The Tao of Apathy (6 page)

“
Shh,” Bigger whispered
back.

Joe watched Bigger listen to Seuss who wasn’t
saying anything. Bigger was worried. Even though the new guy was
terrible and hadn’t even made it to the meeting and was hired just
so that Seuss would have someone to fire, Bigger thought he would
be the first to go. After all, Bigger knew that Seuss hated him and
would love to get rid of him.

“
-Although I’d hate to see any of
you go,” Seuss said avoiding Bigger’s gaze. His staff got up to get
away from Seuss as he closed his notes. “Wait. Wait. Before we
leave, we have a surprise for Ester. Today is Ester’s birthday.
Ester started working in the kitchen when she dropped out of high
school at sixteen; before there even was a kitchen here and the
nuns made the meals on hotplates in their living quarters.” Seuss
clapped his hands and began singing, “Happy birthday to you.” Two
co-workers wheeled in a cake on a cart and carried a banner that
read, “Happy Birthday! Fifty is nifty.”

“
Look at that stupid ass sign,”
Joe groaned to Bigger who was singing. “Do they really think that
they are being originally funny? Don’t they care enough about Ester
to come up with a personalized banner? I hate to tell them that
they do not have the first sign that says fifty is
nifty.”

“
Well, they always say, ‘Oh Lordy,
he is forty.”

“
Someone should outlaw that damn
saying, too. They've been done to death. And why is that a thing?
Lordy and forty don’t even rhyme.” Ester was now beet red and
looking at her giant cake as the other elderly ladies crooned, “How
old are you? How old are you? How old are you? How old are
you?”

“
And look at her,” Joe said.
“Fifty is not nifty. It sucks. She is old, she has a crappy job,
and she will never have better until she dies which won’t be long
now.”

Everyone finished singing so that Ester could
blow out her candles, but instead of making a wish, said, “Thanks
for being here for my birthday party, Joe.”

Chapter 6

After days of a constant sleeting, the winter
sun now streaked through Grumby’s closed blinds as he talked with
the members of the reorganization team. The consulting company with
its terms –company and team- had made Grumby think that there would
be dozens of people collecting data at Saint Jude’s. For some
reason, he expected to see people with clipboards and measuring
tapes, yet he had only ever met or saw these two.

Jack Ketch was a tall, well-built man with a
Tony Robbins smile. Thomas Bowdler, his associate, believed change
was a necessary part of life. He held nothing sacred, not
traditions, closed minds, signed contracts, or human life. At five
foot six and three hundred pounds, he was not a handsome man. He
had a bald, wrinkled forehead that mirrored his bald, wrinkly
chins. If someone was to put him upside down, magic marker two eyes
and a nose below his mouth and cover the rest of his face with a
scarf; he could be a chin puppet of himself.

“
We have something to talk about,”
Ketch said. “A possible problem.”

Grumby felt his neck muscles bunch up and
wrench themselves like a sports bra on a Biggest Loser contestant.
Lately, he had been under so much pressure that he spent each day
feeling his heart implode in his chest and his stomach juice
erupting into esophagus. And now something bad. “Y-you haven’t
found any sexual harassment scandals, have you?”

“
Grumby. I am not goofing around
here.”

“
Yes,” Bowdler broke in with a
voice created by vocal cords bullied by fat. “During the
reorganization process, there is always a hitch that we need to
deal with. Jack and I always wait until this point to bring it up.”
Grumby gulped. “We have to be careful that we do not look like we
are cutting minority’s jobs and using reorganization as an excuse
to discriminate; although we are willing to do that.”

Grumby laughed and slapped his desk. “Is that
all? There is nothing to worry about here. We don’t have any of
those people working for us. Except for our towel-head doctors, our
staff is one hundred percent white. Is, was and will be white. If
worse comes to worse, we will hire some darkies to work in the
kitchen or clean rooms.”

“
Good. Good,” Ketch said. “I like
to see a real American.”

Bowdler leaned forward. “We could devise a
reorganization plan that would get rid of the non-white
doct-”

“
Hold on now. I draw the line at
racism against rich, foreign people. Let me tell you something,
they have the same values as any of our white doctors. They are as
greedy as you or I. But also they have two qualities my white
doctors don’t have. They are competent and they are willing to work
at this hospital as long as we keep paying them in U.S. dollars and
not the drachmas or whatever they would earn back at Rice Paddy
General. As far as I am concern, I wish all of my doctors were
black, Arab, or Asian.”

Chapter 7

“
No, your husband is going to die
soon and you won’t ever see him again,” a nurse in SOL told the
wife of Mr. Annunzio. “That’s a truth. Once we have done everything
for him, you will be without him.”

The woman was not comforted. “I can’t pull the
plug. I won’t.”

“
He is already gone. I need you to
understand, he will never recover.”

“
I have already come to terms with
that thanks to all of your empathy and patience,” she said in her
heavy Italian accent. “I just know that when his heart stops
beating, he will come back as a ghost and haunt me. He swore that
to me before he went unconscious and God told me in my heart that I
will be sorry for what I done. I want Gabriele right here where I
can keep an eye on him.”

“
That’s stupid,” the nurse
consoled. “You need to end your husbands suffering. This is life
and death and needs to be thought through thoroughly.” He backed
out of the room and hurried to the Domino’s pizza he had
ordered.

“
No. No,” the elderly lady, Mrs.
Annunzio, called out after him. “I need some time. I think maybe I
will be tormented for the rest of my life. It is my fault he was
hurt. I need some time. I was driving. I need some time. He was
always such a hot head. I know his spirit will torment me.” The
nurse called in the doctor, an intern from the Psychiatric Care
Unit, and a grief counselor and they got her calmed
down.

They would have called in the priest, but he
believed in ghosts, too. Even the grief counselor had heard the
priest go on about some holey ghost. “That priest is an ignoramus,”
the grief counselor said, espousing the new directive of Saint
Jude’s that eliminated God due to his
non-cost-effectiveness.

After a couple of hours, they got Mrs.
Annunzio to admit herself to the psychiatric ward for a few days.
This unit of the hospital was a place for people with too hard a
grip on reality. Its doors were always locked so that the unstable,
suicidal, or dangerous people were kept inside. There were many
procedures that were followed so that the insane, delusional, and
criminal remained behind the locked door. This population of which
Mrs. Annunzio was now a part of was never unsupervised; except when
they were. If they wanted to smoke, someone would buzz the electric
door lock and let them go out in groups. They would ride the
elevator with whoever happened to be in there and then go to the
Butt Hutt and strike up conversations with staff and other
patients.

Today, a teenage boy with ribbons in his hair
(on one of those smoke breaks) was telling Joe and a nurse how he
was on a fructose high. Joe ignored him and worked on staring at
the nurse’s breasts without getting caught. The ribbon-haired boy
kept getting closer to Joe as he talked. “I eat some oranges in the
morning and I am loving life, man. I don’t care what my parents
said to get me in here. They are evil. Only natural things go in
this body,” he said thumping his Keith Richards chest.

The nurse whispered confidentially to Joe,
“His parents admitted him to the psych ward while he was having a
bad trip.”

“
As far as whackos go, he is
actually one of the better ones,” Joe said back.

“
Grapes make me go wild man. But
don’t ask my parents, they will lie. Fructose highs are better than
any drug highs, man, but I haven’t done any drugs. Life is too
sweet for that, man.” He moved almost nose to nose with
Joe.

“
Life blows dead rabbit. Dude. And
it only gets worse as you get older.” With that said, Joe got up
and left.

Yolanda stood at the window and cursed her
choices in life. She had an oxygen mask over her face and still had
trouble breathing. That nurse that doesn’t know anything is right,
she thought. I am a fool. I have brought this on myself. All I
needed was some self-control. A little brains and I would be happy.
I always blamed my smoking and all my problems on Dad, but he is
not the one dying.

Only my own stupidity gave me cancer. I
deserve this. I did this and now I’m a burden to these people.
Janice is right to berate me for getting cancer.” She raised her
eyes up to God and then down to her nurse. Janis was coming out of
a yellow door followed by a thin teenager with ribbons in his hair
and she had a Salem Ultra Light in her mouth. Yolanda fell to the
floor. "She shouldn’t have been up anyway," Janis said when she
found her.

Chapter 8

Joe saw Bigger coming out to look for him as
he walked back from his smoke break, so he stopped outside the door
and lit up. “Hey,” he said.

“
Are you just getting done with a
break?”

“
Do you want to go back
inside?”

Bigger shook his head. He stood with his hands
under his apron and listened to the melting snow drip off the roof
of the hospital. “I’ve been thinking and I probably don’t have to
worry about being laid off even though I refuse to wear any
freakin’ white pants.”

It was then that Tim, the security guard,
burst out the door carrying a nun by her collar and let her go with
a push. “Orders are I have to remove you from the premises, sister.
My bosses don’t like your attitude. Oh, hi there Bigger. Joe. How
ya guys doing?”

Bigger helped the nun up from where Tim had
dropped her. “What are you doing here now? I thought you worked
nights?”

“
I’ve been working overtime for a
long time now escorting employees that have their positions cut to
save money.”

“
Don’t nuns work for free?” Joe
asked.

“
Doesn’t that make for a long
shift?” Bigger asked, his question given like a third grader on
career day.

“
Na. At night, I usually go home
and go to bed after I punch in, eat whatever the doctors having
lying around their lounge, and screw my girlfriend. Besides, this
is my last day. They are going to contract out security starting
tomorrow.”

“
That sucks.” Bigger looked with
concern at Tim. The nun, standing in the street, grunted and threw
a rock through a third story window.

Tim shrugged. “It’s not like I misplaced a
winning lottery ticket. This job pays minimum wage and I had to buy
this uniform myself.” Then he looked at the bright red jeans Bigger
had on. “Still health insurance was nice.”

Chapter 9

It was April in Lansing. Green new weeds
sprouted among the aluminum cans and empty fast food wrappers left
from the melted snow banks. All that was left of the winter, except
for a chance of a late spring blizzard, were the oily tufts of snow
in the armpits of the freeway ditches. The reorganization was in
full swing and the day to day operation of Saint Jude’s had begun
to tighten. Tighten like you had accidentally yanked your child’s
underwear on. A warm, but rainy spring and retirees returning from
the winter in Florida had brought the annual spring influx of
patients which was against the new budget policy that budgeted and
maintained staff at the most cost effective level of the average
patient count.

The new staffing levels made good fiscal
sense. The reorganization company had taken the number of patients
per year and divided by 365 to get the number of beds occupied.
They then rounded down a few to account for HMO reducing the number
of days patients stay to recover and developed a formula for the
amount of staff needed. Once the board of trustees had those
numbers in their hands, they immediately began to leave positions
open and convert patient rooms into offices. However, spring was
not average; it was a breeding ground for sickness and accidents
and old people back from Florida that did not exist according to
the new budget.

And although the layoffs had stopped as the
administration relished and languished in the planning of the
second phase of the reorganization, the staff was still worried
that their jobs would end tomorrow. At the same time, many were at
the point of walking out. They were rush around without time to
think busy with the overflow of patients. They were paid overtime
and double-time while the Public Relations Department bought ads on
radio stations asking sick people not to come to the
hospital.