We’re pleased to unveil DCQ’s new “Features” section, future home for an untold number of award-winning investigative articles, fictional and fact-based short stories, and longer nonsensical expositions. We’ll also post pieces that had previously been published exclusively in our print editions. Case in point: “These are Hospitals,” the first in a multi-part series chronicling one man’s exploration of public health care facilities in urban America. The story ran in our Preview Issue; to cop a copy, join us next Friday at a club in the city made famous by the Bluth Family Banana Stand.
SAN FRANCISCO - A block from City Hall, the Tom Waddell Health Center lies hidden in an alley that houses a diverse and entertaining troupe of homeless people who, lacking a convenient alternative, have no qualms with urinating on your car tire if you pick the wrong spot. The walk from my apartment takes me through Civic Center and past the $400,000 gilded dome of the Hall, cutting through groups of bureaucratic suits returning from schmoozy lunch hours. The sun is shining. Pigeons are flapping. Activists with bullhorns are protesting something. Everything’s right as rain.
Thirty seconds later, I’m straining to find a comfortable position in a scratched plastic chair in the clinic’s cramped, L-shaped waiting room. Six or seven others wait for their numbers to be called, each holding a paper slip retrieved the butcher-counter number dispenser on the wall. Everyone’s black except for me and a gaunt man sitting across from me. He pulls out a stack of wrinkled napkins as he brushes a few long strands of wiry hair from his face.
“Does anyone mind if I change the paper in my shoe?” he announces.
Nobody seems to notice.
“Why paper in your shoe?” I ask, bewildered.
“I have problem feet,” he answers, pulling off a shoe and slowly pulling out a long trail of yellowed toilet paper. “Some people mind — that’s why I asked. Most don’t.”
“Hmm,” I respond.
That was that.
I fill out the registration forms and pass them through a smeared plastic window to one of the administrative workers. An hour and twenty minutes pass. There’s a little kid across from me, probably four or five. The man he’s with is talking loudly with a pal who just showed up. Everyone seems to know each other here. Eavesdropping, I gather that these two have a substantial history — they’re playing the catch-up game. Thus far, the conversation has centered on which friends are in jail, which are out on parole, and which are headed to court. They’re both cursing up a storm, albeit in a jovial manner. Still, there’s children and shit. I consider objecting, but my instincts tell me these fellows might know fellows who do bad things to fellows like me.
The party breaks up and, once again, the room is quiet, save for the low moans emanating from a withdrawing addict to my left. The woman twitches constantly, fiddles with a stack of documents, mutters to herself about a friend who done her wrong. Hazy light filters in through a thick, rectangular window, the kind, threaded internally with chicken wire, that is omnipresent in urban gymnasiums.
Another thirty minutes pass. Counting downward, the voice over the loudspeaker lethargically draws closer to my number. Just then, the clinic’s front door creaks open, and a moment later, a jittery, smiling man pops his head into the waiting room. He saunters into the cramped space, pulls a blue Nalgene bottle out of a filthy backpack, and begins filling it under the Alhambra machine in the corner.
“Nice little watering hole they got here,” he says to nobody in particular.
Nobody answers him. Nobody cares about his watering hole.
Impervious, he adds, “One thing when you come to this part of town is you always got fresh water.”
He throws the knapsack over his shoulder, clad in a ripped denim jacket, and walks out the way he came. I gather this is a routine stop along our cowboy’s daily Market Street bushwhack.
The loudspeaker crackles with more numbers. Eventually it says mine, and I follow a curt Asian nurse through corridors to an airy room with a steel surgical table in the middle. The doctor will be right in.
Twenty minutes pass, giving me time to study every corner of the space. There’s a large, angled skylight at the apex of the ceiling, thirty feet above me. The room must be forty feet long and twenty-five feet wide. The air is cold. So is the steel. Glancing at my watch uneasily, I grimly consider the types of surgeries that might have come to fruition on the table I now sat upon. Autopsies? Where the fuck is this doctor?
She arrives and, in the absence of a simple fucking hello, asks me to pull up my pant leg so she can look at my injured knee. It’s been hurting for six months, I explain. Rest hasn’t helped, nor has exercise.
Three hours after I first took my seat in the waiting room, Doc quickly fills out a small form and hands it over, referring me to San Francisco General Hospital for an X-ray a month out. Then she’s off, leaving as silently, as frigidly as she came.
Back in the waiting room, sick people are literally crying out for help. Meanwhile, a McCovey longball away, San Francisco’s anointed leaders spend taxpayer millions examining Golden Gate Bridge barrier designs intended to prevent people who actually want to die from achieving their goals.
This is…the San Francisco Public Health System.
