A Life More Ordinary

This must be what Custer felt like towards the very end, as he stood on that hilltop at the Little Big Horn, looking around and realizing that there was no help coming. That sinking feeling of knowing that everything was drawing inexorably to an end, that awesome loneliness of knowing that there were no more choices to be made, no way to retrieve the situation or to redeem himself. Surely a situation to try even those with the strongest of faith.

When I look back, I'm not sure what it is that I see. Meaning seems to merge into futility until the identity of each is lost as they merge into something else, something I just can't really come to grips with. Perhaps I am just to close to the events in question, or perhaps I am just unwilling to admit to what is right there in front of me, that there is, in the end, no meaning and everything is just a lesson in futility.

For fifteen years, I ran a group home for a social services agency that put such an emphasis on living up to those goals that they fired me when I had a heart attack. The ugly truth of that place was that the people running it were far more interested in preserving their own positions than they were in anything so mundane as actually taking care of the kids they were in charge of. Ostensibly a 501(c) organization, the administration was always after those of us who were actually running the day-to-day operations to find ways to save money and keep expenses down. Now, while that may make sense for a company that's supposed to turn a profit, it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense for a company that is a non-profit organization. As an example, every time money was tight, the push was to cut back on what was being spent on the kids living in the group homes, including the clothing budget and what was being spent to feed them; at the same time, the senior administration gave themselves a 22% pay raise. And those of us who would be considered the "middle-managers," when we pointed out that perhaps the priorities were a little misguided, well, we were labelled the "trouble-makers."

Kids and adolescents living in group homes can be quite a creative bunch. In my time as a unit supervisor, I was confronted not only by children wielding knives, but by just about anything else you can think of that can be used as a weapon. Chairs were always fun, as several of my broken ribs can attest to, as were things like pool balls stuffed into socks.

One afternoon, I walked into the house I supervised to find that one of the 18-year-old residents had discovered a roofing shovel somewhere, and was using it to threaten the other residents and the staff. When I came in, as a matter of fact, one of my staff was in the dining room, wrestling with this kid and trying to get that shovel away from him. I just walked past those two, made sure that everyone else got out of the house, then went into my office and called the police. That kid followed me, all the time swinging the shovel around and, while I was speaking to the 911 operator, pulled the phone cord out of the wall. I'm not entirely sure what he was thinking, if he believed that by disconnecting the phone the cops wouldn't know where to go, but I have been around long enough to know that when a 911 operator is told that an armed assault is going on, they tend to get a bit concerned when the call is suddenly cut off.

I obviously don't know what that operator said when she put the call out, but she must have made it sound like everybody in the house was being murdered. Frankly, when that kid yanked the phone cord out of the wall, I just left. No point in sticking around and winding up as a blood splash on the wall, right? But before I had taken two steps out the front door, it was like I was suddenly in The Blues Brothers. Every squad car on the west side of town that day must have responded to that call; I counted at least ten by the time I was done, all with lights and sirens. I remember two of them charging right across the curb and across the front lawn while a third pulled a violent u-turn in front of the house, as well as the ones that screamed up the driveway and the ones that came in through the back drive. Needless to say, after the police were done, we never saw that kid again . . .

I remember the day I got crunched in a restraint, where one of my more unreasonable kids decided to lose his mind and come after me with a chair. It didn't hurt nearly as much when he broke one of my ribs with that chair as it did when two of my staff tackled the kid, with me unfortunately still on the bottom of that particular pile. By the time they managed to extricate me from that scrum, I was having trouble breathing and couldn't move my left arm. Still, being the guy in charge, I somehow felt the need to help my remaining staff keep control over the house while that particular situation was resolved, despite the other kids pleading with me to go to the hospital.

By the time I finally did go, that kid was calm again and the other kids, having had no interest in involving themselves in his malfunction, had gone back to more important things to them, like watching TV. And the punchline to this particular story is that, while I was in the Emergency Room listening to the doctor tell me something I already knew - namely, that I had a broken rib - my boss called me to say that I was in trouble because I hadn't asked for her permission to go to the hospital. I've often wondered what the people in charge of enforcing the Worker's Compensation laws would have had to say about that, had I bothered to inform them . . .

Before I went to work for that agency, I spent five years or so as an indpendent contractor to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, meeting and greeting every schizo in the fifty wards of Chicago. I spent part of that magical, mystery tour doing psych evals and profiles of DCFS clients, and part of it investigating charges of abuse and neglect. If I wasn't a cynic before I did those things, I certainly was after.

I could tell you about the eleven-year-old girl who was in a group home in the city that I profiled, who tried to seduce me during the interview. She was, shall we say, a well-developed child which, I came to find out, was one of the results of sexual abuse. It seems that that tends to stimulate the hormones in charge of sexual development. Anyway, it turned out that, as she coyly unbuttoned the top few buttons of her blouse, that her main ambition in life was to be a Playboy playmate and have lots of sex . . . In order to finish that interview, I had to call in one of that agencey's child care workers and have her sit in as a witness.

God, are you out there?

I could tell you about the sixteen-year-old girl I profiled, who was six months pregnant and refused to acknowledge that little fact. She had all the affect of a rock, and the reason I was testing her was because she had taken a five inch bite out of her mother's shoulder. By the time I was done with the interview, my skin was literally crawling, and I knew with the certainty of the tomb that if she were allowed to give birth and keep her child, that child was as good as dead. And there wasn't a damned thing I could do about it.

God, are you listening?

Or I could tell you about the parents I interviewed, who had beaten one of their toddlers to death with a baseball bat. They had completed their court-ordered parenting classes and the judge, it seemed, was considering returning their other children to them. You know, the ones who had been starved, used as ashtrays, beaten with extension cords, all those normal things that parents do. All of the screening I did on them pointed to the fact that they had learned nothing from all the court-ordered intervention, but what do I know?

God, are you there?

One day, I walked into an apartment in the Robert Taylor Homes, your basic urban demilitarized zone, to inestigate a charge of possible abuse. The place, I must say, was kept very neat, and came complete with hot- and cold-running roaches. The father was an assistant chef at a very well-known Chicago restaurant, favourite of yuppies everywhere, and the mother was a very pleasant woman who apparently collected Government money for having children. It was an exceptionally beautiful day, with brilliant sunlight pouring through the windows . . . and there, lying curled up in a frying pan on the stove, was the infant who had been the cause of the abuse charge. I never even conducted the interview. There was no reason to. I turned right around, left, and called the police.

God, do you even care?

I look back, and I can't help wondering what it was all for. All I can see is the blood and the wreckage and the tears, a trail of small horrors that merge into a kind of meta-tragedy that has no beginning and no end. There was a time in my life when I would receive letters from former clients of mine, all of them reducable to the same, depressing message: if I had only listened to you, things would be different. A few, here and there, who actually did make it, the one who found a foster family he fit in with, and who later on became a police officer. The girl who went on to join the National Guard, and leveraged that into going to college. But balanced against all the others who just continued to spiral on down into the darkness . . .

What was it all for? All the time and effort, and the dismal banality of it all just rolls right along without interruption. Perhaps that is just the greatest practical joke of all, the illusion that we can make a difference, that we can change things. For in the end, there is only what there is.