Chronically Ironic

·Collard Greens n’ Roaches

I was doing some time in what you would consider “job hell” or “job solitary” or “job penitentiary.” I had to work to put myself through college and pay my sad little living expenses, meager as they were. I though that home health care attendant sounded very…well, caring and nice. Let’s just put it this way: trying to understand Fundamentals of Math and caring for the elderly do not necessarily go together. My patience as a student was never all that great, and my patience with the old people was tried daily. Take, for example, Mrs. Finley and M.T.

Mrs. Finley was really someone else’s assigned patient that I kind of took over for a weekend, and it somehow turned into a 3 or 4 month stint. Rarely did we have the same patients for more than 6 months. Mrs. Finley lived in a ramshackle house that appeared to have been built circa 1945, on a barren piece of land in what was essentially the ghetto. I don’t know if you can really have a ghetto in a small, backwoods East Texas town, but it was definitely not the wealthy or even middle-class neighborhood, hence, ghetto. I had experience in this so-called ghetto before, and the location did not concern me. Old people that keep their gas-old-timey-wall heater on in the heat of summer did concern me. Mrs. Finley was approximately 102 years old. We were never sure because she didn’t really know when she was born. She was a sometimes wonderful, sometimes cranky light-skinned black woman, and had incredible stories of petticoats and horses and growing up in the west in the early 1900’s. She dipped snuff. I had no idea what that was until I had to buy some for her at the gas station down the street. She would put it in between her bottom lip and teeth before bed every night. My duties included cleaning, making some meals, getting her ready for bed, and doing the same for her severely mentally-challenged son who lived with her – 62-year old M.T.

Cleaning. Upon my first visit, I had no idea where to start with this house. It was a small three bedroom house crammed to every nook and cranny with shit from the past 50 years. I would try to clean bathtubs and sinks that were stained with years of grime, never-cared-for rust that did not come out…your worst cleaning nightmare ever. It was an exercise in futility at best, because whatever I did, M.T. would undo. But we will get to that in a bit. The second part of the “cleaning” was even more futile: thousands upon thousands of roaches inhabited this house, and made it their permanent home. When I say thousands, I MEAN COMING OUT OF THE CUPBOARDS MAKING THE WALLS CRAWL thousands. I am sure at this point in the tale, you are saying to yourself “…and you only got $5.45 and hour?” Yes. It is true. Desperate times call for desperate jobs, and evidently I would put up with a whole lot of shit that you could not pay me enough to do now. Fumigation, the pest people told us, would not touch this desecrated household – the only respite from the roaches would be to burn the house down. Since Mrs. Finley refused to go in an assisted living facility, there would be no house-burning – just me and my little many-legged friends, trying to coexist together in perfect harmony. Which leads to…

Cooking. Okay, this was a sucky task at best. Not only could I not cook soul food correctly, the constant smacking of roaches that I had to do WHILST cooking the soul food was a great inhibitor in my learning process. For Mrs. Finley, there could not be enough vinegar in the fucking greens, and purple hull peas, I am convinced, are Satan’s Legume and will transform at will between hard round pellets to instant grainy mush in half a second. She would sit in her wheelchair and laugh as I would combat cockroaches and cook. And then she’d eat it, and tell me what was wrong with it. Whenever I had a little money, I would just bring them both some dinner from the only soul food restaurant in town. Unfortunately for me, I did not often have money.

Getting her ready for bed. This took an inordinate amount of time, mostly due to the snuff-dipping and the telling of the stories (which I didn’t mind, compared to all the other shit I had to deal with when I got there.) This was actually the most enjoyable part of the job, because it was the first time I learned a little humility when dealing with people that have to depend on others for their food and comfort. I sometimes read to her, and she enjoyed that. Sometimes, after I got home from a long evening at the Finley residence, I was tired but humbled in a way that no job had ever taught me to be before. But the next day would lead to…

Taking care of 62-year old mentally challenged son, M.T. M. T. was a 62-year old man with about an 8-year old mentality. He couldn’t speak very well, so communicating what he needed or wanted was difficult for him, and even harder for me to understand. To get my attention at one point, he threw oranges at me. One after another. This was not cool. He would also try to make coffee by himself when I was gone. This was troubling for two reasons – 1) he did NOT need coffee, and 2) he did not comprehend the coffeemaker. He would put the grounds in where the water was supposed to go, put water in the pot, turn on the burner and walk away. When I would get back, he would be furious that the coffee was not “making,” and proceed to curse or throw things or cry. These outbursts were horrifying at the time, but funny afterwards – and on Sunday mornings, he would turn on the television to a gospel program and make up his own words to gospel tunes. They usually involved the words “baby” and “damn” and sometimes “shit,” and always “M.T.” When he was having a good day, though, it was priceless – he would pat my arm and smile the same smile as when he threw the oranges at me, and call me “baby” too.

There are more stories of different patients I had while working my college days away as a home health care attendant, but Mrs. Finley was by far the most memorable and my favorite. Working with all of the roaches made me what I am today - I mean, if you can work in that environment, you just might be able to work anywhere. Either way, there are days when I would rather have an orange thrown at me from time to time now, just to remind me that all of my job experience, at the very least, left me with an assload of stories. And maybe a little human kindness.

Work is a Four-Letter Word