“The Right Spot” by Toni Mirosevich
After I’ve had my coffee, kissed my loved one, closed the front door and whispered low so the neighbors can’t hear, “goodbye, house,” I settle myself into the car, click the seat belt, slip in a CD, something without words, for the words will come soon enough, the words are on their way, racing towards me as I race towards work; a libretto of elaborate excuses, new scams, accompanied by the singing of the gurney wheels in the hospital halls, the bells, buzzers and cell phones ringing just outside my exam room door.
I pull out of the driveway, into the street, just as a truck roars up in my rear view mirror, and I lay on the horn, fool. He narrowly misses me, I narrowly miss him, what a jerk to not slow down, then I recognize it’s my neighbor, his big sunny head behind the truck’s steering wheel. I honk and wave, a wave that says, Oh forgive me, I didn’t see you, and he waves back a wave that says, Oh that’s all right, no harm, no foul.
I notice how different he looks on his way to his work; his white chef’s jacket, clean shaven mug. I know he’s wearing his black-and-white checked chef pants, is headed for the homeless shelter in the Tenderloin where he’s the head cook. He looks so different on the weekends, out in his front yard in his faded jeans and holey t-shirt, just a homebody mowing the lawn, the back and forth across the green grass as imprinted on his DNA as that wave.
Last Sunday he and I were standing in the middle of the street, I was complaining about my boss, what an asshole. He turned to me and said, if you let your boss get to you then you drink the acid you meant for him to have, you drink that poison. My neighbor’s a big man with a big heart, yet as I drive away he gets smaller in the rearview mirror, with each second he diminishes. His big truck turns into a toy truck and I picture him driving to a shelter that’s as tiny as a dollhouse, with little cots and blankets the size of tiny hankies, where the homeless drink their soup out of itsy thimbles.
Years ago, I worked in a soup kitchen, I, who can’t cook. Once I was asked to warm up buckets of frozen split pea soup. That night, the families lined up and I ladled up the soup, smiling, proud, as if I’d made it myself from scratch. One by one, people brought their bowls back, each thick green sea barely touched, the split peas floating around like capsized life boats. The stuff was burnt, inedible. They who were very, very hungry, wouldn’t even touch that soup.
By the time I get to the freeway their sad faces fade away, they diminish. I’m on automatic pilot all the way to the hospital and start to think about the ones waiting for me in that line up; first, the heroin addict, who’ll have a story, who’ll tell me how he lost his script for methadone , it must have fallen out of his pocket on that rainy day we had last week, and I’ll think back to 5th grade science class, the lesson about where rain comes from, how water evaporates from the ocean into the clouds which rain down and flows to the sea and then it all starts over again, the cycle begins again, just like his story does.
Next will be Pain Man, who’ll start up the minute he walks in, who’ll say, “Will you check my labs again?” “I’ll say, “All of your blood work is normal” and he’ll shout, “You’re wrong, all of you are dead wrong.” The diabetic will answer no, no slip ups lately, she’s been staying off sugar, but on further questioning will admit, “I have jam on toast five times a day.” I’ll ask Goth girl if she’s been taking her anti-depressants and she’ll say she’s way too depressed to take pills, anyway, they’re not a natural. The young Vet on anti-anxiety drugs will hold up his cell phone and say, “Here, look, I took this shot when my pills dropped on the wet bathroom floor,” and he’ll show me a tiny grainy photo showing grainy white dots on a grainy public stall floor and am I supposed to believe this, to count this technological post- it-note as irrefutable evidence?
I accelerate with each story, and it’s as if they’re all in the car with me, as if I’m the driver of a bus full of the noncompliant, the drug-seeking, the cannot-hold-a-job, the sign-my-disability form. Miles of freeway blow past, the Dow’s been up and down and up again, get up for the day, that’s what I need to do, get up. Every single morning this is how it goes until, not far from the hospital, two blocks to be exact, right after I drive by the children’s park surrounded by a barbed wire fence, there is a spot I come to, a spot in the road.
There’s nothing on the asphalt to mark it, to locate it. There’s no big red X. Nothing tips me, no pothole or speed bump or dip, but I know when I hit it for it’s as if the spot makes a sound that trumps all the others-the street sounds, the sirens, the chorus of need. Is it the sound of some distant bell, a memory, a warning, reminding me of something important, something I’ve forgotten to pay attention to? Like when a newscaster at a military memorial says, “They’re about to have a moment of silence for the fallen, let’s listen in…?”
Then again, maybe I’m inserting a sound where there is none, maybe at this spot there’s an absence of sound, a Bermuda Triangle of soundlessness, so all I’m left with are the words inside my head, a voice from somewhere deep inside that whispers, Okay, stop it now, stop it, judge not lest ye be…To hear the voice better I turn and tell everyone on the bus to pipe down and before you know it we’re in front of the hospital. I pull into the parking lot, wave to the parking attendant, cross the dying lawn which never needs mowing and enter the building, the unsafe building, the building that will crumble in the next temblor, what a sound that will make. We’ll all go together, we’ll go in a poof. I start the day, pull the chart off the exam room door, go out to the reception room and there he is, the heroin addict, slumped in a chair. I signal him with a wave that says, Come on in.
Eight hours later, I push open the hospital doors to the street and it hits me like a wave, the sounds and smells that have accumulated around the building, that create their own atmosphere, made up of human sweat, urine, curses, exhaust. Before I get in my car, I take off my white lab coat, longer in length but not so very different from my neighbor’s white chef’s jacket. That’s when I look down realize I’m wearing my good slacks and if you look real close you can see a tiny black-and-white check pattern in the weave.
We could be twins, my neighbor and I, in our matching outfits, and we have something else in common. I’d lay bets we’ve seen the same people today, they’ve gone to him for food, food that tasted good for he is a good cook and didn’t burn the soup, the bowls came back to him as empty as the scooped out bowl of this white sky, and they’ve come to me for medical care, for I know when to listen hard to what is below the words, all the words. I get into my car, thank the parking attendant, and as I go to pull into the flow of traffic, he waves and signals “No one’s coming.”
I drive down the street, and what do you know, they’re all on the bus again; the heroin addict who just today told me his mother was an addict and whose father was an addict and when you think about, who is he to not carry on the line. Here’s Goth girl who looked pretty happy when she said she still wasn’t taking her meds, it’s the first time she’s brightened in months, some spark in that small defiance, and isn’t it one of the best in life, jam spread on toast, strawberry jam and apricot jam and marmalade with tiny orange flecks of rind, my diabetic is in heaven when she spreads it on, I can taste how good that would be, how one tablespoon or five of that sweetness could fill each day. The vet told me he’s in rehab and thinking of taking a photography course, he’d be good, I can tell by those cell phone shots that he’s got a good eye, and sitting next to him is Pain Man, who has a broken heart nothing will fix, we’ll never find a test that will lay his search to rest, and judgment won’t find a seat on this bus, it’s already full, there not one empty seat.
I keep my eye on the road, we’re coming up to the children’s park and that’s when I hit it, the same spot, the spot I hit coming in, but now, there’s a different sound, one you can barely hear, soft, like sighing, I hear them sighing, everyone is sighing, and all those small exhalations become a breeze that sings and is cool and clears the old air way. If there were words to this music, if I were to write the libretto for this breeze the refrain would be: what diminishes thee diminishes me. This is the right spot, where no bowl is left unfilled, no acid is poured, where every story is offered up and is received. Further on down the road the steering on this bus could go or a careening car, coming from the opposite direction, could miss the stoplight and plow right into us. “I didn’t see them coming,” he’ll say, when the cops question the man behind the wheel, “They were right in front of me but I didn’t see them coming.”
Copyright © 2009, Toni Mirosevich