A man had lost his wife about four months ago. He couldn’t sleep, and he was starting to drink, he said.
A high-school girl was having trouble with her stepfather. He had taken the locks off her bathroom and bedroom doors. She was afraid to be in the house alone with him.
Dick couldn’t recognize any of their voices. They were not Mail Baggers.
Then a man called who said he was phoning from a booth just outside the emergency room of Miami Municipal Hospital. “I been listening to your program on this transistor radio in the waiting room,” he said. “I called in to tell you about me. I take the cake. I thought you’d want to hear about it. If they gave out prizes they’d have to give me a big one. I take the cake.”
“Oh,” Dick said wearily.
“See, I live here. You understand me? In the emergency waiting room. This is where I live. I’m an emergency, do you follow?”
“They let you stay there?”
“Well, I’m an emergency, ain’t I? Sure, the docs and nurses let me sleep here on the leather sofa. You should see the shape some of these clowns are in — their heads all unbuttoned and their blood upside down. Boy oh boy. They give you bad dreams on the leather sofa, some of them. I got my eye on one guy sitting outside this booth in a wheelchair right now. He ain’t cut or burnt or nothing, but he looks pretty sick. Wife’s more upset than he is. She’s got this steel nigger comb, just keeps running it over and over through his hair and looking down at him from behind the wheelchair. Yeah, you really see it in a place like this — second-degree burns, third-degree, the works. And accident cases. You know what’s the worst accident case there is? Motorcycles. These kids come in, and I mean they’re totaled. Like they fell off the world. One time I seen a guy hold his eye in his hand like a marble. And raving maniacs—they’re cute. You wouldn’t believe the language comes out of their mouths — especially the women’s. My God, what’s on some people’s minds!
“Tonight a little kid come in who’d worked one of these washers onto his finger and it wouldn’t come off. They got a tool that cuts off rings and they used that. Imagine having a tool for something like that. That’s what gets me. They got a tool for everything. For pulling beans out of people’s noses and getting crud from their eye. There ain’t an emergency they haven’t worked out in advance.
“Most people couldn’t take living in a place like this. I know what to avoid. If it’s real bad, the ambulance driver comes running in first to tell the girl at the desk. Then I know it ain’t something I want to see and I get out of the way.”
“Why do you stay?”
“Why do I stay? In case something happens to me. I’m an epileptic, I got Grand Mal. That means the Big Bad. The Big Bad I got. But I’m right here, you follow? I’m Johnny on the spot. I’m never more than a minute from help.”
Dick didn’t know how he was going to get through the rest of the program. The man was waiting for him to say something, but he couldn’t think of anything.
“I got a right,” the man said abruptly. “Hell, I’m an emergency. I got Grand Mal.”
“Where do you dress?” Dick finally managed. “What about your clothes?”
“Oh. Yeah. Well, that’s interesting about that. I got this buddy in the hospital laundry. He throws my stuff into the hopper with the sheets and the gowns. Everything on me is fresh every day. And there’s this vegetable on the seventh floor — they let me use his electric razor.”
“You’ve got it made,” Dick said.
“How do I eat? You know how I eat?”
“How do you eat?”
“I take my meals off hospital trays! I eat what the sick leave!”
“Terrific.”
“What, you don’t believe me?”
“I believe you.”
“Then what’s wrong? You think I’m talking about garbage? Full- course meals! Full-course breakfast! Full-course lunch! Everything full course. I eat better than you do. It’s balanced meals. A dietitian makes them up. I’m on a salt-free diet. My cholesterol’s lower than yours is. I could overeat if I wanted — sick people don’t have much appetite — but I watch myself, I don’t gorge.”
“Just push yourself away from the hospital cart, is that it? That’s the best exercise.”
“Yeah. Ha ha. Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I do have this little staph infection. What’s so terrible? It won’t kill me, I can live with it. The residents have their eye on it. It’s low grade, practically nothing.”
Dick groaned.
“Well, where should I go, hot shot, where? I’m an emergency. My life’s an emergency. Where’s an emergency gonna go?”
“I’m not criticizing.”
“Listen,” the caller said, “I ain’t stinted. I get everything I want. The chow’s good. I get dessert, even. I already told you. Ha ha. I take the cake.”
He couldn’t have taken any more calls. It was a good thing the show was almost over. He was tired. He did the commercials mechanically, announced the temperature and told his listeners the time, and then he reached forward, took the table microphone and brought it close to his mouth. He paused, not quite certain what he was going to say.
“I’m worried about Henry Harper,” he said at last. “I’m thinking about Ingrid in the Buick. I don’t even mention air pollution, foreign policy, or the terrible things that have been turning up in the artificial sweeteners. There’s crime in the streets, and to tell you the truth, we’ve mucked up our fields and streams too. I hope the Sierra Club wins its battle against the Disney interests in California. I’m troubled about the whales, and I mourn for the death of Lake Erie. The pill has harmful side effects and not enough people wear their safety belts. We ought to have better gun laws. Everywhere the environment is as run down as a slum. Strontium 90 takes a generation to break down, but even that’s faster than the non-bio-degradable soaps. The young have chromosome damage from LSD and the old live without point. Our diet isn’t any good. Where will the money come from for low-cost housing? Charcoal steaks cause irreversible lung damage; cancer is broiling in the barbecue. The pace is too fast and the noise level’s too high, color TV makes you sterile and too much sunshine queers your skin. Speed kills and hot water from the factories raises the temperature of the river and murders the fish. Food preservatives poison our breakfast cereal. There’s monosodium glutamate in the baby food and baldness in the hair spray. There’s BHA in the white bread. Oh God, there’s far too much nitrate in the soil, and unless the furriers become more responsible in five years the only leopards left alive will be in the zoos.
“I’m concerned about barium and arsenic in the drinking water of playground fountains, and about the carcinogenic wax on fruit like the bad queen’s toxin on Snow White’s apple. Jesus, friends, our bath water mustn’t be too hot and the rubber from our tires dissolves into the air so that we’re choking on our own tread. Keep all medicines out of the reach of children, I tell you. If you drive, don’t drink! Coffee is bad for us and we don’t know what aspirin does to our cells. We haven’t figured out our priorities. Smoking stunts your growth, and I don’t like the way they shunt the phosgene gas back and forth across the country on railroad cars. They’re playing Russian roulette with our lives. The long straightaways on our freeways can hypnotize you and there’s enough mercury in the eggs we consume to drive a thermometer. Don’t look directly into the eclipse. Only you can prevent forest fires. We’re drowning in litter, shipmates. Jet lag upsets the circadian rhythms and plays holy hell with the stewardess’s monthlies, and sonic boom is killing the gazelles. The air isn’t clean. Mark my words, the population explodes even as we drop dead. A thermal inversion melts the icebergs and our coastlines are drowning. An underground nuclear explosion can set off an earthquake, and I’m not so well myself.