I wait in the alley behind the nursing home in my battered van with its liver spots of rust. It’s like a getaway car, engine puffing and side doors wide open, ready to whisk a guy I’ll call Willie to his new apartment. He wants to make his final exit from the nursing home through the alley delivery door, quickly and quietly, before anyone asks questions.
Maybe slipping out the back adds to the drama for Willie. Maybe it feels more like tunneling out of the stalag–it isn’t nearly as much fun to just roll out the front door. Or maybe it’s necessary to sneak out. I’ve heard stories from friends in other cities who’ve made a hobby of springing folks in wheelchairs from nursing homes that when the nurses find out they call security. And then the guards say stuff like “You are not authorized to take this patient off the premises.”
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Sometimes it takes real elaborate schemes. One of the best tips I’ve heard for successful nursing-home liberation is to recruit some wholesome people who look like the types who like to take cripples on field trips. Maybe dress them in square-dancing clothes or something. And once you’re out, just don’t ever come back.
Willie checks in at the nurse’s station. “I’m taking some more stuff to my cousin’s house,” he says. That’s his cover for why he’s been packing up and moving out boxes lately. He told them he’s had too many things stolen, so he’s moving what’s left.
Willie’s had seven roommates in the nearly two years he’s been here. He never had a choice in the matter. They’d just move a new guy in with only a curtain between them. One pretty much lay in bed and blathered about how he could cure a woman of any disease she had by urinating on her and how he was going to “kill the niggers.” Another spoke only Polish and liked to urinate in garbage cans. They were all basically like that. Willie never had anything resembling a relationship with any of the men he’s shared a room with.
Willie unlocks the elevator and sends Mark down with the boxes. We go around to the other elevator. Willie pushes the button, and we hear the gears grinding in the shaft. “Sounds like a dying dragon,” he says.
Up on the 12th floor Mark slides a huge box to the end of the hall where Willie’s apartment is. It’s so heavy he can’t lift it. When he asks what’s in it, Willie says, “Nightmares. Missing medicine, wrong medicine, people going into the medicine cabinet, not even nurses.” Someday he’ll write a book, he says. Someday he’ll sue.
