Kevin Kling's Holiday Inn (8 page)

I don’t sing “It’s nighty-night to brother.” It’s a song my mom made up so we could get my brother to sleep. He was afraid of the berts. The berts were headlights from cars passing our house that shone through our window and moved along the wall as they passed. This terrified my brother, and he screamed, “The berts, the berts,” until my mom ran in and we sang. It goes:

He giggled every time we sang the “we all love him so” part. Then he fell asleep and his hand opened and doughnut crumbs fell out. People used to think my brother was angry because he walked around with his hand in a fist all day. The truth was, he was holding doughnuts, usually one of the first he’d seen that day, “Just in case.”

So I sing “I See the Moon” to myself.

There are no berts, no brother, and I can’t see the moon either. I say the nighttime prayer to myself. I say it slowly, trying to find hidden meaning. Most of the time I can say the whole thing in under five seconds. “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Nope. Nothing. And I fall asleep on the rubber mattress. Falling asleep is like the moon, it feels like home no matter where you are.

No man wakes knowing who he is. Thank God. Then, with a sigh or a gasp, the realization sets in.

All the toys in the playroom are broken, either by the kids who owned them in real life or the kids who have already gone through Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children. I notice right away some kids have one toy, some none at all, and that one very small pale child has every toy he wants. He isn’t playing with them. They are piled at his feet like he’s the Christmas tree. He looks around the room at the other children. His face is expressionless but perfect: black, shiny hair, pearl skin with blue veins, blue eyes—huge blue eyes—and red lips. He is the closest human I’ve ever seen to the Charmin toilet paper posters. My sister has the whole collection hanging in her bedroom. I walk over and ask if I can read a Little Golden Book,
The Little Engine That Could
.

A perfect, pure, high-pitched note says, “No.”

“You’re not reading it.”

“It’s mine.”

The unmistakable logic of power.

“I’ll give it back when I’m through.”

“No.”

“Please?”

“No.”

It would be easy to walk away. I’ve already read the book a million times at my grandmother’s house and colored on some of the pages. But this isn’t about a book. With my eyes locked on his, I pick up
The Little Engine That Could
. The perfect kid doesn’t move. I slowly pull the book to me and start to turn. The split second my gaze breaks, his two henchchildren heave me onto the floor, take the book, and in expressionless, workmanlike fashion begin punching and kicking me. I scream for help but the other children do not move. In fact, they look more intently at their toys or projects or the floor. The henchchildren pound away.

At the Bluebird Shopping Center, when Mom dropped me off at Old Woman in the Shoe, the head babysitter said my brother was too young and not allowed to stay. While my mother argued, I ran to a toy oven and pulled out a plastic turkey. A bigger kid took the toy turkey from my hand and pushed me down. Steven tore loose from my mother’s hand and started pounding the kid with his tiny doughnut-filled fist. He had to be pulled away. After that my mother always insisted my brother stay with me at Old Woman in the Shoe.

But my brother isn’t anywhere near Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children. As the henchchildren continue to pound me, I replace my body with the kid who owns these clothes. And while he takes my beating, I’m in the front seat of the car, riding back home with my Mom and Dad. It’s nighttime, and we’re riding through the Missouri countryside. The lights in the windows of the farm houses look like eyes twinkling. Every once in a while, one winks at me. I lean against my father, and I can smell his smell through his white cotton shirt. Mom hums along with the radio. My brother and sister are at home waiting to surprise me with a party. I am the chosen one. The car moves toward home, and I hum along with my mother, “I go out walkin’, After midnight.”

“Enough,” says the tiny perfect manchild, and the beating stops.

Later Gary tells me, “Beware The Little Prince.”

I say, “He told me I’d better stay in line, that he can make the nurses give me extra shots.”

“No, he can’t do that, but he can make it worse in here. Just ignore him. He’ll stop after you’re not new anymore.”

I don’t plan on being here that long.

“And,” he said, “don’t sing, the next time they pound you.”

“Was I singing?”

“Yes. They would’ve stopped sooner, but the singing made them mad.”

It’s the same when my brother hits me. Never sing or laugh when someone is beating you. For some reason it just makes matters worse.

“Why is he called The Little Prince?”

“That’s what the nurses call him. They always say, ‘Whatever you say, Your Highness,’ and, ‘Mustn’t upset The Little Prince.’”

I know even though someone is called a Prince, he doesn’t necessarily act that way. My friend Kent Neil Winchester, who lives kitty-corner from our house, has a dog named King, and it doesn’t act like any King I’ve ever heard of.

The nurses are all excited, not for themselves, for us. The Shrine Circus is in town. We aren’t allowed to go, but the parade will pass through the courtyard of the hospital. The nurses tell us how lucky we are. We scramble to the windows as we hear the bands down the street, the face of a crippled child pressed in every pane. The parade circles below in the courtyard. Doctors and nurses and some older kids are in the yard below, waving to the floats. Gary’s bed is pulled up next to the window but he’s flat on his back and can’t see.

“What’s happening?”

With my face pressed against the window, I can see head tops of band members and clowns and soldiers. They looked like toys below. I yell at them to “Look up here,” but I we’re too high up, and the windows won’t open. I stop yelling because other kids look at me like I am stupid. Gary seems more excited than anyone and he can’t even see.

“What else?”

I tell Gary everything I see, but a parade looks very different from the sixth floor of a hospital, so I do some inventing with details from parades I’ve seen in the Little Golden Books version of
Toby Tyler
.

There are elephants, I tell him, and a giant, and monkeys, and a bearded lady. Then I begin to invent my own story. I know that if I’m walking down the street and a man pulls over in a car, maybe a hairy man with bad teeth, and he smiles and says he’s my Uncle Carl and to get in the car, I should scream and run away. But if “Uncle Carl” pulls over in a story, I can get in and go with him no matter where that is, and in fact the story is usually better when I
do
get in. Gary laughs at the part where the lion breaks loose and runs rampant through the crowd, ripping the hospital staff to shreds and knocking over a lantern that sets the hospital in flames. The intent was for drama, but a laugh is a laugh in a hospital, and you take them when you can.

A little later some clowns visit us and scare the younger kids, but I have learned not to fear clowns. We have cake, and the clowns leave, laughing and honking.

It’s very calm then, after the clowns leave. We are all sitting quietly around a little picnic table in the playroom, silently awaiting orders. Even The Little Prince Charmin seems compassionate in this stillness. Then it dawns on all of us at once. We are unsupervised. The nurses have left with the clowns, and there is no one watching us. In the brand-new stillness that comes with knowing we can do whatever we want to, one of the kids picks up some leftover cake and throws it into the eye of another kid. The kid with cake in his eye has both arms in casts, but manages to get some cake on top of his foot. The kid who threw the cake has to sit and wait because his legs are up against the wall across the room. The foot flicks the cake and pieces hit everyone and the fight is on. Cake flying everywhere. Gary is screaming, “Hit me! Hit me!”

The Little Prince Charmin is screaming, “No! No! STOP IT! STOP IT!”

But we can’t. Soon paper plates are whizzing through the air. Cake in the hair, down people’s prosthetics. Nurses rush in.

“Stop it. Stop it!”

The action comes to a standstill, but I sense there is just enough time to throw one more paper plate. I let it fly, and we all watch as the plate gently floats across the room and scores a direct hit on right forearm of The Little Prince Charmin.

“Got ya. Got ya,” I yell.

But the room is silent. Everyone stares as The Little Prince Charmin lets out a blood-curdling scream.

Gary whispers, “Now you’ve done it, Sandy.”

The nurses fly into action, putting The Little Prince Charmin on a gurney and rushing him out of the room. Another nurse calls for a doctor to meet them in another room, stat.

The nurses tell us quietly to go to our beds while they clean up. And we do. And pray for The Little Prince.

That was the day I learned what hemophiliacs are and why you can’t hit them, even with a paper plate, because they might bleed to death. I also knew that’s why The Little Prince did what he pleased. Everyone was afraid of him, afraid of hurting him. At Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children, you learn fast that mobility and dexterity have little to do with a person’s standing in the pecking order.

Usually it is the other way around. It certainly is in the outside world. We all knew this, and used it constantly to our benefit. We all knew when to cry, when to attack, when to throw a tantrum, and how good it made others feel to make us feel better. We also knew there were those who feared us and thought we were weak. Beware them and bring them to the attention of the others. We could suss out an adult in a sentence or two. I did. Depending on how someone commented on my arm I knew what to expect.

“What did you do to your arm?” This suggests that I am to blame for my condition, an assumption that must be corrected as quickly as possible.

“Nothing. I was born this way.” Now it’s an act of God, and this evens the playing field. Then to get them in your debt, follow it with, “It’s okay, I’m used to it.” Now you’ve let them know not only that you’re okay, but so was their question.

If someone says, “What happened to your arm?” jump straight to, “It’s always been a little smaller,” because they already feel a bit compassionate and there’s no need rub it in.

Any words like “shriveled,” “deformed,” “crippled,” “withered” always have a negative connotation. It also shows they think they know why I was born this way. Even though I don’t know what “happened,” I make these people pay a little, simply by feeding into their fears. Make it worse than they already think it is, have a hard time with a simple task, struggle with a button or a shoelace. That does the trick.

Other children ask me about my “little” arm. I like the word “little,” which makes no moral assumptions, so I tell them the facts and they always seemed to handle it well.

If someone is too bold and reaches for my arm, I pull away and it hold it like it’s very precious and delicate.

But if someone is afraid of me hurting it, I’ll show how strong it is. I’ll pinch their finger, but not very hard, and say, “See?”

“Oh yes,” they’ll say, “very strong.”

And everything is fine.

Don’t try any of this on a nurse, a doctor, or your parents. New nurses maybe, other kids’ parents for sure, but never a doctor. They don’t put up with it.

In a way, I feel at home. Not in the hospital but in this community. At Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children, I’m in a world where everyone knows what I know. We are sealed in together like a city of mayors, and I’ve just laid out the baddest hemophiliac in the valley.

When the little Prince Charmin returns, his entire right side is swollen and bruised. He gives me the skinny eyes, and I know I’m about to pay big. I wish Gary was The Little Prince. He’s in a body cast and by all rights should have the most power. But Gary doesn’t care about power. He’s happy. I’ll bet he was born happy. I’ll bet The Little Prince Charmin was born unhappy. And now his look tells me the rest of my stay at Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children is going to be a nightmare.

But before The Little Prince Charmin can exact his revenge, I get sick. I wake up the next morning with spots on me. A kid runs up to me and tells me I have the measles.

“The measles?”

“It means you have to live in a glass cage for three weeks, so you don’t give it to the other children.”

“Measles.”

“It’s not bad. You get ice cream, your parents can visit more often. And you can have toys.”

“Toys?”

“When the nurse comes for you, every toy you’re holding goes with you, because it has the measles, too.”

I go immediately to the toy room, which is where they find me, buried in toys.

“Now we all have the measles.”

All the toys come with me to the glass cage. For the next three weeks, all the kids come to visit. Not me. Their toys. I hold them up to the glass and the children talk to them through the glass. They tell the doll or stuffed bear or truck how much they miss them and what the their day was like, and to be good and not afraid. Toys in the hospital are our confidants, our confessors. When we’re angry, they take the blows, when sad, they hold the tears. I learn a lot about my fellow patients over the next three weeks. Not The Little Prince Charmin, he just stares at me, memorizing me for later.

On March 18, I spend my fourth birthday in the glass cage. Mom and Dad visit me. They give me cake and make some of the henchchildren and nurses sing “Happy Birthday.” The Little Prince Charmin is there, and I can see his lips moving to the song. I know he’s not singing for me, but you just can’t help singing when it’s “Happy Birthday.” It’s a memorable birthday, but not for the reasons you would want.