Day 25: Interlude from the hospital

jan 24

Ask any New Orleanian to tell you about the Saints, and they will probably begin by shaking their head and saying something like, “Well, baby, lemme tell ya this. It’s a little bit about football, but really it’s about magic.” Or love, or New Orleans, or the spirit of, say, Great Uncle Clarence, who religiously watched every single game the Saints ever played until he passed away in 2008, and you know he’s going crazy up in heaven right now. Best seats in the house. Everybody’s got that relative; everybody’s dedicating this season to their ghosts. It’s about football, but it’s also about so much more than football.

I’d intended, on these little call-night interludes, to write about the strange and beautiful things that happen in the hospital: the long thin nights, the jolly singing ladies from Environmental Services, my 82-year-old patient whose feeble creaky wife brings us collards from their garden in the mornings, carefully wrapped in Scott towels to help them stay crisp during the 2 bus rides in from the East.

But tonight’s not a normal night, not anywhere in the whole city. This is what happens in the hospital tonight: everything stops. Everything stops, and we all, every single one of us--the doctors and the nurses and the patients and the relatives and the x-ray techs and the security guards and the dietary services people—we all find a spot to sit, and we all watch The Game. Yes. For four hours time stands still, and the hospital might as well be somebody’s enormous fluorescent-lit living room, for all the medical care that’s going on, because suddenly nobody’s having chest pain or back pain or respiratory distress or diarrhea, and for just this little while nobody cares if sweet demented Mr Washington’s climbing out of his bed again, or you didn’t put the date and time on your orders, or the relatives are sneaking in with 12-piece boxes of Popeyes chicken, way after visiting hours are supposed to be over, because nothing—absolutely nothing—is more important, not even in a functioning hospital with a whole bunch of legitimately sick people in it, than That Game. And so, minus the alcohol, we do what you are doing: we cringe and pace and bite our nails, we have collective mini-strokes, we pray, we sing, we jump and holler, we eat nervously, we send anxious text messages to everyone we know, we hug strangers at every first down, we curse loud and long at the referees.

And then, when it’s over and the city begins to explode with a joy that even we New Orleanians, arguably the most celebrating people on the planet, have never before experienced, we burst outside onto the second-floor bridge to the parking garage, and we are surrounded by the cheering and honking, the flags and streamers and fireworks and, yes, gunfire, and it is about football, but it’s also about so much more than football as the long-suffering but always exuberant people of New Orleans stream out into our still-broken streets, overflowing with noise and victory, embracing loved ones and strangers all over the city, and the young girls perform dance routines in the middle of the street, and the RTA bus driver stops the bus and gets out and dances on the sidewalk with a couple of women who are going crazy on the corner, and everyone’s yelling “We’re going to the Superbowl! We’re going to the Superbowl!”

And I think it’s so perfect and adorable that we all keep saying “we.” Not “The Saints are going to the Superbowl,” or “Our team is going to the Superbowl,” or “My little cousin Juju might get tickets and take my Uncle Larry to the Superbowl.” Oh, no, baby. When we say we are going to the Superbowl, it is because, in some weird metaphysical way that each one of us somehow understands, we really are. Every last one of us. We, the people of New Orleans, have finally, finally made it. And it is about football but it’s also about so much more than football as we fill the world with our noise, the sounds of a people who create music even in the midst of utter, cataclysmic despair, the sounds of a people who’ve been crawling through a deep cave together and are finally seeing, for the first time in longer than you’d ever want to imagine, the light. Not forever but for this moment we have won something—we have won something!-- and in the streamers and the sequins and the shouting, the horns and the dancing and the fireworks, we all—the bus drivers, and the EKG techs, and the high school baton twirlers, and the mail carriers, and the chambermaids, and the homecare workers, and the oldtimers playing dominoes on the neutral ground, and the men selling shrimp out of the backs of their pickups, and the pastors, and the babies, and the go-go dancers, and the people riding around the Bywater on the tall bikes, and the wild-eyed hustlers under the Claiborne overpass, and the ladies making stuffed peppers in the back of the corner store, and the strippers, and the waiters, and the dockworkers, and the shut-ins, and the graffiti artists, and the nuns, and the grandmothers, and the outlaws and the yardbirds and the grifters, all of us—we are all, all, all going to the Superbowl.

We dance on cars, we shout long and joyously through the night, and when the sun rises we are still celebrating because we have done it; we are coming out the other side, and not only are we still alive after our long sad legacy of deep suffering, and not only are we still beautiful and shining, a people who dance at funerals and make the entire world fall in love with us, but this time we’ve also won! We won! Could you believe that? We’ve never won anything in our lives, the people of New Orleans, and as the night ends and the day dawns and we are still streaming gold and music all over this cracked decaying city, you can feel the world shift a bit beneath us. You can feel our hands unclench a little, and some of our deep gray sadness lifts off and leaves us, and the space behind fills up with our music and the sounds of our footsteps, and our people keep dancing, dancing, marching in.