I’ll fully own up to being a complete nerd when it comes to the original Star Wars trilogy. The Empire Strikes Back is the second movie I remember seeing (the first being Bambi), the first I actually enjoyed, and remains my favorite movie of all time. I learned to read with the old Marvel Star Wars comics. I first became a pack rat collecting Star Wars figures. It really did shape my childhood. So it was only a matter of time before this blog turned toward talking shit about the prequel trilogy.
When The Phantom Menace came out in 1999, I went in with big expectations, and walked out of the theatre bewildered. Beyond the immediate issues of over-reliance on CGI special effects, cute kids and offensively stupid step-and-fetchit sidekicks, there was something deeply troubling that I couldn’t pinpoint. The movie left me feeling spiritually unfulfilled for reasons I couldn’t explain.
The same thing happened with Episodes II and III, even after they aged Anakin Skywalker past the point of physically being a cloying child and marginalized Jar-Jar Binks.
Recently, while re-reading the now non-cannon Marvel series, I realized that the problem is the Jedi.
In my youth, I was told that the Jedi were the last bastion of order and good in the galaxy. They were built up into these mythic space samurai who we were told were the most awesome beings the galaxy has ever seen. In the original trilogy, a single, partially trained Jedi seemingly brings the Galactic Empire to its knees (note that I said seemingly). Then I was left to imagine what the entire Jedi order could have accomplished for fourteen years.
And after fourteen years of waiting to see them in action, the prequel trilogy Jedi order served as cannon fodder for shitty robots and then clone troopers – the same troopers Luke and the poorly funded, non-force-sensitive rebel soldiers easily defeated.
Meanwhile, by the second movie, we stop seeing any regular, volunteer soldiers from the republic. Jedi become the sole, human focus of the storyline and merchandising. Everyone doing the fighting is either a Jedi or a clone trooper. This solves the marketing problem of kinder, gentler parents of the new millennium finding actual soldiers killing each other and dying for their cause too violent because Jedi deaths are super heroic and noble, while clone and robot deaths are impersonal. However, this focus fails to make Jedi especially interesting because all they do is overthink the ramifications of their actions, then get cut down by an army of soulless droids or by an army of clones with gentic predisposition for hitting their heads as they come through the door.
Now look back at the original trilogy - specifically the end of Return of the Jedi. Wait a minute. Luke doesn’t kill the Emperor. Darth Vader kills the Emperor. Luke surrenders to the Empire to protect his friends because his force sensitivity makes him a liability, and then a geriatric Sith Lord kicks his ass. Sith Lord Darth Vader, mortally wounded, sees his Jedi son begging for help, steps in, and kills the Emperor because his Jedi son can’t quite do it. Let me reiterate that Darth Vader was mortally wounded and still managed to actually accomplish his goals.
So it turns out that the Jedi sucked at everything.
And, as an added bonus, because the Jedi suck, the whole saga turns out to be the story of Darth Vader’s balls.
No, really.
The entire scope of the story is expanded by the prequel trilogy, and it changes the whole meaning. The overall focus of the storyline shifts from being the story of Luke Skywalker saving the galaxy by becoming the last of a line of great holy warriors to the story of Darth Vader and, symbolically, Darth Vader’s virility. Darth Vader’s story is that the Jedi were a bunch of impotent, ineffectual stiffs who never actually accomplished anything because their beliefs ultimately castrated them. Even when Luke has made it all the way to Emperor’s throne room, Darth Vader is the one that actually throws the Emperor into the center of the giant, round space egg, thus bringing order to the galaxy and ending the Jedi/Sith tradition of indoctrinating children into their neutered mindfuck cult.
Happy Easter.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Chapter 864: St. Francis of the Implausible Birth
A number of people have asked me when I will be doing a hate-filled treatment of the night my wife went into labor. Such situations are comedic gold mines, no?
No.
But I can give it the ol' college try.
There's a lot they don't tell you about the child birth in a standard public school education. For one thing, they don't mention that the whole experience is comparable to sitting in the front row of a Gallagher performance, and I'm not just referring to the splash zone. You are immediately struck by how shockingly unfunny every aspect of it is.
First of all, we did not go into the hospital expecting to become parents that night. I mean, we knew that she was pregnant, but she wasn't due for another month. The Hateful Wife had merely... done... something... with her... preciously precious precious parts that might have involved either urine or something... soupier.
See? That's not really comedy gold there.
When we arrived at the Catholic hospital, the midwife on call was the one I seriously prayed to multiple gods that we wouldn't get. Why? Because she had come up with a voice for my wife's uterus that sounded like Julia Sweeney on quaaludes. Seriously. 'It's Pat' on downers. Yep. That is a noise I want to associate with the inside parts of the hate womb. And fuck me if she wasn't wearing a kitten iron-on sweatshirt and didn't have one of those miner's flashlights strapped to her head when she walked in the room. The woman just did not inspire confidence.
So, we explained the situation to this woman and, well, apparently it was very interesting, but she wasn't very forthcoming with explanations. Instead, she ordered blood tests and turned on that mining flash light.
....
At this point, I will change the subject to avoid talking about what happened next. Earlier in the day, the Hateful Wife and I had been texting each other back and forth about dinner. I had been planning on making burritos and she wanted to know what she needed to pick up at the store. I sent her a detailed list of what we needed via facebutt. And then she called me to tell me that we had to go to the hospital because it was probably nothing, but....
Okay, let's check back in with what was happening at the Hospital.
..vagina.
The midwife hemmed and hawed for a few minutes, then stood up, turned off the mining lamp, and had a word with the nurse outside.
A second nurse came in to have a go at Katie's veins because the first nurse couldn't tap into them. At this point, we were informed that Katie had wiggly veins.
By this time, we had been in the hospital for nearly two hours without anyone actually telling us what the fuck was going on. In fact, no one had even mentioned the possibility that Katie would be going into labor yet. All we knew was that something was up, and that is a fucking terrifying situation when you want your hateful spawn to grow up and reign over the Earth with swift, terrible smarminess.
So, when the midwife came back in, Katie asked her what was going on.
The midwife replied that there may have been some traces of amniotic fluid in the sample they had taken from Katie's pants, which meant that they would need to do more tests.
We then asked her what was happening in a broader, less immediate sense.
The midwife then told us that there was a possibility that Katie had leaked some amniotic fluid.
Finally Katie, frustrated with the evasiveness, bluntly asked if we were going home with a baby that night.
"Well, probably not this evening, but definitely some time over the weekend."
Moments later I was following an ambulance to another hospital, scared shitless and grieving the end of my potential adult adolescence, because the religious hospital felt like splitting hairs about the definition of premature.
Oh wait, you missed something crucial back when I was talking about burritos to protect your virgin eyes from graphic descriptions of the prodding and poking of my hateful wife's womanly wanton lotus. In the midst of the midweirdo's spelunking expedition, she casually mentioned that they actually had several projected due dates for Katie over a window of a month and a half, but had only told us about the later ones.
A month and a half?! What kind of bullshit quack fuckery is that?!
So once Katie asked if she was going into labor, Midweirdo told us that technically, the child would be 6 hours premature from the earliest projected due date. Because of this, there was an off chance that we may have to be transferred to Maine Medical Center, but that wasn't too likely. Then it became very likely. Then an old guy and a nervous fat kid were strapping Katie to a stretcher while I frantically started calling relatives, telling them to change course for MMC because the head of peditrics didn't want to take the risk of the possibility of giving birth to some kind of godless, premature squid baby based on the month and a half window of crappy projections.
At this point, as I was reading this aloud in the proofreading stage, Katie interjected that the projections were "total crap because they based it on her last menstrual period, which she had written it down and knew exactly when it was, which means that he was at exactly thirty six weeks."
So yeah, because our child was six fucking hours premature according to a woman who assigned voices to other women’s uteruses, we were shipped off to a different hospital - one with a neonatal care unit that wasn’t covered by our insurance.
Okay, wait. What? Yeah. The largest insurance provider in the state didn’t have a contract with the largest neonatal care unit in the state. Thanks for fighting socialism and Planned Parenthood, tea baggers. Its good Christian patriots like you that have ensured that insurance providers are free to NOT FUCKING COVER THE BABIES YOU DON’T WANT PEOPLE TO ABORT. Let the eagle soar.
But I digress.
I followed the ambulance up Congress Street to Maine Med, but eventually had to break off my pursuit to find long-term parking. I probably could have followed the ambulance to the entrance, but I was convinced that there would be an endless stream of horseplay-induced groin injuries, sucking chest wounds and fork-to-eye accidents that night, and I didn’t want to be that asshole that didn’t have blood on their clothes taking up one of the choice “Oh god, there’s blood everywhere” spots.
I ran through the night, my arms flailing through the air like Kermit the Frog after he’s announced the guest on the Muppet Show down along the trail leading around the Hospital. I like to think that I plowed over dozens of injured patients like a comedic juggernaut, throwing a few people in body casts into the road, clothes-lining old ladies and doubling back just to uppercut a seven-year-old orphan who’d just had his appendix taken out, all the while screaming “MY WIFE IS HAVING A BABY” but that probably didn’t happen. In fact, I don’t recall seeing a single person until I got to the emergency room.
I burst through the doors, and looked helplessly at the empty waiting room. Every previous experience I have ever had with emergency medical care had involved a prolonged wait next to someone with a bad case of arterial spray and/or an unexploded firework lodged in one of their eye sockets, so I was absolutely baffled by the idea of my wife getting immediate medical treatment.
A security guard saw my puzzlement and asked if he could help me. I explained my situation to the guard, and he offered to escort me there through the secret, actually convenient service entrance that didn’t force you to navigate winding corridors of abject patient fuckery that have formed from years of constant expansion, provided I didn’t tell any of the other staff members.
Montalban (not his real name) the security guard and I quickly found Katie in one of the birthing stations. A nurse was checking her out. In the course of the ambulance ride, Katie’s lady parts had apparently gone from a smidge dilated to the Lincoln Tunnel. Of course, the smidge dilated part could just have been the Midweirdo misinterpreting Katie’s belly button. Her estimation skills had already proven wonky, after all.
Our friend Tia showed up shortly after I arrived with a sandwich for me. She had previously agreed to photograph the birth and help keep relatives out of the room.
The next hour and a half is a bit of a blur. There was screaming and blood work. There wasn’t time to administer drugs or an epidural. Katie repeatedly punched me and then apologized to the nurse for shouting fuck at the top of her lungs, only to be reassured that it was a completely appropriate thing to say, given the circumstances. I started sobbing about how much I wanted a burrito. The doctor walked in, slapped me and yelled "compose yourself, woman!", then took a look a quick look at my wife, gave us the thumbs-up and left. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. My hateful little man, Frankie, was out, cradled in my arms as Katie proclaimed “That was fucking ridiculous!”
And it was.
No.
But I can give it the ol' college try.
There's a lot they don't tell you about the child birth in a standard public school education. For one thing, they don't mention that the whole experience is comparable to sitting in the front row of a Gallagher performance, and I'm not just referring to the splash zone. You are immediately struck by how shockingly unfunny every aspect of it is.
First of all, we did not go into the hospital expecting to become parents that night. I mean, we knew that she was pregnant, but she wasn't due for another month. The Hateful Wife had merely... done... something... with her... preciously precious precious parts that might have involved either urine or something... soupier.
See? That's not really comedy gold there.
When we arrived at the Catholic hospital, the midwife on call was the one I seriously prayed to multiple gods that we wouldn't get. Why? Because she had come up with a voice for my wife's uterus that sounded like Julia Sweeney on quaaludes. Seriously. 'It's Pat' on downers. Yep. That is a noise I want to associate with the inside parts of the hate womb. And fuck me if she wasn't wearing a kitten iron-on sweatshirt and didn't have one of those miner's flashlights strapped to her head when she walked in the room. The woman just did not inspire confidence.
So, we explained the situation to this woman and, well, apparently it was very interesting, but she wasn't very forthcoming with explanations. Instead, she ordered blood tests and turned on that mining flash light.
....
At this point, I will change the subject to avoid talking about what happened next. Earlier in the day, the Hateful Wife and I had been texting each other back and forth about dinner. I had been planning on making burritos and she wanted to know what she needed to pick up at the store. I sent her a detailed list of what we needed via facebutt. And then she called me to tell me that we had to go to the hospital because it was probably nothing, but....
Okay, let's check back in with what was happening at the Hospital.
..vagina.
The midwife hemmed and hawed for a few minutes, then stood up, turned off the mining lamp, and had a word with the nurse outside.
A second nurse came in to have a go at Katie's veins because the first nurse couldn't tap into them. At this point, we were informed that Katie had wiggly veins.
By this time, we had been in the hospital for nearly two hours without anyone actually telling us what the fuck was going on. In fact, no one had even mentioned the possibility that Katie would be going into labor yet. All we knew was that something was up, and that is a fucking terrifying situation when you want your hateful spawn to grow up and reign over the Earth with swift, terrible smarminess.
So, when the midwife came back in, Katie asked her what was going on.
The midwife replied that there may have been some traces of amniotic fluid in the sample they had taken from Katie's pants, which meant that they would need to do more tests.
We then asked her what was happening in a broader, less immediate sense.
The midwife then told us that there was a possibility that Katie had leaked some amniotic fluid.
Finally Katie, frustrated with the evasiveness, bluntly asked if we were going home with a baby that night.
"Well, probably not this evening, but definitely some time over the weekend."
Moments later I was following an ambulance to another hospital, scared shitless and grieving the end of my potential adult adolescence, because the religious hospital felt like splitting hairs about the definition of premature.
Oh wait, you missed something crucial back when I was talking about burritos to protect your virgin eyes from graphic descriptions of the prodding and poking of my hateful wife's womanly wanton lotus. In the midst of the midweirdo's spelunking expedition, she casually mentioned that they actually had several projected due dates for Katie over a window of a month and a half, but had only told us about the later ones.
A month and a half?! What kind of bullshit quack fuckery is that?!
So once Katie asked if she was going into labor, Midweirdo told us that technically, the child would be 6 hours premature from the earliest projected due date. Because of this, there was an off chance that we may have to be transferred to Maine Medical Center, but that wasn't too likely. Then it became very likely. Then an old guy and a nervous fat kid were strapping Katie to a stretcher while I frantically started calling relatives, telling them to change course for MMC because the head of peditrics didn't want to take the risk of the possibility of giving birth to some kind of godless, premature squid baby based on the month and a half window of crappy projections.
At this point, as I was reading this aloud in the proofreading stage, Katie interjected that the projections were "total crap because they based it on her last menstrual period, which she had written it down and knew exactly when it was, which means that he was at exactly thirty six weeks."
So yeah, because our child was six fucking hours premature according to a woman who assigned voices to other women’s uteruses, we were shipped off to a different hospital - one with a neonatal care unit that wasn’t covered by our insurance.
Okay, wait. What? Yeah. The largest insurance provider in the state didn’t have a contract with the largest neonatal care unit in the state. Thanks for fighting socialism and Planned Parenthood, tea baggers. Its good Christian patriots like you that have ensured that insurance providers are free to NOT FUCKING COVER THE BABIES YOU DON’T WANT PEOPLE TO ABORT. Let the eagle soar.
But I digress.
I followed the ambulance up Congress Street to Maine Med, but eventually had to break off my pursuit to find long-term parking. I probably could have followed the ambulance to the entrance, but I was convinced that there would be an endless stream of horseplay-induced groin injuries, sucking chest wounds and fork-to-eye accidents that night, and I didn’t want to be that asshole that didn’t have blood on their clothes taking up one of the choice “Oh god, there’s blood everywhere” spots.
I ran through the night, my arms flailing through the air like Kermit the Frog after he’s announced the guest on the Muppet Show down along the trail leading around the Hospital. I like to think that I plowed over dozens of injured patients like a comedic juggernaut, throwing a few people in body casts into the road, clothes-lining old ladies and doubling back just to uppercut a seven-year-old orphan who’d just had his appendix taken out, all the while screaming “MY WIFE IS HAVING A BABY” but that probably didn’t happen. In fact, I don’t recall seeing a single person until I got to the emergency room.
I burst through the doors, and looked helplessly at the empty waiting room. Every previous experience I have ever had with emergency medical care had involved a prolonged wait next to someone with a bad case of arterial spray and/or an unexploded firework lodged in one of their eye sockets, so I was absolutely baffled by the idea of my wife getting immediate medical treatment.
A security guard saw my puzzlement and asked if he could help me. I explained my situation to the guard, and he offered to escort me there through the secret, actually convenient service entrance that didn’t force you to navigate winding corridors of abject patient fuckery that have formed from years of constant expansion, provided I didn’t tell any of the other staff members.
Montalban (not his real name) the security guard and I quickly found Katie in one of the birthing stations. A nurse was checking her out. In the course of the ambulance ride, Katie’s lady parts had apparently gone from a smidge dilated to the Lincoln Tunnel. Of course, the smidge dilated part could just have been the Midweirdo misinterpreting Katie’s belly button. Her estimation skills had already proven wonky, after all.
Our friend Tia showed up shortly after I arrived with a sandwich for me. She had previously agreed to photograph the birth and help keep relatives out of the room.
The next hour and a half is a bit of a blur. There was screaming and blood work. There wasn’t time to administer drugs or an epidural. Katie repeatedly punched me and then apologized to the nurse for shouting fuck at the top of her lungs, only to be reassured that it was a completely appropriate thing to say, given the circumstances. I started sobbing about how much I wanted a burrito. The doctor walked in, slapped me and yelled "compose yourself, woman!", then took a look a quick look at my wife, gave us the thumbs-up and left. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. My hateful little man, Frankie, was out, cradled in my arms as Katie proclaimed “That was fucking ridiculous!”
And it was.
Friday, April 15, 2011
CHAPTER 212: VOLUTEERING
ON THE SPIRIT OF VOLUNTEERING (or UPON STARING DEATH IN THE FACE FOR THE FIRST TIME)
I'll get this off my chest right away. When I was thirteen, I may have inadvertently caused someone's death while "volunteering".
On the surface, volunteering may seem like a noble activity. The ideal of volunteering is that you do unpaid labor for the betterment of mankind or to ease the suffering of the less fortunate because you are a good individual who believes in doing such things. And as with most ideals the effectiveness of volunteering tends to crumble whenever it becomes institutionalized by organizations. In my early teens, I constantly found myself in situations where organizations I belonged to (schools, scouts, youth groups) volunteered me for activities that were intended to help other people, but inevitably fell short of the stated goals.
I was a bit of misfit in 1991, as you probably can imagine. I liked punk rock at a time when most of my peers were caught up in that uncomfortable transitional phase between the dwindling popularity of hair metal and the rise of New Jack Swing and hip hop. I was growing my hair out with the idea of turning it into a mohawk while a lot of kids around me had mullets with sweet fades shaved in the side. I wore the same jeans, red flannel, combat boots and Jane's Addiction or Ministry shirt almost every day, whereas I saw a lot of people in the halls of Lewiston Junior HIgh attempting to wear an odd mix of bib overalls and Poison t-shirts. Despite the early onset of teen rebellion, I was also still active in Boy Scouts and the Youth Group at the church my family attended. They were things to do at a time when I would have otherwise spent my weekends in my room alone, drawing xenomorphs, playing Final Fantasy and shamelessly masturbating to anything I could find that showed a little cleavage.
One Saturday afternoon that November, the church youth group decided to volunteer at a local nursing home. To the youth group neophyte, this might sound like a harmless activity that could brighten someone's day. I mean, really, what is the worst that could happen?
The church we belonged to was very small, not especially well funded or well connected, and subscribed to a kind of gonzo philosophy of what constituted good, clean fun. Being a few weeks after Halloween, someone at the church had some leftover cake makeup, which they donated to our group. So, in this case volunteering at a nursing home meant painting our faces up like clowns with leftover halloween makeup and going room to room trying to cheer people up who didn't seem to know or care that we were coming.
Being thirteen at the time and not being a serial rapist, I had no idea how to apply clown make up, and neither did anyone in the group. In a world where clownery is somehow an acceptable occupation, there are actually many societal benefits to the existence of clown colleges, and instruction in the proper application of cake make up is one of them, because its very difficult to achieve that look that only produces mild discomfort and not abject horror. After 45 minutes of trial and error, I managed to achieve a look that can best be described Raggedy Andy meets inverted Al Jolson meets members of the black metal band Emperor. Most of my face was pink, my lips were huge and red, and I had black circles under my eyes that ended in tear drops. You'll note, also, that I made no mention of any clown couture actually being donated to our cause. We were dressed in street clothes, and in my case this meant the afore mentioned flannel and Jane's Addiction shirt. I looked terrifying, but we were running late. In hindsight, I can laugh at this because I'm a horrible human being, but at the time I was frustrated and humiliated because I had a genuine desire to brighten someone's day when I started. I'm honestly surprised that none of the nursing home's residents didn't throw their medicine at me and surrender.
When we arrived at the nursing home, we paired up into teams and each of us headed down a different wing and attempted to make the twilight years of the senile and enfeebled a little merrier. I can't remember who I was paired up with, but I'm pretty sure that midway through our sojourn, my partner traded me to another volunteer for cigarettes and radiator wine, but that's probably not true. At least, not the part of the transaction. I totally got traded for looking too shitty.
The typical reaction from the people we dealt with was one of confusion. We didn't have a chaperone, so there wasn't a familiar face to explain who we were to the patient we were visiting, what we were doing and why we looked like rejects from the Kiss Army. We would knock, and upon getting a response, we would burst in and caper around the room. Or, at least that is how it worked initially. After meeting indifference in the first three or four rooms, the sadness of the whole situation started getting to us. If we were lucky, the person would smile at us, thank us for coming in, then shoo us along to the next room so that they didn't have to feel sorry for us and we didn't have to feel sorry for them.
It was actually worse if the patients attempted to interact with us. In one case, my partner and I stepped into a room and started to introduce ourselves when the old man we were visiting started asking questions. He demanded to know who we were. He then asked me if I was a boy or a girl. When I started to explain that I was a boy, he said that was too bad, then he told me that I was ugly, and not just because of the poorly applied make up. He then took an increasingly uncomfortable interest in my actually female partner until we walked out.
And then it happened. We knocked on a door, a nurse inside told us to come in, we excitedly said "Hello!" and were met with the sound of a heart monitor flat lining. The nurse pressed the emergency call button. Instantly, another nurse rushed in behind us and covered the patient with a crotchet blanket while the first nurse calmly, but quickly ushered us out of the room, trying to explain to us that everything was fine. To this day, I'm still haunted by the moment. Not in the sense that I feel guilty about the fact that my actions may have caused someone's death, mind you. If my interpretation of the events is at all accurate, this person was about to die anyway, and I simply helped them along into the afterlife. No, I'm more haunted by the nurse's treatment of the body. It was the first time I'd ever seen the human form treated as merely an object, and they picked the worst blanket they could possibly find to conceal it, as the open holes in the pattern were the size of my head. They might as well have covered it with a cargo net. I could still see the frail, lifeless arms and legs and the shriveled, motionless hands and feet. Mostly, I felt sorry that this person had died alone, except for the company of a nurse who didn't realize that every kid in the western world knew about flat lining because of E.T., and their last moment of human interaction was probably seeing my poorly painted face and thinking "Fuck it. I'm too old for this shit."
About three weeks later, my scout troop went Christmas caroling at the same nursing home, and the exact same thing happened.
Knock-knock.
"Come in."
"We wish you a merry..."
"BEEP BEEEP BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP"
"CODE BLUE!! HE'S CRASHING!!!"
"Mr. Pelletier is fine kids. He's just sleeping."
"Oh god! Call the family!"
"Would you like a cookie?"
At which point, I was just sort of blase about the whole thing, because of course I wanted a cookie and at least I didn't look like the Joker's asshole cousin.
I'll get this off my chest right away. When I was thirteen, I may have inadvertently caused someone's death while "volunteering".
On the surface, volunteering may seem like a noble activity. The ideal of volunteering is that you do unpaid labor for the betterment of mankind or to ease the suffering of the less fortunate because you are a good individual who believes in doing such things. And as with most ideals the effectiveness of volunteering tends to crumble whenever it becomes institutionalized by organizations. In my early teens, I constantly found myself in situations where organizations I belonged to (schools, scouts, youth groups) volunteered me for activities that were intended to help other people, but inevitably fell short of the stated goals.
I was a bit of misfit in 1991, as you probably can imagine. I liked punk rock at a time when most of my peers were caught up in that uncomfortable transitional phase between the dwindling popularity of hair metal and the rise of New Jack Swing and hip hop. I was growing my hair out with the idea of turning it into a mohawk while a lot of kids around me had mullets with sweet fades shaved in the side. I wore the same jeans, red flannel, combat boots and Jane's Addiction or Ministry shirt almost every day, whereas I saw a lot of people in the halls of Lewiston Junior HIgh attempting to wear an odd mix of bib overalls and Poison t-shirts. Despite the early onset of teen rebellion, I was also still active in Boy Scouts and the Youth Group at the church my family attended. They were things to do at a time when I would have otherwise spent my weekends in my room alone, drawing xenomorphs, playing Final Fantasy and shamelessly masturbating to anything I could find that showed a little cleavage.
One Saturday afternoon that November, the church youth group decided to volunteer at a local nursing home. To the youth group neophyte, this might sound like a harmless activity that could brighten someone's day. I mean, really, what is the worst that could happen?
The church we belonged to was very small, not especially well funded or well connected, and subscribed to a kind of gonzo philosophy of what constituted good, clean fun. Being a few weeks after Halloween, someone at the church had some leftover cake makeup, which they donated to our group. So, in this case volunteering at a nursing home meant painting our faces up like clowns with leftover halloween makeup and going room to room trying to cheer people up who didn't seem to know or care that we were coming.
Being thirteen at the time and not being a serial rapist, I had no idea how to apply clown make up, and neither did anyone in the group. In a world where clownery is somehow an acceptable occupation, there are actually many societal benefits to the existence of clown colleges, and instruction in the proper application of cake make up is one of them, because its very difficult to achieve that look that only produces mild discomfort and not abject horror. After 45 minutes of trial and error, I managed to achieve a look that can best be described Raggedy Andy meets inverted Al Jolson meets members of the black metal band Emperor. Most of my face was pink, my lips were huge and red, and I had black circles under my eyes that ended in tear drops. You'll note, also, that I made no mention of any clown couture actually being donated to our cause. We were dressed in street clothes, and in my case this meant the afore mentioned flannel and Jane's Addiction shirt. I looked terrifying, but we were running late. In hindsight, I can laugh at this because I'm a horrible human being, but at the time I was frustrated and humiliated because I had a genuine desire to brighten someone's day when I started. I'm honestly surprised that none of the nursing home's residents didn't throw their medicine at me and surrender.
When we arrived at the nursing home, we paired up into teams and each of us headed down a different wing and attempted to make the twilight years of the senile and enfeebled a little merrier. I can't remember who I was paired up with, but I'm pretty sure that midway through our sojourn, my partner traded me to another volunteer for cigarettes and radiator wine, but that's probably not true. At least, not the part of the transaction. I totally got traded for looking too shitty.
The typical reaction from the people we dealt with was one of confusion. We didn't have a chaperone, so there wasn't a familiar face to explain who we were to the patient we were visiting, what we were doing and why we looked like rejects from the Kiss Army. We would knock, and upon getting a response, we would burst in and caper around the room. Or, at least that is how it worked initially. After meeting indifference in the first three or four rooms, the sadness of the whole situation started getting to us. If we were lucky, the person would smile at us, thank us for coming in, then shoo us along to the next room so that they didn't have to feel sorry for us and we didn't have to feel sorry for them.
It was actually worse if the patients attempted to interact with us. In one case, my partner and I stepped into a room and started to introduce ourselves when the old man we were visiting started asking questions. He demanded to know who we were. He then asked me if I was a boy or a girl. When I started to explain that I was a boy, he said that was too bad, then he told me that I was ugly, and not just because of the poorly applied make up. He then took an increasingly uncomfortable interest in my actually female partner until we walked out.
And then it happened. We knocked on a door, a nurse inside told us to come in, we excitedly said "Hello!" and were met with the sound of a heart monitor flat lining. The nurse pressed the emergency call button. Instantly, another nurse rushed in behind us and covered the patient with a crotchet blanket while the first nurse calmly, but quickly ushered us out of the room, trying to explain to us that everything was fine. To this day, I'm still haunted by the moment. Not in the sense that I feel guilty about the fact that my actions may have caused someone's death, mind you. If my interpretation of the events is at all accurate, this person was about to die anyway, and I simply helped them along into the afterlife. No, I'm more haunted by the nurse's treatment of the body. It was the first time I'd ever seen the human form treated as merely an object, and they picked the worst blanket they could possibly find to conceal it, as the open holes in the pattern were the size of my head. They might as well have covered it with a cargo net. I could still see the frail, lifeless arms and legs and the shriveled, motionless hands and feet. Mostly, I felt sorry that this person had died alone, except for the company of a nurse who didn't realize that every kid in the western world knew about flat lining because of E.T., and their last moment of human interaction was probably seeing my poorly painted face and thinking "Fuck it. I'm too old for this shit."
About three weeks later, my scout troop went Christmas caroling at the same nursing home, and the exact same thing happened.
Knock-knock.
"Come in."
"We wish you a merry..."
"BEEP BEEEP BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP"
"CODE BLUE!! HE'S CRASHING!!!"
"Mr. Pelletier is fine kids. He's just sleeping."
"Oh god! Call the family!"
"Would you like a cookie?"
At which point, I was just sort of blase about the whole thing, because of course I wanted a cookie and at least I didn't look like the Joker's asshole cousin.
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