The sixth floor

   There is a free taxi service at the medical complex and in the van I listened to two guys razzing one another.

   “You keep doing that,” said one,” and they’ll send you to the sixth floor.”

   “Uh-uh,” said the other, “I ain’t never going there.”

   As I left the van, I turned and asked, “What’s up with the sixth floor?”

  The driver said: “That’s where they send the crazy people.”

   Once inside the lobby, since I could not decode my paperwork, I handed it over to the information person at the circular lobby carrel. She was a black woman with blade-length fingernails, purple with speckled stars. Her black hair was flattened to her head like a solid helmet held in place by a slick liquid substance of sorts. She had a phone in one ear, but motioned to me anyway. I gave her my papers.

   She took one look at my paperwork and her brown eyes came out of her head achieving cartoon-like amazement. She snapped loudly, in a Wal-mart shoppers’ voice, “Sixth Floor, blue elevator!”

   Her words rang out like a warning and I felt the entire room behind me come to a silent stop. As I turned around, I imagined the room watching me, but saw that most folks were going about their business except this one guy. He had long, thin hair and our eyes locked. As I approached him, he said: “Hello, Captain,” as if he had recognized a long lost friend. I quickened my mosey past him in the direction of the blue elevator.

    Having heard no screams or sounds of beatings, I checked in on the sixth floor and sat in the waiting area. A man took a seat nearby in my row carrying one of those Styrofoam take out boxes. After a great deal of motion spreading out his buffet and  moving things around—coffee cup on the edge of a chair, salt and pepper and butter on the magazine table, knapsack on the floor—I could deduce peripherally that he was finally cutting his meal. Thing is he continued—while clutching plastic knife and fork—cutting up his meal for several minutes with white-knuckled concentration. Then he lathered some toast, laying the stuff on as though painting a wall, getting into the corners and the edges. Then he lathered the lather for several more minutes with the concentration of a surgeon.

   As soon as he completed these tasks he stabbed some food and held it mid mouth when his name was apparently called. He cried, “I knew it,” shut up the box with great care, placed it on his chair. He stood at attention while a nurse discussed his case. I could see him nodding nervously and shuffling his feet and nodding and nodding.

   Finished, he sat back down, opened his carton, and began the motion of eating when the nurse returned. They discussed something and then she left.

   He began stabbing food and eating swiftly, as though his meal was in danger of disappearing. I took a moment to check out the meal, which looked like it had gone through a shredder, nothing really discernible, although I spotted an identifiable piece of potato I fancied.

    Meanwhile, a very thin guy wandered by us, head down, muttering, “Got to lose five pounds, got to lose five pounds.” He had just been weighed and received a blood pressure and temperature exam. Now he was making a spectacle of himself by speaking and walking around the waiting area, no doubt losing more weight with each pass around the room.

    I noticed another patient enter the men’s room for the third or fourth time since I had been sitting there and wondered if he was enjoying a bit of dope each visit. I thought about checking him out but feared losing my place.

   Every so often, someone in scrubs would appear and announce a name. Finally, a man wearing a white shirt, tie and suspenders and shaped like a pear came out and announced, “Mr. Rogers!”  I chuckled. Wouldn’t it be grand to see THE Mr. (Fred) Rogers on the sixth floor, I thought. I’d love to see him wearing a thin sweater and welcoming us to his “neighborhood.”  That would be a sight worth paying for. Or Elvis or Nixon. I’d pay to see that.

    “Mr. Rogers,” the pear man repeated. A thought occurred to me. Perhaps he meant me. Slowly, I rose and waved. I announced my name to him and he verbally chastised himself. “I’m so sorry, I meant you, just had the name wrong.”

   “That’s OK,” I said, wanting instead to make myself feel as though I finally fit into the culture of the sixth floor.

   “Would you be mine?” I might have said, “could you be mine, won't you be my neighbor?”