A Pleasant Conversation with a Dangerous Man
I knew who he was before I walked in there. I had tended to him before, watched over him while he slept in that hospital bed. But those were times he would not have remembered, times when his withdrawal had driven him to the sort of behavior that required my supervision. How the pervasive barrage of such behaviors are given to the tolerance of even the most loving of parents, may God forgive me for not understanding.
He was out on bail, awaiting sentence for the crime of having killed an old man over misplaced property. This I would confirm only while seated beside his more self-aware persona.
I walked into the room and there he was, seated upward on the bed, speaking with the sitter whom I was to be relieving. There was neither doubt nor hesitation to her voice when she told me he was a nice man. She was writing down information to contact him later. It seemed as though they had formed some kind of a connection; I couldn’t be sure, neither was I sure what to expect from him myself, based on what I had seen, both from this man and others.
He didn’t seem to recognize me from the less amiable connection he and I had previously formed. That was a start.
“Hey man,” he said after our reintroduction. “Do you think you can bring me some food, a sandwich or something? Nothing with meat, though.”
“I can’t really leave the room myself,” I replied, “but I can certainly ask the nurse to bring you something.”
“Yeah, you know you can’t leave the room at all, right?” He sounded not in the least but controlling, but in fact nurturing. “Are you new?”
“I am.” I was not, but knowing a little bit about this man, I wanted his knowledge of me to be laced with as much sand and static as possible.
He proceeded to instruct me on some of the basic procedures involved in supervising a patient.
“I know because I’ve seen it,” he said. “Because I’ve been here.”
I sat in the chair beside his bed, and after a few minutes he asked me to help reposition him on the bed.
“Put some gloves on though, man,” he added. “Just don’t wanna get the COVID, you know what I mean?”
As a sitter, I was supposed to wait for an aid to assist with things like maneuvering and generally handling a patient, but he insisted that he was in pain.
After I helped slide him up on the bed, the nurse walked in and looked over him. She checked his IV, his leads, maintained careful attention on the vitals monitor, which sounded in soft beeps throughout the night.
“Where did you get that necklace?” He asked her.
“My what?” she said, then acknowledged the subtle shine of metal on her chest. “Oh. You’re observant, aren’t you?”
Dismissing the topic for her subtle refusal to answer his question, he moved the conversation onward. “Hey, what happened to your wedding ring?”
The nurse hesitated. “Oh… I don’t wear it to work.”
“What does your husband do for a living?”
“My husband?” she said. “He’s also a nurse.”
“Oh, was he that guy who was in here earlier?”
“That was him!” she said almost right away.
As she was leaving the room, he said, “You dropped something there…”
The nurse turned and I turned, checking the floor.
She looked at him. “Did I drop something or are you being funny?”
He gave a bright smile with false teeth. “I just wanted to see you turn around one more time.”
“You’re so silly!” the nurse said and then closed the door behind her.
Once again, it was just him and me.
He made small talk with me. He said I sounded smart, I brought up that I was a writer. He noted the leather binder in my lap.
“You’re a genius,” he said with dry conviction. “All that writing.”
I told him he was being generous.
He shook his head. “You’re a genius. What did you do after high school?”
“Community college,” I said. “Tried my hand at university studying journalism, but I dropped out. I didn’t want to write what they told me to write. I wanted to do my own thing.”
“You realize you’re just proving my point, right?” His eyes seemed to glow. “I got a job you might be interested in.”
I told him no thank you. I said I already had the perfect job for the moment, a job where I could sit and work on my writing, meet new people here and there. I just couldn’t see myself applying for another job, certainly not in another company.
He asked me if I wrote poetry. I told him that wasn’t something I could ever get the knack for, and was not versed in it at all.
He gestured at my binder. “Let me read some of your stuff and I’ll tell you some of mine.”
I searched quickly for a polite refusal, and conjured that my work was not finished, half-feigning embarrassment. He persisted to a point; I continued to evade, maintaining that I was open to hearing his work.
“Do you wear cologne?” He asked.
“I don’t.”
“You should,” he said. “You need to have confidence in yourself. I know sometimes you go home, and you’re alone, and you get depressed sometimes. I know. You have to just go up to a girl one day and say ‘I just have to say, I think you’re really beautiful,’ then just walk away.” With a flourish of his finger, he added, “If she likes you, she’ll talk to you. There are women all around here who look at you. I know. I’m not gay, but you’re not ugly.”
“Thank you.”
He squinted a little. “You know… I said I had a job for you earlier.”
I nodded once. “I remember.”
His face went flat. “You could have at least asked me what the job was. But you just weren’t interested.”
“I was not.”
He was looking directly at me in the silence, the vitals monitor making its low beeps. “That was kinda rude, don’t you think?”
My heart was racing.
“I’m sorry you feel that way.”
He broke eyes contact. “Well… thank you for apologizing.”
He proceeded to describe a job working in “the big tower at an airport, what’s it called?”
“Air traffic control?”
“Yeah. At least put an application in, man.”
“Okay, I will.”
I will not.
He talked to me some more about poetry. At one point, he insisted I write his poetry down in my binder while he spoke it. I proceeded to write it down in his notepad, which the hospital had given him. He was a little salty about this, but proceeded anyway.
The poem was about a woman on the bus he liked to stare at. She was, as he described, attractive but had track marks on her arm.
I wrote as he spoke, but did not get everything down, and did not ask him to slow down or repeat anything.
What I got was:
I feel as though the stars rise for her
As well as moons growing large…
As though moons rise with such tranquil charge
She knows she’s not perfect…
She gasps Earthly
As beautiful as the dreams we find
In the uprise of our minds…
She leaves carelessness
As cities cry
The quiet that sublimes her laughter ripples
And now dark pools of deeper thought…
I pulled the paper out of the notepad. After complimenting him on it, he told me to keep it. He told me to share it. He said he wouldn’t write his poetry down, as it reminded him of his deceased wife. He said that every time he started to write, he cried. I am not sure in the aspects of the brain which would have compelled him to cry writing it and not to speak it, but of course I did not bring this up with him.
“I should stop talking now, though,” he said. “If we keep talking about poetry all night, eventually we’re fall in love!”
He didn’t stop talking.
In a change of course, he entered a tangent on the Black Lives Matter movement, explaining how white people want to keep black people in one place and other such commentary. He said “Take gay people, for example…” he stopped himself and looked at me. “…Are you straight or gay? Just so I can word this the right way.”
“Straight,” I answered quickly.
He then presented a shallow comparison between gay men’s problems and black men’s problems.
Again, he said he was ready to sleep. He reached into his mouth, in what seemed like preparation for sleep, and pulled out his bridge, along with a vanguard of teeth. He told me it happened from boxing without a mouthpiece. One of the teeth somehow fell out, and he started getting frantic looking for it. He asked me to turn the lights on. He started to get up from the bed to look for it, and I called for help, as he wasn’t supposed to be out of bed unassisted.
I supported him as he made his way off the side of the bed and onto his feet. While we waited for an aid, he said he was in pain and had to stretch.
“Hold my shoulders,” he said. “I need to bend over.”
He did so. Twice. Both times I held him from falling forward.
Finally, help arrived for him, and the aid was able to find his tooth.
Thankfully, this was when I was pulled from him after two-and-a-half hours to sit with another patient who was not so far along in his detoxification. An older woman came to replace me and, when I spoke to her at the end of the shift, she told me she’d had no problems with him.
It was only hindsight that brought me to suspect his subtle infusions of innuendo into the conversation, and trying to ascertain my sexuality. Some of these things I’m only realizing now that I’m writing it down. He introduced it in a way that could have been banter. Indeed, it could have been. In fact, my whole interpretation of the conversation could have been the defenses of my sensitive nature. But that is how the game of power is often played, and while I am sensitive, I am not easily rattled; I’m not easily made to believe that I am in the presence of someone who is truly and seriously dangerous.
Maybe it was my fault that the conversation had at times become awkward and tense.
But the facts remain:
This was someone who had been convicted of killing a defenseless old man to death in a fit of rage. And, during his earlier drunken ramblings, he had reminded multiple staff of this fact multiple times.
And he was drawn to me.
The experience made me paranoid for a little while, hypersensitive and suspicious to strangers being nice, fearing they were guided by surreptitious strategies. It was the feeling of waking from a nightmare, and, while getting over it, still feeling a little strange throughout the following day.
As far as experiences go, a nightmare can be just as educational and inspiring as any other. But as far as this experience goes, I’ve more than had my fill.