A Terrible Thing That Was
by
Melissa Anne Leonard
Brooklyn College in 1990 was a campus in transition. Remnants of the faded 1930s glory of the place some called the “Poor Man’s Harvard” were juxtaposed with the prefab 1970s architecture of budget cuts. The grand old buildings were stone, their hallways capacious and ceilings high. The humble new buildings were low, their lighting fluorescent, and offices shabby. The Faculty Lounge abutted the Library, had floor to ceiling windows and featured ancient women in aprons who served afternoon tea as we reclined on long chintz couches and stately wooden chairs. The dining hall was in the basement of the Boylan building; students sat on plastic chairs around formica tables. It was run by a fashionable young guy who said he “dressed as a man during the week and a woman all weekend long,” which was quite a statement in those days. In the English Department office, Louise and Ann, the no-nonsense secretaries, ruled supreme. Louise, acerbic monitor of the usage of the copy machine, had a tattered notice over her desk that warned, “Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.” Ann, model thin with a wardrobe of winter white, wore cat eye glasses and scandalized Louise when she revamped her hairstyle after decades of being the last holdout of the bun. Except for the antediluvian department chair, they terrified everyone.
The teaching staff, as in so many American colleges, had begun to change. The full-time faculty had individual offices overflowing with decades of memos and books, journals untouched for years, never retrieved students’ essays, agendas for long ago meetings, reams and reams of paperwork. As tenured professors retired, some of whom had been there since the late 1940s, and settled in their brownstones and beach homes, they were cost effectively replaced with poverty wage graduate students instead of new tenure track hires. Since there was an ever increasing number of us, the only room large enough for a common office was an old classroom across the hall from the English Department. Louise and Ann referred to it as the Adjunct Room, but for those of us sequestered there, it was the Abject Room. A slew of us jockeyed for space in the dank commune stuffed with rusty desks, mismatched chairs and industrial green filing cabinets used more to demarcate our cramped places than to store any documents. Only the most desperate students sought out any of us after classes in that sad, jerry-rigged room.
So I was surprised, one afternoon, to see Leroy Brown come looking for me because he was not at all desperate; in fact, he was one of the best students in my first year writing class. His name amused me because he was the anti-thesis of the “baddest man in the whole damn town” in that eponymous 70’s song. Leroy was in his late twenties with inquisitive brown eyes, close cut hair and an earnest but confident voice. While he had the physique of a linebacker, he had the cheerful, even-keeled demeanor of a camp counselor, which made sense because he often wore polo shirts embroidered with the logo of the Brooklyn Boys and Girls Club, where, he told me early in the term, he’d been hired right out of high school. Leroy had worked his way up to a full time administrative position and was taking classes to get his B.A. so he could keep climbing the ladder. When he came in, I said, “Hey Leroy, what’s up?”
“Hey Professor Leonard,” he said, then added with a grimace, “Something happened last Sunday.”
I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I knew it wouldn’t be good. “Ok, tell me.” I gestured to a chair for him to sit down, but he remained standing.
“On Sunday, my wife Cynthia and me were coming out of church. Emmanuel Baptist, Clinton Hill, you know it?”
I nodded.
“So we’re coming out and our little boy Michael is right behind. He walks all by himself, nobody can tell him nothing. You know, little kids, independent. All of a sudden he starts screaming. I thought he fell down. I turn around. He’s standing there and I think, ‘Oh Lord, his hand’s stuck in the doors.’ It’s got those big old wood doors, right. I’m gonna pull it open but then I see his hand’s covered with blood and Cynthia’s grabbing him up screaming, ‘It’s his finger! His finger!’ I look where she’s looking and I see that’s his finger down on the ground. That door chopped his finger clean off.”
“Oh my God Leroy, that’s awful,” I said, “Is Michael ok?”
“He is now, but it was crazy. Everybody hears the screaming and comes running and everybody’s yelling, ‘Hold it tight’ ‘I’ll get ice’ ‘I’ve got a car.’ ‘Michael’s crying and crying. Cynthia’s dress is covered with blood.”
“Everything happens so fast. We get to the hospital, run into the emergency room. I carry Michael, Cynthia’s got a baggie full of ice with his finger. There are just a couple of folks in there and they are staring at us. The lady at the desk sees the blood and she takes us right in. So now we’re in this room, you know, with the curtain. Cynthia’s got Michael on the little bed. I’m too nervous to sit, I’m standing there holding the little baggie and I think, ‘Thank you Lord’ because I know any minute a doctor’s gonna come in and tell us, ‘We’re going to sew Michael’s finger back on.’ A nurse from one of the islands comes in and takes Michael’s temperature; she says, ‘You’re brave little man, the doctor’s going to fix you right up.’”
“So did they, Leroy?” I asked with urgency. Leroy was so intense I was getting frantic about poor little Michael. “Did they sew it back on?”
“Well, the doctor comes in, he looks at Michael’s finger and says he wants the surgeon to look at it and he goes out. So we wait some more. I say to Cynthia, ‘What’s taking so long?’ It seems like everything’s slowing down. I look in the bag and the ice is melting, his little finger’s floating now. I’m not gonna lie—I was starting to freak out. But then the surgeon came in and I think, ‘Amen, now it’s going to happen!’ He looks at Michael for just a second and I’m holding out the finger but he doesn’t even look at it. Can you believe that?”
Leroy paused, assumed the officious stance of the surgeon, and continued, “And he says, ‘Mrs. Brown, Mr. Brown, I’m sorry, but we cannot reattach Michael’s finger. But don’t worry, it’s a clean cut and we’ll sew it straight across. You’ll hardly notice it. Children are resilient and he will, without a doubt, learn to live without that finger. Over time, it will be a minor inconvenience.’”
“He said what?” I interjected, shocked. “A surgeon said that? That’s so wrong.”
“’Yes, he did. I couldn’t believe it myself, ‘I said, ‘That can’t be! He’s three years old, it JUST happened. We came here right away. We have his finger right here, it’s been on ice the whole time.’”
“And Cynthia was saying, ‘Why can’t you sew it back on? For my boy’s sake, can’t you please try?’ But he said, ‘I’m sorry but there’s nothing we can do.’ And that man was gone. We could not believe it. The three of us in that little curtained room and my wife started to cry again and now I did too.”
“And then, that little curtain flies open and the island nurse marches back in. She looks straight at me and says, ‘Man, do you have health insurance?’”
“I said, ‘Of course I do, I have it through my job.’” She goes back out and right away, the doctor and that surgeon, who was just there saying there’s nothing he can do, come rushing like the house’s on fire and say, “We have to get this child into surgery immediately; where’s the finger?” I hand him Michael’s finger that he didn’t even look at. The nurse starts an IV and they put Michael on a stretcher. Some orderlies came to take him to surgery and we walk with him as far as they let us.”
“While we’re in the waiting room, it hits me–I finally get what’s going on. They thought we didn’t have insurance. They were going to let our little boy, three years old, go through life with a missing finger because they didn’t think they’d get paid.”
Leroy stopped talking and sat down. He looked exhausted.
“That’s an awful story Leroy,” I said. “Shocking. How’s Michael doing?”
“He’s fine, they said he’ll be able to use his finger just fine.” Leroy paused.
I waited. I was riveted.
And then he continued, “Wasn’t that a terrible thing?” Leroy asked me, Professor Leonard, I want to write a letter to that hospital to let them know what a terrible thing that is.”
And so we sat side-by-side on mismatched chairs at my rusty desk in that little room, and Leroy Brown wrote his letter to the hospital’s Board of Directors in which he told them exactly how terrible a thing that was.
No comments:
Post a Comment