The Prisoner of Vandam Street Read Online Free PDF

your primary care-givers. If you cooperate with them, you will be fine. But there are two conditions under which I am discharging you: Number one is that you must not under any circumstances exert yourself; number two is that you are to be confined to your quarters for a period of approximately six weeks.”
    “Don’t worry, Kinkstah!” said Ratso. “The time will fly by.”
    “I really must emphasize,” said Skinnipipi, “that you remain in your flat until the Plasmodium falciparum has entirely departed your system.”
    “You can do it, Kink!” put in McGovern. “And we’ll be there to help you.”
    I looked up at two big white faces and one skinny brown one. Like martinets, they turned briefly sideways to each other, then all three gazed back down at me hopefully.
    “Do I have your word, Mr. Friedman?” intoned the doctor.
    “Spike Lee’s made of cat shit,” I said.

Chapter Seven
    N o horsepital in America will let a patient leave the building on his own steam, which was just as well because I doubt if I could’ve made it. The vehicle of choice, of course, is the wheelchair, which gives you an opportunity to find out what it’s like to be The Invisible Man. Outside of the few nurses and professionals who deal with this sort of thing every day, almost everyone else you meet instinctively prefers to talk to you—if they talk to you at all—through the mouthpiece of the more ambulatory person who’s pushing the chair. Inside the horsepital, the wheelchair-bound virtually don’t exist because they are such a common commodity. It’s almost like seeing somebody pushing around a sack of potatoes. This is as it should be. The guys who put accident victims in the meat-wagon usually don’t say, “Oh, God! Look at all the blood!” More likely, once the situation’s under control, they’ll be talking baseball or football, or, if they happen to be homosexuals, they’ll be talking about Celine Dion’s new CD. Likewise, a horsepital orderly is not likely to say: “Look at the poor man in the wheelchair. I wonder what’s wrong with him?” They see this shit all the time. In fact, if you’re not careful, in a horsepital you can get your ass run over by a wheelchair.
    But when dealing with the tourists, the visitors, the families, and the wide world outside the horsepital, you rapidly find yourself transmogrified from a familiar commodity whom everyone ignores to an oddity whom everyone ignores. In other words, being wheelchair-bound means that everyone relates to you as if you were a dog or cat or infant, and it’s not so bad once you get used to it. People ask the person pushing the chair, in this case McGovern, “How’s he doing?” or “What happened to him?” or “Did you notice that his nose is falling off?” It takes a brave soul to talk directly to somebody in a wheelchair, and in the rare event that it happens, it’s usually accomplished in nauseatingly patronizing tones. “Did we get some good rest at the hospital?” or, once they’ve spoken a bit to McGovern, “Are we going to follow the doctor’s orders?” My response to any and all questions like this was uniformly the same: “Piss off, mate.” It worked remarkably well. Even young, inquisitive children seemed to almost viscerally understand where I was coming from, and I don’t mean the horsepital.
    McGovern, for his part, seemed to enjoy pushing the wheelchair and answering questions for me. McGovern, of course, was the man who once combed his hair before meeting a racehorse. He was also the man who, several years earlier, had chosen to have elective surgery at the VA hospital in New York on Yom Kippur. He would not have been my first choice in the world of people I wanted to be pushing my wheelchair, but when you’re in a wheelchair, there’s nothing you can do about that either. Eventually, inevitably, you come to hate the person pushing your wheelchair. Even a big, kind-hearted, devoted McGovern-type will begin to get up