Ham on Rye: A Novel

  It was just as well. A tough guy didn’t need that. I took off my ancient cap and gown and handed it to the guy at the end of the aisle—the janitor. He folded the pieces up for the next time.

  I walked outside. The first one out. But where could I go? I had eleven cents in my pocket. I walked back to where I lived.

  29

  That summer, July 1934, they gunned down John Dillinger outside the movie house in Chicago. He never had a chance. The Lady in Red had fingered him. More than a year earlier the banks had collapsed. Prohibition was repealed and my father drank Eastside beer again. But the worst thing was Dillinger getting it. A lot of people admired Dillinger and it made everybody feel terrible. Roosevelt was President. He gave Fireside Chats over the radio and everybody listened. He could really talk. And he began to enact programs to put people to work. But things were still very bad. And my boils got worse, they were unbelievably large.

  That September I was scheduled to go to Woodhaven High but my father insisted I go to Chelsey High.

  “Look,” I told him, “Chelsey is out of this district. It’s too far away.”

  “You’ll do as I tell you. You’ll register at Chelsey High.”

  I knew why he wanted me to go to Chelsey. The rich kids went there. My father was crazy. He still thought about being rich. When Baldy found out I was going to Chelsey he decided to go there too. I couldn’t get rid of him or my boils.

  The first day we rode our bikes to Chelsey and parked them. It was a terrible feeling. Most of those kids, at least all the older ones, had their own automobiles, many of them new convertibles, and they weren’t black or dark blue like most cars, they were bright yellow, green, orange and red. The guys sat in them outside of the school and the girls gathered around and went for rides. Everybody was nicely dressed, the guys and the girls, they had pullover sweaters, wrist watches and the latest in shoes. They seemed very adult and poised and superior. And there I was in my homemade shirt, my one ragged pair of pants, my rundown shoes, and I was covered with boils. The guys with the cars didn’t worry about acne. They were very handsome, they were tall and clean with bright teeth and they didn’t wash their hair with hand soap. They seemed to know something I didn’t know. I was at the bottom again.

  Since all the guys had cars Baldy and I were ashamed of our bicycles. We left them home and walked to school and back, two-and-one-half miles each way. We carried brown bag lunches. But most of the other students didn’t even eat in the school cafeteria. They drove to malt shops with the girls, played the juke boxes and laughed. They were on their way to U.S.C.

  I was ashamed of my boils. At Chelsey you had a choice between gym and R.O.T.C. I took R.O.T.C. because then I didn’t have to wear a gym suit and nobody could see the boils on my body. But I hated the uniform. The shirt was made of wool and it irritated my boils. The uniform was worn from Monday to Thursday. On Friday we were allowed to wear regular clothes.

  We studied the Manual of Arms. It was about warfare and shit like that. We had to pass exams. We marched around the field. We practiced the Manual of Arms. Handling the rifle during various drills was bad for me. I had boils on my shoulders. Sometimes when I slammed the rifle against my shoulder a boil would break and leak through my shirt. The blood would come through but because the shirt was thick and made of wool the spot wasn’t obvious and didn’t look like blood.

  I told my mother what was happening. She lined the shoulders of my shirts with white patches of cloth, but it only helped a little.

  Once an officer came through on inspection. He grabbed the rifle out of my hands and held it up, peering through the barrel, for dust in the bore. He slammed the rifle back at me, then looked at a blood spot on my right shoulder.

  “Chinaski!” he snapped, “your rifle is leaking oil!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I got through the term but the boils got worse and worse. They were as large as walnuts and covered my face. I was very ashamed. Sometimes at home I would stand before the bathroom mirror and break one of the boils. Yellow pus would spurt and splatter on the mirror. And little white hard pits. In a horrible way it was fascinating that all that stuff was in there. But I knew how hard it was for other people to look at me.

  The school must have advised my father. At the end of that term I was withdrawn from school. I went to bed and my parents covered me with ointments. There was a brown salve that stank. My father preferred that one for me. It burned. He insisted that I keep it on longer, much longer than the instructions advised. One night he insisted that I leave it on for hours. I began screaming. I ran to the tub, filled it with water and washed the salve off, with difficulty. I was burned, on my face, my back and chest. That night I sat on the edge of the bed. I couldn’t lay down.

  My father came into the room.

  “I thought I told you to leave that stuff on!”

  “Look what happened,” I told him.

  My mother came into the room.

  “The son-of-a-bitch doesn’t want to get well,” my father told her. “Why did I have to have a son like this?”

  My mother lost her job. My father kept leaving in his car every morning as if he were going to work. “I’m an engineer,” he told people. He had always wanted to be an engineer.

  It was arranged for me to go to the L.A. County General Hospital. I was given a long white card. I took the white card and got on the #7 streetcar. The fare was seven cents (or four tokens for a quarter). I dropped in my token and walked to the back of the streetcar. I had an 8:30 a.m. appointment.

  A few blocks later a young boy and a woman got on the streetcar. The woman was fat and the boy was about four years old. They sat in the seat behind me. I looked out the window. We rolled along. I liked that #7 streetcar. It went really fast and rocked back and forth as the sun shone outside.

  “Mommy,” I heard the young boy say, “What’s wrong with that man’s face?”

  The woman didn’t answer.

  The boy asked her the same question again.

  She didn’t answer.

  Then the boy screamed it out, “Mommy! What’s wrong with that man’s face?”

  “Shut up! I don’t know what’s wrong with his face!”

  I went to Admissions at the hospital and they instructed me to report to the fourth floor. There the nurse at the desk took my name and told me to be seated. We sat in two long rows of green metal chairs facing one another. Mexicans, whites and blacks. There were no Orientals. There was nothing to read. Some of the patients had day-old newspapers. The people were of all ages, thin and fat, short and tall, old and young. Nobody talked. Everybody seemed very tired. Orderlies walked back and forth, sometimes you saw a nurse, but never a doctor. An hour went by, two hours. Nobody’s name was called. I got up to look for a water fountain. I looked in the little rooms where people were to be examined. There wasn’t anybody in any of the rooms, neither doctors or patients.

  I went to the desk. The nurse was staring down into a big fat book with names written in it. The phone rang. She answered it.

  “Dr. Menen isn’t here yet.” She hung up.

  “Pardon me,” I said.

  “Yes?” the nurse asked.

  “The doctors aren’t here yet. Can I come back later?”

  “No.”

  “But there’s nobody here.”

  “The doctors are on call.”

  “But I have an 8:30 appointment.”

  “Everybody here has an 8:30 appointment.”

  There were 45 or 50 people waiting.

  “Since I’m on the waiting list, suppose I come back in a couple of hours, maybe there will be some doctors here then.”

  “If you leave now, you will automatically lose your appointment. You will have to return tomorrow if you still wish treatment.”

  I walked back and sat in a chair. The others didn’t protest. There was very little movement. Sometimes two or three nurses would walk by laughing. Once they pushed a man past in a wheelchair. Both of his legs were heavily ba
ndaged and his ear on the side of his head toward me had been sliced off. There was a black hole divided into little sections, and it looked like a spider had gone in there and made a spider web. Hours passed. Noon came and went. Another hour. Two hours. We sat and waited. Then somebody said, “There’s a doctor!”

  The doctor walked into one of the examination rooms and closed the door. We all watched. Nothing. A nurse went in. We heard her laughing. Then she walked out. Five minutes. Ten minutes. The doctor walked out with a clipboard in his hand.

  “Martinez?” the doctor asked. “José Martinez?”

  An old thin Mexican man stood up and began walking toward the doctor.

  “Martinez? Martinez, old boy, how are you?”

  “Sick, doctor…I think I die…”

  “Well, now…Step in here…”

  Martinez was in there a long time. I picked up a discarded newspaper and tried to read it. But we were all thinking about Martinez. If Martinez ever got out of there, someone would be next.

  Then Martinez screamed. “AHHHHH! AHHHHH! STOP! STOP! AHHHH! MERCY! GOD! PLEASE STOP!”

  “Now, now, that doesn’t hurt…” said the doctor.

  Martinez screamed again. A nurse ran into the examination room. There was silence. All we could see was the black shadow of the half-open doorway. Then an orderly ran into the examination room. Martinez made a gurgling sound. He was taken out of there on a rolling stretcher. The nurse and the orderly pushed him down the hall and through some swinging doors. Martinez was under a sheet but he wasn’t dead because the sheet wasn’t pulled over his face.

  The doctor stayed in the examination room for another ten minutes. Then he came out with the clipboard.

  “Jefferson Williams?” he asked.

  There was no answer.

  “Is Jefferson Williams here?”

  There was no response.

  “Mary Blackthorne?”

  There was no answer.

  “Harry Lewis?”

  “Yes, doctor?”

  “Step forward, please…”

  It was very slow. The doctor saw five more patients. Then he left the examination room, stopped at the desk, lit a cigarette and talked to the nurse for fifteen minutes. He looked like a very intelligent man. He had a twitch on the right side of his face, which kept jumping, and he had red hair with streaks of grey. He wore glasses and kept taking them off and putting them back on. Another nurse came in and gave him a cup of coffee. He took a sip, then holding the coffee in one hand he pushed the swinging doors open with the other and was gone.

  The office nurse came out from behind the desk with our long white cards and she called our names. As we answered, she handed each of us our card back. “This ward is closed for the day. Please return tomorrow if you wish. Your appointment time is stamped on your card.”

  I looked down at my card. It was stamped 8:30 a.m.

  30

  I got lucky the next day. They called my name. It was a different doctor. I stripped down. He turned a hot white light on me and looked me over. I was sitting on the edge of the examination table.

  “Hmmm, hmmmm,” he said, “uh huh…”

  I sat there.

  “How long have you had this?”

  “A couple of years. It keeps getting worse and worse.”

  “Ah hah.”

  He kept looking.

  “Now, you just stretch out there on your stomach. I’ll be right back.”

  Some moments passed and suddenly there were many people in the room. They were all doctors. At least they looked and talked like doctors. Where had they come from? I had thought there were hardly any doctors at L.A. County General Hospital.

  “Acne vulgaris. The worst case I’ve seen in all my years of practice!”

  “Fantastic!”

  “Incredible!”

  “Look at the face!”

  “The neck!”

  “I just finished examining a young girl with acne vulgaris. Her back was covered. She cried. She told me, ‘How will I ever get a man? My back will be scarred forever. I want to kill myself!’ And now look at this fellow! If she could see him, she’d know that she really had nothing to complain about!”

  You dumb fuck, I thought, don’t you realize that I can hear what you’re saying?

  How did a man get to be a doctor? Did they take anybody?

  “Is he asleep?”

  “Why?”

  “He seems very calm.”

  “No, I don’t think he’s asleep. Are you asleep, my boy?”

  “Yes.”

  They kept moving the hot white light about on various parts of my body.

  “Turn over.”

  I turned over.

  “Look, there’s a lesion inside of his mouth!”

  “Well, how will we treat it?”

  “The electric needle, I think…”

  “Yes, of course, the electric needle.”

  “Yes, the needle.”

  It was decided.

  31

  The next day I sat in the hall in my green tin chair, waiting to be called. Across from me sat a man who had something wrong with his nose. It was very red and very raw and very fat and long and it was growing upon itself. You could see where section had grown upon section. Something had irritated the man’s nose and it had just started growing. I looked at the nose and then tried not to look. I didn’t want the man to see me looking, I knew how he felt. But the man seemed very comfortable. He was fat and sat there almost asleep.

  They called him first: “Mr. Sleeth?”

  He moved forward a bit in his chair.

  “Sleeth? Richard Sleeth?”

  “Uh? Yes, I’m here…”

  He stood up and moved toward the doctor.

  “How are you today, Mr. Sleeth?”

  “Fine…I’m all right…”

  He followed the doctor into the examination room.

  I got my call an hour later. I followed the doctor through some swinging doors and into another room. It was larger than the examination room. I was told to disrobe and to sit on a table. The doctor looked at me.

  “You really have a case there, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  He poked at a boil on my back.

  “That hurt?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well,” he said, “we’re going to try to get some drainage.”

  I heard him turn on the machinery. It made a whirring sound. I could smell oil getting hot.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  He pushed the electric needle into my back. I was being drilled. The pain was immense. It filled the room. I felt the blood run down my back. Then he pulled the needle out.

  “Now we’re going to get another one,” said the doctor.

  He jammed the needle into me. Then he pulled it out and jammed it into a third boil. Two other men had walked in and were standing there watching. They were probably doctors. The needle went into me again.

  “I never saw anybody go under the needle like that,” said one of the men.

  “He gives no sign at all,” said the other man.

  “Why don’t you guys go out and pinch some nurse’s ass?” I asked them.

  “Look, son, you can’t talk to us like that!”

  The needle dug into me. I didn’t answer.

  “The boy is evidently very bitter…”

  “Yes, of course, that’s it.”

  The men walked out.

  “Those are fine professional men,” said my doctor. “It’s not good of you to abuse them.”

  “Just go ahead and drill,” I told him.

  He did. The needle got very hot but he went on and on. He drilled my entire back, then he got my chest. Then I stretched out and he drilled my neck and my face.

  A nurse came in and she got her instructions. “Now, Miss Ackerman, I want these…pustules…thoroughly drained. And when you get to the blood, keep squeezing. I want thorough drainage.”

  “Yes, Dr. Grundy
.”

  “And afterwards, the ultra-violet ray machine. Two minutes on each side to begin with…”

  “Yes, Dr. Grundy.”

  I followed Miss Ackerman into another room. She told me to lay down on the table. She got a tissue and started on the first boil.

  “Does this hurt?”

  “It’s all right.”

  “You poor boy…”

  “Don’t worry. I’m just sorry you have to do this.”

  “You poor boy…”

  Miss Ackerman was the first person to give me any sympathy. It felt strange. She was a chubby little nurse in her early thirties.

  “Are you going to school?” she asked.

  “No, they had to take me out.”

  Miss Ackerman kept squeezing as she talked.

  “What do you do all day?”

  “I just stay in bed.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “No, it’s nice. I like it.”

  “Does this hurt?”

  “Go ahead. It’s all right.”

  “What’s so nice about laying in bed all day?”

  “I don’t have to see anybody.”

  “You like that?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “What do you do all day?”

  “Some of the day I listen to the radio.”

  “What do you listen to?”

  “Music. And people talking.”

  “Do you think of girls?”

  “Sure. But that’s out.”

  “You don’t want to think that way.”

  “I make charts of airplanes going overhead. They come over at the same time each day. I have them timed. Say that I know that one of them is going to pass over at 11:15 a.m. Around 11:10, I start listening for the sound of the motor. I try to hear the first sound. Sometimes I imagine I hear it and sometimes I’m not sure and then I begin to hear it, ’way off, for sure. And the sound gets stronger. Then at 11:15 a.m. it passes overhead and the sound is as loud as it’s going to get.”

  “You do that every day?”