On my desk is a yellow sticky note with two scribbles on it:
the corporate intent
a gripa with the grappa.
Two unrelated subjects, mystifying.
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The first entry concerns the new PeaceHealth Hospital at Riverbend in Springfield, Oregon, a five-hundred-something million-dollar caper. It's a grand affair in neo-Italian renaissance style. The lobby is as large as a town square and the stone fireplace is three stories high. Everything is gleaming wood and polished metal and carved glass. Around the lobby the hospital bulks and towers and stretches like a giant ocean liner. A medical warren of room after room dissected by long halls that dwindle away into the distance. If you look down one of those halls you lose your balance. The medical rooms are generous, the patient rooms even a bit luxurious.
But, according to my eye witness, the working CNA — a Certified Nursing Assistant, that is — I live with, it was a shock to see the staff rooms. Tiny cubicles, smaller even than the crummy tuck-aways at the old facility, badly lit, stuffy, windowless and feeling window-lesser if compared to all the glass everywhere else. Somebody had to pay for that glass and chrome, and you know who.
Here's a show palace for clients and doctors and administrators, with minuscule cubby holes for all the working people to rest their weary feet during lunch break. Rest their weary feet? Standing room only, most of the space is taken up by the refrigerator. Lunch break? Let's get outta here, it's claustrophobic. Running a quarter mile of hallway feels like some sort of freedom.
Staff rooms are not designed for comfort. Let's make sure they don't linger there. Better back to work than choking. Of course, my CNA says laconically, that's the corporate intent.
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Saturday night my CNA and I go out, to Jo Federigo's, Eugene's off-and-on and sometimes only jazz club. The club has gone through many hands, not always good or lucky ones, and changed hands again recently. The total remodeling job was bragged about in the local newspaper.
Slow disappointment of somehow all the same, only so much less of it, like grand expectations stepping into empty space. They tore out all the good old stuff and replaced it with nothing but blank walls painted stark white. Except for a shiny new imitation wood floor instead of the ancient soiled grey carpet, maybe that's an improvement if I sit staring down on the floor for the rest of the evening. There used to be solid wooden benches where people could squeeze together, and long tables covered with paper on which the so inclined could draw pictures with crayons provided by the establishment. Whole works of art had been created thus and duly displayed. Now it's fancy little tables with spindly legs and fake marble tops dropped here and there like disorderly luggage at the Greyhound station. All the pictures are gone, the photographs are gone, the other items of interest are gone. It's bare looks with not a hint of tits and ass.
Prices have swelled, though, we discover. No more cheap brandy and a soda from the fountain for five bucks, everything's martinis now. Does Blake still work here? Sorry, no. She was too old, he doesn't say but has it written on his face as plain as day, and you Sir and Ma'am are old, too, you should be home in bed. I'm your pink as a baby's ass young waiter, shaved to the second layer of my skin, I'm as slick as the CEO of an under-funded corporation, I expect big tips because I'm overgroomed and underpaid, and my forced smile tells you that you're taking too long, I'll give you more time for consideration, how's that?
I order a grappa from the CEO disguised as a waiter, surprised to find it on a list of otherwise vodka-laced martinis. My CNA doesn't drink and after more agonizing time for consideration orders scallops. He eventually gets three of them, on a severely rectangular designer plate. Would you like pepper and/or parmesan cheese with that, sir? Yes, please. CEO goes fetch. One tight screw of the pepper mill, two light handed turns on the cheese grinder, and voilà, there are some black dots and five, no, six shreds of parmesan cheese on the three scallops. Very pretty.
My CNA slices tiny bits off his scallops and says the scallops are delicious. I'm happy for him. Myself isn't so well served, or else more critical. The grappa — can it be? — seems to be looking down at me from a long aristocratic nose of a glass. It is clear as water and smells and tastes like pure grain alcohol.
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I tell my CNA about drinking grappa in Italy. I remember a pale golden hue and a distinctive aroma of grapes. Grappa is not named after grapes but after the town of its origin, Bassano del Grappa, yet has its material feet deep down in grapes indeed. Grappa is made from the leftovers of grape pressings. Skins, seeds, even stems are distilled into a liquor and then aged in wooden barrels, from whence they get most of their coloring, though there is also some pigmentation from the original pomace.
Clear grappa denotes an un-aged distillate, cheap stuff any dedicated Italian would despise. I'm not Italian by nationality, but I am dedicated when it comes to grappa and other issues of liquid animation and fluid exchange. Issues that will come up, as it turns out.
Italy, how far away is that? Not half as far, it seems, as from here to there anywhere at the new PeaceHealth Hospital. My CNA is on a verbal run with a critical patient from sixth floor orthopedics to ground floor ED. Twenty minutes, pushing a heavy load. The patient could have died on the way. It would be faster to airlift them from the roof and deposit them on the ground. Staff is running marathons. Staff is tired. One of his nurses told him, so he tells me, she and her CNA husband roused themselves to go out on a date. They went to a movie, fell asleep fifteen minutes into it, woke up when the end titles were rolling, they were still so tired they couldn't remember where they had parked their car.
My CNA says his right leg is sore. And he's still hungry. Not nearly enough parmesan cheese, I guess.
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Enough complaints. We've come here for the music, haven't we. Not Italian, but Cuban. A singer — guitarist duo backed up by a rhythm section.
The singer has a clear voice with lots of colors and expressions. She also has an exceptionally lovely face, beautiful hand gestures, small tits that are a pleasure to picture in their nudity, and such a fine ass stretching her tight hip belted white cargo pants she all but makes up for the bottomless bareness of the renovation disaster. She's artwork and decoration enough all by herself, both to hear and see.
The guitarist is an old acquaintance of mine, a not-quite friend, with whom I've had a one-sided love affair for years. It kicks in the moment he picks up his guitar and ends when he lays it down. In other words, I'm a fan.
When he plays I pearl into romances with every note and transform all his features into snapshots of instant beauty. Was there ever such a handsome man? I'm infatuated with that cat-like stillness when he's sneaking up to one of his bluesy ideas, the lucid tension when he's searching through a rising series of progressions. He's not given to facial drama like so many other musicians. There's only a bit of strain around the mouth, but I could swear his nose grows longer like Pinocchio's caught in a lie when he gets himself entangled in contradictions of this or that musical tall story. And then he's out through some harmonic loophole I never quite catch, and all is serenity with the face of an angel. Now was there ever such a luminous man?
He unstraps his guitar and looks like a misanthropic little bookkeeper. Love's over. There's still not-quite friendship. I go to say hello, and he says, hi, thanks for coming, my pleasure, it was wonderful, but what do you think about the remake, awful, isn't it, just a big memory lapse. And then I tell him about my disappointment with the grappa.
Jazz musicians are ever witty. Looks like you have a gripa with the grappa, he says. A comeback that's almost worth having paid for the vile stuff. And drunk it too I soon realize, taking those steps up and out of the club rather carefully. I let my CNA drive.
