Kilroy was Here (Excerpt)
The V.A. hospital sits solemn and grand above this too busy northwest city where traffic rumbles and rain mostly pours. Darkness lies between this place and the city, a darkness we've but noticed lately. I totter at a red-hot half-a-mile an hour along lighted halls and Burnside generally outruns me. Burnside drives a wheelchair and his motto is "Leave no nurse's butt unpatted ... because, as he says "Waste is a sin and I'm practicin' to be a preacher."
And this V.A. hospital, itself, is no bad place for a Burnside type of ministry. The hospital stands like a temple, and through its halls and secret passages and operating rooms eternally pour shapes of human hope and pain; shapes of mystery, dread, high times and low. People stride or tippy-toe or cakewalk these halls depending on who's got what share of joy or trouble, and where that trouble lives. Talking about the geriatric ward, Burnside says to me "It ain't altogether a noble occupation, Ross, but it's three hots and a flop. It is, by God, a livin'."
"It's a dying," I tell him. "It's the jump-off place where the world takes its last shot, and Sarge, the world is gonna win." When you talk to Burnside you have to mix good sense with a touch of facts or he won't understand. Burnside has flung b.s. for seventy-six of his seventy-eight years, having been somewhat slow as a baby.
He rolls that wheelchair like a Hell's Angel of the geriatric ward; a wheelchair with racing stripes, a foxtail, an ooga-ooga horn, and the remnants of a Japanese battle flag fluttering from a stick of the kind you see on bicycles. Burnside has arms and shoulders like a dwarfed goliath, and legs so thin his small feet look like powderpuffs attached to toothpicks. "It's a real adventure being in this kind of shape," he tells me. "You learn to crap in a lotta new ways." Burnside has about three red hairs remaining along each temple, his dome is bald, his moustache gray, and hair sprouting from his ears approaches maroon.
The kind thing would be to let him pass away in silence, and the smart thing would be to pass away myself; but days stretch long when the brain is good and the body is shot--and for too long, maybe, we've been silent. My hands no longer hold a pen, but thanks to the mysterious East I have a tape recorder that works. My hips almost don't work. I've got hips like cracked glass.
My tape recorder purrs like a Japanese cat as I tell about what happens, or has happened, and as I concentrate on Burnside. Burnside was okay until, some years ago, he bounced a Honda Goldwing off a phone pole and into a lady's petunia patch. She stood wailing over bruised petunias. He claims to have hammed it up over a busted motorcycle and a busted pelvis, taking advantage of the situation in an attempt to lure her into the sack.
Other people around here are lucky, maybe. They fester in a vegetable state. They've disconnected from the world, have dreamed their ways into the past, and become ghosts who sit before the dayroom t.v. listening to chatter, patter, gossip, and lisping cartoons. The t.v. spooks are more ghostly than the real ghosts who plague this hospital. This place is a ghost factory.
It was the real ghosts who started things. We lifers were peaceful enough telling lies about our different wars, and about our lives in and out of the military. We were happy checking obituaries each day, and chortling over the passing of generals and presidents. "The main difference between dead and alive," says Burnside "is that 'dead' means off the payroll." Then the ghosts got into it. They generally hang around the cemetery out back with its brightly glowing slabs, or else jungle up in broom closets or under beds. They wisp their ways through these halls, rolling along silent as the soft paws of dust kittens. The orderlies don't see them. The nurses don't see them. We can hardly see them.
"It's a perfect set-up," Burnside says. "Plenty of company, cafeteria, television, bed, and a cemetery right at hand." Then he tells a Burnside-type of story. Once, in the days after he retired from the Infantry, he worked as a groundskeeper in a corpse-farm called, Rest Eternal. "They had amazin' discounts for employees," he tells anyone who will listen. "I was losin' money every day I stayed alive."
But stories about Burnside's past didn't amount to a pastel damn once the present took over. The ghosts in this geriatric ward began manifesting. We didn't know what was happening at first. We did know our ranks were thinning--around here the ranks are always thinning. In a little over a month two beds opened up as sgts. Smith and Sanders passed to the great beyond. Their empty chairs in the dayroom quickly filled with a couple of retired Marines still dumb enough to believe they were assigned to temporary duty. Plus, another bed was knocking on empty. The door to corporal Harvey's room stayed closed. Nurses came and went, came and went. Doctors avoided the place. All signs read "Farewell, Dan Harvey."
Darkness started to roll along the hallways, and darkness clustered in the geriatric ward. The dayroom clouded, became blue like a 1940's bar filled with jazz and tobacco smoke. A clarinet wailed as the t.v. ceased its quack and faded without a flicker. Darkness fell in individual rooms and squelched the common sounds of people puking, or gasping and sucking for breath, or whimpering as pain pills wore off.
Not a mother's son or daughter in that dayroom missed a thing, although nurses kept scampering back and forth, back and forth, unseeing. Ghosts appeared tricked out in their best things, and so solid you could see them. The men wore '40's uniforms, and the women looked like Greta Garbo, except more fun; American, English, other kinds mostly oriental. Some of the gals wore uniforms, most wore dresses. The clarinet wailed like the love-ridden and lonesome voice of a transport leaving dock, the voice behind final waves, final goodbyes. The clarinet talked about Lili Marlene, and in the background a trombone sobbed. The ghosts seemed trying to tell us something. A sailor ghost flagged semaphore; colored flags whipping around the alphabet, but the only man on the ward who knew how to read it was a blind quartermaster, so that was a loss.
The halls became bluer, smokier, like lukewarm passions in the dusk of an old man's mind. Chill air moved through the halls, and the door to corporal Harvey's room opened. A nurse stepped through the doorway, her shoulders slumped, her hair astray, and she carried that beaten look the nurses get when they have lost.
"Janet," Burnside said in an abstract and irrelevant way that for the moment held no b.s. "Susan. Yukiko san. The girls we left behind." He watched another dejected nurse leave corporal Harvey's room. "That poor sumbitch is so dead," he muttered "that he really ought to go on sick call."
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