From the Green City

Willie wasn't really a hospital volunteer, but he liked to think he was. Not that it was so hard to become a hospital volunteer, but actually being one would have ruined it for him somehow. Besides, the application to become a volunteer-two pages of little boxes and lines-required a grip on reality that just didn't interest Willie. A few real things interested him. First, he liked the blue coats that the volunteers got to wear. Being resourceful, he managed a decent facsimile from an old work shirt that he found in a garbage bin at 24th and Kansas and just as soon forgot that he found that way. He believed, and told many people, that it had been his father's. He also liked the fancy name tags that the volunteers got to wear; those were beyond his resources but not his charm, for he talked a newfound friend in Personnel-bribed him with three dirty stories and half a pack of dirty cigarettes (scrounged from 24th and Utah)-into making him a shiny plastic name tag that just said, Willie-Hospital Volunteer. He liked it that way, wouldn't have wanted or known or remembered what to offer as a last name. Willie gave tours. He invented a history for the hospital to fill its past, invented himself and the patient people around him, invented them better than they could have themselves, and with more sympathy. He invented a leg for the man with phantom limb pain, stroked it with his fingers. He invented spiders on the walls for an old alcoholic, helped the old man brush them off his skin, steadied his trembling hands. He invented beauty in the homeless women, the women with no mirror to their name who still put on makeup, blotting their open sores, their louse and scabies scars, with thick indiscriminate pancake. Willie invented health. It was what he did best. The patients took to seeking him out after they'd seen the doctor, just before they left, alone or in groups, by bus or on foot, to whatever their current squat happened to be. Some were strangers, hailing from the terraced lawns along Dolores Street or from the deep rhododendrons of the park. Most were locals, though, calling this or that heating vent on 23rd Street home. Willie's invention was always of use to them at this moment, to translate the doctors' words into something they could use. He said rest my arm and I jus' got a job carryin' things how can I do that with one arm, you tell me . She said to ice it how'm I s'pose to do that don't even got a fridge! You think ice is hard, try heat in this weather! I'm s'pose to put these here eyedrops in, I got the shakes so bad can't pee anyhow but on the floor! And Willie always had some wizardry to offer. He spun ice from cold iron; heat from the hoods of recently parked cars; steadiness from a sour-smelling, damp, moss-eaten wall, sending them on their way again, barefoot, homeless, and unchanged, but somehow refreshed, like scarecrows and lions and tin men back into the green city and into the fields of poppies beyond.