I See You in the ICU

by Jim Washburn

The guys I try to play jazz with were talking, as we’re wont to do when not defacing the fake book, talking about the downward spiral of the world. Our youngest player remarked that time for him is swimming past so much faster than once it did. Where does the day go?

Curtis Mayfield

By the time you reach our age, I assured him, all you really have time for is regret. I was joking, but only by a matter of degrees.

How did I get so far gone,

Where do I belong,

And where in the world did I ever go wrong,

If I took the time to replace what my mind erased,

I still feel as if I’m here but I’m gone

Curtis Mayfield sang that, not long before he passed away. It was written from the perspective of a gangbanger who’d burned himself away on crack, though Curtis’ actual situation was far different: paralyzed from the neck down from a freak accident seven years earlier when a lighting truss blew over at a gig and severed his spine. Unlike the character in his song, Mayfield was blameless in his fate, but he nailed the feeling. You don’t have to be a crackhead to feel that your life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The great majority of us find ways of living less than we should.

Unless you have an Obamaian drive towards service, you will have plenty of opportunities to be disappointed in yourself. Unexpended talent and potential turns into rot inside you. Life will beat you down, and it’ll do it with your own stick.

Regrets? I have a few, but, like the other ways of being down on oneself, I consider them self-indulgent. They sure don’t do anyone else any good, and they sap your ability to be useful, so that you wind up feeling like even more of a shit.

Does knowing this keep me from sometimes wallowing in regret or from giving myself more reasons to wallow? Nope.

Why do we screw up? Why do we pour our time into a whisky bottle or a computer game rather than make the most of it? Why do we people repeatedly do things that limit the scope of our experience, that dull our ability to see and help others?

I lost one of my dearest friends last year, a great songwriter who still hadn’t written his best songs. I also lost my dad. We were just barely learning to grow close, but that’s all ice cream on the sidewalk now. Both of them likely would have lived years longer but for a close personal relationship with alcohol.

And now, I’ve been visiting another old friend who’s been two weeks in an ICU with the same MO, which made his liver FUBAR. The first time I saw him in the hospital, there wasn’t much to visit: a slack, yellow-skinned form with a distended belly, his eyes unfocused cadmium yellow slits showing no cognition. This is the stuff they leave out of the Captain Morgan ads.

Visiting five days later, he had improved dramatically, not that it seemed that way to him. He was conscious and recognized people. His eyes were still the color of cat pee, but they were open and focused. He could speak in a whisper and was pissed off with his lot. He wanted water, which he couldn’t have, nor the ice cream he asked for. He needed this moved, that pillow there, the bed elevated, no up more, the covers on or off. And, in his most persistent whisper, he said he wanted to die.

“Who doesn’t?” I responded, not exactly Mr. Bedside Manner. “But the one good thing about what you’re going through now is you’re seeing a lot of people coming through here who love and need you. You might want to hang around for their sakes.”

I used to think existence made so little sense that the only sensible response to it was to cease existing. In college some of my more acerbic associates nicknamed me Suicide, and I did quite nearly do myself in one night, Pet Sounds on the turntable and 117 volts running through a Kustom amp footswitch to bare wires wrapped around my fingers. As soon as the dogs barked on “Caroline No,” I was stepping on that footswitch. Instead, halfway through “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” a friend called to ask, “Hey, want to go out for hot chocolate?” Chocolate beats nothingness every time.

I finally realized that life doesn’t need to make sense for you to love it, just like your Uncle Bob doesn’t need to make sense for you to love him. A lot of times the less sense something makes, the more endearingly human it is, like a good Nancy cartoon or desert dinosaur roadside attractions or Captain Beefheart’s Lick My Decals Off, Baby. Let it all in, kids.

And then let it out. If you’re not engaging others, not playing at least a supernumerary part on the stage of life, not blowing your horn somewhere, then you might just as probably be dead. Me? I fall short lots of the time, or leave the metaphoric horn right in its musty metaphoric case. But if you keep moving around long enough, sometimes good things happen.

I attempt guitar, not a horn, in this jazz band. I’ve never heard most of the songs in the book. I read music about as well as Bush read the Constitution. When I solo, fully seventy percent of what I play is crap that I’d never want to hear as a listener: I’ll hew tediously to the chord positions and a few familiar licks; Other times I’ll leap from the plane and then try to act like I’m skydiving rather than falling, with the music whooshing by, and me scrabbling to find a purchase on it with uptight, utterly-non-swinging flurries of notes.

And sometimes I forget what a useless ass I am and let myself be buoyed by the music, which it does like the warm currents in a Caribbean lagoon, and the inner dolphin comes out and gets to swim around a bit. You don’t get to do that without landing on your face a bunch first.

We all have limitations, but look again at Curtis Mayfield. He made one of the most beautiful, giving albums ever while flat on his back, immobilized from the neck down, with only enough lung power to sing a couple of lines at a time. That’s a little humbling, isn’t it, compared to the workaday excuses most of us have?

People need people. There was a great article in a recent New Yorker about how solitary confinement turns people seriously nuts. Without the reflections we get from others, we tend to vanish to ourselves.

This wasn’t a problem for the people I lost this past year. They had plenty of friends and connected up just fine with the world. So why did they exit the world in a beveraged lie-out?

Maybe they just really liked drinking. Maybe that’s how they got to their lagoon. Maybe life had lost its edge, and getting more than comfortably high was for them like swimming out farther than you know you can swim back, just to see if you care enough to try. I have no idea, but I sure miss them.

I saw my friend for a third time today. His bed has a feature to make it thump rhythmically to loosen congestion in the lungs. When I came in it was thumping like a jackhammer. His liver wasn’t doing what livers should at all. Liquid was building up inside of him, some was in his lungs and every breath seemed an effort. His gurgling whisper was even harder to understand. What if he was making perfect sense, and we couldn’t tell?

“Get me out of here!” I did hear him say that.

Even with the parade of well-wishers, most of the things that make life worth living must seem awfully remote from his ICU bed. When you’ve got tubes stuffed into so many holes that you look worse than John Travolta in Battlefield Earth; when the ammonia produced by your kerflunct body is fizzing in your brain pan, competing with sedatives and maybe a dozen other drugs; when pain, discomfort and dread are snuggled up close and everything else feels distant and muted, so that the stunning ocean view just out the window doesn’t even register: you are in trouble. It’s not like tax trouble or succubus trouble. It is trouble that runs entirely through you like a brackish new set of veins and arteries.

So you may not be doing your doing your best decision-making at this point. I’m all for an individual’s right to die—it’s a sham to say we are free otherwise—but you should hope the individual is at a place of calm and reason when that decision is made.

Back a few days ago, when he could still talk, he took up his “I want to die” mantra a second time. His other visitor and I told him he’d just have to wait on that one. Was there anything else we could do for him?

He pushed his voice above a whisper. “Help!” Since we weren’t going to pull his plug—and which plug? ... for all I know his bed has a catapult feature—he was checking to see if anyone else in the wing would. “Help!” “Help!” “Help!”

No one responded, so I did what I hope someone would do for me if I were in a  similar situation: I went to the CD player that already had a Beatles disc loaded in it, put it on track ten, and said “Here you go” as “Help, I need somebody ...” came from the speakers.

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