Hunk and Angel

At work they have me take Mike clothes shopping. He needs new jeans and shirts and shoes. Before we can go though he needed to finish all of his tasks. These are things like mop the floors, clean the kitchen, vacuum, clean the bathroom. These tasks exist so Mike has some sense of responsibility. He doesn't have job and if it were up to him--if he had complete and total freedom--he was just live off of his social security and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes all day long, forget about the stupid tasks. Mike knows that if he doesn't do his tasks he can't go out and often he doesn't want to go out because he has everything he needs--coffee, cigarettes, TV. So you have to persuade him because there is a belief that it is important for Mike to go out into the "community." The "community" is what you and I think of as the world, you know, Taco Bells, gas stations, red lights, crosswalks, everything. For Mike the world is split in two. There is the "community" and there is the group home and the grounds of the group home. If Mike wants to go out into the "community" he must be accompanied by someone like me.

I need to pursuade Mike to go clothes shopping. I go over to his apartment and find him sitting watching TV and suggested, but not too obviously, that he start cleaning, getting his stuff done, as he calls it.

"I'm tired," he tells me, nose crinkled, lips persed.

"Well, if you don't get your stuff done you won't get to go shopping, and you won't get any new clothes and you'll have to wear your crappy clothes."

Mike looks and me and says, "I need new clothes."

And then, like I have flipped a switch, pushed some magical button, he is off and talking a mile a minute. "I just gotta mop, and clean that up good and I want to start some decaf and hey Angel will you stay over here so i can take a shower--"

"One thing at a time Mike, just get your stuff done."

"All right."

I start to walk out the door and he talks to me the whole way, "Don't lock it because you'll be coming back over but I'm mopping now so don't come back over. Wait a little bit. I'm just going to get this started then start some decaf and maybe have a cigarette--"

I shut the door and go back to the office and wait for Mike to finish his tasks. He goes through a bottle of 409 and eight rolls of paper towels a week. He just sprays and sprays and sprays then pulls and pulls and pulls on the paper towels. Mike has a seizure disorder. He is forty seven years old. His motor skills aren't great and a lot of his medication makes him shakey. I don't want to say he'd retarded, not for some pc reason, but because I don't think he is retarded, or see him as retarded. But he is. He isn't fully mentally developed. This is how retarded people work: they develop adaptive skills, so while they are completely incapable of doing some regular, ordinary stuff like carrying on a conversation or cooking meals or managing money, they are adept at other things, especially if these things help their lives work better, like knowing bus schedules, using the toaster, and sometimes, manipulating people. And so it's easy to forget that these people are retarded because they have honed these adaptive skills. So a lot of the time I forget that Mike is retarded and when we go out into the community and I see the way people look at him it will all of a sudden hit me because they are staring at him like he is covered in shit. Oh yeah, Mike's different. I don't want a medal or anything for forgetting the fact that the retards that I work with are retarded. It just surprises me. To me Mike is just this guy who talks really loud and fast and I get paid to hang out with.

So Mike gets his tasks done and we take off to Old Navy to look for jeans and shirts. We grab a few pairs and Mike goes into the dressing room.

"Come out and show me."

"Why, so you can embarrass me, Angel?"

"I wouldn't dream of embarrassing you, Mike."

"Who's your hunk?'

"You're my hunk. Go try on the jeans."

One day Mike and I were watching ER and he asked me if I thought George Clooney was good looking.

"Oh yeah, he's a hunk," I said.

"Who else is a hunk?"

"You are Mike."

"Am I your hunk?"

"Sure."

"Are you trying to embarrass me Angel?"

That is how Mike got the nickname Hunk. And he tells everyone. If we are in public he will ask me who my hunk is, and I say you are Mike, you're my hunk. And then he usually calls me his angel. And sometimes he'll say to the people we are near, "We're just good friends." Reassuring them that this young girl isn't dating this old man. See, he's not retarded. He is aware of how our exchange may be perceived, and he attempts to make it clear. Although, I'm sure it never really is.

My friend got me the job. I had been searching for three months and my BA in English couldn't get me anything so I took it, or I guess, it took me. Mike and I immediately hit it off, and I get along well with the others that live there. I moved back home expecting, well, not expecting to get to the point where i thought, sure I'll take any job. And to agree to working in a group home you have to have reached that point.

I thought I might be good at it. My grandfather was in a home for memory care, dying of Alzheimer's and I'd spent time there when I wasn't looking for a job. Everyone told me that I was good with "them." The people that weren't all there. I'd feed my grandpa, rub his neck to make sure he swallowed, tell him we were so happy he was eating. As my grandpa stared straight ahead, lazily chewing his food, trying hard to swallow (maybe he wasn't trying at all, how should I know) I'd talk to the others at the table, Cliff and his wife Loiselle, Mary Kate who called everything "bullshit," Tony who was an old player who I once gave a kiss on the cheek. He was so grateful he started crying and saying, "She kissed an old buzzard like me."

Alzheimer's patients aren't the same as retards. I know that. In most ways Alzheimer's patients are worse off. If you're retarded you still get to remember the people you love, your family, memories. You still get to have those. Would you rather spend your whole life on the fringes of society but relatively unaware of your marginal status or have a this entire normal life and then have your mind deteriorate into a worthless pile of oatmeal at the end of your life so that you don't even have your memories to comfort you?

Right before I started at the group home my grandpa died. He just stopped eating and drinking and wasted away to one hundred and forteen pounds and then his body quit.

Mike walks out of the dressing room in his socks, arms held out, bent at the elbows, "How do I look Angel?"

"You look good, Mike."

"I always do." He does a little turn. The girls working the fitting rooms, in the tanks that said something like, "meet me at the beach," and hip hugging jeans, bangs, flip flops, perfect pictures of summer, look at him and then at each other.

The girl behind the counter's name is Melissa.

"Hi Melissa, I have two hundred dollars to spend on clothes, and my staff Angel here is taking me shopping." His staff, I imagine that Melissa thinks Mike is some rich eccentric with gobs of cash that hires young girls to take him shopping at places like Old Navy.

Melissa smiles, "That's nice."

"We're just friends. She has a boyfriend. Do you have a boyfriend?"

"No."

"We should go out sometime. I've got over two thousand dollars in my account."

"Oh, Mike," I said, "You're such a ladies' man." I smile at Melissa, trying to offer her some comfort, but I'm afraid she thinks I'm just as strange as Mike. Especially when I ask if I can take a picture of Mike handing her the one hundred dollar bill to pay for his jeans and shirts. Why would anyone want a picture of someone buying clothes from Old Navy? Because when you're retarded people make stuff like this out to be a big deal.

As we are walking out of the store Mike yells--it's the only level he knows how to speak at-- "She was hot. I wouldn't kick her out of bed for eating crackers."

"You should really keep your voice down, Mike." I tell him. I didn't look but I could feel the teenage girls in their tank tops squirming in their hotness.

Once we are out in the summer heat he asks me, "What's wrong Angel, you jealous? You are. You are so jealous."

I just smile, which to Mike is confirmation that I am, in fact, jealous.

The shopping trip seems like it's taking forever. I rush us over to Sports Authority to buys shoes. I look for something inexpensive, but quality. Those New Balances that are all white, that old men wear, are on sale and I suggest to Mike we get those. He has no complaints, makes some jokes about shoes size correlating to penis size and we get out of there with out him harrassing the girl behind the counter too much.

Walking over to Mervyn's Mike decides he needs a cigarette break. We sit down on a concrete bench. A skinny young man is sitting, smoking as well.

"Hi." Mike is so friendly. "What's your name?"

"Brian."

"I'm Mike," he holds out his hand. "This is my staff, Angel. I live at a group home. How are you doing?"

Brian nods at me. "I'm good. How are you?"

Brian doesn't look at Mike like he is covered in shit, or that he is really any different at all.

"I'm all right. Just tired. My birthday is coming up and I've been thinking a lot."

"About what?"

I know Mike's answer before he says it, and I don't think that the fact that this is what he is always thinking about cheapens it, he says, "About my parents. Just thinking about them a lot and missing them. They're dead."

Brian nods, "You know they are in a better place though. Do you think they are in heaven?"

"Yeah, I know," Mike says, and then that switch flips, "Hey, Angel when we get back I want you to help me fix my VCR. I can't play my tapes in it. I'm not going to say what type of tapes they are here. That wouldn't be appropriate." He puts out his cigarette and we wave goodbye to Brian, whose expression has gone from concern to amusement. It is not so say that Mike's missing of his parent's isn't real or valid because that is the thing he is always thinking about, obsessing over. If anything that makes it wholey real and completely valid. Yes, his parent's died over two year ago. But who says how long we are supposed to grieve. I wonder though what Mike really means when he says, "I miss my parents." It is simply that, or does he, like me, see it in a larger picture. See that his parents died and that he will die and how does that affect what he does with his life, with the small amount of choices he gets to make, the slight stewardship he has of his life. Maybe the only way Mike can articulate any sort of frustration he has with his lot in life is by saying, "I've been thinking a lot. I miss my parents." Maybe his problems are so complicated and tangled that he can't sort them out, or maybe they are just as simple and innocent as missing people he loved.

At Mervyn's we get Mike some hankerchief and some short sleeve button down shirts, with the breast pocket. "For my cigarettes," he says.

Back at the group home Mike put on his new clothes--new jeans from Old Navy, a button down shirt, white New Balances, and a hankerchief sticking out of him back pocket. I am proud of him. He looks good, put together, and the longer I stare at those white New Balances, the button down shirt, the hankerchief, which he take out at rubs his nose with, it all becomes so familiar and I realize, my grandpa wore these clothes. This is an outfit my grandpa would have worn. I have inadvertantly dressed Mike as my dead grandfather.