JOURNAL OF JOHNNY VALDEROSSA:  
HOSPITAL
mh    1/98

I went to the hospital today.  The big one a stone throw's (if the thrower is pretty good) away from campus.  Away from campus and its plush orderly trees and its robust energetic student body and its distinct yet similar in style (is it neo-classical?) learned buildings.  I went to the hospital because I didn't have anything else to do.

Entering the sliding doors (don't you know I opened them with my mind powers, man) I slided on the sleek dirty floors pass a registration desk with "Nutrition Dept." engraved on it.  Two frowny women manned it, as wrinkled men with thin waspy dull-gray hair wearing faded flannel shirts, all slouched slightly over, waited in line.  The line curved around into a hall, and I followed the line and walked on through symmetric swinging hospital doors into more corridors.

The walls were calm turquoise with an occasional picture hanging at different intervals so the monotony would not drive you crazy.  I followed the corridors like a hedge maze.  Enclaves, space broken off from the halls filled with waiting people, were always either to my left or right.  They all looked the same, as did the people and chairs and magazines inside them.  I remembered there had been a big VA outside the hospital.  I realized that meant Veterans Affairs.

I left the Veterans Hospital with its old men who I couldn't tell apart, all saggy chins and eyes, eyes that just didn't seem to be there, eyes that were all either content or devoid of hope.  I'm not sure which.  I'm sure though everybody and everything seemed the same in there to me.  I left the Veterans Hospital and walked across the street (it's pretty cold, I remember putting up my hood and pretending to be Ben Kenobi) to the "regular" people hospital.

The people in the main hospital were more varied.  I walked past them and into floods of more varied people until even them, with their sports jackets and sunglasses and homemade sweaters and short long hair and chubby malnourished black white brown skin all seemed the same.  I walked following overhead signs at random.... Oncology, Dermatology, Radiation, X-Ray.  And then there was something that stuck out in the land of light blue walls and hospital attendants with tired faces hurrying by holding a coffee and relatives trailing behind their grandfather in his IV attached wheelchair.  



She was probably sixteen.  I spotted her all the way at the end of the hall.  She was walking, but it was more like dancing the way her body moved, toward me.  She had more curves than that damn land of straight lines and chemical equations and cubic architecture had ever seen.  She knew it too.  She saw my eyes and half grinned half smirked.  Boy did she prance by me.  A few minutes later (I somehow had gotten turned around) there she was walking towards me again.  We again swapped eyes but this time they met longer, and as she past I laughed.  I started making plans for what I would do the next time I saw her.  I decided on saying something stupid like "I'd like to thank you for bringing beauty to this sad place," but I never saw her again.

I walked on up stairs and down elevators and peeped in rooms with uneaten jello sitting on a tray in the corner while the old (I think he was Native American) man laid in his properly folded white sheet covered bed, with feeding tubes coming up the nose, and watching the (I'm guessing this) nurse's favorite soap.

Somewhere along the trip I stopped to tie my shoes.  Across from a closet of trays of jars of test-tubes and needles ready to take and hold blood, was a girl.  Now that I think about it, she was also about sixteen.  A double walking cane contraption was holding her up.  As our eyes met her jaw grimaced.  I am not handsome or anything, but I am a man and she somehow knows that men do not like girls that can not prance and suddenly I felt something I don't know what and I walked on.

I was getting tired of the whole hospital environment with its heavy semi-musty air, so I quickened the pace of my aimless wandering.  I stopped paying attention to anything except the EXIT signs.  Soon I was back outside in the fresh fresh cold air with the sun shining down and my university just a stone throw's (if the thrower is pretty good) away.