The time had come to see what I had learned about being an actress. Every has to learn how to “act” one time or another, in order to get through this life, but the performance I turned in the next day at the Welfare Office did my Directors proud. I came away with enough vouchers for rent and food to make it for at least a month and I thought possibly I’d discovered a whole new career in films.
Using the money I’d stashed for that pint I no longer needed, I took the guys out for coffee (IN the restaurant, not over it, for once) as a thank you. Gordie, Tony, Gus, The Don and I crowded into a booth right in the middle of the morning coffee break crowd, and ordered coffee and rolls. They wanted to hear all about how my performance went and I wanted to tell it all, so it took me awhile to notice the stares from the folks sitting across from us. They weren’t friendly.
Don got up to use the men’s room and had to walk right past that booth. Face it, none of these guys will ever end up in GQ magazine. Some of them have even forgotten what it’s like to end up in a shower. The Don, however, was always dressed in his best old clothes when he went out and about, hair combed, stubble shaved, his old Stetson sitting cocked to the back on his balding head. But it was those piercing, light blue eyes that caught the attention, (well, mine, anyway.) They outshone all the lines on that worn rough face and made you one forget the slow, limping, bowlegged gait.
“Goddamned bums, all of ’em!”, growled the older man across from us, looking up from his ham and eggs as The Don walked past. “Buncha goddamned bums.” His perfectly coiffed wife, keeping her eyes on her plate, just clucked, shaking her head. (I had to check out really quick and go inside, to the safe space I’d carved out for when I felt like killing someone with my bare hands. ) Then I looked at all of us, through that man’s eyes, for just a brief moment.
None of the rest of them had shaved, of course, and the front of Geordies old jacket was stiff with spilled coffee and who knows what else. The elbows of Tony leather jacket had said goodbye long ago, and he never took off that grungy grey wool hat with the ear flaps till summer. Gus? Well, since he had no teeth at all, his beard was full of pastry crumbs and coffee drizzles, all making their way through its tangles. Yes, indeed, we were a motley crew all right. Not exactly a sweet smelling one, either. Anxiously, I quickly scanned the room: was there anyone there who might recognize me? Bad moment for me there.
One that did not get past The Don, who had just returned. Damn. He could pin you right to the wall with those eyes, without saying a word, and seemed to enjoy doing it too. Then he launched into his Directors critique of my mornings performance, and while he gave me points for some of it, he had more to say about how I could do it better the next time I went back to get the medical stuff rolling.
I was growing more curious about this guy, who never talked about himself or his former life at all. Later that day I ran into him in the common room and asked him what he’d done for a living when he was younger. He suddenly decided the dishes should be washed and left the table. Did he have a family anywhere, I asked? He just walked out of the room.
When I got the chance later, I asked Tony, who was the only other one very talkative at all, about The Don. He just told me I should mind my own business. Well, of course, that’s like holding a rare steak in from of a hungry bear. Hell. I was a psych nurse. Just give me time, and I’ll crack that guy wide open.
The next few weeks, with their support, I jumped through the many hoops necessary to get the approval for the first hand surgery and THE DAY finally come. I was literally terrified; too many bad former experiences with surgeries under my belt, and I knew I’d be wide damned awake for this one. I wanted my Mommy and my Granny, my kids, and everyone who ever loved me right there with me, to hold my other hand, but all I had was the guys.
Who of course shuffled right into that hospital with me, en masse, in all their tattered, odiferous glory, much to the consternation of some of the starched white staff, and the other people who had to share the waiting room with them. Somewhere along the line, I seemed to have stopped worrying about who saw me with this crew, I was just so glad they were there.
I don’t know where in the heck they got the money for the cab to haul me back home. I was still pretty dopey from the meds, and with their help, I made it up the stairs and into bed, my left arm in a huge pressure bandage and sling. Somebody was always sitting there when I’d wake up. Somebody made me some hot soup. Somebody fed my cat. Since I was walking into walls, one of them escorted me to the rest room down the hall, where I made the horrible discovery that I couldn’t pull my pants all the way back up (over all the territory they had to travel,) with only one arm. Nor could I unhook my bra when it was time for bed. Now what? I had finally figured out life hands you the lessons you need, and yes, I did need to learn to ask for help, but this was getting WAY the hell out hand.
After two nights (of sleeping in my clothes) I needed a shower pretty bad myself, and was trying to figure how I’d accomplish it all. That’s when they all came in and sat down and I knew there had been another summit meeting of some sort, among my keepers. The Don, wisely, kept his mouth shut and let Tony do the talking. He said I probably needed some more help, like with my “clothes and stuff,” for now. He said since he was just a harmless old man who couldn’t get it up if he tried, he’d help me if I wanted.
There are times humor is the only possible coping mechanism, and this was one of them, so I grabbed three bras out of my drawer, and tossed one to each of them and said, “Now YOU figure out how to get on of those on and off YOUR OWN selves, with only one hand!”
Thereafter came one of the most bizarre scenes I’ve ever been a part of in my entire life. Four old wizened winos, dead serious about figuring out how to put on and take off a bra with one hand. I can’t begin to repeat the jokes and running commentary of that next hour or so, or accurately record my reactions, which ranged from incredulous to hysterical. I’ll have to settle for telling you the results of their brainstorming for ways for me to dress and undress by myself, with only one hand.
All it took was one pair of long handled, needle nosed pliers in my good hand, reaching across the body to pull up the pants, and simply leaving the bra hooked, putting it on over your head, and again, pulling the thing into place with the needle nose pliers, while leaning forward at the opportune moment! And they didn’t stop there, either.
Since one hand was totally out of commission for six weeks, and the one yet to be fixed didn’t work so hot either, they figured out how to wire a piece of wood to all the doorknobs so I could open and close doors more easily. They found some used Velcro to put on my shoes so they didn’t need to be tied. One made me a little stand to sit my book on so I could read without having to hold onto it. Each of these innovations were presented with great fanfare, much pride and always, lots of laughs. If my feminist companions of years past had been there, they’d have about died of shock at the jokes I was now laughing at right along with these guys, while handing them back all the sexist male humor I knew, and I knew quite a bit! You live in the world you have, not necessarily the one you’d like and this one was a real trip and a half.
And so it went, for the next six weeks of healing one arm, then the next surgery and six more weeks of healing the other one. They each established their own ways of determining my needs FOR me, then meeting those needs, and it seemed to energize them. They went out and got my groceries and put them away, stopped in every day to open the cat food can, swept my floor, even did my laundry. I noticed even the common room looked cleaner, and that toilet was kept almost spotless the whole time.
Oh yeah, Christmas came and went during this time too. We decided a Scrooge type Christmas was for us, and Ba-Humbugged out way through the whole thing .
Meanwhile, all this while, The Don finally had his captive audience for some serious sobriety repair work. It was like being home schooled by a strict and unrelenting tyrant of a parent. The Don was a fervent believer in the Twelve Step Program of Alcoholic Anonymous and was dead on determined to make one out of me as well.
But I was NOT going to try it again. No damned way. Not after all I’d been though with years and years of trying and failing to make it work for me: and in fact, it had been extremely harmful to me in more than one way. The way that program had been presented to me over and over, by hard core AA cultists who insisted that I accept my “powerlessness” and turn my entire life over to some damned “higher power” (who they all defined as “God” in those days,) was like telling me I had to repeat my whole horrible past as the sinful child of rabid fundamentalists who had already cone their best to eradicate all traces of who I was. Then there were the hard core groups who had told me I would lose my sobriety, and couldn’t even be considered sober, if I didn’t get off the antidepressants, so I did, and ended up hospitalized after my first serious suicide attempt while sober.
Now here stood The Don, every morning at 10 am sharp, the hated Big Book in hand, ready to dump some more of that crap on me. Not on your sweet life, Buddy. It took no time at all for me to go right back to hating that guy and telling him so in no uncertain and very colorful terms. But did it shut him up and chase him off? I wish.
So I cranked up my very good mind and took him and his precious damned Big Book head on. You want a good fight? Well, bring in on, and may the best man win.
The other guys made sure to stay away until after 3pm: they didn’t want to become collateral damage. I sat up late nights, preparing for the next days battle. I suspect he was doing the same. Two pretty sharp intellects, locked in a life and death struggle here, neither one about to say “Uncle.”
To his credit, over those noisy weeks, he did manage to get me to see some of it from a different perspective, a broader one than I had had before. It made it possible for me to hang onto some of the truly useful parts of that program, something I really needed and used to save my sobriety many times in years to come. But there was just no way, would never be anyway way, for me to fully embrace the concept of my intrinsic “powerlessness” over my own life, or for me to place the full responsibility for my life in the hands of some “external” deity or “higher power” To me, that was life threatening stuff, and remains so to this day.
To MY credit, I gave him a whole lot to think about too, in terms of him taking some credit for his OWN sobriety and seeing himself as a pretty darned powerful human being in his own right, as well, with or without the help of some external “deity”. It was during one of these “turn the table on him” sessions, he finally let me see his human side.
We had been talking about guilt, and I spoke of my own, as alcoholic parent, for so many years of my life with my kids I spent drunk and “absent” in so many important ways. He teared up, in spite of himself, before he could hide it.
I just waited, letting the silence grow, and he finally told me of his daughter. His only child. The one he abandoned at age 8, for his addiction. The one he tried to find to reconcile with when sober before, only to learn she had died the year before, in a horrible car crash, hit head on by a drunk driver.
Then it was my turn to step behind The Don, and hang onto him, as his dam broke wide open. That night he stayed in my room with me. We laid side by side on the bed like two totally exhausted old warriors, too tired to do anything but hold hands and stare at the ceiling together till we fell asleep. We were still lying just like that in the morning. Such preciousness shared in those silent hours.
Over coffee in the morning, I asked him about his liver, straight up, and he didn’t lie: he only had a few months, six at the most to go, on what was left of it, according to the docs. There was no one left to really care, he said, except the fellows here. They were his family now. “They know what to do”, he said, when the time came for him. We talked about dying for a long time that day: it was like he’d never had the chance to talk about it before.
Oddly enough, it was only a few days after that the knock came late one night. Gus had gone to make sure Wally was safety in bed and didn’t have his cigarettes and lighter within his reach. Well, ol Wally was in bed alright, and asleep for good.
It was pretty amazing to watch them swing into motion, as if they’d rehearsed it. They knew the phone numbers to call, the far off niece to contact. While we waited for the undertaker to come, we all gathered round his bed and they told stories about ol Wally, pretty funny ones, too. Of course he needed to be toasted. Over and over and over, which pretty much took care of Tony, who passed out cold.
The undertaker came, and they simply waved ol Wally on out the door, and set about dividing up his stuff. They all knew what he wanted them each to have. For some strange reason, he’d asked them to give me his belt buckle that was shaped like a buffalo. Seemed they all knew everything about how each other wanted things to be done when they died: they’d been through this gig before. Death was no surprise here. Life goes on.
Soon, it finally came time for me to leave and go back to the city. Not an easy thing to do at all,
nor was it an easy thing for them to have me go, either. A fairly large part of me didn’t even want to.
But I had my own grown kids, and a whole lot of work to do on mending my relationships with them still ahead. I had years of my own still sober life to live that would go on much longer than theirs would, and we all knew and accepted that reality. I had to earn a living again.
But still, it was so hard. I had a private goodbye with each, and gave them each something of mine to keep, and got the same back from each of them. We had a wild send off party where we relived every crazy moment shared over the past months.
The Don, of course, was the hardest to say goodbye to. I bet him a buck he’d cry, and I won. But then he won it back because I did too. He promised to have someone let me know when, as he put it, he blew this pop stand. I knew it would be on his terms and done his own way.
This time we didn’t have to hug each other from behind. It was a full length body hug, and a nice long one, too!
He did, however, get the last word, as I found out when a gal at the bus depot asked me if I knew I had a copy of the Serenity Prayer pasted on my back.
The Don blew this pop stand four months later, according to a coffee stained postcard from Gus.
Thank you, Ol Buddy, you did good. Thank you so much.
And the rest of the guys too, for more than I could ever say.