I was a Male Nurse, don’t call me Shirley .
The years between 1968 and ’72 were to say at the least, fucked. OK pandemic kid’s I get it, you now wear the crown of fucked up times. Good for us. Graduating High School and facing the dreaded Vietnam Draft was a right of passage for all abled bodied males. Rich kid’s and schizo’s had a easy out.( OK, OK I was a Psych Nurse I have a professional license to use that word).”If you’ve got the dough,” it was said, “you don’t have to go.” Not this middle class, white punk, who fancied himself some kind of revolutionary . I stared down that gun barrel. LOL Gun barrel Vietnam.
By the time I was eligible to go die in a useless, imperialist, immoral , blah, blah, blah, war, they had invented the “Wheel Of Death” . A lottery to see who would be drafted. I being the dumb ass I was got to leave high school a semester earlier . I went to the original Hippie High School in Philadelphia PA. The Parkway Program. A progressive school . We did not have a school per se. We had a old beat up building along the river. We took classes at all the institutions of Philadelphia. Wanted an Art class, go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Took Zoology 101 at the University Of Pennsylvania . They had a dead horse in the class room, a great big motherfucking horse that still smelled of formaldehyde. We were a bunch of hippie kid’s that got to roam the streets of Philly with out parental guidance. Good luck with that today. Can you imagine letting a group of Teen’s manage their own education.
What To Do ? 18 facing an existential crisis of life. I go to a Psychiatric Hospital , no not to play nut’s, but to apply for a job. I had taken Psych 101 at Temple University ,as a high school class and knew everything about the workings of the human mind. Absolutely everything .“No kid” said the very nice black man with the deep voice . “ look guy, you don’t have the experience to work here”, but in a fatherly voice. There is a Program run by the Government (OMG LBJ all the way) called CETA. They have a grant for Nursing School. I won’t ABC explain look it up, who cares. All I know is “school and a stipend!!!”
C’s all C’s. Going from a golden boy to a C’s you next Tuesday guy. What a bitch. Ok three men in a boat, no wrong story three men in a all female school and only one being white and heterosexual , kinda, sorta . Everyday I was going to quit, everyday. Two buses, one subway and a trolley ride. Fuck me. Then like an act of god came the ‘CLINICAL’S. real life , real fucking bodies to inject and stuff.
First Day on the floor. Nervous ,a bit scared but ready to go. My first patient was an elderly black man, Mr. Moody. A name never to forget ,not that I got to know him, but because he CODED 5 minutes after I met him. No I did not do it. Now to you mere mortals who have never experienced a CODE , a cardiac or pulmonary arrest , all I can say is. Fuck me. It’s like riding the rapids , white whiter rafting in Colorado while holding a fragmentation hand grenade and playing the Harmonica while writing the great American novel. A CODE is organized chaos at it’s pinnacle. I became addicted. I became a Trauma junkie. Always looking for my next fix. C’s students do graduate and because I was this young, big, strong man and white to boot. I was offered a job even before graduating and taking my Professional Licensing exam. Assigned to the Satellite Units of a Emergency and Intensive Care Unit of a large inter-city hospital is every crisis junkies dream. I was dreaming.
The Real World. . Itchy the rush isn’t the same. “You know Tommy you really should go back to school you need a BSN.” Good boy goes to school. Stays pretty much high & drunk most of the time . Schools out for summer baby. Itchy. Gotta go somewhere. Psych. No blood , well very little but lot’s of chaos and we love chaos. Psych yeah.
Something Wicked This Way Comes. Poor and middle class kids don’t have many options on schooling. Do we have to do that here ? No, OK. One day I get a letter from a very strange source ,the United States Army . Dear Nurse Braun , we would like to offer you the opportunity to attend the Army Academy Of Health Sciences. WTF is this shit. Me a former semi-Trotskyist joining the army . ha ha ha. I joined. Yes I was kinda, sorta burnt out on it all. Still seeking something. still looking for that feeling of life or death. Life or fucking death since I was 18 I had been doing the life or death dance. Dancing with death. How I loved her. Rationalization time. If your going to do Trauma care go where the most trauma is. I went to the trauma, oh I went to the trauma.
Basic Training and Other Things . Go watch the movie “Full Metal Jacket”, a lot of Vets will call Bullshit but it’s not too far off the mark about basic. Debasement, punishment, push up’s and after it’s done you are now a new you. You have just joined a new Tribe with it’s own language, rituals and hierarchy .You’ve thrown hand grenades, learned to shot a M-16, Blow shit up, kill people and sleep in the mud. You are a soldier. Who me ? ha ha ha. I took to it. After the brutality of Basic off we go to San Antonio Texas. Home of the US Army Medical Department Center and School (AMEDDC&S), Academy of Health Sciences (AHS) it is the largest medical education and training campus in the world producing nearly 35,000 medical profession graduates a year . Probably one of the biggest medical training facilities that you never heard of like the NCIS before it became a TV shows. Army by day, drunken college campus by night. Next stop SF CA 1977. Letterman Army Medical Center. Presidio of San Francisco . Every morning I woke up to the Golden Gate Bridge, right out side my barracks window . Stunning, beautiful, majestic, but it all turned out to be bullshit . I was so rope a doped. I ended up right back in an ICU for two years.
SF CA ‘77–’79. So what do you think a hedonistic wonderland pre AID’s would look like. Welcome to San Francisco in the 1970’s. Sex, drugs ,rock & roll. Army style. You can fuck anybody but ‘Don’t ask don’t tell” . If you were LGBTQ in the Army in those days. The US Army Medical Corps was a safe place as far as safe places went. No swishing but a lisp was OK. Then came the storm . Signs , notices on poles in the streets ,on the doors of Gay Bar’s . “Do you have any of the following signs” Gay Cancer had arrived as I had left.
I was a Male Nurse and Don’t call me Shirley. Being a male Nurse came with a plethora of shit. My sexuality is my sexuality. Love is Love. I’ve been with the love of my life for 37 years. She just happens to be a female. Yes Nursing was a safe place, once again as far as safe places went, for the LGBTQ community back in the day. Butch Female Nurse’s always compared to Nurse Racket. Male Nurse's came in two versions. One out a “girl watch out for me” and the other “hey lets talk about baseball type”. Ain’t stereotypes a bitch. Vietnam changed this many medics became Nurse’s and some progress was made, but that gay male nurse thingy persists to some extent. So after 48 years I hung up my stethoscope . Goodbye Nursing, Goodbye blood & guts and all the fun implied. Goodbye Psych that I loved so much. I was a male Nurse you can call me Shirley.