But right now, we have John, just out of jail, not happy about it.
I come from behind my cubicle and say, “Hey John, I thought that was your voice.”
John slumps in a chair. There are four chairs crammed into this tiny space we jokingly call a lobby. Three fans swish the hot air around so it cures our eyes like meat.
John says, “Hey Dave,” and nods like he’s defeated, like jail and everything else have already won. John wears a green winter coat. He is not, inexplicably, sweating.
I look at Sue.
Sue says, “Dave, this is John. John is here to see you.”
Sue is sometimes a beat off.
Six years ago, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. A year later, she quit her job at a bank because she couldn’t stand for long hours and started volunteering here as a receptionist two days a week. Sue walks with a cane. She has a loud laugh that makes people uncomfortable. She sometimes screws up basic tasks, transferring calls, taking messages. Everyone in the office thinks Sue is deteriorating. They think it’s the MS. It may be. But I think it’s us. I think we make Sue nervous and conscious of her MS and she starts thinking about her MS and her cane and the way one of her legs drags slightly and how we notice it and she forgets to think about what she’s doing, transferring a phone call, taking a note. I’ve taken to screwing up in front of Sue on purpose. I drop things and lose pens and ask where forms are. Some days, there is enough time to screw up on purpose and still recover. There are minutes and hours when the phone doesn’t ring and people don’t come in asking for free food and free bus tickets to get to work. Last week I knocked over a candy bowl and crawled around on the floor, looking for Jolly Ranchers, and Sue and I laughed all afternoon at my clumsiness.
Sue says, “John is just out of jail.”
I say, “I thought I heard him say that.”
John says, “It is just unfuckingbelievable.”
“Jail, or that you’re out?” I say, trying to make a joke.
I’ve joked with John before. He’s a funny guy when he’s not just out of jail, when he’s not feeling hopeless, when he has a job and some scratch.
I can’t remember when that was exactly.
John showed up at the outreach in October, right after I started, when I wore confusion like a name tag. I’d been told what the outreach did by a couple different managers at a couple different offices but it felt too scattered and disconnected. We did food and rent and utilities and gave away winter coats and children’s toys at Christmastime and other things, too: cheap cars for individuals slightly above the poverty level; Easter baskets and Giant Eagle gift cards for other people, at other distances from the poverty level. Mostly I sat at a desk, waiting. I read a bunch of pamphlets, but it all felt like PR, like good publicity. I wanted to talk to people, to clients, to anyone in need so I could find out what exactly we provided.
Once I spent an hour talking to a delusional man about the U.S. Navy and what they owed him in benefits and back pay for not allowing him to enlist forty years ago. I thought we could provide him nothing, not medicine and not therapy, but I loaded up three bags with groceries and we walked to his car weighed down with enough food to fill his cabinets. As for the navy, I suggested they weren’t worth his time. They were impossible with back pay, especially for people they’d already jacked around about enlisting. It would be better to get in touch with his caseworker again; that woman would know where to find him some money to help with his rent and those people would be better than anyone on a boat or dressed up like an admiral, you could trust a caseworker; and so we talked until he calmed and drove off.
Delusions are not only for the delusional.
If you expect anything, even the chance for your own dirt, you lose.
* * *
John stares at his hands, two pink cracked babies. He wants to talk but everything you say when you’ve been in jail is not what you’re supposed to say. He mostly “motherfuck”s.
I’d read two books on narrative therapy before I started back to school. Narrative therapy asks: Are you telling your stories or are your stories telling you? If you’re only telling the worst about yourself in the worst possible way then you need to find a way to change your story, to focus on the strengths, to find a story that includes the best parts of your life.
It’s like in Hamlet: For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
If you say your life is shit, it’s shit.
I’m making this sound simple but I think simplicity is where to go. In the next two years I’ll take class after class on therapy after therapy, and each therapy will desperately detail itself into sounding different from the previous therapy by citing some statistics and some scientific tics, like conversation is the same as penicillin, like helping someone get out of bed who is too depressed to get out of bed is open-heart surgery. I believe people need to talk. I believe other people need to listen and, when necessary, talk back. People who don’t have money will always need money. That’s why I got
