One Man, Many Pasts

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 Neighbors

I live with a crazy woman. She’s been analyzed and declared sane and competent, but she is without doubt batshit crazy. She firmly believes that her cat is the embodiment of the son she never had, she’s missing anywhere between a quarter and a third of her brain, and she recently signed three different contracts with three different companies to install brand new windows in the entire house and — as a result — has since lost almost $8,000 and is aiming to lose much, much more. Legally sane, yes, but ridiculously crazy.

My neighbors seem to blow her crazy out of the water. Three or four people, from what I gather — a mother, a son my age, a younger son, and a daughter that I’ve only recently seen — live in the older quasi-Victorian style white house.

The mother, forty-something, is tall, tan, and blonde. I don’t see her much unless she’s sitting in her van smoking or outside arguing with her eldest son. Her ex-husband lives a street over, and frequently drives by in his flashy BMW coupe to show off how great his life is now that he doesn’t have to worry about her or the kids. From the information I’ve gathered, she gets doped up on anti-depressants and pain meds constantly.

The son, the one my age, looks like he walked out of an Urban Outfitters catalog. I see him walking around the neighborhood in pastel chinos with a cigarette hanging from his mouth every now and then. Like his mother, he too takes medication, but he takes lithium for what I assume to be bipolar disorder. He doesn’t appear to interact with anyone except his mother, but even then they communicate through loudness. On occasion I see him sitting on his back patio smoking and staring out into the yard.

The youngest son is a nuisance, frequently leaving behind his skateboards and bicycles and toys strewn about both their yard and mine. He stares through their front door at anyone who passes by, and I firmly believe his only vocal setting is “loud”. Sometimes I see him beg his older brother to play with him — to go riding with him or kick the ball around, to do anything — but the older brother simply pushes him away and walks on by himself.

The daughter, who I have only recently started to see, is perhaps the only normal one in the house. She plays with her younger brother, takes him to his friend’s house, and walks their dog. She’s tall with a full head of sand colored curly hair. I think she recently graduated high school due to the fact that her mother’s van recently had “Congrats Grad!” written on the back of it, but I’m not totally certain. Honestly, the daughter is the only person in the family I’ve ever seen smile. She’s the only one that talks instead of shouts.

The crack in the otherwise perfect face of suburbia starts with this family. Perfect house, perfect lawn, and an outwardly picturesque family to anyone that might drive by on any given day. Like any family, however, they are far from perfect. Love affairs, mental instability, and foundation shaking arguments that dot the week shed light on their otherwise quiet and somewhat eerie existence.

The Smoker

She sits alone under the carport, a shield from the downpour that surrounds her. She’s older, but not elderly, and “slightly overweight” – something she says her recent back surgery caused. I’ve talked to her once before, and she explained that the pool gave her relief from her pains, both physical and emotional.

“Floating supports my back,” she told me, “and going under keeps everything in my head quiet.”

A couple of months ago she told me about her mental state and how her ex-husband had pushed her to driving a shard of glass into his stomach. He survived, and she was left with a scar in her palm (she held her hand up to show me – there was no scar). Psychiatrists had prescribed her a number of pills to take daily, but according to her they’re doing more harm than good. She says they add voices, rather than remove them. Her family is the root of her problem, she tells me, “The bane of her very existence” — having cut her off from grandchildren and financial support. She now lives with her daughter and grandson – the only two people that haven’t yet abandoned her. She explains that were it not for them, she would not be alive today.

She once told me that this, her current existence, is hell.

She sits under the carport smoking one cigarette after another after another. Even from my spot, some twenty feet away, she appears blank. Maybe it’s the gloomy weather, but she seems more depressed than usual today. On occasion I’ll see her outside smoking, usually standing and pacing – today she’s sitting in a purple lawn chair, staring into the many thousands of raindrops falling in front of her.

Four cigarettes, and she consumes each one down to the butt. Hot orange tip after hot orange tip.

After she finishes her last cigarette, she reaches for another but the box is empty. She sets it back down on the little square table to her left side, and proceeds to dump the ashes into the little patch of grass that would – I suppose – be called her front lawn. It’s no larger than three feet wide by five feet long.

Even without cigarettes, she remains seated for the next ten minutes, staring idly into the rain. When she attempts to breathe in, her first real breath I’ve seen while watching her, she coughs. Hard enough to make her bend over and hold her chest, but not hard enough to make her go inside. I rarely see her outside, so I’m not sure if the cigarettes are what’s killing her or if, ironically, it’s the fresh air.