by Tim

“I’m kind of between things right now,” I mumble. “I used to work at a shelter.”

“Oh, really,” the Tall One says. “Did you know a guy named Michael Hare?”

The Other One is fumbling around in the small hole he’s made in my groin. Something to do with my femoral vein and the best route to my heart but the valium kicks in and everything goes a little fuzzy.

I’m watching a black & white fractal throbbing on a monitor to my right. They tell me it’s my heart.

And I do know a guy named Michael Hare. I’m not sure why the Tall One is referring to him in the past tense.

About five years ago I was between shelter jobs. I had actually left the field for good. I’d done my time—half a decade working frontline was enough for me. I was burnt out. I went back to school, did the 3rd year of my English degree, had another baby and ran out of money. I had no desire whatsoever to return to working in shelters. Out of desperation, I took a job landscaping.

Landscaping was hard. I had done it before but I was 40 now and smoking a pack a day. One day we were hauling a mountain of gravel up another larger mountain of dirt using wheelbarrows. I started getting the kind of chest pains that make everyone want to take you to the hospital. The kind that make people in hospitals walk fast and hook you up to machines.

The Other One tells me that my femoral vein will carry the contrast agent to my heart while they shoot x-rays at it. The x-ray machine will then take pictures to see if my heart is working right. I’m not so sure. It all sounds a little sci-fi to me.

Michael Hare looks like the shaggy, bearded homeless guy on TV. In his fifties, US Army fatigues, army boots, one eye. “Lost the other in ‘Nam.” A bottle picker. Alcoholic, I guess. He suffers from hypochondria compounded by a myriad of real health problems. He also has a child-like but embarrassingly goofy way about him. He often refers to himself in the third-person—as Bunny Rabbit.

In my first year of shelter work, my wife and I, also in our first year, decided to avoid the difficult decision of which family to spend Christmas with. Instead, we invited a dozen or so homeless guys over for the day. Michael Hare was one of them. I borrowed a bus from a friend and we loaded everyone up. Some of the guys just slept all day. Others spent long periods of time in the bathroom. Others watched movies. One guy played guitar all day. Later on, we had turkey and all that, but for breakfast, we had French Toast. Michael made us French Toast.

The day passed—a good day—and life returned to normal. But every time I saw Michael after that, which was almost daily, he announced to me, in his annoying baby-talk voice, Bunny Rabbit made French Toast for everyone! He kept this behavior up for four years—a fifty-year-old, one-eyed ‘Nam vet.

“Yeah, I know Michael. Haven’t seen him in a while.”

“Oh, you didn’t hear?” the Tall One asks. “He died. It was terrible. I used to work Emerg. He was in there all the time. When they brought him in last time he was already dead. Someone had stuffed him inside a shopping cart and pushed him down a hill. He was frozen. Still stuffed inside the cart.”

The contrast agent reaches my heart and the monitor explodes with monochromatic mushroom clouds. They ask about the murmur. I mumble something about endocarditis and dirty needles and don’t worry, it was a long time ago. And all I can think about is French Toast.

I ask them later if my heart is working right. I’m certain it’s broken. But the Tall One tells me my heart is just fine. “Perfectly normal,” the Other One says, “all things considered.”

They let me out of the hospital a few days later and I call Debbie Newman at the DI for an interview. I start in Intox a week or two later.

I’ve worked in shelters for about a decade now. I’ve never been very good at “getting people off the streets.” I could count them on one hand. It’s complicated business. More often than not the people I know end up back at the shelters. Sometimes I let them make French Toast in my kitchen.

I don’t even like French Toast.

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