I
WOKE UP ONE MORNING IN THE VETERANS HOSPITAL and Zel was sitting in a chair beside my bed. I had to laugh. Zel looked a fright in his hospital gown with his bumpy whiskey nose and his carpetbagger’s grin. He was riddled with cancer—linked to Agent Orange—and wasn’t going to get well, but he was just as cheerful and nonchalant as ever.
I had pneumonia. My lungs were full of fluid.
When the coast was clear, Zel loaded his syringe with vodka. I’d never heard of such a thing but Zel claimed he’d done it dozens of times in Nam, at the military hospital in Saigon. I watched him unhook his IV line & plug in the syringe, & I
We talked for a while and then Zel got going about his screenplay, “Death Valley.” It was interesting, but I was fading fast and I guess I must have fallen asleep because when I woke up he was gone.
It was the beginning of a very restful period, a time of renewal for me. After a few days, Zel got me installed in his semi-private room. Nobody knew we were in the hospital so nobody came to visit us, and we spent a lot of time just talking. Outside our room was a long hallway leading past more rooms and the nurses’ station, then the bathrooms used by ambulatory patients and visitors, and finally the dayroom with padded chairs upholstered in old crumbly red leather, stacks of magazines, a TV and a long row of snack machines.
Zel had figured out a way to beat several of the candy machines and the coffee machine. I mean he had those machines clocked. And just about every day he’d coax the peanut machine into giving up a shower of quarters. But food was never an issue. It wasn’t like we were going hungry. The meals were great. They’d bring the menu around and you could circle whatever you wanted. I usually got the baked chicken with rice pilaf or the Virginia ham and duchess potatoes, and Zel would get the seafood Newburg in puff pastry. For dessert we’d have vanilla ice cream or cherry jello.
“A person gets goddamn sick of cherry jello,” Zel said one day, thumping on the floor with his cane, but he was kidding, I knew. Zel appreciated the meals as much as I did.
One night a homeless guy with two broken legs came in from ER, a man named Potter. He’d gotten looped and fallen down a concrete stairwell. Potter was still reeling drunk and the doctor was scared he’d get the DTs if he took him off the alcohol too abruptly, so he prescribed one ounce of bourbon every four hours. An hour later a delivery stooge from a liquor store showed up with a fifth of Old Grandad. The nurses administered the bourbon in plastic cups and kept a close eye on Potter’s blood alcohol level to make sure it didn’t fall too low.
The nurses kept the bourbon under lock and key, of course, but this incident gave us a bright idea. Zel paid LeRoy, the maintenance guy who changed the light bulbs, to smuggle us in a bottle of Smirnov’s. LeRoy managed to snag us a couple of syringes too. When the coast was clear, Zel loaded his syringe with vodka. I’d never heard of such a thing but Zel claimed he’d done it dozens of times in Nam, at the military hospital in Saigon. I watched him unhook his IV line and plug in the syringe, and I did the same.
Slamming vodka was a hoot. One minute you were cold sober, and the next minute you were giddy-drunk. And no telltale alcohol-breath! It was beautiful. We got it down to a regular routine. In the afternoons, when things were quiet, we’d fix, then hook our IV bags up again and go for a stroll with our walkers by the nurses’ station. There was a nurse Zel was sweet on. She was a Jersey girl, Claudia, from Perth Amboy.
Then one night a young Lance Corporal who’d lost both legs, an arm, and half of his face in Iraq got hold of a scalpel and somehow managed to cut the veins in his one remaining wrist. You could hardly blame him, but hospital security got a lot tighter after that, and we decided to cool it for a while.
Zel and I had a lot of talks in the dayroom. He’d flush out some free candy bars and coffee, and he’d go on and on about the steam bath at Long Binh and the massage girl who walked on his back while we waited for Claudia to happen by. I don’t think she was ever sweet on him. After all, he was a lot older and a blackout drunk, but you never know. We’d look out the window, too. We watched a hummingbird build a tiny nest glued together with spider webs. A day or so later, two white eggs appeared, no bigger than peanuts. After the eggs hatched, the mother bird would make trip after trip to feed the babies, sticking her bill all the way down their throats. When you’re confined, like we were, you amuse yourself with trifles. Of course we could have left, gone AMA, but we weren’t all that anxious to get back to the streets.
Destry's Last Ride continues...
