Waterloo Bridge

If you set your sights on certain things, say, the Van Clyburn Competition or the Nobel Prize in Physics, you've got to get an early start.  That's why I got in on the ground floor of Loss.  Loss is my thing.  It has been my thing so long that I kind of lost track of my first loss experience.  Even in the womb I may have sensed that things were not right.  At any rate, when it comes to life taking away, I am your man.  Which is why I'm cautious about my own reaction to Marlou's cancer.  Her latest news is, relatively speaking, on the positive side.  Chemotherapy is holding back her body's cellular terrorism the way a dam holds back a lake.  Sure, a little something goes over the spillway.  That's to be expected.  But as one of her surgeons observed, these days cancer, even serious forms, is beginning to look more like a long-term, chronic disease.

The problem is that for those of us who easily go into loss mode, it is hard to say what's happening, as opposed to what was happening...and whether what feels like loss is maybe just a reminder of loss.  A loss leader, as it were.  Which leads me back, the way things do these days, to London, 1969.

I had relatives who lived close to Norland Square, and I saw a lot of them, and they saw a lot of me, and surely it was time I had a life.  Hanging out with middle-aged people...well, there was only so much of this anyone could take.  It seemed that my youth had vanished.  One minute I was listening to the best of the San Francisco bands roaring across the Berkeley campus lunch hour.  The next minute I was spending evenings of discussion and recollection, interspersed with moments of arch humor, in the company of German Jewish refugees who wouldn't know a Fender from, well, a fender.

So I took an evening off.  That is to say, one Saturday I decided to head for the Old Vic.  It was a good place for a young guy, the Old Vic, in those days home of the National Theatre.  I must have attended a matinée, for the play, "The National Health" by Peter Nichols, was out before dinner time.  In retrospect, this was an adventurous choice.  The drama dealt with the health of British society.  The anecdotal workings of the medical system symbolized something larger, we were to believe.  I did believe.  For vibrancy and for clarity, both of voice and of purpose, British actors are hard to beat.

Nichols' play spans several modes.  There's the main scene, a large, drafty Victorian hospital ward, all patients in gowns and metal beds, with an ambisexual orderly, played by Jim Dale, who sees through everything.  There are soap opera vignettes with campy spoofing of the Dr. Kildare genre, reminding us of the romantic and shallow clichés embodied in doctors and nurses...these scenes in an overlit cartoon frame, played downstage and close to the audience.  I could not grasp some of the British social context, but it was an adult play about people with adult lives, and that was enough.  I did not have an adult life, it seemed.

This knowledge gathered and acquired weight as I began the trek home.  My crutch could carry me remarkable distances in those days.  Still, I could feel myself tiring and knew that the 12 London Transport bus would be the better course.  No walking home from the tube station...but dropped right at Norland Square.  That's why I had set out for Waterloo Bridge.  It was November.  Guy Faulk's Day, the 5th, had come and gone.  In America, people were just about to celebrate Thanksgiving.  It seemed terribly sad now to be so far from home, so far from having a girlfriend and having money and having a career.  And so cold.  The wind whipped off the Thames in sudden wet gusts.  The bridge seemed to be receding.  My crutch clicked, my hip twisted, my paralyzed leg hit the stone footpath, the good leg planting itself.  Then again.  Taxis, warm and full of people who could afford them, rattled by, spewing diesel.  The gusts became a wind, steady and piercing.  People scurried along.  Even the British knew better than to linger in such weather.  A few muttered 'mind how you go' as they passed, heads bent, mufflers pulled tight.

The cold and the sadness, each massive in its way, pushed me down and down into the grimy pavement.  There was no stopping, and no place to stop.  For the first time, I could see a certain risk to these London crutch adventures.  One could run out of steam, lose energy and need to sit down.  Yet there would be no place to sit.  A shiver of something other than cold moved through me.  Click and twist and click and twist.  I was making progress of a sort.  The bridge was nearer.  It loomed, dark and arching over the sinister Thames.  It did not matter.  None of this mattered, the street, the cold, the time-to-bus-stop calculation.  Things had run down and run out, and this is what it came to, crippled, options scant and, if one could give it a name, homeless.  

The force of this, a sadness so crushing and absolute, slowed me or slowed something in me to a virtual standstill.  Worse, I was not standing still, but limping, pathetically, grotesquely, toward a bus.  People gave up for a reason.  They came to a crossroads without roads, and they reasoned.  A suicide, or a logical conclusion to a certain array of forces.  Which did not feel so bad.  I had heard stories, after all...in the hospital, the real not-on-stage hospital in California, the one I had hobbled out of a less than a year before.  For some, it wasn't worth it.  They had decided.  Made a decision that, I learned much later, was the leading cause of death among those who survived spinal-cord injuries, within the first five years.

I stumbled forward, blind and mechanical.  There was no reason, as there was no future.  People and things and lives went on, because they went on.  Because they had to get to a bus stop, the apparent goal, empty but there.  A white post down the highway.  Up the steps, stone and sooty and London.  Up and up, and at the top nothing but the cold blast of winter's rehearsal on exposed parapet.  Traffic grinding, passengers huddling, something like the spirit of the play...life failing, falling so short of expectations, and yet worthy of acknowledging, in a three-hour effort, that there was continuance.

I found a place against the bridge wall and waited.  An elderly woman, probably about 40, clutched at her coat and murmured in Cockney, 'not a night for you, love, is it?'  This was becoming irritating, one particular British turn of phrase.  Bit pricey, isn't it?  Lost the race, hasn't he?  Shouldn't be here, should we?  Better off dead, aren't we?  Statements, asked us questions with implied agreement.  Presumptuous, that's what it was.  I barely nodded at the woman.  Where was the 12?  Buses crept over the bridge, one after the next, and finally there was this one, mine...with the conductor ringing the bell to keep going.  The early Saturday evening bus was jammed with passengers heading for the West End just over the river.  And another, this one slowing and stopping, 12 Harlesden.  The woman appeared beside me, grabbing my elbow in Cockney, but lots of 'there, dearie' and 'mind how you go.'  Thank you, I said, it's not necessary.  The latter, I would learn, is a form of politesse among the British, sailing as such expressions do, through one brain cell and out the other.

Inside, the bus was remarkably warm.  A man sitting on one of the benches facing opposite at the end of the double-decker rose and offered his seat.  This always happened.  I had grown used to it, perhaps too used to it.  On this occasion, I managed to squeak out a thanks and collapsed onto the hard upholstery.  Passengers were still struggling aboard, and somewhere to my right someone was talking loudly.  

'A bloody cunt is what you are.'  

The words landed harsh.  I tried to block them out.

'You close your gob, mister.'  The London Transport conductor yelled down the aisle.  She was a large West Indian woman, who stood just behind the driver's perch, taking coins and cranking out flimsy cash-register-style tickets.

'Shit is what you are, bloody shit.'

I was too exhausted to look.  Maybe all this would end.

'A right shitty cunt.  Fucking shitty.'

Everyone was looking now.  He was in a forward-facing seat, head lolling just enough to signal inebriation.  Scents of alcohol, sweat, grime all rising in a familiar London Transport crescendo.  The bus had stopped and not started.  We were sitting in the night, in the cold, on Waterloo Bridge.  I leaned my head against the stainless-steel grip pole.  

'That will do with your F's and you C's.'  The conductor heaved herself off the bus and disappeared.  The bus idled.  

The driver stepped aboard.

'That's it mate.  Out.'

'Fuck off.'

The driver, jacketless and in his white shirt, seized the man by his lapels.  Pulled from his seat, the passenger seemed confused, all his energies working to comprehend rather than to fight.  He growled incomprehensibly, face flushed, body half floppy.  The driver pushed him halfway down the aisle.  The man stumbled the rest.  At the step, the driver dragged him to the pavement and flung him against the wall of the bridge.  

The bus started to move.  Passengers started to murmur.  The lights of Westminster came at us.  Things jiggled and warmed and flung about in the familiar way of double-decker buses making a turn.  I had made a turn myself.  It was cold out there.  It was warm in here.  When the bus stopped, my room with its heat flaming blue from the North Thames Gas Board would be a few minutes away.  Sometimes a few minutes was all we needed.