Still Life with June

by Darren Greer

  3. Until 1957 permanently shell-shocked veterans were on the same floor as the Down’s syndrome and catatonia patients. In 1957, hospital staff noticed that the vaginal cavities of female patients in the ward were unusually large and loose compared to pre-war measurements. Despite being in segregated dorms, the shell shocks were managing to fuck the shit out of the retarded girls.

  4. When the city took over the facility in 1951, female Down’s syndrome patients who were permanently assigned to the ward — “lifers” as Pete would say — underwent a forced sterility program, humanely achieved by general anaesthetic and modern-day tube tying techniques, to prevent the increase of the country’s Down’s syndrome population.

  5. In 1969, the hippies and left-wingers got hold of this tidbit of information and together with the Catholic Church, started a campaign to close the facility unless the city stopped forced sterilization in every city-run facility.

  6. When the city took the institution over in 1951, the birth rate dropped from an average rate of six per year to almost zero. It jumped back up again when the city’s policy of forced sterilization was suspended in 1970.

  7. In 1978 a fifty-two-year-old woman who at age seventeen had been permanently assigned to the Sisters of Good Hope for retardation was released when she was found to have a much milder case than was originally diagnosed. In 1993, this woman sued the city for tying her tubes. She was awarded ten million dollars in the groundbreaking lawsuit. The city defence lawyer told a friend after the trial that he was going to buy shares in Crayola because their stock value was about to jump by ten million dollars. The friend “just happened” to be carrying a pocket-sized tape recorder in his jacket at the time; the record button “just happened” to be depressed and the tape was rolling. He sold the tape to a national TV tabloid and the defence lawyer lost his job.

  8. Many civil tort lawyers, also known as ambulance chasers who work pro bono with award percentage, have spent the last seven years looking for women who were committed to the Sisters of Good Hope Care Facility between 1951 and 1970 and who may have been forced to have their tubes tied by a cold-hearted, eugenics-minded city bureaucracy with plenty of hard cash to pay out in lawsuits.

  9. As of my first visit to the Sisters of Good Hope, and much to the city’s relief, these lawyers hadn’t found anybody, though a small number of them continue to look.

  10. Nobody — not even that most eugenics-minded of men, Adolf Hitler — has figured out a way to reduce the number of sleazy lawyers being born every year.

  More dramatic tension. More funeral marches for the supposed good hope of the Sisters of East 73rd.

  LXVII

  Before I could see June I had to make an appointment with Mr. Dawes, the wing administrator, who personally reviewed all petitions for visitation. Normally, he said, there would be no problem, but my request to see June after all this time was, in his words, “unusual.” He was a pasty-faced, overweight man clad in a grey suit, with a gold-plated chain that hung around his neck and supported a dangling pair of rimless eyeglasses that he seemed never to wear but only polish. Whenever he shifted even slightly in his wooden chair it creaked dangerously beneath him, and I couldn’t help but wonder how many chairs he had gone through in his tenure as administrator. He sighed a lot, less out of any existential bewilderment, I guessed, than from the sheer burden of carrying around all that extra weight. All day he sat in that office, rarely visiting the nurses’ stations or the wards. When he did go upstairs he took the freight elevator. Even this probably exhausted him and caused great blooms of sweat to unfurl under the arms of his clean white shirt.

  I have always had deep sympathy for fat people. I see a fat woman or man labouring painfully along the street or taking up two seats on a bus and I am put in a mood for hours. It is less a feeling of commiseration than of total despair and heartache for them. I have cried, I really have, watching fat people try to force themselves through the turnstiles in the subway. At the same time I can be intolerably cruel, though I have learned to keep my politically incorrect “fat-cracks” to myself. I never see a grossly overweight woman without thinking, simultaneously: Poor Thing and Two-Ton Tessie.

  The administrator, Mr. Dawes, sighed yet again. “You see,” he said. “That’s my problem. We do have a policy that states that family members can visit for short periods such as what you’re proposing. Except that, in my tenure here as administrator, I’ve rarely seen it put to use. When people are put here, Darrel, it’s rarely so that the family can have a nice place to visit on Sunday. I hate to say it, but most of our residents are here because their families can’t handle them, or don’t want them. Sad, but true.”

  “I see,” I mumbled.

  “Except that you, for some reason, seem to be intent on re-establishing contact with June.”

  “I am,” I said, quietly but firmly.

  For the first time Mr. Dawes — General Dawes, as I’d already begun to think of him — looked directly at me. His eyes were very large and very blue, like Dagnia’s, but pale. He squinted a little, trying to focus on me without his glasses. “We’ve checked up on you, you know,” he said.

  “You have?” Panic settled in my chest like dust, choking me. I thought that they knew. That General Dawes’s fat, seemingly kind face concealed some bureaucratic monster, who had only been playing a half-hour game of cat and mouse before chasing me out or calling the police. My grip tightened on the arms of my chair. I didn’t know if what I had been doing was illegal; I wasn’t going to stick around to find out, if it came to that. But instead of a monster I saw something entirely different in General Dawes.

  “You’ve spent some years in reform school,” he said. “A little in prison, and a long stint on the streets due to, um ... heroin addiction, was it?”

  “Cocaine,” I said. “Five years of it.”

  “Then you went into the Salvation Army Treatment Centre and got some help. You have been working there ever since as a Residential Assistant. You have stayed clean and sober since then?”

  “Yes,” I said, quietly relieved. This was nothing more than I had told them, mixing my own history with Darrel’s to explain the missing years. General Dawes nodded.

  “I admire you,” he said. “What you’re doing takes a lot of courage. I also admire the fact that you’re trying to get to know your sister again. But I have to ask you one question, Darrel. I’m sorry if it may be a bit painful, but I really must, as legal guardian to your sister, ask it, all right?”

  “Shoot,” I said.

  “Do you remember the circumstances of your sister’s departure from your home in Three Rivers?”

  It was a question I had been dreading, though somehow, deep down, I expected it. Darrel’s files mentioned nothing about this, other than that she had left when he was twelve. Twelve was too old for me, for Darrel, to tell General Dawes that I didn’t remember. I wondered if what I was doing was entirely wrong. Was I going through too much effort to help this girl, or to help Darrel, who was beyond help anyway? I was about to give the whole thing up and just walk out of there, when Dawes saved the day. He looked at me with such immense sympathy in those watery blue eyes that I couldn’t help feel the first real pangs of guilt for lying to him. “I know some about your childhood,” he said. “From June’s files. I know it wasn’t pleasant. And I won’t ask you to talk about what you cannot. Maybe we can talk about it later.”

  “So you’re going to let me see her?”

  “Yes,” said General Dawes, closing June’s file and plucking his glasses off his chest to polish them again. “You can see her until one or the other of you decides you’ve had enough.”

  LXVIII

  The first time I actually visited June at the Sisters Who Gave Good Hope, as I renamed it, I was accompanied by another nurse with soft-soled squeaky shoes and white pantyhose. Her name tag said she was Judy Lomez but she didn’t offer this information herself. I thought she was tight-assed bitch — another Nurse Ratched. She gave me the tour of the t
hird floor and the Down’s syndrome and catatonia ward.

  She showed me the recreation room, where the patients played crazy man’s ping-pong with no partner and watched Mr. Rogers on the big screen TV. “This is where your sister spends most of her days.”

  Some of the catatonic and autistic patients were in front of the television when we came in, staring their empty, straight-ahead-at-nothing stares. In the Consumeristic Period, it will be written, it was okay to be brain-dead, as long as you did it in front of the television.

  A few oversized retards roamed the hallways and the recreation room looking in vain for a ping-pong partner. None of them wore pyjamas or nightdresses. They were all dressed like you and me, in bargain basement jeans and imitation designer sweatshirts and All-Star high-top basketball shoes. I asked the nurse about this.

  “This is not a television program, Mr. Greene,” she told me. “This is not fictional bedlam. We don’t allow our clients to get up and wander around in the morning like they’ve got nothing to live for. Everyone gets dressed here, or they’re not allowed out of their rooms.”

  “Where do they get their clothes?”

  “The city supplies them.” She said no more.

  We didn’t go into the cafeteria because the girls were eating, which explained why only the catatonic and autistic were left in the recreation room. I asked the nurse when they would eat.

  “When someone feeds them,” she said.

  We went by the nurses’ station, and walked without comment past the “containment” room. All one had to do was look in the small window to tell what it was. A rubber room. Lomez asked me to please hurry up, and took me to June’s room.

  “You’ll wait here for her,” the nurse said. “She shares this room with Marsha, but they’re both having their lunch. She’s already been informed that you’re coming.”

  “She probably won’t recognize me,” I said nervously. “I haven’t seen her for years.”

  “She might not,” said the nurse. “But then again, she may. You’d be surprised what June remembers.”

  Lomez went off to get June. I sat in the wooden chair next to a wooden table covered in sheets of loose-leaf marked up with Crayolas. It’s a cliché that retards draw with crayons, but it’s true. Not because, as the city defence lawyer thought, retards are particularly fond of crayons, but because crayons don’t have sharp edges. I wondered if in prison guys got pencils to write letters with or Crayolas. It was hard to shank anyone with a crayon, though pencils could do a nasty job, especially with the added potential for internal lead poisoning. I would have to ask Pete. There were no Crayolas at the treatment centre. Pens and pencils abounded and no one ever got shanked. Then again, as the clients were told repeatedly, treatment was not a prison.

  While Lomez was getting June, I looked around the room. I was surprised by it. Big open windows with white sheer curtains hanging in them. Lots of good light. Two sturdy single beds constructed of bright yellow pine with thick blue down comforters spread neatly over white-sheeted mattresses. The beds looked cleaner and more comfortable than my own. The walls were hung with drawings on loose-leaf paper that could only have been done by one of the occupants. Two stick figures standing in a field with a yellow cartoon sun blazing brightly above them. A big brown blob that could have been a horse, or a hippopotamus, standing by what could have been a lake or a blue car. This room, except for an opened box of Kotex sitting in plain sight on one of the dressers, could have fooled anybody into thinking that two little children lived here. Suddenly I didn’t feel so sorry for Darrel’s sister. What could be so bad about living in a perpetual childlike state? Even if you did bleed from the crotch once a month? Even if it was an institution for the mentally challenged et al? Hell, June probably didn’t even know that. She probably thought she lived in a giant playhouse with big catatonic dolls that watched TV all day and would let you do anything you wanted to them. I wanted to leave then, before the nurse came back with the three-year-old in a thirty-threeyear-old’s body. I tried to leave just as Judy Lomez brought June into the room.

  June.

  Big June.

  Six feet if she was a inch, and fat, with big tits and strawcoloured hair and a great, beaming three-year-old’s innocent smile. In olden days they used to say that people who were retarded were touched by God. It is where the saying “touched” comes from, as in “That guy is a little touched upstairs.”

  “June,” said Lomez. “Do you remember your little brother, Darrel?”

  And before I knew it Darrel’s sister June, who had never met me before, ran over and wrapped me in her arms in a great bear hug and cried out ecstatically, “Bubby! Bubby! Bubby! Bubbeeeeeeee!” Over June’s shoulder I could see that Judy Lomez was smiling. I smiled back at her.

  “I guess she remembers me,” I said, half-choked by the strength of this retarded stranger’s embrace.

  The nurse nodded. “I guess she does.”

  Suddenly I was glad I’d come. Even if I was fooling all the nurses, and Dawes. Even if June was so afflicted she didn’t know the difference between me and the brother she had last seen when she was sixteen. I was glad I’d come because when you give someone something that makes them happy — even if that something is a lie, even if that someone wouldn’t know the difference between a Radio City Music Hall chorus girl and Geraldo Rivera — you’ve given the world a little more hope with which to fight its next crop of bad-guy stuff. You’ve given the sleazy lawyers one less case to keep them away from their wives and children at night. I stood there, getting the stuffing hugged out of me by someone who had once been touched by God, and for no reason I could think of, no reason at all, I started to cry.

  Which made Ms. Judy Lomez, not a Nurse Ratched after all, smile all the larger and Ms. June Greene hug me all the harder.

  LXIX

  Happy Millennium.

  That’s all anybody heard on December 31, 1999. Every fool in the street, every TV newscaster and talk show host was saying it. Happy Millennium. I did not say Happy Millennium, for two reasons:

  1. I am one of the losers who knows he is a loser and who will not celebrate the millennium until the Gregorian calendar convinces me it actually is a new millennium, which will not be until December 31, 2000. There will be a strong but unified army of us — mathematicians, historians, anal retentives who always have to have the details right and drive everyone at work crazy, losers who know they are losers — who will be running around wishing everybody happy millennium on December 31, 2000, and getting strange looks. If you do not know why we will be doing this I won’t bother to explain it, because you obviously — and probably quite happily — do not fall into one of the above categories, and so will be one of the ones giving me a strange look this coming December 31.

  2. My birthday is January 1. I make it a point to never celebrate my birthday. Especially the last one, when I turned thirty. There we all were, sitting on the very pinnacle of 1999, waiting to be swept like lemmings over the cliff into the year 2000. Everyone else was clapping and screaming. Hotels and airlines had tripled their already ridiculous rates just to celebrate the occasion. On the Eiffel Tower in Paris the last number on the clock went from a nine to a zero. The same happened in Piccadilly Circus in London. Times Square in New York. In Rome. In Cairo. Every city everywhere, somebody watched a nine turn to a zero and went absolutely apeshit.

  I was sitting in the office. Most of the guys were upstairs asleep. (They had been partying like it was 1999 all their lives and most of them couldn’t give a shit about the millennium. The few that were awake were sitting in the smoking room having a fag and wondering how many lines their dealers were doing right then.) I brought Juxta with me. Not allowed, but on such a night no one adhered to the rules too closely. Except for the curfew rule. Nine guys didn’t return that night. Millennium fever. More than half of them would be dead, in jail, or in detox by the end of the first week of January 2000.

  LXX

  I sat in the office, lights and c
omputer off, listening to the muffled shotgun madness drifting in from the streets. I could feel my body being torn out of 1999 and set unevenly down in 2000, shedding twenty-nine for thirty. I had been eating from aluminum pots all my life and those little chemical free-agents could have been in there all that time, oxidizing in my brain like crazy. Or my lungs could already contain oat cells that in a few years could turn into cancer cells and have their own little millennium celebration; I smoke enough for that. Or a thousand other things could be waiting to happen, and I had yet to accomplish anything I thought worthwhile. Juxta was asleep at my feet. Millennium fever is not infectious to cats. Or to Orthodox Jews, who are in the sixth millennium, according to the Judaic calendar. Or most of the Chinese who, despite switching to the modern calendar for geopolitical reasons sometime in the 1940s, still believe in a calendar old enough to make the Gregorian calendar look like June’s Minnie Mouse watch.

  LXXI

  Get this:

  In the thirteenth century Roger Bacon, who had already been locked up by his fellow Franciscan monks for being crazier than a shithouse loon, figured out that the Julian calendar was off by eleven minutes per year. That meant that every year they were gaining (or losing, I can’t remember) eleven minutes, so that in a hundred years or so January 1 wouldn’t be on the same day as the January 1 a hundred years before. Because Bacon was a monk, what really bothered him was that they would, after a time, be celebrating all the holy days when Christ did this and Christ did that on the wrong days. He wrote a long letter to Pope Clement IV explaining his theory and the urgency of adjusting the calendar by eleven minutes so there would be no “drift,” as he called it, against the solar year — the exact amount of time it takes the Earth to revolve around the sun, which according to Bacon’s theories was three hundred and sixty fourand-a-half days plus or minus (I still can’t remember) eleven minutes. The pope, like the good administrator he was, wrote back to Bacon saying something like: