Dignity.
Let me tell you a tale of dignity… or, more accurately, the complete and utter lack thereof.
I was walking down the hallway of the emergency department a couple of years ago, “minding my own damn bidness,” as I say, when everything shifted into slow motion.
I don’t know if your brain does this, but basically, when I come near “The Epic,” my perception of things slows to a frame-by-frame crystal clarity. It happened at about 115 miles per hour when I wrecked my Honda into a bear and at about 40 miles per hour when I wrecked my Shadow into a ditch. It has happened a few times when I have been forceful.
It happened as I walked down the hall in the ER.
From the room ahead of me — I’ll say about 50 feet directly ahead — a patient emerged, clad in the distinctive blue paper garments that denoted “psych patient” in our facility. She was walking slowly, and my vision at distance is not good enough to tell much of anything in terms of her appearance. What I can see is that she has a potbelly and is cradling it with her right arm in that “Damn my guts hurt” sort of way that you only ever see either in the ER or right before you find out you’re about to go to the ER. She’s walking slowly, but staggering; there’s purpose to her ambulation, but no direction. It occurs to me that she’s trying to get somewhere, but doesn’t know quite where. I guess (correctly, it turns out) that she’s looking for the bathroom.
As I pass the restroom door, I indicate it to her — “Ma’am, if you’re looking for the restroom, it’s right here” — as she stumbles toward the wall. She’s close enough that she only loses a stutter step and catches herself on the omnipresent plastic handrails that line every vertical surface at the facility. As I mentally document all this, I hear a soft but distinct thump.
I don’t know if there’s a proper technical term for a turd. If there is one, I don’t know it. I call them turds. There’s “fecal matter” and “feces,” of course, but these words are too broad. A turd, specifically, is a textured, usually brown, cylindrical presentation of some mass and structural integrity; a Baby Ruth candy bar in a swimming pool will terrify swimmers because it has similar visual characteristics to those of a turd. The peanut-y lumpiness only fails in that I have yet to see a turd that is truly straight.
Hey, get your pretentious jackass off your shoulders. You’ve seen a fair number of turds in your life, too.
Anyway, everything around me slowed. I pointed and spoke and the patient staggered and thump and suddenly there was a fucking turd on the floor. It rolled a few feet away from her as she hid her face in the door frame she had staggered into, shaking her head and trying ever so hard to just be swallowed up by the floor beneath her feet.
I have seen the place to whence that road leads. I have had the great good fortune to be able to observe this place from the outside, as an observer rather than an active participant, and I can assure you that, having observed it, I am resolved that I will never go there, and that you’d also rather live out eternity in a box.
This poor, stupid creature did not realize that she had none (or perhaps very few) of her teeth in her head, and only perhaps half of her normal allotment of hair upon it; she did not realize that her body had been ravaged beyond any recognition by probably a couple decades’ worth of chemicals she had shoved up her nose, in her lungs, down her veins. She was absolutely a poor stereotype, a movie character device that shrieks without volume control at all those who pass how she will suck their dicks for $5 toward her next hit of anything they’ll purchase for her. She had absolutely no pride left, no dignity, no self-worth; she had no reason to live, and now, just to drive a final nail into the coffin she had so long ago consigned herself to, she had now shit herself.
Standing up, shuffling toward the john, this pathetic life form — it makes my face wrinkle up to call her a woman — finally had the last vestiges of her identity stripped away from her and shown back to her; the kali-ma of her self definition had been completed. Where can you go that’s lower? What further indignity can one visit upon herself?
I am forced to wonder in this moment: How many dicks had she sucked for crack? How many tricks had she turned for meth? What life had she left behind for another bump, another hit, another joint or needle or gram or whatever measure her drugs took? Had she lived in a crackhouse, been pissed on and infested with fleas and lice, eaten the garbage out of a McDonald’s dumpster, lain for days on end in smearings of her own shit with her tongue lolling out of her mouth and her eyes rolled back in her head? How long had it been since she had seen anyone that actually loved her without them recoiling from her in disgust and horror? How many days — hell, how many years — had she spent trying to trade her own tears for another second of numbness?
Did she think she was going to find her way to some great revelation through mind-altering drugs? Did she think she could drink herself to Oblivion, smoke herself to Nirvana, shoot herself up to some form of transcendence?
That stuff is bad for you, dude. Don’t trust me and my “establishment” word on the subject. Think about it for yourself: How much are you looking forward to shitting yourself in a hospital hallway while the rest of the world looks on, shaking their heads and making jokes about how fucking pathetic you are?
