Bogeywoman (8 page)

You could go buggy from boredom in the bughouse, if you weren’t buggy already. But at least from fall to spring all five of us Bug Motels from East Six went to school. We really went, almost the way normal teenagers get on the bus and ride to school. And yes it was queer going to Girls’ Classical from the loonie bin, and even queerer to go from Girls’ Classical back to the bughouse every afternoon, but everything about a ritzy dreambox hospital like Rohring Rohring makes for strange combos.

A little yellow school bus just our size picked us up every weekday morning on the traffic island between trolley tracks at the Broadway entrance. If Mr. Nurse’s Aide Reginald Blanchard was the one sent to watch us off, and usually he was, we’d be smoking down the line of us like five twigs of kindling. Behind us loomed the ruby brick hospital, frilled with black iron lace like the fin de siècle society matron she was, and across six lanes
of traffic was the livery stable of all the fruit and junk wagons left in the city, where a few late-sleeping ayrabbers (the lowest of the low except for us mental peons) were still straggling out the wide-open barn doors one by one behind their seen-it-all nags. Then the bus pulled up and we were off to our separate lyceums, Park School for Bertie, Mount St. Agnes for O, Faith Bible for Emily, Calvert Hall for Dion—I was the only one in public school, since Merlin wouldn’t have us think ourselves so grand, not even from the bughouse.

And at 4:45 we were all back on the traffic island, with tall red Reggie firing up our Luckies again, bending down the row of us with his lighter like a mother bird loaded with worm purée. And as we eyed that swanky Dunhill, inlaid with pearls and engraved not
RB
but
lm
^c
l
, obviously cadged from some female ex-patient for favors large or small, we thought uneasily of all the ways Reggie wasn’t like a mother to us, for, all things being equal, he would rather please you than thwart you, but he had his price. Now he let us smoke, backs to the wind, while he turned up his own collar, and when we were through he delivered us safely back to Rohring Rohring, sixth floor, east end, the Adolescent Wing, and, wherever we had left it, our mission.

Even when you live in the bughouse, life needs a mission. Especially when you live in the bughouse. After all, here you’ve got no field hockey team, no terrarium for your reptile collection, no Broncos Marching Band, no Future Lawyers of America. We called ourselves the Bug Motels because we were a rock band, but we hadn’t gotten around to learning instruments yet. Junk food couldn’t be a project here. This wasn’t Camp Chunkagunk where you got a candy bar every two weeks when you turned in your laundry. We Bug Motels had pocket money and charge accounts, two restaurants, a snack bar and a gift shop
with a six-foot-long candy counter in the basement. We rolled in malted milk balls, canned potato sticks, cheese and peanut butter crackers, pretzel rods, you name it. For a while we had the use of the doctors’ tennis courts in the afternoons and huffed around the sunless courtyard in parkas and gloves, but then it got too cold even for us. We needed a doper to refine and complicate our appetites and godzilla gave us Bertie Stein, not only an experienced dope fiend but a mastermind. Bertie funneled us into the Manhattan Project, the H Bottle, the Big Blue Bomb.

You know that quaint sort of old bomb that falls, like it’s raining lipsticks, out of bulky white airplanes in
The World at War
? Under the main hospital next door were a huge pharmacy and the fabulously rumored morgue, but Rohring Rohring’s eight stories sat on a warehouse, an underground dump for big stuff, distillation urns and sterilizer boilers and hundred-pound drums of industrial cleanser, and royal blue size H cylinders of laughing gas that looked just like those bombs. It was one of them, fixed nicely next to its twin H of oxygen in Robinhood green on a cart like you’d use to bus a cafeteria, that souled our mission.

Bertie Stein was featherweight and restless and sifted about the corridors of Rohring Rohring all day long in roachlike silence, slipping through cracked doors if he found any, trying every lock and tuning his junkie’s x-ray eyes on blank walls and dead-end corridors. One day he saw a silver cart loaded with nitrous oxide roll off the third floor elevator and take its place in a row of rolling bins of soiled linens, waiting for some dutiful flunky to wheel them over the catwalk to the laundry chute in the main hospital. Bertie crawled on his hands and knees between laundry bins and from the moment he goosenecked up for a closer look at that cart with its copper tubes and gauges and mixers and regulators, the funny gray enema bag of a gas
reservoir dangling down and the dear little red clown’s nose of a mask with two horny valves sticking out of it, he had to have one for his own. For our own. And pretty soon that was our mission.

He reported to the Bug Motels: “The nature of this gas,” drawling it out farcically,
gazzz
, “is a cartoon with the picture gone. You know, like, Tom the Cat falls through the roof of the opera house and bounces around the orchestra on his rubber stamp head. He gets spitted on a cello bow, sucked up a flute, digested by a bassoon, ha ha ha, tenderized by a marimba mallet, hee hee hee, and finally he gargles the tenor’s high C by swinging from his tonsil. Ho ho ho, except there’s no picture so why am I laughing. I’m laughing cause I weigh nuttin and I got these pink and blue bubbles popping in my veins. And now I’m crying cause I just tasted the tragedy deep in the pillowy fizz. Good stuff you’re gonna say. So how come such good stuff is legal for totally square tooth mechanics? Cause they’re gonna torture you anyway so you’ll never know you had any fun, but we’ll cop us a tank before our teeth are rotten.” The picturesque logic of the bughouse—how could any self-disrespecting Bug Motel argue with that?

Bertie ya see had three traits which made him a great maestro of missions: all that Stein moolah, a mind bent on one thing only, and no fear of the consequences, so that if someone had to take a fall, why shouldn’t it be Bertie? And that’s how he had landed on the funny farm in the first place, by juvenile court order. He had seen the inside of every crumbling smelly youth joint in Maryland and the District of Columbia, and at least had breakfast there before his parents fished him out, over and over, and redeposited him in Rohring Rohring. This scary exposure had only hardened in his dreambox the wish to be changed from itself, by any substance obtainable.

For a week we had been sending Emily down there five times every afternoon in a bin of dirty hospital gowns to scope the landing, since at (presently) fifty-three pounds she made the least dent in its canvas bottom. Of course she couldn’t roll herself off the elevator much less back onto it. She had to peer out through holes we had poked in the side for the ten seconds the elevator doors were open, while up on the sixth floor we pushed the down button frantically to summon her back to the Adolescent Wing before anything funny happened. “
Bombs away?
” we’d whisper in code into the bin of pale blue bathrobes and sterilizer towels, when it reappeared. “Nuh-uh,” she squeaked back every time from her nest. And on like that for six days and then on the seventh the elevator came back empty. “Uh-oh.” Sumpm funny
had
happened. We looked at one another and shuddered and ran down the hall to play ping-pong. We had to look innocent—and besides, Dion pointed out, for once we had just the right number for mixed doubles.

“Three to two, my serve,” Bertie hollered, so the whole bughouse would believe in our alibi. “Is she dead?” O whispered. “Who da hump knows,” Dion said. “It depends if she went down the chute headfirst or sideways,” I whispered back. “Sideways … oooo,” O echoed in her spooky-flute voice; you could tell from the queer crook of her chin she was picturing Emily stuck between the third and second floors, with her head wedged at an uncomfortable angle. “Say, does it hurt to be paralyzed?” I asked.

“Aaanh, she was only fifty-three pounds away from disappearing anyhow,” Dion said, “she wants to die, ain’t it?” “She was waiting for the birds to feed her,” I said, “least that’s what she told Dolores, who told Reggie, who told me.” “That’s a very beautiful idea,” sighed O, “that Emily is a saint, I’d never think
of nuttin like that.” “Ya know, certain girls love death like I love D.O.A.P.,” Bertie observed, “like O here—you can tell from the eye makeup. To her every day is a funeral.” “Just cause
you
have to die before you get to wear makeup, Hebrew school creepo,” sneered O, glacially. “I don’t care if I do die. That’s why I’m here,” Bertie bragged, “and I won’t be wearing makeup either, I’m getting smoked, man, cause I figure I’ll be 98 percent tetra-hydrocannabinol by then.”

“Aaay, don’t worry, da stuff looks good on you,” Dion told O, “ladylike, I mean. Koderer don’t wear no black on her eyes, and she looks like Oliver Twist. In the movie, ya know.” “Ursie’s queer,” Bertie explained. I froze and O gasped. “Get oinked,” she said loyally, for she was a friend of mine, and as I was wildly in love with her I had never even let my hand brush her hand by mistake (lemme die first).

“I wear a little Clearasil over da zits now and then,” Dion said, “but nuttin on the eyes. Nino don’t recommend it.” Nino was his tailor. “I wonder if they’ll put any makeup on Emily,” O worried—meaning on her little dead white face. “Aaanh, Emily was a strange-looking bird at best. Makeup wouldn’t do nuttin for her,” said Dion. “I think Emily was cute, in a ugly sort of way,” O almost sobbed, in her spooky-flute. [
Whap!
] “Ace,” she added. O had a devastating serve. We volleyed on gloomily.

We had played three whole games—by now we had just about given up on ever seeing Emily alive again—when they rolled her onto the ward on a gurney, trailing white linens like a dead infanta. It all looked like a weird dream: Dr. Hamburger and Dr. Beasley running behind like footmen, or pilgrims, in tunics of elfin green. The last of the day slanted through the tall windows of the dayroom in banks, forming six mirages in the shapes of pyramids. As her body passed through them, the dust,
like shrimps and scorpions of pure light, made way for the princess in worshipful agitation. The turban of gauze on her head pushed her face up at us, her open eyes glimmered drily in death through the mashed lace of her eyelashes—but then she blinked and smiled a little.

“What happened? What happened?” everyone asked, and we ran alongside the palankeen too. “Oooo my neck. It was kind of fun. Ursie …” I bent down to her, and she whispered: “… they think I tried to kill myself …” She giggled. “So what else is new,” Bertie panted, and I jerked his ponytail and stuck out a Ked so he fell splat on his face. “… and listen, Bug Motels—
bombs away
,” Emily said in code, “Big Blue on three … just standing there …”

Dr. Buzzey (Emily’s friendly but useless dreambox mechanic) met Dr. Beasley and Dr. Hamburger, the medical residents, in her doorway. Then her private room sucked in all three, along with a coupla nosy nurses, Hageboom, if I remember right, and Mursch, and the door flapped shut behind them. Fluorescence streamed from its little square window. Somebody clicked shut the louvers. We stood there staring at the nothing of it.

“Ursie,” Bertie said, tenderly pinching his nose to make sure it wasn’t broken, “get down to three before they move that thing.”

“Me!” I said. Bertie after all was my height, had subsisted on tablets, syringe squirts and aromas for five and a half years and was skinny as a Yeshiva boy from Ruthenia. “I weigh one twenty-five,” I argued pointedly, knowing his own weight couldn’t be over a hundred. Even O was fatter than he was. “But girls aren’t as noticeable for being up to sumpm,” he said, an insight which didn’t quite hold up in the bughouse, but I was pleased that he clumped me with
girls
, it meant my cover was working. “And if the bomb is a heavy motha,” he went on, “who else but you can
carry it?” He had a point there. Now ya see how Bertie got to be a mastermind: He knew his henchwoman, just which body part was headquarters of all her vanity, and mine was my muscles.

So I said yes but I stuck at going downstairs in a canvas laundry cart as long as some unknown unbribed nurse’s aide was still on the loose on three, zealously dumping the laundry bins down the chute without even checking them for mental patients. “And besides, we got no cart,” Dion reminded us. It was true, Emily had been launched from the one laundry bin we’d purloined. We were stuck. But all at once Emily’s door opened a brilliant crack—I caught sight of Dr. Beasley leaning down to her face like a strangler—and the empty gurney popped out. The linens on top of it had been whipped into peaks and gulleys, alarming as a meringue pie. Forty seconds later we had a new plan.
Big Blue … just standing there
, Emily had said, which sounded like that H, big as ya motha (Bertie’s charred old doper’s eyes glowed like furnace doors), wasn’t even on a cart—so we needed all the muscle we could get.

Bertie faded around the corner, came back in a minute with two surgeon’s tops he had pinched during some other caper, two pale green blouses with only a few smears of sumpm liverbrown and crusty down the front. He handed one to Dion. “Cheese, cool,” Dion said, and waltzed off down the hall with the thing. “No, man, keep away from that mirror!” Bertie called after him but Dion was already turning into his own room. “That’s the last we’ll see of him,” Bertie sighed, and it was. “Hey, what the hump, I guess I can push the thing by myself, it’s got wheels. Okay, girls, climb aboard.” O and I stared at each other while Bertie pulled his own green top over his head. It was big as a bank lobby on him but the smears of ancient gore and baggy fit looked touching on his haggardness, as though he were in med school at the
age of twelve, a boy genius whom dissection of dead bodies had shocked out of his growth. I mean he looked plausible in a certain way. Fact was even Dr. Beasley and Dr. Hamburger looked kinda babyish, big-eared and simian in those green smocks. And by the way, what were they doing in there with Emily so long, I wondered. Bertie must have had the same thought. “Is she stand-up?” he asked, squinting at her blank door. “As a fuk in a phone booth,” O replied, in the voice of vast experience. She and I still stared at each other and I saw her heart beating fast in the faint blue fork under her temple.
Climb aboard
, Bertie had said. Did that mean—lie down together on top?