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.