Weekends at Bellevue (27 page)

So, this guy with his tattooed face is giving me the line about his dead mother saying “Join me.” It’s a sneaky, calculated move. I’ve only met one other malingerer who used this tactic. A Vietnam vet I got to know while I was working at the Bronx VA Hospital. That guy followed me down to Bellevue for a while after I left the VA, but he gave up because I wouldn’t admit him once I got settled in my new digs. More important, he came into a lot of government money when he won some back-owed cash for a disability claim. The last time I saw him at Bellevue, we were talking investments—stocks and bonds versus real estate—so I knew I wouldn’t be seeing him for a while. But before the money came through, he used to go from ER to ER, where he would report hearing his dead father’s voice saying “Join me.”

“Works like a charm,” he told me. “I get admitted almost every time with that line. That, and I put an unloaded shell in my mouth and try to light a match to it. Freaks everybody right the fuck out,” he beamed proudly.

I try a different line of questioning with Pussy Licker: “Why is it that I see you around the hospital so much?”

“I come to the clinic here to get my AIDS medicine,” he tells me.

“So, I’m just curious. Why are you so rigorous about taking care of your health if you actually want to die?”

“Huh?” he asks. He does this a lot whenever I ask him a tough question. Any question, actually.

As the interview progresses, it sounds like this:

“Do you take any medications?”

“Huh?”

“Have you ever seen a psychiatrist before?”

“Huh?”

This starts to drive me insane, as it does Vera, who’s sitting to my left in the triage room. We look at each other with raised eyebrows, lips pursed, sharing a moment as the “Huh”s start to amass in a pile on the table in front of us. Obviously, he’s stalling while he tries to come up with a line, and his “Huh” is a way to buy him some time. It is an obvious “tell” that indicates that he doesn’t have an honest answer for us. There’s practically no point conducting the interview if all we’re going to get is bullshit. Also, here’s a man who claims he hasn’t been sleeping for a month, hears voices, and sees visions (which he says are happening all day, every day, including right now), yet he doesn’t look the least bit disheveled, distracted, internally stimulated, or preoccupied.

I know he is lying, Vera knows he is lying, and on some level, I do hope the Pussy Licker man himself knows he is lying. It’s time to let him know that we aren’t going to be able to gratify him tonight.

I break the news to him in a way that I hope will spare me too much hassle. “Sir, while you do have an excellent story, which many psychiatrists in the city would completely buy, you are unfortunate this evening for several reasons. One, I have been at this a long time and so I am not having any of it, and two, we have no beds to offer you tonight because we are full.” I play this up. “If it were slower here tonight, I’d give you a place to sleep, but we just have no place to put you. Maybe you should try another hospital?” I cock my head coyly.

“You’re not going to admit me?” he asks, incredulous.

“No, sir, I am not,” I say as politely and deferentially as I can muster.

“Can I get a Xerox of my chart, then? And a copy of the ambulance call report sheet too? The dispatch lady from 911 said with that complaint, about hearing voices to kill myself and taking those pills, that I should be admitted anywhere in the city. She said to call her if I didn’t get admitted.”

In all my years, this is the first time a patient has asked me for a copy of the EMS sheet. I’m impressed. “That’s a new one on me, man! A copy of the ACR? You are a piece of work!”

Then he tells me that while he was waiting to be seen in the nondetainable area, he was looking for a piece of metal to cut himself with. When that goes nowhere, he ups the ante. “You know, Doc, on top of the pay phone when I called 911, there was a razor. I shoulda just used that to cut myself.”

The guy is starting to get desperate, laying on one veiled, and not-so-veiled, threat after another: He’ll sue me and the hospital, he’ll hurt himself as soon as he leaves here.

He finally asks me, “What happens to doctors like you who kick out patients and then they come back on a gurney?”

I tell him calmly, “It’s never happened to me, so I don’t know.”

He stops talking then, and looks down at his lap. He has pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and placed it on his lap underneath the table. He reaches into his wallet, slowly. I am a bit panicky now, because he has mentioned a razor, so I don’t know if he has one in the Velcro part of his wallet that he is peeling back. We are alone in the triage room with him, with no hospital police in sight, just Vera and I, and I’ve been pissing this guy off, as usual, though I was actually trying not to.

Live and don’t learn, that’s my motto.

I never do see what he takes out of his wallet, if anything, because he closes it back up, looks at me, and sighs heavily, angrily. He’s got nothing. It was a ruse, just to scare me, which it did.

The last guy to open his Velcro wallet in front of me had a shard of mirror in it, and Mr. K, one of our more proactive psych techs, was on him in a heartbeat, swooping in from the side, wrapping his arms around the guy’s torso. They both crashed to the floor. I remember thinking how chivalrous it was of Mr. K to take a fall for me, literally.

“Listen, do you want me to fill out the paperwork so you can get into
a shelter?” I ask, as nicely as I can muster. It is a lousy consolation prize, and he knows it. He declines.

Vera escorts him out of the triage room, and he says to her, “I bet you would’ve admitted me if I punched that doctor.”

“No, actually, we would’ve pressed charges and sent you to Rikers,” she says with a saccharine smile.

Like the last guy who punched me
, I want to add. But I keep that part to myself. No need to give him any encouragement. I go back into the nurses’ station to fill out his paperwork, relieved that I have escaped another attack.

For now.

O
n Monday morning, I go to Dr. MacKenzie’s office and tell him I’ll take the pay cut. Life is short, and I need less bullshit in mine.

T
uesday morning, quarter of nine, and Jeremy and I are loading up the car to head to the house. I get Molly into her car seat and then put the AM radio on to hear a traffic update. A woman has called into the station claiming that a small plane’s just hit one of the World Trade Center towers. She’s looking out her window describing the smoke coming out of the tower, and now some other man is also calling in who’s seen the plane hit. Their stories differ in terms of how big the plane is, but my assumption is that it’s only a little twin-engine Cessna or something. Jeremy slams the trunk and gets into the passenger side.

“Some pilot just crashed into the World Trade Center,” I tell Jeremy. We listen to the radio for the next hour and twenty minutes, as the story continues to unfold, more and more unbelievable. “I should be at Bellevue,” I say repeatedly as we drive away from the city. “Whenever there’s a disaster like this, I’m pretty sure we’re all supposed to just report for work immediately.”

“We’re not turning around,” he says.

Okay
, I think.
We need to get Molly somewhere safe. She’ll be safer outside of the city
. Maybe I’ll just take the train back in, once she and Jeremy are settled at the house. They probably need me at CPEP. With the Pentagon attacked too, people must be losing it. The psychic fallout on the periphery of the explosions must be immense—people panicking, paranoid, in shock, traumatized.

When we finally get to the house, we’re in time to see the second building collapse on CNN.

The phone rings, and I assume it is someone trying to track me down from the hospital, telling me I have to report for duty, but it is Spalding Gray. Being on the phone with Spalding is like having a front-row seat for a workshop of his next monologue. This time, however, he isn’t regaling me with fascinating anecdotes, peppered with his neuroses. Now, there is something different, feverish in his delivery. He’s unloading his mania onto me, his speech revealing the layers of his obsessions and delusions. It’s still a monologue of sorts, but it’s heaving with pain and pathology. He and Kathie have sold their house in Sag Harbor and they’re moving a mile away to North Haven. Spalding has become obsessed with the move, convinced it is a cataclysmically bad decision. He regrets selling “the green house” and is wary of relocating. He rambles on about how unfit the new house is for habitation and how perfect the green house was for him and his children, and mostly about how he wants to turn around time, to undo the sale, the closing, all the things that can’t be undone.

I try to sympathize with him. He’s been through so much. A car accident in June has left him in a very bad state, physically and emotionally. He’s been intensely depressed and has required multiple surgeries. He still can’t walk very well. Maybe he’s fixating on the house sale needing to be undone because it is more feasible than undoing the car accident. He’s clearly connected them in his mind. He repeatedly reminds me about the coincidence of the names: The driver of the car that crashed into his in Ireland and the real estate broker who has sold his beloved green house share the same common Irish name, which he weaves into the tapestry of his obsession. It’s all been too much for him to handle, and he seems to be unraveling.

I can barely get a word in edgewise until I ask him, “Spalding, have you turned on your TV today? Do you know what’s going on?”

“What? What are you talking about?” he asks.

I hear Kathie in the background yelling at him that the World Trade towers have fallen.

“There are other things going on in the world, Spalding. Big things. Bigger even than your house, maybe. Go see what Kathie is talking about. Call me later, okay?”

I hang up and think for a moment about my compartmentalized life, the four bags in my closet that segregate Bellevue and Manhattan from my country house, my work days from my days off. My little plan is not exactly working today as Spalding’s mania crashes through my barriers, as I putter around my house feeling like I should be at CPEP. And Spalding has breached some boundary too, crossing over the line from neurosis to outright mental illness. I need to call Kathie later to create a treatment plan. He needs more help than I’m comfortable providing.

I try to get Daniel on the phone to see if he wants me to come in, assuming it’s total chaos at Bellevue by now. I spend the next thirty hours trying to phone in to work. All circuits are down. A fast busy signal with every number and every pager I try. We also can’t email anyone; the dial-up keeps getting stuck at “authenticating.”

It’s not until Wednesday afternoon that I finally reach Daniel, who tells me that things are under control. They were prepared for five thousand casualties and evacuated most of the CPEP and the AES. They emergently discharged as many patients as possible from the inpatient wards, making space for surgery patients and burn victims. Stretchers were lined up on every wall, in the lobbies, and in the parking lots, but they only got something like two hundred patients all day. He is describing what I already know to be true. I have seen the empty stretchers on the television for the past two days. The wounded simply didn’t arrive.

“We’re fine here. Just come in this weekend,” he tells me. I imagine he wants to run the show on his own; he wants the glory, the martyrdom.
Well, this is one big, juicy steak he won’t have to share
, I think to myself. Of course, these malevolent thoughts are childish and irrational, triggered by all of my resentments toward Daniel, but the truth is, I’m relieved to be off the hook. I don’t want to leave my family and our safe haven just yet. He is working—as I should be—and I’m more comfortable resenting him for it than feeling inadequate and guilty.

Tuesday and Wednesday, September 11 and 12, we have the most spectacularly beautiful weather at the house. I go kayaking and running. I sit on the grass with Molly and marvel at the warm wind, the stark blue sky with no airplanes, and the sparkling sunshine. Wednesday morning I bring home the
New York Times
from the A&P. The pictures are poignant and nauseating. I remain fixated on the horror of people in business suits jumping to their deaths. Those images are burned into my brain. Later, research on the people who witnessed the disaster will
reveal that those who watched the bodies fall are the ones with the most severe symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

We speak to Jeremy’s sisters, one of whom lives in SoHo and is having to deal with constant sirens, National Guard blockades, and acrid smoke and fumes. We beg her to come up to the house, and eventually she takes the train with her husband and two kids. We spend the rest of the week hiking in the woods and eating big meals. The television is always on in the background. Rudy Giuliani has become “America’s Mayor.” It is his finest hour, and he is lucky. His term is coming to a close, and he was going to go out with a whimper, but the World Trade attacks are allowing him to go out with a bang, a hero by proxy.

S
aturday night rolls around and we drive back into the city, no problem. I get Jeremy and Molly settled in the apartment before I take off for work. I park in the back lot, behind the hospital, which is now full of government vehicles. There are official-looking cars parked on every available surface behind the hospital, on the curbs, on the grass, everywhere. There is also a huge red, white, and blue school bus. One of the hospital policemen calls over to me, “Hey! You wanna meet Mike Piazza?” A bunch of the Mets and Yankees have come to Bellevue to visit the patients who are 9/11-related. I take a pass on Piazza, waving and smiling graciously.

I am eager to get into the hospital, curious if the CPEP will be busy or not, but it is unusually quiet—a ghost town in a ghost city. I take sign-out and learn we have only five people in the area, a ridiculously small number for CPEP. I can’t imagine why, the weekend after the towers collapsed, we would have such a low census. The calm after the storm?