Coming of age in the emergency room.

At this time of the morning—two, three, four o'clock—lonely people seek solace in the fl uorescent light of the emergency room. If you've been to a twenty-four-hour grocery store late at night, you may have seen the same people. Th ey hesitate, put a can of soup back on the shelf, then take it down again and put it back in the cart. Refugees from the daylight world, they move with the timidity of those whose lives don't mesh with others'. —Paul Austin (1) n a Friday night ritual played out in a myriad of high school stadiums across the South, I suited up in a football uniform (Figure). Following the game, I left the locker room dressed in another uniform consisting of white pants and a white shirt and headed to the emergency room (ER) of a local community hospital where I had a job as a medical assistant. My " Friday night lights " were no longer the pageantry of stadium lights but the institutional hue of fl uorescent bulbs. Th e 60 or so minutes it took me to transition from the rough and tumble world of a varsity football game to the surreal hum of the ER always engendered some degree of incongruence in me as I garnered some unusual and atypical coming-of-age experiences. What my teammates may have thought about my postgame activities never occurred to me. Th ey tended to congregate after the game at a nearby pizza joint called Gigi's, having their own coming-of-age experiences, probably involving beer and cheerleaders. Th is job started innocently after I volunteered in the ER, where I was made to feel useful doing minor tasks. Somehow I parlayed this into a real job at the impressionable age of 15, making $1.80 per hour in the hospital's summer program for students. Our small group was expected to periodically present ourselves to the hospital administrator and give an account of our activities. Surely he had more pressing duties, but he listened patiently and even with interest to our refl ections. Th e following summer, having achieved the more legal working age of 16, I was back in the ER, this time with the title of male nursing assistant. When the school year started, I was asked to work weekend night shifts. Retrospectively, I realize that this was the year my innocence began to recede into the ethereal mist of …