On sleepless nights it seems as though the sky will stay black forever, that it’s only sleep which makes the day come. I must have finally dozed for an hour or two, because suddenly my room was filled with light. Another splendid June morning, just the weather for telling old women with fractures that their beloved dogs were dead.

I had a friend from college, Steve Logan, who was a psychiatric social worker at Cook County Hospital. We used to work together a lot when I was with the PD—he evaluated some of my less socially acclimated clients. There was even a year when we thought we were in love. We couldn’t sustain it, but the memory of our affair warmed our friendship.

Since our work paths stopped crossing we only managed to get together a couple of times a year, but he would probably arrange for me to see Mrs. Frizell. I waited a long two hours until nine o’clock when I could decently try calling him.

Steve sounded pleased to hear from me and clicked his tongue consolingly over my tale of woe. He agreed to locate Mrs. Frizell and take me to see her if I’d meet him in half an hour—it was his day off and he was using it to take his children to the zoo.

I dressed in a hurry and snuck out without Mr. Contreras hearing me. I felt too flayed to tell him what had happened—and to listen to his reproaches.

Cook County Hospital lies on the near west side, just off the Lake Street el, between a VA hospital and Presbyterian-St. Luke’s. The latter is an enormous private hospital with the most modern of facilities and an on-going building program that threatens to swallow the surrounding community. Prez, as the locals call it, has no connection to the county hospital, except when their patients run out of money and have to be rolled down the street to be picked up by the taxpayers.

County had been put up around the turn of the century, when public buildings were supposed to look like Babylonian temples. Following its creation the public has declined further acts of generosity. We continue to put money into the county jail and courts, building ever bigger annexes to support ever more law enforcement, but the hospital languishes. Every six months or so the papers spread an alarm that the hospital will lose its accreditation—and its federal money—because the building is so far below code—but then the feds relent and the place continues to hiccup along. The fact that the operating rooms aren’t air-conditioned and the hospital has no sprinkler system seems like trivial reasons to deprive the poor of one of their few remaining sources of health care.