Jackie Cooper...and the surgical orderly.

With Jackie Cooper

In my many California job-changes, I worked for the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center as a surgical orderly, I would transport patients from their rooms to surgery, bring them into recovery and minor assist in the OR.

We were now living several blocks from the medical center, in a bungalow owned by a former colonel of the Taiwanese army. He and his wife in the front house and us in the bungalow. I simply don’t remember what happened here but it only lasted a couple, three months, we were suddenly living with Sally’s ‘friend’ from a church we had been going to (I had been seeking a spiritual solution, desperately looking for the way to get better, faintly recognizing (at least) our life seemed unmanageable…a vague sense. I was rife with broad denial to our addictions and Sally’s glaring personality disorder …it was Christmas time… the friend felt sorry for us, I don’t remember anything more of this except she tired of us very fast, disdain filled the apartment.

I befriended a fellow; Tony Castro, also a surgical orderly. A likable Cuban guy, lived with his mother and loved pot. We became easy friends. Tony and I would hang, one day we smuggled a tank of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) out of the one-day surgery suite. Took it to the bungalow with some plastic tubing and sucked on this stuff until the tank was encased in frost and we were beyond any laugh… laid waste. He suddenly became distant (go figure), I guess for one, he was feeling some guilt that he screwed his friend’s mother and the other, I would guess, was that the Sally and Michael team were not quite right in the head?

Tony easily made the jump to operating room technician (ORT) school and a sudden OR nurse as fiancé. He moved on, maybe I was his bottom.

In the late 1970’s and early 80’s there was a popular TV show ‘Trapper John, M.D.’ starring Parnell Roberts and directed by Jackie Cooper. He did a lot of film work and a great deal on the production end of the industry, one of the original “Our Gang” (Little Rascals), Perry Mason in the Christopher Reeve ‘Superman’ films, won an Emmy for his directorial work in the TV Mash in 1973. And played opposite Susanna in ‘Glamour Boy’ (Paramount, 1941).

‘Trapper John M.D.’ used the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center grounds and buildings for many of their outside shots.

I knew that Cooper directed Trapper John. I spotted him one day while I was on a lunch break. He was sitting with the rest of the crew on a break. In my scrubs, I approached him certain that he’d be (at the very least) pleasantly surprised, maybe asking me into the crew’s inner sanctum, maybe even leading to a job in something I really wanted to do. Ah yes, we’d become friends!

What I got was, “Oh yea? She was a good kid!” He returned to task and I returned to the OR.

I remember one day being asked to fetch a man for a scheduled surgery. In the bed I found a young good-looking guy about my age. I asked the nurse what the surgery was for, she said he had tumors behind his nose, inside his head, they were going to try and remove them.

I watched the surgery mesmerized. Half his face peeled away, lying on the table while they dug.

It was more than I could take, I wept in the hall, prayed for him.

There was a Dr. Wong an oral surgeon who, once a week, would use a suite to perform surgery on severely mentally retarded kids from local group homes. The guy was ruthless. We’d strap these poor creatures in with a papoose/cocoon-like restraint that would hold body and limb from toe to neck like a Velcro vise, stick a rubber wedge in their mouth and go to town, pulling five, six, seven teeth at a time with little, if any anesthetic. It was horrible. This guy was a monster.

But he liked me. Asked me to come work for him, and train to be a dental assistant.

I quit the HPMC and joined the Wong team (what else is new?). Lasted with Wong for 6 weeks.