Monkeyshines
chapter 16
In February 1975, Chris and I went to work as program directors for CARC, the Chicago Association for Retarded Children. The executive director was Otto Whitehill. Our immediate supervisor was Otto's deputy, Jerry Friedman. Our job was to coordinate the restoration of an old mansion near Evanston, IL, and start up an ILC, an independent living program. We’d live there, at Deborah House as it came to be called, with 18 mildly retarded (now developmentally disabled) adults. Adam would be born there. It was a perfect. It didn't seem perfect at first, but it was.
One of the apparent imperfections was the way we got hired. Chris pitched the job hard, documenting our varied experience and education, but Jerry still had to call me at the prison for an interview. I was by the bars near the phone waiting for it to ring. When it did, and the gate slid open, my mind went blank. As I answered that call, I couldn't imagine what I might say that would help my chances of getting hired. None of my experiences gave me a clue. Much later, when I asked Jerry how he could have taken such a risk as to hire us, with me being in prison, he said, "You should have seen the other applicants."
Another apparent imperfection was our moving into the building long before it was really habitable. It was in rough shape. Bottle gangs had been staying there. They'd barbequed in the bathtubs, and littered the place with wine bottles, ragged bedding and food scraps. It was rat central. The roof had leaked, and there'd been no heat for two years, so nearly all of the doors and windows were warped and wouldn't work.
The owner considered demolishing it before CARC bought it. We put a new mattress on the floor of the third floor attic, and arranged some orange crates as dressers. Chris hung bits of cloth over the windows, and voila', we had a place. We hung an old cowbell inside our third floor window, and ran a string from it down to a tree limb near the front door, so we had a doorbell. At times the fire alarm went off in the middle of the night for no reason, and winos occasionally dropped by looking for their friends, but it was still a relief to live in that funky attic and chase invading squirrels out through the holes in the eaves. A relief from the angry tirades we'd endured each morning at the Wrona's.
Duke and Marie had allowed Chris and me to live with them in their home after I was released from prison, but they were terminally, hysterically, critical of us. Like plump Tasmanian Devils they screamed at me, a hungry tiger, that it was a dog-eat-dog world, and that Chris and I had better wake up. They said our jobs paid too little and the conditions were bad. But it seemed obvious to me they were feeling that a lifetime's work seeking respect and status was all going up in smoke. Instead of having a daughter and son-in-law they could feel good about, they had us. Worse for us, they had another daughter and son-in-law who seemed to be doing fine. Sue was an artist and taught grammar school, and Jim worked with Duke building gas stations. Chris and I were sore thumbs.
The first time Chris and I met the clients who were being considered for residence at Deborah House, we were shocked. They looked oddly imperfect to us, and we felt uncomfortable with them. We worried that we might be getting into something that would be uncomfortable for a long time. These retarded adults, however, quickly showed themselves to be unique individuals. They were affectionate and accepting, and relatively uninterested in nasty, underhanded schemes. They were OK.
And I found comfort in a fantasy that police raiders, should fate have more of them in store for me, would have to negotiate with the clients before reaching me in my third floor eerie. I imagined the raiders might become confused by that process, and just give up and go away.
Jerry Friedman, our boss, was funny, responsive and smart. He was balding and over-weight, and he joked about it. At a festive dinner, after introducing his gorgeous wife to someone and being struck for the umpteenth time by a reaction of surprise that his wife was so good looking, Jerry leaned close to me to say, "Do I look like a fucking gorilla or something?"
Soon after Chris and I had started, Jerry said two things that always remained in my mind. He said, "To do a really good job, you have to enjoy your work." An excellent instruction, I thought. And in the context of our effectiveness in getting work done, he said, "Every human organization has a formal system of laws or rules that are supposed to govern activity, and an informal system, the underlying mechanics; that's the people involved and their prejudices. Try to remember that the informal system always dominates."
What an idea! It was very enlightening to me. And so simple. It sharply altered my thinking. I grew up focused on formal rules; breaking them was cheating. Now I saw what had been hidden by this preoccupation with the formal system. I felt I was retarded myself and only just learning to put my socks on before putting on my boots. Of course, every child quickly learns to negotiate rules by manipulating adults, and I'd done it myself a million times in every phase of my life, but I'd never clearly conceptualized the principle. I'd taken water from the faucet without understanding the plumbing.
Jerry also suggested that Chris and I take ‘naps’ in every room in the house in order to cultivate a sense of being at home.
One of our first residents was named Gerald R. Ford. He had a low I.Q. and cerebral palsy, and when he was still an infant, his parents were advised to put him in a ‘home,’ because, they said, he'd never be able to respond to them as a ‘real’ son. The Fords felt Gerald already had a home. They raised him in it for 19 years. He came to us a warm, skinny, clumsy kid who wanted to work in a bank but couldn't count. After a lot of practice at counting, he came home crestfallen one day after trying to buy a $120 stereo with 120 pennies.
He could read well, and he read a lot about insects. As our little band hiked in a forest preserve one day, Gerald stopped to pick up a bug. As he peeked at it in his cupped hands, Cyril and I joined him. Cyril had extensive biological and zoological knowledge. He was a bona fide scientist. We peeked at the bug in Gerald's cupped hands and Cyril said, "It's a katydid, Gerald."
"Yeah," said Gerald, in his characteristic booming bass voice that was just barely understandable, "It's a male."
I’d loaned Gerald my extra boots for this hike, and while crossing a stream, he missed the stepping stones a few times. I feared that the new wet boots might be hurting his feet; so, I asked, "How are the boots feeling, Gerald?"
Gerald looked down at them pensively, took some think time, then boomed, "They feel fine." He seemed quite definite about this, so I started to nod a final acknowledgement. Before I could, though, he added, "Except when I walk." Two years later he’d be working in a bank as a maintenance assistant much loved by his fellow employees.
Ruth was another early resident. At thirteen, she’d been diagnosed as mentally retarded, and subsequently institutionalized. She’d spent the next thirty years in a back ward at Dixon State hospital. At Deborah House, Ruth was almost always smiling. She was very happy to have her own room. She was very happy to be able to clean the house. She was very happy to be able to work at McDonalds. She liked to do extra chores, take care of Adam, or whatever. She liked getting to the dryer as soon as it stopped, ahead of the person who'd turned it on, so she could fold the dry clothes quickly and perfectly as a surprise for their owner. Life had suddenly come up roses for Ruth.
Tony Stavropolous, another resident, was raised by his great grandparents who’d come from Sparta, THE Sparta. They’d instilled in him an unerring sense of right and wrong. Every decision he made was between right and wrong. At a weekly group meeting, as we planned the menu for the following week, Tony had to decide between chicken and roast beef for the Sunday dinner.
He labored over the decision for a minute, then turned to Chris and me, and in the wheedling whiny voice we’d all come to accept, he said very seriously, "Well, Mike and Chris, chicken is good. Yes?" He paused, looking around for reassuring signals that he was correct. He got some, thought for another moment, then continued, "And Roast beef is good." He collected more signals. He was obviously stymied by this duality of goods, and then he said, in a struggling, absolutely sincere voice, "Mike and Chris, why is it so hard for us to think, now, when we want to? Can you tell me this?"
Marshall Reifman was another resident. He’d been a working jazz musician until he was badly beaten in a mugging that caused him brain damage. Now, at 52, he was our poet in residence. Discombobulated in most practical tasks, he was always armed with a cryptic comment or provocative question. He dressed like an ambassador. One night, after they’d performed, Marshall held court for a group of visiting musicians. As I passed the assemblage, I heard Marshall say, "Yeah, I live here, I live everywhere. What's the difference between here and there? Just a little ‘t’ or tea or tee, you know what I mean? I'm a golf ball, and this is my cup."
Sam Sagi came to live at Deborah House after he interviewed us. He was nearly blind and his glasses must have weighed four pounds, but he worked effectively as a messenger in downtown Chicago by day. He was an opera buff by night. He’d exchanged correspondence with some of the world’s great maestros, and he knew all of the major and most of the minor opera. His ambition in life was to work for an opera company. His father was a lawyer who’d taught Sam not to waste time in useless competition. Sam accepted any blame that came his way, and he never accused anybody of anything. But he was tenacious and fearless in asking specific, respectful questions until he felt he'd asked enough.
On the subway to the opera one night, we were menaced by two knife-wielding alley warriors. As I herded my clients off the train, Sam occupied these two loonies with totally friendly questions. Are you going to the opera this evening? Do you like opera? What do you like to do for recreation? Et cetera. We all made it off the train safely.
Sam earned more money than us or any of our staff, raising interesting but unanswerable questions for us all.
Duane Cloud was a 22-year-old teddy bear, a chubby Lothario. His independent living training seemed sandwiched between his various romantic escapades. As he and two other residents sat in the bank with me one day, waiting to open accounts, a pretty nurse took a seat across from him. She had no reason to think he wasn't alone when he turned his bedroom eyes on her. His whole body spoke softly to her and she responded. She lowered her eyes, then raised them and looked back into Duane's eyes. Her body took the same languorous pose as Duane's. They seemed deep into shared feelings, and in other circumstances, I’d have thought they might leave the bank together. Then the spell broke. A bank official introduced himself to us, and Duane's status leaked out. In the nurse's eyes, I saw bemused surprise touched faintly by embarrassment.
We worked with a staff of twelve, mostly part-time, highly motivated, college age people. An exception was highly motivated Ann Widrevitz, a retired army major who didn't seem to seek retirement. She wanted to be useful forever. We had a speech therapist and help from the central office on intake and accounting. We were $250,000 in the red and the state had not yet paid us any money. I had to call the state comptroller's office, and tell him that Deborah House was closing because of this. Our residents would be out on the street. The next day, the comptroller's office sent us a check for $185,000.
Chris and I tried to invent a staffing pattern that would allow us to stay involved at Deborah House for many years. To us this meant rotating management teams so each got lengthy periods of ‘normalizing’ time off. We did some trial runs with Peter and Maggie being one team, Joe and Laurie being another, and Chris and I being a third. (Joe and Laurie had met as fellow employees at Deborah House and fallen in love). The rotation system didn't work, but during a trial run, Chris and I took our first time off in over a year for the occasion of Adam's birth.
The Lamaze and LeBoyer birthing techniques weren't yet in vogue, and to get access to them, we had to choose between California and Toronto. We chose Toronto because it was closer, cheaper, and gave Adam an interesting citizenship option. (Later, when he was nine, Adam groused that we'd dashed his chance to be president by having born him in Canada.)
We’d never consciously decided to have a baby. We thought there were so many born kids who needed parents that we didn't need to produce any more. When we learned Chris was pregnant, we chalked it up to poor birth control and decided on abortion. We were as effective planning the abortion as we’d been avoiding the pregnancy. It was serendipity.
Going to Toronto was the best decision we ever made. The process of Adam's birth was positioned properly; it was first. We had integrity. His birth was not super-imposed on other activities. We’d walk five miles a day through the parks and streets of Toronto. At the beach, I'd dig a hole in the sand before spreading out our blanket, so Chris could lie on her stomach and look like all the other bikini’d beachniks until she got up and presented her great belly.
My interest in children that had germinated during our time with Jimmy, Kevin and Colleen now blossomed, and I began to reorganize my whole interpretation of life. I began to see all human frailties as consequences of inadequate birthing and nurturing techniques.
Cyril came to Toronto the day before Adam was born. Adam was born shortly after Dr. Whedham kicked me out of the birthing room, and took Christine to an operating room where he could use forceps to turn Adam’s stubborn head in the direction required so it would fit through the only available exit. I'd begun whacking my stopwatch against the wall when the contractions reached 5'30" in length and 1'15" apart. We’d been told they'd last a minute or two and be two or three minutes apart. Dr. Whedham said Adam's heart was slowing due to the very long contractions, and that he’d have to use forceps, or else.
The Lamaze people had warned us that each birth was unique in some way, and I’d stopped thinking in terms of whether problem A, B, or C would attend the birth. I realized that, while each potential problem had only a remote chance of occurring, there were zillions of potential problems. The odds accumulated, and I saw the matter as, Which of the zillions of possible idiosyncracies will we meet? The forceps worked. Baby was born with black eye, but that was fine.
I encountered a totally new and unexpected set of thoughts shortly before Adam was born. A clear message came to mind, like a vision. I saw myself burying a tiny body in an unspoiled woods. I thought this was showing me what to do if the baby was born too defective to see as having really been born at all. I had a powerful sense that it was my job to see this kid through, and that part of the job might be to decide if he had any chance. What other people might say about it just didn't matter. I could only compare it crudely to the way a mother cat denies food to a severely stunted kitten. I was happy to see this terrible decision mooted as I counted baby's fingers and toes, and checked his little pee-pee and scrotum. All babies are nearly blind at birth, so I ignored his uselessly searching eyes. I inspected the folds and creases of his body until I felt I'd seen enough.
Becoming parents changed our lives beyond any expectations. Our confusion over goals vanished. We became perfectly clear about our purpose in life. Take care of baby. It was delicious. Visitors joined us in our single recreation, baby watching. Gradually, of course, we became hopelessly confused trying to figure out what was best for baby, but we had a distant point toward which to march.
The miracle of Adam's birth was followed four days later by his grandfather's death. I was at the hospital with Christine when we got the call saying Lewis ‘Duke’ Wrona had died. Heart attack. A cruel loss. We'd been getting closer. Duke used to ‘sneak’ over to Deborah House to help with whatever projects we had going. He said we shouldn't let anyone know he did it, but never said why.
We tried to understand it by trying to understand Duke and Marie. They’d both been orphaned early, like a lot of people in their generation, a generation that seemed to me to have run on a fast pragmatic track of continuous crisis. The Cap-Com War started during WWI, then the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition, Depression and World WarII. A wild ride and quite a puzzle. It seemed my parent generation found little time to evaluate the phenomenal changes they’d experienced.
Duke said to me, just before he retired, "I took a gamble. I decided to work like hell until I was 60, then retire and do what I wanted. If I live a long time past 60, I won. If I die, it won't matter."
So Duke worked like hell. Leaving many brothers and sisters subsisting in the woods of northern Michigan, he went to Chicago to work. He lived in a church basement while getting started in construction. When WWII started, he was among the first to join the new Seabee battalion in the Navy. He helped build the CIA base in Langley, Virginia, and after the war, he built gas stations in Chicago for oil companies. He only had one speed, full speed ahead. He retired at 60. He hated being retired, so he went back to work. He was dead at 61.
I probably knew Duke as well as I knew my own father, which was not really well at all. Neither seemed to put much energy into the ‘softer’ side of life. They didn't seem interested in figuring out personal feelings or motivations, and they didn't seem very concerned for their personal health or the need for self-expression. They didn't seem to think about the future of the planet or how to make it a more beautiful place, although this was changing in Duke in the years before he died. They were economic combat models, like their fathers and grandfathers I loved them, but they pissed me off, because they didn't leave Adam a grandpa.
Marie was devastated. She’d looked forward to the retirement years, and was suddenly robbed again by death. Her father died when she was a little girl, and at 15 she’d lost her mother. Chris told me that when her mother was a teenager she had slept with a string tied to her own dying mother for years. When Marie's mother needed help during the night, she’d pull that string.
Combining that experience with the Depression and WWII, and the subsequent years of strident upward mobility, Marie's feelings seemed understandable to me. I’d heard Gloria Steinem use a term that I thought fit Marie. "Affluenza" - a condition found in women who've lost their husband, retain wealth that's identified as the husband's legacy, and have a low self-image. Because they were isolated in lives of self-suppression and service? Marie seemed to accept isolation and call it independence.
I had a long-standing habit, an inherited tendency, as it were, to judge all things as if God sat on my shoulder and whispered secrets to me. It needed changing, and it occurred to me, at a time when I was fuming about Marie's obstinate withdrawal, that what I fumed about, and saw as a failure in Marie, was a failure in myself.
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Monkeyshine #5, the Projected Fault; an emotional criticism of another is usually a misplaced self-criticism. ("It takes one to know one.")
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What I criticized in Marie is common to us all. The fear of loss and resulting defensiveness. As one textbook put it, "We may plan according to our hopes, but we perform according to our fears." Husbands and wives, parents, even friends may withdraw if they sense they're too dependent on the friend'ship. How much can a person stand? When can we back away, and tend to our selves without fear of condemnation?
I sensed I was still learning to give others what I wanted for myself. At the bottom of things I saw a need in people to decide certain matters for themselves without fear of being roughed up by friends, family, agencies or committees for getting it ‘wrong.’ Defining those ‘certain matters’ is problematic, but it involves a sense of honor, integrity, wholeness, a place where we're perfectly adequate. No civilization has yet managed this, at least, not for long. But a model exists in the parallel worlds of life beyond the fear of a death that comes built into this damned body. A place where souls accept each other without warring or trembling over property or shelter, no ‘or else’ pecking order paranoia or desperation.
So Deborah House was perfect for baby Adam. The residents doted on him, and he heard Chinese, Yiddish, Spanish, English and Greek spoken daily, and Chris and I were always around to cuddle him. Our bedroom had no bed but rather a super thick carpet that made the tiny room into one large bed. I’d lay down with Adam nearly everyday at nap time. I'd close my eyes, and imagine I was zooming from the Earth's surface up into space, and chant until he fell asleep. I sang "Home, Home on the Range" at times.(I heard a fellow opened a western wear store in Japan called Hormone Derange and a restaurant called Buffalo, Rome.)
While at Deborah House, I bought back the double deck bus I’d sold to Steak N Shake five years earlier. John Skille and Peter overhauled its engine in our driveway at Deborah House. Like Peter, John was a mechanical wizard. He'd built bomb sights and irrigation systems, rewired houses, staged rock concerts, and invented special tools. He was one of those human bears from the North Woods, where humans still survive by learning lots of skills and developing thick hides. The high point of the engine re-build was taking turns with a 16 pound sledge hammer to slam the cylinder sleeve out of the cracked engine block.
Later, John managed the CARC re-sale shop, where some Deborah House residents worked to learn a variety of skills, from operating a cash register and making sales, to shop maintenance procedures, general work habits, minor repairs, and dealing with the public (In the course of picking up donations and schlepping them back to the shop).
After nearly five years at Deborah House, still friendly with the organization, but in need of a change, we resigned. We did feel a curious pressure inside our minds to say and think bad things about some of the people and the stressed situation we were leaving, but we resisted it.
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Monkeyshine #21, when people leave a person or a place, they tend to think up judgmental ‘reasons’ that serve to justify the change.
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Not that there weren't displeasing elements in our situation. The inevitable office politics had raised Hydra heads. (The Hydra was a nine headed serpent in Greek mythology that grew two heads for each one cut off.) Some people swam like fish in the office politics lake, but we found it distracting. And there was a time bomb in the basement - sex education.
What sort of sex life was ‘appropriate’ for the residents? At meetings with parents, I was intensely aware that we lacked consensus. I didn't think any three people out of our group of forty would have agreed. Personally, I felt that if the sex was flowing, the love might flow better, and that if a person wasn't having any sex, they'd better whack their weasel. I never shared this overly simple philosophy, of course. Most people seemed to think sexual transactions were profound undertakings, or casual and unimportant. (I came to believe that sexual transactions ‘should’ be casual, but hardly ever were.) So I'd nod understandingly when people suggested that their offspring shouldn't have any sex at all, and I'd nod understandingly when people said they wanted their offspring to enjoy full freedom of sexual expression.
When we talked about such stuff, there was usually lots of furtive eye contact and telepathic probing as everyone tried to determine if they were talking about the same things. I attributed the tension around sex to women's historic vulnerability to pregnancy, men's egocentric disregard for this, the community pressure on everyone to conform, a fear of disease, heartbreak, exploitation, and scant positive education.
Some residents had to be instructed that fellating a friend in the living room, with the lights on and other residents trafficking the area, was totally unacceptable. Others could decide questions of sex and marriage as well as anyone. The in-house policy on sex education was to first determine the level of knowledge and interest of a resident, and then tailor a program response. The plan was to address the person's sexuality from a survival perspective. Getting arrested, beaten up, pregnant, raped, sick or heartbroken all had survival implications for our clients. We tried to help them avoid these hard effects, but it wasn't easy to locate each resident's star in the sexual sky.
One fellow, Teddy, who always wore a suit, and was able to borrow his mom's car for dates, was seen by the other residents as a sexual mover and shaker. He was surrounded one night by a group of residents eager to question him about a recent date. They wanted all the salacious details. "How far did you go?" one resident asked point blank, as the others leaned forward to hear each syllable of the answer. "All the way to the museum," was Teddy's dead pan response.
From Deborah House, we drove the bus to Berkeley to visit Jimmy, Kevin and Colleen. We recruited them and some of their teenaging friends for a bus trip to Bloomington, Illinois, where we bought the McLean County Jail. It was a hundred years old, built of 8' square, 12" thick pieces of granite, had an attached twenty room Victorian mansion, and 36 cells, divided into two sections with 18 cells stacked in each. It was a fortress. I planned to re-name it the Avanti Popolo Space Center, retro-fit the building, and establish a hospitality center. I felt like Noah.
The bus was my ark. The old jail was Mount Ararat. Chris my guardian angel. Some tenuous links remained connecting me to the practical world, which I saw as increasingly and terribly Procrustean. I dreamed of establishing the first tavern in space, the Star Bar. An ancient and revered friend, Max Taverne, had this same notion, before me or after didn't matter. He'd go into space on such a venture. Ivy League schools were already developing electromagnetic tunnel type mass drivers that suggested the imminence of relatively low cost space travel. I had friends making movies who could do a science non-fiction project like this on a special effects budget. And I had friends on reserve for Sky Lab. They'd be interested.
The old jail could serve as a headquarters. All I needed was 50 million bucks. Failing that, $75,000 would float the jail retro-fit. The bank liked my plan to fix the building and install shops, but would only loan me $30,000. (That worried me, because the guy I bought the jail from was influential at the bank and stood to gain handsomely if I spent the $30,000 on repairs and then defaulted.) And the local unions threatened to picket me if I worked with teenagers and hired no union members. And the municipal electrical, plumbing and building authorities kept equivocating regarding the sort of work they'd approve; e.g., one week I'd be told I could repair a certain bit of plumbing, the next week I'd be told it had to be replaced with new.
The daily struggle to make ends meet pushed the Star Bar deep into the recesses of my imagination. As the Avanti Popolo Space Center slipped under water, Chris and I applied for jobs at Cunningham Children's Home in Urbana, Illinois. It wasn't so bad. I lost a few thousand dollars, but it was well spent. I considered it tuition. Cyril's cousin, to whom he referred as Gyro Gearloose, lost his home and every other dime he had in a failing attempt to market an automatic dishwasher for space ships.