To The Dogs
(continued from page one)
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nyway, I couldn't say for how long I sat at my kitchen table with my eyes so affixed, but I do recall vaguely that I was again late for work.
By week's end, I was consuming all of my meals in Friendship Park and thereafter became such a regular beneath the golden arches that the cashier came to have my food pre-bagged and waiting under heat lamps—Egg McMuffin at 7:30, Chicken McNuggets at twelve noon, Big Mac Combo at six sharp, super-sized, iced tea with lemon.
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It was the bums' detachment, I think, that first attracted me to them, their indifference to the frantic pace of life around them, to all the mating rituals and soccer practices and drug transactions occurring within their midst, to the grid-locked streets and high-rise concrete bunkers surrounding their
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tiny slice of Eden, as if they were conserving energy for some upcoming final struggle or maybe attempting reverse-entropy. Something about their ability to improvise and their simple self-sufficiency made me feel—well, inadequate.
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Not that their lives could have been easy, not between all the tourists pointing and the police harassing, not between the roving night gangs and the unexpected early morning lawn sprinklers.
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I think it was their unique brand of camaraderie that most intrigued me, their brotherhood of secret rites and oaths suggesting another approach to living life.
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But whatever the nature of the pull, my fascination grew to idée fixe.
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I canceled a whole morning of surgery so I could watch them even longer, then told my office manager I felt sick and left early that afternoon.
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I began to worry constantly about the bums, about their safety and inhumane living conditions and the hardships they endured, about whether they were happy or lonely, about my chance discovery that to the British the word 'bum' happens to be their slang for buttocks.
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I took to abandoning my meals barely-eaten on the park bench in case the idlers might be hungry and to leaving behind canned goods and old clothes and plastic tarps and even small amounts of cash.
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I contemplated approaching them to ask if they needed any doctoring but never did because . . . well, for one thing, they scared me half to death.
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I began to wonder whether they viewed me as just another nuisance, if they would rather I merely let them be, if maybe I should cut this out.
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That's when I first caught sight of Dave.
It was him, all right. I recognized him from the newspaper and remembered his sad story.
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He was playing with his dog, a coyote-thin retriever just as yellow as a Hostess Twinkie.
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Something about bum and pet charmed me, the way as a couple they seemed so oblivious to their predicaments, and I yearned to experience the same. I'd gradually come to feel as if I were no longer leading my own real life, anyway, as if my mind had somehow become trapped inside the wrong body.
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It began to rain but I didn’t move. Dave took cover inside of his cardboard box while the dog crouched close by in the dirt. While the storm passed over quickly, despite my umbrella I still got soaked.
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After that incident, the bums regarded me differently and began studying me with the same fascination that I had while studying them, like two people sizing up each other on a first date. After a while they even seemed to welcome my gaze, sometimes to the point of strutting around or showing off.
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Though there were still no attempts at direct communication, I could tell that a bond had been forged, deadbeat to bench warmer. I came to perceive their existence not as a step backwards but as a form of social evolution, a progressive and new way of coping.
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One day Dave's mongrel ran up to me and grabbed my hot dog right out of my hand.
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That night I couldn't sleep and thus found myself wide awake when the phone rang at 2 AM.
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It was the St. Vincent's emergency room nurse calling about a patient who'd been accosted. One of the man's upper eyelids had been deeply lacerated. The notion came to me to make up an excuse—dead car battery, got the flu, close relative arriving at LAX— but I'd employed that approach with Nurse Betty three times in two weeks.
Reluctantly I responded, and on my way to the hospital I drove by the darkened park.
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I thought about checking out the sleeping bums but then grew ashamed of my Peeping Tom obsession, embarrassed about how I'd begun spying on them like they were freaks. It was high time to call it quits, I decided, time to leave these people behind me and get on with real life.
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The ER is a human zoo at night where the animals never sleep. I walked into his curtained cubicle, anxious to get the job done and myself back in bed.
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Lying on a gurney was a body that reeked of sewer, according to his chart a transient without medical insurance.
An ophthalmologist had already examined the man's eye. The nurses had scrubbed the patient's face with orange Betadyne and draped off his wounds. The instrument tray was open.
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I adjusted the lights, slipped on my magnifying glasses, and donned a pair of sterile gloves. All I could really see of the fellow was his shredded right upper eyelid. I ordered him to hold still, injected the local anesthetic, and then carefully probed his wounds. After removing a shard of brown glass (beer bottle), I started in on the reconstruction, my hands moving by habit, my mind still half asleep.
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Once I'd pieced him back together well enough to allow his lids to function in unison, I asked him to open up so I could assess the adequacy of my repair.
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Unexpectedly, the lights in the ER went black, but then quickly came back on as the emergency generators must have kicked in.
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For some reason, I felt different. I again ordered the bum to open up his eyes, but this time found myself holding my breath as I waited, fingers trembling, my chest thumping like CPR from the inside.
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His lids quivered and strained and then . . . snapped wide apart!
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Of course it was Dave, his green eye just as shiny as a pickle lifted out of a barrel of brine. His irises seemed to be swirling and like a whirlpool sucked my gaze in through his pupils.
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I felt enfolded and winded, like a drowning man being dragged down for the very last time, and, in that way, the twosome became a simple one, as if I understood Dave just as well as I understood myself, as if I'd known him for just as long as I'd known myself.
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The surgical lights seemed suddenly extra bright. Not only could I make out my reflection on his glistening corneas but I could feel my gaze penetrating all the way through them, down to his retinas and into his brain, just as Dave must have been able to visualize himself deep inside of me.
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(continued on page three)
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