My Hours Under the Fluorescents: Waiting it Out in Milwaukee’s Hospitals and Jails

On Monday morning, our first day at Wisconsin Lutheran, I woke up with a pain in my eye. It was intermittent, and when I rinsed off my contact it was gone, mostly, so I left the hotel room, got on the bus with my fellow activists, and prepared for a long day standing vigil. Wisconsin Lutheran is a school whose policy book states that “homosexual practice” is a sin and that the school will teach and discipline accordingly. They certainly did hold fast to their claim about teaching; the day before we came to campus (we were told the sidewalk out front was as close as we could get) the school held a Bible study attended by 150 of the 300 students in which they were told that the main thrust of the Bible is that we are all sinners, and that Christ himself had clearly and unequivocally ordained marriage only between a man and a woman. Those themes came up again and again in the conversations I had with students during the day. It was clear they had been prepped–every time the conversation would get difficult, the student I was talking to would circle back to one of those two statements.

At one point, my presentation group and I were “invited” to drive to the outskirts of town to a conference room in the Sheraton Inn to give some of our thoughts on Progressive Theology to a small, hand-picked group of students, faculty, and administrators. The school’s pastor who, since he was ‘hosting’ the event, took the liberty of prefacing and concluding our presentation, read the story of Jesus rebuking Peter––”get behind me, Satan”––as a an example of how he saw his role in relation to our visit. Needless to say, it was a difficult day, though our little group stood and spoke well and developed some important relationships with students in the meantime.

When the pain in my eye began to come back, I thought the weird scratchiness and weepiness was just a little dust from standing outside all those hours. Or maybe a result of stress. But by five o’clock, when we left campus to share a much needed meal and time of conversation with the amazing folks at the Milwaukee LGBT center, I was having a hard time keeping my eye open at all. Blinking didn’t help and shifting my contact in my eye didn’t help and, when we finally got back to the hotel at seven or so, taking the contact out altogether only seemed to make it worse. Within an hour I was on the way to the emergency room with some hotel ice cubes wrapped in a washcloth pressed over my right eye and my left eye closed to keep it from accidentally pulling the other one open, which felt for all the world like sandpaper and lake water being shot from one side of my eye to another. My partner and two friends led me into the emergency room with one eye painfully propped open so I could at least see the blurry outlines of the doors I was entering and the chair I was ushered into. One nurse took my basic information, another gave me bracelets to indicate the seriousness of my condition and an allergy to sulfa, and I was sent out in the waiting room to wait for my name to be called. The nurse who registered me was optimistic: an hour to an hour and a half, she said. Three hours later, the ice in my washcloth had melted completely, our friends had left to check out the food situation for the next day and had come back with hummus, pita, and soy drink that tasted like heaven, and had left again. In all that time we had heard only one person’s name called over the loudspeaker. Allison, who could see, was grieving for the people who were waiting alone on the little, screwed down chairs around us. She described them to me: one man with a badly sprained ankle, a woman with a pink mask over her mouth who was dry heaving into a matching pink tub. I didn’t need her to tell me about the choruses of coughs and groans all around us. I could hear those for myself. Obviously, this was a room full of people who were, in many cases, worse off than me. And so we waited. There was nothing else to do.

We talked a little about the speech we were planning to give on campus the next day, but without any ice left the pain in my eye was especially distracting. Time stretched and bent and flowed around us until I had no idea how long we’d been in that loud place where sight was a memory and nobody knew when their deliverance would come. If you felt well enough, or if you were lucky enough to have someone to send, you could shuffle over to the front desk and ask how many people were in front of you from time to time. Six, Allison was told when we finally got desperate enough to ask, and then later, three. I was afraid to send her after that because your number could go back up if more serious folks came in the meantime. I wasn’t sure I could handle that..

Finally, at around eleven p.m., my name was called. I held my left eye open in order to follow a nurse in teal green scrubs through one set of swinging doors and to a bed set up in a hallway. “It’s not a room,” she said. “But at least we got you back here.” She was getting a pillow and some new ice, she said. Then she disappeared. We waited for her and then we waited for the doctor. Another forty minutes or so, at least.

After that, there isn’t much to tell. Eventually, a doctor came. One drop of numbing eye solution, two Vicodin, an eye exam, and a flurry of receipts later, I was in a taxi cab back to the hotel with the diagnosis of a scratched cornea, a prescription for antibacterial drops and the assurance that my healing would be quick. In the morning, my eye was still red, but I could blink without wincing and look Allison full in the face when she asked how I was doing. I could even smile.

Three hours later the two of us were in police custody, along with four other Soulforce folks and two members of the Milwaukee community who, when we were told to leave the tables we had set up to try to talk to students on campus, decided to stay. Allison, Kourt, Emil, Justin, Jonathan, Ray, Wendy and I were driven by police car to a holding station nearby, which we were told was the newest and nicest of its kind. The floors and walls were painted hospital beige. The waiting benches were long and cold with bars running along the front of them so that one of your hands could be cuffed to them while you waited. The chairs, where there were chairs, were bolted to the floor. One officer took my information and then another. I was led to a holding cell with one long cement bench along the side, and a stainless steel toilet/sink combination against the far wall. The door in front of me had a thin, high window through which officers would peek occasionally, sometimes saying my name or sliding a paper for me to sign through the slot in the middle of the door, sometimes just looking and going away. None of them explained why they were there or how much longer I’d be waiting. They just came and went and I sat.

Without my watch––it had been taken along with shoelaces, jewelry, scarf and belt, everything in my pockets––I had no idea how much time was passing. Officers came and went through a hallway that must have connected to my cell block off to the right, making incredible clanging noises as the doors opened and closed. Once, I was summoned to have my photo and fingerprints taken. Then I was returned. The officer said, simply, “it’s going to be a while,” and then left. I meditated and dozed, I did the back stretches my naturopath instructed me to do everyday which I never remember––overall, I tried to be calm, be patient, and welcome the chance to be alone. But every time the door slammed and the banter of officers in the rooms nearby rose to a pitch, every time a blue, zippered torso walked by my door, I caught myself hoping that maybe now was the time they’d let me out, that maybe my waiting was over.

With my eye feeling better, I studied everything. Just as, the night before, I’d listened until I could distinguish between a particular person’s coughs and another person’s wheezes, now I began to distinguish the smudges in the beige wall of my cell that maybe, almost, if you squinted right, began to spell a word. “Mast” maybe? Or “Mark”? I worked my way up to the ceiling, where a single fluorescent tube was covered with diamond-patterened plastic and framed by wood on all sides so the whole contraption could be bolted at an angle where the ceiling met the wall. No corners or recessed edges to hang things from. No switch to turn off the light.

It was then that it came to me how similar my two instances of waiting had been. That fluorescent glow that made it hard even with my eyes closed to pull into the dark of myself and meditate had the same tone and consistency of the lights in the waiting room the night before that had made me squint, even with my eyes closed, even though it made them hurt more. In the waiting room I’d felt the same sense of helplessness as I felt in the cell, especially when I considered what it might feel like to be arrested without the preparation or support I’d had as a member of Soulforce choosing to take that risk arrest for something I believed and knowing I’d be out before evening. How last night, as today, all I’d really known was that I had to get through the waiting, no matter how cold or bored or in pain I felt, no matter how long it would be. How the chatter of the nurses and receptionists around the night before had been like the back and forth of the officers, trying to figure out which forms needed to be filled out, which pictures needed to be taken. How all that chatter was a reminder that there was a system much more important than my pain or my choice to stand up for justice at Wisconsin Lutheran, that my sickness and my arrest were just a blips in the process, no real events in themselves.

I know that the process of arrest and detainment is not nearly so impersonal for a lot of people: that people of color often find themselves singled out for abuse and hazing after being arrested for even the most routine offenses, or for no offenses at all; that having an organization with the money to post bail for me and seven of my closest friends gave me a peace of mind few people have when they’re taken in. But still, I can’t help but think of how striking the similarity was for me between my time in an institution that had been established to heal me and one that had been established to reprimand me for breaking the law. It seems to me that both work within frameworks of waiting that render clients’ will and emotional well-being irrelevant.

Recently, Alexey, one of our co-leaders, told me that many folks who finish their time volunteering with Soulforce end up working for prisoner’s rights in the jail systems. I can see why. And after the last twenty-four hours, I am more ready than ever to add patients’ rights to the list as well.

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