The Walking Man Read online

  The predictable consequence of using food as a means to validate my existence was, quite simply, obesity. Although it's clear to me now that the foremost physical obligation of a quadriplegic is to maintain a minimum body mass, as a teenager I never once considered the consequences of my immense body on others. To me, pounds were life insurance. Sometimes, at night, when I couldn't sleep I would calculate how long I could survive without eating; I estimated if my weight hit four hundred pounds, I could live almost an entire year.

  If you can't move, and you're the size of a house, transportation isn't your biggest problem; rather, it's bedsores. Stationary skin, under weight, perceives itself as being injured, so the body's wonderful immune system attacks it, creating potentially fatal skin ulcerations called bedsores. The only way to prevent a bedsore is to constantly move so your body will believe it isn't dead and subsequently calls off its self-destruct mechanisms. As a practical matter, this means that quadriplegics, especially heavy ones, need to be rolled every few hours, or they will die within a month or two. In my home-bound world, this meant at least six times a day—with the help of my brother Hal, Mom had to pull up on my sheets to roll me from one side to the other. I can remember like yesterday, the thousand times I screamed in the dead of night, "Hal, Mom, get your asses out of bed and roll me!"

  The only partial mitigation for my inexcusable treatment of my mother during my days of homecare was my age; I was a teenager. And like most teenagers, I was smart enough to be lethal, but stupid enough not to fully recognize the obligations of adulthood. So to my great shame, I considered my mom more of a robot than a sentient human. To me, my mom was put on this earth to serve me. Consequently, as soon as I smelled shit, I called out for a change. And when I was hungry, regardless of the hour, I demanded food. All in all, between the rolling, cleaning, and feeding, an hour rarely passed without me yelling, "Maaaaaaahhhhhhh!"

  My demands took their toll.

  Four years into my quadriplegia, the care and maintenance of yours truly caused my Mom, a lifelong teetotaler, to reach for the bottle, a decision that eventually led her to experience a breakdown during one of my mid-afternoon feeding sessions.

  Every day during my two o'clock "snack," I ate four Jell-O pudding cups. Since I lacked the muscle power required to execute an aggressive swallow, pudding was my favorite treat. However, spooning pudding into me was a challenging and time-consuming task because most often I would regurgitate a mouthful several times before ultimately swallowing it.

  This meant my Mom needed to recapture my rejected pudding while it flowed down my chin, before it ended up all over my chest. The process required an exceptional level of hand-to-eye coordination but, when executed properly, it was a thing of beauty: feed, scrape, scrape, scrape; feed, scrape, scrape, scrape; feed, scrape, scrape, scrape…

  On the day of her breakdown, per her usual routine, Mom had lined-up four pudding cups on my nightstand, butterscotch as always, my favorite flavor. My guess was Mom was drinking vodka because I couldn't smell anything on her breath. Regardless, her impairment was obvious; the first scoop of pudding filled both my nostrils causing me to sneeze. My sneeze covered most of Mom’s face with brown-yellow emulsion, mostly pudding. In response, Mom went wild, burying my entire face in an inch of pudding until I could no longer breathe.

  Fearing imminent death-by-dessert, I somehow mustered the strength required to form a blowhole in my pudding mask, which allowed me to yell, "MOM, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING!"

  In response, without the assistance from my brother Hal, Mom rolled me on my side and stuck my pudding spoon where the sun don’t shine. Then, she gave me the middle finger while exiting my "living room"—never to return. In response, I said something I'll regret forever…

  Later that day, my dad informed me that Mom had hurt herself, but she was going to be okay. He then said he would take care of me.

  "Son, Mom needed some time away from you," Dad said with tears in his eyes. "You'll see her again soon."

  Twenty-four hours later Jimmy Something-or-other showed up and drove me to Leicester County Hospital, one hundred miles west of Apple, just far enough away to make regular family visits impracticable.

  Chapter Two

  Leicester County Hospital

  On my back, raised three feet high, and parallel to the ground, my head was immobilized by a "transport strap," and I could only look up as Jimmy Something-or-other pushed my infamous gurney up the ramp to the main entrance of Leicester County Hospital. I couldn't get a very good look at the place but I saw enough to know the building was big, old, and well kept. From the corner of my eye, I also caught a brief glimpse of the entry landscaping, a lawn that looked like a golf course green and a driveway lined with orange chrysanthemums. The main section of the building was a four-story brick and stone structure. It featured a massive entry archway constructed of large, carved brownstones. The stones were rough hewn yet perfectly interlocked as if they'd been assembled with the help of technologies far more advanced than a hammer and chisel. The building reminded me of the Apple Library, which was constructed right before the Civil War, so I figured Leicester County Hospital had been treating the "ill" since the mid nineteenth century. I was right; it opened its doors in 1846.

  Within minutes of my arrival, I learned to the left and right of the "old hospital" were two wings. Each wing was fifty yards long, fifteen yards wide, and three stories high. Both structures were identical and housed the functional components of the facility. They were composed of large single pane windows and tan bricks, similar to the bricks Catholics deployed to build parochial schools back when nuns and faith existed. Time and acid rain had randomly oxidized the bricks causing varying degrees of hideous brown staining—but this ugliness was more than offset by the wing's windows, which were spectacular.

  Originally commissioned to ensure patient privacy, each window at the hospital featured an exquisite etching. On one window there was an Indian Chief on horseback, spear in hand, hunting a buffalo; another depicted a man chasing a child; a third a ballet dancer mid-pirouette. In all, more than one hundred figures in motion adorned the wings of the Leicester County Hospital, home to two hundred fifty-two quadriplegics.

  Initially built as a residence for the broke and/or insane, the founding name of Leicester County Hospital was The Leicester County Pauper and Insane Asylum. Located atop a hill that would be have been called Mount Everest in Iowa, the hospital was situated at the junction of the Wachmacallit and Hossiwhassit rivers between the Berkshire Mountains and the border of New York State in the small town of Shyshire, Massachusetts. To white people, Shyshire is most famous for making farmers' boots, otherwise known as ‘shitkickers.’ To Native Americans, Shyshire is considered holy ground because it was the site of several Indian massacres—settlers slaughtering Indians, not vice-versa.

  Leicester County Hospital was sited in Shyshire because Shyshire was the only town in Massachusetts that openly accepted payoffs for welcoming operations nobody else wanted including: insane asylums, nuclear power plants, prisons, chemical plants, and hazardous waste dumps.

  The town's aggressive zoning practices, often referred to as ‘Shyshire Tradeoff,’ eventually led to a quarter billion dollar trust fund which enabled the perpetual operation of several Shyshire institutions including Leicester County Hospital which never missed a payroll or charged its residents a dime.

  Overall, the vast majority of Shyshire's citizenry accepted their town's cash-for-hazard proposition for it ensured long-term employment even though the dangerous nature of many jobs resulted in a shortened lifespans. There weren't many old people driving Buicks around the streets of Shyshire, and everybody seemed to like it that way.

  When Leicester County Hospital was originally built, much was made of the hospital residents, which included people alternatively described as lunatics or maniacs. Its most famous detainee was Hungry Jack Foster, a fur trapper who chopped up and consumed his family of five during one particularly tough winter.
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  During the Great Depression, the mayor of Shyshire used the hospital's notoriety to secure extensive public works' funding, which he used to build a ten foot high concrete wall around Leicester County Hospital's three hundred acres. The wall, lovingly referred to as the 'Great Wall' by the people of Shyshire, kept the soup flowing until Shyshirites found real work after World War II.

  Most of the Great Wall was composed of a concrete-gravel mix that was poured during subzero weather. This mistake eventually caused the exterior surface of the wall to erode, leaving behind a vertical mass of gravel, which was a surprisingly good visual complement to the hospital's rural setting.

  The main access road to Leicester County Hospital was also built in the 1930s, though, unlike the Great Wall, it was intentionally beautiful. Designed by a German graduate student from Boston University, the road was inspired by a Nazi propaganda film that followed Adolph Hitler's motorcade as it zoomed down an Austrian boulevard. The tree-lined access road featured two extra wide lanes and a median strip containing equally spaced oak trees. Over the years, the branches from the median's oaks had become intertwined with limbs from trees that lined either side of the road. The entanglement gradually created a three-mile long tunnel that was dark and cool in the summer, causing it to become a destination hiking-trail for the few citizens in Shyshire who lived past sixty-five.

  Granite archways capped both ends of the Leicester County Hospital Access Road. Built into each archway were guard posts that were manned twenty-four-seven by a staff of state-paid security guards who for decades had successfully argued that their positions were vital because the hospital's quadriplegics posed a "severe flight risk."

  In fairness to the guards, adjacent to Leicester County Hospital was a small minimum-security prison. Also present, was an emergency response building that housed the snowplows and the ambulance vans necessary to shuttle multiple quadriplegics to a real hospital should the need ever arise. There was also an ugly steel Quonset hut used to store sand and salt: the materials required to keep the LCH Access Road passable during the winter months. The structure was a larger version of the buildings adults buy to house an extra car, or keep the family meth lab away from their children.

  Although Leicester County Correctional Facility was technically a prison, it was not exactly Alcatraz. It had a sixty-inmate capacity and it looked like a Holiday Inn. Its administrators referred to as a "detention center" for it lacked the guard towers required to store violent offenders. Subsequently, the facility primarily housed embezzlers, check-bouncers, shoplifters, drunk drivers, and guys who failed to pay child support. Punishment consisted of a television-viewing limit of six hours per day and the mandatory wearing of an orange armband so the "guards" would know when to check their wallets. Otherwise, Leicester County Correctional Facility was the perfect place for a petty criminal to spend some time before committing additional petty crimes. Sentences were always six months, or less. The food was great, and visiting hours were limited. So, there was no major incentive to escape.

  The rooms in Leicester County Hospital were built to sleep six crazy people in cots. In the 1950s, when the hospital was renovated to service quadriplegics—mainly returning veterans of the Korean War—each room was retrofitted to house two deluxe hospital beds. The beds were spaced ten feet apart to provide enough room for a body hoist to help patients in and out of bed. The floors were covered with black vinyl tiles, speckled with gray chips. The walls were painted bright white with high gloss enamel. Acoustic tiles composed of cork and asbestos covered the ceiling while three equally spaced hanging fixtures blew high-intensity light upward to enable glare free examination of the room and its contents.

  When I first entered Leicester County Hospital, I was surprised to find there was no lobby, or even a front desk. When Jimmy Something-or-other pushed me through the front door of my new lodgings, nobody was present to say hello or stick a needle in my foot to certify my pitiful state.

  "Hey, is anybody home?" my man Jimmy yelled. "I got a dude here that can't walk!"

  In addition to his mechanical inaptitude and his distinct lack of intellectual prowess, Jimmy lacked sufficient social skills to proposition a stranger, so instead of stopping a nurse to inquire about my destination, Jimmy pushed me through the hallways of Leicester County Hospital for about an hour before a tall and well-dressed woman asked, "May I help you?"

  "I gotta deliver this paralyzed dude to somebutty," Jimmy informed her.

  The tall woman was Juliette Dritch, the hospital's administrator. Juliette Dritch eventually became one of my heroes, but my first assessment of her was not flattering; she came across as cold and severe. And, I did not like the way she dismissed my clueless driver.

  "I'll take it from here, young man," she said to poor Jimmy. "You can go now."

  "Me?" Jimmy Something-or-other asked, pointing at himself to clarify any ambiguity. "Yes, you," she said sharply. "Somebutty will return the gurney to your ambulance in a few minutes." She then turned her attention to me. "The man from Apple, I presume."

  "Yes," I said.

  "Welcome to Leicester County Hospital. Some people say it's not the best hospital in the world. Those people are wrong," she declared without the slightest sign of a smile. "We run a tight ship, and we pursue excellence in everything we do. No task is too small not to be done perfectly. This institution will provide you with the best possible care."

  "I'm happy to be here," I responded timidly, intimidated by Juliette Dritch's powerful presence. "Caring for me was driving my mom crazy."

  "You're moving into room 302, third floor east," she said with a cough. "Your room gets morning sun. I think you'll like it. Your window bears an etching of a walking man from the Victorian era. We call him 'Johnny Walker.' He has a cane, but he doesn't need it. And, he definitely is not the whiskey Johnny Walker."

  "The walking man," I said. "How ironic."

  Juliette Dritch considered responding to my snide comment, but instead she peered at me and said, "Your roommate is a man named Arthur Slank. He's middle-aged, and from Hyannis. We're thinking you'll get along."

  "I'm sure we will," I said. "I'm easy-going."

  "Excellent," she said, once again without the slightest trace of a humor. "Leicester County Hospital has a strict no move policy," she said soberly. "Once you're assigned a room it is your room, period."

  I grimaced. "Sounds strict."

  "Not so," she quickly assured me. "If we move one person, everybody will want to move and soon we'll be playing matchmaker to two hundred fifty-two quadriplegics. It would be complete chaos."

  "Chaos is bad," I snickered.

  "I'm glad you understand, young man. Individuals often need to make sacrifices for the good of the group. My staff looks forward to serving you."

  "Thank you," I said.

  "You're most entirely welcome," Juliette Dritch assured me as she elevated my gurney to a sitting position before pushing me into my room where I was introduced to Arthur Slank, my first of seven roommates.

  "Arthur, your new roommate is here."

  Arthur grunted. "Cellmate more like it." "Arthur can twist his head and has partial use of his left arm," Juliette Dritch said with a noticeable level of disdain. "He can also raise his eyebrows."

  "Ain't I the lucky one?" Arthur said.

  Arthur Slank looked exactly like Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, but his hair was longer and whiter. My guess was he was fifty, thirty years my senior. His fingernails were yellow. Years of smoking, I figured.

  Arthur tilted his head slightly, showing off, no doubt.

  "Do you like Tom and Jerry?" he asked me.

  "The cartoon?" I responded.

  "Of course, the cartoon," Arthur said. "What the fuck do you think I was talking about? You know another Tom and Jerry?"

  "No, I guess not."

  Juliette Dritch patted my arm. "Don't mind Arthur. He's quite a joker. I have to go now. Nurse Judy will be by shortly to show you around our wonderful hospital."
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  Less than ten seconds after Juliette Dritch departed Arthur launched his first attack.

  "I swear to God, kid, if you fuck with me, I will kill you," he hissed.

  "Really," I said with a wry smile.

  "Don't mouth off to me, you fucking punk—as of this minute you are my slave. And I'm your master. Say it!"

  "Say what?"

  "Master," he said. "Call me your master!"

  "You have to be kidding me," I calmly said.

  "You think I'm kidding, bitch? Check this out."

  Using his one good arm, Arthur extracted a disposable lighter from a mattress crease and sparked a flame to life.

  "So you have a lighter," I said.

  "Yes, a lighter," he declared, before laughing evil genius-style. "I have the power of fire."

  I was beginning to understand.

  "Fuck with me and I'll toss a lit napkin onto your bed and fry your pathetic ass. Do you hear me?"

  "I hear you," I responded.

  "Then say it," Arthur shouted.

  Slightly freaked out, I recited, "You are my master."

  "That's better," Arthur Slank said as Nurse Judy entered the room.

  "Hello there, sweetie!" Nurse Judy exclaimed.

  "You talking to me?" Arthur asked.

  "What do you think, Arthur?" She said while shaking her head. "Jesus."

  Nurse Judy was a chunk of woman. She was feminine, but built like a tank. She had red-brown curly hair, rosy red cheeks, and an ass bigger than a wheelbarrow. Like all Leicester County Hospital employees, Nurse Judy always provided her patients with top-notch care, but if she liked you, she treated you like a king.

  "My boy from Apple. I'm going to take good care of you," Nurse Judy said as she grabbed me under my armpits, pulled me out of my bed, and tossed me over her shoulder. "It's bath time, kiddo."