Worthless Goddamned Cripple

Questionably skilled but consummately arrogant MD’s descended on the warehouse every couple weeks to examine residents. They depended on the charge nurse behaving like a shameless lickspittle, scampering behind them and juggling charts while they made their rounds. When the duo entered a room, the nurse informed the preoccupied doctor of the occupant’s condition and its progress or deterioration. (There’s nothing quite as pathetic as a wide-eyed simpleton striving to gain the confidence of an uninterested taskmaster.) While the nurse groveled in the background and scribbled notes, the doctor examined the resident and intermittently deadpanned statistics and generic comments. They both usually ignored questions posed by the resident. more »

The warehouse should have retired Miss Witt like state governments should revoke driver’s licenses issued to dazed coots who imagine they’re driving a bumper car when they get behind the wheel of their Olds. Though the aging CNA maintained good intentions and a friendly demeanor, her job performance had slowly but steadily degraded. Mr. Gold, the kewpie doll-sized administrator interpreted any questioning of Miss Witt’s abilities as a threat to his authority.

New patients regularly arrived at the warehouse from a hospital. The hyper-stupidity of the administration undermined efficient communication between the warehouse and the hospital involved, and a considerable number of ambulance attendants and cripplevan drivers were thieves. more »

Freddie expected the CNA’s to unconditionally wait on him even after he’d shown the capability of performing a given task. For example, he easily navigated his wheelchair to the liquor store but took for granted that a CNA would happily drag his drunken ass to the shower room when the stench of his soap-deprived body became unbearable. If anyone questioned the annoying lack of effort he put into taking care of himself, he bellyached like a petulant child: “But I be all crippled up.” Sometimes he’d also remind them: “. . . And I’m a black man.” I never figured out any reasonable correlation between his race and his accidental injury. more »

CNA’s indifferently accepted that some residents pissed onto the linoleum floor while lying half asleep in their beds because they were too lazy to get up and baptize the porcelain catchall. It never crossed their pea-brains that such a resident might be wildly ill-bred. Most parents teach their small children appropriate toilet habits; therapists were supposed to teach such skills to absent-minded patients. But the therapists often sloughed the responsibility off on the charge nurse, who delegated it to the CNA’s. The dullwitted CNA’s proved themselves incapable of any action beyond summoning a member of the housekeeping staff and telling them to mop the floor.

To be fair, it was hard to tell at first glance who suffered from physical dysfunction and who chose to conduct themselves like a fucking animal. more »

Most residents excelled when glomming public aid checks¹ and securing government “benefits” i.e. handouts to which they were entitled (as opposed to petitioning for “assistance” which by definition requires effort). But when it came to bathing or digesting text full of big words and unaccompanied by colorful illustrations, they couldn’t understand why they should be bothered.

On three occasions the administration designated an HIV-positive resident as my roommate.² They realized I was probably the only denizen of the warehouse not so dirt stupid as to believe that you would “catch them AIDS” from doorknobs or airborne cooties. And I’m not some Neanderthal homophobe who assumes that all HIV-positive men are gay and therefore subhuman pariahs anyway. more »

The Torah teaches tolerance. It appeared that the old school Jews who owned the warehouse never got the memo. Or maybe they equated the tolerance of non-Jewish individuals with apathy because some out of touch old fart scholars decreed it so.

Whatever the case, Mr. Gold projected an irritating moral superiority that he claimed Judaism had bestowed upon him. It was obvious that the pint-sized administrator of the warehouse embraced the Jewish faith as a business strategy, only because the owners were devoutly Jewish. Mr. Gold often referred to Judaism as “weird,” and once remarked that he appreciated a faith that demanded frequent days off work to acknowledge holidays. more »

The clueless administration of the warehouse equated holiday celebration with normalcy. They put substantial effort into decorating for the major holidays, which means they occasionally ordered the mouth-breathing activities staff drones to adorn the warehouse with colorful and shiny festive crap (which no doubt mesmerized the housekeeping staff). more »

The warehouse administrator, Mr. Gold constantly proved himself an amoral subhuman. He had gained the physically and mentally infirm residents’ trust by tacitly claiming to have earned a degree that made him a medical doctor. In fact some community college had merely awarded him a certificate that qualified his sawed-off shyster ass to work as a garden-variety pharmacist. He might not have even done that—I don’t remember and anyway I knew him to be a pathological liar. more »

In some older Chicago neighborhoods there’s a ditch in front of residential buildings. Freddie, one of my roommates, claimed to have been sitting on a lawn chair in front of his house when an old friend burst into the yard and slapped him on the back. The force of the slap sent Freddie headfirst into the ditch; the impact broke his back.

He’d demonstrated the capability of walking behind his wheelchair while gripping the handles to support his towering frame, but most of the time chose to plant his skinny ass in the seat. I overheard a therapist ask him why he didn’t walk more often. He whined his answer: “Because I be all crippled up.” Plus he couldn’t stand upright when he was crocked—every day he knocked back plenty of cheap vodka. more »

Up until I finished the sixth grade, the decorations in my classrooms reminded me and the other students of approaching holidays. Most of my teachers decked out their rooms with cardboard die-cut characters and tableaus: gold and red leaves welcomed fall; skeletons and jack-o’-lanterns meant free candy; two-dimensional Santas evoked unspoken greed; stereotypical leprechauns rollicked until St. Patrick’s Day; a few pompous-looking fancy boys or a damaged bell served as an all-purpose reminder of “patriotic” holidays about which nobody gave a crap, except those grown-ups who got the day off. more »