Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

Anyhow for me, for now, the dinky old school bus was over-o well it was summer anyway-and likewise I was missing the latest caper of the Bug Motels, which, I reflected sadly, was going to be its best ever. We were starting up a Rohring Rohring rock band with one hundred percent medical instruments, I mean we were about to execute the real, original mission of the Bug Motels-to play bughouse music. We weren’t going to dress in matching sequined uniforms, either, even supposing we could get em in this dump. Though of course we practiced kicking together like the Four Tops, we saw a band as a loose confederation of eternally solo flirters with dementia. In that, we were before our time. The first stage, already under way, was junking around the hospital for anything loose. Next we would whip up five sonorous contraptions of medical parts and work on our numbers, each one starring a different Bug Motel. Then one of these days we’d give a bughouse concert.

But a bughouse band never stays the same or it rots: now one Bug Motel was in the burn unit swathed head to foot in whatever miracle wrap they roll you in after you try to barbecue yourself. And another Bug Motel was on ice in a quietroom-stuck in Suicidal Semi-Observation. The Bug Motels still had their mastermind Bertie, and Dion, and O. But how far could they get without the Bogeywoman for muscle? or Emily loyal-to-the-death-by-starvation for guts?

So here I found myself and was it queer or what, to pace the exact same layout that was in a warped sort of way home to me, only deserted, as though every other member of the Bug Motels had died and gone to a worse place. For that’s what I did for exercise and pastime, whenever they let me-paced the green linoleum halls, past rows of green steel doors, day and night. I had a sort of itch: just keep moving it said and I did. At first I had to have a nurse’s aide with me all the time. Gloria dragged behind, grumbled about her feet, twisted her fingers in the back of my hospital gown and rode me like a hand puppet. She was short and slow, with the build of a sumo wrestler. “I ain’t took this job so I can wear my stems to stumps,” she panted, “hold up, ants-in-you-pants, this ain’t the infantry.” “I can walk by myself,” I told her, “what am I going to do? tear down the walls with my fingernails?”-because the halls were gleaming nude, no furniture, no pictures, no knobs rails hooks sticking out, no nothing. Even the nurses’ station was wrapped in chicken wire, the chicken wire in turn sealed up in (probably) bulletproof glass, everything slick as the glass mountain. “You mine your bidniss, I mine mine,” Gloria huffed and puffed and kept up with me as near as she could, or yanked me backwards when she couldn’t take it anymore.

Once she was beat she slumped against the wall, and then I could get stuff out of her, I mean about the other bugs hidden in quietrooms behind the green steel doors. Behind O’s door lived a soprano twenty years over the hill with petunia-colored spots of rouge on her baggy cheeks and a queenly arch to her baggy throat, which, I found out, she was trying her best to ruff with a noose. Since she was in O’s place I wanted to worship the ruins of beauty in her, surely her gorgeous air required a fan, but on the few occasions we passed in the corridor, she with her keeper, I with mine, she pretended to speak no English, though Gloria told me she was born in Ellicott City.

Dion’s place was filled by a genuine mountain man from Sumpm Sumpm Gap in Allegany County. Mr. Woofter was as dark red, shriveled and dried out as venison jerky, and the one time he managed to speak to me he whispered only “Silky draws? silky draws?” and showed me an evenly corrugated one-dollar bill that must have been pried out of a very small space-a rotten tooth maybe (he had plenty of those). I think he was trying to buy my underpants, but of course I owned nothing but Camp Chunkagunk white cotton at the time, and in my quietroom I had lost track even of those. Here on East Five it was hospital gowns for everybody, even the diva, though somehow she got the rouge pot too. A salesman type with the shakes, wildly boisterous when not weeping, lived in Bertie’s old room. And in Emily’s was-nothing, no one, just emptiness and shade and a pearly sheen on the padded walls from one high small window.

I paced. “Let’s face it you cramp my style,” I sneered mildly to Gloria over my shoulder, “this is cruel and unusual punishment not to let me go by myself, godzilla knows you can watch my every move from the nurses’ station.” “Maybe you right, maybe it is being cruel- to animals ,” Gloria agreed, “cause I hear yall animals push that little bitty Emily down the laundry chute. And then she have to burn herself.” “How is Emily?” I asked, even more mildly. Mildness was my new strategy for getting outa here, but Gloria was too obtuse to notice. She didn’t answer about Emily. “I let you go, next thing I know you sawing away on that arm like a turkey drumstick,” she said. “Ya mean with my teeth?” I argued back, “so what if I did? How far would I get before you were out here whaling on me? Not even an hors d’œuvre…”

Finally I wore her down and not a moment too soon, by now I itched so bad I was galloping, my hospital gown billowing out in back of me like a parachute on a jet plane. Gloria roosted massively on a high stool in the nurses’ station, folded her liver-wurst arms and never took her eyes off me. No way I could inveigle a hand under my gown to scratch the pubic triangle under these conditions. At first I had thought nothing of the itch, it seemed I’d always had it, mildly, subterraneously, a faint munching at the roots in the front yard, itch scratch itch. And it still seemed like I’d always had it, but now it was the starving central fact of a life, the little place marked x for the nail that nailed you, the tooth that gnawed you, the hunger that ate you, the itchy spot that souled everything alive. But if that were so, if I’d always had it, then how had I ever managed to stay in one place for five whole minutes? Now I galloped, up and down, up and down. Gloria squinted at me suspiciously through the glass. Dinner came, did I want it in my quietroom? No thank you, I slapped the slop on the white bread and galloped on, bolting down great half-moons.

But finally Gloria’s shift was done. I never thought I’d be sorry to see her linebacker’s shoulders sway off down the hall until the night nurse, Miss Kniffin, led me to my quietroom, took away my gown and whanged the steel door home behind me. Wait don’t leave me! Just lemme (Blam. Clank-the outer door guard. Then nothing.) Not that I couldn’t pace in my quietroom, that was one good thing about emptiness, you could pace it off, round and round and round the padded hole. But now I had to face it, live alone with it, stark naked. I did have a social disease, I mean my coochie was not itself, could not be itself although it appeared to be itself, in fact looked exactly like its usual hideous self, scraggy black hair pasted to white skin like swamp grass sucked tight against a clay bank when the water drops.

I threw myself on the soft floor, peered into that darkness between my thighs and everything looked the same in the bad light, no there was some kind of brown trash down there where the whips of hair rooted in skin, I scratched at it with the bitty edge I had left of one fingernail and managed to pry some off and hold it up to the gray twilight-good godzilla! it walked across my fingertip. I saw, just barely, its lacy nippers waving. Crab was no figure of ayrabber speech, then, these were crustaceans of some microscopic universe whose entire Chesapeake shore could fit between my legs. I scrambled to my feet and paced even more wildly, for the yellowed old padding I was lying on looked a lot like the ancient mattress in the ayrabbers’ stall. I had to get rid of these bugs before I infested this place, if I hadn’t already-I couldn’t lie down-no one could know- lemme die first . But what was the cure for crabs if you couldn’t tell a doctor? And even supposing you could find a doc who wouldn’t rat on you to your dreambox adjustor, how were you to collar this expert unless they let you out of here?