Emrgency Room Decisions

Emergency Room Decisions

I was only a few months out of the Army and only a few more months out of the red clay of Pleiku, Vietnam and only a few more months away from attending the state college thirty miles from my home.

The GI Bill had been why I had signed up in the first place. But this afternoon I was unexpectedly standing against the wall in an empty hospital emergency room waiting to be checked in. It hadn’t been my plan when I woke up that day, but here I was. I had been taken out at home plate in the middle of a pickup baseball game with friends and had dislocated my shoulder.

Before the day would be over, I would realize it is seemingly small decisions and even minor plans that can determine the course of the rest of our lives. I remember that day, more than fifty years ago, whenever I feel my life hasn’t gone the way it should have and especially when I begin to try to figure out whose fault everything is.

It was a sweltering Sunday afternoon, and there was a world of hurt in the green eyes of Billy B as the nurse pushed his wheelchair down the hall from the front door toward the emergency room, followed closely by a local cop who looked as if he wanted to be anywhere else other than this sad rural hospital on a warm summer afternoon, walking this young addict in a wheelchair towards a room he wouldn’t remember and a doctor who wouldn’t be able to help him.

 B had gone too absently into the turmoil of the drug-addled 1970s without a plan for the next step in his life, and this is where he had arrived.

I was leaning against the coffee machine waiting for someone to work on the shoulder I had dislocated when they went by, with B’s head bobbing like one of those plastic dash-board white-haired trolls.

“Hey,” I said, stopping the cop.

“What’s going on with him?”

I pushed myself off the coffee machine and winced from the pain in my shoulder, but the cop stopped.

“This is none of your business,” he said, and made it clear I was to back off.

I was in my early 20s, just out of the war and headed for college on the government’s tab, and my idiot injury was painful, so I nearly let it go at that.

They backed the wheelchair against the wall at the triage station and left the room.

B and I had spent most of my month-long special leave from the Army a few years earlier driving around nights in my sister’s VW in partially altered states.

We were a lot alike and got close. He introduced me to the music of Phil Ochs, and I talked him out of joining the Army.

“The Army is the worst thing that ever happened to me,” I explained over the lip of my chosen drug, a Giant Imperial Quart of Narragansett. I may have been wrong about that.

B was eating hash and dropping acid. I had only started hanging out with him because I wanted to get to know his sister, which I never did, but then we got along, and I started picking him up at night because I liked his company.

He was one of those eternally funny people who could make you laugh until your face hurt, and after a year in a war, if I wasn’t going to get to meet his sister, I at least needed someone to laugh with.

This chance meeting in the emergency room was the first time I had seen him since then.

I leaned back against the vending machine and stared across the room of plastic chairs at the lingering vision of B being wheeled by.

Triage was across the waiting room on the other side of the chairs about thirty feet from me, and I could see B’s clouded eyes clearly in the bright light of the small office.

He looked like he had the mange — his red hair seemingly having fallen out in clumps. His skin had the look of oatmeal. His eyes were for the most part closed and weepy. I recognized

 the clothes – the black jeans and red flannel shirt – just like the ones he had worn when we were hanging out together drinking and chasing women. I couldn’t let myself believe they were the exact same clothes, but they probably were.

He looked up for a second and our eyes met.

I nodded, and he smiled.

Two of his top teeth were missing and the rest had begun to rot near the gum line. I walked over to the door to the office and mouthed, “What happened?” Then I realized he wasn’t smiling at me. He wasn’t smiling at anyone. He was just smiling.

Addled bliss.

The cop suddenly appeared in the doorway and asked, “Are you a friend of his?”

I nodded.

“What’s his name? We found him down on Central Street sitting next to a dumpster, beside some old furniture.”

I stepped into the office and helped fill in the forms as much as I could, and we looked up his sister’s phone number and called her to come get him.

Billy B just sat in his chair and looked at me.

Stared.

Vacant.

“Hey Billy,” I tried, sidling my chair across in front of him.

He recognized his name and looked at me now focusing.

“I know you,” he said.

Then he went stone blank.

I looked at the cop for an explanation.

“Smack, I think,” he said.

Just as they were taking me to have my shoulder fixed, B’s sister came in the frontdoor. She smiled at me in embarrassed thanks.

The nurse offered me a shot of Demerol.

“These things can be painful,” she said. She was right. I said no.

Our lives are affected for a reason. We are supposed to pay attention.

We are supposed to have a plan.

Maybe the Army and the war had helped after all.