When the cats woke me up on Saturday morning I didn't feel rested at all. There were two possible explanations for this.
It might have been because I'd had such a long and action-packed day on Friday—at work for eleven hours, I walked 16,000 steps in total.
Then again, I had stayed up watching the hands on the clock turn past midnight to one to two and then to three o'clock pondering (weak and weary, to be sure) whether I should grow out my hair, bleach it, and wear it in pigtails from now on. This crisis in identity arose after a Mardi Gras parade, when I wore a funny hat made to resemble a Viking helmet with two pigtails flowing from either side onto my shoulders.
Whichever reason it was that I got so little rest the night before, I now had to deal with the fallout while also going back to work. My plan was to coast through the day walking fewer steps than the day before and performing, at the most, only an eighth or a third of the tasks that had compelled me to walk seven and a half miles within the confines of a single ninety thousand square foot structure.
But you know what they say: people make plans and God laughs his ass off because he created a species of animal that's basically just a walking column of brainless garbage. Then he called this creature "human" and now watches impassively as each of us develops and swells the concept of inhumanity to proportions equal to the size of the universe—all while slowly decaying over the course of seventy or eighty years and then expiring with no warning.
After clocking in I started walking back toward the assisted living dining room to talk to my residents about what kind of day it would be, reminding them that there was little planned except watching Rooster Cogburn at two o'clock. Before I could make it to the dining room, my phone rang.
After I said hello, a voice hissed into my ear, "Where the hell are you?"
I could barely hear what the person was saying. "Excuse me?"
"The hell I will! If I excuse you for this, you'll want me to excuse you for worse and worse behavior until you're nothing but a soulless wild animal quivering with rage and malice, destroying anyone or anything that gets in the way of your sick pleasures," said Citizen Jim.
Of course it was Citizen Jim. And this time I heard every word but wished I hadn’t.
"What do you want?" I asked.
"I want to know where you are!"
I ducked into the tiny space that hides a garbage chute into the basement dumpster.
"I'm at work," I said.
"If you're at work then why do you sound like you might be sitting in an outhouse down the hill from a haunted cabin on the ridge of some godforsaken hill in West Virginia?" he asked.
I opened the door to the garbage chute room and stepped back into the hall. "Does this sound better?"
"I'm not here to judge the quality of your voice or cell phone service—you need to get your ass in gear and come get us," he said.
"Us-who? Where?" I asked, though I knew that going to get him and whoever he was with wasn't likely to happen no matter where they were.
It made me think of all the times my mother had called me when she was sun-downing in the nursing home.
“The school’s flooded and they’re evacuating us,” was one of her go-to dementia-generated catastrophes. One evening when I went to visit her, she let me know—in a whisper, with a lot of craning her neck to make sure nobody was listening—that she and her roommate “got arrested” the night before. She wouldn’t say why, but, had it really happened (and knowing my mother’s inability to be creative) it would have been for something like calling a radio station and telling them the school was flooded and the children needed to be evacuated.
I was removed from the remembrance of these past things by Jim’s voice in my ear—whispering again, but a little louder than before. “We got a hostage situation here,” he said. “And I need to be home in time to get the vet’s office.”
“Oh no! Is something wrong with Igor or Gomez?” I asked, referring to Citizen Jim’s two cats.
“The cats are fine! It’s a grooming appointment,” he said.
I felt that pain. “Do you have to get your cats sedated at the vet to be groomed, too?” I asked. “Zelda has to be completely knocked out to get her nails and fur trimmed.”
“What’s your obsession with my cats? It’s not an appointment for the cats! I’m talking about my monthly trip to get shampooed, fluffed dry, de-wormed, and flea-dipped. If I miss this appointment my wife won’t let me sit beside her on the couch in the evenings while we watch TV until I reschedule.”
I had no response. To my non-response Citizen Jim responded with, “Don’t think about it too much or you might crap your pants. Believe me, we don’t need any other odors mingling with the cocktail that’s already destroying our air quality at the moment.”
“You keep using the word ‘we,’ but you’re not telling me who’s with you or where you are,” I said. “How am I supposed to help you if you aren’t giving me all the facts?”
“Well goddamn, Joe Friday, I’m sorry! I guess fearing for my life has made me a little too nervous to remember all the conditions of your friendship,” Citizen Jim said. “I came to see you but you weren’t here so I thought I should check with your neighbors to find out if an ambulance carried you away or something. Nobody answered on the left side of your place so I went to apartment on the right.”
“You mean Dave Nextdoor’s place?” I asked.
“I don’t know his name, I just know that when I knocked one voice said come in and another voice said go away so I started trying to bust the door down with an ax.”
The average person would hear this and think he was lying, but I knew from my own experience that one of Citizen Jim’s favorite ways of entering a house is by busting down the door with an ax. I think it’s because he never could pass the written test and physical exam to become a fire fighter, but what do I know?
“Then what happened?” I asked.
“Well I guess I was a little overzealous—the head flew off of the handle and landed right on top of a bag from Olive Garden that Über Eats had just delivered to another apartment,” he said.
I knew exactly which apartment he was talking about. The woman who lived there had many different deliveries made throughout the week, but the most frequent drop-off was from restaurants. She’d always seemed sweet. I had to second guess my impression of her when Citizen Jim told me what happened next.
“As soon as the head of my ax hit the bag from Olive Garden the door of that apartment flew open and a woman started screaming about her delivery. I guess she looked over to where I was standing and saw the ax handle minus the ax I had raised above my head—I was getting ready to break the glass on the window of your neighbor’s apartment. She yelled, ‘You owe me forty-five dollars!’ So I tried to play dumb and told her she had it backwards and asked her if she stole the head off my ax.”
“Then what happened?” I asked.
“What do you think happened, Einstein? She came at me sideways, so I banged on the door and rattled the knob—turns out it was unlocked the whole time!” he said.
“That’s good, right?”
“Well, it was good to get away from that Über-eating banshee, but then I had to deal with that old crypt keeper that smells like a jockstrap stuffed with the ass of a striped polecat and a block of Limburger cheese.”
The picture was a little clearer now. It seemed that Jim, Dave Nextdoor, and Mr. Jerry were inside Dave’s apartment. But who was the hostage? And where was the situation going? It was a no-brainer that Dave Nextdoor was one victim in this scenario. However, I was sure that flipping a coin would be the only way to determine if Citizen Jim or Mr. Jerry was the villain.
“So what’s going on, now?” I asked.
“I locked myself in the bathroom but I can hear Mr Jerry and Dave Nextdoor arguing,” he said.
“About what?” I asked.
“Let me put the phone next to the door and see if you can make it out,” Citizen Jim said. After about fifteen seconds Citizen Jim laid the phone against his ear again and said, “Well?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I couldn’t really tell.”
“I think they must be fighting about laundry detergent and condensed milk, because they’re yelling ‘Roll tide’ and ‘War eagle’ at each other,” Citizen Jim said.
Panic rose to the whites of my eyes and almost blew off the top of my head. “Get out of there any way you can, Precious Lamb! You can’t get in the middle of a fight between an Alabama fan and an Auburn fan—they’ll tear you to pieces to get to each other!”
“I don’t think I can leave—I still hear the Über Eater outside yelling about the money I owe her for that Olive Garden food I wrecked with my ax,” he said.
Then I said something that felt like fire as it passed through my lips: “Call the police right now!”
“I’m gonna try to make a run for it,” he said.
The shouting got louder when he left the safety of the bathroom, but then I heard Dave Nextdoor say, “Put that thing down, you old fool!” followed by a hollow THUNK! and the sound of wood cracking.
“What’s happening? Run! Hurry!” I yelled at Citizen Jim.
I’d forgotten I put my phone in speaker mode when Citizen Jim called, and now realized I had ten residents, a nurse, a nurse’s aid, and two housekeeping associates gathered around me listening to the play-by-play.
“I don’t need to run,” Citizen Jim said. Then I heard him say, “Why’s he on the floor, Dave Nextdoor? What the hell was that?”
I couldn’t make out what Dave Nextdoor was saying. Neither could everyone who’d formed a circle around the table where I was sitting with my phone.
“What was it? Who’s that? What happened?” came at me all directions.
Citizen Jim started laughing. “Oh, man! I guess that old sandal-wearing scarecrow picked up a piece of rope tied into a monkey’s fist knot around a ball bearing that was on the coffee table and started swinging it around. He went to hit Dave Nextdoor upside the head but he missed and ended up clocking himself. He’s laid out like a pig at a luau, now, on top of the coffee table he busted when he fell,” Citizen Jim said.
Everyone
in the room with me
cheered and began
shuffling away toward their
rooms. I
wondered how I was going to document the activity we’d just
finished: social, emotional, spiritual, or cognitive? Maybe I’d use
all of those designations. They
were certainly very stimulated, that’s for sure.
“I guess you don’t need me, now,” I said.
“The hell you say! You need to come and lure the Über Eater away so we can drag Mr. Jerry outside—he really ripped one when he knocked himself out, and now it’s like the room’s filled with mustard gas,” he said. “We won’t survive very long in here without the appropriate equipment.”
The worst danger had passed, so I ended the call and left the guys to deal with their own mess. I ran to catch up with the residents to see if anyone wanted to play cards before it was time for lunch.
