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Liti-Gator
Doubletree Resident
(108.227.229.50) on 1/25/2013 - 10:05 p.m. says: ( 319 views
, 5 likes
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"The looks on the faces of the staff were priceless. Who is the white man? " |
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(An excerpt) "That man is here to see Mister Evans again! Did you see him? They went into his room." The rumors flew down the halls and into the cafeteria, to the maintenance room and the laundry. There was a lawyer in the building and he was here for Ronnie Evans. Again. He was in Mr. Evans room for almost an hour. And he didn't leave after. They went out into the courtyard, same place they went last time. And they just sat there talking. About what, no one knew. What they did know was that you didn't see no white lawyer hanging around no nursing home and be up to any good. Especially one talking to Ronnie Evans. They were right. We were up to no good. We were planning jail breaks. I had to jump through the hoops of course, the state had seen to that. So I started with Mr. Nicovich, the Center Director and worked my way through the maze. I sent a letter. I called. And when he agreed to meet with me, I showed up in his office, shoes shined and teeth polished. Patrick Nicovich was a man biding his time. He'd been the director over the Home for well on ten years and the weariness of the place, the drabness of the job, the sheer sullenness of overseeing the end of the line for Jefferson County's indigent invalids and those who cared for them seemed to drape itself over him. When I walked in, he was hunched over a newspaper. Superman is this. Superman is this. He stroked his beard with his pencil. Ten letters. What the hell was it? This one and one more and he'd have the thing whipped. It took him a second to notice me. He finally put his pencil down and looked up at me quizzically, like a man sizing up another man for a suit of clothes. "Can I help you?" he asked in a monotone voice. "I'm a friend of Ronnie Evans. I just wanted to introduce myself. Ronnie wants to go out - to leave the facility for a few hours from time to time. With me." His brow furrowed. He slowly raised his chin, meeting my eyes as he pulled himself upright in the chair with great effort. "He wants to do what?" he asked sarcastically, his eyes narrowing. I paused and looked at him darkly. As usual, the system did not appreciate deviations from the course. I knew full well how to conduct an adversarial relationship. "To go out. On day trips." "And you are going to take him?" he asked incredulously, a bemused expression spreading over his sizeable pale face. ~ I'd spent weeks worried about it. We talked about a lot in those first weeks. One visit at a time for an hour, maybe two. We got to know each other a little. I began to see Ronnie as the man he was, rather than as an object of pity. He loved to eat, or used to. He loved martial arts movies. Loved to smoke cigarettes and talk trash. Loved to remember his days back in the neighborhood, before the accident. He loved women and old people and kids. And in all those conversations, I was careful to avoid it. Careful to avoid the one topic he and I both knew mattered most to him. He spent weeks in those halls waiting on me to bring it up. I knew in my heart, he wanted me to offer. "Why don't we get you out of here for little while?" I knew he wanted me to take him out, if only for an hour or two. And I put it off and put it off, anxious about the unknowns. Not wanting to go there. Not wanting to....handle him. For all the visits, all the long talks, all the barriers we slowly but surely broke down, for all of that, in the end, one thing remained true. He was still different than me. And I was afraid of him.
The Alabama Department of Human Resources was created in 1935 to administer the assistance programs that were part of the Social Security Act, assistance programs developed to help an American public that was suffering through the financial hardships of the Great Depression. The agency's original name was the Department of Public Welfare. In 1955, it was renamed the Department of Pensions and Security. The current name was adopted in 1986. The department employs 4200 workers across 67 counties. Its stated mission is to provide for the protection, well-being and self-sufficiency of children and adults. Overseen by a board headed by the Governor of the State of Alabama, the agency's organizational flow chart contains no less than 34 boxes, each designating a division with its own objective. I had learned that even the most intimidating flow charts were but graphic representations of persons, ultimately. All of those boxes, if you looked hard enough, had people in them. Yes, the State of Alabama Department of Human Resources had humans in it. I understood, knew deep down from experience, that contrary to the conventional wisdom, these were not, at their core, simply soulless bureaucracies housed in monolithic buildings containing labyrinths full of doors. If they were fortresses, erected to protect against deviation, they could be penetrated. And I had penetrated them before. You just had to look past those boxes to the people inside them. You had to open those doors. It had to be done face to face. I needed one person. One human being who had any idea who Ronnie Evans was and why he deserved to go out for more than a 15 minute smoke three times a day. Ronnie had told me about Adult Services, the box in that chart responsible for his "protection and well-being." It was a start. I made a number of calls to the office in Montgomery, then Birmingham. Eventually, I got the voice mail of the local social worker with oversight over Ronnie. I introduced myself, said I wanted to make arrangements to go on day trips and asked her to call me back. Two days later, Ms. Charletta Moore returned my call. I explained what I wanted and she reluctantly agreed to meet me at the Home the following week. I was going to be sized up again. She asked me several questions, including where I lived, what I did for a living and what my interest was in Ronnie. And she could not have been any uglier about it. I answered her questions straightforwardly, with an ever-growing chip on my shoulder. "Mister Evans" she called him, though he was sitting right there, "cannot just leave the Home whenever he wants to. We need to be called first. At least two days ahead of time. We'll need to know when you are leaving, where you'll be going and when you'll be back." Her voice was sharp with disdain. At the time, I didn't know exactly why, but I knew this lady did not like Ronnie at all. Inside of two minutes, I knew she didn't like me either. But we got through it. I passed whatever test she had given me and we were good to go. When she left, I could see Ronnie rocking himself, almost imperceptibly, back and forth in the chair. "Bud! We goin' out!" he sang at me. He was still rocking. Rocking and grinning. It was the first time I ever saw a legless man do a jig. "Yep. We are" I agreed, the realization of what I had gotten myself into settling over me like a wet blanket. "We sure are." When the social worker left, we sat there like a couple of generals plotting military maneuvers, discussing our options. I'd call DHR ahead of time as required. We'd leave after lunch one day and be back in time for dinner. He wanted to go right then. We settled on the following Tuesday at 2 o'clock. I could get him in the car, he assured me. He'd talk me through it. I nodded at him and rolled my eyes. "You can do it bud," he said with authority. "It ain't that bad." He could not stop grinning. "And where are we going to go?" I asked him. I had no earthly idea what we could do, where we could go or how in God's name I was going to make it happen. He grunted and flashed his over-large teeth at me, big toothy teeth, gums from here to China. "The titty bar" he said with a gleeful growl. "I wanna go to the titty bar." ~ I pulled close to the curb, parked and made my way inside. Ronnie was waiting on me as usual, his chair pulled into his doorway with his head on its side so he could see down the hall. Unlike every other time I had seen him, today he was wearing a sweat jacket and a hat. A raggedy, light blue knit toboggan pulled down over his ears. I wondered if he realized how hot it was out. He reminded me of a character from the old Fat Albert cartoon I watched as a kid. But older. And more real. "We got this" he whispered. "Just push me out front so I can smoke first." I hunched over his sprawled out wheelchair, released the brakes and pushed him down the long hall to the nurse's station. I signed him out. Name of Patient - Ronnie Evans Time Out - 2:00 Time Back - 5:00 Escort: Adam Morel The thickly jowled nurse behind the desk just watched me from behind her caked mascara and thick horn-rimmed glasses. She looked over the counter, down at Ronnie and back at me, expressionless. I pushed him down the South Hall, up past the main cafeteria, down the East Hall past dozens of rooms, and through the electric glass front door out onto the veranda of the complex. When we got out into the July sun, to the concrete bench just before the circular driveway, I stopped, bent over and put his brakes back on. We had been through the smoking drill many times before but I was still not quite used to it. He lifted his head up off the front pad of the wheelchair, straining as I pulled the small change purse hanging by a cord around his neck off of him. Inside was a pack of Kool Menthols, a lighter and a key. The key unlocked the large plastic box in the bottom of his closet. The box that housed every meaningful possession in Ronnie's life. Mostly, paperwork - letters he'd written to politicians and reporters, medicaid records, dog eared greeting cards and photographs, his collection of martial arts and porn movies, several cans of soda, a dozen or so bags of chips and two cases of cigarettes. I took out a cigarette, careful not to break it, and the lighter. He turned his head and puckered his lips out like a fish, waiting on me to place the end of it between his lips. When I did, I held the lighter close in and he pulled hard until it lit, his stomach heaving up off of the chair. I was still amazed watching Ronnie smoke. Once the cigarette was in his mouth, it stayed there until it was gone, smoked all the way down to the filter. He held it there, in his mouth like that and pulled the nicotine in, releasing the smoke, pulling in, releasing the smoke, pausing for a moment or two between pulls, his eyes pinched half closed and watering from the smoke wafting back into his face. Sometimes he screeched out a few words of conversation between pulls. Mostly he just smoked. Four minutes later, he'd be down to the filter and I'd reach down and remove what was left of the thing. I had never smoked in my life but the tips of my fingers always stunk like tar and nicotine when I returned from our visits. When he finished, we began. He told me what to do and I did it. "Push me over to the car, near the door. Put my brakes on. Open the door. Turn me around so my head is toward the trunk. Put the seat down close to the ground. Push it as far back as it goes. Recline it way back." He had never been in my car, or any vehicle other than an ambulance or a van built for disabled people in years. But he eyeballed the situation and gave orders. I tried to stop worring and, one step at a time, did what he told me to do. "Come over to my chair. Unhook the tube for my bag. Take my bag and hook it to your belt loop. They emptied it before you got here." I unhooked the colostomy bag from the side of his wheelchair, unkinked the tube running from the thick plastic bag into his stomach and placed the plastic hook at the bottom of the bag onto my front belt loop. The remaining urine drained to the top of the bag as I re-oriented it. I hoped the seal held. He looked up at me. "All right. Take my hat off and unfold the sheet off me and remember how I told you." We had come to the hard part. The part that scared me. I took the sheet, made onto the chair like you would short-sheet a bed, and gently pulled it away from the bottom of his torso and unfolded it, letting it drop down to the sidewalk behind his chair. He directed me around to the front of him. I followed his direction, stood there looking down at his bald, black head and began to laugh. "Brother, this is awesome!" I yelled. "It's crazy!" I had zoomed out and seen the two of us there, out on the sidewalk in the summer heat. Two guys society said didn't belong together. His urine bag was hanging at my waist, flopping against my thigh and he was bending upward toward me, impossibly arching his back trying to somehow help me. "You look like a contortionist" I said, my now crying with laughter. My sides ached. He was not amused. "Come on! Time's wastin' bud! We keepin' the wimin waitin'. Now make sure you don't yank the tube. And don't let it kink." I bent over, eyes watering, sweat dripping down my face and cracked up. When I regained composure, still wiping the sweat from my face, Ronnie stretched his entire being up off of the chair and toward me . I took a deep breath and grabbed him under his arms in one fell swoop, bear hug style, and with all the strength I could muster, jerked him up and out of the chair. Our faces were so close together, our noses touched. I could feel his dead weight pulling at my lower back. All I could think about was not dropping him. Gritting my teeth, I ever so slowly shifted my weight and slowly turned toward the open door to my car. For a moment, he swung there in the air, and then his distended stomach swung back and pressed hard against mine. "Okay bud" he grunted, struggling to speak. "Now bend over and put me on the seat." I reached deep, summoned all the muscle fiber available in the small of my back and leaned forward, into the car with him. "Watch my hea..." It was too late. The side of his head banged into the roof line of the car, forcing it unnaturally down as I dropped him onto the seat. His body, propped unnaturally upright on the seat, jerked into a spasm. "Okay" he stammered. "Grab my stumps and jerk them forward, toward you." His body continued to spasm, becoming rigid as his atrophied muscles recoiled from the shock. I reached down to the bottom of the pant legs that had been cut off at mid-thigh and were pulled up and behind him, up under what I could only imagine were his buttocks, the place where he abruptly ended. Reaching under him, I gave a quick yank and his torso finally flexed slightly at the hips, allowing his head to fall back against the head rest. "You did it. Now lean the seat back just a little for me." He was breathless. I kneeled there on the ground next to the car and sucked wind. I was completely drenched. As he convulsed, his eyes widened like moons and he smiled so big I could see every tooth in his mouth. We had done it. All I had left to do was break down his chair, figure out how to fit it into my trunk and we were out. Out of the Jefferson County Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. Ronnie's venue of choice was waiting. And, as instructed, I'd brought plenty of singles. |
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-- Starred by: BabySister GatorTom hailegator GatorDJ MichiGator -- |
The looks on the faces of the staff were priceless. Who is the white man? Liti-Gator 1/25/2013 - 10:05 p.m.
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