A nurse comes into the room to explain. The shouting man has taken a drug overdose, they really can't sedate him because they have no idea what drugs he's already taken. The nurse says the man's in restraints, down the hall, but we're all going to have to tolerate his shouting until he wears himself out.

Still, the man's shouting about gooks and kikes.

With each shout the dying son jerks a little, winces, and his mother stops singing. After a little while, a few automatic injections of morphine, the man's still shouting about demons and devils, and the Mom picks up her purse. She gets to her feet.

She goes to the door, and I follow.

She's giving up, I figure, heading back to the motel. To the airport. To Minnesota.

As we're going down the hospital hallway, the yelling gets louder, closer, until we're right outside the man's room. The door's half open, and inside is a curtain pulled shut around a hospital bed. The Mom goes in. She goes through the slit in the curtain.

The man's shouting, calling her a cunt. Telling her to get out.

I go to look, and the man's naked in bed, his hands and ankles buckled to the chrome bed rails with leather straps. He's huge, filling the whole mattress, and wrestles against the leather straps until every muscle pops up, huge with blood and veins, smooth with tattoos of snakes and women in bright red and blue. His face flush, he yells for the "fucking" nurse. She should "fucking get in here." His hands and ankles strapped down, he twists and fights. The way a fish arches and flops on hot sand. The inside of each arm is poked with IV needles. The skin scabbed from old injections.

The Mom sets her purse on the edge of his mattress. She says, "What pretty tattoos."

I remember that because it's the only thing she said. Then she takes a tissue out of her purse, an old, crumpled tissue.

You can't tell anyone about a naked man without getting to his penis and balls. They're the only part of him not fighting. And not covered with tattoos. His genitals are just red, wadded flesh in the nest of his black pubic hair.

At this point, I've been volunteering around hospitals since I was fourteen. Where I grew up, you had to perform several hundred hours of volunteer work to be confirmed in the Catholic Church. About the only place to do this was Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. Fourteen years old and I was cleaning delivery rooms. No rubber gloves, and I'm tossing out afterbirths. Washing coagulated blood out of stainless steel pans, I loved it. My other job in the hospital was dusting shelves in the pharmacy. A few years down the road and this would've been my dream job—me alone with this smorgasbord of painkillers—but for now, it was beyond boring.

Me, I thought I'd seen everything.