We started out in Monterey and quickly burned most of our bridges. Even now, I can barely remember all the people I’m supposed to contact about money owed, belongings stored, friends and outstanding bills completely forgotten. Since we had no money, and worse, we owed, getting out and towards some kind of temporary refuge was first and foremost.

Sonora, California was our first stab at relocating. We lived rent free in a house where a supposedly quadriplegic woman needed certain hours of care-taking. We would care take her, she would care take us.

When I first met her, at our “interview”, I was taken with her physical beauty. At the nearby Alzheimer’s unit where we found additional work, I was used to changing the diapers of antique oddballs that were sweet, although completely out of their minds. Quadriplegic Alice was neither of those things.

I sat very close to her bed and surprising myself, put my hand automatically on her body. Her eyes were a striking, feline green, almost translucent. Her hair, a healthy salt and pepper combination that hung shoulder length in a lush flow, gave her the eerie glow of a mischievous, second youth. And she was entirely unapologetic about this indication. She worked it. She was bad at bullshit. The cordial chit chat at initial interviews was missing here. Her daughter in-law sat at the foot of the bed, looking haggard yet hopeful. She asked Alice, “Can we keep them?” It sounded like “are we there yet?” or “can I go now?”

Alice’s own mother was there too. She spoke with us as though she had been through an assembly line of caretakers and wasn’t about to get too personal. It had become obvious to me that caretakers often came from the cesspool of society. I’ve met my share at social services. Usually they need a place to live, and care-taking is something they grow to resent after it houses them a while.

Not all caretakers are desperate. I’m sure there are caretakers who have genuine nursing experience and live monastic lives of selfless service. Alice’s mother was not familiar with this altruistic group. She was used to the cesspool. Still, she was pleasant enough, showing us our new bedroom, where we could store our belongings and the general lay-out of the land.

Looking back on the first day, I recall the television was uncharacteristically off. All four women including the one man, were smoking cigarettes. Smoke filled the barely ventilated living room. Alice bought cartons of generic menthols that she was often proud to report, “only cost $22.oo at Cost-U-Less!” At times of absolute nicotine desperation, I sat up at night and smoked these with her. Aaron could never bring himself to do the same.

Three generations of small town women sat in that room. All pregnant by sixteen, all so young to be mothers, grandmothers and women of great personal battle. The underbrush, the as yet hidden, darker stories of death, loss and addiction, mental and physical illness, would with time, waft up like a stank fog, slowly poisoning anyone who breathed it in. As with my own past, my own demons not yet put to rest, everyone was dangerously revealed by the time we abandoned ship three months later.

In the front of our new house on Hatley Drive, someone had erected a tacky, House of Elvis-style memorial garden. A statue of the Virgin Mary stood in the center of a circular rock garden. Stuck in between and around all the rocks, were bouquets of plastic flowers. A tin, makeshift storage unit sat as the backdrop. The aluminum shack was painted in an effort to look more “country”, using whatever painted trimmings that constitute or connote the country theme.

What puzzled me about these people who really did live in the country, was why all their shops, yards and homes were filled with highly manufactured, highly stylized, predominately plastic, fake country trimmings. Fake flowers where there easily could have been real. Was it the effort? In a place where the phone number to Wal-Mart is listed on the fridge ahead of emergency contacts, doctors and family members, low-cost convenience was king.

After that first meeting, I never shared a single moment with Alice in her living room where she rested twenty-four/seven without the constant presence of either Ricki Lake, Jerry Springer or any variety of the popular Court-TV television shows that serve up morality-fast food style.

Plus, no one had any teeth, including Alice who literally had not a tooth left. At social services, perfectly young and healthy women carried their sets of teeth, like a change of clothes, in purses or pockets. An old hooker I met in rehab told me that crack or heavy methamphetamine use could result in teeth damage or even loss. The hooker was in her forties and she too carried her teeth in her purse. She also decided to share with me that certain clients of hers preferred fellatio with toothless prostitutes because of obvious hazards no doubt a full set of teeth pose to the sexual act. I remember the day the old hooker got her teeth in the mail. I thought she looked like Dracula, but she was so excited.

I began to feel that there existed a huge underground society whose teeth were in fact fake. Young people, old people, rich people, poor people…all of them toothless. And at any time someone you knew and trusted would rock the very foundation of your friendship by horribly removing what you thought was their natural teeth.

Right away, Alice’s mother made a stab at explaining the slightly creepy, mostly plastic memorial garden. She said, “Alice’s daughter committed suicide, though she will tell you it was murder.”

I asked, “How long ago?”

“Two years exactly” she answered.

“And how long has Alice been a quadriplegic?” I tried to politely wonder aloud.

“Two years exactly” she said, not quite meeting my gaze.

Psychosomatic quadriplegia? I’d never heard of it, but then again, I could see Alice wasn’t a true quadriplegic even though the ad in the paper said so. She had feeling absolutely everywhere, enjoying frequent leg and back massages, screaming out dramatically when her toes or feet touched even slightly. She had scars all over her body, several on her stomach which was perpetually bloated from daily opiate use. She was sly as a fox, lying with ease, getting involved in other people’s business and playing them against each other. I could see a small smile begin to form across her face whenever someone like the physical therapist would come over and treat her as though she were an invalid child. It was a role she enjoyed. She liked being the center of attention. After all, she was already the center of the living room. All of life in the house passed through, or revolved around where she lay.

Lisa, Alice’s troubled daughter-in-law, defined Sonora’s geographical vortex of bad health. She was the perfect representative of a desperate culture. She had the face of damage, a smoker’s face, a methamphetamine face. The town was crawling with meth addicts. Full-functioning labs were constantly busted, adding another stain to the town’s white trash reputation. She was thirty-four and she looked awful. A former stripper and current opiate dabbler, the mother of two and grandmother of one took care of Alice certain mornings in the early week. I recognized the signs of her addiction at once, the constant trips to the emergency room for shots of Demerol, the suspiciously missing bottles of Alice’s morphine and the pill collections strewn all about the house. On top of all this, she was manic depressive as was her six year old son, Robbie. Robbie tried to kill himself twice by the time he turned eight.

Manic depression was another town trend. Everyone was taking Depakote to battle the mania. One afternoon, Lisa told us of her long, strange, tragically amazing list of past and current ailments. At age thirty-four, she had suffered grand mal seizures, three major strokes. Anemia, blood clots, a genuine heart attack, a series of continuing mental breakdowns, coma and migraine headaches. When we fled Sonora, Lisa was preparing to check herself into the mental ward for the umpteenth time. She readied herself the way a person might plan for a weekend vacation, running errands, securing a babysitter, organizing the house.

Finis

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