What’s Up, Doc?
I sat in the station wagon as the engine warmed up to think about where I was going. When Doc and I met, he told me he’d been staying at the YMCA. He never said which one. I knew of at least three in Philadelphia and two more in what was considered the ‘greater Philadelphia area.’ I didn’t want to have to visit all of them, so I tried to reason out which one he’d gone to.
Even as I considered the probability of the various YMCA locations, I reminded myself that just because he had been staying at the ‘Y’ didn’t mean he’d go back there. I shook my head and spoke out loud to argue with myself. “Don’t be silly. People operate based on a pattern. Doc was at the ‘Y’ until I took him in. He left here without time to consider his options. Therefore, he’ll go back to the ‘Y.’”
I put the automatic transmission into ‘DRIVE’ and let the car idle from the garage. I got out into the cold to shut the garage doors. As the wind bit into my flesh, I wished I would have gone upstairs for an overcoat. I damned the forgotten overcoat and everything else and hurried to get back in the car.
I drove to the end of the alley and turned south on Broad Street. The last I’d seen of Doc, he’d been going in that direction. I followed and planned to start my search at the Center City YMCA. If I didn’t find him there, I’d go to the one in South Philly. If he wasn’t there, I’d have to stop and reassess.
As I cruised along Broad Street on that bitter cold Monday morning, I thought about the day when I learned about Doc. It was the same day I’d given my speech about The Great War.
* * * *
“How about some lunch?” I asked as he and I pushed the doors open to exit the school into the midday sunshine. It was the middle of November, and even though all the leaves were gone from the trees, the weather was unseasonably warm. The newspaper said the mild temperatures wouldn’t last much longer. A hard frost was coming fast. I wasn’t looking forward to it.
Doc pulled a thin maroon jacket around himself. He was cold in spite of the soft weather. He shook his head. “I can’t. I forgot to put any cash in my pocket when I left home this morning.”
“Nonsense. It’ll be my treat. You’ll be doing me a favor. I hate to eat alone.”
Doc refused a second time but agreed when I pressed him. He and I strolled along the sidewalk toward the main street. I recalled passing a diner when I was looking for the school earlier. It seemed a likely place to take our meal.
The town where my nephew Ben both lived and taught was called Merchantville, New Jersey. It was an upper-middle-class suburb of Philadelphia. It boasted ample green space and an excellent school system. My sister, Edie, had recently been talking about moving there to live closer to her son and his family.
She hadn’t been comfortable in the city since the Columbia Avenue race riot back in ’64. The disturbance was nowhere near where she lived at the northern end of Center City, but the news coverage of the event rattled her. “It could happen right here.” She said one evening when we were having coffee after a family meal at Walt’s Special. “I don’t want to be caught up in it. I didn’t worry so much when Abe was alive, but now that it’s just me and Mister Pickles, all I do is worry.”
Abe was Edie’s husband. He died the same year as the riots from some kind of wasting respiratory illness. Mister Pickles was an ancient and arthritic beagle. The dog was more than half blind and tended to howl for no reason at all. I doubted the animal would cause an intruder any trouble unless the intruder happened to trip over it. I also suspected that my sister’s desire to leave the city had more to do with loneliness than it did with any fear of getting ‘caught up’ in a riot.
As Doc and I sauntered along the main street with its tree-lined sidewalks and glass fronted businesses, I decided there could be worse places for my sister to live. I resolved to encourage her plan to move the next time I saw her.
Doc and I pushed into the diner and were shown to a booth. The waitress put a clean, glass ashtray on the table between us. I shook my head at it. I hadn’t had a cigarette in fifteen years. I asked Doc if he smoked.
“I can’t afford it.” He admitted miserably.
I cocked my head with curiosity because I never met anyone who couldn’t afford to smoke. The cigarettes we sold in the vending machine at Walt’s Special cost only twenty-eight cents per pack. I didn’t approve of smoking because of the health risks associated with it, but as a former smoker, I understood the allure of the habit.
I wanted to do something nice for my new friend. I wanted him to relax and enjoy his lunch. I was curious about him and wanted to know his story. As a preemptive trade of sorts, I got him something to smoke. I took a dollar from my pocket and offered it to the waitress. “What’s your brand?” I asked him.
“Shamrocks.”
“Shamrocks, the lucky cigarette.” I dug out another fifty cents and passed it to the waitress. “Bring us three packs of Shamrocks and keep the change for your trouble.”
She hurried away on her task and left us to look at the menu. Doc scratched the side of his face through his scraggly beard. “Why?”
“Why what?”
He repeated his question to the table. “Why are you being nice to me? Why pay for my lunch? Why buy my cigarettes? You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me. I could be a terrible person.”
“Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Are you a terrible person?” I quickly held my hand up to stop him from answering my rhetorical question. “I was born in 1900, so whatever year it is, that’s how old I am. In my sixty-eight years on this Earth, I’ve been an apprentice tailor, a soldier, a cop, a detective, a dishwasher, a chef, and a maître d. I’ve loved and lost and learned to love again. I’ve met all kinds of people. My experience has accumulated to the point where no one can lie to me anymore, not by word or by deed. That’s how I know you’re a good man who is in some kind of trouble.”
He played with his hands on the placemat in front of him. “I’m not a good person. I’ve done things…awful things. I’ve done things I can’t ever make right. I…I killed people.”
The waitress picked that instant to return with the cigarettes. She put them on the table with a book of matches and asked us if we were ready to order. I told her we still needed a moment, but I asked for some coffee while we looked at the menu. She went away to fetch it.
When she was gone, I shoved my hands under Doc’s nose. “You see these? These hands have killed thirty-eight people. I killed twenty-five in The Great War and another thirteen as a cop and a detective. I’ve killed with a bayonet, a rifle, a handgun, and once with a liquor bottle. I’ve beaten men with my fists. I’ve beaten men savagely. One man died after I beat him. My hands have done terrible, vicious things. That’s not all they have done, though. I use these same hands to do good for people. I’ve held children with them. I’ve cooked food with them. I’ve lifted people up with them. Sometimes, probably not often enough, I pray with them.”
I took my hands back from under his nose and used them to open one of the packs of cigarettes. Shamrocks were king-size filter cigarettes. They came in a red soft pack with a bright green four-leaf-clover on the front. I coaxed one from the pack and tapped it on the table to tamp the tobacco toward the filter. I held it out to Doc. He accepted the cigarette and stuck it between his lips. I struck a paper match and held it for him. He lit his smoke and leaned back on his seat to stare at me over the top of it.
I held my hands up like I was surrendering. “My hands are tools. They’re not good or bad. My life is the same. It’s for whatever I choose to use it for. Some of the things I’ve done are good and some are not so good. I do my best to do more good than bad. What else can a man do?”
He drew on his cigarette and blew the smoke out. He held it up for a second like he wanted to toast my health. “Thank you for this. It’s a filthy habit. I picked it up during basic training and liked it more than I should have.”
I shrugged to show I didn’t judge him for his habit. “You’re a doctor. You know what you’re doing better than most.”
“Yeah, I’m a doctor. I’ve got a sheepskin that says so, but that’s all.” He held his hands up to show his palms to me. “You did a lot of talking about hands. You see these? They’re not exactly doctor’s hands.”
They were red and chapped like the hands of a scrubwoman. I didn’t comment on what I saw. I waited for him to make his point.
“If you wanted to be nice, you might call me a custodian. I can’t even claim to be one of them without a stretch.” He dropped his hands and smoked the cigarette from the corner of his mouth. “I swing a mop at the YMCA. That’s how I pay for the bed I sleep in. For the little bit of sleep I get, I may as well not bother.
“I’m terrified that one of the guys I knew from med school will come in to exercise or play ball. I don’t want them to see me, so I only work at night. Once the place empties out, I push my mop. I go through the whole great, big place, top to bottom, all three floors. The work takes most of the night. When you’re asleep in your nice bed, I’m mopping the ‘Y’ like a ghost. Instead of chains to rattle, I’ve got an old tin bucket with a squeaky wheel and a mop I gotta wring out with my hands. Some doctor I am.”
He finished with his self-loathing venom just in time for the waitress to come back with our coffee. Neither he nor I had even cracked our menus yet. In order to show some respect for the waitress’s time, I asked her for a recommendation.
“Folks love our fried chicken and waffles.”
“I’ll have it.”
“Same.” Doc muttered as he rubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray.
The waitress took our menus and went to put our order in. When she was gone, I asked the obvious question. “So, what happened?”
“What always happens? A woman.”
The story he told as we ate our lunch was as old as Samson and Delilah. Doc met a pretty, young woman while he was in college. She was training to be a registered nurse. The pair courted, as much as young people still court one another, and got engaged. He started to plan his entire life around the woman, who was inappropriately named Faith.
Their relationship was rose petals and silk sheets the rest of the way through college and well into Doc’s residency at the hospital. One early Thursday morning, after a double shift in the emergency department, he came home to the little apartment he shared with Faith. The lovers had been ‘living in sin,’ to use an antiquated term, for almost two years while they planned for when they could get married.
When Doc entered the couple’s shared bedroom, instead of his sleeping bride-to-be, he found an empty closet and a sealed envelope on the dresser. Inside the envelope was the engagement ring he had given his fiancé and a ‘Dear John’ letter.
The letter was especially nasty because, not only had it come with no warning, but in the text, Faith explained that she could no longer tolerate being engaged to a ‘Nancy man’ like Doc. She wanted a ‘real man.’ In fact, she’d found a real man and had gone off to move in with him. The real man who Faith had found was the senior physician who oversaw Doc’s progress as a resident. The man was young in age but advanced in title. Because of his seniority, this man held Doc’s career in his hands.
Suddenly, Doc felt like his whole situation in life had become untenable. His personal life was shattered and his professional life intolerable. If he would have gone out and gotten drunk like a lot of men would have under the circumstances, everything might have been fine. What he did instead, while he was still under the influence of his heartbreak and double-shift exhaustion, was go down to his local army recruiter and join up. He showed his hospital identification and was immediately accepted as a medic for the ‘police action’ in Vietnam.
By the time he went to sleep later that morning, and woke up in the mid-afternoon, he suspected he’d made a mistake. It was too late, though. He’d signed on the proverbial ‘dotted line,’ and the army had him. To his credit, he did the honorable thing and went through with his decision. He quit his job at the hospital, sold his furniture, and moved out of his apartment. He was honest when he explained things to his folks. Upon the date he’d been given, he reported for basic training and was eventually sent to war.
“It was indescribable.” He explained to the chicken bones and smear of syrup left on his otherwise empty plate. He swirled the dregs of his coffee and drank them down. “Where you fought, at least you knew who was on what side. Over in ‘Nam,’ you never knew. Anyone could be the enemy. That country is so screwed up, you never knew who you could trust. The businessman with the briefcase, the peasant farmer with a cart, even the kid trying to sell you his sister, any of them could be Victor Charlie.”
He looked at me with his head down and his eyes up like he was afraid of what he might see if he looked at me properly. “Sometimes, things would just happen. My first week in country, I hadn’t even been sent out yet. I was playing cards with some guys in the barracks. I decided I’d lost enough money and went for a walk. I wasn’t a hundred feet away when the barracks exploded. Someone had planted a time bomb. All the guys I was playing with were gone.
“The bomb must have been inside the footlocker we were using as a card table. When I ran back, there wasn’t enough left of any of them to try to save.” He snapped his fingers in the air. “They were dead, just like that.”
Doc talked while I paid the check. He talked the entire time it took us to walk back to the school. He kept talking even as we loitered around the school parking lot. Once he started his story, he didn’t seem able to stop. I suspected that he’d said more to me about his time in Vietnam than he’d said to anyone else, ever. By the time we were leaning on the side of his car, a 1949 Oldsmobile wagon which he bought to get around upon his return to the states, I’d learned a great deal about the lean man with the long hair and unkempt beard.
One of the things that I learned was the truth of his claim of having killed people. He hadn’t killed anyone. He blamed himself for several deaths, but the worst thing he was guilty of was standing by while people were killed. I understood why he felt responsible for the deaths, but responsibility wasn’t the same thing as guilt.
I didn’t try to talk him out of the way he felt. Something told me there would be time for that later. I suspected that he and I would see each other again. I wound up being right, but I didn’t realize how soon that would happen.
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