Old Dogs

Episode opens on BRANDI BELL walking through a club in mandated next to nothing outfit. The camera tracks her as she rushes around with light up signs and bottles, cheering and working alongside the other bottle girls, letting her smile fade as she disappears into fluorescent back rooms, plastering it back on before returning, fresh drinks in hand, to the dim, pulsing club floor. Eventually, back under the bright lights of the club's inner workings, she counts her tips as two of her coworkers gossip in Spanish and complain about not having made enough for their rent that month. A new month. Brandi looks up. “Shit”.

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ELAINE sits in front of the TV in the old folks’ home alone, yelling out the answers to Jeopardy, cursing the participants when they get them wrong.

Brandi, now dowdy in scrubs with a freshly showing- 3 month- pregnant belly tucked away, argues with an elderly man about taking his medication, flirting with him slightly until he caves. In contrast to the club, the camera holds still and the room is near silent save some coughing and the quiet buzz of the game show in the back.

Elaine tells them to keep it down as Brandi leans over to give the man his medication and he peers down her top. Elaine goes to light a cigarette as Brandi comes over to remind her it's not allowed. “What are you, an attendant?” Elaine asks, cigarette dangling from her mouth. “I’ll smoke where I please.” Brandi looks around nervously until a man in a white coat comes by and apprehends Elaine for what must be the millionth time: you can’t smoke in here. Begrudgingly Elaine puts it away and the doctor pulls Brandi to the side.

Brandi is in the midst of apologizing to the doctor when he interrupts her. “You have to be sterner with the patients. I have more pressing matters here. We can’t have nurses and doctors leaving their posts for trivial things like this.” Brandi says she understands, but he’s still going. “You know we have very fragile patients here. People die here. Just today, Mr. Sneider, Room 15? He’s gone now.” Brandi apologizes again and the doctor sends her away, “just don’t let it happen again. For now, why don’t you get to it.” Brandi wonders: get to what? “Room 15.” He pats Brandi’s hip on her way out.

Brandi goes to room 15 as a gurney rolls out and down the hall. Full of a life. Pictures, books, a handmade blanket. Pills and IV bags and bills. Slowly she cleans it all up, placing things carefully into organized piles.

Brandi continues her rounds, cleaning unseemly medical sites, guiding easily forgetful old folks with promises of visits from their kids, turning over freshly abandoned rooms for new elderly occupants, brought in by disinterested kin.

She asks the doctor where she should bring Mr. Sneider’s things. “Who?” he asks. She clarifies, Room 15. “Oh, just throw it out,” the doctor says. Brandi tries to protest, but his family! But the doctor insists. No one will come for those things. “Room 13 is insisting on taking her dinner in her room,” he explains. “Can you manage to bring it to her?”

Brandi passes room 15 with an anxious sense of mourning, carrying a tray of unappetizing food to room 13, inside which, Elaine sits, staring at another TV (now showing the news), cigarette lit in her mouth. “You really can’t smoke that,” Brandi exclaims, rushing over to pull it away and put it down, jostling the tray and spilling some food along the way. The two bicker over the cigarette and the food and how Elaine must eat it, even if it's horrible and has spilled, but only for a moment. Brandi notices Mr. Sneider’s blanket on Elaine’s couch. Instantly, she accuses her of stealing it but quickly notices something new in Elaine’s eyes. She misses Mr. Sneider, her neighbor. She is capable of compassion, though she quickly tries to hide it. Brandi understands, though, and sits next to her, watching the TV quietly. She tries a bite of the food. “It really is awful.”

The anchor turns from a story of the rampant and violent drug trade along the south of Florida to a tale of a string of pharmacy robberies in the state’s north. “People here are idiots,” Brandi mutters. “People here are desperate,” Elaine corrects.

The next day, Brandi comes to sit next to Elaine at her solitary post by the TV. Elaine tries to ignore her, tries to shoo her away, but Brandi is persistent. “What did you mean by that yesterday? Desperate?” Elaine finally breaks. Look around. No one wants to be here. Not the patients, not the employees. People die three years early just to get out. Brandi understands this. Hand on her belly, she is desperate too. She has an idea. “Why don’t we rob a pharmacy? Like on the TV?” Elaine is shocked: there is no way. Brandi pushes, though, she thinks she has it all figured out. Her baby’s daddy, he knows people, he knows how this works, he can help. Still, Elaine says to put it out of her mind.

Later that night though, the doctor knocking at her door with medication and a reminder of its cost. She tries to refuse. She feels fine without it. He calls her by name, treats her with a special, rare kind of hard earned respect and faint sense of pity. “I know it's a lot, Elaine. But you’ll die without it. You have to take it.” Elaine falters, takes the pills. Lights a cigarette. The doctor lets her.

The next morning, she finds Brandi. She’ll do it. But with certain strings attached.