I Watched an Old Man Drowning in Unconsciousness

            Late Monday morning, after breakfast I headed out to pay a visit to Tom Phillips, whom I’d heard was on his last legs and in the hospital just down the street from me. I rode south on Dunn Avenue, even though it’s a one-way street going north. Whenever any cars were coming though I moved to the curb, got off and walked on the sidewalk. There weren’t very many cars. I was trying to find The Bickle Centre, which I’d thought the email told me was between King and Queen. I rode down to King but didn’t see it, so I rode back up. I saw some people standing in front of the residence that’s attached to the Catholic Church just south of Queen, so I rode up to them and asked if they knew where the Bickle Centre was. The guy hadn’t heard of that particular name but he told me that there were three small hospitals south of King and that one of them is a place for old people that are about to die.

            In front of the entrance to the driveway of the Bickle Centre was poor looking old man in a wheelchair. He looked at me and held out a red lighter towards me as he made clicking motions with his thumb and had a hopeful look on his face. I think he might have been a patient at the centre and his gesture might have been his way of asking for a forbidden cigarette.

            The Bickle Centre was entirely covered on the outside with orange tarp and several sections were clearly under construction. At first I wasn’t sure if the place was open at all but since the automatic door worked when I stepped in front of the electric eye, I figure it must be open after all. I locked my bike to a construction fence and went inside, where it obviously was open. I found out from reception that Tom’s room was 425, so I went up to the fourth floor. I walk in two directions following the numbers as they climbed to 25 but when I got to the room, Tom’s name wasn’t on the list of patients. I asked a staff member on his way into the room if Tom Phillips was there but he told me “413” so I walked back and found the one marked T. Phillips.

Despite the name on the door, when I walked in I still wasn’t sure if I had the right room.  I didn’t recognize the pale, flesh-wrapped skeleton on the bed as Tom Phillips at first. Sitting beside the bed was a grey haired woman that I didn’t recognize and she was talking to a nurse or doctor about the man on the bed. As I waited for them to finish I looked at the emaciated barely conscious man and he started to look more familiar, like a bad drawing of Tom Phillips. In fact, the horribly skinny old man in the bed looked very much like someone that Tom would have enjoyed painting, especially from a foreshortened perspective.

When the nurse or doctor left I introduced myself to the lady at the bedside. I found out that her name is Phyllis and she’s a long time friend and painting buddy of Tom. They spent many a day painting together at Allen Gardens and she told me they spoke on the phone almost every day. I said “Hi Tom!” and Phyllis called to him, “Wake up Tom! Your friend is here!” He did not seem like he was asleep but rather just below the surface of consciousness. He would raise his left arm high in the air from time to time and it really looked like a man that was trying futilely to swim upward to break the veneer over the top of insentience. He moved his right arm too but it didn’t have as much mobility because he was lying on his right side.

On Tom’s left leg was an orthopaedic boot and his foot was covered in purple bruises. I commented that it looked like his leg had not recovered from fall he’d had a few months before. Phyllis confirmed that he’d been at St Michael’s Hospital for most of that time. I had been at the studio on the morning that he fell and broke his leg and I recounted for Phyllis what had happened. The bookkeeper, Sol had come to ask Tom for a cheque and though Tom was having difficulty walking, he got up from his easel to go and get his chequebook, but his cane was on the other side of the room. He took a step and fell. The other members came to help him up. He got his cane and took about two more steps before he fell again and this time he either broke or fractured his leg. The paramedics came and took him to St Michaels. Phyllis spoke the name of that hospital with disgust and declared that it’s a filthy place.

I told Phyllis how back in the mid 80s I’d gone out to shop lawn sales in the Annex with Tom and he was walking so fast I could barely keep up with him.

I also told her that Tom had given my daughter and I a kitten about twenty years ago and it was only a year and a half ago that her grandkittens died of old age.

As we talked it seemed like Tom was possibly aware of us and was struggling to rise so he could break through and be part of the conversation. Perhaps the slow flailing of his seaweed strand of an arm was an attempt to signal us and say, “I’m here! Grab hold of me and pull me up!” The movements of his arm looked also a bit like someone making brush strokes. On of the nurses had commented to Phyllis that a day or so before she’d seen Tom drawing in the air in his sleep. Just a few days before my visit, Phyllis told me that Tom had been fully conscious and singing to the nurses. Phyllis told me that Tom had actually been at the Bickle Centre, three blocks away from me, for the last month. I felt disappointed because I could have visited him a few times while he was still conscious if I’d only known that he’d been there.

I left at around noon, telling Phyllis I’d be back at another time soon, although it looked to me like Tom was going to sink deeper into unconsciousness and he wouldn’t be back.

When I got home I couldn’t put off doing my laundry any longer, so I stuffed my bedding and clothes into two large President’s Choice cloth shopping bags and carried them on my handlebars to the Laundromat. While everything was washing I went home and did some dishes and listened to Beck’s “Stereopathetic Soul Manure”, which is one of my favourite of his albums that I’ve listened to so far and my track is “Satan Gave Me A Taco”: “Satan gave me a taco and it made me really sick / The chicken was all raw and the grease was mighty thick / The rice was all rancid and the beans were so hard / I was getting kind of dizzy from eating all the lard / There was aphids on the lettuce and I ate every one / and after I was done the salsa melted off my tongue … Some old lady came along and she thought I was a freak / so she beat me with her handbag till I could hardly speak / I was lying there naked, my body badly bruised / in a pool of my own blood, unconscious and confused / Well the cops came and got me and they threw me in their van / I woke up on the ceiling and I couldn’t find my hand / They took me to the judge, his eye’s a glowing red / The courtroom was filled with witches and the dead / Well the sheriff was a hellhound with fangs and claws / The prisoners were tied up and chained to the walls / The air was getting thick, the smoke was getting thicker / The judge read the verdict and said ‘Cut off his head!’ (Though I assume the rhyme is supposed to be ‘pecker’) / Well they placed me on the altar and then they raised the axe / My head was about to explode when I noticed the Marshall stacks / I noticed all the smoke machines, the cameras and the lights / and some guy with a microphone dancing in tights / and I noticed the crew and the band playing down below / and I realized I was in a rock video / So I went and joined the band and I went out on tour / I smoked a lot of heroin and passed out in manure / I made out with groupies, started fires backstage / I made a lot of money and I gave it all away / Well the band got killed so I started a solo career / and I won all the awards and I drank all the beer / I opened up a taco stand just to smell the smell / cooking with the devil while frying down in hell.”

In the late afternoon I took a bike ride. Just before leaving I went out on the deck to check the weather. My next roof neighbour Taro was sitting outside his apartment and he called out, “Beautiful day!” I told him I was about to take my bicycle out and asked if he thought just my tank top would be okay, He responded, “Beautiful!” I left with only the undershirt on but actually it was almost too chilly for just that. It was okay once I got moving though. I managed to pass everybody without getting passed all the way out to Donlands. Well, that’s not entirely true. A woman passed me just after the light at Bay because she hadn’t had to stop, but I caught up with her just before Yonge where neither of us could get past the cars in front of us. She commented that it was a tight squeeze and told me to go ahead of her. Just before Donlands a guy did pass me though maybe I had unconsciously slowed down because that was as far as I wanted to go. I went down Yonge to Queen and then home.

That night I watched an Alfred Hitchcock Hour teleplay about a bald, bespectacled computer technician named Walter Mills. This was in 1965 before tech nerds became sexy. He is engaged to a young woman that works for the same company but she breaks it off and goes on a rant about him being the least interesting and the most ordinary man on the planet, who never does anything different from one day to the next.

On his lunch hour Walter stops into a wig shop and enquires “for a friend” about the price of a real hair toupee. The salesman, sensing that it’s really for Walter, takes him in the back and fits him with not only a toupee but also a Mitch Miller style beard. Walter is transformed. He looks and feels like an entirely different person. While wearing the beard he creates the persona of Philip Marshall. Later in a bar he hears a couple, Noreen and Curly arguing about boats and, suddenly full of confidence, Philip pretends that he is an expert who can settle their dispute, as he has sailed all around the world several times. Noreen is impressed with Philip and tells Curly to get lost. Noreen becomes Philip’s girlfriend and he buys a boat to take her sailing, arranging with the marina owner for him to help Philip so he doesn’t look like he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Meanwhile Walter’s landlady sees Philip come into his place and thinks two people are cheating her by paying rent for one. Walter moves out and gets a room as Philip, this time making sure the new landlady understands that Walter is a business associate that will be visiting regularly.

While leaving Noreen’s place one night Philip is confronted by Curly, who calls him “Walter” and threatens to tell Noreen what he knows unless Philip uses his bought to help him hide some stolen jewellery. Philip agrees and they go out in the boat to a mooring from which Curly’s bag is anchored.
            Walter’s ex-landlady tracks down Philip’s landlady because she is looking for the rent that she thinks Philip owes her. They go to Philip’s room where she sees nothing but Walter’s clothing. Philip comes home to find both landladies and the cops waiting for him. He is accused of having murdered Walter and so he has to reveal that Philip and Walter are the same person.

Walter then goes to Noreen and reveals that he is Philip. He begins to leave but she stops him and kisses him, saying she doesn’t care. He tells her about Curly’s blackmailing of him and she advises him to go and pull up the bag of jewellery then moor it somewhere else. When he does so the cops arrive on a tip from Noreen. It turns out that there were no jewels but rather a dead body and her and Curly had been scamming him from the start.
            It seemed kind of a rip-off for Walter, considering that he was innocent of murder, but I guess the lesson is don’t wear a toupee and a fake beard.