Fiction by Doug G.
Again the
click-clack and the doors open.
Voices down the hall
and it don’t smell like pee.
It don’t smell so
bad here as you might think, though sometimes it smells real bad.
Sometimes, I think
I smell it—blood, dirt, gunpowder, what-have-you.
I can smell the bad
coffee now, and my stomach goes whooom it wants it so bad, but a few
more doors need to click-clack open before all that can happen.
A couple guys got a
puzzle going, and maybe I’ll help them after breakfast and group.
They got ladies here, too, and I see them sometimes when we do
classes, like we have one on anger management and there’s some in
there.
One day, the girl
with the green hair was wearing a space kitten t-shirt—like it had
on it a kitten in space with Saturns and stuff and glitter on it that
I guess they let her keep.
Cracked me up, for
sure, but I knew I had to raise my hand to say anything—them are
the rules—and I didn’t want to get in trouble, so I hushed up.
Later on I had a
laugh.
Sometimes, I think
about Greengrass and how we used to have horses there we could keep
and pet. The work wasn’t all that bad—I don’t mind working,
like I keep sayin’—and the horses were always right there,
waiting for us.
I turned a hitch at
Greengrass, then on the street. Then here.
John, he’s my
therapist, is not so bad as everyone says he is. And the psychiatrist
sees me once a month or so and adjust my meds.
Which I guess I’m
doing better now.
Once, they brought
in some people from the outside for a class. All the people they
brought said they were like us, but they didn’t look too much like
it.
There was an older
gentleman who didn’t say much, and a bigger lady with a pretty face
and a black lady, and they talked about how they rebuilt their lives.
And the old man said he was better now that he got his correct
diagnosis and the black lady started to cry when the topic of hope
came up.
And it hurt to see
that. She seemed so nice.
She had nice
clothes—real put together—and good hair and a badge on. Not just
the visitor badge, but one from where she worked outside. I bet she
smelled good too.
It’s the smells I
miss: nice perfumes from the business ladies downtown or good coffee
or even the street smells like the exhaust smells for the parking
garage where I used to flop or the asphalt or bricks.
See, I got my hitch,
and it’s time I got to to do, then John says involuntary for
a while and then, John says, “Well, we’ll see.”
He says that a
lot—doesn’t want to promise anything—and sometimes that gets
under my skin a little and sometimes not.
Once, when we were
all still kids—there were five of us kids—and we were living in
that trailer outside Wamego, and we find a hole full of baby
bunnies,and we pulled them out. We was just playing around with them,
not hurting nothing. We was just kids, but I remember the little
rabbits and how they felt just struggling against my hand and how
soft.
Then Big Mike came
out the back door and yelled at us and the bunnies just start jumping
everywhere and we all ran back inside.
Next day, the hole
was empty. The bunnies were gone, and Sam said they were dead or got
eaten by coyotes ‘cause they smelled like people now, not bunnies,
and their momma would never take them back.
Sam was a liar. A
natural-born liar.
But he might of been
right about that.
Next day, Big Mike
was gone, too, and Catherine, too, but I could see she’d busted up
her compact and dropped her lipstick in the toilet because if Big
Mike was going to have her all to hisself, he was going to have her
“warts and all.” Which is how she described herself when she was
in curlers and her bathrobe in the IGA and had been crying all night.
I didn’t hear her
say it that night, but I knew she would. I didn’t see she ever had
any warts, neither, but she always tried real hard with us kids.
She left a note and
everything, with the social services number on it, and I bet Big Mike
beat her bad for that too, but it was all she could do, and I knew
she wouldn’t just up and leave us and not do it.
We lost the note,
but I hung on to the Bic pen laid next to that note for a long, long
time.
John says I got
PTSD, and he wants to do some eye thing with me, but the psych says
I’m schizo, and he won’t ever budge.
Once I met a guy in
here got TD real bad, been on Haldol so long he could barely talk,
but he could tell you every Top 40 hit for every week from, I swear,
1956 to 2104, when he says his radio broke and nobody to fix it.
He could sing some
of ‘em, too, but ‘cause of the TD, he’d sing it real bad. But,
thing of it is, nobody here made fun of him. It’s like that in
here, since we all know that in a few years, who knows? That could be
us.
The other day, I
heard one of the ladies had a baby in here. They had to rush her over
to the clinic as if they couldn’t see it coming. But then, she
wasn’t due for a long time yet, I guess, and they had her so wacked
out on Risperdal that she couldn’t tell them she was havin’
contractions, then her water broke, and all hell broke loose.
She’d just cry
anyway when anybody asked her anything at all.
So they rush her
over, and a OBGYN from town rushes in in the middle of the night, and
he gets in past security faster than anything, is what I heard.
But I never heard
what happened to the kid.
What could
happen to you when you’re born and your mom’s in a place like
this?
