The Zone

I once thought it would be cool to write a song for every kid who spent more than two weeks in the inpatient psych unit where I work. Not that I have time to do that, but there’s a crying need for some of these passionate stories to be told. These children are a force of nature and will not be denied.  Their parents or foster parents only bring them here when they explode and careen past the farthest imaginable limit of adult solutions.  The hospital oughta pay me to write songs, record them and then include the CD in the discharge packet. Right, that's gonna happen. As my dad always said, “wish in one hand and poop in the other and see which one gets full first.”

It's Christmas time on the unit and there’s a big tree all lit up in the dining/game/tv room. Even though it's a fake tree it looks cozy in there, and every time I walk by I feel the urge to go in and hang out with the kids while they're eating or cutting out snow flakes or otherwise attending to the glow. There’s a cardboard menorah too, but it pretty much gets short shrift, sitting by the fake fireplace next to the stockings.

I’m here late because this is my night to work in the ER. It’s dead, thank God; just a couple of stragglers, including one morbidly obese guy who got a psych eval. He was depressed and hungry. We gave him a box lunch and a list of local food pantries and sent him back out into the frigid night in his dungarees and orange hooded sweatshirt.

On these late night I feel a little disconnected here in China Town. When I first moved to Boston in 1980 this part of town was called “The Combat Zone”.  I remember coming here once or twice back then and it was scary enough that I steered clear. It was a hot bed of prostitution, alcohol and bad judgement. The oil and water cocktail of drunk-off-their-asses townies, college students and hard core street hustlers was always simmering, inviting each and everyone to exercise bad judgement of their own.  There’re a few old timers here who remember the regular influx of bruised and lacerated patients that used to pour through these ER doors on a Friday or Saturday night. The citizens of China Town banded together and squeezed the strip clubs and porno shops out of their neighborhood. I don't blame them because they had to live and raise families there, but I must admit I feel a twinge of regret at the loss of the wild dangerous place which used to incubate down here.

When my shift ended at midnight I rushed out into the icy cold, stepping carefully on the way to my car which was parked in the garage just over the Mass Pike. It is my custom on these nights is to catch the end of the Grateful Dead Hour on WUMB as I'm driving home.   It's all esoteric live recordings and in my predictably exhausted and dissociated state the music has direct access to the part of the brain which is best able to appreciate the tonal linguistics of the Dead. Garcia's emotive bell tones and assertive sixteenth note forays were a clarion call as  I drove up wrung-out Tremont Street, along the Roxbury line and cut up thru Jamaica Plain. A strong wind palpably buffeted my car.   More Christmas lights began to appear; a magnificent swatch of them reaching down from a church steeple, still lit even at this late hour, bouncing perilously. Blinking yellow lights and white icicles clusters swayed.  The Dead were hitting their stride in a space jam which was like a mainline infusion from a concert hall long ago. The transitive nightfall of diamonds came around as I turned left past the monument; almost home.