I once worked at an assisted living facility — a place where old people go to die, essentially. I was paid under the table to prime and paint and peel wallpaper and rip up carpet, but it was a brief stint due to my commitments to school. In the two weeks I worked there, I earned maybe $250. Not bad for a high school student — God knows it put gas in my ’93 Nissan Pathfinder.
While working at the facility, I had the pleasure of interacting with the elderly. Many of them without families, either because they had been abandoned by them or because they simply outlived their kin, and they seemed to enjoy having someone my age around to talk to. During my time there I heard countless war stories. One man claimed to be a Navajo Code Talker, another claimed he was dropped into enemy territory during Vietnam, but most sat quietly while others spoke of their war histories, probably mulling over the things they had seen instead of choosing to relive that past through words.
Of all the men I met, however, one stuck out most. I’ve since forgotten his name, and he passed away during my last few days of work there, but his stories stuck out more than any others. When I started working at the home, the manager told me about this man. “He’s delirious, you know, he suffers from dementia but he’s a great man. Every day he tells a different life story — every day he’s someone or something new.”
He was right. On my first day of work, the man rolled up in his wheelchair and introduced himself as a pastor. While I primed the walls and primed them some more, he went on about his days as a missionary in Spain and France and Germany. He told me about various miracles he had witnessed and the things that God had told him in his sleep. He said to me one day, “God told me you’d be here — said you’d be here to help.”
The man was missing on my second day of work, out for testing at the hospital. He returned on my third day, this time to tell me about his life as a major league baseball player. “Back in the day,” he said, “I struck out the greats. I beat the Yankees and the Red Sox. Rodriguez ain’t got nothin’ on me, boy.”
On my fourth day, he told me stories about his job as a pilot during Vietnam. His best friend had been shot down, his cousin tortured by the Viet Cong, and he himself narrowly escaped crashing into a mountain. “Bastards thought they could tear down the good ol’ USA, son, but we taught ’em not.”
On my fifth day he claimed to be an oilman from Texas, and said he had struck black gold some thirty years ago under the hot desert sun. “My family took the money, though, said I was crazy and left me here. I ain’t seen ’em since.”
His stories changed like the seasons, and near the end of my employment — and the end of his life — they seemed to get stranger.
One day he claimed to be Earl Warren, judge of the famous Brown v. Board of Education case. The problem with this was that Earl Warren had died in 1974 and was white — whereas this man was black and for the time being alive. Another day he claimed to have stepped foot on the moon, proudly declaring that he was the first and only black man to do so. During his stay on Luna, he interacted with “space aliens that sounded an awful lot like Russians”.
On my last day of working at the home, he pulled me aside for a quiet, brief conversation.
“I’ve been a lot of things, son, and you’re the only person who listens to me.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Mmhm, but let me tell you something.”
“What’s that?”
“I ain’t crazy,” he started, “I ain’t never been any of those things, but I tell everyone I had been.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because it’s the funniest damn thing to see their faces when I tell ’em I was an astronaut.”
In his delusions, in his dementia, he had not lost his humor. I left at 2pm that day, and returned a few hours later when I saw an ambulance at the facility. Upon my asking who had passed this time, because it was a regular occurrence, I discovered my friend had died of a massive heart attack after telling the new nurse one of his stories.
The People Watcher 