(Part Two will be posted later this evening)
(Authors Note: This is a true story I’ve never told completely before, now ready to be told. Also, so you know in advance, that if cuss words and anti religious language offend you, then this isn’t a story you’ll care to read. It is also a reflection of how life looked to me twenty years ago, not necessarily as it appears to me now. I offer it only to illustrate once more, the simple, beautiful reality that Authentic Americans come in all shapes and sizes, from all stations in life, and ought not ever be dismissed as having “little worth”.)
In 1986, I loathed Christmas with a passion.
I hated ever single sacred, shiny, jingly-cheap bit of it.
“Ho Ho Ho, my ass!” I mumbled, as I stood in the welfare registration line, hating everyone standing in front of me, hating the nasal sound of the intake workers voice, the face of the case worker I had yet to meet, the papers I would have to fill out, the cold bare grayness of the room, the stinky air I had to breath in and most of all, hating the tinny music, wanting to rip out the speakers braying “Oh Come All Ye Faithful….”
“Sure. Right.” I thought. “Well, YOU go right ahead, folksies. Bend those knees and open those purses and worship your little holy asses right OFF! Me, been there, done that, and just look at how joyful and triumphant I am!”
Bitterness has an acrid taste all its own and it rose up in my throat: I wished I could spit it out. “A person ought to be allowed to simply stop breathing when they choose to,” I thought. “Just shut your eyes, and stop. Zap! Shoot right on out of this horseshit excuse of an existence.”
It’s hard to be nice to people when you hate everyone. I wasn’t nice, of course, and the results were predictable; “Sorry, there’s nothing we can do for you until you…”, followed by a long list of hoops and hurdles I knew I could never get past in a million years. “Should have known better”, I muttered, walking away, biting back the curses. “Should have known better.” All I needed was help to pay for the surgery, and to live till I could get it done and get back to work: too much to ask, apparently.
Damn, it was cold and wet. Sidewalks covered with frozen slush, the wind biting hard, the long blocks back to my room stretching ahead forever. Home town streets. Familiar streets I’d walked so many times when I was still a real person and belonged there, in another time. Head down, eyes on my feet, so no one could recognize me, I made my way “home.”
Up two flights of smelly stairs to the little room that would only be mine till the end of the week unless I won a lottery, hoping against hope I did NOT run into any of my “neighbors”, smelly old wino’s all, every one them. Then the usual struggle to get the damned key into the damned lock with hands that didn’t want to work anymore, and weren’t going to , either, unless I could work some damned miracle and get the surgery I needed so I could use them again. I could hear my ol cat meowing his welcome. “SHHHHUT UP!” I hissed, afraid he’d blow his/our cover, and I’d lose him too. No pets allowed here. Just us bums.
Supper was a can of tuna shared, some crackers, and a cup of hotpot brewed instant coffee. Snow was blowing hard outside the window: I felt some comfort at being inside and warm, knowing I’d done what could be done with this gawd-awful day, even if it didn’t help at all. At least I didn’t drink.
I heard the rumble of male voices in the hall, some of them slurred, of course as usual. Except for the one that was never slurred, that of my old AA nemesis, “The Don” himself.
How horrified I had been on that first day here, trying, while gaggin, to clean the shared toilet down the hall enough to dare to use it, to look up and see HIM leaning in the bathroom doorway, with that self satisfied smug grin on his whiskered face.
“Guess YOU’VE come down a few pegs, huh?”
“Shut UP, you old asshole!” shot right out of my mouth, and with this spirited exchange, an old acquaintance was renewed, to his delight and my complete chagrin.
He’d been almost 20 years sober when I saw him last, in one of my many (useless) former attempts to “get” the AA program, and get sober myself. Pretty smug, self satisfied AA Cloned God-Jerk he was back then too, even before he blew away his sober time and dived back into the gutter. But sober again now, he said, for several years. And here I was with five years clean under my belt, yet here we BOTH were, living in this flophouse full of old end stage wino’s?! Go figure.
His story was he wanted to be here. That he knew the only way he’d stay off the sauce was to stay nose to nose with the underbelly itself, doing what he could for the other guys there, who were quite diligently drinking themselves to death. Which was where he was headed too, and no too far in the future, according to the yellow tinge of liver failure that was all too evident to this unemployed nurse. Whatever. Who cares.
“So you figure it’s finally time for you to repent and earn your way ALL the way into heaven, huh?” was my sarcastic response: he’d get no applause from me, as was easy to see his that precious damned “Higher Power” hadn’t done a whole lot for HIM now, had it?
“Yeah.” He said softly, “Now it looks like I REALLY got my work cut out for me, with you here!”
“Well, you can just Fuck OFF! And stay the hell AWAY FROM ME!”
Chuckling, he ambled off down the hall, “Just holler if you need any help,” he laughed, over his shoulder. Fuming, I almost scrubbed the enamel right off that damned toilet, bad hands or not. How much worse could things GET?
Have you ever tried to live without much use of your hands? Let me tell ya, it’s not real easy. With the nerve supply to both badly impaired by carpal tunnel syndrome, they just don’t obey well. They drop ever second thing you pick up. They can’t even handle a damned doorknob half the time, and the pain never stops: it’s relentless. Try tying a shoe, hooking your bra, hell, even pulling up your pants. Or sleeping.
None of this did a thing for my sunny disposition. Nor did the boiling rage I felt at the abandonment of a “father,” who was even now sitting in the warm and cozy comfort of my dead mothers home, one that he didn’t care to share with the likes of an evil step child like me, even for awhile, as I had learned the hard way because his addled, alcoholic mind thought I’d come home just to get his money.
I didn’t know how to survive this way. I had never in my 46 years ever had to worry about homelessness, or hunger, or lack of access to medical care. And nobody, anywhere along my long recovery road had mentioned even the possibility that life could go straight to a hell in a hand basket like this AFTER I finally sobered up.
But it doesn’t take all that much, really, when one is single, and still alienated from family in most ways, (natural consequences from having been a roaring alcoholic for years: that takes time to mend.) One serious fall was all it took to start my (sober) dominos falling, one by one. The back, then the hands slowly stopped working. It’s hard to be a nurse without that basic equipment and they take away benefits when you have to drop to part time hours, then drop even those because your body isn’t cooperating anymore.
So you look for work you CAN still do, and end up a freakin nanny until you can’t lift the kids anymore and then you give up and go back to the place you once called “home.” You know, the place where they will always take you in, but sometimes they don’t, when the one person who held that illusionary “home” together is no longer there to do so.
Like most who have never been destitute, I honestly thought there would be help for me to get past this, and back to work. Lamb to slaughter, it was all the way. Who knew? Who knew the real cost of needing system help, is the total shredding of whatever last strands of human dignity you may have left, by the time you come to the absolute end of your own resources and finally admit the need for such help?
Who knew it was a totally adversarial process, where those who walk in are assumed to be guilty of gaming the system before they even open their mouths? One which requires you to prove you aren’t a “player” first, and then to prove, to the sole personal satisfaction of whatever burned out worker you draw, that your need indeed IS genuine?
One moment stands out. I am sitting at this case workers desk, both hands in braces, one arm in a sling as she reviewed the medical records I brought that documented both the back injury and the severe carpal tunnel diagnoses for both hands. She didn’t read very far before looking up at me with surprise. “Well!”, she said, “You’re an RN! You can ALWAYS get a job: nurses are needed everywhere.” closing my folder as she spoke. She was done with me: her mind snapped shut like a clamshell. I might as well have been talking to her empty chair from there on. But as it turned out, on that occasion, I was struck too dumb to even have a reply.
And so it was that I ended up living with six winos at the ol Sawmill Inn, the only flop house in my small home town where I THOUGHT my chances of getting this surgery done would be better than they were in the big city. It was the second floor over the Sawmill Inn restaurant, where I used to spend many hours with friends and colleagues in times past, and now could only enjoy the fumes of all that good food.
I went back to the welfare office the next day. There were only three days left to find a way to pay my next weeks rent: I had 10 dollars left to my name. They HAD to have some kind of emergency help for people in this kind of temporary mess, they HAD to. This was America and it was February in Minnesota, fer gawds sake!
I tried very hard that day. I did good, too. I didn’t yell at anyone. I stayed polite and calm.
And came home totally defeated.
The outside door in the alley opened by itself and there he stood, The Don. He grabbed the small bag of groceries out of my hand and headed up the stairs to my room. Gruffly, he said, “Give me your key!” I was too tired to object.
He shoved my cat off the table, plopped down my groceries, pulled out the only chair, and told me to “SIT!” I sat.
Then he paced back and forth and yelled at me.
For a long time.
He called me a damned stubborn fool who was about to become a damned DRUNKEN fool again, if I didn’t take some help from someone, and damned soon too.
He said I was too stupid to LIVE unless I got off my high horse and stopped thinking I could handle everything by myself.
He said I was living smack where I needed to be right living now, among those who REALLY knew how to survive in this country when ALL the chips go down, so why in the hell don’t I let them HELP me figure out how? “Don’t you see you’re not one goddamned bit better OR smarter than those guys down the hall?? You are one drink away, just ONE goddamned drink away from being just LIKE them.”
Something broke inside me, right then and there.
I felt it go and it took all my fight away with it.
I knew I had saved just enough money for a pint.
Just in case.
Words had never failed me before.
But I couldn’t find a single one now, so I sat there like a zombie.
Emptied out. No stuffing left. All done in.
Empty sack ready for the garbage.
He finally ran down enough to notice I hadn’t said a word for a long time.
Then was like he didn’t know what to do , and then he did know what to do, and he walked around behind my chair, and from there, folded me up in his scrawny arms.
The damn broke.
Wide open.
He just hung onto tight to keep me from flying apart and splattering all over the walls. Wave and waves and waves, one after another till I finally ran dry, and my eyeballs felt like they were somewhere across the room from me.
He got me a wet towel and sat awhile on the edge of my bed, saying nothing.
Then he got up and quietly said, “I’ll see you in the morning, and we’ll get to work figuring this out.”, and was gone.
I made it over to the bed and ol Tieg came and curled up against my tummy, his favorite place in the world, not seeming to mind missing supper at all. We fell sound asleep and didn’t wake up till the sun did.
The Don knocked on my door at 8 am sharp, and my formal education in how to survive in America, when the bottom falls all the way out, really began in earnest. We started with “How to Get The Landlord to Let You Be Late With The Rent”.
He said this would be easy, because I’d been paying on time and I was a rare sober tenant that didn’t cause any trouble, so they’d cut me slack for a few weeks, like they did for other non trouble makers. He said they knew this was easier that re-renting the room, and it was all a tax write off for them anyway. I just had to go downstairs, ask to see the owner, and be soft spoken and polite. ( the smart ass had to grin when he said that). I’ll do it tomorrow, I said, because DAMN, I hate to ask anyone for anything…
“You’ll do it right NOW”, he said, “or you won’t do it at all.”
So even though it made my jaws hurt, and my pride literally convulse, I went down and did it. “Sure,” the guy said. “Two weeks from now will be fine.”
When I got back up to my room, Gus and Tony were in there too, waiting for me with fresh coffee brewed and a package of breakfast rolls open on the table. It was a party they said, to celebrate me finally “really moving in” and becoming a real human being. Smart asses, all of `em. I still love those sticky, gummy rolls.
After that, it was on to “How To Get Emergency Help From The Welfare Office 101”. Seems there’s a whole different kind of communication required, coupled with the “appropriate demeanor.” You can’t, he said, expect to be helped just because you NEED help, you have to LOOK like you need help, and SOUND like you need help and will be SO grateful for anything they can offer. So see, you can’t sound very smart, or proud or capable at ALL, because all of these things tend to just piss them off.
Since clearly this was not getting through to me, they all took turns role playing it for me with each other. Don magically transformed himself from this intelligent, sharp witted fellow to some skid row sad sack who could barely raise his head to meet anyone’s eyes, and spoke in this soft, subservient whispery voice. It was a rather magnificent performance that drew him applause from the other two and even from me.
Then I began to get it: if I wanted help, I couldn’t ask for it as “myself.” I had to ask for it from behind a the kind of persona they needed me to have, a beaten down, not very sharp, very humble petitioner, begging for whatever scraps I could get, who could clearly be grateful for any at all.
“No way! No way in hell could I do that” I protested, the mere thought of it enough to make me gag.
Oops, wrong thing to say, for all this earned me was another two hours of rehearsal, with Don as the caseworker, during which I careened from rage to hysterical laughter and back again, several times. I also noticed the other two guys had picked places to sit on the floor with their backs against the only door.
The group consensus, at the end of this exhausting session, was that I was ready for my debut performance the next day. To which I would be escorted by my professors, who would stay out of sight, but still there to support me. (and, I suspected, to make sure I actually got there. )
Then they invited me to join them for supper in the common room.
Oh boy. You had to walk through this common room to get to the single rooms, so I was familiar enough with it to know I didn’t want to go there. There was a full kitchenette in one corner that looked like it had had its last scrub down two decades before, the refrigerator door was kept close with duct tape, and you were really glad you had boots on walking across that linoleum floor. It had a rickety cigarette-burned old kitchen table with rickety chairs, an old overstuffed, sagging couch full of stains I didn’t want to identify, a few broken down easy chairs and a 12 inch black and white TV sitting on a milk crate. There were some shreds of old curtains hanging onto the rods for dear life, and that’s it.
Supper itself, as I had seen before when passing through, consisted of a combination of whatever foods each had to share on any given night, sometimes augmented by handouts from the one or two friendly cooks downstairs that could be conned out of some leftovers.
On this particular night, I could hardly refuse without seeming ungrateful, so I grabbed my last can of tuna and some crackers (and a dish and cup and fork of my own) and joined in the communal meal. Of course, this late in the day, Don and I were the only ones sober enough to set the food out. I helped him convince the others to eat something, anything, as food was not all high up on some of their priority lists anymore, apparently.
Wally, especially, who spent most of his life curled up with his wine bottle on the couch or on his bed in his room. One good look at Wally and I knew he wasn’t long for this world at all. They said he was once a well known businessman in town, with a thriving accountant business, nice home and family, all abandoned long ago for the sweet oblivion of booze. Now I had to work pretty hard to get him to swallow a few pieces of macaroni.
That night we dined on my tuna mixed with Gordie’s can of macaroni and cheese, a can of baked beans Don brought, and some day old buns from downstairs. It did beat sharing that tuna with just ol Tieg. These guys could tell some hilarious tales. No one cleaned up after the meal, of course; they were guys, remember? Stuff just stayed there till the next meal when it would be tossed out to make room for fresh stuff.
When I went to bed that night, I noticed some strange sensations. I felt “lighter” somehow, inside. That bitter taste in my mouth was gone and it felt like there was more room in my chest for air. I even had to chuckle a few times, remembering the role playing. Ol Teig purred louder ever time, too.
It might very well be that laughter is ever bit as life saving as food and water.
See you tomorrow for Part Two.
(crossposted from Village Blue)
