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Even at eight A.M. the waiting room was full, mostly female, mostly black. Crazy Abe, jumping up and down amidst these women, screamed at me YOUR PROBLEM IS YOUR CIRCUMCISED YOUR PROH . . At the nursing station, things were out of whack? Howard Greenspoon, looking pale, was sitting with Gath, Elihu, Cohen, and the two policemen, and Howie was drinking a cup of coffee, something I'd never before seen him do, since his IBM cards showed a positive correlation between cups of coffee and cancer of the bladder. Howie was telling , the crowd what happened:
"I went into the bathroom on the second floor an hour ago, and I was in the toilet, and a guy opened the door, poked a shotgun in, and demanded money. I gave him three bucks, and then I did a really stupid thing?I gave him my college ring. How could I? I loved that class ring, I really did. He didn't ask me for it, and I offered it to him. Why?
"Remarkable," said Gilheeny, "but better it gone and you here than vice versa."
Howie left, but the policemen stayed on, and Quick, explaining, said, "It is a season of terror, and we have been been asked to serve another eight hours until four P.M. Sixteen hundred in the military convention, is it not, Naval Officer Gath?"
"Aye aye, mutha," said Gath. "I shore wish we'd get some of that big stuff in heap, instead of all this vagitch. I feel so mean I could go bear hunting with a whip."
"A remarkable statement, and no less so than the night just past," said Gilheeny, "when Quick and I were summoned on police radio to a naked bar for an alleged shooting. We entered, the music stopped, all heads turned to us. The Law. Silence. 'Too calm,' I whispered to Quick as we watched the barkeep slowly mop the floor and deny any shooting in his establishment. Then Quick supplied the clue."
"The slop the barman mopped was red. Beer is not red, and yet red blood is," said Quick.
"I then spotted three men sitting too close together against the wall, and commanded them to move. They did, and the man in the middle fell over, dead. Such was their surprise that we refrained from having to 'stick them' with our lead nightsticks, thus avoiding many months of work with Cohen around the gnawing question of guilt. A dangerous time."
"The raw red time when words give way to acts," said Quick.
"We must all take care," said the redhead. "With luck we shall see you again at sixteen hundred in the fine post meridian. Good?bye."
They were gone, and fear and gloom coated my mind. The charts were already piling up, the main themes being anxious men who'd seen the TV special on "How to Have a Heart Attack" and women with Sunday?morning belly pain. Picking up a chart, I ventured into the crotch of the day, my head ringing with the words COMPASSION and HATRED. There was no "big stuff," there was no humor, there was only the clear translation of black rage into, as Cohen put it, "the body ego." The main translation was into the abdomino?genito region. and I heard the chief complaint of "pain in my stomach" over and over again, until there were quarts of urine to be looked at, tens of pelvic exams to do, and do carefully, for every once in a while there could be a "keeper."
With one particular woman came disaster. Having done the total work?up, and finding nothing, I'd gone back into the room to tell her I could find nothing wrong with her that I could treat. She accepted that, and began to put on her clothes, but her boyfriend did not, and said, "Hey, wait a minute, man. You mean to tell me you're not going to do anything for her? Nothing?"
"I can't find anything I can treat"
"Listen, dude, my woman is in pain, real pain, and I want you to give her something for it"
"I don't know what's causing her pain, and I don't want to give her anything, because if it gets worse, I want to know about it, and have her come back. I don't want to mask what's going on."
"Damn you, look at her, she's suffering. Now, you gotta give her something for her pain."
I said I would not. I went back to the nursing station to write up my findings. The boyfriend pursued me, and although the woman was embarrassed and stood near the door wanting to leave, he would not and began to use the crowded E.M. as a forum: "Gods damn you. I knew we wouldn't get any help here. You just want her to suffer, 'cause you enjoy it. You honkies don't give a shit, as long as we get the hell out."
My temper rose, and I felt that warm limbic flush creeping about my ears, my neck. I wanted to jump the counter and beat the shit out of him, or have him beat the shit out of me. He couldn't have known that I shared his sense of being a victim, his sense of despair about the wrecking of black women by forces of control, his frustration with disease, with life. I even had grown to share his paranoia. I couldn't tell him, and he couldn't hear. Paralyzed by rage, both of us, the same rage that put bullets into the Ke
"You're white as a sheet," said Cohen. "That guy really blasted you."
"I don't know how I can take twenty?three more hours of this."
"The secret is to decathect. Withdraw your libidinal investment in what you're doing. It's like putting on a space helmet, and going around on autopilot. Emotionally, you withdraw, so that you're not really there. Survival, eh?"
"Yeah. I wish I did have a space helmet."
"Not a real space helmet. Decathexis is an i
"Why?"
"'Cause all jobs are boring, except this one. Try it"
I do
Midafternoon. Lull. Breathing a little easier inside my space helmet, thinking I might just make it. Suddenly the doors slammed open. I and Gath and Elihu were thrown into that surreal hyperacute time sense brought about by real disaster. Sirens blared, lights carried by a priest on one side and Quick on the other, in came Gilheeny, sheet?white, the right side of his body all blood. We jumped up and in an instant were in the major?trauma room. Gilheeny was alive. In shock. As the nurse cut off his clothing and we put in the big lines and went over his vital parts?head heart lungs?we heard Quick, shaken, tell us what had happened:
"There was a robbery at an ice?cream shop. We chased the thief, and he turned on us and emptied a shotgun into Finton."
"Officer Quick," said Gath, "you bettah leave the room."
I felt hyperalive, and found myself doing five thing at once. Despite my concentrating on Gilheeny, I felt amazed that on a Sunday afternoon of the coldest day of the year, not only should some bastard rob a store, an ice?cream store, but that it should be done armed, and with a shotgun? How much cash could there have been in an ice?cream store on a freezing Sunday afternoon in winter? As I looked at the bloody mess was the right side of the policeman's body, I wanted have the robber in the room, to beat the shit out him.