For His Birthday
Meet CJ a young black dope-dealing male who was diagnosed with Focal Segmental Glomerulosclerosis in his mid-twenties. After a few years of extreme non-compliance with his medications and follow-up he lands on dialysis at this early age. By now he has started to sample his own merchandise and is addicted to cocaine, and opiates. His long on and off relationship with the law is fortunately off at this point.
Today, walking to his room, for the umpteenth time in the last couple months, I am prepared for the worst. The nurse has just detailed me with tales of his strange behavior based on strange dolls since this readmission to hospital. Psychiatric disturbances would just be too much right now.
I knock on the door. One of the bodies in his bed rises in the dim light and smiles to reveals his familiar gold capped row of front teeth. I recognize his companion, flashing a brief smile too with a matching set of gold. It is obvious they are both glad I have returned from leave. I am glad to see them too, looking well. I notice the room is decorated. I am barely able to pull my eyes away from the new fixtures and back to the bed.
“We doin’ alright”, he responds to my salutation.
I have had three years practice looking past the tattooed tears on his cheek, and beneath I see hopelessness and worry. Not what I was expecting. His eyes meet mine squarely. “You sure ain`t nothin` you can do? I mean it been three months and I just been in here all the time, man.”
“It is still the same. No dialysis center wants to take you because of your history.”
“My history, my history! Ain`t none o` dem even talk to me; like they know me!”
“Well, the drugs, prison, not taking your pills. It`s all in your record and I can`t force them. I am still trying.” He sinks back into the bed, absorbing the familiar lines.
“How was the New Year?” I feel compelled to break the silence of my own hopelessness in this case. “I know you left hospital and I see you have some new decorations.”
The second voice comes forth from the bed like an eager kid in class bursting to answer the easy question.
“That was me. You know it was his birthday,” his wife half-says, but with a quizzical look.
“He knows that already,” he answers her question to me with an air of satisfaction.
I was already nodding to the question anyway, and grateful for his conviction that I care enough to know everything about him all the time.
“He loves these things,” she continues as she waves to the new tenants of his room. He used to have the whole series, including the ones that could talk, but he lost `em when he went to prison. I tried to get them back knowing they would cheer him up. But man I had to go really far! They real hard to get these days! Especially ones that could talk. She doesn`t talk but the other two do.”
She was pointing to the Bride of Chucky dressed in white veil and black leather. Chuck himself and his son looked on from different corners of the room.
I smiled. It made such perfect sense that these figures would give him comfort inside while snarling at a world that refused to attribute any more detail to him than his hideous appearance and previous crimes; a world that interpreted all his actions outside of the realm of an ordinary human; a world that refused him a proper home as a child and put him in another state of limbo now even with failed health. I smiled that I could not properly detangle my complicity nor his culpability in it all even after three years. At least there was Chucky to explain what we all felt.
No trackbacks yet.