Sixth in a series of stories from my career as an occupational therapist working with military veterans.

When Carl came up out of it he knew something was seriously wrong. His dog – a rangy stray he’d befriended – had licked his face to wake him and now trembled at his side, whimpering in hunger. Nothing new there, but his arm seemed nailed to the floor and on inspection had swollen like a fat lady’s leg, his fingers black exclamation points sprouted from a purple balloon. Reluctantly he lifted his head, then sat up horrified, having to drag that appalling deformed appendage onto his lap. The dog retreated and cowered in a corner. It took Carl a while to calm himself down enough to stop screaming.

Weirdly, no pain. The arm lay dead as a log, rotting from the elbow. Bloated bodies afloat in yellow water, bursting the seams on their pajamas. They popped and deflated at a burst. Come home to roost now. Red light everywhere, then blue, then darkness again, the dog restless, half-mad hunger in its frightened eyes. Seeking to calm him, Carl explained that time is a lie, measured not by clocks but by suffering. For users and dogs alike, the pendulum swings between hunger and satiation, tick-tock, but in the elastic yet ungiving web that made up the night to come, that clock went still. The only measure Carl’s slow rocking on the floor, the arm in his lap an abomination, like some monster’s aborted fetus. The poison seeped closer, would choke him off. He apologized to the dog for having to leave him like this.

Probably at some point it would begin to hurt, might hurt like hell, but that wouldn’t last. Even a flayed homunculus squirming in the hot piss of soldiers eventually stills, invites the flies. So this was the fate he’d courted. He imagined that the room’s one grimy window was a gaping, hot and greedy maw. The traffic below emitted a persistent rumbling growl born from the dragon’s red and honking belly. It too pulsed with hunger. The city itself and the whole blue ball it rode on just a junkie in need. Then the floor and walls tipped. He’d expected pain but not hallucination, not these shadowy skeletons thrown up in newsreel black and white.

He watched a scrawny man squirm across a floor of chipped linoleum, dig a plastic knife out from under a crusty hot plate, and sit stabbing a black pig held tight in his arms, again and again. The pig squealed, the man laughed maniacally. Sirens sang in the mix. He felt so bad for the poor yellow dog. Across the room, its more than human eyes fixed on the creature to which it had hitched its wagon, who lifted a broken plastic shiv in his one good hand and plunged it deep and satisfying into the swollen bag of flesh, then carved down, mouth wailing, eyes wincing, eventually tugging out a vein and a broken needle tip oozing blood and pus. A river of festering gunk mushroomed out of the wound as if it would never stop. Suicide to have done such a thing. The one straggling drummer in a long suicide parade. Here in this broken ruin of paper walls, cry after cry of sheer anguish and horror across the empty hours after dinner and no one dares to knock, no one bothers to check, no one gives a tinker’s damn. Just stop it, will you? Just keel over and be still. Lie down, damn it. Down.

 

But see, what happened, that old yellow dog, he wouldn’t have it. Sprawled out junkie dead to the world and they’d find me when the stink seeped out to the hall one day. That was alright with me. I mean at the time. But that dog, I call him Mister now, because he’s a man of a dog, you know what he did? You ain’t gonna want to hear this, but it was real as day. He come over while I was out again and he drank it all, every lick of pus and blood, yes he did. Until my arm shrank back to size. And he licked up inside the wound and cleaned it all out with his raspy old tongue. And then he went over in a corner and barfed it all out, and then he came back for more. And he had to of been at it I’m telling you for at least a whole day. Eventually I guess I come to, and my arm was on fire, man, I tell you. Five alarm. I had to go. Left him there alone like the ungrateful son of a bitch I am. Straight to the ED and when they seen me they bumped the line and flushed me out with saline and pumped me up with antibiotics so strong I shit my pants. And you can best believe I hit the bodega for some Alpo when they let me go. Stood on the corner for an hour boosting coin to earn it. And we shared that dog’s dinner, I’m not ashamed to say. That’s Mister. It’s mostly his eyes, man, everything they see. So I decided one thing, and it’s true to this day. I don’t want to say it. Jinx it, but I’ll tell you. My plan is live up to those eyes. What Mister thinks of me.

 

Carl’s not the first man who’s broken down and cried in this clinic. It can be a heavy place. You come in off the street — some of these guys live right down below there in boxes under FDR Drive — and it’s warm and the light’s good up here on the tenth floor, and yes we’re paid to do it, but we sit you down and bathe your wounds and salve your muscles and stretch your joints in a gentle way we’ve learned. You can nap while your hands warm in paraffin gloves. Right now while this wiry Viet Nam vet pulls himself together, I’m at his side working my thumb up crosswise to the fiber along a nasty swath of old scar that runs from his wrist to his elbow. The cicatrix lies deep, thick between the long bones of his forearm, and blocks rotation, so he can’t hold his palm open without bending sideways from the trunk. Frankly, I don’t know if anything short of surgery will help. But for an hour three times a week, we try. He goes home with an elastic band that winds around his arm, tugging a twist. He wears a glove with rubber bands stretched from fingertip to wrist that pulls his mummified hand a few degrees closer to a fist. When he arrives, I measure the change, never much, swap out the rubber bands, work on that scarified flesh, and like it is with most of these lonely guys, maybe it’s just the physical touch, I don’t know. But they talk. And sometimes when the talk takes them down a particular tunnel, you hand them a box of Kleenex. It’s okay in here. Patients and therapists alike, we’re used to it.

 

After that day, all I can say is, I was woke. Me and Mister had a long talk. And then we took us a long walk. We went straight out on the GW Bridge, all the way across there, way up over the river. You ever done that? The wind running from upstate makes the wires sing and that hum from the tires on the grates? Way up high there like it’s all just for you and you decide. Still do it to this day. Went to Goodwill and got me one of them ten dollar an hour jobs, mine’s sorting books, a ton of books come in there every day, and I go through and pick the ones go to the store, the ones go to Africa, the ones go to the mill. VA found me a room but they won’t take Mister, so I’m okay in my squat. Hard to stay clean I won’t deny, the whole street’s a market, but what I found you walk with your dog nobody mess with you. Maybe nod or something but you walk on.

You should see my place. Got enough books in there now I could build an igloo. My new thing’s the slave tales, the bad old testimonies, you’d be surprised how many turn up. Mandingo shit, but for real. Seems like people been bad a long time, you know? We ain’t invented it in Nam. What you think about this arm? Somebody say I should just get them to take it off, be better off without it. But maybe you can fix it. I won’t give up if you don’t. And it’s a badge, too, right? Of how fucked up a man can be. How close you can walk it.

Summer day I get home and it’s still light, Mister and me walk over the bridge to the Jersey side and take that path up the Palisades. We just hike upriver some, it’s all woods along there. It’s a cliff we found and you can lie down on the grass. Highway’s right there, cars going by, but in the trees you don’t see them. And the whole wide river out before you. I’ll bring a box of dry food in my bag and feed him. Might chew a bite of that old crumbly shit myself. And he pulls up in the crook of this same fucked up arm. I tell you buddy, when the traffic dies down and the river fans the air and the trees rustle like they do, for me and Mister that’s the best sleep a man or dog can have. It’s our little vacation. In our little tricky place across the river. And if we don’t get a storm this afternoon, that’s where we’ll be tonight, too.

 

Third in a Series about Talking Old Soldiers.  This one from a nursing home in Fort Wayne, IN.

On the way down the hall to the rehab gym, I find Uncle Adolph stuck in a corner with his broom again. Usually, you can just say good morning, take his elbow, turn him away from the wall and he’ll keep on sweeping. Something about his eyes, he sees spiders everywhere and tries to get them all. But today he takes my arm when I reach for his and says, Sonny I could stand a cup of joe, I surely could. As you know, there are unwritten rules for anywhere you work, deals cut without any kind of written protocol, and this is one of mine. I’ll step outside the boundaries of my job description, no problem, I’ll answer a nurse’s call bell if you need me to, clean up the incontinent and change their sheets, and I’ll still make my productivity quota even if I have to stay late to do it. But the payback is this. Stop the day in the middle when the opportunity arises and sit for a coffee with an old soldier. I mean, like so many of the old vets, my dad never talked about any of this, so I get it where I can.

They call him Uncle Adolph because of the flag in his room. It’s a Nazi swastika his daughter says he took down from a town hall in Germany in 1945, had all his buddies sign with their home addresses, and tucked away in his gunny for the ship ride home. She framed it like a museum piece and hung it on the wall. People hate the thing, it’s got that evil aura, but you have to admit it’s a powerful symbol of the biggest thing that ever happened to the old folks here, the event that made their lives. It’s like a pin stuck in a map, saying this is where we all began.   We end up there with our coffees. He takes the wooden desk chair that eases his rickety back and I perch on the Barcalounger as best I can. In his line of sight as his rheumy eyes gaze about him are the flag, his narrow bed and a window framing a gloriously yellow ginkgo, its leaves flickering one by one to the lawn in a lazy breeze.

Maybe it’s the flag or a memory of a similar tree glimpsed long ago in France, but he starts right in, speaking aloud a stream of thought that goes like this. Shoot, when we was fightin’ the Germans, I was all up in there. It was a terror, but (he chuckles drily) there was some good boys among ‘em. We was fightin’ the Germans, and them folks that, well they wasn’t Germans, but you could call ‘em Germans and they was alright with that. And the English. No, we wasn’t fightin’ the English. They was with us. And the Ice Landers. They was with the Germans and then they was with us, I believe. He sets his Styrofoam cup on the desk and forgets it.

My daddy and me we built this place, this nursin’ home every brick. And now I live here. Ain’t that a hoot? And that house over there in the whadyacallit, development, the big one? That fella we built it for, he was a little bitty thing and then he grew up and he got on up to 8 feet. Head like a big old fat pumpkin. I mean 8 feet. Doorways in that house are ten. Every bit a that house is custom-built for giants. You oughta see the bath tub, now that’s a sight. Pretty day. Them trees is all yellow, I can see that. I wisht I could get out and walk among ‘em. But they’s afraid you’ll run off. Funny thing is, I’m the one put them alarms on the doors there myself. Built my own damn jail is what.  We used to call them leaves dragon’s gold.  Pile ’em up and play.

Them Ice Landers, now I’m gonna tell ya. They was some swimmin’ people and in the cold! They was one day I’m walkin’ along and this Ice Lander’s in this swimmin’ hole, he sees me comin’ and crawls on out and I ask him best I could if he’s alright. He says, Gut! Or Goot! Or whatever, so hell I take my own clothes off and jump right in. Come up, couldn’t get my breath for nothin’, no way. Like ta squeezed my lungs out. I mean cold, boy! And he’s just standin’ there buck nekkid and grinnin’. So I say, alright, and I just dive on down underwater and I’m just a swimmin’. Stayed in there til I was blue. ‘Fore long this Australian fella wanders up, call ‘em blokes. Say, bloke, is it cold? I say come on in, see for yourself. And wouldn’t you know it, he strips down and just dives in like a trouper. Cussed me up one side and down the other, and he knew some Australian words, except he couldn’t hardly get his breath either there at first. We laughed!

That dang flag, I don’t know.  Them boys’ names on it, they’s all gone now, wouldn’t you say?  I’d like to get down and fix these cracks here along the floor. My daddy wouldn’t have it, no sir. They was this hurricane come up. We dug down under a rock is all we had, felt this cold blow and looked up. That boulder was gone. The Quonset huts. City boys had put ‘em up. Flipped upside down like bowls and the boys with their legs stickin’ out. I can see that clear as day. I stayed on in, got up to three stripes, but that was as far as I wanted to go bossin’ boys around. Come on back here and went to work for my daddy buildin’ houses. You cain’t throw a rock in this town without you hit one we did. They’s a penny in a brick in every one and I can tell you where it is. Ward off tornadoes is what Daddy said. He’d let ya cut up, take a breather any time long’s ya got your work done. It’s a good way to be. Now give me that broom, they’s a big old bug in the corner there boy.

Second post in a series about military veterans I’ve known, working as an occupational therapist and researcher over the years.

Okay, he’s a half pint. He’s a squat Puerto Rican with no right to vote but that don’t mean he gets outta military service. Drafted, but he’s mean as beans, and he’s been diving the shipwrecks since he could walk, so ten minutes post-induction he’s a Demo Unit leader, and he is bad! He’s fit to swim through the Berlin sewers and reach up, cut off Hitler’s one hairy ball while that squirrelly madman sits the toilet. He thinks about that for real. And the feats he pulls off during his tour are just as outlandish. Dynamites shipyards then floats away on the outgoing tide, hitches a U-boat ride up the Rhine, drags uniformed Nips offa Tokyo boardwalks and slits their throats just to keep his hand in. Which is sort of a joke, because along the way his right hand gets torn off. You may want to know how, but there he won’t go.

So he rehabs in New York at war’s end and figures why not stay? No work in PR for a hard nut lefty. And he gets this religion jones, goes to confession, thinks it through. The only way to fix it, he figures, is to make himself into a good man. Cuts a deal with God, one good deed for every bad one during the War, and tacks up a wall chart to keep track. It’s a tough calibration, matching up a gutted Nazi to a plaster repair for the landlord, balancing cigarette handouts with cigarette tortures. He’s getting on in years now but still toeing that line, even to the point where he’s a trusted bagman for an Orthodox Jewish gold merchant in the 40s.

Doddering up Broadway with his heavy satchel, he looks like a garden gnome with a shaggy beard. So the thug kids who roust him figure him for an easy mark. How would they have guessed? The years of scratching off deeds on the wall, the sleeping catlike reflexes.  The old man’s prosthetic hook plucks out the eye of the first with a single ruthless swipe. The other guy stares aghast but then is down the street running before his buddy hits the ground. People rushing by, it’s all happened too fast to register. The little man bends, tucks the satchel between his knees and calmly wipes his bloody hook on the crumpled man’s pants cuff. One crepe-soled shoe crushes the plucked eye with a satisfying grapelike squish. Then he takes up the satchel and dodders on.

So how do I know all this? Next day he shows up at the VA prosthetics clinic and tells them he wants the whole length of the thing feathered. Prosthetist asks, like a saw? Yes a saw, for traction. For traction? He’s bad. He’s WWII Navy Demo. With a list to balance.   Which for some reason he’s brought with him. And shows me.

For much of my career as an occupational therapist I’ve worked with military veterans, both as a therapist and a researcher.  In these next few posts, I’ll be sharing some things I’ve heard and seen, told as close to verbatim as a Southern boy is ever likely to get.  Here’s one from my time at the VA Hospital on 23rd Street in Manhattan.  It was a while ago, but I ponder it.

“I’m tellin’ you, them boys in the Hooch.”  He shakes his head, cocks an eye. “They don’t never come out. And nobody go in there neither. Less they say come. I mean, no doctor, no nurse, no custodian, nobody.” We were at the cable machine. I had him standing sidewise to the frame, doing shoulder rotations with a pulley. You have to pay attention or your elbow swings away with the motion and you can blow out all that expensively repaired rotator cuff, so I was up close, tucking a magazine in the crook of his arm. That way if he cheated the magazine would fall. I wanted him to focus, but he wanted me to know about the 23^rd floor. He said, “You know how people act funny we used to say, you keep that up you goin’ to Bellevue? Maybe you heard it, people around here say 23^rd floor. Or just the Hooch. “

He caught the eye of another guy squeezing theraputty at a corner table, and raised his voice, making what began to sound like a sales pitch for the place. Important for all to grasp the far gone to Indiana nature of this enterprise behind the double locked doors on the 23^rd floor, doors I’d seen myself and wondered about, painted with some childishly scrawled palm trees and birds with toucan beaks and double eyebrows. He made it sound like a mythical land, something out of a novel, a psychiatrist’s joke where the inmates run the asylum, but the way he told it, it was not a joke at all, because it actually worked for these guys in its own altered prismatic way.

“Man,” he says, “the Hells Angels, they’d be pussies to these guys. I mean, no meds. Total drug holiday. No sedatives, no neuroleptics, no narcotics of any kind. No cigarettes. They’re vegetarians, man! Drink fuckin’ protein shakes. They’re monsters. Beefed out like Batman! Got their own gym, got their own religion. They get women up in there sometimes, ladies say there’s nothin’ like it. Pure men. No bullshit. All the perfume stripped off. But psycho’s to a man. Not a night’s sleep among ‘em. Lights on 24-7, that good old spooky rock playin’. Caged rats, but with human brains and too much time on their hands. Just pacin’ the wall.”

“You know what they oughta do?” I shake my head once, ask him to switch sides to do external rotation, and he obliges, though now he has to turn his head and lean back to make sure the theraputty guy can hear him. “What they oughta do, set these dudes up like the Dirty Dozen or somethin’, give ‘em a mission, let ‘em just go out and Rambo some dictator or some shit. I wouldn’t put it past ‘em that’s what this whole Hooch thing’s about anyway. Lab rats. Way to recycle a fightin’ man. You know like catch a guy in a good midlife crisis. When the true suck of life begins to sink in. And let ‘em just blow each other’s brains out. I’m tellin’ ya, it’s a concept! They oughta do that with the Army, man, no foolin’. They oughta set the draft at age 40 or around there, leave these little teenager boys alone, maybe relax the requirements a little, work that gut off, toss ‘em a ground to air armament and just fuckin’ let ‘em go to Viet Nam on somebody. You know, some sneaky old stockbroker on Wall Street, cabdriver, school teacher. Just throw ‘em all together in some size 44 khakis and poke ‘em with a stick. It’d be one bloody war, I can tell you that, brother. And they’d all be better for it. All of us would. Shit, I’d go. No shit, I would. And think about it a minute, you might too.”