Disturbing the Peace (Vintage Classics) (3 page)

“My God. I’d forgotten about Labor Day. This is – the point is I’d never have signed that paper if I’d realized – I mean this is really very – unfortunate.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” the doctor said around his chewing, spilling crumbs of meat and bread from his lips. “I’d say you’ve done the right thing. Look: you’re an attorney; you deal with the police at all?”

“No. My clients are – No, I don’t deal with the police.”

“Well, okay; even so. You’ve seen the shape he’s in.” He wiped his mouth on one white sleeve and left a streak of ketchup. “Which is better? Having him safe in here for a while, or out walking the streets until the cops pick him up and book him for disturbing the peace?”

He woke up soaked with sweat, breathing stale and fetid air. A naked light bulb shone in his eyes and he found he was in a steelframed bunk slung by chains from the wall, like a bunk in a troopship or a jail.

“… Everybody out,” a voice called, and there were other sounds: groans and curses, wretched coughing and hawking, a loud fart, the creak and bang of bunks being folded back and clamped against the wall. “
Let’s
go,
let’s
go. Everybody out.”

When he sat up a hand closed around his shoulder and rolled him onto the floor. He was wearing grey cotton pajamas that were much too big for him: the pants tripped his stumbling bare feet and the sleeves hung to his fingertips. Swaying and squinting under the lights, he rolled up the sleeves first, disclosing a loose plastic bracelet that read W
ILDER
J
OHN
C. He bent over to roll up the pants but was kicked from behind and fell to his hands, and he looked up frightened into the angry face of a Negro in pajamas like his own.

“Watch your ass, man. This here’s the
corridor
. You got no business hunkerin’ down playin’ with yourself; get up and
walk
.”

And he did. Steel-mesh panels were being drawn across the folded bunks to prevent anyone from using them: this was indeed the corridor, the place for walking. It was yellow and
green and brown and black; it was neither very long nor very wide, but it was immensely crowded with men of all ages from adolescence to senility, whites and Negroes and Puerto Ricans, half of them walking one way and half in the other, the dismaying variety of their faces moving into the glare of lights and then into shadows and then into the lights again. Some were talking to one another and some talked to themselves, but most were silent. He felt warm grit under his feet until he stepped on something slick; then he saw that the black floor ahead was scattered with gobs of phlegm. A few of the walking men wore dirty paper slippers, and he envied them; a few were smoking, with packs of cigarettes in their pajama-top pockets, which puckered the roof of his mouth. Then he saw that some weren’t wearing pajama tops but straitjackets, and he wanted to whimper like a child.

There were closed windows at both ends of the corridor, covered with steel mesh: the light outside was drab – either an early grey morning or a late grey afternoon – and there was nothing to see but air shafts and windowless walls.

Near the middle of the corridor stood a Negro orderly in hospital greens, and he hurried toward him with a mouthful of questions – Look: where’re my clothes? Where’s my money? Where’s a phone? What’s the deal here? – but when he confronted the man he felt small and shy and all he knew was that his bladder was about to burst.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Where’s the bathroom?”

“Over there.”

And he followed the pointed finger into a bright stinking latrine where men squatted on toilet bowls or stood jockeying for position at a long urinal trough.

“Now this here,” another orderly explained, “is your toothbrush. Way you can always tell is because it got your name on it.
See that tape? Wilder. When you done with it, put it back here in this rack. Ain’t nobody gonna use this toothbrush but you, and you never gonna use nobody else’s toothbrush, understand? That way, nobody pick up no trench mouth or nothing like that. Understand?”

But nobody was allowed his own razor. The men stood four and five deep waiting to shave at a steamed-up mirror under watchful, official eyes.

“… Soon’s you done you rinse that razor and lay it on the shelf. Ain’t no use foolin’ with that razor; you can’t get that blade out. That razor’s
locked
…”

“… Showers for the new men
only
. Showers for the new men
only
. Not you, Gonzalez, you come on back outa there …”

There was no soap in the communal shower room and no way of regulating the water: the new men slid around on greasy duckboards and tried to clean themselves until each was given a towel in one hand and his own wadded pajamas in the other.

“Can I have slippers?”

“Ain’t no more slippers. Slippers all gone.”

And then it was back to the corridor with nothing to do but walk. He passed a locked door with a small wired-glass window and peered inside to discover a padded cell. Canvas mats of the kind used by wrestlers and gymnasts were hung from the walls and spread on the floor. It was vacant, but the one next door was occupied: a man in a straitjacket lay face down in it, as still as death, with a dark stain of piss around his thighs.

“… I don’t care! I don’t
care
!”

Both columns of walkers shrank aside to make way for the spectacle of a young white man shadowboxing down the middle of the hall. He was stripped to the waist and he’d neatly ripped off his pajama pants to the length of prizefighters’ trunks; he was
bobbing and weaving, jabbing and hooking in a swirl of yellow dust motes.

“… Can’t you idiots understand? I don’t
care!
I want my father to see me like this!”

“All right, Henry; easy, now,” an orderly was saying, coming up from behind to put a hand on his shoulder, but the shadowboxer spun and faced him with both fists cocked.

“Don’t call me ‘Henry,’ you dumb black bastard – call me Doctor or I’ll break every fucking bone in your—”

“You ain’t gonna break nothin’, Doctor,” a second orderly said, and the two of them held his arms. Both orderlies were bigger than he; they had no trouble turning him around and leading him down the corridor. He didn’t struggle in their grip but his shouting rose until he sounded on the verge of tears.

“… God damn it, if I want my father to see me like this it’s none of your dumb, black, ignorant, motherfucking—”

“Your father iddn’t gonna see you no way, Doctor; come along easy now, ‘less you want Roscoe to shoot you out.”

“Yeah, yeah, shoot me
out
, that’s all you know. Big deal! Ah, you poor, dumb – Whaddya do? Go home and tell your wives, ‘Hey, baby, I got me a doctor today’? ‘Got me a real white doctor right in the ass’? Well don’t forget I’m naming both of you, and your little buddy Roscoe too, tried to send me up to Wingdale. I’m filing a mal – a mal – a mal
practice
suit against this hospital, and when the facts – when the facts are out you’ll all be …”

He was out of sight now, and out of earshot because of the laughter and jeers and catcalls that broke in his wake. Another Negro in greens was hurrying down the corridor with a hypodermic syringe; he stopped and squinted at it under a light, holding it high while he thumbed the plunger just enough to
make a drop of liquid appear on the point of the needle, then he went on toward the shouting man.

“Go get ’im, Roscoe,” somebody called. “Fix ’im up good.” And there was more laughter as the columns began to move again.

Wilder felt a light nudge at his elbow and thought he heard a voice say, “Want to kiss me?”

“What?”

A remarkably handsome Negro boy was smiling there, wearing a turban made of his pajama top, gently swiveling his shoulders to display the beauty of his naked torso and holding his half-erect cock in his hand. “Do you want to kiss me?”

“No.”

“Oh, it’s all right. It’s all right. You can kiss me if you want, but only if you say ‘I love you’ first.”

It was time for breakfast. Double doors were opened at one end of the corridor and both columns became a jostling crowd.

“… All right, hold it; hold it now. Two at a time. Two at a time, or nobody gonna get
nothin
’ to eat …”

The sense of entrapment was even worse inside the mess hall: once you’d been shoved crouching and sidling down the narrow space between a long table and its high-backed, immovable wooden bench, there was no way out. Wilder sat pressed between a toothless, ancient man and a fat boy whose wet mouth hung open as if in pain from the cramp of the table against his belly. Each of them received a plastic bowl of glutenous oatmeal with canned milk and a mug of lukewarm coffee, and Wilder didn’t know he was hungry until he’d dug into the oatmeal with a big tin army-surplus spoon. If he could eat, if he could drink this coffee and find a cigarette and a telephone, there might still be a chance of the world’s coming back to normal. But the old man couldn’t lift the shaking spoon to the reach of his gums
without spilling it, and the fat boy picked up his bowl in both hands and plunged his face into it, slobbering like a dog as the porridge slid down his chest; then a shrill voice at one of the other tables rose to panic: “Lemme
outa
here, lemme
outa
here, lemme
outa
here …”

When the mess hall set him free at last he found that the men who looked the least insane had begun to congregate at the head of the corridor where there was a little ell facing the locked front door. On a high book-keeper’s stool beside the door sat a policeman – not a uniformed hospital guard but a real New York City cop, complete with badge and dangling nightstick and holstered pistol. He chewed gum steadily and talked to no one, not even the orderlies, and he wore the kind of sunglasses whose lenses were silver mirrors on the outside: if you tried to look into his eyes you saw only a double image of your own craning face. Even so, this seemed the best place to be: the place where rational things were most likely to happen.

“Hey there, Shorty. How’s old Shorty today?” The man who said this wasn’t much taller than himself, and he was ugly – a sallow face with close-set eyes and a big humorless smile full of bad teeth – but his pajama pocket bulged with cigarettes. “I seen you when they brought you in last night.
Boy
you was high.”

“I was?” He could remember nothing of last night after the ride in the ambulance with Paul Borg rubbing his back.

“Yellin’ and screamin’, talkin’ a mile a minute; they shot you out and you
still
wouldn’t shut up. I figured, Jesus, this is some tough customer we got here; this must be some
big
son of a bitch. Then I seen you was even smaller’n me, and laugh? I damn near died.”

“Yeah, well, look. Could I have a cigarette?”

“I’ll save you,” the man said, and turned away.

“‘Save’ me?”

“He won’t save you,” another voice said. “He never saves nobody. He’s a prick.”

The door opened then, letting in a rush of cool air – not fresh air, but cool and better-smelling if only because it came from some wider, cleaner corridor – and there was a loud, happy chorus of “Charlie!” … “Hey, Charlie!” … “How are ya, Charlie?”

He was well over six feet tall and built like a heavyweight, a Negro dressed in greens like the others but dominating all of them, dominating everyone as he pocketed his key ring and moved slowly into the ward, trundling a medicine cart. “Good morning … Good morning,” he said in a deep, rich voice, and even the cop said ’Morning, Charlie,” after making sure the door was locked behind him.

“Hey Charlie, can I see you a second?”

“Charlie listen: ’member yesterday I asked you about somethin’?”

They swarmed around him, coming from all sides as he wheeled his cart to a stop in the exact middle of the corridor, where he raised his head to address them all.

“Nourishment, gentlemen!” he called out to one end, and “Nourishment, gentlemen!” to the other. The trays of the medicine cart held many shot glasses filled with what looked like bourbon whiskey or maple syrup: it was neither, though it tasted a little like both.

“You bring my paper, Charlie?” said a man with a dirty bundle of newspapers under his arm.

“Oh, now, Mr. Schultz, you have plenty of papers. Use up the papers you have, then maybe I’ll bring you a new one.” And he turned to one of the orderlies. “How many admissions last night?”

“Eight. We got a hundred and seventeen on the ward now.”

Charlie winced and shook his big head. “That’s too many. And there’ll be more coming in today, more tomorrow, more Monday. We don’t have fa
cilities
for that many.” With a jangle of his key ring he opened a door marked
KEEP OUT
, briefly revealing what looked like a snug little den – a table and chairs, shelves with cups and a hotplate and coffee-makings – and came out with two packs of Pall Malls in his hand.

“All right, one at a time, gentlemen,” he said to the eager crowd that pressed around him. “Form a line to the right, please; one at a time and only one apiece. Not you, Mr. Jefferson, you’ve got a pack in your pocket. You know the rules: these are
ward
cigarettes …”

Everything was slightly improved with Charlie’s arrival, with the “Nourishment” and the ward cigarettes: the lights were less glaring and the shadows less dark, and there were new discoveries to be made: a long wooden bench against one wall, other places to sit in a recess between sections of folded-up bunks and even a place to lie down – four dirty mattresses on the floor of an alcove at the far end, well away from the mainstream of walkers. But the padded cells were still there, six of them, and one now contained the twisted figure of the man who’d shadowboxed and screamed before breakfast. He lay with his mouth still open in the shape of outrage, as if ready to scream again in his drugged sleep, and his dark hair glistened with sweat.

“Who shot Dr. Spivack out?” Charlie’s heavy voice inquired.

“Roscoe, Charlie. He was actin’ up real bad.”

“What happened to his pants?”