| A Glutton For
Pain by Sam Gridley |
| Sam Gridley's stories have appeared
in Other Voices, Cimarron Review,
Passages North, The Cream City
Review, Epoch,
and a number of other magazines and anthologies. A founding member
of the Working Writers Group in Philadelphia, he has received two
fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts as well as a
Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Each Saturday Mrs. Herbert, with a puzzled frown, hands me last year’s birthday card from her daughter. While I read it aloud and explain what it is, she cranks her head down to study the baseboard like a Terminix man inspecting for insects. Or perhaps she thinks her dreaded muggers will slip in through tiny holes in the wood. By the time I return the card to her dresser, she’s forgotten I’m there. That’s how it goes. Yet this Tuesday an office mate said to me, “It must be so rewarding, sharing your time with old people. I can see why you do it.” “Mm-hmm,” I muttered into my coffee cup. My colleague hasn’t a clue. I volunteer at Cedar Crest nursing home because I’m a glutton for pain. It started when Leann died of bone cancer 13 1⁄2 months ago. Since then our daughter, Lisa, has graduated from high school, mutilated her face with tattoos and pierces, shacked up with a jobless tenth-grade dropout and generally refused to speak to me, maintaining that I don’t understand her lifestyle. A combo wife/daughter loss ought to be enough for any one person, but it seems I need extra suffering, so I donate my Saturdays to the nursing home. There’s a slight personal connection. Leann did some legal work for Cedar Crest. Also, my grandmother spent her last two months there, and her death was far less gruesome than Leann’s high-tech hospital ordeal. At the end with Leann, it seemed that human beings had no role at all, only machines and morphine. So maybe I think of Cedar Crest as the dignified alternative. But I don’t delude myself that I’m making a difference, any more than I did with Leann. Cedar Crest is a well-funded place with plenty of staff and volunteers, and what I do, anybody else could. We wheel the patients outside to see the April sun splash across pale shoots in the tiny garden. We read aloud to the human ruins we’re tending, or try to talk with them. Rarely do they answer. If they speak at all, it’s babble. Now and then they get abusive and punch somebody, which for them—and sometimes for us—is the highlight of the day. This is the dignified alternative? As I watch the patients, I think about how doubly awful it is when you don’t have enough mental function to know it’s awful. Mrs. Herbert reminds me of my grandmother—shoulders so frail and crunched she could be 108 instead of 78, and so paranoid she thinks criminals are crawling through cracks for the express purpose of assaulting her. I try to believe it’s a blessing Leann died before she could reach that state. My co-workers, if they knew my thoughts, might say I’m cynical. Hah. Or a psychiatrist might say I’m depressed. OK, but what does that explain? The episode with Dr. Stern epitomizes it. He was once a famous urologist, well known for his discoveries about a rare disease—something to do with pissing, I suppose, or some precursor to the act. Now Dr. Stern regularly pisses his pants but throws a fit if a staffer tries to diaper him. Perfect retribution, some might say. After all, he got rich off other people’s urinary ills. Dr. Stern requires a wheelchair, not because he can’t walk but because he refuses to. Doesn’t act out like some of the others, but won’t move voluntarily either, so if you want him to come to the cafeteria for lunch—he’s not yet helpless enough to qualify for meals in bed—you have to coax him into a chair and roll him down the hall. This past Saturday, Janet took him out back for a brief spell of sun. Janet is a slim, latté-skinned, 30-something nurse I fantasize about getting to know better. (I realize these feelings are ridiculous, but dreams of a woman’s touch are impossible to give up, even when you’re bald, arthritic-kneed and pushing 50.) After Janet wheeled Dr. Stern through the French doors to the garden, a commotion inside pulled her away. It was some minutes before she remembered the old man, and when she sped back to the doors, she took one look and screamed. I was close by, in Mrs. Herbert’s room, reading her the birthday card for the ninety-seventh time. When I lumbered down the hall to Janet, I saw at once what appalled her—Dr. Stern on top of the garden wall, tilting wildly to and fro, one hand ripping at his crotch and the other flailing in a frantic balancing act. Clad in a flannel pajama top and sweat pants, he made an absurd, fantastical sight. I dashed outside. Janet, gulping down her shriek, came a couple of steps behind. My first thought was to save Janet the shame of losing a patient by horrific accident. Second thought, perhaps, was to demonstrate that I’m not too old for her. At that point, concern for Dr. Stern himself came third. The garden is about 20 feet on a side, hardly more than a townhouse backyard, composed of flower beds, planter boxes, a concrete path and, in these spring months, lots of mud. Because it’s a city yard abutting an alley, it has to be protected so that someone doesn’t break in and steal medical supplies or fulfill Mrs. Herbert’s delusions. Hence the barbed wire strung along the top of the old stone wall—two thin strands that had grabbed Dr. Stern by the groin. After stumbling over the blanket he had shed, I plowed into the flower bed and reached for him. But the wall’s a good 10 feet high and I couldn’t do more than touch his foot, even by jumping. Meanwhile he was singing his death song, a strange keening that rose and fell in volume as he lurched from side to side. We were yelling at him, naturally, but he gave no sign of awareness. “He’s never tried to escape before,” Janet cried. “Get a ladder. There must be one in—” I couldn’t think where to locate a ladder, but Janet was a staff member, she ought to know. “And find somebody to help!” I bellowed. “Where did they all go?” I tried to climb the wall. I wedged my thick fingers into chinks between the stones and succeeded only in scraping off the skin. That was when the pain of it began to hit home: Him trying to “escape” when there was no place to go. Freedom as a narrow alley with a locked gate, and beyond that, city streets where he couldn’t fend for himself for half a minute. I kept straining to reach him, but I’m a big soft guy with huge feet. My shoes couldn’t get a purchase on the stone and my weight dragged me down into the mud, my arthritic knees throbbing. Though the old man had the advantage of a slight build, it embarrassed me that I couldn’t match his athleticism. Did he used to be a mountain climber? Noticing my efforts, he stopped lurching in order to stare down with a face like a sad monkey’s. Clearly he didn’t know who I was, though he had seen me many times. When I smiled to reassure him, he studied me through hooded eyes as if I might be an alien species with special wire-cutting apparatus on my teeth. For a second I thought I could appeal to him. “Doctor,” I huffed, “let me—help if I—” But he lost interest and returned to his struggle. By that point he seemed to have forgotten where the barbs had snared him. Instead of trying to loosen the wire at his crotch, he raised his elbows like wings. His balance was as amazing as his agility, because when he quit thrashing he appeared secure up there. His tufts of white hair flared upward. His little spotted hands took hold of the barbed wire to make a fulcrum, and he flapped his elbows. It looked like he intended to fly. Did he think he could metamorphose into a bird? Or become an angel through concentration and effort? His sallow face began to resemble some artist’s conception of a saint in rapture or agony. His eyes closed. His narrow chin lifted toward the clouds. His hands were bleeding where they gripped the wire. It wasn’t just this place or these people he was trying to escape, I felt, but the overall trap he was in—his own mind and body. The basic human predicament. And like some medieval saint, he presumed that by devoted labor he could rise from the prison of flesh to a finer, freer state. Carried into the sky by cherubs, I guess. Of course I couldn’t know what passed for thought in a brain snarled by Alzheimer’s. Yet at that moment I was convinced I understood him. I wanted to believe along with him, and I knew it was preposterous. The only way for him to lift off was paradoxically to fall and break his head open. Splat. No angels. One less crazy inmate in the yard. I stood there for two, three minutes, suffering with this deranged old man, until the rescue crew charged out the door—a couple of burly aides with a ladder and a step stool and Janet running behind. The men knew exactly what to do, as if they’d handled wall-scalers before. Dr. Stern, however, would not accept anyone else’s idea of salvation, so he fought them tooth and nail. Well, nail anyway, because he lacked teeth. He also spat on them and punched one in the eye. Every particle of his being flamed in outrage. I was tempted to help him by kicking those guys in their wide asses. But I just watched, and in the process lost any chance of impressing Janet. They bound his limbs. They lugged him off under their arms like a rolled-up rug. Not brutally—this is a high-class institution—but with the patent assumption that physical safety for all was the main concern. When the rescue was over, I started crying. Actual tears that dripped onto my hands. I hadn’t cried since the day after Leann’s funeral, when I broke down at the sight of an empty cereal bowl. “What’s the matter?” Janet said, incredulous. “It wasn’t your fault. He’ll be fine. By tonight he won’t even remember.” I couldn’t explain. I wiped my face on my sleeve and looked away. Last night I woke up wondering whether I’d dreamed Dr. Stern. The image had the graininess of real life, though, and it refused to fade in the light of the bedside lamp. Then, in recollection, I saw a dark stain spreading across the old man’s pants and wetting the aides’ hands as they bundled him. That made me laugh. They’d kept him captive on earth, but he got his revenge on them, his tiny measure of triumph. At the same time I was gasping as if I too were stuck on that wall, endlessly, inescapably. I looked over at the picture of Leann on the dresser, but she was oblivious, caught in another time and place. So this volunteer work, it sounds rewarding, my co-worker says. Yeah, if you treasure human pain. This morning I phoned to see how the old man was doing. The nurse at the desk said “Same as usual,” sounding surprised that I’d called. Actually, I think my daughter, Lisa, might be one of the few who’d understand. If you tattoo your face, that’s seeking pain, right? Which makes me wonder if it’s time for another effort in that direction. I could try inviting her home for dinner some night. Since she cleared out, barely four months after her mother died, she hasn’t set foot in the place, but I imagine she’s so broke that free food could tempt her. She’d never come without the dopey boyfriend. Even so, we might get a couple minutes to talk. I could say, How’re you handling it? Any better than me? I could offer platitudes: It gets easier. Just give it more time. (As a father I’m supposed to say such things, and believe them.) I could say, more truthfully, that I saw an old man, bound like a rug, who can’t remember his dream of angels. I could say: Look, honey, I think I kind of understand what you’re doing now, and I’ll leave you alone about it. Because we need this pain. It’s what we have that’s alive.
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