Giving Blood

The squat cinder block building in downtown San Francisco looked more like a fortified bunker than a medical facility, tall windowless walls topped by barbed wire, and a hardened steel entrance door with an enamel placard that read, “MIDTOWN MEDICAL ASSOCIATES -- EARN $82./MO.”

The sign was gouged, scratched with knifepoint names, scrawled numbers, ornate graffiti, and grotesque sexual depictions.

I still don't understand how it works out to $82.00, but surely, it's not enough. By their reckoning, I'd make $5.33 an hour -- $8.00 total payment for a ninety minute foray into a world where science meets the street and the street's people: itinerant biological factories fueled by alcohol, meat and fear.

The product has already been produced, the miracle has already occurred. You have it with you right now! The time spent in harvesting is merely a concession to your body's natural reluctance to part with its ruddy fluid.

Above a metal drop slot in the building’s armored door was a yellowed strip of brittle paper with marker pen block letters, “Plasma Center.”

My first pull on the door handle did little more than stretch my arm and send a sharp pain through my shoulder joint. I was sure it was locked until a kick from within threw it open. A fat woman with grease-slicked hair hobbled out. She snarled around a little brown cigarette clenched in her teeth - a sweat stained CATS tee shirt tied in a knot above her dirty belly.

I stepped inside before the door swung shut. A chain attached to the top of the door coursed over a wall-mounted pulley and held a heavy metal ballast. I stood alongside a rank and file of metal folding chairs as the door slammed with a deafening Boom. That thunderclap reverberated through the entire building, resounded off the dust-webbed walls and settled in a scorched black coffee machine at the rear of the chair platoon.

I let my explosion anger pass and up popped my cynical comedian take. “That sure beats a door bell!

Duct-taped to the Institutional Green walls were hand lettered cardboard signs: “Anyone unwashed will not be served.” “Please roll up both sleeves.” “Shoes are required.” “Weekly Bonus Winner - Jorge Ramirez.”

I stepped up to the reception desk and waited to be acknowledged by a woman wearing a white uniform and cap. I’m sure she was trying to look like a nurse, but there was no reason to play this game any deeper than I had to.

“I'd like to...”

“Donate?” she said, mildly amused by my unwillingness to refer to this as anything but a cash transaction. I almost said yes, but only uttered a weary grunt.

“Have you eaten recently?”

“How recently?” Now I was confused. Do I get a meal?

“Today?”

I nodded. That’s right, White Uniform, I'm not a bum or a junkie. I'm just like you. The fuck I am. Twenty-odd years out of Nam, sick of being a stand-up comic, and ass-deep in a marriage with a sucking chest wound – I just want to piss away an afternoon and pick up some juice money.

Her hand written name badge, Irene - Clinic Manager, was the tip-off. No last name, no RN, embossed plastic label tape. She was merely the first gatekeeper. From here on it would be easy. I wanted it to be very easy, and low key. I needed the money. Bullshit, I didn’t need the money. I was bored and depressed and this seemed sufficiently weird to shake off another afternoon, killing time.

“Please fill this...” She handed me a paper cup and pointed, “...back there.”

I knew what was back there. A toilet, sure, but more than that, people earning! Earning that $5.33 an hour, working toward that $82.00 a month, maybe scoring a bonus on the way. These people had passed the first screen and were already in there.

Walking back to the bathroom I got a good look at the place. Behind the reception area was a large room where people coughed, cleared their throat, and coughed again. Rubber-soled shoes squealed against the linoleum floor – mottled gray and brown, but streaked with thin meandering lines of burgundy and claret – as White Uniforms carried dark bundles of plastic into a side room with a cardboard sign that read “Laborotory.”

“Bag down!” an earning woman yelled, bringing another pre-occupied White Uniform to collect the product.

Shit, there were a lot of bodies in there. I got cold, inside. I don't know, I got cold and I didn't want to look, but I kept staring and froze. There was just too much to take in, to think about, to guess at. Twenty or thirty of them: men, women, old, homeless, scabbed, stretched out on what looked like high school cafeteria tables.

Discarded alcohol swabs, urine-stained fabric, stale body odor, and pot-burnt coffee combined into an overpowering stench of illness and decay. These people needed to be healed, but the Midtown Medical Associates were taking blood out of them. Carrying it away to a room with a mis-spelled cardboard sign.

Labratory. Lab rat room?

For $8.00. For themselves, lying on thin foam rubber sleeping bag pads on lunch tables with needles and bags and tubes everywhere. Bags of red and clear fluids and tubes and needles making the connection...

... to the 44th Med. hospital on an afternoon so hot that the air seemed to reverberate like the brass bell at the orphanage. Rick was smashed bad. Jesus, he didn't look like a person from the belly down. Smashed to shit.

Every doctor tied something to something else and somehow it worked. But it wasn't enough cause he was broken like nothing I'd ever seen and he was slipping out quick.

“I'm goin' home, Sarge. Fini Nam.” he whispered.

I knew he would be home within hours, maybe minutes. I played the crusty sergeant bit, “Bullshit, trooper, I own your ass for another eight months and nobody skips out on Higgs.”

“Sorry `bout that shit, Sarge. They're cutting orders right now. It's home, on that big-assed bird. Caio, G.I.” he murmured, a bubbling cough hiding under each word.

My feet ached in my wet boots, the concrete floor of the ICU pulling them down, heavier and hotter than I could stand, but I could not move. I just froze and I couldn’t look away.

“Rick...” I wanted to drop the game. Shit, he knew what was happening. I knew. What was the point this performance with no audience? We were soldiers and this was always a possible outcome. Couldn’t we be more… Christ, what was I asking for here? Honest? Brave? Or was it that I just wanted an easier way out for me? Some way to avoid the death and doom and loss that I feared would one day be mine.

“Higgs...” he focused on my eyes for the first time that afternoon. “Thanks, man...”

“For what?” I choked, my throat shut, my eyes starting, my chest a gripped tremble. Oh, fuck, here we go! I kicked myself. Tough it out, Higgins. Tough it the fuck out!. Don't let this boy see his funeral on your face. Say some time-honored words. Make some bullshit happy-talk.

But I couldn't. The time for that had passed. He was where I would someday be. He was setting aside his hope for his reality. He was accepting a different release from Nam, a different homecoming. I was so very ashamed that I had lived in a war without respecting this simple and inevitable truth: We die alone.

Rick's eyes were soft and wet, the whites amber, lost to me, already seeing past Higgins, past Bien Hoa, past the war.

“Thanks for being my friend.” I remember hearing him say as my restraint broke. There was nothing but empty pain and plummeting sadness.

“Yeah... okay, man...” my voice sputtered, “ `See you back in the world.”

The room blurred and ran and I walked away. I didn't look at the bags. I didn't stare at the tubes.

They weren't staring at the tubes on the lunch tables. They were looking at the ceiling or each other or at the huge bank of nothingness that hung below the water stained ceiling tiles over their heads. I saw slack-jawed men searching that void for a lost opportunity, a forgotten favor, or forgetfulness. Ruddy-faced woman looking for some little piece of their puzzle, some warm act of kindness, or reprieve.

Or maybe that was all I had on my mind as I walked to the toilet with my cup. Another piece of cardboard, another sign stuck to the wall with a rusty thumbtack: “Please go to the bathroom, urinate, have a cup of juice and some crackers and get a magazine before beginning plasmapheresis.”

The bathroom was a fucking pigsty: punchholes in the wall, homo graffiti and sex phone numbers all within arms reach of the seatless toilet. I passed my water staring at a drawing of a skull with a dagger sticking out of its eye socket, filling the cup, then awkwardly splashing into the center of the bowl.

When I returned to the front desk things had changed and I was getting sensitive. It happens when I feel out of control and I accept it. I have no choice. This alienated mood is so seductive, as if I was at the center of a brilliantly orchestrated production mounted for my fascination and amusement. No character too extreme, no behavior unrehearsed, no set design too outlandish. I am the sole audience member in a tour-de-force replication of reality; a erstwhile spectator within a lavishly created simulacra that I can only applaud by my willing participation. It is only during this participation that I feel the presence of the Author.

At the rear of the room a man was sleeping across three metal chairs, curled into a question mark within his grime-shined long coat. His face and head were shrouded in matted hair except for an egg-shaped patch of shaved scalp. Through its center an inflamed red gash strained against a line of surgical stitches.

A couple in their early twenties stood at the door sharing a cigarette and discussing something that required whispers and furtive glances. She might have been considered “a beauty” if she were clean, un-bruised and still had her front teeth. He was a proud wastrel, pock-marked and scowling. The tattoo on his neck was a lifestyle logo in graphic cartoon lettering, “Rat Boy.”

In the first row of chairs, a black dude sat rocking and mumbling a gravel-voiced free association rant that was at once inspired and disturbing. He spoke to his imagined audience, taunting, boasting, and scolding in a circular progression that always brought him back to his premise, which he said louder and clearer than the rest.

“I am the Black Jesus... Mother Mary gave me this soda cause I gave her all my money... and don't you never call me a nigger... Your Momma told you never call me a nigger and I'll fuck her up the ass... I can see you but you don't know how I work... I can level the forest... I'm Mount Saint Helen... I'm in the earth... I am the earth... I am the Black Jesus... I live in Hunters Point with Fats Domino... I'm Joe Louis... I'll box your ears and then fuck yo' Momma up the ass... I'm Popeye the Sailor... I know how the cows eat the cabbage... I bring up the wind and tell the moon when to shine... I am the Black Jesus!”

I left my piss cup on the counter and sat next to him. I didn't look at him or acknowledge his rant, but I paid extremely close attention. His rhythm spoke to me and I inconspicuously pressed my forefinger and thumb together an instant before he got around to exclaiming, “I am the Black Jesus.”

After several times of correctly anticipating his “base phrase,” I sensed it coming and started to press my fingers. He faltered and quickly changed his rhythm. I stopped paying attention. I didn't want to screw up his act with my energy.

A teenage street boy in camouflage fatigues and a woman who looked like a lost tourist stumbled in. She was invited to stay, he was gruffly dismissed.

The “nurse” called me back to the front desk to verify that I had not earned $8.00 in the last three days, which was a cinch. I had no purple needle bruise.

I knew I had passed the first gate. From here on it would be progressively easier. I relaxed, knowing that the full show was unfolding effortlessly. I would be amazed and entertained by the subtle complexity and visceral impact of what I was about to participate in. I let it engulf me.

“You will be seeing the doctor shortly. Do you have any questions?”

“No.” I already knew more than I needed to play my part.

“First, we’ll need some background information: Boils? Diphtheria? Diarrhea? Heart Disease? Medication? Tooth extraction? Tattoos?”

I feel healthy when I tell people that I've never had the Plague, Smallpox or Dengue fever. Damned healthy.

“You will now see the doctor.”

It was a modest office with a small desk against the wall, no blotter, one book - a Miriam Webster dictionary, a small stack of magazines, all face down – Dell Crossword Challenge Magazines – dog-eared and yellowed.

The doctor was one of Medicine's men on the street; bleached, tired, preoccupied, wearing a white lab coat with a name tag – Goodman – and gray tinted glasses on flesh-colored frames. He looked as if he had already given The Midtown Medical Associates all of his... eleven down -- six letter word for fluid portion of blood.

“The red cells are returned to you to prevent anemia. This allows you to donate every 3 days. This form says you understand that you can't have your plasma back. This form says that you will be receiving your red cells back. This one says you understand what I've said. And this says that you understand that you will receive $8.00 total cash payment for your”, he cleared his throat and swallowed, “plasma”.

Thank God I didn't have to sign one saying that I understood why I was still there. I felt sick. I felt lost. I felt doomed. Not doomed in the sense of being singled out for death, but destined to repeat this endless empty cycle of looking for something to break the spell I was under. I was entranced, absorbed by my lack of “self,” my lack of will. I spent years with no innate feeling of being me. All I had were the feelings I deliberately sought out to stave off the “nothing feeling.” I may have felt sick, and lost, and doomed in Goodman’s office, but the alternative was feeling “nothing” and wondering why I exist.

Goodman looked over the top of his glasses at me. “Don't worry if you're parked out on the street cause they don't start towing until four and it's only one. And there are crackers and juice on the table next to the toilet.”

Tang and Ritz Crackers. Ritz, but the house girls in Nam called them “Rizz”...

…I stood outside a Military Police guardhouse marked “11 Field Force Main Gate -- National Workers Checkpoint” as two Green Berets in camouflage fatigues interrogated an old Mama-san. The taller Beret was a ruddy good-ol'-boy with several of his front teeth missing under a thick blond mustache; the other, a meticulously groomed sergeant with a football player's physique and mirrored aviator sunglasses.

Gap-Tooth held one of Mama's bony arms and, though she cried out, none of the passing G.I.'s seemed to notice the brutality. Burly Sergeant twisted her other arm into an agonizing, unnatural position until she screamed; pain and tears. They yanked her tote, breaking the handles and ripping the canvas along a seam.

Both Berets hooted triumphantly when they found what they were looking for.

Mama-san panicked when Gap-tooth tossed the bag aside and thrust the Black Market contraband evidence in her face: a small box of “Tide” detergent and a tropical tin of “Ritz” crackers.

Burly shoved her to the ground and ripped her Gate Pass from her blouse, tearing a white cotton flap from shoulder to hip. Her breast, withered and dark-nippled, jutted out, exposed and disturbingly vulnerable.

I wanted to help her up, lessen her embarrassment, but I was afraid to confront the Berets. It was done, just like that; no pass: no job, no base privileges, no money. I could hear the taunts of the house-girls, “Too old to be a “Short-time Girl.”

Another M.P. posted at the Gate, had been watching all along. When he saw the Mama-san was now without a Pass, he ordered her off the Base, out onto the highway. She pleaded with him while modestly holding the torn cloth of her blouse, but N.G., fini, “That's all she wrote.”

Finally, seeing the futility of her situation, she wailed as though having lost a child, but the gate M.P. was unmoved. He kicked her ripped bag out onto the highway and pointed the muzzle of his M-16 toward a village to the east. Mama-san staggered away calling out to the sky for mercy, clutching her torn bag and breast.

I stood there unable to move. I couldn’t help her and I couldn’t look away. Her pain was my pain. My hope for being able to live was half-a-world away. Hers was right here, but equally inaccessible. I didn’t know how to help her,

Gap-tooth tossed the box of Tide into the back of their Jeep and Burly opened the tin of crackers. They drove off toward the Beer Hall, packing their mouths with the dry crackers; laughing out volleys of spit crumbs.

I heard coughing and cursing and looked up to the stained ceiling tiles as I took my paperwork to the lunch table room. An old man with a scraggly gray beard stirred on his table and called out, “Bag down!” He sat up and looked around, ready to call out again if no one responded. When he saw a White Uniform approach, he pursed his lips and made a kissing sound. The woman stared through him as though he wasn’t even there, pinched off the bulging bag and began cutting the tubes: tubes from the old man’s arm to the bag and on to another frosty bag of dextrose solution.

She took another bag from her lab coat pocket. Not bulging, but collapsed and almost solid. So red it looked black. The old man shivered as the chilled dextrose mixed with the bag of clumped red cells. His shiver turned into a shuddering yawn that shook the sluggish drops into a stream that ran deep, dark red…

…dark, dark red, splattered and driven in rivulets across the chopper windshield in the downdraft that flattened whatever cover there might have been in the grass.

There were choppers everywhere: Cobras circling -- fangs poised, Cayuse Recons on high and open sided Huey “slicks” down low, on-loading wounded: infantrymen, radio ops... even cooks! This was big bad.

Hell, there were gunships pulling walking wounded onboard as they fired into the brush, hovering over the grass, pilots screaming “`SGO! GO-GO-GO!”, searching the treeline for that fatal puff of smoke that is the last thing you see, before the last thing you hear.

“Who’re you with?” I yelled to the door gunner, but quickly shut it off. Stupid. It didn't matter. Just a question formed in fear and panic, oblivious to the truth that any destination on the planet was better than being here. The Huey lifted off, so I sank down to wait for the next one.

I watched the “dust-off”, cold and detached for a moment before it hit me. “Oh my dear God” I thought and my stomach sank. My skin grew numb and my panic disappeared. I knew this feeling well. It comes when there is nothing left to fear. I was as good as dead, but I wasn’t dead. Whatever happened next would be “what will be” not what “I wish to be” – a life-defining moment.

My body felt as though it extended into the universe and I watched the chaos from what seemed like a distant point of view. I was out there looking back at me, but fully aware of my trembling body. My senses were was all over that Landing Zone at once, a guard’s burned fingers on an M-1 barrel, an APC driver’s blinded face oozing blood from a thousand pieces of pepper shrapnel, a grunt’s leg that couldn't stand on its shattered bones.

I breathed it in and shuddered it out. “Fuck” I whispered, “Holy Fuck!”

“Bag Down!” a woman yelled, and a White Uniform pointed me toward an empty lunch table.

I laid back onto the table, preparing to earn $82.00 a month.

- end -

Martin Higgins