Cast the First Stone by Chester Himes Page B

into the bathroom while I was bathing and said he’d wash my back. I let him. He said his name was Harry. I’d been in too many hospitals to be nurse-shy, and I didn’t know then that this was something else.
    They served our supper on bed trays. There were two diets, the solid which was No. 1, and the liquid which was No. 2. I had the solid diet. It consisted of milk (or coffee), vegetable soup, bread and butter, steak, fried potatoes and a slice of pie. No wonder everyone tries to get into the hospital, I thought.
    That night the paper boy brought me my toothbrush, paste, soap and towel, my bathrobe and some Bull Durham which Hunky had sent me. Later on the magazine man brought a new toothbrush, a new tube of tooth paste, a new bar of soap, a new towel, and another bathrobe which Mal sent me. With my belly full of steak, newspapers and magazines to read, plenty good service, two fine friends, I felt solid good. I could do my time there, I thought. I could lie up there without moving and be satisfied for twenty years.
    At six o’clock, when the shift changed, the day nurses donned their uniform coats and took a brisk walk about the yard, grouping off in two and threes. They had yard privileges. That night Book-me slipped over from A ward to visit me. He gave me hell about putting all those names on that kite. I gave him some Bull Durham and tooth paste and loaned him one of the robes. That mellowed him.
    Later that night I found out why Tino had put me in the hospital so readily. He was trying to make me. Before the week was out all of them had tried. Even the colored porters. I’d been so mad so long it had begun getting funny by then.
    They had a system. They’d take a new convict, if he was young and good-looking, feed him well and keep him there until he was too grateful to refuse. “It’s nothing to it,” they’d argue. “Everybody does it.” There was a song that went: “Slugs do it, bugs do it, even funny looking mugs in jugs do it,” or at least that was the way they had it. They had it all worked out. If one couldn’t succeed, another would try. Then, after the first one made him, they’d all have him.
    The whole hospital setup was a stinking, grafting racket. The doctor came around once a day. If there wasn’t anything wrong with a guy whom the nurses wanted to hold they’d chart him with a temperature. The doctor knew about it, but he didn’t care.
    They charged daily rentals to the big shots and sold the No. 1 diet, drugs and medicines. Every night there was a big poker game in the t.b. ward with hundreds of dollars in it. Sometimes the nurses played high-stake bridge on the porch downstairs. Everyone was either a wolf or a fag. The wolf is the so-called male of the species, a rare and almost obsolete animal. The fag is the female. And there were those who did not want to be associated with the fags, but were not actually wolves, who were loosely classified as wolverines, which was what most of the wolves were when it came to the test.
    Everyone who worked in the hospital made money. Each had his own racket. They didn’t make any money off me. I fell out with everyone except the supervisor, Tino, who had turned out to be a pretty good egg when he found out he couldn’t make me. A lot of guys would have tried to give me a tough way to go. But he didn’t ride me. He even insisted that I remain there when, in a huff one morning, I demanded my clothes and said I was getting the hell out of that whorehouse before I knocked out somebody’s teeth. He said Gout would put me in the soup company but that if I stayed a couple or three weeks longer I could probably get back in school.
    I didn’t fall out with the cute little nurse, Harry, either. He was neither a wolf nor a wolverine but just a pleasant bitch who had a crush on me. He made it very pleasant, not sexually of course, seeing that my bed was made with clean linen every day and rubbing me with alcohol and giving me eggnog with whiskey, and