Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) (20 page)

How? you ask?
 
So did I, when I figured out what it must be costing.
 
The answers tended to veer.
 
Basically, surgeons kept forgetting to bill for his operations.
 
Charge nurses kept losing track of his expenses.
 
The accounting department did a lot of creative arithmetic.
 
“Lost” equipment could be found in his room most of the time—but never was.
 
People—staff and other patients—sometimes made donations to a Smiley fund…at least once in five figures.
 

I strongly doubt that anyone ever mentioned any of this to him.
 
There were always two packs of Camels on his rolling table when he woke up, that’s all, and shortbread cookies on the table beside the bed, and two or three very good books he’d never read before in the drawer.
 
If he ever wondered about any of this, I never heard him mention it.
 
It would have been too much like worrying, and that was something John Smiley was no more capable of than he was of trampolining.

Why did he rate this kind of treatment? you’re wondering.
 
I can put it in nine words.
 
He was the happiest human being I ever met.

Don’t ask me how.
 
All he had in the world was that room and those smokes and books and cookies and whoever happened to wander in his door…and somehow the son of a bitch managed to have more fun than a barrel of monkeys.
 
I never spoke to anyone who ever found him other than cheeful, and his door was always open.
 
Somehow he’d found the handle.
 
Joy had become a habit for him.
 
And he had a way of making it contagious.

They sent the hard ones to him.
 
Terminal cases.
 
Women who’d lost babies.
 
Unsuccessful suicides.
 
Patients in clinical depression.
 
Amputees.
 
Burn cases.
 
Parents or loved ones of patients in bad shape.
 
He helped, they said.
 
Patients who could walk, hop or wheel themselves up to Six East tended to heal faster, they said.

I’d heard about him; everybody had.
 
I’d even worked on him one night when he coded and nobody else was available—and gotten a signed thank you card the following week.
 
But I’d never met him.
 
Tell you the truth, I hadn’t much wanted to.
 
What I’d heard of him had made him sound a little too Leo Buscaglia, a little too Michael Landon.
 
You know, the smiling suffering saint of Six East.
 
Pat O’Brien would play him in the movie, and there’d be too much music.
 

But then one day I got to figuring that if he could help the Head Nurse handle the death of her mother, and help the Chief of Staff cope with the death of his son, and help the boss porter deal with the loss of his hand, maybe he could help me manage the dread news that I was not a very nice guy.
 
So I walked into his room and bummed a smoke.

The first words out of his mouth were, “Jesus, Doc, who pissed in
your
canteen?”
 
The Saint of Six East.
 
I guess I stared at him for awhile, trying to figure out how to reply.
 
I thought,
my wife
, and then,
God
, and then,
pretty much everybody, I guess
and then,
I wish to hell I knew
, and while I was trying to decide which to pick, what I heard come out of my mouth was, “I’m given to understand that
I
did.”

To which he nodded and said, “Now
that’s
a bitch, alright.
 
Pull up a chair and tell me about it.”

“Well,” I said, “I kind of came here hoping you could maybe tell me about it.”

He nodded.
 
“Sure,” he said.
 
“As soon as you tell me what to tell you.
 
When did the first symptoms present?”

And we were off.

First I told him about Janet, and of course by now I had that polished into a nice comedy routine.
 
He was a great audience—laughed like a lumberjack on nitrous, fed you little straight-lines, volleyed but always let you have the topper.
 
Then I did a slapstick sketch of me wandering the halls like a fat Diogenes, looking for a dishonest friend, getting pie after pie in the face.
 
He laughed so hard I was afraid it might be hurting him, so I throttled it back and tapered off and finally just asked, “So tell me, John: what do you think I’m doing wrong?”

He kept smiling and said, “I can’t answer that until I get to know you, Doc—and I don’t know if I’m gonna live that long.
 
It’s up to you.”

I asked him what the hell he was talking about.

“Look,” he said, still smiling, “I thank you for the show.
 
It was great, and I really appreciate it.
 
But Doc, there’s only two reasons to make people laugh.
 
One is because you like ’em, and you want to make ’em feel good.
 
And the other is because you’re scared, and you want to keep ’em at arm’s length.
 
You’re good: I don’t know if you’ll ever let me get inside.”

I stared at him and started to cloud up, but how can you get mad at a guy who’s nothing but bad meat from the collarbone down?
 
Finally I just said, “I’m not scared of you, John.”
 
But even I could hear my voice shaking.
 
And he did two astonishing things.

He pulled the sheet down to his lap.
 
And he closed his eyes.

Do you get it?
 
First he made it possible to look, then he made it okay to stare.
 
So I stared.

Well, I told you, I worked ER.
 
I guess I’d seen things as bad or worse.
 
Hard to quantify, really.
 
How many mangled limbs equals one decapitated infant?
 
I’d seen things so bad I won’t describe ’em to you…but I’ll tell you this: I had never once cried.
 
Not once since I entered med school.
 
If the patient was unconscious and there were no civilians around, I made a joke.
 
If it was real bad and the patient was listening, I thought of a joke and someone to tell it to later.
 

I looked at John Smiley’s body and I thought of a side-splitter…and then I burst into tears and cried harder than I had since I was three years old.

I cried so hard so long the Charge Nurse came in to see what the hell was going on and John had to pull the sheet back up.
 
I’d never liked her, and hated crying in front of her, but I couldn’t stop.
 
I was afraid she was going to hug me, and she did an amazing thing herself.
 
She said, “Call me if you need me, Sam,” and walked out again.
 
Thirty-five years she and I have been friends now.

When I was cried out, John took hold of my shoulder.
 
Grip like the jaws of a tax collector.
 
“Sam,” he said, “you got the same problem all doctors got if they’re worth a shit.
 
You got too much empathy.
 
That’s why you got in the racket, and why your life’s going south.
 
You feel other people’s pain.
 
Your line of work, that’s good and it’s bad.
 
It helps you fix what you can fix—but it chops you up.
 
It kills you when you can’t fix one.
 
You overdosed.
 

“So you put an off-switch on your empathy.
 
You turn it off with a joke.
 
You look at the symptoms instead of the patient, because you can’t stand to feel what he feels anymore.
 
Trouble with them off-switches, when they break it’s usually in the off position.
 
You can’t turn your heart off all day and then go home and pop it back on for the wife.
 
After awhile you can’t even warm it up for your friends.
 
You can’t even feel your own goddam pain.”

“So what am I supposed to do,” I asked him.
 
“Change jobs?”

“I hope not,” he said.
 
“Word in the halls is you’re damn good.
 
Over-insulated, maybe, but good.
 
Maybe you just need to cry a little more.
 
And do a little more of the right kind of laughing.
 
The kind that brings you closer instead of further apart.”

“Where do you find laughter like that?” I asked him.

And he gave me directions to Callahan’s Place.

***

Well of course, none of us needed to be told any more about the specifics of the Doc’s cure.
 
We all knew what happened when you came to Callahan’s.
 
And for as long as any of us had known him, Sam Webster’s laughter had been, beyond question, the right kind.
 
His laughter had brought a great many of us together, over the years.

“What happened to John?” Zoey asked.

“Oh, he hung on for another two years,” the Doc said.
 
“Plain impossible, of course—but then, the shape he was in, I don’t suppose two years was all that much more remarkable than two minutes.”

“Jesus,” Marty Matthias said.
 
“What the hell kept him going?”

“I asked him once,” the Doc told him.
 
“He said to me, ‘Sam, people keep comin’ in that door with problems I can fix.
 
How many guys you know are that lucky?
 
Even healthy guys.’
 
Then he laughed and told me the one about the man with the silver screw in his navel.
 
That’s how long ago all this was: that joke was new, then.”

“How did things work out with his wife?” Zoey asked.
 

“To tell you the truth,” the Doc said, “that surprised me more than just about anything else about John.
 
They got along great.”

“That is surprising,” Zoey said, nodding.
 
“It sounds like she was in a strange position.”

“One of the strangest,” the Doc agreed.
 
“Look at it from her point of view.
 
‘Mrs. Smiley, your husband has taken his last step, and earned his last nickel.
 
You’ll get rich from it—but not until he dies…and it looks like he’s going to keep circling the drain for years to come.
 
And if you divorce him before he dies, you won’t see a dime.
 
Have a nice day.”

“How did they deal with it?” Zoey asked.

“Well,” the Doc said, “Helen came to visit every Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday night.
 
Generally got in by eight o’clock, and sometime along toward ten, she’d shut the door…or whoever else had been visiting with them left and shut it behind them.
 
You can’t lock those doors, of course—but it would’ve taken a very busy guy to get past all the nurses and patients running interference, and get within twenty feet of that door.
 
By eleven she was usually on her way home, smiling like Mona Lisa.”

“Jesus,” said Dink Fogerty.
 
“What the hell could they
do?
”

“I actually got up the balls to ask him one time,” the Doc said.
 
“Relying on doctor’s arrogance.
 
He didn’t mind a bit.
 
By that point he’d been utterly without privacy of any kind for so long, he was willing to tell anybody anything.
 
‘Hell, Sam,’ he said, ‘I got the use of both hands and my tongue—what more do you need to please a woman?’
 
‘Well, okay,’ I said, ‘but is there anything
she
can do for
you
?
 
Women aren’t wired up like men: damn few of ’em can just take.’
 
And he gave me that big pirate’s grin and said, ‘I can’t feel a damn thing from my chest down…nothing good, anyway…but Sam, you wouldn’t believe how sensitive my nipples are.’
 

Les Glueham murmured, “That’s the most beautiful thing I ever heard of,” at the same instant his wife Merry breathed, “That’s the most terrible thing I ever heard of,” and then they looked at each other and both nodded.
 
Zoey and I shared a glance, too.

“Wait for it,” the Doc said.
 
“About a year and a half before he finally died, John asked me to find some nice guy for his wife.
 
He said she had to stay legally married to him, so she’d collect big-time when he finally caught the bus, but that was no reason for a woman as nice as her to live alone.”

“Wow…what did you do?” Tommy Janssen asked.

“What could I do?
 
Went home and cried my eyes out, and then I found a nice guy for his wife.
 
Three guys, actually.
 
Nicest three bachelors I could find.
 
She dated all three for awhile, then settled on one and moved in with him.
 
Never missed a visit, mind you—except now she brought her boyfriend along.
 
He and John got to be good friends.
 
He’d stay for an hour or so, then leave her alone with her husband, and swing by to pick her up an hour later.
 
The two of them got married the week John died.”

“Holy smoke, what a story!” Tommy said.
 
“Are they still together?”

“No,” Long-Drink McGonnigle said.
 
“She died on me.”