Chapter 6

“Mack. Is that a real name?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What did you say?”

The drill sergeant’s neck muscles actually bulged. Stacy stared at the muscles, realizing they looked like two noodles dancing. The image struck him as funny. He forgot where he was, in Marine boot camp, and grinned.

“You think something I said was funny?”

“No, sir. I mean no-“

“We got a clown here. First one, but won’t be the last. Hit the deck. Give me 100.”

So within moments after they arrived at boot camp, Stacy found himself on the ground doing pushups. All he could think about were the drill sergeant’s neck muscles and he grinned as his body went up and down in the well practiced movements. Luckily he took Rick’s advice that he better be prepared to do a lot of them in boot camp.

A year later Stacy heard that the drill sergeant died in the war. He was eating dinner and they were having beef stroganoff. Stacy looked down at the noodles and, with his fork, moved them up and down, sideways to the left, to the right. He couldn’t quite get the noodles to move the same way they did on the drill sergeant’s neck.

“What are you doing, Mack?” one of his buddies asked.

He shrugged and kept playing with the noodles. Stacy didn’t realize that he’d been grinning until someone asked him what was so damn funny.

“You think that’s funny?” the hotel clerk, a red bearded, red haired thirty something asked the customer in front of Stacy who was holding up a newspaper.

“Sure it is,” the old guy answered, pushing back one long lock of grey hair and tucking the paper in his back jeans pocket. “Say, you could do with more of a sense of humor, youngblood. Live as long as I do and you’ll find that’s true.” He picked his credit card up off the counter and, saying “excuse me,” slipped past Stacy to leave.

“Weird sense of humor,” the clerk said to no one in particular, drinking from a can of diet soda. “Next.”

“I need a room,” Stacy said. “Any discounts if I stay a while?”

“How long?”

“Not sure.”

“Take a wild guess. Or else I can’t tell you what the discount will be.”

The other customer was right, Stacy thought. This guy could do with more humor. They settled on a figure and Stacy agreed to spend two weeks at the glorious Turqoise Towers, as they called the Flamingo Hotel when he was in high school.

He was that close to home, but without a car, he felt he walked the length of several states. There were a few things on his agenda: getting some decent rest and meals into himself, hitting a bank to straighten his money out, and looking into whether he could manage to ride a scooter. Maybe not a motorcycle, but a scooter. It beat mass transit.

The dour clerk assigned him Room 456, which made him chuckle until he saw that it was up four rickety outdoor flights of stairs and down the entire parking lot length of a long outside hall. He returned to the lobby, plunked his cane on the desk and asked for a room that wasn’t such a hike.

“You should have told me you wanted a handicapped room, sir. I would have been happy to do that,” the clerk said.

“I don’t need a handicapped room. I just need a room within the state’s limits,” Stacy shot back, grabbing the key to Room 101. He walked outside the lobby door and practically fell into the doorway with the wheelchair symbol on it. Fine, he thought, sticking the key in and pushing the door open with his cane.

The room was the same as every other room he stayed at there: double bed with a turqoise comforter; a crooked wooden end table with a crooked lamp shade, askew from the antics of the teen guests who liked to throw things around; a nondescript landscape painting of a mountain over a lake; a small brown refrigerator next to a 19 inch TV on a dresser on the wall opposite the bed; and an attached bathroom done in flamingo pink – shower curtain half torn, off white, uninviting towels in a stack on a pink sink across from a pink toilet that it was best not to look into as you peed.

So he didn’t. There was a railing along the side of the tub in this bathroom, which was the handicapped accommodation apparently. Stacy thought of the paraplegics and quadriplegics he met in the veterans hospital and wondered how that came near to qualifying the room as a handicapped one as he flushed the toilet.

He was beginning to understand why the old guy was razzing the hotel clerk. He wanted to call the desk up and ask exactly what about Room 101 was accessible. Then the phone rang and he leaned over to answer it, tripping and falling onto the bed.

“Hello.”

“Is everything to your liking, sir?” the clerk asked. “Anything you need?”

“Yeah, to be left alone,” Stacy muttered. He hung the phone up and sat on the side of the bed, realizing he didn’t see a TV remote. Sighing, he remembered the old adage: when you step on someone’s toes, they’re likely to step back on yours.

It was an officer in the hospital who told him that, after Stacy refused to do his physical therapy one day and yelled at a few of the nurses. He never found out the officer’s name and wasn’t sure why he was even there, considering he wasn’t a doctor or medical person. Maybe he was just there to give someone a medal or take care of some paperwork.

Or to deliver philosophy lessons to wounded sailors, soldiers and Marines who gave the staff a hard time.

After that, Stacy tried to cooperate more. It wasn’t easy because his injuries hurt and he didn’t want to do what they told him to. But he tried to treat it like boot camp again, a place where you have to do what you have to in order to get through. A finite place where you can stand anything knowing it’ll be over some day. A place where you and everyone else have an unwritten agreement that Life Sucks But It Could Always Be Worse.

There were other unwritten agreements that floated around the hospital ward. Stacy knew that from the first day when he realized the hierarchy of patients, their level of injury and/or disability which was constantly being charted in advance of some classification for some of them, those of them that Weren’t Ever Going To Be One Hundred Per Cent. It was a catch phrase, too, one you heard relatives say to each other.

“He’s never going to be one hundred per cent,” they would say quietly and to the patient they would say “Don’t give up if you want to get all better, if you want to be one hundred per cent.”

Stacy told his parents he would settle to be 75 per cent, if he could pick and choose which parts fell into the other 25 per cent. They didn’t laugh, but they didn’t lecture him either.

Later that night, after his first visit with his parents, the nurse told Stacy that his leg might be as good as 50 per cent, but his recovery was up to him.

He laughed and said “Nothing is up to me any more. I joined the Marines to leave home and I’m going back there injured. Don’t tell me it’s up to me.”

After she left the room, he waited for another visit from the officer, almost hoped for one, but the guy never showed up He felt cheated without any words from the philosopher. Instead there was a clown who visited their room, a volunteer who rode a unicycle and who came into their room to try to make Stacy and his roommates laugh.

His roommates did laugh. One guy was going home with a broken leg that was healing and the other had a shrapnel injury that was doing better than anticipated.

When Stacy didn’t laugh, one said to him “Heck if you can’t laugh when a clown’s here, when can you?”

Stacy shrugged. “A clown? First one, but won’t be the last..”

Copyright 2008 Ruth Harrigan