The Blob

What you are about to read may contain very strong sexual or offensive language, strong explicit nudity, very strong gore or disturbing violence, or graphic drug abuse. Essays with this rating should not be read by anyone over 18 (even if they are accompanied by an adolescent) and are usually edited to get an "R" rating. Today NA-17 essays are called "uncut" for verification that very graphic sex or violence scenes will be depicted.
Or it may just contain vivid descriptions of snot.

Whenever I want to make myself laugh, I think of this one particular “incident” I had with my friend Julie in college. I sometimes do this intentionally, and I can really get myself laughing maniacally if I don’t stop thinking about it. If I were an actor, I’d use this to my benefit if given a scene that required me to perform floor-punching, hysterical laugher. I don’t know why I find it so funny, but I doubt seriously that I’ll get through writing this without slipping over the edge several times.

I first met Julie in junior high school, although we really didn’t like each other then. We were both in band, and she admitted years later that she couldn’t stand me at that time. Julie was always high strung, and she wore her emotions on her sleeve. The first time I noticed this was when she got into an argument with the band conductor. I don’t remember what the problem was, but I do remember that he was the kind of person you didn’t want touching you. He was creepy in a Bela Lugosi kind of way. His skin was semi-transparent and tissue-papery, and Vitalis dripped out his thinning gray hair. I believe he made a sexist innuendo from his podium, and Julie took issue with it, and they went back and forth until he sent her down to the dean’s office.

Even at age fourteen, she had balls bigger than anyone I knew, and I always admired that. She was dramatic in a Bette Davis, Depression-era movie kind of way. To this day she is the only person who has ever thrown a drink in my face in a restaurant. Or anywhere, for that matter.

When we got into high school, we were still in band, which was overcrowded. Neither of us bonded with the director (“I can’t respect a man who blows his nose on a washcloth,” she once said.) We both had the low honor of being Band Alternates. As if being a band nerd wasn’t bad enough, we were the leper nerds of the Plant High School marching band. There were a set number of people needed to march the formations. Any extra players, instead of practicing marching every day on the football field, had to show up and just sit in the stadium. If someone was sick or broke a leg or couldn’t play for any reason, the director would put in an alternate. If he’d been a reasonable person, he would have switched out alternates for each game, but that’s not how he operated. We were Permanent Alternates. The Not Good Enough. During the entire school year I marched once.

Julie and I got to know each other while being leper Alternates, roasting in the afternoon sun on splintery wooden bleachers. We learned we had a lot in common. We both were in single mom-led families, something that was much more the exception than the rule back then. Both of our mothers were “heavy drinkers” (although neither of us would ever utter the “A” word about that.) We both loved Volkswagens. Her mother had a tan squareback, and when I turned 16 I bought a ’71 Superbeetle. And we both shared a perverted sense of humor and adored the grotesque.

A friend of her mother’s was opening a restaurant, and Julie got me my first job as a shrimp peeler/dish washer there. We got work permits and health certificates together, which were required of anyone under the age of sixteen. Ever the emotional one, Julie almost fainted while having her blood drawn for the health certificate. And she cried.

Although I never told her so back then, Julie was lovely. She had blazingly white, wavy Lady Godiva hair that she wore in a long braid that stretched all the way down her back. But the thing about her that really got to me was her laugh. It was loud and sharp, and once she got going she would throw her head back, look towards God, and bring her hand up to her chest as if she was grasping make-believe pearls. It physically drained her. When she ran out of air, she would stomp her feet back and forth until she could stop laughing long enough to inhale.

Just as she was hot-headed and dramatic, she was also quick to laugh and fast to forgive. And I did plenty of unforgivable things in those years.

As time passed, we remained close friends, but we were also, at times, viciously passive-aggressive. To know and to love Julie was like living in a kettle of fish. You couldn’t help but admire her assertiveness, and she was seemingly fearless. You also recognized that there were times when Julie would not only stir the pot, but would light the flames under the kettle, and before you knew it, everyone in the pot would turn into an uncomfortable, steaming bouillabaisse. I, on the other hand, was only mean and inconsiderate. Julie would always calmly say, “Bill, I can’t wait ’til you die so I can dance on your grave.” And after we graduated and shared a 50-minute commute to college, I would sometimes leave her stranded out there, forcing her sister to drive out and pick her up.

Which brings us to The Incident. One late afternoon after classes, we got in my bug, buckled up, and I let out this rip-roaring, fender-popping sneeze. “God, Bill,” Julie said, “flip the car, why don’t you?”

I’d had a headache all day, and didn’t want to get into it with her, so I just apologized. As we headed west on Fowler Avenue, I noticed that my headache was almost gone.

We are approaching the NA-17 segment of our program. You may want to leave now.

There are times when you get something caught between your respiratory system and digestive system. You have to get rid of it, but you can’t decide the best way to remove it from your body, so you try both ways. You try blowing your nose to get it out through the respiratory system. When that fails, you try to swallow it and hawk it up into your mouth to expel it. But sometimes, neither system works satisfactorily, so you just stop, conceding that in time it will work its way out on its own.

This foreign body isn’t really snot. It’s a semi-translucent, whitish-clear color. Maybe it’s 20% snot, 80%, uh, I don’t know, but for want of a better word, let’s call it “organic latex.” Like a bungee cord, it is extremely rugged and quite stretchable. Sometimes you blow out only the beginning of it, and you can pull the rest out, like a magician with endless tied-together silk handkerchiefs up his sleeve. It is tough yet adhesive, and well held-together, and sometimes you can pull the whole alien out of your nose and feel it resurrect up the back of your throat. Sometimes it hurts to unearth. But it is so bizarre and so elastic that you could use it to secure luggage to the roof rack of your car. Let’s give it a name and call it The Blob. We have all produced this at some time in your life.

A little later, we stopped at a red light, and I noticed something bright and shiny in the hollow of the tiny armrest on the door of my car. I stuck my finger in to the opening and pulled out what appeared to be the largest Blob known to mankind. I really didn’t know what it was or how it got there. To this date, it has never been matched, either size or durability. It dangled from my pointer like a giant, slimy pendulum, or perhaps a baby elephant’s trunk.

“Good God!” I exclaimed. “What the hell is this?”

Julie took one look at it and, remembering The Sneeze ten minutes earlier, began howling. She grasped her chest and turned her head upwards. Her feet drum rolled against the floorboard of the car. She was radish-red, and tears streamed down her face, and when I moved The Blob closer to her for further examination, she screamed, hit my arm away and continued laughing and crying and screaming until after the light turned green and we approached the interstate.

Her laugh was infectious. After I remembered the sneeze, and could therefore identify the foreign object, I should have pulled over. We were both hysterical. I don’t remember what I did with The Blob, but knowing the kind of person I was back then, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I at least tried to hang it from my rearview mirror, just as people do with CD’s and beads today. I should have bottled it, or somehow preserved it for science. It was simply not of our species. We were on the highway a long time before either of us could speak again, and when we did, we could only have tiny conversations until Julie would recall my prying The Blob out of my armrest, and off she’d go again. That would, in turn, prompt me to start laughing breathlessly as we rushed southward on the interstate. It wasn’t safe. I’m surprised that Mothers Against Laughing Drivers was never launched.

When we pulled up to her house, Julie plopped down on the sidewalk and went into her last nuclear-powered hysterical rant. She reclined onto her back and rolled side-to-side, stomping her sandaled feet, and I soon joined her, getting to the point of silent laughter, where all you can hear is breathless wheezing. I don’t know what was funnier: the incident itself, or just watching her being so tickled. It took a long time to stop. There would be a minute of getting under control, and then for another few minutes we went off on another doubled-up, cackling binge. If any neighbors saw us, they probably assumed we were under the influence of some really good weed. It was painful. My abs were sore the next day.

Julie and I have spoken several times about this in the last three decades, and every time we do, we both still get out of control.

And luckily for me, she has passed this story on to both of her children. And if this legend keeps being handed down, I hope one day it will be a common folk song played around summer campfires: “The Blob That Ate the Volkswagen.”



billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Y2K+10

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Is anyone planning on celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Y2K scare? And if not, why not? Maybe if I play my cards right, we can actually re-live it.

For those of you who were either not yet born or were just not paying attention, bad things were predicted for New Year’s Eve, 1999. According to some reports, people wouldn’t be able to order Happy Meals or flush their toilets. All traffic lights would go dark, and nuclear power plant meltdowns would force us to duck and cover. Reactionaries hoarded food and water, bought guns, ammunition, extra door locks, gas masks, survival books, and hazmat suits. Bank failures and a global economic collapse would trigger the launching of nuclear missiles. Even normally rational people were withdrawing all their cash from banks, because there were rumors that ATM’s would not work, all because mainframe date fields might remain at two digits instead of increasing to four. Because it was over-reported, people naturally overreacted. There was global paranoia.

Instead of the earth exploding, people woke up on the first day of 2000, amazed to find their televisions still working, and all channels were running endless loops of Emily Litella chirping, “Never mind.”

Y2K was a scam. Overnight, people who were good proposal writers became millionaires. According to a February, 2000 article in Money magazine, the Y2K scare cost American businesses half a trillion dollars, all of which, I suspect, was awarded to contract workers from Bangalore, India. After, of course, the proposal writers who procured them were paid.

I worked in IT at the time and was relieved to learn one Friday in late 1998 that not one person on our staff would be dedicated to Y2K repair. It would all be taken care of by a group of contractors. I was so thankful to learn that Y2K would not interrupt my afternoon tradition of playing endless games of Space Cadet: 3-D Pinball for Windows that I took that afternoon off to go and play it at home rather than from behind a locked office door. It was so much more fun with the sound turned on.

I worked in a rural town of 1800 people. When I moved in, there was one stoplight. When I left, there were three. Most of the jobs in the area were manufacturing jobs with companies that produced either a) drugs, or b) alcohol. In fact, I challenge any other city of 1800 to show that the majority of their residents work for companies that enable addiction. I suspect that Elkton, Virginia, has the highest per-capita rate of workers dedicated to making people drunk or high. It is so remote and out of the way that the nearest town with a movie theater or a Walmart is Harrisonburg, sixteen miles away. There is no public transportation. Most people have pickup trucks. Ours was the only one without a gun rack mounted on the rear window. Ours was a parasol rack.

So I will never forget that following Monday morning when two taxis, quite possibly the entire fleet of Harrisonburg Yellow Cab, pulled up and dropped off 6 Indian nationals who were to be our Y2K programmers for the next several months.

I am not proud of the way they were treated. They were all shoved into a dirty, crumbling trailer with toxic paneling and discarded office equipment. This work environment, sad to say, was identical to mine. Yet in opposition to the 14 years I spent there, none of the Indians frittered away hours composing letters to the editor and company vice presidents, insisting that we were working in poisonous, sub-human conditions.

Eventually the six of them pitched in and bought two sputtering old cars so they didn’t have to pay the outrageously expensive taxi fare to and from The Burg. They were all more comfortable living in a movie-theater-sized town instead of backwoods Elkton. And even that wasn’t a safe bet, as once an uncooperative Mexican migrant worker was literally shot out of a tree for not obeying law enforcement. Turns out he didn’t speak a word of English and couldn’t understand the commands. And let’s face it: Elkton was far more frightening to an alien. If you weren’t born in Elkton and had generations of inbred families that came before and after you, then you were not to be trusted. If you were brown-skinned and spoke without a twang and were hard to understand, you were one deer-rifle-shot away from the grave.

As one of the alcohol employees, I was in training and technical support, so I didn’t have much to do with the Y2K fixers. My job, by then, was pretty much obsolete. If you didn’t know anything about computers, the company didn’t hire you. Yet, I was still teaching at the Control-Alt-Delete level. Trainees often usurped the class from me and did a better job of teaching than I did.

The Y2k Indian tribe interfaced minimally with our database programmers, and if it wasn’t for the smell of curry wafting from the microwave of our shared break room, we probably wouldn’t have even noticed they were there. They were soft spoken, self-supervised and self-testing. I always suspected that they weren’t Y2K fixers at all, but rather spies from an outsourcing company, EDS, which one year later took over our department and fired everyone who failed to suck up to their corporate executives. And the ones who spent too much time behind locked office doors playing Space Cadet: 3-D Pinball for Windows.

A few months later, the programmer/spies/tribesmen proclaimed our systems to be Y2K compliant, and they drove off in their one remaining rickety car, and we never saw them again.

If you were an IT employee at my company, once every 8 weeks you were tethered 24/7 to a company-supplied pager, shoebox-sized cell phone and 25-pound laptop computer. You took them wherever you went, as if they were the nuclear code briefcase. I would solve all the unimportant requests, like the ones that came from pustules who would call at 3 am because they forgot their Outlook passwords. Most of the other calls were too complicated for me, so I always had to chase down our database administrator and let her take care of the brainy problems. Fortunately, she had the nuke box the week of the Y2K click-over, but I still had to work for 8 hours on Saturday, January 1, 2000, in case an unseen Indian Y2K bug created a production delay. During those eight hours, my phone rang exactly zero times, and I got so bored playing Space Cadet: 3-D Pinball for Windows that I can’t even launch that program today, sounded or silent, without feeling as if I just swallowed a handful of Ambien.

While I was “working” that day, the rest of America was logging on to eBay to sell the emergency supplies they had purchased in order to sustain life after the Y2K Armageddon. When people realized they’d been duped, their generators, battery-operated ovens and icemakers, water purification tablets, Pocket Fishermen, and cases of margarita mix were sold at a fraction of their original purchase price. Elsewhere in the world, proposal writers retired and shopped for real estate in St. Tropez and St. Barts. In India, underpaid former Y2K fixers rang in the new year with double portions of dahl and naan, e.g., beans and bread to all you Elktonians.

So I’m thinking the best way to celebrate the anniversary it to revitalize it. If I could get some major clients on board: IBM, Oracle, and perhaps SAP, and get them to publish white papers warning the world that computers have crashed when post-2010 dates have been entered, we could relive the entire bogus scenario. Once it’s reported on CNN, I’ll download and plagiarize a proposal from the Web, change 2000 to 2010 and e-mail it to all the Fortune 500 companies. One of them, some think-outside-the-box, proactive-instead-of-reactive MBA will have to believe me. And I’ll move into a skuzzy trailer, join a tribe, and pretend to work. A few months later, I’ll be yacht shopping.

But first I’ll need to find a new computer game to keep me looking busy.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Auntie's Boy

(with apologies for the sappiness.)

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Every summer for six years in a row I hopped on a plane headed west. Usually it was on the now-defunct Braniff Airlines. I don’t know why Braniff went out of business, but two reasons float to the surface: 1) Their tickets were dirt-cheap; 2) They commissioned the inventor of the mobile, internationally-acclaimed artist Alexander Calder to design “Flying Colors,” a fleet of jets he painted in wild, abstract designs, just as amorphous and vibrant as his regular, non-jetliner pieces. Imagine what that must have cost. Imagine Southwest, hiring, say, Robert Rauschenberg to do the same thing today. Not only would it cost millions, but it would be tough to execute, since he’s dead.

Before I got my first paying job at age 15, I would fund these annual trips by collecting and recycling aluminum cans and deposit bottles. It takes 32 cans to make a pound of aluminum, and I would get ten cents a pound for them. From September to May I had to collect 32,000 cans to make a hundred bucks. Soda bottles were much more profitable, but they were much more difficult to find. So to make fifty bucks, I had to locate only 1000 Coke bottles. $150 would pay for my flight and give me a little summer spending money.

I was motivated to do this so I could spend three months with my Aunt Kay, my dad’s sister, and my favorite person in the world. If I stayed home during the summer, my mother would force me to enroll in bizarre institutions, such as the Sadomasochistic B&R Ranch Day Camp, where ne’er-do-wells and rule breakers would be publicly beaten at the daily “council ring” meetings. I also once spent two weeks at Vacation Bible School, a long, tedious ten days of hell. When they asked how we wanted to celebrate the last day, I suggested a Jesus piñata. Whatever the event, they were always things I hated, so it was in my best interest to go west in the summertime.

Aunt Kay and Uncle Earl would pick me up at Stapleton and take me home. If I arrived after dinner (Did you know they used to serve meals on domestic flights? It’s true,) then there would be a fresh-baked apple pie (Kay’s specialty) and Dolley Madison butter brickle ice cream (Earl’s favorite) to top it. If I arrived before dinner, there was always my favorite meal: corn flake chicken, pan-fried potatoes and a fresh garden salad. I was spoiled rotten every summer. It was worth every bottle and can I picked up.

The first thing I saw when I entered the house was Kay’s amazing Chambers gas stove. She had cooked on that stove from the day they moved into the house they built in the late 30’s. It was a beautiful white Art Deco stove with red knobs and handles and built-in salt and pepper shakers. Above it hung a set of Revere Ware pots, pans, and skillets. Stainless steel with copper bottoms, they were always kept shiny by her scrubbing them with Twinkle copper cleaner and a nylon net scrubbie she made herself.

I can’t put my finger on it, but there was something defining about those shiny copper bottomed pans. My mother had the same set of Revere Ware, but instead of being hand washed and polished with copper cleaner, they were just tossed in the dishwasher and later put away in a dark cabinet. My mother once remarked to me that she still remembered coming home from the hospital after delivering a stillborn baby, and the first thing she saw was the Revere ware, bright and shiny, reflecting in the just-cleaned kitchen window. Kay had been taking care of the house and my infant sister while the caesarian took place. Mom reflected warmly on the feeling she got coming home to those clean windows and gleaming pans, after having gone through such an awful event. It was something she never forgot.

It was the kindness and simple things that defined my Aunt Kay. Growing up, each Christmas there was always a hand-knitted sweater or pair of slippers under the tree for my sister and me. And she took exceptional interest in my well being. Maybe because I was the youngest and seemingly most at-risk, the most vulnerable after my Dad died, or maybe in some odd way I reminded her of her late brother. But every summer was an adventure. A road trip to see my cousin in Vancouver. A jet boat excursion up the Snake River at the bottom of Hell’s Canyon in Idaho. But more than anything else, it was just the interest she paid and the attention she gave me and the things she taught me that meant the most. There was such a void of that back in Florida and such a flood of it that came from her every summer, that it was no wonder I cried on the plane going back home every August.

It’s because of her that Other Bill considers me such a genius around the house. I can hem his old pants and turn them into shorts, rewire a lamp, paint a house the right way, hang crown molding, manufacture a new catching bag for the avocado picker, fix a toilet, cut glass, prime a pump, hang a ceiling fan. Everything I know how to do is a result of Kay’s instructions. My dad’s family members were poor Michigan dirt farmers and never went to college. Everything they did, they did themselves. And if they didn’t know how, then they’d by-God learn how, because there was never money to pay someone else to do it.

My Aunt Kay could cut hair, singlehandedly add an addition to, or strip and re-roof a house. She could sew anything, from a pair of drawstring pants to a formal gown. I don’t think she ever bought a dress off the rack for herself. She could throw together a strawberry-rhubarb, lemon meringue, peach and apple pie in the time it would take a normal person to follow a recipe and measure the ingredients for just one of those. She canned her own pickles, made her own jam from raspberries she grew in her back yard, split rails and built a fence with the wood.

One summer she bought me my first 35 mm camera. It was almost $300, and she paid for $200 of it and loaned me the rest. “Well if you figure you have four more Christmas presents and three more birthdays and a graduation present, that’s two hundred bucks right there.” And I paid her back ten dollars a month for the next ten months. And she still sent sweaters. She stopped sending the knitted slippers because she had taught me now to make them. That camera took the best pictures and documented the next 20 years of my life.

On the cool Denver summer nights, unless there was a democratic convention on, we would never watch TV. She would sit in her red velvet Victorian rocker and knit. In the 70’s she made ponchos and sweaters to order that were sold at Andersen’s Variety Store, and she could burn through the skeins of yarn and complete one in two nights. We talked about politics, what I was learning in school, about my friends, and not often enough, about her childhood. She had some great stories about my dad, like the time he chased after her with the egg beater and got it caught in her hair. When I’d ask her for more stories about my dad, she’d say, “What do you want to know?” But my answer, “anything,” wasn’t enough. She didn’t care so much to reminisce. I think it was because she and my dad were so close, and she still mourned his early death. But she loved talking about current events, and she was full of questions for me, and she often forced me to think outside my little middle class box.

We were once talking about college draft deferments, and I told her I was glad I was going to college so I didn’t have to go in the army. “Why should you,” she asked, “just because you’re lucky enough to go to college, get out of serving your country just because you can afford to?” Her challenges to me on so many 70’s newsworthy events shaped my political outlook and social mores even to this day. I was starving for conversations like these, but back in Florida, they never happened. In Colorado, there was a plethora of topics that we discussed every night, and once we exhausted one topic, we would quickly move on to the next. Before we knew it, it was midnight or 1 AM.

She gave, and she taught, but most of all she cared. In so many disputes I had with my mother, Kay took my side, including my opposition to my mother’s second marriage. Having an adult to agree with me was an enormous comfort and an equally enormous thorn in my mother’s paw.

Aunt Kay had two kids who cared for me and took me under their wings as well. Generosity of the soul is apparently inherited and passed on.

I’ve tried for five years to write something about her that wouldn’t sound sappy and sentimental, and for the life of me, I haven’t been able to do it. This will have to suffice until I learn to be a better writer. Having her in my life was meaningful beyond words, and I still think of her all the time, but always every June 23rd, her birthday. I was often with her to celebrate it, sometimes sneaking off in the late afternoon on my cousin’s bicycle to buy her something sweet smelling from the florist. She lived a long life and died at 89. She’d be 101 now. I tried telling her several times, in person and in writing, how much she meant to me. She never thought she did anything other than what a normal aunt would do. She’d simply thank me, and then we’d move on to the next topic.



billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

The Nursing Pool

Give Him The Enema!

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Who hasn’t heard the complaint of a weary airline passenger when they get off the plane: “Why is it that I’m always the one who has to sit next to the screaming baby?” Although I have often complained about that, a screaming baby is a birthday at the beach compared to the person I inevitably get as my hospital roommate.

I have a history of cardiac problems. It’s not that I’m overweight or don’t eat right or don’t exercise, or at least one out of those three. My parents should never have bred. My father was 51 when he checked out from a heart attack. Several years later my mother had valve replacement surgery and a pacemaker stuck in her, and she was never the same after that. Why I got all the bad genes and my sister is totally unaffected in any way from this mishmash of foul genetic combinations is something that makes me wonder if maybe, just maybe, my dad wasn’t actually her father.

In my early forties, I was a hospital inmate for 6 days with a messy bout with appendicitis. When I was first wheeled into my room, I got stuck with a barely cognizant man, easily twice my age, which is typical for me, because I’m usually in the cardiac wing. When you’re in the cardiac wing, you’re pretty much guaranteed that your roommate is going to be someone’s great grandfather. For this visit, I wasn’t in the cardiac wing, but I got the octogenarian anyway.

I always, without fail, end up with the screamers, the moaners, the complainers, and the violent, and they all poop in their beds (so do I, but that's another story).

Don’t deny it, nurses. You always wait for the one new patient who looks most likely to not complain. Once you find him, he becomes the person you place with the screaming nut case. You see me coming. I hear you whispering. “Looks like this one’s ripe for the picking.” is what you’re mumbling, isn’t it? ISN’T IT?

In order to be a hospital employee, it helps to be a gambler in order to pass all the free time they have. So they all take bets on the time they think someone will die, or, in my case, when I would finally break down and begin to complain about the accommodations.

So after a while, my roommate was sound asleep, muttering quietly to himself. I could live with that. I drifted off to sleep with his gentle yammering not disturbing me.

When I awoke to the screaming, my heart was pounding, and I had the uneasy feeling that a macaw had been released into my room.

“AAAAAAAAA! HELP! HELP! HELP ME! HELP ME!” screamed the tropical bird. After I tucked my heart back into my chest cavity, I realized it wasn’t a macaw at all. It was my roommate. I then thought, why don't hospitals have some kind of Match.com website where you can pick someone compatible? I'd put in for a quiet reader, maybe a Ipod listener of 60's folk music who spoke only when spoken to.

The screams were still echoing down the halls, and nurses came running into the room, not to aid him, but to help me. It seemed that the needle on the pulse-o-meter from the heart monitor on my chest sent out a code blue signal.

“Are you all right?” the nurse asked.

“Yeah, I’m all right. It was him screaming, not me,” I said.

“Yeah but your pulse shot up to 200,” he told me.

“That’s because he was screaming,” I tried to say with a sad look on my face, the kind that would send them the “I need a private suite with a whirlpool spa” message.

“Yeah, he goes on like that all night, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“Well can I get moved to another room, then? This is crazy,” I snapped.

“All beds are full now, but maybe tomorrow we can get you in another one.”

“Please?” I begged.

The nurse moved out to the hall and yelled out, “Okay, whose name is in the 3 am box in the complainer pool?”

Someone called back, “Dr. Ansari.”

My nurse cursed, “Damn! It’s always a doctor who wins!”

Just as I was drifting back to sleep, the feathers flew again and the macaw started back in with the screaming. He sounded like a helpless girl in a B movie about to be stepped on by a dinosaur.

That was it. I took my pillow and my plasma-on-a-pole down to the family visiting room, which, at 3 am, was naturally empty. I stretched across half a dozen brick-hard chairs. When I woke up, my body felt as if it had been attacked by killer woodpeckers.

The next day was my surgery. The appendix and part of my intestines were successfully removed, but damn, I forgot to tell the doctor I wanted my appendix for show-and-tell.

Which brings us to the story of the first time I was hospitalized. I was seven and went in for a tonsillectomy, complete with ether anesthesia, which I can smell clinging to my nostril hairs to this very day. Before the surgery, I asked Dr. Bagby if I could have my tonsils to take to school for show-and-tell. He amusingly granted my request, and later sent them home with me in an old mayonnaise jar full of formaldehyde. They were enormous and red and just the thing to make the girls run away, screaming in terror. I’ve never seen the inside of a scrotum, but I suspect I could have convinced people they were testicles. But I was 7; I didn’t yet know what testicles were.

After my recovery, I couldn’t wait to be the envy of my second grade class with my Removed Organs in a Jar. My mother drove me to school that morning, but somewhere between my bedroom and the ’57 Chevy, the jar started to leak.

“What’s that smell?” my mother sniffed.

“What smell?” I pretended not to be a part of this.

“It’s those tonsils! Throw them out, throw them out now!” She pulled over, stopped the car and threw it in Park.

“Give them to me!” she demanded.

“No, c’mon Mom. It’s just a few more blocks,” I whined, pathetically.

“What’re you gonna put them in? They just don’t have empty jars in your classroom.”

Actually, they did. If you think back to second grade, you probably remember a high cabinet full of donated baby food jars that were used for doling out tempera paint. But before I could make my case, Mom snatched the jar from my hand, rolled down my window, unscrewed the lid and splashed my testicles, I mean, tonsils into Mark Pintaure’s next-door neighbor’s front yard. She tossed the jar on the back seat and sped off, as I carefully marked the spot where they fell, because I hoped to rescue them later. But alas, that afternoon when I walked home, I searched high and low, but the tonsils were gone, probably to a crime lab somewhere where someone was probably looking for the rest of the body.

Back to the appendectomy post-op scene. My second roommate was a 20-something mutt with long, greasy hair and teeth that had probably never seen the overhead light at a dentist's office.I waved as they wheeled me by him. “At last,” I thought as I pressed the morphine pump, “a young one who won’t scream.”

I woke up to him screaming on the phone, demanding that someone come pick him up, because, “I ain’t got no health insurance. You gotta sneak me outa here. “No, I di-ant drive here. They brought me by ambo-lance.” He was one of those odd white boys who spoke ghetto and thought that because he wore his pants belted at the knees, he was just as cool as the brothers who do the same. But he wasn’t.

After he finished his rant, a social worker came in and told him that he qualified for assistance in paying his bill. After that he called his friend back and told him to gather the white homies to come see him.

The next day, while eavesdropping, I learned from his ER-assigned doctor that he had only been dehydrated. The doctor told him to drink more the next time he went to the beach. It took a night’s stay and thousands of dollars of publicly-funded testing to figure that out.

Meanwhile, each time I woke up, it was to a room full of scary-looking white people and blasting hip-hop music. Once I woke up as Mr. Dehydro, waiting for his discharge papers, was reading the riot act to a nurse, demanding a better (free, publicly-funded) lunch. Mercifully, I was one with my morphine pump, and I just knocked myself out again.

Not long after that, I was back in the hospital for the first of two unsuccessful cardiac ablations. As I walked into the room I glanced over to see CNA's and volunteers waving dollar bills, eager to get in on the pool. I saw this as a bad sign. This time I roomed with a loud, old couple, even though he was the designated patient.

This great-grandfather and his wife were the bitterest wintering couple I have ever listened to. He was in for some kind of intestinal blockage and had just completed one of those luxurious barium enemas.

There was constant bickering between the two of them, even after visiting hours were long over.

He: Why can’t I see my doctor?

She: Because the doctor’s a stupid schmuck.

He: Well get the noiss, then.

She: I just went to the noiss. She said she’d be here in a minute.

He: They don’t care. You think they care? That was an hour ago. Tell her if she can’t give me an explanation, then I want to check myself out. I want to go home.

The nurse finally came in just as the doctor arrived, who insisted grampa would not be released until they figured out why he couldn’t keep any food down. Along with his wife, the patient (the word and the man both being oxymorons) demanded that they be told what was wrong right now; they were tired of waiting, and they were going to report the doctor to the AMA. The doctor said there was nothing he could do until the tests came back and made a hasty retreat.

A second nurse arrived with a bag and a hose, and the two of them hit him with the news. “We have to wash the barium out of you, otherwise it’s going to turn into concrete.” I don’t know if this was medically necessary, or if they just wanted to punish him. Naturally, the old couple flew into a rage.

As they got into a physical fight, Nurse Ratchet said to Cherry Ames, “Give him the enema.”

“I’m going to call the police!” he threatened, trying to slap the nurses away.

“The police won’t come, because there is no crime being committed,” the nurse argued. Then back to Cherry Ames, Butthole Nurse, she screamed, “GIVE HIM THE ENEMA!”

“I’m calling all the newspapers when I get out of here. I swear to God I am!”

The enema quieted him down. Or maybe it didn’t. You see, this time I had brought earplugs and forced them with my pinky way down in my external auditory canal. You learn you have no control over these kind of things. I drifted off to sleep, and in the morning I was taken in for the heart surgery, which was a picnic at the park compared to the ranting of Mr. and Mrs. Enema.

When I woke up, I was in a private room. No whirlpool spa, but completely void of noisy strangers. Apparently, if you don’t complain before you have your procedure, you win the pool.



billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

So You Want to Work for a Police Department

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It was a few days after September 11, 2001. I had been voluntarily unemployed and planned to stay that way until my unemployment insurance ran out. Because there were reports that the attack would cause a recession, I figured it would be in my best interest to go out and start applying for something with benefits.

Several weeks later, as luck would have it, I got a response to my application at a local police department and went in for an interview. Because it was a low-paying administrative job, I had intentionally dumbed-down my resume, hoping to make myself look more interesting in person.

Not long after that, a detective called me and requested that I report the next day for a polygraph.

I had never taken a lie detector test, and had only seen them in the movies, with the nervous, off-the- paper, needle-twitching-device going berserk whenever the accused was fibbing. So I felt a little nervous about it, but not nearly as nervous as I should have been, I later learned.

The night before the test, I tried in vain to resist reviewing my sins of the past, which numbered in the upper digits of infinity. I wondered exactly what they’d want me to admit. Would they make inquiries into my sexual orientation? I thought about all the reckless things I did when I was in high school. My only chargeable offenses were drunk driving, vandalism, weed smoking, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, all of which went uncaught, but what else should I prepare for?

At the police station the next day, before he started asking me questions I didn’t want to answer, Detective Palmer shut me in a conference room, leaving me alone to fill out a 22-page volume of questions. Most of my written answers I had never told family or even my closest of friends.

I could feel sweat dripping down my armpits. There were dozens of questions, asked several times but with different wording, attempting to trip me up about my drug and alcohol use, gambling, and financial status.

I had a tough time with the questions. Did taking office supplies really count as stealing, and wasn’t a laser printer just an office supply? What about using the photocopier for my income tax returns? At least I didn’t take it home.

Another question was: How many times have you smoked marijuana?

Who writes for these people, I wondered. Are they kidding me with this shit? Did they think I kept a reefer diary? A narcotic spreadsheet, maybe? How many times? What did that mean? What constituted a time? Did one hit constitute a time, or did a whole joint constitute a time? When I was in high school, no one ever smoked their own joint. It was passed around. If I had half a dozen bong hits at one party but hours apart, was that one time or six? Should I wait for Detective Palmer to come back in to illuminate? And what kind of idiot was I going to look like if I asked him for clarification?

I decided to estimate. I probably toasted one with friends every weekend through high school. As the worst case scenario, let’s say the group of us hit on 3 joints every weekend. I didn’t smoke on summer break. 52 weeks minus 12 weeks equals 40 weeks times 3 J’s times three years. I had to do the math longhand, but the answer was 360 times. That seemed excessive, so I rounded down to 200. But what about college? Fuck it, I thought. I am never going to get this job. I should just get up and leave.

Detective Palmer came back in the room before I had gotten to the end of the book. He told me to take my time and went away again.

Great, I thought. Not only am I a degenerate, but I’m also a slow degenerate. Sweat poured off of me. I finished it as quickly as I could, trying not to read too much into the questions. Then I started reviewing it, but before I could finish, Detective Palmer came back in and sat down.

Earlier he had told me, “As long as you tell the truth about everything, you will pass the polygraph. All you have to do is not lie.” This gave me little to no comfort.

He slowly scanned each page. I was thinking, Would it be bad form to ask to have a ceiling fan installed in here or request some Gatorade? My electrolytes are dimming.

“How many times have you used cocaine?” Detective Palmer asked me, pinching his chin.

“Twice,” I admitted, just as I had on paper.

“And when was the last time you used cocaine?” he continued.

“Probably around twenty or twenty-one years ago.”

“When you used cocaine, how did you use it? Did you snort it or shoot it?”

Honestly, I thought, why is he asking me this? Was this going to be on the final? Wasn’t it enough to admit I had done it?

A cokehead lesbian friend of mine once told me if I didn’t like the taste or the feel of snorting coke, I could get the same buzz if I inserted it rectally. I never liked cocaine, and at that minute, I was so relieved that it would have been a lie to say I had shoved it up my ass.

“Snorted it,” I said.

For some reason, he looked pleased.

Just as the questionnaire had asked the same questions several times in different ways, so did Detective Palmer. For example, at one point he asked me the value of the things I stole in the past 10 years, then later on asked me the total value of everything I ever stole. This, I guess, should have included those sixty-some rolls of Lifesavers I tricked out of a faulty vending machine at the library where I once worked. And was that stealing, or was it just a good value? After all, I had paid a quarter for those rolls of Lifesavers. Was it my fault the vending machine wasn’t foolproof? This was a 30-year-old theft I recalled the night before when I was trying not to remember bad things I’d done.

After reviewing every question in the 22-page book, Detective Palmer decided to go through it one more time for good measure.

“So you smoked marijuana 200 times,” he said.

“Well, you know it’s hard to say. When I was a kid, the group I hung out with, that’s what we just did. It’s hard to put a number to it, it was so long ago.” I tried to emphasize the fact that it was ancient history. That should count for something, right?

“Well,” the detective continued, “would you say you smoked it two times a week for several years, or one time a week, or more?”

“Sometimes more than twice a week,” I admitted, refraining from adding the Clintonesque addendum, depending on what your definition of what a “time” is.

“So let’s say you did it three times a week,” he suggested, rounding back up. “For how long?”
He knew that I smoked dope more than two hundred times. He’d been interviewing applicants for, oh, let’s say, three times a week for the past fifteen years.

“All through high school, and then I tapered off during college,” I said.

“So would you say two hundred and fifty times over a period of maybe, five years?”

I could feel the sweat running down my neck now. Great. Nothing like visible signs of dishonesty to insure my unemployment for the next fifty years.

I delayed my answer, trying to do the math in my head and compare it to what I wrote down.
“I’m not sure,” I finally said.

“Does three hundred times sound like a more accurate number than the two hundred you put down on your answer?” he probed.

What was this, a flea market? He was trying to jack my number up. I should have been riding it down. Instead of a job, I was going to be leaving with poor-quality tube socks.

“I guess so, now that I do the math.”

“Well, that’s why we go over this with you, because sometimes a person won’t go back and think about the span of time involved,” said Palmer. “This will make it easier for you while you take the test. So three hundred times sounds good?”

I nodded.

I knew that every time this man blinked, he saw a different junkie, as if he was clicking through a Viewmaster. Blink. Hello, Keith Richards! Blink. It’s John Belushi! Blink. Lookie, it’s James Taylor! Blink. Looks too old, but is that River Phoenix?

The tide of sweat started to recede a few minutes later, while he covered debt, gambling, and arrest history. He made notes in the 22-page workbook as we conversed.

Then he said, “It says here you don’t drink alcohol.”

“That’s correct,” I told him.

“You don’t drink any alcohol at all, or you just have a cocktail now and then?”

I said, “I don’t consume alcohol at all.”

Now I was being grilled for the bad things I didn’t do. Am I on Candid Camera? Is Alan Funt, Jr., behind the wall?

This seemed to perplex him. How could I, this Timothy Leary job applicant, have snorted coke, sometimes took Percocet just for the euphoria, and smoked bales of marijuana, not also imbibe in the legal intoxicants?

“Did you ever drink alcohol?”

Here we go, I thought. I decided just to purge. “Yes, when I was younger I drank a lot. From the time I was fourteen up until I was twenty-eight. Heavier when I was in my twenties.” And you would have too, if you’d lived with the dickhead I’d spent my twenties with.

“So you quit when you were twenty-eight?” Palmer asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you go into rehab or join AA?” He asked that as if those were my only choices. What, like I couldn’t have become a Mormon?

Detective Palmer was getting on my nerves. I was beginning to wonder if these were legitimate questions, or if this was all for his personal entertainment. After the interview was over, would he and a bunch of other officers head down to Mr. Donut and recite excerpts from my 22-page Dissertation of Sins? “Get a load of this one!” And they would all laugh and say, things like, “Oh, yeah, and while we’re at it, let’s hire Charlie Manson.”

“I didn’t do either. I just stopped. I changed my routine and instead of going home after work, I went to the gym.” I was proud of that and wasn’t embarrassed to admit it.

“Very admirable,” said Palmer, genuinely.

Wouldn’t kill you to put a few dents in the treadmill, either, I wanted to say, but held my tongue. I had no reason to be hostile; the man was just doing his job.

Finally, he closed the book, stood up and said, “Okay, are you ready for the test?”

I stood and looked at my shirt. You could see through it, it was so wet. “As ready as I’ll ever be,” I told him.

“Just relax and tell the truth, and you’ll be fine.”

We walked into the next room where there was a desk, a chair with arms, and a personal computer. Palmer hooked me up. He strapped two belts on me: one over my chest, the other over my abdomen. There was also a blood pressure cuff snugly in place on my upper arm and a gizmo clipped to my finger. I was told to sit up straight with my feet on the floor and put my arms on the armrests of the hard chair. His desk was behind me, so I didn’t look at him when I answered. I looked at a blank white wall. I felt as if I was seated in the electric chair. Where is my pastor? Where’s my stone crab claw dinner?

Blink. I’m not Janis Joplin; I’m Susan Hayward. I want to live! I want to live!

The room was silent while he booted the computer. He told me my answers would all be yes or no. He then started the program and had me answer “yes” to a couple of questions that I knew weren’t true, I guess to gauge the meter. That’s it: just relax and lie.

The interrogation then began and went on for the next forty minutes. I felt like a dumpling, curdling in chicken stew. Most of the questions that Palmer asked me began with, “Other than we discussed.”

“Other than we discussed, were there any other times when you took things from your employer?”

“No,” I answered honestly.

“Other than we discussed, were there other times that you used cocaine?”

Instinctively, I almost said no, but at that second I remembered a time when a friend brought some cocaine to a party, and we did a line in my mother’s bathroom. Fortunately again, not rectally.

“I just remembered another time,” I said.

“Just answer yes or no,” he reminded me.

“Yes,” I answered. I figured I was finished then. There was a long pause.

“Other than the ways we discussed, were there other methods you used to ingest the cocaine?” Palmer asked.

I was immediately paranoid. Had that cokehead lesbian been interviewed during my background investigation and told him I took opioids up the butt?

“No” I muttered, but I was flustered, and I felt myself turn red. If the needle flew off the Richter scale, it was then. I knew that was going to be his lead punch line at the Mr. Donut meeting.

After it was over and he unplugged me, Palmer asked me about the third time I had done cocaine, and I told him I really didn’t remember it until right when the question was asked.

“It’s okay,” he asked. “You were still honest and told the truth.” He released me and promised someone would call me the following day with the results.

I went out to my car and breathed a sigh of relief and wondered if I had any Percocet left in the cabinet at home, or if I had finished them during my last migraine. I could use the euphoria, but I was late for another interview elsewhere.

Just hours earlier, I thought that being a working for a police department would be fun as hell. I’d get to rub elbows with motorcycle cops and the SWAT team. Maybe some of them would let me play with their Tasers. I thought I had certainly earned it during that three-hour Spanish Inquisition, but realistically, I never expected to get the call I got the next day from the interviewing captain, offering me the job.

“I passed the polygraph?” I asked, thinking that this was some kind of cruel joke and that maybe she was calling on a speaker phone from Mr. Donut.

“Well, Detective Palmer said there was a little inconsistency in a couple of the questions, but not enough to disqualify you,” she informed me, and she asked me when I could start.

I thought for a moment. “You know, I was wondering if I could have until the end of the week to let you know.”

“We really need to know as soon as possible,” she said, “because we don’t want this position to get held up in a possible post-9-11 hiring freeze.”

I sighed and said, “Well as long as you promise me the job won’t be as stressful as the polygraph.”

She laughed and said, “Hell, no one here has a job more stressful than that, even when they’re being shot at.”


billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

The Inability to See Distances

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I was in third grade. Initially, my teacher, Mrs. Reins, was out recovering from cataract surgery, and we had a substitute. This was back in the day when cataract surgery was a life-threatening operation, before implantable lenses. After surgery you looked like Mr. Magoo, with eyeglass lenses so thick you could fry ants on the sidewalk with the magnified solar energy. Mrs. Reins was no exception. When she arrived in December, she was a target for mockery. A frightening sight, her eyes were magnified to the size of tetherballs. And unfortunately, she was still pretty blind. You could make wild faces at her, and she never knew. Her handicap also enabled Howard Frankland, Steve Smith and me to stay busy drawing Batman pictures while she assumed we were practicing our newly-learned cursive techniques. Today, of course, if you need cataract surgery, all you have to do is pull up to the speaker at the cataract drive-through.

“Do you want 20/20 vision with that?” comes the voice from over the speaker. “It’s only seventy-five cents more.”

You then answer, “Yes, and I’d like mine with cheese.”

“The doctor will see you now. Please pull up to the first window.”

For ignoring my blind teacher and failing to do my class work, my karmic justice arose four years later when puberty hit. I flunked the in-school eye test and was sent home with a note to my mother, directing her to take me to the eye doctor.

The optometrist confirmed the myopia, and I was given a prescription for eyeglasses. At that time, the choice of frames for boys was virtually unlimited, provided you wanted only black or brown horn rims. I chose the black plastic frames, because I knew that my ability to look like pubescent Woody Allen, along with my sparkling orthodontia and clunky orthopedic shoes, would make me the most popular boy at Wilson Junior High School.

Picking up the glasses at the optometrist’s office, I remember looking through the storefront window across the street to the clock on the bank and being able to tell the time.

Wasn’t technology wonderful?

But my vision continued to deteriorate. When I was fifteen, I begged my mother to let me have the now-available wire-rimmed frames. Up until then we just replaced the lenses in my shabby looking Woodys.

By then the braces had come off, and I flat-out refused to wear the orthopedic wingtips anymore, knowing full well that this would cost me my popularity for the rest of my youth.

The frames were awkward and heavy. My lenses were glass, and thick glass at that, and they drilled dents in my nose and behind my ears. When I took off my glasses, there were big red spots on the bridge of my nose and blisters on my ears. They couldn’t be adjusted enough to make them comfortable.

When I was a junior in high school, I don’t know how, but I convinced my mother to pay $200 for a pair of hard contact lenses for me; the cornea-scratching, painful, masochistic kind. Had to have them.

For two weeks I ran around school with my head tilted back at a 45-degree angle, because that was the only way I could see. I looked like some kind of William F. Buckley trainee. I never thought they might be ill-fitting. I just thought that was the price I had to pay for fashion. They made my eyes itch horrendously, and I would rub them, and the lenses would slide up into my brain. Then I’d have to raise my hand and tell my teacher I needed someone to guide me to the bathroom so I could look in a mirror and fish out my lenses, which were lodged up somewhere in my dura mater. I had insisted that getting rid of my thick spectacles would make me appear less ridiculous, and clearly that was happening. I had evolved from Woody Allen to José Feliciano by way of William F. Buckley.

I got refitted, and the new hard lenses weren’t so bad, but every other time I blinked, one would fly out, and then I went back to glasses for a week until a new lens was ground for me.

The next year I switched to soft lenses and had a little celebratory party in the bathroom to flush my old hard lenses down the commode.

In my life, I wore soft lenses, gas-permeable lenses, extended wear contacts that damaged my eyes, and disposable lenses. With every new contact lens breakthrough, I stood up to the plate to try them.

In my 30’s I got sick of buying the paraphernalia required for contact lenses: cleaning solution, boilers, conditioning solution, saline solution, forceps, artificial tears, re-wetting drops, and endless cash to buy all that crap. Not to mention the affirmation cassettes that told you that nothing was wrong with plucking rubbery disks off your eyes with unsanitized digits. It was too much trouble. I went back to glasses.

My vision still declined, but just as technology changed with contact lenses, so they did with eyeglasses. They were now able to condense the thickness of my Mrs.-Reins-tetherball specs to a thinner polymer. There were glasses that were almost frameless, making them very lightweight and comfortable to wear.

Still, when I entered the production floor of the beer factory where I worked, I had to wear safety glasses, and the employer didn’t pay for condensed lenses, and the required frames were solid and heavy. The lenses were 5/8" thick, so thick that they prevented the side temples from closing. Legally blind is 20/200. I was 20/200 light years.

I closely followed vision technology. I remember seeing a show about a procedure called radial keratotomy, where your cornea is sliced like a pizza to improve your nearsightedness. The procedure was discovered by accident by a Russian doctor after picking shattered eyeglass lenses out of a young boy’s eye.

Yeah, baby, come at me with an X-Acto knife, smile and say, “Pizza! Pizza!” I’m ready for that.

I only knew one person who got the radial-K surgery, and he ended up having to get new lenses implanted from a cadaver. He had stitches hanging out of his eyeballs, and if that doesn’t make you wince, you are not human.

Then along came LASIK. And after Tiger Woods had LASIK, I went to the same doctor who did Tiger’s eyes. I was making enough money then that it seemed reasonable that for perfect vision, I would have to pay four thousand dollars. As a bonus, before the procedure, they gave me Valium, which to me is worth at least half of that.

I thought the procedure would be grosser. My worst fear of seeing someone come at my eyes with a knife was unsubstantiated. They just had these little gizmos that pried my eyes open so I wouldn’t blink. It went dark, and I heard a little buzzing and felt a disgusting little splash on my face (eye soup?) I sat up, looked across the room at the clock and could tell the time.

Isn’t technology wonderful?

That was ten years ago. Three years ago I got a prescription from an optometrist and am again wearing glasses. My myopia has returned. And I need a magnifying glass or readers to look up a number in the phone book.

My dear third grade teacher, Pauline Reins, I’m sorry I ever mocked you. If you were alive today, I’d treat you to a ride through the cataract drive-through. And then we’d go split a pizza.





billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Allene's Voice

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It is January of 1964, a few days after my seventh birthday. It is my first birthday without my father, who died 4 months earlier. I have been sick a lot since then, and my mother has an interview today and can’t stay home to take care of me.

I am a veteran croup kid. When I cough, it sounds like the bark of a bull seal. I also have a temperature. As a special treat, Mom calls Allene to see if she can come watch me.

Having Allene there guarantees that I’ll have an exceptional day, despite my being sick. Before Daddy died, she would come to the house to clean and make us a nice fried chicken dinner. Now, without our man-of-the-house income, we can only afford to have Allene on rare occasions.

In Tampa, it is a common site every day at 8 am to see throngs of black women walking down the street in front of our house. They arrive on the bus that brings them from the other side of this segregated city. They dress colorfully, and some carry umbrellas to keep the sun off of them. After their walk, they arrive at the residences of white ladies, where they change into their crisp white maid dresses and scrub floors and toilets, wash windows, vacuum, dust, and sanitize their kitchens after making the evening meal. For all this hard work, they get paid only a few dollars a day, less than minimum wage. In the late afternoon, they don their bus dresses again and walk back to the bus stop, laughing and trading stories about their day.

Today when Allene arrives, as always, she pretends not to know who I am. “Where’s Billy? All I see is a big boy.” Then after taking a closer look at me, she says, “Well lookie there. You’re growing so big!” I give her a hug. She smells like line-dried laundry and vanilla.

Allene changes from her traveling clothes to her white dress in the back bathroom and puts her colorful dress in the clove-scented broom closet in the back hall.

After my mother leaves, Allene comes to my room and asks me what I want. It’s always the same: a Coke. Allene makes a Coke like no one else. She wraps ice cubes in a dish towel and goes out on the back step and pounds it with an empty glass Coke bottle until the ice is coarsely crushed. She transfers the ice into a plastic tumbler and then pours the Coke over it . She wraps a paper towel around the base and serves it to me in bed and asks if I want a story.

“I want to play school,” I say.

“Your Mama said you need to rest. But maybe later we can play if you’re up to it,” she offers.
She pulls out The Tall Book of Nursery Tales. The book has been opened and closed hundreds of times by Allene and my parents. Many pages are dog-eared. The spine is split, and some pages are loose.

My favorite story is always "The Three Bears." She sits beside me in the bed, holding the book with one hand in front of me so I can see the pictures. The other arm is behind my neck with her callused hand resting on my shoulder. She reads with such joyful expression and uses different voices for all three bears and for Goldilocks. I laugh with her, and she reads me another one, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, which puts me to sleep as her voice intentionally softens.
She wakes me up in a couple of hours to give me a Sucrets lozenge and a tablet of penicillin and asks me what I want for lunch.

“Peanut butter and jelly,” I say.

“What kind of jelly?” she asks.

“Ummmm, apple.”

“What else?”

“A banana popsicle.”

“You want to watch some television?” she asks. “If you take your blanket and pillow out into the den, you can stay warm on the couch.”

I am happy to do so. There is a long sectional sofa that I bundle up on. We have two televisions, but they are both in the den. One is an old DuMont console that stands like Atlas, holding on its shoulders the Sylvania black and white portable that used to be my grandmother’s. They are set up this way because the DuMont only has sound, and the Sylvania, on top, only has picture. Sometimes we like to watch NBC while listening to CBS. When my dad was alive, he would watch Chet Huntley, and then when it switched over to David Brinkley, he would let me switch the sound to the other channel, which was Woody Woodpecker. I loved watching Woody’s voice come out of David Brinkley’s mouth. When Chet came on again, I had to switch the sound TV back to his voice.

Today I decide to watch The Price is Right, and in a few minutes, Allene brings me my sandwich, cut in four even squares, just the way I like it, and some apple slices and thin strips of carrot. And of course, another crushed-ice Coke. For a while she watches the show with me as people win new ranges and other things we can’t afford, like new color televisions.

“Aren’t you going to eat something?” I ask her.

“I think I’ll get something later,” she says, but she never does. She doesn’t eat our food. Allene always brings a piece of fruit or some crackers from home, even though we have told her many times to help herself to anything in the house.

After lunch, I fall back asleep to the sound of someone winning an Amana refrigerator-freezer. When I wake up, I’m back in my bed. Allene has carried me there because it’s closer to the kitchen, where she can keep an eye on me. I stretch and yawn and call her name.

“Awake now?” she asks, arriving at my bedside with half of a popsicle.

“Yes, can we play school now?” I ask.

“Sure,” she says, “after you finish your popsicle.” The cold bar is soothing on the back of my swollen throat, and I finish it slowly, savoring its sticky coldness as it trickles past my tonsils.

We go into the kitchen, where we arrange two dinette chairs to face each other, and we sit.
Sometimes Allene is the teacher, and sometimes she is the student. This time, as the teacher, she holds up a pad of lined paper that we pretend is a chalkboard. She draws a picture of a cat on it.

“Can anyone in class tell me what this is?” she asks, panning the room of imaginary students. I raise my hand, but she calls on Jennifer. She cups her hand to her ear. “What? What, Jennifer? Speak up Jennifer. A horse? No, this is not a horse. Go sit in the corner.” We both laugh.
She sees me with my arm up. “Billy, can you tell me what this is?”

“A cat,” I say.

“Yes, that’s right, it’s a cat. Now can you spell cat?”

“C-A-T,” I recite.

Below the drawing of the cat, she writes, D-O-G

“No,” I correct, “it’s C-A-T.”

“That is C-A-T,” she insists.

“No it’s not. It’s dog, D-O-G.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes I’m sure.”

“Why don’t you write it for the class, then?” she suggests.

She gives me the crayon and the pad of paper. I cross out D-O-G and write in C-A-T.

“Oh, that’s right. You’re so smart. You get an A-plus.”

This game goes on for an hour. We switch, and I get to be the teacher, and she intentionally answers my questions wrong. Two plus two equals five, she insists, and we both break up with laughter. I love to hear her laugh. It is a hoarse, wheezing chortle that grows into big belly laughs.

Not too long after that, Mom comes home, frustrated and in a bad mood. But the smell of Allene’s fried chicken is somehow soothing, sitting steaming on its paper towel-covered plate.
Allene has also prepared her scrumptious milk gravy. Later Mom will make rice to put under the gravy and also a box of frozen vegetables. Mom thanks her and offers to drive her home.

“I’ll take the bus. You don’t want Billy out in the cold car, now.”

Mom thanks her again.

She changes clothes, and I always cry when she leaves. She gets down on one knee and hugs me and promises she will be back soon. I watch her through the jalousie windows as she joins some of her friends on their walk to the bus stop.



My sister and I grow up and learn to cook. We are made to vacuum and dust, wash windows and strip wax off the kitchen floor. We rarely see Allene now. She is old and doesn’t work much anymore, but now and then she comes over to make us chicken and visit with us.

As I enter adolescence and become politically and socially aware, I chastise my mother for taking advantage of Allene and tell her she should send her a thousand dollars. Times are a little better now for us, and we have a cleaning woman, Helen, who comes in once a month. Mom pays her $7.50 for a day’s work, and she never even sees Helen. She just leaves her the money in an envelope with the instructions written on the outside.

It is 1969, and I am 12. When my grandfather takes us out to dinner, it is always to the cafeteria. At the end of the food line there are a half dozen black men dressed in starched white uniforms. They work for tips only. Three men carry our trays for us, and my grandfather gives one of the men a dime. It drives me absolutely out of my mind.

When my grandfather dies, more than anything else, I feel relieved that I no longer have to be a witness to his selfishness. But now, when Mom takes us to the cafeteria, she puts only a quarter on one of the men’s trays. She doesn’t even put it in his hand. She places it on the empty tray the man offers, just as my grandfather had.

The next time she offers to take us there, I refuse to go. My mother and I bicker about it. I insist the cafeteria is violating labor laws, getting something for nothing and is taking advantage of minorities. My mother insists the men are just carrying trays, for God’s sake. What do they expect for that? She asks, “Would you feel the same way if they were white men?”

“Absolutely. The cafeteria is getting free labor no matter what color they are,” I insist.

“Well then why do they do that job if they feel like they’re being taken advantage of?” she asks.

“Maybe they just need the money.”

“Well they should be glad they have a job. It took me months after your father died to find employment.”

It’s no use arguing with her, and I stand firm in my convictions. “Fine,” she says, “your sister and I will go, and you can stay home and fend for yourself.”

So I do stay home. I eat a peanut butter sandwich. With apple jelly. Cut in four squares, just the way I like it, and some apple and carrot slices.



Now it’s 1983. I am working in Saudi Arabia, and the mail, which is addressed to me at work, is the highlight of my day. I recognize my mother’s handwriting on the envelope and return to my office to read it.

My Dear Bill,
I have the unfortunate task of having to tell you we lost our dear Allene last night. Her house caught fire and she was trapped inside…

I weep hard, like a child, and my tears smear the ballpoint ink on the letter. After I was old enough to do so, I never visited Allene, even though I loved her and thought of her often. I was a teenager and was too busy misbehaving with my friends to pick up the phone and call her. I feel just dreadful; my guilt is immeasurable, and I’m consumed with sorrow. I can no longer picture Allene as the sweet, generous woman from my childhood. I can only picture her with a look of terror on her face as her rickety old clapboard house, in flames, engulfs her.

Today a copy of The Tall Book of Nursery Tales arrives in the mail. It is a sentimental find from eBay. When it arrives in the mail, I am happy to see that it is as beat up as our old copy had been. I leaf through it and admire the colorful illustrations. I sit down and read "The Three Bears." The words come back to me, but I don’t hear my mother’s voice or even my dad’s voice.

It’s Allene’s voice I hear.


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