seven minutes

The man seated across from me at the La Familia Day Care Center in Hollis Hills, Queens, is David; but he does not resemble a single David I know. When I say resemble I'm talking about facial features, expressions and ethnic backgrounds. He towers over me at six feet five inches but looks uncannily small as he hunches over the small maplewood desk and looks at me through drooping eyes like I am a piece of ginger, like I am catastrophe, like I will sentence him to isolation and squash his eyeballs; that expression of you may only touch me cautiously -that grave, defeated look.

I begin my routine.

"My name is Jonathan Wollman and I'm here from Castleton College. I'll be taking just a few drops of blood from you today for a diabetes test and a lipid profile test." 

I stare into his eyes. The white part looks a little yellow, and a few ruptured capillaries are netting around the edges. I am scared that there is some sort of a pressure build-up within his eye chambers, puffing it up, that may eventually make it explode. That will end up pretty badly; probably in a runnel of blood gushing out of his pink carunculae, leaving him blind, desperate and suicidal. What is left of a homeless man without the gift of vision? I ponder. 

He nods, loosely, and smiles a few times. Something must be really funny that I don't quite get or am completely oblivious to. I repeat my introduction. There is no agreement, disagreement or acknowledgement; just a calm indifference possibly common among the poor, homeless and decaying.

"Do you have a preference for which hand I should use?" I ask.

He shakes his head, gently at first then violently, for a few seconds. He pauses for a moment, yawns, and resumes shaking his head. His platinum-blond hair clomps against the arch of his forehead and thrums like a boat engine brrr-ing through the ocean. 

"Alright. I'll use your left hand, then. Do you have a finger preference?" No answer. I carefully reach for his ring finger. It is cold and crinkled and frighteningly white. 

"Do you mind rubbing your hands for me, please? This'll help with your blood flow." I tell him, while rubbing my own to show how it needs to be done. "If we get your hands nicely warmed up then we don't have to prick you multiple times," I say. 

Suddenly, he makes a low-pitched, mechanical gurgling sound. Perhaps he wants to say something?

"I don't have blood," he says, finally. The voice is gruff, a little raspy, a little smokey but not extremely deep. It sounds like a packet of audio waves leaking through a plug of mucus, covering, intermittently, a nozzle looping into his vocal tubes. 

I laugh spontaneously. "You're funny," I say, but he's not amused. "It'd be hard that way. But here...can you please rub your hands while I get my kit ready?"

He rubs his palms in smooth continuous circles, but so gently that I doubt it will do any good. The motion seems mechanical, artificial and ticklish; as if his fingers have ears and wake on command. There is no mind involved, just simple steps and two bare hands rubbing away in sporadic rotations, familiar to one another like coeval half-sisters or neighborhood cousins skipping rope, rowing or lobbing pebbles in a lake. 

From the blood kit in my delegated station 6 I take out a piece of white netted gauze, a Johnson & Johnson Band-Aid, a green plastic-encased lancet, a lipid profile cassette and a capillary tube. I arrange them all on a piece of paper towel, in an anti-clockwise fashion, and go through my checklist to make sure I have everything I need.

I've missed the alcohol swab. So I turn to my left, pull one out from the kit and keep it at the end of the trail. It looks like a Japanese fan, only not as sophisticated. Then I pick it up and tear it through the center of the wrapper. One uneven piece spirals down the eight inch distance and lands on the paper towel. The other is still stuck to the swab. Next, I pull the swab out with my right thumb and index finger and throw the other piece of the wrapper into the trash can. It lands without a sound -as if, nonexistent. 

I bring the alcohol swab closer and closer to his ring finger. Eventually, it touches the pulp, I wipe it for a few seconds and fan the area to dry it off. There are little ripples on his skin, as if hit with an avalanche or corrugations made from wind, the kind of creasing that happens when you dip your fingers in hot or cold water for too long. Age and homelessness have taken its toll, forming shapes like contour maps all over the pulp. This is a sad reality and there is nothing I can really do to remedy it. 

Within a few seconds, I pick up the lancet, twist the cap off, hold it perpendicular to the finger, count in my head, one, two, three and push the plunger, deep, through the five strata of epidermis, into the inner layer of skin, till the tip of the micro-spear nicks a part of the digital artery. I remove the lancet, and notice a drop of blood peeping through the wound. 

"That felt great, Doc. Do it a few more times," he says. The lancets are not reusable and I have no reason to prick him multiple times, unnecessarily, so I take it and throw it into the red "Sharps" container. As soon as it enters the container, it is invisible because the bucket is not see-through. I hear a crrunch, and know it has landed safely. Glass upon glass, steel over steel, they can resume sharing stories of piercing, pain and viciousness, the many people that have come and gone in happiness and in despair. 

I collect the first drop of blood in the capillary tube and start the A1C test right away. Then I wipe the site of his wound with fresh gauze, and start squeezing his finger to get a few more drops. I will need it to run the lipid profile cassette. He seems restless and annoyed, all of a sudden. 

"Just one more minute, just one more minute," I say as Theresa, my assistant, and I squeeze out blood from his finger. Finally, we have the necessary amount and start the test. I give him a Band-Aid and ask him to wait. The tests take about seven minutes to run. During the remaining time, he is allowed to drink water, fill up a questionnaire or just sit there. 

After about a minute or so, he suddenly starts talking. "You can't deny that the Germans still won, aye? They revolutionized the world. They proved themselves despite having a bad reputation. They did the right thing -you know?" 

"Oh-okay. But where is this coming from all of a sudden?" I ask, casually.

"You're using a god-damn Siemens machine. You outta know this shit." I'd never given it much thought, but he was right. 

"Those Jews, I tell you...I hated them. Growing up. I knew the Germans did the right thing. But now I hate them even more."

"Why? Why do you hate them even more now?" I ask. 

"Because one of those docs, Silberman from the Bronx, killed my best friend. My best friend of 37 years. It's tough, ya know?" He says.

I expressed my deepest sympathy and then asked, "What did he do?"

"Never paid attention to my friend. At all. They say they wanna take care of the homeless, and volunteer for this and that to show that they care, but that's bull-fucking-shit! They don't give a bleep about us poor people. They lie to us, tell us, we do this, this and this, and everyone believes. When Cody was in pain, he didn't even write him a damn pain-killer because he was busy. My ass. He was probably too busy fucking his slut or mooching up to the rich ones. It'll all about the money, isn't it? You people are all about money." 

He made a gesture with his right thumb and index finger, gliding the 2 briskly, thumb over index, like flipping bills, or tossing a coin. "Because of that Jew, my friend died of an airborne infection of the Central line. What could be worse?"

There were 2 minutes left on the blood panel machines. "Keep talking," I said.

"37 years is a long time you know. When you know someone for 37 years, it takes another 37 years to forget." 

"I'm sorry for your loss, David."

"Thanks Jonny. Cody was such a simple-minded guy, you know. It's really hard to find. We lived together, found food together and hung out all the time. When I became homeless, in the September of 2006, he even left his parents' home to come with me."

"That was very sweet and considerate of him," I said. 

"Sometime around mid-summer, last year, we went to Santa Monica. Hitchhiked all the way. We did drugs, smoked pot, talked about life till the end of the night. We just always discovered new things about one another, and that brought us much closer throughout the years. Such a good guy...oh God's so vicious!" 

30 seconds left on the clock.

"A lot of you think that homeless people like us are always unhappy. But let me tell you, it's not true. Not necessarily. We are and we aren't. It's like a dynamo going back and forth. All we expect is for society to not treat us like a piece of shit. Like dirt. Many of us had homes once, had families once. But circumstances change things ya know? When you lose all of that, you start looking for new companions. People who understand your situation and not judge you for everything that happened. You look for people in the same boat as you -or even a new cruise-liner. You start bonding over it, slowly; you have things to talk about -where the free food is today, when the heater's not working in the Citigroup Atrium, when it is...stuff like that. There's competition too you know. People struggling...who gets that dang food first! But it's an adventure really. Not the typical...just a different kind of life. Some have it betters than other, just like you folks."

The green Fisher Scientific beeper goes off. I mute it and write down the numbers.

"Have you ever had a companion? Like someone who you just think about and it brings a smile on your face? Gives you energy on a bad day? Someone you know who's thinking about you constantly even if you haven't talked to them in 2 weeks? Someone you can count on no matter what -come hail come snow, even through the most bizarre family circumstances -like the death of your son? I smell him in this room, even thinking about him. I hear him talking on his cell phone with his god-damn sister in Nashville, Tennessee. Oh Cody..."

I smiled at him then waved my hand at Jemima, who was standing at the reception area, to let her know that the tests were complete and that she should send me the next patient.

But David continued. "...And you know when we were in Riverdale, earlier this year, visiting my cousin Diana Finley. One Saturday evening we sat down in the living room floor and made plaster molds of our hands. They looked great, boy, they looked grreat. You could see the outlines of the veins, hairs, everything. I took Cody's and he took mine. But that bastard broke it within a week. Haha. But I kept it carefully. And thank God I did. Now that he's gone, I hold on to it every night before I go to sleep, outside the church or on the street. It's like holding on to a little part of him, a part that doesn't slip away. A part of him that stays with me, real and alive. I bring it close to my face sometimes, to wipe my tears. Maybe he can feel it too, up there somewhere..."

"It'll get better," I say and offer him a hug. It's awkward and maybe unprofessional, but he appreciates it nonetheless.

"Maybe it will, maybe it won't. Time will tell. But I tell you boy, those Germans were right." 

I didn't want to prolong the conversation, on this topic of Nazism and anti-Semitism, any further. Finally, I said, "Your numbers are ready, David. Zenda will escort you to Dr Karen's office and she'll tell you what your numbers mean. It was nice meeting you. Hope you feel better and have a wonderful day."

He stands up while pushing his chair backward with a resounding squawk. He has advanced hydrocele, a condition where his testicles are enlarged to a point it almost touches the floor. Lymphatic drainage issues -chewing his organs away, second by second. Homeless and uninsured -why, of course, should he receive treatment? God forbid healthcare should ever be a human right -the line of thought that exasperates me beyond control. In the middle of all this, I notice his suspenders, beautifully woven, holding up his denim pants with mini-eruptions of thread. 

He shakes my hand one last time and before he leaves he leans forward and says, "Pleasure. Pleasure meeting you boy. When you grow up, just remember one thing, the helpless will always need your help. Don't fool them no more."