The pills Soupspoon took — Percocet, three at a time, six times a day; three times the dosage the pharmacist said to take — made him tired and listless. He’d sleep the day through, after going for his “zapping,” and then wake up at night thinking, half dreaming, about the lost days of his life.
After the first week he took the long train ride to the clinic by himself. The women there were all nice to him. Only women worked for Dr. Fey.
Soupspoon brought them sweet rolls and hot coffee with skim milk and Sweet ’n Low just the way they liked it. Then he’d sit in the maze of cushioned chairs and bask in the slatted sunlight that came through the blinds. He’d doze in the chair thinking about the lazy rock lizards down along Water Moccasin Pond. They’d crawl up on the slate shore in the noonday sun. He’d imagine himself a lazy sunning lizard who didn’t have the time or the mind to worry about cancer or the rent. All he had to do was to eat flies, and there were enough flies to last a thousand years.
A distant chime sounded whenever the pale violet door to the waiting room opened. Skeletal old men and balding children would come through. They all had the same look; as if they were concentrating on a question in their heads. Some deep religious problem or maybe long division. Old women came in wearing out-of-style clothes. Some of them wore pastel trousers and T-shirts with no jewelry. Many who still had some hair had given up their combs completely. They sat and stared out ahead trying to figure out that problem. They sat and waited for the nurses to call.
There were three nurses. Yvonne, a big brown girl from Tennessee originally, who had nine children and a husband who was no good but pretty. Wendy, who was blond and full of smiles even though she wore braces and had bad skin. And Bristol, a straight-backed English woman who made everything happen and managed to be nice even when she was pushing some poor old frightened dying woman in or out of the door.
Soupspoon liked Bristol. He was idly considering her big breasts and the little jade earrings that dangled beside her square jaw when the chimes sounded.
Two young men entered. They were as different as day and night. One brunet and the other blond. They were both tall, but Harry was sober and serious where Bob had a grin on him just like he must have had when he was three. Harry didn’t like to talk. If you said hello to Harry he’d nod and look down at your hands. But Bob laughed as if you were some long-lost cousin and asked you how your life had been.
Bob was six foot one and weighed just over 120 pounds. His blond hair was in wisps now, and there were open sores on his face that oozed pus and blood. Bob couldn’t walk without Harry holding his arm. They usually got in late.
After Soup met Bob, he’d save him a seat next to the nurses’ station if he could.
Soupspoon felt sorry for everybody who had cancer and had to be shot through with atomic radiation. But he liked Bob, because he was one of the only patients who still had some humor.
“How you doin’, Bob?” Soupspoon always asked.
Bob would look back as if he were thinking hard and then he’d smile and say, “If it was any worse I’d be better off than I am now,” or some such blues humor.
While they waited, Bob and Soupspoon talked about things. They gauged each other’s pains and treatments. Bob talked about his soap operas and events in the news. Harry kept out of the way and left the two to their gabbing. Every now and then he’d ask if Bob was comfortable or if he needed some water.
“You got a girlfriend, Bob?” Soupspoon asked on the day after they met. He thought that maybe he had one but she left when he got cancer and now he had to rely on his friend.
“Harry’s my wife,” Bob answered in a sly tone. He was looking Soupspoon in the eye when he said it, a smile tucked under the three or four hairs of a mustache that he had left.
“Oh.” Soupspoon nodded. “You a homo, huh?”
“We say ‘gay’ these days,” Bob said.
“Yeah, I know. But you know, sometimes a word just sticks in your mind and nuthin’ else seems right. To this very day when I talk about my own people I got a inclination t’say ‘colored.’ I know I’m s’posed t’say ‘Negro’ or ‘black’ or ‘Afro-American,’ but I say ‘colored,’ ‘cause that’s what we said when I was a boy and it fits in my mouth right.”
Bob laughed in a mild hacking way that he had, and they became friends. Soupspoon found out what AIDS meant. How so many people had it and didn’t even know. He found out that Harry had been tested and that he had it.
“I’m sorry to hear that, man,” Soupspoon said to Harry one day. The hale young man nodded and smiled. Then Soupspoon understood why he stayed so somber, because when he smiled he also cried.
“We all sure do got the blues, don’t we, Bobby?”
“At least we can sing together,” he said. “At least for a while.”
By the third week Soupspoon’s pain was almost gone. He only had to take two Percocets a day.
Bobby was dead.
Harry sent a long letter, which Kiki read to Soupspoon. It said that Soupspoon had helped Bobby laugh those last two weeks. “...the only things he looked forward to were seeing you in the morning and watching As the World Turns in the afternoon,” the letter said. It also gave the time and address of the service. It was in the Village, not far from Kiki’s.
Soupspoon stood at the back of the chapel. Over four hundred people had crowded in to pay their last respects. The family took up the front row. Mother and father, his sister and her kids. They were all broken up. They cried for Bobby Grand. But what got to Soupspoon was the men who had come to pay their respects — they cried too; cried with that deep sort of bereft sorrow that people have when a great leader passes. That ragged kind of sorrow you feel when your best friend dies. A brave kind of man who you, in your ignorance, never believed could die.
It made Soupspoon think of Jolly Horner.
Jolly had a big black face bulging with shiny cheeks. He had powerful smiling teeth that could bite through iron nails. His big hands and legs were so strong that he could lift a barrel full of water and carry it a quarter mile.
When Jolly Horner clapped those big hands behind Soupspoon’s guitar it sounded like artillery; cannonfire and the blues.
I hear a train a-comin’
bang!
You know you hear it too
Bang!
It’s got a seat for me, Mr. Charlie
Bang!
I be sittin’ right next to you
The floor gave way right under Jolly’s feet. Seth Wyles made a bet with his uncle that Jolly could carry a two-hundred-pound spotted pig up the ladder to the top of Seth’s barn. Jolly could do it, there was no doubt about that, but he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to play the fool for white men. But Seth made him do it anyway. He told Jolly that if wanted to keep his job then he had better tote that Pig.
It wasn’t much of a challenge except that the pig was scared and the boards of the barn weren’t strong enough. Jolly made it to the top, but then the floor gave way and he came down, pig and all. They fell through to the plow mare’s stall. The mare reared back and crushed Jolly’s big face.
It was a hard life back then.
People died all the time. Young people died from hard blows, disease, and from taking their own lives. If you cried for every one of them you would have died from grief. Let their mother cry, their children; everybody else just picked up and went on. There was no holiday that you got to mourn.