The Music's Over

Trauma Bay #4 is in high gear. At least fifteen hospital staff, from blue scrubbed techs and nurses to white coated residents and medical students, cluster in close quarters around a patient who appears to be unconscious. From my vantage point at the patient’s feet all I can see is a spray of tubes sprouting from beyond a neck brace which conceals her face. I have nonetheless a stellar view her bare feet one of which sports a nasty little bandage wrapped around a blackened middle toe.

Until recently this hospital wasn’t an officially designated trauma destination for city’s ceaseless round of wailing ambulances, but that changed a few months ago and now my pager goes off at all hours signaling the imminent arrival of another victim. The designated recorder is seated at a stainless steel table and taking note of each unfolding event. When I approach him he nods towards the attendance book and I sign on the social work line. My presence, although nominally required, is irrelevant. Emergency medical care is being delivered primarily by a tall athletic looking nurse in his late twenties who is deftly inserting tubes, hooking up electrical feeds and calling out readings, blood pressure, O2 sats, heart rates. Standing at the patient’s head is another nurse who’s job is to operate a suction tube which vacuums the patient’s mouth. “There’s blood in her mouth” she calls out. The recording nurse duly notes this fact, which I verify with a glance at the reddening coiled clear tubing running off the back of the vacuum. Now amidst the turmoil the recorder is interviewing the ambulance driver and I edge closer to eavesdrop. This patient, I learn, is a 73 year old woman who had fallen backwards and hit her head on concrete. Apparently there was a witness to the fall, but no one’s exactly sure who that was. Standing beside me is a bald, 60 something man, one of the few people besides myself who is not dressed in hospital attire. He is swabbing the top of his head with a white towel. I realize, looking past him out the ambulance bay doors, that it's raining cats and dogs; an early summer storm has blown up out of nowhere.

“Squeeze my hand” says the resident. To my surprise the patient squeezes. I edge closer and am able to get a better look at the patient’s facial features. She doesn’t look as old as I had expected. The team now rolls the patient over onto her stomach, "on my count",the whole scene reminiscent of ER. The examining doctor scrutinizes her backside and calls for lube. “No tone”. The recorder enters it into the record. An x-ray is pending and the team repairs to the greater ED to gather around a computer monitor and review the MRI. The bald man, his head now dry, takes a cursory look at the film. His shirt is soaked through and I overhear his remark to one of the residents that the storm "came up at exactly the wrong time.” I ask him what his role is and he tells me he’s the attending surgeon. Moments later he says, to the ED Attending, “you’re all set?” I didn’t hear her answer but I must have missed a nod because now he’s heading out the ambulance bay doors. The rain appears to have stopped.

Hours later in my Thursday night rite of passage I escape from my 13 hour day out the back exit onto Tremont St. and step wide eyed into the Dionysian extrusion of the boozy Boston theatre/club district. Everywhere scantily clad twenty something girls with legs up to here strut, even in the freezing perils of the season, though tonight it’s balmy and they're all buoyant. Halfway across the busy street I hear the sound of live rock and roll, Light My Fire, emanating from the Wilbur Theatre. I dodge a car, retrace my steps and approach the entrance to the theatre from which bashing of cymbals and whining organ beckon. Still wearing my hospital photo ID around my neck I walk thru the wide open doors. An usher stationed at the front desk glances up but seems uninterested. I avoid eye contact, sprint furtively up the stairs, pull aside heavy red velvet curtains and step into the humid darkness of the balcony.

Below me on a brightly lit stage stand The Doors, or at least half the Doors: Ray Manzarek and Robbie Krieger. The band consists of Manzarek, Krieger, as well as a bass player (Ray’s left hand’s been relieved of its metronomic task), drums and some poor singer saddled with the job of standing in for Jim Morrison. I’ve arrived just as “Jim” is finishing the chorus leading up to the epic organ/guitar solo, the one they used to cut short whenever the song got played on Top 40 radio stations. The crowd is on it’s feet. I deduce that this must be the last song of the evening. I’d seen this concert advertised on billboards for weeks as I walked past the Wilbur on my way to and from work. I had halfway thought of attending, but then thought better. I have indelible memories of seeing The Doors play in 1968 and had recently engaged in an argument with my band mates, all a good 10 years younger than me, who couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. I’d tried half heartedly to convince them of the Doors greatness, then went home afterwards and listened to some of their music. Much of it sounded lifeless and dated and for a moment I doubted myself, but only for a moment. If the record was all you had to go on it requires a willingness to let go to stand a chance in hell of being touched by the essence of the Doors. Jim Morrison walked on a high wire from which he soon fell, but for a couple of years their music lived in a place that all poets and musicians reach for.

Ray Manzarek’s iconic organ solo is underway. My eyes are adjusting to the light now and I look down onto the tops of the heads of what I’m assuming are a happy crowd of baby boomers. Since it’s Thursday night I’m guessing most have to get home right after the show, but for the moment its “Rock and Roll!” Ray’s playing his solo note for note from the record, but it lacks the attack and urgency of the original. He sounds like a guy in a cover band. Now he's banging on the keyboard with his booted foot, then pointing zealously at the audience, who go wild, and then over to Robbie. Krieger does pretty much the same, evolving his original solo into some Van Halen-like pyrotechnics before passing it back to the sad “Jim” to bring it home. As Dylan said, "there’s nothing in here moving." I turn, part the velvet curtain, descend the stairs and walk back outside into the alcohol fueled, hyper-sexualized, theatre district night.