Ten days ago I got to Megan and Georgia’s house in the East Baltimore barrio. Usually the cars are double parked, but the ICE raids have had the spics spooked. There are actually parking spots. If there is an ambulance call, or fire, the emergency vehicles could actually get up the street. The sky was crazy, like Apollo had given Phaeton his chariot and an etch-a-sketch sled to draw lines.
Megan was standing on the porch, pale and shaking, sweating, “I took off work, Baby—felt like hell. I don’t even want a smoke, can’t even take a shot of vodka, so I don’t want to beat this fucking spic to death for yelling at his beautiful wife.”
The man looks at me and I nod, “Hey man,” and he returns me a squint of ultimate oppression, ‘Hefe, does she beat you,’ flashing across his dark eyes.
The little girls come out all dolled up and chant, “GiGi!” and Megan says, “You girls look beautiful today, just like your mommy,” and then sneers to me half under her breath, “And their men look like trolls! If my son in law talked to my daughter like that I’d be hiding in the bushes with a hammer.”
In the heat the Mexicans stayed buttoned up in the box houses while this dumb cracker went grocery shopping for the ladies. The Mexicans to the left have two chickens, 2 girls, 6 boys and a baby, none older then 10. They come out at dark and grill, drink, sit the baby buggy in the open doorway and have a nice noche. Us old ghosts went to bed. She was suffering through the throes of something worse than the tooth infection from last month.
She makes minimum wage and has no insurance. Her medicaid lapsed because she could not get any tech person to re-up her insurance, which had happened to me and was fixed by Lynn after a few years uninsured. With her blood pressure meds running out and no insurance, her doctor cut her loose. She took a day off from work and paid a sedan all the money she had left to get across town to social services. She waited five hours in the office and was dismissed by the lady at the desk, who said, “You make too much money. You don’t qualify for health insurance.” Megan, who makes the Maryland minimum then gets to see the Haitians, Nigerians, drug dealers and illegals riding cars she could have never afforded in her wildest dreams, nice clothes, plenty of cash. “I’m a fuckin’ Pollack, what can I expect.”
“You don’t mind if I toss and turn? I want you by me, but I can’t sleep.”
“Oh, I can sleep through anything,” I assured her.
Within an hour, my deteriorating hips propped up by a pillow between my legs, my head on another, I hear, “Give it!” it’s her in half sleep tugging on the pillow between my knees. I give it up, roll up my shirt and use that for a spacer between the knees and fall off.
An hour later, the pillow is being taken from under my head and I try to hold on to it. She yanks with one hand and plants an elbow in my chest with the other and does a crocodile roll.
I spent the next few nights drinking 7.99 a fifth Imperial whiskey and watching fights, passing out in the recliner.
Three days later she was taken off in an ambulance with these sage words, “Baby, I don’t feel right, have to go to a city hospital like a niցցer and beg.”
I told her, “They will love you—you’ll get good care.”
I did their house work, cleaned and folded her clothes, and prepared a hospital stay bag for her daughter to take to her, then went back to the Brickmouse House in the Northeast. She was released on Friday morning. After our five hour Friday focus dinner, The Operator, bought her and Georgia carry-out and drove me over saying, “If you are in any trouble with your lady, blame it on me.”
Once inside, her shrunken form, still pale, shivering on the cusp of July in two sweat shirts, hugged me and she said this:
…
Baby, I just came back from the pit of hell—what a shit show! The ambulance picks me up from work and they were very nice. I was too proud to let them wheel me out. I walked out. My boss was so nice. The lady EMT strapped me in a seat, not on the gurney, and said, “What do you need?”
“Anything but opiates—I don’t want any opiates!”
She laughs, “That’s a first, that is all anybody wants from us!”
They use these mechanical cuffs that are so tight my arm is bruised.
The ER was packed, insane, nothing but hundreds of junkies, fiending, shaking, pissing, sores oozing, puking in barf begs. 'Sepsis in Room 1,' over the intercom, then, 'Sepsis in room 3, STAT.' Everyone gets a barf bag. You go in, it is assumed you are a fiending junky. I couldn’t take the smell of the piss and the vomit, all of the moaning and groaning and dripping sores. I asked the nurse to take me out and she wheeled my down the hall next to this elderly couple. I kept passing out. But when I got called, the old lady woke me up and said it was my turn.
I was in the hallway from 1:30 Tuesday afternoon until 7:10 AM Wednesday, when I called you. After that, before they did anything, they had to check me for sores—everybody is a junkie! They ran three bags of this IV stuff through me. Once I was in the room, where this man was behind a curtain, they were super nice, treated me like a human. They brought a whole herd of medical students in to see me. We all introduced ourselves. I had acute kidney failure from taking Tylenol for the abscessed tooth. The insets were all stuck in the kidneys. They took me off most of my meds, so I don’t know how my heart is working. I had my first heart attack when I was 29. So, I got a social worker so I can go to a cardiac clinic to get the stents checked—they are 11 years old. Oh, and they had to check me for STDs! I said to the lady gynocologist, “Don’t you need to have sex to catch that shit?” Still they have to check and I was clear.
No way was I going to use their shower—bet there were STDS in that hole! First, I would have froze to death, thanks so much for sending the blanket. There is so much disease in that place they have to keep it cold. Second, they have lazy niցցers doing the cleaning. All those junkies that have drained their puss in that shower and then some slacker is going to hit it with a spray bottle once and walk—no way am I using that shower.
Oh, the person behind the curtain, who they called Lou, started to talk to me, and asked me my name. I said, “Megan, sir,” and it says, “I’m not a man. I’m a woman. I hate kids and never got married—I have dogs, dogs make more sense then people.”
I apologized. All Lou did from then on was gripe, complained about everything.
Please thank your friend for this food, the sour dough roll is excellent!
…
“Here,’ I said, “he gave me some money for you too,” handing her $150.
She took 2 of the $50s and gave me 1, “You keep one, Baby, you’re traveling—you fucking nut. And please, stop fighting.
