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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonism_Resorts |
When I was ejected out of my newly gentrified Park Slope apartment building for not breaking a city lease illegally (and for losing the income from my job), I had to stay with a gentleman friend I met at the local library. It wasn't that I thought my new friend was of sound of body and mind, it was simply that I had no other options available to me, except those fevered delusions that my family routinely plays out amongst one another while I (as the head of my family) struggle with typical life situations, but that's certainly nothing new for me.
Since I've been parenting most of my life, I trust myself to handle as best as possible the worst conditions life can throw at you, because I've never had it any differently in my life (also not of my choosing). What child asks to be born into a very dysfunctional situation rife with mental illnesses, domestic violence, rampantly unchecked psychoses, aberrant obsessive compulsive behavior, and untreated addictions, treated like huge "secrets" that almost every human family has? No one, that' s who. And so, I was under no pretenses when my friend walked me to my church for a casual meeting with some members of the volunteer charity St. Vincent de Paul, which I'm sure he heard of, struggle as he does with manic bipolar depression and paranoid schizophrenia, because they give away free food there.
Under my watch, the volunteers working actually dropped their bullshit act of pawning off old cans from the backs of their closets with food no sane healthy person would ever eat, replacing those dusty cans with vouchers for fresh food from the local grocery store instead (heavy on the organic produce), and for that I am glad. Social "do-gooders" often tends towards the obviously condescending, tentative as they often feel their grip on reality is, reassured only by kicking on the already downtrodden among us, but not so with me. I needed impromptu legal advice for my court cases through the housing court system of Brooklyn, one of the most lopsidedly corrupt institutions I've ever run into, but also not without genuine people looking to help those in need, most often impoverished black single mothers.
It's not fair, and I didn't like one minute of my introductory course with the twin worlds of our legal systems and Public Assistance, but as my friend from Brownsville told me, "You have to treat 'Welfare' like it's your job", knowing the system as he does, because he's a fourth generation recipient of tax money, but that's typical for the criminally insane. There's no way I could sit in an overheated room full of the mentally unfit popping off during their long wait for social justice because there's no real appointment system for services, like a regular government office would have or, say, like any private office I've ever worked at. It's just not in me to do something so insanely wasteful as that when I can be working, like now.
But he worked it like he was born to it, which he was. You see, you have to be taught by someone "in the know" about what time you need to get there so as to not blow your whole day, where to stand and what line to go on (and if you don't do it "right", the personnel there adopts this shocked peevish look by your newness and questions, because they see the same types of families for generations), what kinds of forms you need, what window does what kind of social service, what to say and how to say it, and so on. It was nuts. No healthy person I know thinks, speaks, or acts like anyone I encountered through my enforced labors through the worlds of the addicted and afflicted.
What I did learn after my brief tenure with the lowest of the low is that they need healthcare and supervised monitoring through supported housing for the seriously sick over any kind of fake program that pretends a violent schizophrenic with obvious tremors just needs "a hand up" with an hour of resume writing workshops and vocational training, because being able to rip off the system puts you up there intellectually with a sophisticated cat burglar rather than some pretend office bureaucrat. That's the actual mindset reflected: we're all insane here, except for you because that was the attitude I got from customers and workers alike in the public systems of New York. You, Miss, definitely don't belong here, given with a strangely quizzical look of puzzlement about why a gorgeous, educated, healthy woman like me was even doing there, because that's exactly what it felt like.
Why am I here? My friend Cotto had no such allusions. He knew he fit the system. He likes smoking pot and sitting around bullshitting with nut cases for hours, like the town drunk who takes up "his" barstool every day at noon; because that's the only kind of regular schedule a mentally infirm individual can adhere to, besides the numbing, hand-wrung, midnight laundry hidden behind closed doors that typifies suburban anxieties. They're just more well hidden than those out in public that marks city life. While I fretted every single minute I spent in a system not designed for me, wondering why free Internet wasn't available for people supposedly looking for jobs like I was, Cotto took up residence like the fat king he likes to daydream he is.
One of his favorite fever fantasies he recalled to me one evening at "Casa Crazy", in the part of the 'hood that slips quickly from Park Slope's elite privilege to hardcore Hispanic poverty and crime, involved his ideas about what a dream vacation would be like. Since he knew I was well-traveled, he must have told himself that his lies were entertaining fodder for me while I slept on the floor of his overheated rented room, and they kinda were, if you could ignore his creeping mania returning as his medications waned. On such a cold winters evening did he tell me the tale of his overblown addictions combined with overheard exploits at Mexican resorts, like I would ever believe that he went to one, seeing as he was on our payroll for, well, just about everything, vacation hotspots not included.
But, that's what he wanted me to think: he and his crazy fat ugly girlfriend went to a Club Med type of resort for sunbathing in the nude, partner-swapping in the common area hot tub (also done in the nude, naturally), followed by hours of hazy pot-smoking under the sun with his paramour, while they non-judgmentally explored the finer points of a S&M lifestyle habitue, like a sophisticate on a winery tours pontificating pretentiously about every grape varietal in the glass, which it most certainly was not. His room was dirty, smoky, smelly, scary, and not at all like my life, the real life that he wanted (at least for a little while) to pretend that he had, sick as he was when I knew him.
When I quickly got another gig (while working at the public library and using their Internet service, just like I am today) he freaked out, though I had no idea why. I took a lower level job than my experience with a no-name indie publisher just to get a paycheck so I could pay back rent on a contract designed to bankrupt me while it terrorized me, which it did. It was only later on, after I left his squalid tenement life for other not-so-fair spots on the globe, that I realized what he was actually trying to tell me: I was his dream made real. He gushed when I got home from work exhausted, using the nighttime hours to clear trash out from the wrecked room I paid fair market value for, unfit for living as it was, but those were the times as they existed.
He gurgled with excitement from another easy day I paid for, as I whitewashed the walls with thinned cans of paint I could barely afford in a baggy shirt bought at the dollar store up the block, nailing down loose floorboards while rinsing them repeatedly with white vinegar that repelled city bugs like cockroaches, because I had to. He'd created some ideal celebrity out of a tired book publishing professional who'd apprenticed into the industry way back in 1993, working my way steadily up the creaky ladder I stood on while he watched me work, squinting at me through the smoke. "Oh, snap!", he bubbled excitedly to me, in front of the super's first floor apartment that was strikingly cleaner than the upstairs rooms he rented above him, "This is awesome, man! We're going to need an 'enoturage', yo!".
I realized long after I left for more troubled pastures with greener fields, that's exactly how he saw me: as the girl that every man dreams of, doing feats of brilliance and physical endurance that a chronically sick man like him will never ever be able to do. I was his real-life action hero, right there in front of him, instead of the fictional caped crusader from the video games he used to check out of reality with, on those nights when he was too wound up to sleep and out of sleeping medication. I was his holiday vacation from his own life, brief as that was, because like every seriously mentally ill person I've ever met, he will never have the loving romance of my life over the weirdly leveraged head games that the sick use in lieu of an actual adult sex life.
There were no power struggles between he and I, no strange mind games to manipulate, no weird sexual tensions to exploit, no leveraged money to control me with, no extended overwrought, passive-aggressive coercions...no, there was nothing like that. I was just another overworked New York mama takin' care of her own, you know what I'm sayin'? That's all it was for me: just another day at the office, taking care of the sick people of this world (with no vacation days or vacation pay included), and ain't that the truth for you, too, girlfriends? You know it is. Now, hand me that silly-looking piña colada mixed drink with the tiny umbrella under this here sunlamp. At least we can pretend to take a break, even if it's for a little while, right? No vacations for us, are there? There's never enough time or money for that, when you're a real mother like me. Nope, there definitely isn't.
