The nurse was nosy and wanted to know why someone hit me on the head with a shovel. She seemed nice, though, and I liked her hair, so I agreed to tell her, but later, after breakfast. The food tray was sitting right there in front of me and not even a grade-three concussion and 23 stitches could keep me from that creamy pile of eggs, toast, jelly, butter, coffee, cranberry juice and, holy fucking shit, an orange cut up in juicy little pieces.
Delicious. Every bit of it. Every crumb. Every drop. Every speck. The orange brought me back pre-street, when I had a job and money and a bed and shipped friends and family members $50 boxes of Florida oranges for Christmas. I only gave the very best — honeybells, sometimes called Minneola tangelos, the greatest citrus in the world. The orange at the hospital was good, too — no complaints — but it wasn’t a honeybell. I’d probably never eat another one of those, but no use feeling bad about it.
I was napping when the nurse returned. I think she woke me up. The mattress was so comfortable, the sheets so smooth, that even waking up felt good. What a great bed and more food was coming pretty soon, too! I wanted to cry because I was so happy, but I’d have to do that later, not in front of the nurse.
It turned out she wasn’t really a nurse. She was from a social services agency or she was a volunteer who went around trying make messed-up people like me feel better. Either way, I liked her.
So, I sat up a little, but I didn’t start talking right away. I stopped myself because I needed to be coherent, like a normal person. I needed to speak in a logical fashion and explain why some guy hit me over the head with a shovel. That’s what she wanted to know, right? I didn’t want to go off on a bunch of stupid tangents and forget what I was talking about and embarrass myself.
When I was a newspaper writer, I learned the easiest way to start a story was to tell it chronologically, starting as late as possible and then ending it as soon as possible. That way you don’t make people read a bunch of stupid shit that they don’t need to read.
The ending, she already knew, some jerk hitting me with the shovel, but the beginning wasn’t so clear. It would be boring to start when I was a kid — and who cares about my childhood, anyway? Should I start when I was in college? Should I start when I got my first job? That was too long ago, so I decided it would be better to start the day I lost my job, the day I went completely bonkers, the day I don’t ever want to speak about.
For her, though, I’ll try.
The boss called me in his office, told me to sit down, and asked me if I wanted a cookie. Who doesn’t want a cookie? I ate and listened to him talk about the newspaper business going down the drain and that the stuff I wrote about was all icing, but they didn’t need the icing, anymore, because the cake was gone. Then, he said I was a great guy and a hard worker, but if I wanted to stay employed I would have to write about the other stuff, the more important stuff, the meat, the potatoes, the murders and the house fires, the festival previews and the business expansions.
No more icing. No more cake.
Does it matter why this made me so angry? I guess so. I mean, I knew I still had a job, but just not the same job. But, wow, I got mad. I was outraged. I was apoplectic. I was lava burning down the mountain! All those years, I worked just to get the privilege of writing about what I wanted to write about and now it was gone and I’d have to go back and do what I did when I was young and stupid and worked like a fucking dog 15 hours a day.
The boss asked me if this was okay, if I needed some time to think about it, and that’s when I lunged across his desk and started choking him. He had a thick, greasy neck, so it was hard to get a grip, but I did and I kept squeezing. The people in the newsroom could see everything because his office had glass walls, so another guy ran in and pulled me off him and so I had to choke that guy, instead, but my hands were bleeding and my eyeglasses were broken so I gave up. I sat there in the boss’s office and the police came and took me away and I never went back to the newsroom again, not even to collect my personal belongings from the fart-stinking cubicle I sat in for so many years.
I told the social worker/volunteer that more bad stuff happened after that because you don’t lose everything just because of one thing — not even a big one like attempted murder — but it would be nice if we could talk about the rest of it later because it was getting towards lunch and I didn’t want to miss that and, after I ate, I wanted to spend some quality time sleeping in this truly spectacular bed. But, before she left, I told her that her hair was the best hair I’d ever seen and she laughed and said she’d be back tomorrow after breakfast. I told her I’d like that and I’d even give her my breakfast orange if she wanted it and that was a really big deal because nobody in the world loves oranges more than me.
The truth was, I wanted her to leave. I didn’t want to talk to her about living on the street and having to find food in the trash, beg for money, find weird places to crap and get excited just to take a shower with deodorant soap. I didn’t want her to know that the guy hit me with a shovel because I was trespassing in his yard, squatting between a couple of bougainvillea bushes, taking a crap in what I mistakenly thought was privacy.
As good as the bed was, I didn’t sleep much that night. I dreaded being discharged in the morning. During the night, amid the hacking and gurgling of my hospital friends, I made a plan to slip out after breakfast. Filling out all the paperwork would be a waste of time, anyway. I didn’t have any medical insurance or even an address. What would be the point? I also didn’t want to see the social worker/volunteer. She was nice, sure, but I’m not, and I wasn’t fooling anyone.
Breakfast was terrific, just fantastic, and I was out of there just as soon as I finished that last chunk of orange — peel, membrane, seeds and all — and used the facilities one last glorious time.
The pounding in my head picked up once I stepped outside. I walked quickly away from the hospital and towards nowhere in particular. The fucking sun was already making me sweat. Welcome home loser, I told myself. Welcome home asshole.
I heard somebody say “excuse me,” but I ignored it because that’s what I do, but then I felt a hand touch my arm, and it was her, the social worker/volunteer. She smiled and apologized for startling me. She was carrying tangerines, in a mesh bag, and she handed them to me and told me to take care of myself and to be careful, and then she left, her hair bobbing as she walked away.
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This article appears in Feb 23 – Mar 2, 2017.