Work With Me

Six foot three and wearing a dark suit he was the first person to speak to me when I walked into the hospital lobby. I was paying more attention to the valet parking my car than to what he was saying. Standing close by was an old woman wearing a threadbare volunteer coat, which was as drained of color as her faded pink complexion. The name embroidered over the breast pocket made her appear approachable, resolute in her function that she would offer unnerved arriving patients comfort. It seemed possible that she hadn’t moved from that spot in weeks, maybe years.

I hadn’t intentionally not had this exam last year; I just didn’t make an appointment. His large body housed a booming voice and I heard him say “give me your license and stand over there.” I did exactly as he said, much like I had just been instructed by a police officer to follow a command. He was both the security guard and the photographer. No one got past him without having their picture taken which then swiftly got spit out of a machine as an ID badge to be stuck somewhere on your person.

It takes about ten minutes in the morning for me to apply makeup. But having arranged to take the day off, I stayed in bed a little longer than I usually do on a weekday morning and left my apartment with barely a sweep of brown shadow hastily brushed onto my eyelids. A shiny coat of colorless lip gloss and a five second blast of hairspray, and I left wearing knee length denim shorts, a tight fitting long sleeve black shirt and three inch high platform sandals. An outfit selected for how quickly and easily I could slip out of it and into a hospital gown.

Was he asking me, or telling me to change the slight tilt of my chin. He was telling me. He was insistent that I stand with my shoulders back, but the picture I was most interested in seeing had nothing to do with my facial features. My resistance to his directions was clearly upsetting him. The old woman asked me if I didn’t want to move my bangs out of my face, and I asked her if she was my mother. She too was very determined to have her colleague take the best picture possible. It felt as if I were working with Richard Avedon and that my portrait was being orchestrated for a purpose other than to be ripped off my lapel when I left the premises.

This mid sized hospital in suburban South Florida had become an alternative universe with an employee that took pride in his work, and an old woman that treated everybody as if they were her child. That would have been fine another time, maybe even amusing, but I wasn’t interested in aesthetic guidance and I couldn’t’ have cared less how the light reflected against my skin. The only image I was concerned with was the one the doctor would develop.