Day Has Gone By

The hospital is on a special land once belonging to the Cherokee. It is alongside the Tennessee River in Chattanooga. The Cherokee were removed from these very coordinates in 1838 and then the Union Army nearly starved to death in the same location in the winter of 1863.

The hospital was erected sometime in the 1960’s and was made for the mentally insane of this world.

I’m not sure why I took a job there. I remember driving up for my interview as though I was crossing through the gates of hell. The air lingered like ghosts. A stale aroma through the entire building. When I was 27, I was hired to wash dishes in the kitchen.

We wore purple scrubs and hair nets. Once while delivering food to the patient-care units, a 250 pound beast of a man who I had gotten to know and would joke with, grabbed me by the spine and squeezed me tight like a boa constrictor. I nearly suffocated as he sang the Barney theme song because of my purple scrubs, and because, I’d like to hope, he had found a friend in me.

Another time delivering food inside a unit, a black woman stopped what she was doing and pointed to me like a spirit of God condemning the possessed, and screamed for all of heaven and damnation to hear, shouting, “There he is, in the flesh, the white devil! I knew he was coming and there he is walking before us!”

It was a new world for me. For whatever reason, it was the only job I ever found worthy of my time on earth and when they fired me, it was the hardest that I ever took anything. It hurt to leave.

I worked in the dish pit on my own, and once a day, for an hour, at its busiest part of the day, a patient named after a biblical king helped me.

In the Bible, the man who bears the name is of the lineage of Jesus. In real life, the patient I knew and worked with, killed a man in cold blood, claiming the voices in his head told him to do so, that the voices in his head told him it was the word of God.

He was a good worker and a good fellow from what I gathered. He’d been in the hospital five years and probably will die there.

I got fired for buying him a lynyrd skynyrd CD and a Gnostic Bible, both of which he asked me for. It’s an act I knew was grounds for termination and an act I did anyway.

I’m not sure how I got caught. One day they asked for my key and asked me not to come back.

He had originally requested the Greatest Hits but I told him they’re a better band than their radio songs. So I got him the complete Muscle Shoals Album. Showing him songs like, “The Seasons” and “Was I Right or Wrong” and “Coming Home.”

We spent supper rush hour listening to full blast, the early stuff of Lynyrd Skynyrd and discussed books from the Bible, discussed our names and what they meant.

I called him Buddy. He called me Michael.

We had plenty of leftovers, and a supervisor and I would make sure he ate plenty. I told him about my weekend drinking stories and he’d laugh—as each whiskey fueled night at the bars, I surely did make a fool of myself.

It’s always good to make someone laugh, I believe.

About a week before I got fired, I was allowed to take a few patients who helped occasionally in the kitchen on a walk and he joined.

We walked out upon the grass along the banks of the river where the sun hit every blade and and ripple and shined a natural-world shimmering stained-glass window.

There’s a trail through the woods that I’d walk each day on my lunch break and I led them through it. They could’ve run and had a good chance and I knew it. We scared some deer with the leaves that crackled and each branch we broke underneath our feet.

I told them about the Cherokee and the Union Army. Up ahead somewhere was an ancient Cherokee burial ground I never have found.

They wanted to hold a brief service. I allowed for it. Buddy read scripture from a book banned by the Holy Bible and I swear a thirteen point buck—brown coated fur and ruby, turquoise and amber tinged eyes, the breath of the Holy Ghost snorting through its nostrils—came up to hear him speak, close enough to be fed.