Wonders in
DementiaLand™
By Suzka
©2016 Suzka
Dementialand™ 2007-2015 All Rights Reserved
USBN-13: 978-0-692-79524-8
My mother forgot how she fit in the past. She forgot how to see into the future. She only knew of today where she was able to see all of her self centered in the middle of spectacular!
Ah, the wonders I found in Dementialand. Contents: STAGE ONE
1 - The Junk Man
2 - California to Chicago
3 - A Month Earlier
4 - Don’t Leave Me Here
5 - The Break-In
6 - A Botticelli Moment
7 - The Transfer
8 - Violet’s Stats
9 - Suzka and the Creatives
10 - The First Adam & Eve
11 - The A.O.P.
12 - The Linoleumed Side
13 - Wheel of Fortune
14 - W.O.F at the A.O.P.
15 - Day Eleven
STAGE TWO
16 - Cemetery Picnics
17 - Other Plots
18 - The Flying Comets
19 - DMV
STAGE THREE 20 - Settling in Dementialand 21 - Dementialand
Gadabouts 22 - Re-Enforcements
23 - Sovina
24 - Barbara the Barber 25 - Marlowe Interrogation
STAGE FOUR 26 - Delusions
27 - The Gypsy Sundowners
28 - The Affair with Skeeter
29 - Ellie and Her Father
30 - Espionage and Other Suspicious Activities
31 - Billy the Visiting Nurse
32 - Dementia’s Demons
33 - Thanksgiving
34 - Come With Me
35 - The Girl With Two Birthdays
STAGE FIVE
36 - She’s Ready
37 - After Rosetta
38 - Moving Jesus
Epilogue
Dementialand Characters Dementia is Not a Disease
c.27 Dementia pursued my mother in the nights. Maybe it was when she danced with the gypsies that it had made up its mind that it was going to have her for its own. It would not be easy. My mother had guarded her wits and hid them from us as well as the night’s sundown robbers. But dementia carefully thought this through. It knew it had to be patient if it wanted to have its prize in the end.
Dementia hid behind trees on the side of the night's moons and in dark's empty spaces, waiting for its chance. It followed behind quietly and whispered her name. Wherever Violet went she heard its echo.
Violet disappeared more often, sometimes for only a few seconds, other times for an entire day. In some ways, it was as if she was having an affair. She couldn't hide the change that was inside of her – the unfaithfulness to status quo, to the norm, to the structure and temples she had built. I couldn’t help but notice her struggling with the unexplainable pandemonium jumping inside of her and the guilt that pushed away its promised happiness. There was a scary freedom that only a new love brings. A wide freedom so big and so loud it disturbs and whacks everything in its path. Was my mother holding on to a secret, afraid she might get caught, worried that her new lover would call for her impulsively at any time? How could anyone resist a new love's passion? I found myself obsessed in wandering curiosity. Where does she go when she leaves me?
[ I gave myself no choice
but to think like a painter. It kept me sane.
My friend Gulley Jimson once told me that even the worst artist that ever was, a cross-eyed mental deficient with the shakes in both hands, about to paint the first stroke, looks at the blank canvas as an adventure.
This was a fresh canvas.] It all started in December. My mother drove to church that day. Her bloody eye would have been a shallow excuse to the Gods who appreciated the sacrifices of true martyrs. With one hand, she used a full roll of paper towels and pressed it firmly over her bruises to stop the bleeding; her other hand gripped the steering wheel. When she got close enough to the church property, she made a quick turn and rolled over the curb without notice. The God’s mercifully bumper stopped her at the cement steps at the building’s entrance.
Violet put everything in park, got out and limped into the church with the heavy velvet syllables of Latin in her steps. Syllables she had sung to herself when she was alone in her kitchen.
Her eyelids were fat and stuffy. The right eyeball lost all its white. A rage of purple-like color filled its socket. Blood had been stuck around the cut on her forehead. From her shoulders down, other than the perfumed air of Campho-Phenique that followed her, Violet was girdled, nylon’ed, tucked and wearing her Sergio Rossi high heels like any other morning.
The statue’d saints and virgins saw Violet walk into the church and stopped their solemnness to look at their newest martyr. One lady still settling herself in the pew saw Violet and screamed. The scream echoed throughout the church, changing the holy deadness in the air.
"Violet, Vwaht on God’s earth happen to you?"
[ Everyone who was not my sister called my mother Violet ] A crowd of ladies circled their attentions to Violet’s bleeding wound. A few ladies dug in their pockets and purses for Kleenex to wipe the blood that had now dripped down her neck and made a line around the collar of her white blouse.
Other women beat their breasts trying to remember the patron saint for bad cuts. Violet would know but no one would ask.
"Violet, what happened? You’re bleeding?" Ellie, a close friend, always had a calm way when talking to Violet, in any emergency.
"Violet, tell me what happened to you?" The rank of service reversed its order. The ladies were now the apostles of the moment. The little priest with his purple cape floated down the altar’s steps and melted into the back of the fold.
One of the ladies shouted, "She lookca like she'za been mugga." Another voice from somewhere, "Ooh my Lawd. Jesu, she been mugg!"
The word mugged was repeated and passed around in soft whispers within the ladies as if they were fresh baked anise cookies.
The ladies pulled Violet to the closest pew and set her down.
"No. No. No. I put campho on it. I'm ok."
Ellie took Violet's hand and looked closer at the wound.
"But Violet, you're bleeding, you're hurt. You need to go to the hospital."
One of the ladies turned her head around and repeated the words she heard for the others in the back.
“They saza she needsa to go to the hospitaw.” Another added with sincere but weightless assistance,"My daughter-in-law sister work at hospita. I call her. Yes?" said another patron.
From the back, "Someone call 911." "I'm fine. No. No. No. If I need to go, I will drive myself to the hospital."
No one really listened or paid much attention to Violet at this point.
"Call 911. Someone call 911 right now."
From the side, the little priest solemnly shoved his words between the ladies running chatter. "I will call 911 from the office."
[ I could go on, which is exactly what I intend on doing
but first I must prepare you – this story has its own reality, and its own truthfulness based on my memory of events that legitimately have no rightness or wrongness to them.
I guess this is the best place to start. It was in early December… ]
* "Suzka, this is Ellie from the church. I hate to wake you at his hour, but..."
It was 6:27, the early 6:27 in California. The phone rang five times. Ellie's voice came into the studio by itself after traveling over two thousand miles. It was unlike Ellie to call so God awful early in the morning. She was fully aware of my late-into- the-night creative lifestyle. She never called me
before noon.
"... your mom had an accident. She told us that she fell in the bathroom and hit her head against the counter. She has quite a bruise on her eye. She came to morning Mass and even the priest stopped the service and went to your mother to see if she was ok. The pastor called 911 and an ambulance took her to Loyola Hospital. Maybe you should fly in as soon as you can."
Ellie was my mother’s close friend. She was three decades younger and eight inches taller. Her plain looks changed to adorable when she smiled and laughed. She had easy straight brown hair, cut short, one length except for her bangs that stood fidgeting over her eyebrows like children in a church choir. She often wore flat rubber sole shoes. Ellie and my mother met in church, both were in the choir.
Ellie watched out for my mother, especially in the past year. My mother was somewhat a bit more scattered than usual. Ellie would visit her daily; help her with the mail, separating the junk mail from the second-noticed bills. And she was by my mother’s side throughout the year looking for the valuables and the not-so-valuables that were stolen in the middle of the night by persons unknown.
There was a special bond of trust and respect between them. It is sometimes difficult for people of my mother’s generation and age to put trust in anyone. Ellie was special. I depended on her and trusted her guidance.
Ellie lived only a few blocks from my mother's home. I lived six states away.
* Buried under stacks of moving pad blankets, I looked up at my bangs blowing in the cold draft from the rollup door. I tried to piece together what Ellie was saying but Ellie's voice was so sedative, even when she delivered bad news, one couldn’t help but feel a fuzzy comfortableness in the worst parts. She was good in that way.
Ellie took me through the steps of the morning. The words cradled my body and rocked me very close to sleep.
I was familiar with my mother's morning routine. That helped my head avoid being tasked with the details. For years, in the morning, every morning, my mother, my mother's mother and her mother had covered their heads with cotton babushkas, lace mantillas or rain bonnets and would walk to church in all weather conditions. They walked quickly, as if the priest, the other church ladies and Jesus himself were waiting for their arrival before the Mass could begin.
The face of the church was old, the women with babushkas and boned fingers were old and the spoken language was Latin old. Slovakian whispers filled in the gaps.
[ I never thought my mother religious. Her natural makeup was more theatrical, more dramatic – where else could her talents be more nurtured and appreciated than in the theater of Catholicism. ]
When I was very little, I asked my grandmother why she went to church so much.
"We go to church to ask for forgiveness for our sins."
"What sins?" I’d ask.
"The bad tings the devil makes us do."
"The devil don’t mess with me. I would spit in his face
and kick him real hard in the shins if he even tries messin’ with me. No granma, I know for sure I don’t have no devil’s sins."
"Yes you do. Everyone has sins." "I don't think so. Stella told me there's no such thing like sins. Stella may be young, maybe an inch younger than me, but she’s real smart. She knows things, Granma."
"Don't talk silly. If there was no sin, there would be no hell. You don’t talk to that Stella girl no more."
[ We were so Catholic back then.] This particular morning started as usual. A small quiet group of women entered the church. Their fingers blindly dove into the holy water font then jumped out crossing themselves with its blessings. The women were scattered and isolated in pews. A few shared their space with likenesses to themselves.
They pulled rosaries out from deep pockets; rosaries tangled in Kleenex and small sticky wrapped candies. They prayed in separate dialects, the prayers of the rosary. The air was filled with the soft hisses, sounds of petition, postulation, absolution and forgiveness. Some secretly begged the Madonna to protect their married sons and daughters from their husband or wife’s ways. In the yellow light their mouths moved slowly.
The servicing priest with curly colored-black hair dressed himself in the vestibule, a small room in back of the altar filled with ceremonial silks. When he was fully decorated for mass, he walked out to the altar, spread his arms wide like they were the purple wings of a sainted angel and began the morning prayers in front of the small turnout. His voice was always slow and melodic as if he was anointed in a waterless pool of forgotten grace.
The altar table was pristine with white lace and two candles. At his side were two altar boys struggling to stay awake, tightened their teeth, holding in a yawn.
At home Violet hurried herself in getting dressed. She would miss the first twenty prayers of the rosary.
* Thirty minutes earlier, Violet's hands had pushed the last loose hairs back into her French twist, then heavily spraying everything to its place. Leaning over the counter, she bent closer into the mirror and squinted at the reflected image - a woman with age wrapped in a chenille flowered robe.
Violet occupied the lower portion of the glass. Yellow wallpaper with tiny roses filled in the top parts. A cross of a tortured man, powdered in the bathroom's airborne talc, hung in the mirror's upper corner looking down at Violet. Not reflected, not part of the reversed appearances of things was a postcard taped on the mirror above the lotions. The post card was dated and taped at its corners. It was sent to her from the oldest of her three daughters who years ago moved under the pictured palm trees. All her daughters live with the palm trees. Violet lives alone in Chicago
As Violet stepped back, the tufted rug beneath her grabbed the heel of her Italian shoe and wouldn't let go. The mirror was soundless. It tried to warn her but her body dropped quickly.
Her head hit the corner of the counter hard. A string of pearls rolled down and latched itself on the cabinet's knob and snapped. Blood splashed out and hit the wall. Pearls left their string and fell into the red sea.
* Ellie's voice continued telling me about the accident. "Suzka, I would have waited to call you, but I thought you should know right away so you can make flight arrangements. I am sure the hospital will keep her for a couple of days. Call me when you get to the house."
"Thank you Ellie. I'll check the flights."
I slithered out of my bed slowly and poured my feet into my UGGs. It was terribly cold in the warehouse. I covered my body with a heavy long bathrobe that once belonged to my father. I loved that robe. It was old, worn and had paint on it like every other piece of clothing I owned. I shuffled toward the bathroom meandering through a maze of wet, damp paintings that filled the floor.
I took a quick shower, a brush to the teeth, bungeed my hair to the top of my head and UGG'ed myself to the kitchen island percolator. Coffee first before any decisions were to be made.
As I waited for the pot to stop its perk’ing, I looked over last night's work, which was only a few hours old. I tried to look at the canvases but they were all blurred in with my thoughts.
It's just a bruise.
I kept thinking, it’s just a bruise.
I thought to throw-up.
1.
THE JUNK MAN
It was god-awful damp outside. The night was leaning on the late side of dark. Only two streetlights worked on my end of the row and both were quite nervous. One was rather shy with its light and the other stuttered. The fog tried to help the lights by spreading its fluorescent-ness a bit further like water on a paper towel. But all the fog seemed to be good at was slobbering over my duffel bag and my one carry-on.
The bags and I waited outside my painting studio, a cinder block warehouse. Everything was locked up. All my paints inside had their lids hammered down. A few stubborn brushes were soaking in a cut down milk carton resting on the utility sink in the back.
I had called ahead for a taxi and been waiting for what seemed like hours but only seven minutes actually passed. My hands were damp. I was anxious. I could not stop wond
ering when I would be returning to California, back to my studio, back to painting. My return ticket said three weeks: a generous yet serious amount of time, I thought.
I was fully clothed in the California to Chicago winter-ware. The white cotton t-shirt under a zippered wool vest, a thick buttoned-up cardigan and my black leather bomber jacket; also two cotton skirts, one on top of the other and my signature black tights with the UGGs. I was bed warm and ready for Chicago’s December weather.
Twenty minutes already passed. I was restless and weighted in thoughts. The fog began to clear a path for the real morning to appear.
My eyes focused on a neighbor man on the other side of the street who walked out of his house with a steaming mug in his hand. His other hand flicked a lighter‘s flame close to a fat cigar that was clamped down by his teeth. He stood under a tarred overhang until his cigar was properly lit. His framed house was white and cluttered with junk - treasures rusting in their later years blocked any respectable view. A short picket fence tried to keep his everything contained in a small area about eight feet from the building. From the street you could see old rusty grills, torn lawn chairs and metal injured roosters. There were buggies, wood benches, old Coca-Cola signs and brass monkeys. A screen door rested upright on the side of his house, unattached to its door. Two or three bulging five-gallon bags of dented Budweiser cans filled in the empty spaces.
The neighbor appeared to be a collector of sorts, an entrepreneurial junk man who wore white t-shirts and loose above the ankle jeans held up by thick red suspenders. His hair on the top of his head was sparse, cut short and cropped, his mustache dark, full and bushy. I never formally met the man, I only known of him as the junk man.
The junk man looked at me as if he was trying to make out what I was doing standing there in the wet fog, outside my studio, bundled and bagged. He appeared curious but not very interested. He moved around his collection. I stared and thought very carefully - thoughts I preferred not to have but my mind was thinking of alternatives to a possible desperate situation. I needed to get to the airport.
My stare moved from the junk man to a beat up blue Chrysler at the edge of his property under the stuttering lamppost. My head told me it was his car. The car's vinyl top was torn to shreds with a thousand ripped edges rolling over each other. The engine’s hood had lost its manufactured color and had a large circle of rust in its center. I squinted a bit hoping my eyes would get a clearer picture into the car's contents. Heavy smokestained windows prevented any viewing. It was as if I were yards away from a closed casket at a funeral.
Wonders In Dementialand: Dementialand Page 1