On sleepless nights it seems as though the sky will stay black forever, that it’s only sleep which makes the day come. I must have finally dozed for an hour or two, because suddenly my room was filled with light. Another splendid June morning, just the weather for telling old women with fractures that their beloved dogs were dead.
I had a friend from college, Steve Logan, who was a psychiatric social worker at Cook County Hospital. We used to work together a lot when I was with the PD—he evaluated some of my less socially acclimated clients. There was even a year when we thought we were in love. We couldn’t sustain it, but the memory of our affair warmed our friendship.
Since our work paths stopped crossing we only managed to get together a couple of times a year, but he would probably arrange for me to see Mrs. Frizell. I waited a long two hours until nine o’clock when I could decently try calling him.
Steve sounded pleased to hear from me and clicked his tongue consolingly over my tale of woe. He agreed to locate Mrs. Frizell and take me to see her if I’d meet him in half an hour—it was his day off and he was using it to take his children to the zoo.
I dressed in a hurry and snuck out without Mr. Contreras hearing me. I felt too flayed to tell him what had happened—and to listen to his reproaches.
Cook County Hospital lies on the near west side, just off the Lake Street el, between a VA hospital and Presbyterian-St. Luke’s. The latter is an enormous private hospital with the most modern of facilities and an ongoing building program that threatens to swallow the surrounding community. Prez, as the locals call it, has no connection to the county hospital, except when their patients run out of money and have to be rolled down the street to be picked up by the taxpayers.
County had been put up around the turn of the century, when public buildings were supposed to look like Babylonian temples. Following its creation the public has declined further acts of generosity. We continue to put money into the county jail and courts, building ever bigger annexes to support ever more law enforcement, but the hospital languishes. Every six months or so the papers spread an alarm that the hospital will lose its accreditation—and its federal money—because the building is so far below code—but then the feds relent and the place continues to hiccup along. That the operating rooms aren’t air-conditioned and the hospital has no sprinkler system seem like trivial reasons to deprive the poor of one of their few remaining sources of health care.
In response to Prez and the University of Illinois, which has a campus nearby, a lot of tidy little townhouses have sprung up immediately around the hospitals. Even so, I was reluctant to leave the Trans Am on the street. As I pulled it into one of the private hospital’s lots I wished I’d stuck to a car more in keeping with both my income and the kind of neighborhoods I visit. If I’d bought a used Chevy I could have afforded new Nikes.
I’d arranged to meet Steve inside County’s main entrance on Harrison. It was a strange lobby, with a statue of a naked woman and two children in one corner, and a large square of blue light tubes overhead. I wondered if it was a bug zapper or just ultraviolet tubes to kill wandering germs. If that was the case they were fighting a losing battle with the grime on the floors and walls.
People straggled down the hall eating potato chips and drinking coffee. The waiting area, whose chairs filled several alcoves, was practically empty. On weekdays every seat is taken as people wait their turn in the outpatient clinics. On Saturday morning only a couple of drunks were stretched out on the chairs, sleeping off their Friday nights. The hospital is a monster, built like a large E with seven stories. Homeless people, kicked out of O’Hare Airport, slide in through the side entrances and curl up in the endless corridors to get through the night.
While I waited for Steve a couple of large policemen brought a man down the hall in handcuffs and leg shackles. He was slender and tremulous, a leaf blowing between two branches, and his face was covered with a surgical mask. The mask was as incongruous as the shackles on his thin legs. Perhaps he was HIV-positive and had spat on the officers? Tuberculosis was on the rise at County too.
Steve came down the corridor at a run a little after ten, when I’d studied the inlaid pattern in the floor long enough to memorize it. He was in jeans and sneakers; with his lanky blond hair falling in his eyes he looked like a commercial for the great outdoors. I couldn’t believe he’d stayed with the county all these years without frying his brains, but he told me once that working here made him feel real.
He put an arm around me and pecked my cheek. “Sorry to be late, Vic. Just thought I’d check on whether we knew anything about your lady. We have a six-month backlog right now, so I wasn’t expecting anything, but it turns out there was some kind of emergency hearing on Thursday.”