This Side the Ground
By David Milley
Trapped in this nursing home bed, I feel every bar of the metal frame through the too-thin mattress. “The princess and the pea,” I think, as the burning sensation runs in stripes across my neck and back and legs. Still, the pain is less than it was in the hospital last week, when every part of my body—skin, muscle, bone—felt afire. My arms and legs still ache, and my movements are still leaden, but at least I'm no longer completely immobile. Twisting up my face, I stretch my right hand up to the call device hanging from the headboard and push the button. Shortly, a nurse will come in, bringing me another industrial-strength ibuprofen tablet and a glass of water.
I'm recovering from a blood-borne staph infection, so the nursing home in Medford is only a whistle stop, not my destination. Not quite sixty years old, I'm the youngest patient in this ward. The nurses fuss over me. They're glad to know I plan to leave upright.
My body's reaction to painkillers also gets me special attention and sympathy. My first three days in the hospital were a nightmare, as the doctors pumped narcotics into me intravenously, and my pain—and vital functions—grew steadily worse, despite the cocktail of antibiotics they administered to control the blood infection. Finally, one of the specialists told them to switch me from the IV painkillers to mammoth doses of ibuprofen. My condition began to improve, and once the narcotics were completely flushed out, they could see the antibiotics take hold. The doctors sent me to rehab in this nursing home with a nearly limitless prescription for ibuprofen and a PICC line in my arm that drips an antibiotic cocktail directly into the vein over my heart.
I glance idly at the bag on the IV stand by my bed. The afternoon nurse raps on the door, opens it, and walks in. She carries a glass in one hand and a tiny cup with my medicine in the other, the one that opened the door. Behind her, I see Warren, hesitating in the doorway, holding his black watch cap in both hands. “You have a visitor!” she tells me, brightly, as she transfers a large, white oval tablet from the little paper cup to my tongue, then holds her hand around mine to help me guide the glass of water to my lips, watching to keep the PICC line clear.
I swallow a couple of sips, then lie back. I draw a breath: “Come on in, Bear-Bear.”
The nurse goes to the door and dims the lights a little, before backing through the door and closing it. Warren drags the big metal chair around to the left side of my bed, to sit near the window beside me. He takes my hand in his. “Your mother phoned just before I set out,” he says, “I told her you were feeling better, that you're getting better. We talked a while.”
I almost lost Warren last fall. Last February, a year ago, we both came down with a really bad case of flu. We went to the local CVS, where the nurse practitioner on staff there gave us antibiotics. My cough cleared right up; Warren—who rarely gets ill—never really recovered. His cough lasted through the spring, and when the cough cleared somewhat, Warren never got his old energy back. Bleary eyes peered foggily out at the world. His usual motormouth sputtered out; he began to speak in halting phrases. Fall came, no better. He insisted he didn't feel sick, but he sounded less sure of it with each passing week.
Finally, just before Thanksgiving, we made it to our annual visit to our family doctor. My examination was routine and quick. Dr. Vick joked with me about needing to lose some weight. I came out to the waiting room while Warren went back for his exam.
In less than five minutes, the nurse rushed out to find me, told me to come back to the examining room with her. When I got there, EMTs were wheeling Warren out of the room on a gurney to the back of the building. Dr. Vick looked over at me, no longer smiling: “A real problem showed up on Warren's EKG—he needs to be treated right away. At the hospital. We called an ambulance and they're going to take him to Lourdes.”
“Can I ride with him?”
“No, you'd be in the way. They need to treat him in the ambulance. You should follow in your car.”
The EMTs loaded Warren's gurney into the ambulance as the clinic back door closed. As I passed the check-in desk, the nurse handed me Warren's jacket, hat, and the bandana he always wore knotted around his neck for a scarf. I raced to my car, which we'd parked on the street in front of the clinic, did a three-point turn to head back to Haddon Avenue. Once there, I turned left toward Camden, only to see the flashing lights of the ambulance disappearing in the traffic ahead of me.
I raced behind the ambulance, sometimes gaining enough to see the lights, sometimes losing them. I'd been to Our Lady of Lourdes hospital before, visiting a co-worker in the cardiac ward, so I knew where to go, but I wanted to get to the hospital as close to the ambulance as I could, to make sure Warren was taken care of. I found parking directly across the street from the emergency room—one-hour parking only. I went into the ambulance entrance to look for where they'd taken Warren.
By the time I found the emergency room bed they'd had Warren in, they had already wheeled him off to surgery. A nurse told me to stay in the chair by the bed, that she would make sure the treating doctor would find me when he'd finished, when there was more to know.
I don't know how long I sat there, or even much about that time, except for telling myself over and over to breathe slower, to keep calm, that Warren needed me to be able to encourage him in whatever was going wrong. I clutched Warren's denim jacket like a life vest. I wept, quietly, and blew my nose on Warren's red bandana.
A tall man in a white coat drew aside the curtain. “Mr. Mile—Milley?” he said.
“I'm David Milley.” I stood up, stuffed the soggy bandana into my back pocket. “How is Warren?”
“He's very ill. He got here just in time. His heart is failing—that is the name for it, 'congestive heart failure.' We ran a catheter from his thigh up to his heart and we have him stabilized and in the recovery room, but we need to keep him here until we know the crisis is past. They will be putting him in Room 402 in the cardiac ward upstairs. We hope we can send him home in a day or two.”
“'Heart failure?' How do we treat it? Will he be okay? I don't want to lose him.”
The doctor fixed me with a sudden glare. “For congestive heart failure, the prognosis is not good. Mr. Davy's ejection fraction is only fifteen percent. Normal ejection fraction for a man his age should be fifty-five or sixty.” I must have looked confused, because he continued, “We'll give him medicine to take, but you should make his funeral arrangements now. I will check in his room in a few minutes.” He left me standing by the empty emergency room bed. I picked up Warren's jacket and hat.
With directions from a nurse, I found the elevator at the south end of the emergency room. I made my way up to the cardiac ward, found Warren's room. Warren was already there, still sedated from the operation. The duty nurse, a big man in green scrubs, arranged the intravenous stand and all the bedside monitors and accoutrements. He waved cheerily at me, to take a seat by the window. I sat. I looked out the window, down at the graveyard on the other side of the street, where my car was parked. I recognized that graveyard from books Warren and I had read. I was staring down at the back of Walt Whitman's tomb.
The nurse came over to the window and drew the blinds. He grinned at me. “I'm Wayne.” He stuck out his hand and I reached back and shook it. “They said it was touch and go, but Mr. Davy made it through the operation. He's still sedated, but you can stay here until he wakes. It's after visiting hours, so you'll have to go home right after. I'll be back in a few minutes.” With that, Wayne sailed out into the hallway.
I looked across the room at Warren in the hospital bed. Warren is a short man, barely five foot four, but sunken down into that big bed, with tubes and wires hanging over him and on him, for the first time in all our thirty-five years together, Warren seemed tiny and helpless and old. I looked away, down at Whitman's tomb, willing myself not to weep.
After a while, the doctor entered the room with Wayne right behind him. The doctor checked the monitors without reacting to what he saw there, took a quick look at the intravenous line, then picked up the clipboard hanging on the foot of the bed and made a note. He nodded at me, and left.
Wayne waited a moment, then motioned for me to look at one of the monitors by Warren's bed. “This is his blood oxygenation level”—the number, ninety-four, meant nothing to me— “and this is his blood pressure.” It read one-sixty-three over one hundred. I knew what that meant. Nurse Wayne could read my face. “Yes, it's high, but it's better than it was. He was in danger of having a stroke when they brought him in. And there's an arrhythmia, too. His heart could have stopped without warning. Mr. Davy is a very lucky man. They'll give him medication that should bring his blood pressure down some more.” Dazed, I shook my head.
While we stood there, Warren's eyes blinked a few times and then he looked at me. “Where am I?”
“In the hospital,” I told him.
Wayne added, “We need to keep you a day or two to make sure you'll be okay.” Warren nodded weakly.
Gently, I folded my right hand around Warren's left hand where it lay beside him on the bed. “They say I have to go home tonight, but I'll come back tomorrow with your toothbrush and some clean clothes.”
“And you need to lock up the barn.”
I looked at him, at a loss.
“Can't leave it open. Bring me my key ring off my pants.”
Wayne was on it—he lifted Warren's jeans off a stand by the bathroom door and brought them over to me. I unhooked the big ring of keys Warren always keeps on a belt loop on the right side. I handed the pants back to Wayne to re-hang and gently handed the key ring to Warren. He lay the ring of keys on his chest and flicked through them, one-by-one. After a few keys he stopped. “This one. Make sure you use this one!”
“I promise.” I looked closely at the key, then hooked the key ring to a loop on my own jeans. “I'll do that first thing when I get home.”
Nurse Wayne, standing by the door, raised his eyebrow at me. I told Warren, “I have to go now; they won't let me stay overnight.” Warren nodded. I kept on, “Try to rest and let the medicine do its work. Do what they tell you.” To his credit—or maybe a sign of just how under the weather he felt—he didn't interrupt me.
I cupped Warren's hand one more time. “I'll be back first thing in the morning.” He nodded. I raised his hand and kissed it. I pulled myself away, went through the door, down the hall to the elevator and back out through the emergency room to my car next to the graveyard fence.
When I reached the car, I found a parking ticket tucked under the driver's windshield wiper. I pulled it out, opened the door and got in. I dropped the ticket on the passenger's—Warren's—seat. I burst into a storm of weeping.
All the twelve miles home, I drove down Haddon Avenue, screaming and wailing and hitting the steering wheel, lucky not to be seen by a cop, luckier still not to hit another driver or be hit. The streetlights all formed star patterns; storefronts melted into blinding blurs.
Somehow, I found my way home, parked the car, made my way in darkness back to the barn, and closed the door. I put the key into the heavy round lock hanging from the hasp, closed the hasp, and locked it. I let the key ring hang from my belt and I stumbled to our back door. I went inside. I staggered into the living room, hyperventilating. I called Mike for comfort.
We'd met Mike Zuber twenty years earlier, in the 1990s. In those days, the internet was still new. In offices, our computers could connect through large-area networks as we found new ways to quicken communication and expand our reach. At home, we connected to the 'net with a series of progressively faster modems, finding chat-driven “bulletin boards” with common interests: programming languages, tv shows, gardening, pornography. Mike and I met through a bulletin board service for “bears,” gay men who admire all men hirsute.
We had much in common. There was the bear thing, of course. We both had jobs where we programmed for the new world wide web and proselytized for its business use to skeptical superiors. We both sang. Mike led the bass section in his church choir in Summit Hill, near Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, and I sang baritone in a local barbershop chorus here in southern New Jersey.
I learned that Mike not only knew about my favorite cartoonist, Tim Barela, whose comic, “Leonard and Larry,” chronicled gay married life for me all through the 1980s and '90s, but that Mike and Tim were friends from way back. Mike admired the comics Tim drew for biker magazines long before either of them came out, and began corresponding with him then, bonding over their shared passions for motorcycles and classical music. When Mike started coming to terms with being gay himself, and discovered that his friend was drawing “Leonard and Larry,” Mike biked out to Temecula in California to meet Tim in person. Tim drew Mike an elaborate map of the wonders of gay San Francisco.
After Mike and I were chatting online for about a year, Mike's internet advocacy at work won him a transfer to the Social Security office in Baltimore, training other employees. In his forties then, Mike left his parents' house for the first time, finding himself an apartment out by the beltway. For the first time in his life, Mike could leave his closet behind. I traveled down to Baltimore for the housewarming and to meet him in person.
Mike was not a pretty man. With a beard like Rasputin, heavy cheekbones, curly brown-black hair flaring out from his ponytail, and permanent bags under his eyes, Mike looked part were-creature. Years of slouching in a motorcycle seat on long-haul trips, and decades of earning his living as a counselor at the local Social Security office in coal country in Pennsylvania, left him with permanently slumped shoulders and a thickened middle that exercise could never quite thin.
But above his raccoon mask, Mike's eyes gleamed with fiery intellect, and then there was his voice: a natural bass, deepened by years of cigarette smoking. When Mike spoke, even when he spoke softly, his voice would vibrate the floor beneath your feet. His voice anchored his local church choir. With his psychology degree, and with his years helping people pick their way through the government's benefits plans, Mike always knew the right words to say with that voice. Our mutual friend John and I often spoke about Mike's astonishing voice, its almost hypnotic quality of reassurance, the way that men and women fell in love with Mike for the way words left his mouth.
For his part, Mike fell in love easily and often. It was easy to see when he did: his face softened, his cheeks grew less gaunt and his lips grew fuller. The light in Mike's eyes would deepen and become more liquid as his brown eyes turned almost gold. The first time he opened the door to his apartment to me, I marveled to watch Mike fall in love with me.
When Mike met Warren, and Warren told Mike about his times farming and serving in the army in Germany and living in the Pine Barrens, Mike fell in love with Warren, too. And that's how it was with our friends John and Joe—John, the genius radio engineer, and John's partner Joe, the giant, gentle Wiccan. Mike adored them, and they both returned Mike's love with fierce devotion; everyone Mike fell in love with, did. Going to a gay bar with Mike was like participating in the peace ceremony after communion, but with black leather chaps and bear hugs.
When one of Mike's buddies from the bulletin boards, another Joe, lost everything he had in the floods from Hurricane Katrina, Mike paid to bring him to Philadelphia, helped him find housing, and recruited all of his friends around town to help New Orleans Joe get settled and find work.
In 2008, when nationwide marriage equality started to look like it had a chance of becoming real if we all pushed hard enough, NoLa Joe joined Mike, along with John and his Joe—who had already married in Massachusetts—and Warren and me for the march around Philadelphia's City Hall. Later on, when Warren and I went to Lambertville for our civil union, Mike and his new boyfriend Rick stood witness for us.
Mike was the kindest man I've ever met. Warren and I are both, at core, self-centered. Part of why we work together so well is that we give each other plenty of room to be king of our own domains. Coming out gay in the 1970s required arrogance, a self-righteous sense that we deserve to live our lives in sunlight. Warren and I both sacrificed ties to friends, work, and family in our shared determination to be together, and to tear down the closets they built to contain us.
Mike was a more dutiful son. The eldest of three children, unmarried, he was the one who stayed home when his brother and sister married, trapped by his sense of duty and a family closet of iron. His time in Baltimore proved to be only a two-year interlude. When his father fell ill with the black lung that would eventually kill him, Mike returned home, to nurse first one parent, then the other, to ease their passage from the world. He only came out of the closet in his own home once they were gone.
I pushed in the digits for Mike's number. Gasping, I heard it ring, then Mike's honeyed voice: “Hello?”
I bawled into the phone. For nearly an hour, Mike listened to me scream out all my fear about losing Warren, about being alone, about how to cope. I told him about how my life was before Warren, how I never wanted to go back to that again.
With every fresh outburst, Mike provided words of comfort, like a parent or a priest, his instinct for what to say and what to leave unsaid as certain as always, as I knew it would be. Slowly, gently, Mike coaxed me to bring my sobbing under control.
When I was mostly recovered, when I was mumbling thanks to him for listening, Mike said, “You need to keep it together. If you go on this way, you'll make yourself sick, and then you won't be any help to Warren at all.”
I gulped and said, “I know. I know.”
Mike said, “Warren will be okay. I know it.”
Mike spent the night before New Year's Eve at Rick's place over in Stroudsburg. A heavy snow hit Pennsylvania overnight. Shoveling the sidewalk in front of Rick's house, Mike felt chest pains, went inside to get warm, and died.
We didn't make it to Mike's wake the following week. Travel to the mountains of Pennsylvania was now out of the question for Warren, and I was already feeling the muscle pain and fatigue that would soon render me helpless. John made it his business to track down the notice, and he went. His Joe was stuck ill at home, too, but NoLa Joe went with him.
Mike's sister and her husband had taken charge of the funeral arrangements and prepared the family house for sale. Members of Mike's local motorcycle club attended the wake to drink and pay their respects. Members of the church choir were there. Except for John and NoLa Joe, none of Mike's other gay friends were there—his family had never acknowledged knowing that Mike was gay and they didn't notify anyone outside Summit Hill. Even Rick was kept away. John and NoLa Joe did their best to blend in and stayed only a little while.
When John came home and spread the word on social media, a surprise. We already knew that Mike was well loved, but learning just how many lives he'd touched was astonishing, how many people responded to the news with sorrow, and how many told us stories of how Mike helped them. By the time Mike moved from Baltimore back to Summit Hill, his internet connections had expanded to include people from all over the world. For weeks after the funeral, scores of people contacted both John and me by email and internet post, to tell us how they'd met Mike, what they shared with him, and all the ways he'd made their lives better. Many said they were shocked to learn he had died.
During those weeks, Warren's health continued to improve. Our new normal consisted of monitoring his blood pressure obsessively. The spikes still occurred, but they happened less often and did not rise as high. Warren learned how to tell when his body was warning him to take it easy and when it needed him to be active. Warren proved to be an obedient patient and the medications did their part. Slowly, Warren returned to his garden, working slowly and carefully, as he restored his body.
I hovered over Warren, made sure he took his medicines, took him to the doctors to get the dosages adjusted, watched over him as he checked his blood pressure three, four, five times a day. Every night I woke in the middle of the night, listening in the dark for his breathing. Each week that passed, I grew more tired, dragging myself in to work, then home.
While Warren's health improved, my muscles began to hurt. My legs cramped every night, further ruining my sleep. My right arm, in particular, began to hurt whenever I moved it too far either up or down. I called in sick to work.
At the beginning of February, when I couldn't take the pain any longer, I went to back to Dr. Vick, who examined me quickly and prescribed Percocet, one tablet when I got home, one the next morning. I was to call him if the pain didn't subside. On the drive home, I fought falling asleep at the wheel. Once home, I took the capsule, and went right to bed.
The next morning, I awoke on fire. Trying to get out of bed, my knees locked like frozen hinges. I could not stand—balance was completely gone. I begged Warren to call 911 and within half an hour, EMTs took me downstairs and carried me off for nine days paralyzed in the hospital, two weeks more of rehab in the nursing home, and then another six weeks of intravenous antibiotics at home.
I open my eyes to see Warren still in the chair, looking out the window. The air beyond is darker now, that gray look that says snow is on its way. I say, “Hi, Bear-Bear.”
Warren looks over to me. “You were dozing. I didn't want to wake you up.”
“Thanks. It's good to be able to sleep again.” I sit up a little straighter, wincing just a little as I push against the mattress with my hands and elbows.
Warren studies me a moment. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I say, then I half-point out the window. “You need to get going. It's going to snow. I don't want you on the road right now when it's coming down.”
“I know. I still have some time. I'll be all right.” Warren stands, picks up his bandana from the end table and knots it around his neck. His pulls his watch cap down over his head and snaps his denim jacket closed. He leans in close to kiss me on the forehead, and straightens up, squaring his shoulders before he walks to the door. Opening the door, he turns back to waggle fingers at me. “I'll be back tomorrow. Same time.”
I wave back. “I'll be here.” He grins and disappears behind the door.
A while later, I'm watching TV, when I look over to the window. Snow is coming down now, into the little courtyard formed by the three wings of this building. Lights mounted to the eaves shine out into the snow. They cast a blue light that makes the flakes behind the glass whirl like a snow globe, or like a million stars falling from the sky.
David Milley's work has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Christopher Street, RFD, Feral, and Bay Windows. David lives in New Jersey with his husband and partner of forty-six years, Warren Davy, who's worked as a farmer, woodcutter, nurseryman, auctioneer, beekeeper, and cook. These days, Warren gardens and keeps honeybees. David walks and writes.