12
On the track down 405 to Seizure World he clicks on the radio, they’re playing The Pudknockers’ latest and he blasts himself with a full hundred and twenty decibels of volume, singing along as loud as he can:
Seizure World spreads over the Laguna Hills, from El Toro to Mission Viejo: “Rossmoor Leisure World,” a condomundo for the elderly that used to be only for the richest of the old. Now it’s got its ritzy sections and its slums and its mental hospitals just like any other “town” in OC, and overpopulation sure, there’s more old folks now than ever before, an immense percentage of the population is over seventy, and two or three percent are over a hundred, and they have to go somewhere, right? So there are half a million of them densepacked here.
Jim parks, gets out. Now this place: this is depression. He hates Seizure World with a passion. Uncle Tom does too, he’s pretty sure. But with emphysema, and relying completely on Social Security, the old guy doesn’t have much choice. These subsidized aps are as cheap as you can get, and only the old can get them. So here Tom is, in a condomundo that looks like all the rest, except everything is smaller and dingier, closer to dissolution. No pretending here, no Mediterranean fake front on the tenement reality. This is an old folks’ home.
And Tom lives in the mental ward of it—though usually he is lucid enough. Most days he lies fairly calmly, working to breathe. Then every once in a while he loses it, and has to be watched or he’ll attack people—nurses, anyone. This has been the pattern for the last decade or so, anyway. He’s over a hundred.
Jim can’t really bear to think about it for too long, so he doesn’t. When he’s out in OC it never occurs to him to think of Uncle Tom and how he lives. But during these infrequent visits it’s shoved in his face.
Up the wheelchair ramp to the check-in desk. The nurse has a permanent sour expression, a bitchy voice. “Visiting hours end in forty-five minutes.”
Don’t worry.
Down the dark hallway, which smells of antiseptic. Wheelchair cases bang into the walls like bumper cars, the old wrecks in them drooling, staring at nothing, drugged out. A young nurse pushes one chair case down the hall, blinking rapidly, just about to cry. Yes, we’re in the nursing home again. (“Did I lose? did I win?”)
Tom’s got a room just bigger than his bed, with a south-facing window that he treasures. Jim knocks, enters. Tom’s lying there staring out at the sky, in a trance.
Wrinkled plaid flannel pajamas.
Three-day stubble of white beard.
Do you live here?
Clear plastic tube, from nostrils to tank under bed. Oxygen.
Bald, freckled pate. Ten thousand wrinkles. A turtle’s head.
Slowly it turns, and the dull brown eyes regard him, focus, blink rapidly, as the mind behind them pulls back into the room from wherever it was voyaging. Jim swallows, uncomfortable as always. “Hi, Uncle Tom.”
Tom’s laugh is a sound like plastic crackling. “Don’t call me that. Makes me feel like Simon Legree is about to come in. And whip me.” Again the laugh; he’s waking up. The bitter, sardonic gleam returns to his glance, and he shifts up in the bed. “Maybe that’s appropriate. You call me Uncle Tom, I call you Nigger Jim. Two slaves talking.”
Jim smiles effortfully. “I guess that’s right.”
“Is it? So what brings you here? Lucy not coming this week?”
“Well, ah…”
“That’s all right. I wouldn’t come here myself if I could help it.” The plastic cracks. “Tell me what you’ve been up to. How are your classes?”
“Fine. Well—teaching people to write is hard. They don’t read much, so of course they don’t have much idea how to write.”
“It’s always been like that.”
“I bet it’s worse now.”
“No takers there.”
Tom watches him. Suddenly Jim remembers his archaeological expedition. “Hey! I went and dug up a piece of El Modena Elementary School. Shoot, I forgot to bring it.” He tells Tom the story, and Tom chuckles with his alarming laugh.
“You probably got some construction material from the donut place. But it was a nice idea. El Modena Elementary School. What a thought. It was old when I went there. They closed it as soon as La Veta was finished. Two long wooden buildings, two stories high with a cellar under each. Big bell in one. The high school got the bell later and the principal, who had been principal of the elementary school years before. Went crazy at the dedication. Had a nervous breakdown right in front of us. Big dirt lot between the two buildings. They were firetraps, we had fire drills almost every day. I played a lot of ball on that lot. Once I singled and stretched it to two, they overthrew and I took third, overthrew again and I went home. They made a play on me there, and I was safe but Mr. Beauchamp called me out. Because he didn’t like me hot-dogging like that. He was a bastard. We used to bail out of swings at the top of the swing. Go flying. I can’t believe we didn’t break limbs regularly, but we didn’t.”
Tom sighs, looking out the window as if it gives a prospect onto the previous century. He recounts his past with a wandering, feverish bitterness, as if angry that it’s all so far gone. Jim finds it both interesting and depressing at once.
“There were a couple of girls that hung together, everyone hounded them without mercy. Called them Popeye and Mabusa, meaning Medusa I suppose. Although it amazes me that any kid there knew that much. They were retarded, see, and looked bad. Popeye all shriveled, Mabusa big and ugly, Mongoloid. Boys used to hunt for them at recess, to make fun of them.” Tom shakes his head, staring out the window again. “I had a game of my own that I played on the teacher who was recess monitor, a kind of hide-and-seek. Psychological warfare, really. I used the cellars to get from one side of the yard to the other to pop out and surprise her. The monitor would see me here, then there—it drove her nuts. One time I was doing that, and I found Popeye and Mabusa down there in the cellar hiding, huddled together.…” He blinks.
“Kids are cruel,” Jim says.
“And they stay that way! They stay that way.” Coppery bitterness burrs Tom’s voice. “The nurses here call us O’s and Q’s. O’s have their mouths hanging open. Q’s have their mouths hanging open with their tongues stuck out. Funny, eh?” He shakes his head. “People are cruel.”
Jim grits his teeth. “Maybe that’s why you became a public defender, eh?” Seeing two retarded kids, huddled together in a cellar: can that shape a life?
“Maybe it was.” The little room is taking on a coppery light, the air has a coppery taste. “Maybe it was.”
“So what was it like, being a public defender?”
“What do you mean? It was the kind of work that tears your heart out. Poor people get arrested for crimes. Most crimes are committed by really poor people, they’re desperate. It’s just like you’d expect. And they’re entitled to representation even though they can’t afford it. So a judge would appoint one of us. Endless case loads, every kind of thing you can imagine, but a lot of repetition. Good training, right. But… I don’t know. Someone’s got to do that work. This isn’t a just society and that was one way to resist it, do you understand me boy?”