Fingerless Gloves (8 page)

The hospital signs began before the actual building was in sight. There were posted instructions for how to get to various parking lots, directions for which route ambulances should take, and walking directions for how to get to the different wards. I followed big, red signs for the emergency room. Streets looked nervous as the buildings began to loom in the concentrated car headlights. There were countless windows stretching into the night sky. Some were lit with curtains open. Some had people walking around in them. Still others were dark with the thick, beige curtains drawn. I thought, for a second, of what would happen to us if James was not okay. If we got into the hospital right as the doctor was telling his parents about some complicated surgery with a 50 percent survival rate. I felt my high slipping off me like a weird sweat. I couldn’t bring myself to smoke weed in the hospital parking lot, for fear that, when we walked in, the doctors would think we were two fiends looking to rob the pharmaceutical closet for Percocets. We would surely be escorted out of the hospital by the proper authorities.

I parked the car on the first level of the gigantic, cement parking garage. I managed to stop at the marker, take a time ticket, and wait for the orange gate to lift open. My anxiety was at an all-time high so this small feat was as big a victory as I figured I would end up having tonight. Streets and I jumped out of the truck. The door closing echoed throughout the dim staircases and bounced off the thick parking blocks. We began the walk to the fluorescent-backlit automatic door.

The hospital doors separated for us and, just as I was earlier, I found myself face-to-face with the night nurse on duty. With Streets lagging behind and looking like he was about to have a panic attack, I marched up to the desk and said, “James Squire’s room please. He was admitted earlier this evening, um…had surgery tonight for something. Maybe you could check the ICU?”

The nurse, all thinning hair and swollen knuckles, slowly looked up from whatever magazine was occupying her time. She then turned her wrist over and looked at the plastic watch that had been, at some point or another, turned upside down due to the too-loose band. It took her a moment to register the time before declaring,

“It’s one o’clock in the morning. You know what…Do you think you’re the only two stoners to stumble in here tonight looking for someone? Well, fuck, let me tell you that you absolutely are. This is a hospital…you know, for family members and sober friends of sick people. It’s so past visiting hours that I should call the cops. But I won’t. I’m just going to tell you this: turn around, walk out those doors, and come back at a reasonable hour tomorrow.”

I’m not quite sure about hospital rules. I know that there are ill-defined visiting hours that are, most of the time, loosely enforced. I also know that the ICU is usually off-limits to anyone other than immediate family. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure James was in the ICU. For all I knew he could be in a recovery room resting or he could have checked out that night and been at home. The nurse didn’t even look up his name in the computer. What had his surgery even been about? Hospitals, I’ve concluded, are too vague. The place was, except for a few stragglers in the waiting room, empty. Nurses were moving across the freshly-waxed floor carrying towels and bedpans, wheeling IV hangers and heart monitors. Why had this nurse, seemingly with everything to gain by being decent and helpful to us, decided to toss us out like used up, no-talent pieces of garbage. During her tirade, I could almost feel Streets preparing a rebuttal but, as she went on, we both ended up silent. In that moment of being chewed out, he must have simply forgotten what he wanted to say.

Simply put, we turned and walked out. There are moments in your life made even more difficult by people who aren’t looking out for your best interest. These people will be fed up, upset, unfit for their jobs, and burned out by everyday existence. When confronted with these people at these given points in time, the best thing to do is always walk away. Do not challenge them. You will lose. As the air, cooling with each passing hour, hit us square in our faces as we began the trek back to the car, I began to construct a thought in my head.

First, I imagined James, in some type of recovery room, still awake and watching television. I imagined him watching one of those movies on late at night…movies you’ve heard of and possibly seen before but, until confronted with them on late-night TV, swore you’d never watch again or in the first place…movies that are re-edited and squeezed into the letterbox aspect ratio…panned and scanned to high hell. Then I think of the nurse…who will finish her shift in the next few hours and will undoubtedly go home to sleep all day. I think about the way she exists, filling her nights up and missing out on her days. I wonder if she gets the day off for Christmas and, if so, how she handles the daytime on that solitary holiday. In my head, she’s been working the graveyard shift forever. It gives her sarcastic, biting demeanor some type of charm and reason, as if it’s a mere response to a situation out of her control. As we approached the car, I couldn’t keep my mind still.

Streets was obviously shaken. He began to stammer, “Anton, I’m honestly flipped out. Why couldn’t we see Squire? What was that smell in there? Rubber? I felt like my head was in a condom.”

I think the smell he was referring to was the latex gloves mixing with the floor wax, which for some reason seemed to permeate the hospital even at that late hour. It’s like the night shift had a running joke that they all had to wear those dreaded powdered gloves to drive away outsiders. The whole situation was too sterile…with bedpans being cleaned with industrial strength solutions and nurses’ smocks being starched to the point of breaking at the collar.

I couldn’t decide if I needed to smoke again. In retrospect, this whole thing seems so excessive. Thinking back to it now, and talking about it, I’m almost embarrassed. I smoked pot now and then but, other than this one night, I’m not sure I ever smoked so much over the course of such a limited number of hours. We used to smoke and then plan activities: the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet or a trip to the mall with the Ferris Wheel in the center. Usually, when the high wore off, I would just drive home and go to bed. Occasionally, I would come home and watch cartoons.

On that night, I felt like I was in this gigantic elevator climbing the building where the girl I was in love with worked. Every time the door opened, I found myself wondering if that was her floor…if the ride was over. I knew I loved her, but couldn’t figure out what floor she worked on, so I just kept going up right to the roof, then back down to the basement. In this elevator, my ears were clogged from not popping, but she refused to make her romantic-comedy elevator entrance, so I just kept going. The bell would hit floor after floor as my anxiety reached a fever pitch. At some point, my love would erode into genuine concern that this girl had taken a sick day or had gotten fired without me knowing. I was just watching numbers light up and trying to figure out where the camera was embedded in the tiny cube. Was it in the corner behind the mirror or built into the floor? Needless to say, back in the parking lot, the decision to smoke again wasn’t exactly one I morally grappled with. It just seemed appropriate.

Back in the Escape, I repacked the one-hitter from the seemingly endless baggie of weed. No matter how much I used, there was more. It wasn’t dry or filled with seeds. It was right and moist and good. The truth is, I had bought enough pot that I hoped would last me beyond this one long, strange night. As I put the one hitter to my mouth and prepared to light the blackened end of it, Streets asked, “You mind if I roll something up?”

He was holding a pack of double-wide rolling papers, so I reluctantly handed him the bag. The thing with guys like Streets, they’re used to handouts. Not so much out of privilege, but necessity. Streets never caught too many breaks in our town, so people never felt bad giving him things. He was living in a perpetual state of second-hand contentment. He somehow managed to get what he needed - from food and clothes to a working (albeit outdated) cell phone. His dad, no doubt, was still somehow funding him, either directly or indirectly. Streets wasn’t a hardcore thief or some uncontrollable kleptomaniac. He stole petty things like bagels, bags of chips, produce from the supermarket, candy bars from the Insta-Mart, cigarettes from gas stations, and winter hats from the Army/Navy surplus a few towns over. His car, when it did make an appearance, was just beat up enough to still be running. Streets’ automobile has no distinguishable make and/or model.

I wouldn’t doubt that when it came to money, he was stealing small sums of cash, maybe twenty bucks at a clip, from his old man. Hell, if I were Streets, I’d do the same thing. When it came to pot, he was usually holding, but never offered anything to anyone. This was apparently in direct conflict with his accepting marijuana handouts. Yet, the flip side of this was, when you gave him your pot, he made sure to never smoke more than his share. He wasn’t a greedy man. Despite knowing this, I was still weary about handing him the half-full bag.

Turns out that Streets was rather poetic when it came to rolling joints. I’m not sure where or when he was able to get in so much practice, but his skills were pretty much flawless. I watched the careful distribution of pot along the crease of the rolling paper, then the back and forth as the paper sped through his thumbs and forefingers…the whole process was not only perfectly executed, but also done with incredible speed. Even though The Escape wasn’t moving, and intending to preserve my golden, no-hot-boxing-the-car rule, I still wanted to circulate some air. The numbed nerve endings in my face and hands failed to tell me if heat was needed or not. In an unprecedented maneuver, and one that I’m sure confused Streets, I simultaneously put the heat on and opened the windows. We sat like that for a moment, feeling the hot air from the vents crawl towards the wide-open windows, then slowly and heavily get sucked outside.

The no hot box rule has some basis in a genuine health concern. When I was small, my parents naturally signed me up to play Little League baseball. I was absolutely terrible as an undersized right fielder, the default position because no kids coming up to bat had the ability to “pull the ball”, despite pleas from our overzealous coaches. Not only did I manage to strike out, get hit by a pitch, or take a base on balls during every at-bat during my 5th, 6th and 7th grade seasons, but I couldn’t catch fly balls if my life depended on it. They would either drop next to me or, on particularly unlucky days, hit me in the shoulder or face. The problem was, out there in the field, my eyes wouldn’t stay focused. The sun gave me this throbbing headache that lived right behind my eyes. I could barely see the ball until it was about half-an-inch in front of my face. Often times my balance was so off, I’d come close to falling over my own feet. As it turns out, not only did I need glasses, but glasses all the time…not just for reading or for distance…but for everything. When I finally ended up in front of the eye doctor, he told me that my best hope would be corrective laser surgery when I was about 30 years old. From 7th grade until my 30th birthday, I had a choice of coke bottle glasses or seriously hard contacts. While the rimmed glasses were pretty cool at times during my alternative college years, once I graduated, I switched over to contacts.

Now, I realize that this sounds like the lamest thing in the world but, should I hot box any vehicle, my weak eyes would spasm and cross and burn. I’d look like some deranged caricature of the nerdy kid in every sports movie you watched growing up. This, ladies and gentlemen, is strictly medical. I cannot hot box cars, especially while I’m wearing contacts. My vision begins to blur…I can’t drive…The contact high from the sealed car interior keeps me fuzzy while my eye muscles stretch and contract like a BowFlex. Eventually, my eyes totally reject the contacts and it feels like I have a pound of sawdust behind the hard lenses. The entire situation is, and I know from experience, incredibly ugly.

Streets inhaled, and then exhaled a steady, white stream of marijuana smoke. I watched the end of the joint glow like the last gasp of every bonfire I’d ever been to. The Escape wasn’t moving, so the smoke naturally gravitated and pushed itself towards the open windows. I had loaded up my fake cigarette, held the flame to the end of it and unglamorously inhaled. To be honest, at that point, I couldn’t tell if it was cold or hot out, or if I had on the heat or air conditioning. I knew something was on as the “whooshing” sound from the vents was about as subtle as a freight train. The whole world, for once, was finally holding at a perfect temperature. I held the smoke back as I felt it fill the pockets of my lungs…I felt it dancing on every single cilia en route to my chest. Streets watched me as I exhaled a thin trail, like an airplane leaving behind a reminder of its flight, right out of the side of my mouth. Streets said, nasally holding back smoke, “The way that thing is drawing, you’re going to paint a masterpiece.” Right after his words, came his smoke. It spilled out of his mouth and nose, unevenly and without much poise.

I think, after four more hits, I began to contemplate the entire world as it hinged on the gentle axis of this weird and long night. I said,

“Streets, goddamn it. What the fuck happened to James? I don’t know if he’s on a drip, hooked up to wires and pumps, watching TV. I saw Beth tonight. Her patience with me, with James, with pot, and that asshole Vin Thomas and his never-ending bullshit, is so weird. Why doesn’t she just tell me off?…call me an asshole or something? It’s like this: I want to do something to make this better, but my head is like a bad music video and the words get really big as they fly out of my mouth and hit people in the face…you know those videos?…from the early 90s I think.”

That, to be honest, was probably too real for Streets at that given point in time. I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. Neither did he. He exhaled steadily and just looked at me for a few seconds before saying,

“I think you think about all this too much. Your boy Squire will be okay. Your old girl, Beth…I don’t know about her or about you or the two of you. I’ve been around, but I’m never around. She sounds like, well, not what you need right now…maybe what you will need some day, but trust me, needs come and go like that.”

A snap of his fingers and I knew what Streets said was true. He was the kind of kid who was always there - at parties, at proms, in the student parking lot, at the bar on the night before Thanksgiving. He was this unmistakable background face, like an actor you just can’t put your finger on. While no one hesitated shooting the shit with Streets, no one actually had a functional friendship with him. He isn’t the kind of kid you ask to third wheel on your dates with you. He’s not the kind of kid you want to admit knowing or find yourself going to bat for, even though tonight, as the temperature dipped, I was doing him a huge favor. The only friend Streets Anderson had was the town we lived in.

Suddenly, the events of this evening, and the last two years, seemed to sandwich my brain in a vice. I felt my life constricting my thoughts, and I began to have a meltdown. Streets, back when he used to voluntarily stay after school, would shun even the girls who had crushes on him. They’d walk up to his locker, associating being flirty with some sort of badass quality they imagined movie stars had, and ask him if he wanted to “go somewhere.” Going somewhere, as far as I remember back in high school, used to mean hooking up behind the fire doors in the back by the gym. A younger Streets, without his current scruff and long hair, never went anywhere with any girl.