I will have to live with for the rest of my life. Nobody wants to know that I can’t fuck anymore. I will never go up to them and tell them I have this big yellow rubber thing sticking in my penis, attached to the rubber bag on the side of my leg. I am afraid of letting them know how lonely and scared I have become thinking about this wound. It is like some kind of numb twilight zone to me. I am angry and want to kill everyone—all the volunteers and the priests and the pretty girls with the tight short skirts. I am twenty-one and the whole thing is shot, done forever. There is no real healing left anymore, everything that is going to heal has healed already and now I am left with the corpse, the living dead man, the man with the numb legs, the man in the wheelchair, the Easter Seal boy, the cripple, the sexlessman, the sexlessman, the man with the numb dick, the man who can’t make children, the man who can’t stand, the man who can’t walk, the angry lonely man, the bitter man with the nightmares, the murder man, the man who cries in the shower.
In one big bang they have taken it all from me, in one clean sweep, and now I am in this place around all the others like me, and though I keep trying not to feel sorry for myself, I want to cry. There is no shortcut around this thing. It is too soon to die even for a man who has died once already.
I try to keep telling myself it is good to still be alive, to be back home. I remember thinking on the ambulance ride to the hospital that this was the Bronx, the place where Yankee Stadium was, where Mickey Mantle played. I think I realized then also that my feet would never touch the stadium grass, ever again; I would never play a game in that place.
* * *
The wards are filthy. The men in my room throw their breadcrumbs under the radiator to keep the rats from chewing on our numb legs during the nights. We tuck our bodies in with the sheets wrapped around us. There are never enough aides to go around on the wards, and constantly there is complaining by the men. The most severely injured are totally dependent on the aides to turn them. They suffer the most and break down with sores. These are the voices that can be heard screaming in the night for help that never comes. Urine bags are constantly overflowing onto the floors while the aides play poker on the toilet bowls in the enema room. The sheets are never changed enough and many of the men stink from not being properly bathed. It never makes any sense to us how the government can keep asking money for weapons and leave us lying in our own filth.
Briggs throws his bread over the radiator.
“There he goes again,” says Garcia. “That goddamn rat’s been there for the last two months.”
Briggs keeps the rats in our room well fed. “It’s a lot better than having the bastards nibble at your toes during the night,” he says with a crazy laugh.
The nurse comes in and Garcia is getting real excited. “I think I pissed in my pants again,” he cries. “Mrs. Waters, I think I pissed in my pants.”
“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