Chapter Thirty-Nine
“We’ve been hearing that you may not be too well these days, Carmen.”
The woman speaking was not in any way striking however she was in possession of a fair amount of power and that gave her a certain allure. Then again I was in a frame of mind where even a Big Mac could have an aura about it. I began to wonder how many broad shouldered men were in a van parked nearby, listening to everything on hypersensitive surveillance equipment. I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Well’ was a relative term.
“No one here wants to hurt you, I think you know that,” she offered, preferring honey to vinegar to catch the fly.
I could have saved her some time and told her what any fool knows, that bullshit works best when it comes to flies, but I didn’t and she droned on, “We want to help you…”We’re in your corner…” ”Pulling for you…” ”In this together…”
I spoke. “Dear people,” I began, “what you see before you, this man, me…well, I’m not what you think. I simply want to be the person God meant me to be. I…”
“Carmen,” someone else spoke, a woman with a raspy voice, “we all, believe it or not, understand what you’re going through. Not because we’ve been through it but because we’re trained to deal with it.”
“Listen,” I said, “I have somewhere to be. I really should go. You don’t mind do you? I think we’ve covered a good deal tonight.”
“You go now and you might as well pack your bags. Are we on the same page?”
“Can I sit down?”
“Yes, this isn’t a trial, please make yourself comfortable.”
“What are you reading?” I asked. Maybe my mind, I thought.
“Reading?”
“You said we were on the same page. ma’am.”
“I wasn’t referring to books and I think we both know that.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t be smart.”
“No, ma’am.” Someone stifled their laughter.
“This meeting is about to end, we’re all busy people, too busy to play games,” declared the head lady. “Carmen, you go see your doctor within the next two weeks at the latest. Who is your doctor?” I told her and she made a note. “We are here to help you. If you cooperate we’ll do all we can. Now go, start taking your medication and make an appointment to see your doctor.”
“Yes, I will, I’ll do what you say,” I lied, “thank you, thank you all for coming.”
“Good-bye Carmen.”
“Goodbye, ma’am.” The ladies filed out and one smiled and winked as she left, which made my day.
Browbeating, coercion, bullying, these terms could be used in combination or could stand alone to describe what the women who ran the home had tried to do. I guess it worked as, even though I believed I’d won, I decided to do as I was told and called the office of the doctor who gave me my medication. The phone rang a long time until finally the receptionist answered. She growled at me. I was given an appointment for a week hence and tersely told to show up on time.
The last time I had seen my doctor he had told me he was disappointed in me, but, who wasn’t? I knew, though, that he’d seen people in worse shape than me. In my mind he and everyone else with my best interests in mind were seriously overreacting. He had wanted to know if I was taking my medication.
I answered evasively, saying, “Not regularly”.
“So you’re just here to roost, live in the homes until you wear out your welcome and then move on? Is that the plan?”
“The way you understand me doctor,” I replied, flippantly, “it makes everything worthwhile, you know?”
“Yes I know, Carmen. You’re using the system. What should I do about it?” I was tired of being threatened and stood up.
“Wait,” he said and held up his arm like a traffic cop.
“Yes, what,” I replied, suddenly tired and a little sad in a what-can-you-do kind of way.
“Just start taking your medicine and everything will be fine, you’ll see. Do you have enough or should I write you a prescription?” I looked at him and couldn’t figure out who was sorrier, him or me.
“I have lots of pills. Goodbye.” I left and as I was walking down the street I picked up a stone and projected it angrily in the direction of a telephone pole.
Why couldn’t he understand that Jesus didn’t want me to take the medication? Why couldn’t any of them understand that? I heard some laughter from behind a hedge thick with branches and a voice said, “Take the pills.”
Another voice from across the street said, “Yeah, take ‘em.”
My old roommate Bobby phoned a while after the head lady and her entourage had visited me. He was, he told me, leaving Kingston. It seemed that I wasn’t fully appreciative of what he was saying. In truth I didn’t know what to say. After weeks and weeks of no contact, he seemed to expect me to be shaken up.
His voice went up a few decibels and he said, “You don’t get it do you?” and then, “We may never meet again.”
I was dumbstruck, not sure of who he really was. Because of the sudden rush of emotion I thought he might be involved in the Hollywood scene, maybe an agent or a rock star high on drugs. I was contemplating this when the phone slammed in my ear. Definitely the Hollywood type, I thought.
He was such a miserable person, possessive and controlling to the degree that, even when I was stuck with the understanding of a rock, his attitude towards me made me uneasy. I didn’t get angry, I simply thought, I suppose that’s the way a Hollywood agent is.
When he left his secret went with him. Even when I was well enough to know him to a degree, I hadn’t figured him out. When he had told me that he thought of men the way most men think of women, it should all have crystallized in an uneasy moment or two. He had been so angry when I was leaving our group home to live with Joe, Frank, Paul, and Brian. I pondered and puzzled over that but never quite figured out why he was so wound up.
It’s been said that ignorance is bliss but in my case it came nowhere near, not even in the neighborhood. In the end, after I’d thought it over and knew what he was about, I shook my head disbelievingly. Was I to him as the blond haired barmaid had been to me?
I reneged on my pledge. I didn’t start taking my pills again even though I had promised I would. At the head office, the department in charge of telling grown men and women what to do had confirmed that I had been to the doctor, which indeed I had. The doctor in charge of drugs and, if needed, electro convulsive therapy, believed I was taking my medication. I was all set to claim squatter’s rights in some place psychotic, a fictional spot with its origins in my chemical makeup, but people talk, other people listen and word gets around.
It wasn’t long after I thought I had everyone fooled that the cat clawed its way out of the bag; the jig was up, it was curtains for me. The doctor was on to me and so was the head lady. I became convinced I was going to be hospitalized and so I packed a small bag and left. Unfortunately I was going to have to hit bottom face first to see that there was any up.
I ambled and wandered and ambled some more, ending up in a mid-sized burg, in an all night store, in the middle of the night, sticking a can of sardines down my pants. I went into a donut shop, ordered a cup of hot water and ate the fish with my fingers.
I traveled a while longer and found myself wandering the midnight streets of a one-horse town. The snowy paths and avenues were deserted, a train sang in the distance. I was stuck in Disneyland, a mutant version of the famed carnival, something that would make Walter Disney shudder. Only I could see the rides and hucksters and vendors and only they could see me. The next day I would get a ride through Oz and later be dumped in purgatory. What was that other than highly accelerated confusion?
Like a cruel storm, I had left a mess behind me in Kingston. Not the kind of mess a regular storm of high intensity leaves, tree limbs, branches, dirt and dispossessed sections of newspapers that can be cleaned up in a thorough way, with a sense of purpose. No, what there was of the mess my disagreeable behavior had wrought – distrust, anger and bitterness would be swept into a pile and kept burning until it was ashes. Many folk who had been on my side would have little if any respect for me again.
For the time being though I wasn’t concerned about all that, I was focused on the voices that were directing me here and there, on the phantoms I saw lurking around corners, in doorways, in the bare branches of trees silhouetted against the dark sky and floating in the smoke coming from a chimney.
That guy from the TV show “Eight is Enough”, Tommy, was constantly in my mind and on my case, laughing because I had to beg just to get a smoke or something to eat. He laughed at me because I was freezing. My teeth would chatter and I would search out shelter while he would watch and deride me from where he rested in his Jacuzzi. I saw him clearly in my mind’s eye and I began to hear his laughter ring out.
“Give my regards to Pierre,” he said, lazily.
“Pierre?” I thought.
“Yeah,” he answered, laughing, “Pierre True Dough, as in real money. We’re all in this together. We have to keep you poor.”
A rush of wind and snow carried the conversation away, no voices, only cold feet and colder hands.
Where did I sleep at night? I haven’t even a blurry idea. Obviously, I didn’t freeze; nevertheless, I know the nights were full of a strange brand of emptiness as I walked up and down streets that were destitute of traffic. The snow would swirl in the yellow halo of the streetlight. Everything would seem attainable and then hardly anything would seem so. Those were nights of bumming cups of hot water and getting out of the wind in parked cars.
I ‘d believe that I was the rich person who lived wherever he wanted to and had whatever he wanted – I owned the town and I was out for a stroll. I was an athlete in training, a superstar in the making; everything I was living through was simply part of becoming tough enough to win. I was young, a child and I was being given a second chance. This time I knew what to do and what not to do. I spent my time talking to the only listening ear that took me seriously – the one attached to my head.
Eventually I grew tired of wandering and began the task of finding my way home.
I managed to find my way back to Kingston in a couple of days, bringing with me the smell of cold air and a grim case of the munchies. The cold shoulder with which I was greeted when I got back to the group home wasn’t lost on me, but I put it on the back burner. It was much colder outside and, anyways, I was too busy to worry what the others were thinking. I was looking for anything resembling a victual, any morsel that I could lay claim to as mine.
Yes, it was warmer inside than out. The warmth was nice. The ruffled feathers inside would smooth out but outside the winds would continue to blow, making me want to run, cry and even laugh, laugh at everything and the way it all worked, laugh until I was crying, once again cold and frightened.
I had been unaware that it was nearly Christmas until someone asked me where I’d be spending it. I then realized why I had seen houses with their festive lights shining bright red, yellow, blue and green. The odd plastic Santa Clause and his entourage of hoofed beasts should have tipped me off but, strangely enough, they didn’t trigger any thoughts. The other residents at the home were all going to be with their families. I’d be alone in the house for a few days, I was informed, and I was pleased because I figured I could pilfer some of the tastier food that wasn’t mine. When I’d been foraging I’d found hardly anything that belonged to me, so, I was fairly hungry.
It seemed that I was barely warm – lots of hot showers under my belt and into my bones and some good sessions of hibernating in a warm bed – when the house was deserted and I found myself alone. As I ate the ice cream, jam, yogurt and such that I found, I realized that I wasn’t really by myself. There were many ghosts, ghouls and phantoms right there in the house with me.
The whole jumble called madness had my undivided attention that Christmas. I was alone, there was no one to attempt conversation with, to bug or extract a chuckle from. My illness took center stage and it told me what I didn’t necessarily want to hear, that is, that my time was long past due and that I would never again have a better chance to bring closure to this farce called life. It became an obsessive idea, persistent and in no way willing to take no for an answer.