We went out Route 27, which had beautiful trees and an occasional deer and not much of anything else. It’s basically two lanes that take you to some of the most forgotten places in the state. About every ten miles there’s a gas station with a convenience store, or when you hit the really big metropolises, you’ll get an Agway. It’s the kind of highway where running into deer and falling asleep due to the boredom run neck and neck for the lead in causing fatalities. Along the way, we passed the sign for Forrest Point and I got to thinking of that trio of women in the jail group. They were clearly linked together. It was obvious not only from the tattoos but also from the way they related to each other. It was more than just a friendship; it was almost some sort of sycophantic bonding. Like they were all united toward something. Whatever it was, it seemed evil to me.
Hymie threw in his Louie Prima CD. He was a huge Prima fan, which certainly didn’t fit with being Jewish. Prima’s music recently caught fire again when the Gap ran a commercial with Brian Setzer’s version of “Jump, Jive an’ Wail.” Prima was the real deal and was more rock and roll than anything else. Hymie had the CD queued up to “Buona Sera” and he was starting to groove. First his brake foot started to tap, then, as sax man Sam Butera lit into his solo, Hymie replaced the tapping with all-out stomping. By the time Prima joined in on the trumpet, Hymie was slapping his gnarled-up, arthritic hand to his thigh and improvising his own scat. New Orleans jumpin’ jazz with a Brooklyn Jew accent is really something you’ve got to hear. Then he’d throw his head back and shimmy so much that the four or five hairs that went across the top of his head would get messed up.
We pulled into the parking lot of the soon-to-be halfway house with Hymie and Louie dueting on the “The Sheik of Arabie.” The building was being renovated so there were several pickup trucks and a handful of contractors mulling around. There were half a dozen cars in the parking lot to the left of the building, and I recognized Monique’s older Volvo and Claudia’s Camry.
The building wasn’t quite in the middle of nowhere, but nowhere wasn’t far away. Therapeutically, that had its advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, it meant very few distractions for the clients, giving them the opportunity to focus exclusively on their treatment.
On the negative side, it meant there were very few distractions, giving the clients the continual nightmare of focusing only on their treatment. Although a lot of human service professionals will have you believe that a person can spend all day doing nothing but focusing on themselves, talking about themselves, and examining themselves, I don’t think it’s a very practical idea. Short periods away from bad situations help, but after even a short amount of time, people start getting buggy. Spending all day talking about yourself makes you completely self-absorbed, which I never found to be therapeutic for anything. Unless you’re a social worker, and then talking about yourself all day is a fun and necessary professional activity. It beats working anyway.
The waiting area/lobby of the building was half done and there were the requisite coffee and goodies set up on a long folding table. The table was filled with simple carbohydrated deep-fried goodies along with fat, tasteless bagels and opened tubs of various cream cheeses. There was one of those fifty-cup percolators going, making what I knew would be horrible human-services coffee.
There were stickies at the sign-in desk for us to write our names and titles on and stick to our shirts. Espidera was there and tried his “shalom” routine with Hymie and gave me one of those fist handshakes that are now in vogue with athletes and celebrities. I saw Monique talking to a woman with shoulder-length brown straight hair and wearing those very thin, nerdy black glasses, the kind that Ashleigh Banfield and that woman who did the news on Saturday Night Live wore. There was something particularly sexy about those glasses. I think it gave the woman that kind of smoldering librarian look, the kind that made you think the woman was just dying to free herself from all the inhibitions and restrictions that the professional world forced on her. That, or she was nearsighted.
I went over to Monique with my cup of coffee. Monique was wearing baggy high-waisted men’s pants, a white turtleneck, and a blue blazer, which against her dark skin made her look strikingly handsome.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Hey Duff, good morning,” Monique said. “Duff, this is Katy. She works at the Eagle Heights clinic.”
I extended my hand. Katy briefly smiled but had a look to her that stated, or at least tried real hard to state, that she was all business and not a flighty girl right out of college. Young women entering the social-work field often work very hard at the feminist thing, and they put a lot of effort into the look of being all business.
“Hi Katy,” I said. “How long have you been at the clinic?”
“Four months,” Katy said. “But I did my externship here for the previous year.”
I never understood the difference between an internship and an externship. For Katy, making the point that she had done her externship here was a way of pointing out that she had far more experience than four months. Being new and young in this business is tough. A lot of counseling skills come from what you’ve experienced in life, and if you haven’t had a chance to experience a lot in life, then your skills will be limited. Counselors like Katy tried to compensate for that by looking serious and immediately adopting as much psychobabble into their vocabulary as possible. It was a futile attempt to cover up the fact that the bulk of their life’s experience has been obtained in dorm rooms and on the campus quads. When college kids like this got clients like, say, Walanda on their caseloads, the clients had a great time taking them for a ride.
Bowerman called for everyone’s attention and took the time to introduce the board members present and then asked Espidera to say a few words.
“Good morning, everyone,” Espidera was doing his best sincerity act. “I just feel so blessed to be able to bring to this area such a needed resource.”
“Especially if you need the deduction,” I whispered to Monique, who smirked inconspicuously.
“The real credit goes to all of you,” Espidera continued turning toward Claudia and Bowerman. “Especially to Claudia and Rhonda for the leadership and direction you’ve both shown to this organization.”
It was nauseating but, thankfully, it didn’t last long. From there we were walked through the building where we got to see the suites the patients would live in. They were suites because each bedroom had a small alcove off of it for any children. There was a group dining room that wasn’t finished, but I could already tell that it was going to be furnished in that faux-homey way that somehow screamed institutional while trying to accomplish the opposite. There was a lot of that in these types of places.
We got to see the multipurpose room, a room where lectures, multi-family counseling, and probably any type of exercise class would be held. There were two separate rooms for group therapy, one with a two-way mirror for observation. There were three small offices for the staff to do their individual sessions and a large office for Bowerman. There was also an unfinished area that Bowerman told us was going to be another multipurpose area that wasn’t complete yet and so we didn’t get to see it.
All this excitement was getting to be too much for me to handle, and it was about to get worse. We had another break, and then it was time for the retreat and team-building segment of the day. We all shuffled into the multipurpose area and got ready for a series of goofy lectures and group exercises. The best part of these days was that the lecturers were never well prepared and it usually meant that the day, which was supposed to go to five, would actually wind up by about three thirty in the afternoon.
We were right on schedule to end at three thirty when the Michelin Woman got up and rambled on for an extra fifteen minutes about the importance of a new regulation affecting exactly when treatment plan updates needed to be reviewed by physicians and the importance it was going to have in regard to patient care. She loved the order of regulations, and it kept her from ever having to focus on actually helping a living, breathing person. Talking to the people who came to the clinic was tedious and it was hard to measure if anything we ever did reached them. It was much safer to obsess yourself with regulations.
By the time she finished, I was so bored I felt hypnotized. I couldn’t wait to get out of there and get home. I felt like I needed some mental floss.
19
I got back to the Moody Blue just after five, got my rousing greeting at the door from Al, checked my mail, and hit the play button on my answering machine.
“Duff, it’s Jerry, c’mon by AJ’s tonight. I got some stuff. None of it earth shaking, but I think you’ll be interested.”
That was interesting, and I was glad to hear Jerry actually got to the project. I was afraid he’d get lost in
