Music Through the Floor Stories

Children of God The ad said they needed someone to model "patterns of survival." At the interview, a woman with anE.T.poster on her door told me about the job. "You'd be working at their house," she said, "taking care of two clients with special needs."I couldn't even take care of myself, but I needed a job. "Are they retarded?""Okay, yeah. We don't say that anymore." She coaxed herself out of a frown, in a way that suggested I was the only candidate. "There's a new name: developmentally disabled."They gave me a new name, too: Community Living Instructor. This was in Portland, Oregon. I started working at a home for people who couldn't tie their shoes, helping two grown men get through the day.Jason was worse off. At twenty-eight, he was afflicted with so many diseases that his meds were delivered in a garbage bag. He made Job look like a whiner. Enlarged by hydrocephalus, his head drooped from his body, which twisted in his wheelchair as if it were trying to unscrew from his neck. His mouth hung open in a constant drool. His hands, crippled from dystrophy, curled inward as though he wanted to clutch his own wrists. Among other things, he was prone to seizures and cataleptic fits. He had chronic diarrhea. Every evening, after dinner, I was met with a smell so astounding I had to plug my nose with cotton. I'd wheel Jason, besmirched and grinning, to the bedroom to change his mess. "I made a bad, bad meeeesss!" he'd yell, flapping his arms. "Now we're cooking with oil!" For the most part, his vocabulary consisted of cliches he'd picked up from former care workers, many of them bizarre or unsavory to start with: "cooking with oil" was one, as was "you said a mouthful when you said that." Other times, he was capable of surprising clarity. He loved action movies -- particularly ones in which nature avenged itself on humanity -- and would recount the death of a dinosaur hunter as if it were a sidesplitting joke.The changing of the mess, though, was the high point of Jason's day. He giggled uproariously when I lifted him from the wheelchair, his arms kinked around my neck as I carried him to bed. He never failed, during our brief walk together, to burrow his tongue deep into my ear.Dominic was more serious. Brooding, treacherously off balance, he staggered around the house like a drunk. Down syndrome had smudged his face into the flat, puttylike features of a Hollywood gangster. He was beautiful in a way that startled women. He was thirty-two years old and owned a bike with a banana seat and training wheels. The bike was supposed to be impossible to tip over. He'd strap a helmet on his head and wiggle into an armature of pads and then go for a ride down the street, returning ten minutes later covered in blood. I cleaned his wounds with a sponge. About ten times a day, he'd sneak into the bathroom to "fresh his breath." He always left the door open, and I'd watch him sometimes from the hall. He'd nurse the faucet first, sucking on it until his mouth filled with water. Then he'd pop up suddenly and arch his back in a triumphant stance, face lifted toward the ceiling. Sometimes he'd stay like that for thirty seconds -- moaning, arms outstretched, eyes shut tight like a shaman receiving prophecies -- before puking his guts out in the sink.His voice, when he spoke, was sleepy and far-fetched. He preferred the middles of words. "Abyoola!" he liked to say, meaning "Fabulous!" When he told a story, it was like Rocky Balboa channeling a demon.I'd moved to Portland after a month of sleeping in my car, driving aimlessly around the West and living off my father's Mobil card. The driving had to do with a frantic feeling in my stomach. I felt like Wile E. Coyote when he goes off a cliff, stranded in midair and trying to crawl back to the edge before he plummets. In the glove box, sealed with plastic and a rubber band, was a Dixie cup of my mother's ashes that I'd nabbed from her memoriPuchner, Eric is the author of 'Music Through the Floor Stories', published 2007 under ISBN 9780743270472 and ISBN 0743270479.