City Out of Time. William Robison III
the next half hour, Lanz wandered from one drawer to the next, went through cabinets, and closets, and the refrigerator finding everything he could remember ever having with him had been restored to him. His entire past life was here in the apartment with him, represented in knickknacks, ticket stubs, and lots of useless junk. And all of it now transplanted into some new drawer, cabinet, or closet.
At the end of his trip down memory lane, Lanz collapsed into his favorite recliner set strategically with a view of the city beyond and mused upon his new life and new apartment.
It was well past midnight before Lanz’s reverie ended and he realized that he needed to get some sleep. He turned off the lights around the apartment, made sure that his door was locked, then went into his bedroom, climbed into his made bed, set his alarm for early the next morning, and finally, went to sleep.
Surprisingly, the sound of rain on his window woke Lanz before the alarm went off less than six hours later. Lanz sat up in bed and looked out the smaller bedroom window to the dark skies beyond. Rain wasn’t unknown in Las Vegas, but in April it was pretty rare. Lanz looked around his bedroom and the familiarity of it momentarily disoriented him.
Then he remembered where he was and why he was here.
Lanz got out of bed and went into the bathroom. His shower was different than the one in Vegas and it took him a few minutes to get used to it. His mind wandered for a moment as he wondered why something as simple as a shower had so many different variations in design. In his experience, no two showers were ever the same. The sound of Lanz’s alarm clock broke him out of his reverie and Lanz had to hurry out of the shower to turn it off before it woke the neighbors.
All of his clothes from Vegas were in his new room’s closet and dresser – except, unfortunately, for the clothes he’d packed into the car for his epic soul searching journey. In fact, none of the things from the car had found their way into the apartment. Lanz wondered if he’d ever see any of those things again.
By the time he was done dressing, brushing his teeth, etc... Lanz thought he might be late to work on his first day. He grabbed a banana off of the refrigerator and headed out the door.
Lanz had mapped the route to work the night before. There was a trolley that ran along the left bank of the river on Chester A. Arthur Avenue. Lanz ran through the rain to the trolley stop and caught the first trolley as it came rolling up. He was only mildly wet.
The trolley and rain stopped about a block from the hospital at Illinois Street. Lanz hopped off there and walked one block north to James. A Garfield Way and looked up to see the hospital.
It wasn’t terribly impressive. It looked older than the more modern and sleek Desert Springs Hospital, but it wasn’t old fashioned like Bethesda or one of the master hospitals of the east coast. As a building that dated from about the start of World War II, it had a sturdy and utilitarian look. It looked like a hospital, but that wasn’t necessarily a compliment.
Lanz crossed the street and entered the hospital through the main entrance. He was greeted by an orderly at the admissions desk who looked up the moment he walked in.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“I’m Lanz Franco,” Lanz said. “Today’s my first day.”
“Right,” said the orderly, “You want to go to the employee’s entrance on the west side of the building near the emergency entrance. They’ll get you situated there.”
“Thanks,” Lanz said.
He went out the front door and around to the west side of the hospital. The emergency area was rather obvious, with huge signs in bright neon, but it took Lanz a few moments to find the dark single doorway set into the wall about fifty feet away from the emergency entrance. Lanz passed a couple of EMT’s waiting in their ambulance, looking bored. Bored was a good thing in the hospital industry.
Lanz walked into the employee entrance and was greeted by another orderly the second he came in the door.
“Hi,” she said, “You’re new here. I’m Julia. Welcome to City Hospital. If you have any questions, feel free to find me and ask away.”
“Thanks, Julia,” Lanz said. “Where do I go now?”
“New guys go down the hall and to the left. You’ll find a locker room there. Go ahead and change into your scrubs and wait by your locker. Someone will find you.”
Lanz followed Julia’s directions and easily found the locker room. There were about 100 lockers and each had a name plate on them. Lanz didn’t take long to find the locker with his name on it – written in black marker on a temporary piece of tape. He opened it and found a fresh set of scrubs. After he changed, Lanz sat by his locker and waited.
For the next ten minutes other workers walked into the locker room, changed into their scrubs, and then walked back out into the hospital to start their shifts. Not a normally talkative lot to begin with, no one greeted Lanz. In fact, no one even acknowledged his existence. Lanz didn’t really mind. He was used to the new guy treatment.
Soon, however, Lanz noted that there were a couple of other guys in the locker room that were doing as he was. Lanz looked to them for some mutual sympathy, but they all were preoccupied with their own new guy status. Nobody spoke.
Finally, after the last regular worker had departed for his shift, a Charge Nurse entered the locker room, sized up the new recruits, and said, “New guys… with me.”
He turned around and left the locker without looking to see if anyone was behind him. Lanz and the others scurried to catch up. The Charge Nurse walked to the maintenance elevator and stood there with a clipboard.
“Welcome to the City Hospital,” he said without much conviction, “You are on probationary status starting today. If you pan out, you will be assigned a more permanent position in 30 days. In the meantime, you work for me. I am Terry Middlestad. Just ask anyone for Terry and they’ll find me. Once you are done with an assignment, I expect you to come find me right away for a new assignment. There are three breaks – fifteen minutes at 10am, one hour at lunch, and another fifteen minutes at 3pm. Are there any questions? No. Good. Moving on… Spazick… Spawack… Spazz?”
“It’s Spaciezki,” Spazz replied.
“Whatever,” Terry said. “They need you in the kitchen. Take a plunger.”
“Where do I get a plunger?”
“Find a plumber,” Terry replied. “Now go… you’re late already.”
Spazz sighed deeply and then started off down the hall, clearly without a clue as to where he was going.
“Franco?”
“Yes, sir,” Lanz replied.
“Grab a mop. Toilet on three overflowed.”
Lanz knew better than to ask where to get a mop. He turned around and started walking through the ground floor looking for a janitor’s closet. He found one, opened it to find a mop and a rolling mop bucket, and started back towards the service elevator.
The irony that Lanz’s first day on his new job started exactly the same way as the last day of his old was not lost on him. But, he guessed, it was probably an aberration, or a shakedown period, and if he stuck it out, they’d probably start giving him better jobs.
Lanz didn’t see any of the other new guys all day, but he saw plenty of Terry. No matter how fast Lanz did his jobs, Terry was waiting with some new task even filthier than the one before. Lanz mopped the bathroom on three, saw-dusted barf in pediatrics, cleared the grease trap in the kitchen, and climbed into the compactor outside to get it to work. By five o’clock, he was exhausted, smelled bad, and was desperately hungry because he hadn’t had time to stop all day for a bite to eat – though, to be fair, with the kind of work he’d been doing, food hadn’t been a high priority.
Just as Lanz was changing into his street clothes, Terry entered the locker room and said, “Franco. They need