by Anne Trubek
Last week, I forgot to get a man’s zip code. There’s a line on the blue intake form, an inch long, maybe shorter, and I missed it. I wrote nothing. The man talked. I listened. I wrote other things, things not zip codes, as he offered them or after I asked a question. I knew his income. I knew his religion. I knew his phone number. I knew he had kids and a church, but not where he lived, not exactly, not the zip code, just the house, just the flooded basement, just the landlord taping notes on his front door saying he was going to slap on a padlock. I told this man I would talk to my boss. I told him I would call him back, that I thought we could help.
I took the blue intake form and went to my boss.
“What’s his zip?” my boss said.
My boss knows the form, taught me the form.
I said, “Shit.”
I called the man back. The man said his landlord was at the door, banging. He was taping a note. He was threatening the padlock. I asked where he lived. I could hear the landlord’s fist on the front door, knuckles on wood. It sounded like a hammer.
The man said, “McKees Rocks.”
I said, “What’s the zip down there?”
He said, “One-five-one-three-six.”
I said, “I’ll call you right back.”
Back in another cubicle, my boss’s cubicle, I repeated the numbers off the blue intake form and my boss said, “Out of our service area.”
I said, “We can’t do anything?”
My boss said, “Tell him to call the United Way.”
“The United Way?” I said.
This is part of the process—if you can’t help someone, you refer them to another organization, another nonprofit, another charity, a church, even, which may or may not be able to help them or which may refer them to another organization that may help or may keep the referrals going until the person who needs help circles back to the original organization but days later and with even direr circumstances and less money and more people looking to collect. Or this person may just fall. It goes: shelter, homeless, dead.
My boss—kindhearted, easy to work for—is used to this.
I’m not.
More people come for help than we can help. Who gets help is a confusing process for everyone: the people who need help and the people who help. The money is not enough—the grants, the donations, none of it. One set of numbers means assistance. Another set does not. I can seldom remember the numbers because the numbers are illogical or bogus or impractical or unnecessary or simply a figure to show government officials and voters who confuse poor with being lazy. The poor have become shadows—they’re here always but only visible in the darkness under bright light and sometimes look like nightmares.
If I go to the roof, right here in Bellevue, on top of the old Allegheny General Hospital, where our office is located, where they generously rent us three rooms for a dollar, where we sweat all day because we share space with the boiler room and it’s always ninety degrees, even in winter—if I leave the heat and take an elevator and stand on the roof above the fifth floor, I can see McKees Rocks, right there beneath the bridge, right before the tunnels. I can see the houses and the old rusted-out mills and the machine shops where no one works anymore. I could drive there in minutes. I could run there. I could fall right over the bridge and land in the dirty water.
Out of our service area, my boss said.
We are here, and they are there.
I want everywhere to be in our service area, even though I know that is impossible, even though I know it would be worse, that we wouldn’t do anyone any good.
McKees Rocks is an old mill town, the kind of place that lost jobs when all the steel mills moved away. I knew a guy, years ago, who used to score blow in an old house near a tattoo parlor, down by the river. I think the tattoo parlor is still there. I don’t know what happened to the guy who used to do blow—maybe dead, maybe quit, maybe a lawyer, maybe still at home on his mom’s couch. All those people I used to do drugs with when I was a kid and young man seem like characters I know from books, from movies, all of them stuck in time. It’s hard to imagine someone who snorted coke in a bathroom stall with a Budweiser bottle balanced perfectly on his head ever growing up, let alone old, but I was there, too, waiting for my line.
The world forgives worse.
But then, other times, the world doesn’t forgive anything at all.
* * *
I tell the woman on the phone I will call her back. The blue intake form is complete. I have her zip code, the wrong numbers, but still. I tell her that the most we ever give for rental assistance is five hundred dollars. I give her some phone numbers to try and drum up the rest of the money. I will, later, call those places for her myself. I do not tell her she is out of our service area because I want to find a way to put her in our service area. I think there are exceptionally bright people, talented people, math people, who know how to do this but they work elsewhere at organizations that are not nonprofits and they do not work for college credits or for free.
But right now, we have John, just out of jail, not happy about it.
I come from behind my cubicle and say, “Hey John, I thought that was your voice.”
John slumps in a chair. There are four chairs crammed into this tiny space we jokingly call a lobby. Three fans swish the hot air around so it cures our eyes like meat.
John says, “Hey Dave,” and nods like he’s defeated, like jail and everything else have already won. John wears a green winter coat. He is not, inexplicably, sweating.
I look at Sue.
Sue says, “Dave, this is John. John is here to see you.”
Sue is sometimes a beat off.
Six years ago, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. A year later, she quit her job at a bank because she couldn’t stand for long hours and started volunteering here as a receptionist two days a week. Sue walks with a cane. She has a loud laugh that makes people uncomfortable. She sometimes screws up basic tasks, transferring calls, taking messages. Everyone in the office thinks Sue is deteriorating. They think it’s the MS. It may be. But I think it’s us. I think we make Sue nervous and conscious of her MS and she starts thinking about her MS and her cane and the way one of her legs drags slightly and how we notice it and she forgets to think about what she’s doing, transferring a phone call, taking a note. I’ve taken to screwing up in front of Sue on purpose. I drop things and lose pens and ask where forms are. Some days, there is enough time to screw up on purpose and still recover. There are minutes and hours when the phone doesn’t ring and people don’t come in asking for free food and free bus tickets to get to work. Last week I knocked over a candy bowl and crawled around on the floor, looking for Jolly Ranchers, and Sue and I laughed all afternoon at my clumsiness.
Sue says, “John is just out of jail.”
I say, “I thought I heard him say that.”
John says, “It is just unfuckingbelievable.”
“Jail, or that you’re out?” I say, trying to make a joke.
I’ve joked with John before. He’s a funny guy when he’s not just out of jail, when he’s not feeling hopeless, when he has a job and some scratch.
I can’t remember when that was exactly.
John showed up at the outreach in October, right after I started, when I wore confusion like a name tag. I’d been told what the outreach did by a couple different managers at a couple different offices but it felt too scattered and disconnected. We did food and rent and utilities and gave away winter coats and children’s toys at Christmastime and other things, too: cheap cars for individuals slightly above the poverty level; Easter baskets and Giant Eagle gift cards for other people, at other distances from the poverty level. Mostly I sat at a desk, waiting. I read a bunch of pamphlets, but it all felt like PR, like good publicity. I wanted to talk to people, to clients, to anyone in need so I could find out what exactly we provided.
Once I spent an hour talking to a delusional man about the U.S. Navy and what they owed him in benefits and
back pay for not allowing him to enlist forty years ago. I thought we could provide him nothing, not medicine and not therapy, but I loaded up three bags with groceries and we walked to his car weighed down with enough food to fill his cabinets. As for the navy, I suggested they weren’t worth his time. They were impossible with back pay, especially for people they’d already jacked around about enlisting. It would be better to get in touch with his caseworker again; that woman would know where to find him some money to help with his rent and those people would be better than anyone on a boat or dressed up like an admiral, you could trust a caseworker; and so we talked until he calmed and drove off.
Delusions are not only for the delusional.
If you expect anything, even the chance for your own dirt, you lose.
* * *
John stares at his hands, two pink cracked babies. He wants to talk but everything you say when you’ve been in jail is not what you’re supposed to say. He mostly “motherfuck”s.
I’d read two books on narrative therapy before I started back to school. Narrative therapy asks: Are you telling your stories or are your stories telling you? If you’re only telling the worst about yourself in the worst possible way then you need to find a way to change your story, to focus on the strengths, to find a story that includes the best parts of your life.
It’s like in Hamlet: For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
If you say your life is shit, it’s shit.
I’m making this sound simple but I think simplicity is where to go. In the next two years I’ll take class after class on therapy after therapy, and each therapy will desperately detail itself into sounding different from the previous therapy by citing some statistics and some scientific tics, like conversation is the same as penicillin, like helping someone get out of bed who is too depressed to get out of bed is open-heart surgery. I believe people need to talk. I believe other people need to listen and, when necessary, talk back. People who don’t have money will always need money. That’s why I got into social work: to talk to people who don’t have money and to help them get whatever they need.
John needed money when he came in the office back in October. His truck was out of gas, stuck on the side of the road. His tools were in his truck. Without his tools, he couldn’t work. Without work, he couldn’t pay the bills. The story was telling John in the worst way.
John is in his mid-fifties. He’s worked construction for almost forty years. He looks it. The damage on his face is everywhere: lines, creases, bumps, scars, moles, dark blotches, fresh cuts. His teeth are yellow from cigarettes. His fingers are yellow from cigarettes. His eyes are sometimes as red as Mars. He’s skinny and muscular and walks with a limp.
“I been chasing disasters my whole life,” John said.
We were in the lobby on that day, too. My boss was busy, working on a grant. She asked if I wanted to try to do an intake. She gave me the clipboard and the blue form. I gave it to John. He filled it out and handed it back and started talking.
The last disaster he chased was Hurricane Katrina. He’d been working in Florida when the storm hit, so he packed up his tools and headed west. Disasters brought work and big money. In Florida, John had mostly been drinking. A couple times he’d been on landscaping crews, just to make some dough under the table. Two weeks into New Orleans, John had a grand stuffed in an old toolbox he kept locked away in his truck. A week later, it was fifteen hundred, and he was living good, eating meat and drinking whiskey.
“Not rotgut,” John said. “You drink?”
“I drink,” I said.
I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to say I drank. The outreach was not a religious organization but they had religious ties. I tried to imagine myself as John’s therapist—how much distance was necessary? How much professionalism? How many boundaries? How much honesty? I decided to go with honesty.
John said, “Whiskey?”
I said, “Mostly beer.”
“A lot?”
“Sometimes.”
John went back to his story. He worked for one guy in New Orleans but there were other guys, other contractors, everywhere. This other guy offered more money, a lump sum for two months’ work. John took the job. He started gutting old houses, pulling the copper wire. He did that for a while. He breathed in a lot of mold but didn’t worry about it. The foreman moved John outside and up a ladder to the roof, where he nailed shingles with a gun. Then he was inside, doing plaster. John loved to plaster. “It’s my master trade,” he said. All his clothes have paint and spackle on them, rips in the knees and elbows. He wears painter hats. A smudged-up rainbow is dripped across his boots.
While John worked on walls, he didn’t get paid. He lived on the money he’d stashed in his toolbox. That was fine. He slowed down on the whiskey. He started eating out less. He started eating peanut butter right from the jar for dinner, sometimes dipping the knife in jelly. He expected a check for ten grand, more if there was a bonus. There were sometimes bonuses at these kinds of jobs, at these disasters. Two months went by. John didn’t get paid. The contractor said one more week. Then two. John said sure. He stayed on. The contractor asked for another week. Then he upped it again. They were talking four weeks now, three months instead of two.
The price went to fifteen grand. John was going to be fucking rich.
Then the contractor was gone.
The contractor was gone with the crew of guys he brought with him from Seattle and the rest of the guys, guys like John, wondered how they were going to pay the rent at their shitbird motel.
“I was fucking angry,” John said. “I was going to kill that motherfucker.”
John planned to drive to Seattle to rattle that contractor’s head with a hammer but the more he thought about it the more he felt confused. Maybe the contractor said Portland. Maybe it was Tacoma. Everywhere up there sounded the same, green and wet and cold.
One night, drunk, John used his hammer to smash up his motel room instead. The woman running the motel called her boyfriend and her boyfriend, a huge biker, told John he would either pay for the damages or go to jail. John paid for the damages. He paid five hundred dollars, even though he could have fixed the walls for the price of spackle and some paint.
That’s when the depression set in.
Those were John’s words.
“That’s when the depression set in,” he said.
Earlier I said that John was funny, implying he wasn’t always depressed, but John has always been depressed. He’s always depressed, only some days it doesn’t sound like depression because it’s mixed with jokes and stories, sad jokes and stories, but still jokes and stories. John asks questions. If he talks too much about himself, he digs deeper and refocuses and asks about you, about your troubles. But his troubles are still there. Every conversation has a moment where he asks, “I wonder if it’s even worth it?” and I ask him if he’s serious, if he wants to go somewhere, to a hospital, to talk to someone, and he says, “No, I’m still hanging on pretty good.” He always says, “I’m fine, just depressed.”
I’d heard of the DSM, the book doctors and mental health workers use to diagnose disorders, but I hadn’t bought a copy until graduate school. Depression, like so many other disorders, was still a vague idea, a thing from books and TV, from films, from people on the street, people singing to themselves with dead eyes. My grandfather had been diagnosed—by a doctor, not a book—with schizophrenia in the 1950s, and I knew he heard voices, I knew he thought he was Jesus sometimes, and Jim Plunkett, quarterback for the Oakland Raiders, other times, but I’d never read anything about it. Doctors told my grandmother and my grandmother told my dad and, years later, when my grandfather came to visit, my dad told us, his children, that our grandfather was not quite right. When John told me he was depressed, I thought: Hell yeah, you’re depressed, some guy just screwed you for fifteen grand.
But later, when I open the DSM for the first time, there will be John. I’ll read the criteria for Major Dep
ressive Episode, and it will be like reading John’s biography.
John is depressed all day, every day.
John is not interested in anything, even TV.
He will say, “I drink whiskey, and I don’t even like the taste.”
He will say, “I don’t even like getting drunk.”
He will say, “Peanut butter don’t even taste good.”
He won’t be eating. He will be skinny, wirier every time he comes around. He won’t be able to sleep because he’s so worried about work. He’ll feel too tired to look for a job. He’ll feel like he’s fucked up everything in his life. He’ll feel like it’s his fault that the guy in New Orleans drove off with all his hard-earned money.
John will say, “I’m ashamed to ask for help.”
He will say, “I wonder if it’s even worth it?”
“It’s worth it,” I will tell him.
* * *
That first day I talked to my boss about John, she gave me three Giant Eagle gift cards and I handed the cards over in an envelope. John bought warm food from the deli, mac and cheese and fried chicken, and he used one card for gas. He filled up his truck and drove back to the apartment he was sharing with four other adults, a couple of middle-aged guys who chased disasters like John did, and their girlfriends.
John started coming to pantry. Pantry was a food bank but we called it pantry because it sounded better than canned vegetables and ramen noodles. Pantry was packed but I always asked John how it was going, what he was up to. Work was scarce, he said, but he’d been doing stuff for a temp agency. He said he was on a crew. I could feel how proud he was to have a job, to be pulling himself from the muck. I walked him to his car. We shook on it, on everything. A week later, he showed up in the morning looking for emergency food. He was struggling. He was broke. He was broke even though he still held the same job on the same crew. “These fucking temp jobs,” he said.