Hey Baby, I'm Gettin' Rehabilitated!
There's a drug treatment facility in my backyard. Yes, in my backyard.
I knew change was coming when they hauled Jesus away. The statue of him standing with outstretched arms under the giant magnolia tree was rocked from its foundation, and loaded into the back of a truck.
Then the sign went up: STEPS, with the E fashioned to look like stairs. I assume this alludes to the 12-Step program. I remember sitting in A.A. meetings with my son when he was a teenager, struggling with addiction. I reach back now, and try to recall the details: I think the first step had something to do with acknowledging that life had become unmanageable.
I know some of my neighbors weren’t exactly excited to hear that a rehab facility was coming to our neck of the woods. Admittedly, it was a lot mellower here before, and less dramatic. I do not like the additional traffic it has brought to the little one lane road behind our house, which twists through the empty lot to the building in question. It pisses me off that people drive so fast right past our back gate where I enter the field to walk the dogs. I made a couple of signs and stuck them in the ground.
SLOW PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF DOG!
PUPPIES PLAYING, GO SLOW!
These have proven useless, and I have to be very careful to keep the dogs leashed as we come and go, knowing that as soon as I open the gate, a vehicle might come barreling past.
Where Jesus stood, “lovers in a boat,” a purple-foliaged plant that once rose up around his ankles, now sprawls out aimlessly in his absence. The pale pink blooms look unmoored, unsure of what to cling to, now that he has taken leave. Their existence is unfocused without something to rally around.
In its day, the building that stood empty before it became STEPS had been a convalescent home for nuns. A neighbor tells me about how the Sisters had prayed around the Jesus statue daily as we watch it being hauled away. I imagine the nuns, their heads bowed toward him, and to what lay beyond — now just a big patch of concrete in the center of the field. This has been getting slowly overtaken, grown in with more and more weeds, as anything that stands still around here long enough is wont to do. But apparently, in its day, it was a basketball court.
Once upon a time, patients from the mental hospital, which also stood on this sprawling lot, would come out here and shoot hoops while the nuns prayed just on the other side of the chainlink fence.
For months during the transition, trucks of various contract workers rumble past the house. Plumbers, HVAC experts, security system installation teams, and carpenters. Our once-quiet field is filled with banging and clanging, as the artifacts from bygone days hit the sides of dumpsters. Any remnants from the lives of the Sisters are removed, holes in the roof, patched, and a new basketball court is installed at the back of the place.
A squat, brick outbuilding sits on the property, adjacent to the what is fast becoming STEPS. It is nondescript, unpretentious, and remains untouched during the renovations. Downright lonesome, is what it is.
MHS ALTAR BREAD, the sign on the outside reads. I try to peek in through the slats of half-broken window shades, but too many shadows occlude the view. I think the nuns must have manufactured altar bread here, and that brings to mind a funny story someone once told me of catching the priest at his childhood church filling the holy water from a garden hose out back. I don’t know why this is funny, but it is. I’m not sure where else holy water is supposed to come from, when I stop to think about it.
Finally, there are signs that the project has moved on from demo and reconstruction into the clean-up stage. This is signaled by the appearance of women. They roll their Rs and prattle loudly in the beautiful, fast spoken song of a language I don’t understand as they load mop buckets back into their cars at the end of the day.
New furnishings are delivered, carefully protected under plastic wrap. I peek inside the uncurtained windows in the evenings, tracking the now-rapid progress. I try to imagine who will sleep on the narrow, blue upholstered beds in the single occupancy rooms, and whether their 30 day, monastic experiences will produce lasting, positive changes for them, or not.
“Yes, In My Back Yard.” I say this to myself as I walk my dogs in the field behind our house, well aware that to say anything else would make me one of those “NIMBY” people.
You can’t complain that mental health care needs are grossly underserved in our country, then bristle when a facility opens in your neighborhood.
“Excuse me, Ma’am, can I use your phone?”
I already have it to my ear, as I’ve taken an important call I’ve been waiting for while walking my dogs. In one hand I hold the leash, connected to Mabel, who isn’t moving along as quickly as I’d like. In the other, through the phone, a doctor is explaining something to me about lab results, and now here is this woman. She saw me coming a mile away, and ran towards the fence.
“Ma’am? Ma’am? Excuse me, Ma’am?” She follows me all along the inside of the rehab yard, from one end to the other on her side of the barrier as I walk by. I start to feel like I’m being chased.
“I’m at a rehab center, Ma’am,” she’s explaining. “I need to make a call. Please? They took my phone away. Please, can you at least make a call for me?”
She is clearly feeling desperate, and doesn’t read my body language when I signal that I am listening to someone with my other ear. I mouth the word Sorry at her with an apologetic grimace while I shake my head. Now I’ve lost track of what the doctor is saying.
“I’m sorry, I’m on an important call right now,” I finally have to say out loud, which confuses the person on the other end of the line. The woman has raised her voice to a fevered pitch, and the thing she’s doing with her hands as she tries to keep up with me can only be called wringing.
It’s not that I don’t want to help her, but I also imagine that whatever phone call she wants me to make probably won’t serve her greatest needs. Not that it’s my job to judge this. It’s just that, I’m sorry to say, I know a few things from experience, having already been on several different sides of similar equations.
There is often some kind of drama unfolding at STEPS. Police cars and ambulances come and go, which makes me wonder what has happened, and to whom. The cast of characters slowly rotates as the calendar pages tick by. Some people graduate from the 30-day treatment program, while new ones arrive. Some people don’t make it all the way through.
I saw a scene erupt one day while my dog was squatting in the grass. A gaunt woman with tear streaked make-up stormed out through the front doors, walking past me as fast as one can without calling it running. Several staff came bursting out behind her, one of them calling her name and saying, “Come on. Come back. You don’t have to leave like this.” They stood and watched until she’d rounded a corner and was out of sight, then, throwing up their hands, ducked back inside.
Soon afterward, my own 26 year old son ran away from a court ordered treatment facility in Colorado. He had been sent there in lieu of jail time. We are in the incarceration phase of his schizophrenic illness, and it’s been unbearably painful. This last year he has been in and out of jail, and homeless in between. I can’t seem to afford to let myself feel all that it is. I would not survive, emotionally, if I did.
When I heard he had bailed, and screwed up the opportunity to play a literal “get out of jail” card, I thought of the mascara running down the cheeks of the thin and fragile woman outside of STEPS. I had wanted to put my arms around her. She was the picture of flight, as far as deep brain responses go, and I really felt for her. I could tell she was being pursued by some enormously frightening tigers.
Hours after the big eruption, she was still sitting on a curb holding her knees against her chest, just out of view of the glass front doors. I considered approaching to ask if she needed help. Why didn’t I? I don’t know. (Why don’t any of us, ever?) I guess I didn’t quite feel good about it, either way. I was glad when I saw her later, walking back toward the building. Her body moved with a heaviness. Her arms in a defeated attitude, hung limply at her sides, like the bleached-blonde hair that fell forward, curtaining her face, darker at the roots. There was no fight left in her. No trace of the pissed off hornet that had burst from the doors earlier.
The hard thing about hard things, is that they are rarely the only hard things.
A man who must have just crossed his 30 day mark wheels his suitcase wildly over the uneven ground as he flees like a prisoner from his captor. To take the paved road that bends at a ninety degree angle around the field would double the distance he’d have to walk, but that seems like it would still be easier than what he is trying to do. He yanks the uncooperative wheels roughly through unmown grass and fallen pinecones. The luggage moves along like a rear wheel drive vehicle going uphill in a blizzard.
It’s not just the burden of the suitcase that hinders him — he also has a backpack, and some plastic grocery bags filled with belongings that he’s tried to tie to the handle, which keep slipping down. These bump against his legs as he struggles on. In spite of his inadequate equipment, his gait is headlong. He is on a single-minded mission when he spots me. I can hear in the rushed way his words tumble out that he’s dying for a drink.
“Where’s the nearest store?” We are just out of range of a normal speaking voice, so he shouts the question, in a tone that sounds like something has been chasing him.
I tell him there’s a convenience store about two blocks from here, and point the way.
He doesn’t dispense with the usual manners of people down here in the South. There’s not the unhurried lengthening of lazy vowels. No, “Excuse me Ma’am” or even, “Thank you Ma’am.” He just immediately adjusts course, and is off like a shot.
When I’ve spotted people leaving, presumably discharged, I’ve noticed they often travel on foot. No rides. No loved ones waiting. I wonder where they will go. I often feel compelled to offer them a ride. (Again, why don’t I?) And then I think of my own boy.
A stray dog was sniffing around the front yard recently, setting our own dogs to barking their fool heads off. I stepped outside to see what they were going on about, and found a pitiful, scrawny little fleabag of a thing. Big tumors hung down from her belly, and she was desperately hungry. Every bone of her spine showed through her skin, and her hip bones rose sharply skyward, as though they were trying to get a head start on the way to Doggy Heaven. I think even if her thin fur hadn’t been grey, she would’ve had the same, deathly pallor that hovered about her. She was crying a little with each breath. Her eyes were casting about as wildly as her nose.
I fed her. Right away I felt badly, when I realized it would likely hurt her belly to eat so fast. This is what came of acting immediately on the compulsion to try to help. Now I wish I would have hand fed her a little at a time.
After she’d wolfed the whole bowl down in about two seconds flat, she tried to climb onto my lap on the front steps where I sat, pondering what to do next. I was nervous about fleas or other diseases she was almost certainly carrying, so I tried to comfort her without making too much contact. Her body felt hot and damp, and I couldn’t think of a time I’d felt a sweaty dog before. I thought they couldn’t do that. I considered how I might ease her suffering, but each idea led back to not wanting my dogs to catch anything from her. Even if I managed to get her to Animal Control, I was sure all that would be waiting there for her was a cage, then certain death.
Perhaps euthanasia would be more humane than letting her die on the street, but in the end, I couldn’t even figure out how to load her into my car to take her to the vet or pound, let alone bring her in the house, without my animals suffering some kind of consequence.
I treated her with flea and tick medicine, thinking that if by some miracle she lived, this might help further down the road. I tried to keep her on the porch awhile, hoping some brilliant idea would occur to me. But she was just too far gone, and began barking relentlessly and hoarsely from what she saw as the wrong side of the baby gate.
Ultimately, she went on her way, and I could hardly stand myself for days afterward. I felt I had failed an important test. Why hadn’t I kept her on the front porch, and let her die a dignified death, at least? I watched for her, and the opportunity to do better, but never saw her again. I imagine she was likely dead within hours or days.
I’m not comparing the dog to people at the rehab center, or my son. Or maybe I am, but only in the way that the way the pit of my stomach feels the same in all of these instances when I don’t help, and how, even when I do try, it often doesn’t turn out right. Lack of clarity about what small thing I might do to offer meaningful relief to my fellow, suffering beings tortures my mind.
“Hey, how you doin today, Bébé?” A voice shouts at me through the chainlink, and I don’t know which of the two men it has originated from. He has said it the French way they do around here.
They stand smoking cigarettes where Concrete Jesus once offered his unending blessings and open arms.
“Hey, I’m good. How are y’all?”
In a joyful burst, one of them raises his arms up over his head victoriously and shouts his response, “Hey Baby! I’m gettin rehabilitated!”
I laugh, then we laugh together, and I put my fist in the air like, “Viva la revolution.”
Through my multiple trips to the field with the dogs each day, I become familiar from a distance with some of the residents who gather in small packs outside, smoking and sharing banter, presumably between sessions. (It does seem there is awful lot of time spent smoking, I must say.)
There are some colorful characters, some who seem larger than life. Some sit alone on a hammock, or off to the side, preferring their own company. A few do laps around the perimeter. Anxiety, palpable in the air around them gathers between closely drawn eyes as they pace the rectangular shape of the yard like caged animals. We wave at each other, say hello and smile. They like my dogs, and some people want to meet them through the fence.
One day, I open the gate from my backyard (yes, my backyard), and our heeler mix, Juneau, bolts unstoppably towards the biggest of the oak trees. Squirrels often congregate around it, drawn to the thick layer of acorns gathered underneath.
Juneau has already killed four squirrels since we moved in, and before I can blink, she’s giving this one a run for its money. In a fatal miscalculation, rather than run up the tree to escape her, the squirrel sets off running across the field toward the rehab center. I see that a formal group therapy session is underway in a circle of chairs beneath the big magnolia tree.
Twice, Juneau catches the squirrel and twice, it gets away again. Each time, the collective voice of the group, which now has all eyes on the mayhem unfolding, rises and falls.
Ooohhh! OOOOOHHHH! Some sadistic laughter cuts through the din that reminds me of school playgrounds I knew in my youth.
The squirrel keeps on moving towards the fence each time it gets away, and so do both my dogs. Its clearly injured, which is evident by how disoriented it seems. Making bad decisions and barely escaping Juneau once more, it blunders its way to the top of a telephone pole, narrowly escaping Juneau’s snapping teeth. Now the whole, rubbernecking therapy group has risen from their chairs and moved toward us, eager to get a closer look at what will happen next.
I am running to catch up to the dogs, who’ve left me in the dust. Mabel is crazed, beside herself with excitement, jumping and barking. Her sausagey, dachshund body twists bizarrely through the air, higher than it is long. Juneau is trying unsuccessfully to climb the pole with her front legs, crying for the squirrel to come back down. And then, in a free fall from the top of the pole, suddenly it does. It hits the ground with an audible splat. The crowd goes wild.
Whatever injuries the squirrel sustained, it has finally succumbed to. Juneau pounces in a fraction of a second, and now Mabel has completely lost her mind. She is Juneau’s biggest cheerleader, and the group is loving this. They all shout like it’s a cage fight, their fingers laced through the linked metal, hooting and hollering, and here I come, bringing up the rear, completely breathless.
Like Juneau, who has just finished shaking the last of life from the poor, helpless creature, I stand there in shock, looking at the kill site. The group facilitator is trying to regain control over the situation that has gotten completely out of hand. She’s struggling to keep her composure.
I apologize as Juneau picks the limp, wild thing up in her mouth, and begins to prance around the field, it’s body flopping a little with the bounce in her step. Her head and tail are held high as she does a victory lap.
For weeks, each time I walk near the fence, if there is anyone outside smoking near the ghost of Jesus-past, I hear the running commentary.
“That’s that dog that kilt that squirrel,” someone will say to their friend.
When Juneau runs at full tilt toward a tree, they’ll shout out to me, proudly. “I saw that time she killed a squirrel!”
“Yeah, it’s true. She looks sweet, but she’s a homicidal maniac,” I might say.
It seems we provide some valuable entertainment for these folks, otherwise cut off from the rest of the world.
No one knows how to handle any of this. Not the people going through the hard work on the inside. Not the passerby. Not the mothers who lay awake, worried over what will come to pass for children that therapists warn should not be called children anymore.
“He is a man,” mine recently said. “I want you to stop calling him your baby.”
But how do I explain this to my heart? Imprinted there, indelibly, are the soft golden curls, the perfect slope of his cheek against my breast. The memories that float down like filmy soap bubbles, unbidden, out of the blue — the sound of a belly laugh, or the hilarity of the crazy things kids say: the time he wanted to change his name to Chick-a-little-fa-fa, how he pronounced washcloth like squashclosh, called futons croutons, and vice versa. A smile might break through unfallen tears that burn from the center of my brain when I recall the good times. Mostly, this hurts because they sure seemed like the hard-right-now-times when I was busy living through them. If only we knew how fleeting the sweet, hard-but-whole times might be. Then again…
Photo credit: https://c2.peakpx.com/wallpaper/435/1017/111/jesus-christ-headstone-cemetery-wallpaper.jpg
That was a tough read in places - which is not a criticism.
That was beautiful, thank you.