The Tao of Apathy (15 page)

Seuss glanced over at him as his white uniform
was revealed. “You work in the kitchen,” he said. Then a bell went
off in his head and Seuss screamed, “What are you doing here all
camouflaged up? You work for me. Ethel. Ethel, is this man
bothering you or performing some sort of scam on you?”

“
Is he a spy for the union?” Petty
asked Seuss.

“
Are you a spy for the union?”
Seuss asked Bigger. “You may be fired for this.”

Ethel stood up on her stout legs. “What the
heck is the matter with you, Walter? You didn’t remember that
Bigger works for you?”

“
Oh yeah. Now you are starting to
look familiar. Why are you sitting with a professional and not with
those others from the kitchen?” he asked pointing to Thelma, Ester,
and Augusta as they sat staring into their coffee cups and eating
their ketchup soup.

“
Is he working as an operative for
Betty?” Petty asked.

“
Are you working as an operative
with Betty?” Seuss asked Bigger.

“
Who’s Betty?” Bigger
answered.

“
What’s an operative?” Seuss
asked.

“
This is my son for Christ sakes,
Gregg. The boy that sits across from you every time you have been
over for dinner for the last twenty-five years.

“
You know, your
God-son.”

“
Maybe not. I may be an
eighty-year-old dead Italian guy. I’m looking into it.”

“
Either way, I don’t think you can
sit with us.”

Petty intervened. “We do have some important
things to discuss.” He gave Bigger a hardy shoulder-shake. “You
understand.”

Bigger stood up and turned. Then he turned
back again to pick up his tray, but he was doing nothing but
getting out of there.

“
Sit down, Bigger,” his mother
said.

He sat down.

“
My son is going to stay. There is
no business to talk about. I get a lot of flack for getting people
in trouble when a patient complains. But that does not concern me.
And neither does the employees unionizing. Patients’ rights have
nothing to do with the union and I am not going to try to prevent
people from their right to form a union. I am not going to use my
care for the sick as a way to thwart an administrative issue. My
only concern is ensuring equal, timely treatment to all patients. I
don’t give a crap about your profit margin.” She sat down and began
eating.

Petty thrust out an open hand toward Seuss and
threatened him with his eyebrows. Seuss said, “Ethel, be sensible.
You shouldn’t be sitting with your son. I have watched him go in
and out of union meetings-”

“
Mrs. Steiffy,” Petty interrupted
before Seuss could talk some more. “I admire your dedication to the
patients, but this hospital is a business and always has been.
Despite what Hussein Obama thinks, all charities are. You and I
have the same goal, only I know that we must focus on making great
profits to be able to continue healing people.”

“
Mr. Petty,” Ethel scolded. “All
these changes you have made don’t make sense to me. You took God
and mercy out of health care and now you want to take rights and
respect away from the people who care for the sick. This hospital
was not meant to be a business. It was started in 1889 by four nuns
in a house donated by a parish.”

Petty cracked a leg of his lobster. “Yeah,
well, we don’t have anyone to donate us a new hospital like they
got.”

Ethel stared at him across her plate of food
and pointed her fork at Petty until she finished chewing. “People
donate money all he time and we have over 60 people donating their
time in this hospital every day.”

“
Well, I don’t see it affecting
our bottom line at all. Except for the ones now doing tasks that we
use to have employees to do, they may as well not be here at
all.”

Chapter 30

There is a long hallway in the basement of the
Saint Jude‘s. At the corner where the hallway begins is the
specimens’ lab. Down further is the morgue. There are some
mechanical rooms and some storage rooms past the morgue. Then the
tile floor ends. Here the floor is cement and the lights are
attached to steel girders by wire. On the right side of the hall is
the Central Supply room (now officially The Axial Requisitioning
& Replenishment Center) and on the left is the maintenance
shop. Here the men have lockers and on top of the lockers are
Little Oscar coolers with their lunches. On the bulletin board are
a football pool and a newspaper clipping of when Craig got his
12-point buck. The speaker system that pages the doctors and pipes
in Muzak is not wired down here and there aren’t any chairs with
Lumbar support. There is only a bench by the lockers and a wobbly
stool with a backrest welded onto it next to the counter in the
supply room.

This was the wild west of the hospital. A man
only had what he needed and he lived by his own code because the
law was scarce in these parts. The women were scarcer, preferring
to be in the carpeted civilization where coffee was not served in
Styrofoam cups and one could have cultured conversations about
“Real Wives of San Quentin.”

This was the area Dykes started his day out by
picking medical supplies off the shelves and loading them on his
wooden cart to deliver to the units. His co-workers down here got a
kick out of John. Whenever they asked him how it was going, he
would respond, “I wish I cared.” The guys in the supply and
maintenance department thought of John as clearly different, but
really liked the way he was able to put things so succinctly. In
fact, his “I wished I cared.” became their anthem and they were apt
to use this phrase when they were told to do anything. Dykes
worried that they were making fun of him, but usually he found one
of the guys waiting around to shoot the shit with him. His raw,
undecorated attitude struck a chord with his co-workers and fit the
metal-shelves motif. (At least that was how one of the men that
waited around for Dykes a lot put it).

Two floors up, Dykes sat in his boss’s office.
Mr. Crapper had three large windows that looked out onto St. Jude’s
terraced garden and its two story marble fountain. Eyes down and
shoulders forward, Dykes sat in front of Crapper’s desk. He did not
notice the dark oak and the glass top over it to protect it from
the golf knickknacks and the expensive computer Crapper hadn’t
touched since his secretary logged him on four years
ago.

Mr. Crapper’s thin six foot three frame was
displayed in his black leather chair like he rehearsed sitting
effectively. He was neat in appearance and wore one of his snazzy
ties. With the boyish bounce Crapper’s gray hair had and his
squinty-eyed good looks, he had a definite aura of Richard Gere. In
other words, he seemed gay.

“
Ah..ah…Mr. Dykes-” Crapper began.
He had sent for Dykes earlier in the day and now was surprised to
see him.

“
My name is Bacchus. John
Bacchus.”

“
Hmm. Seems like when I hired you
your last name was Dykes.”

“
My last name is Bacchus.” Dykes
hated having to talk to Crapper and couldn’t bear to listen to him
try to spew out a few coherent words. Crapper, self-conscious of
his speech impediment, tried to be forceful, sophisticated and
smooth all at the same time and this caused his words to
bottleneck. Dykes wanted to take a plunger to his face. What Dykes
really wanted to do was not deal with Crapper. If he thought it
would get him out of this meeting, he would quit on the spot. It
wouldn’t.

“
Well, wh-what I wanted to talk to
you about is th-th-that a lot of people have been complaining
th-that you are not friendly and have a bad attitude. You don’t
ah-ah smile. You—that-is people have reported to ma-me that you
have trouble h-having a con-convers- carrying on a um
conversation.”

“
So do you.”

“
Ah..Ahh..Ahh.”

“
Exactly how many people have
complained to you?” Dykes fired off.

“
Enough people. Well, one. But I
wa-want her to stop pestering me so I am coming down hard on you.”
Crapper put his hands on his hips as he sat, then felt he was not
looking official and folded his hands on his desk. “You need to be
more friendly in the elevator. You-you-are you-It seems, well-do
you have a prolonged illness that I should know about. The reason I
ask is that people h-have been suggesting that I am not letting
people have sick days.”

“
I get them like I am entitled
to.”

“
O-okay, but you are depressing
the patients by looking sick. T-there I’ve just come out w-with
it.”

“
I’m not sick and my name is not
John Dykes.”

“
I am glad y-your not sick, Mr.
Bacchus. Y-you are wa-one of my best workers.”

“
Call me Dykes.”

“
B-but Dykes, I n-need you to stop
a-a-annoying the nursing staff by being so quiet in the elevators.
You-re fr-freakin’ them out. H-help m-me out here,
Dykes.”

“
My name is not Dykes.”

“
N-now, the way I am g-going to
resolve this is by giving you a br-brosh-brochure on our EAP
program. You know, the Employee Ass-ssistance Program.”

Dykes felt both suicidal and homicidal at the
suggestion. “Maybe that program can help confused gay people. Maybe
it really helped you, but I don’t need it.”

“
I am not gay,” Crapper hissed.
“Uh..see? This is uh..uh.. a p-p-picture of my fiancée.”

“
I thought that was a picture of
Mama Cass.”

“
No.”

“
Melissa McCarthy?”

“
I wish.”

“
It’s okay, you know, to be
gay.”

“
Because I care, I am handing you
this brochure,” Crapper continued, red in the face and reading off
a prepared script for dealing with troubled employees, “which
details how our referral program helps you overcome personal
problems that may interfere with your job performance.”

“
Like say denying your sexual
orientation or frying your brain with long term marijuana use, for
example?”

Crapper blinked his bloodshot eyes and flipped
through his script. “It is obvious that you have some problems you
need to start to deal with, insert employee’s name
here.”

“
But if I am not ready to face
them, won’t I just throw this pamphlet out?”

“
I don’t believe so.”

“
Hmm. I have another question,”
Dykes said, clutching the arms of the chair he was sitting in. “If
a nurse is rude to me, can I report that to someone and have
something done.”

“
Absolutely,” Crapper said
instantly. “Just l-let me know. Uh-um, I give you my
guarantee.”

Dykes leaned forward. His knuckles turned
white in the silence. “Guarantee of what?”

Crapper knitted his brow. “Isn’t a guarantee
enough? What’s b-better than a guarantee? C-c-come on, I m-mean,
D-Dykes. I am just ass-ass-ass-asking you to be
reasonable.”

“
My name is John
Bacchus.”

Dykes left, leaving the EAP brochure on
Crapper’s desk. He had figured his gay comment would have made
Crapper fire him on the spot, but if he wasn’t going to be fired,
then he might have to do what Crapper wanted to avoid another
meeting like that. But Dykes found that he only had to acquiesce to
any directive Crapper might give until Crapper lost interest or it
escaped his impaired memory. Sometimes Dykes simply ignored the
directive and gambled that Crapper didn’t want another meeting with
him as much as he didn’t want one with Crapper.

Dykes walked to the elevator and stepped on
between two nurses. He smiled at them. He tried to make his mouth
say hi, but he couldn’t with the thought that one of them might be
the one that complained to Crapper.

“
Hi, John,” Mary Eddy
said.

Dykes nodded at her. Dykes would not be more
friendly because his words were heavy, weighted. He was not strong
enough to lift the words with his tongue over the wall of his
teeth. Paralyzed, he watched the nurses get out on the first
floor.

In social situations, he talked himself out of
talking. And if he could not even convince himself to take a chance
and say hello in the hallway to someone that he had laid on top of
naked (lest he pile up more proof of his loneliness), how did
Crapper think that he could tell some EAP counselor his problems.
Dykes decided that the only extra talking he would do would be to
spread the truth about Crapper having a thing for chubby women.
While Dykes loved plus-sized women as well, Crapper was handsome
enough that even the chubby women would be disappointed with
him.

Chapter 31

Betty stepped into the Butt Hutt carefully as
it was her first trip to it. She was afraid that the yellow slime
on the walls would drip on her. Then the odor hit her, but she
continued in. A collection of nurses, housekeepers, and maintenance
guys sat around the center table talking about the union. She was
surprised to see Mr. Bowdler from the re-organization company
sitting off to the side. She scowled at him, and he scowled back,
shaking the loose skin under his chin. She then went to the
opposite side of the room where Father Chuck was
sitting.