The Shouldice Clinic, where I’ve been having my inguinal hernia repaired, is the province of men. Mostly past middle-aged, we wear slippers and nametags. Feeling more lonely and vulnerable than we would like to admit, we express ourselves in uniquely masculine manners.
Cliff reclines in a lounge chair watching a Jays game. He has the tidy sliver mustache of a World War I flying ace, and wearing a track top that matches his track pants, he carries with him the aura of a particularly somnolent character from a Wes Anderson film. He looks over at me, “I hate it when they don’t run out the ground balls!”
A man who looks like a Mountie rides on a stationary bike. He has the perfect hair of a Ken Doll and he wears a Montrael Canadiens t-shirt. He’s been out of surgery for just four hours, and I’m staring at him with a stunned reverence. A guy who notices me doing this, gently elbows me in the ribs, whispering, “we call him THE HAIRPIECE.”
At dinner we eat cubes of Jello for dessert. We know nothing about one another, our culture and class obliterated by our shared malady.
A 17 year-old boy sits on the sofa with his legs up. He has a baseball cap on sideways that says Helvetica and he’s doing clandestine sketches of the various patients in their housecoats. A man in a Japanese Kimono borrows my laptop and we talk about his life outside of infirmity. He trains Martial Artists. He shows me some clips on YouTube, and then we begin to speak more broadly, first about the UFC, and then UFO’s and then finally, after 25 minutes, he confesses that he has a “gift” that allows him to see demons.
My roommate is a black guy from Scarborough who is covered in gangster tats. He has a defiant and unimpressed manner, and when I introduce myself and shake his hand, all he says is his name—Joe–before turning back to work on his jigsaw puzzle. Later, after we had both gone through surgery, he explained the meaning behind his tattoos.
A man with crisp, Paul Newman eyes works at his laptop. He’s been out of surgery for a few hours, and unlike the vast majority of us, he’s dressed just as freshly as if he was stepping out of cab for a meeting. He tells me the Chief of Surgery did his hernia. The Best, he adds. He tells me he’s going to take the stairs up to his room, tossing his head over his shoulder toward the stairwell, inviting me to lead, follow or get out of the way.
Vassaly emigrated from Hungry in 1980. He now lives in London, Ontario. He asked to borrow my laptop so that he might look at photographs of birds. There’s the picture he took! He presses his big finger on the screen of my computer. “Is Robin I took in my backyard,” and then he scrolls down, “ Only two new comments.” He seemed very disappointed by this news.
A Portuguese man from Aurilla talks about the apartment buildings he owned back in Europe. Walter, wearing a Tilley hat, nods his head, and then holds up the front page of the Globe and Mail, “HOW CAN THEY POSSIBLY LOSE TRACK OF 15 BILLION DOLLARS!!!”
In the dark, we all gather for the hockey game. As the hours pass, we drift off. One by one we limp to the nurse’s station, where we’re handed a little paper cup containing a sleeping pill, “everything’s going to be just fine—you take this and have a good sleep now.” And she pats each one of us on the shoulder, soothing us with her voice, her touch.