“Miss…excuse
me, Miss…” Oh, he’s talking to me, I realize after the third “Miss…”
breaks through my little coffee shop solo thought bubble. ”How do you spell Patricia?
P-a-t-r-i-s-h-a? “Yeah, you could”, I
reply, though most people would spell it …P-a-t-r-i-c-i-a”. A pudgy young man sitting
nearby at one of those little round rocky wooden tables squints in
concentration as he stores the name in his not-so-smart flip phone. “How’s the arm?” I ask him, glancing at a bandage on his totally tattooed arm. “Oh, yeah!” he
exclaims, “You were there! You the one… “
On a previous
day at Starbucks, I honestly can’t recall how long ago…was it 6 days or 6 weeks
ago?… I was, of necessity, sharing one
of the large square tables with a couple other patrons, trying to get some work done during my lunch
break, when this young baby-faced fellow sitting at our communal table looks at my name tag and asks where I
work. When I tell him, he shows me this wicked
abscess on his arm “from a burn” and asks if he can come to our clinic. He
actually has Kaiser but he asks - over and over - what the doctor will ask him
about how he got this ugly red inflamed looking wound. I tell him – over and over - I’m not a
doctor, but he really should see one soon, and to not worry about the questions
– unless it’s a gunshot or knife wound from an assault, they won’t report
it. A Queens ER tech at a nearby table
joins the “Go to the ER today, man” chorus.
But the guy is ambivalent, mired in some inner turmoil about what to do
next. When I gather my things to return to work, he goes
back to making calls from his cell in search of antibiotics.
“I had really
bad staph, I got dialysis, they said I almost lost the arm…” he effuses,
filling me in—or possibly spinning a tall tale, one he surely now
believes. He reports visiting an ER that
same day and if had he waited “they said I coulda died, I almost lost the arm…I
wouldn’t have gone if you hadn’t told me to”. “Hey, it was you, not me,
man. I didn’t drag you there – you’re
the one who decided to go”. He kept shifting
his locus of control, insisting if not for me (and the Queens ER guy) he would
have been armless or dead by now, and so we eventually settled on the “God
works in mysterious ways” theory. Then
he went back to working his phone, working the system: “What! I gotta come in?...”
I packed the un-read papers, picked up my
coffee cup, and returned to work.
