By
Jim Celer
I sat in the can reading “Edward Mills and George Benton: A Tale” , a short story by Mark Twain, well after I had finished what you do there. What I was actually doing now was thinking, or not thinking exactly but being conscious that my mind was wandering. That’s what I was doing – that, and hiding from work, from the phone calls and frustration, and from the certain knowledge that Amber Romander was going to disappear
The Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services – that’s what surrounds the bathroom. The job is, nominally, to provide human services.
This used to be called “the dole”. Or “welfare”. It’s a direct result of The New Deal and The Great Society. It’s our way of uplifting the unfortunate, giving them a chance, ending poverty.
Oh, the pressure. Sometimes you just need to stay in the bathroom.
I’d been hearing from Amber constantly. She’d called five times already, was probably calling while Edward or George – one of them – was robbing a bank, would certainly call when I returned to work. .
Which I had to do sooner or later. Other clients needed stuff too.
My supervisor was waiting for me, kind of scanning my desk. She looked skeptically at the book in my hand. I think it confused her, it was so out of place. We intimidate each other, since what I called the “Broken Spirit Team Meeting”. That was when I exposed her and simultaneously she, well, broke my spirit.
We hadn’t really looked each other in the eye since. Now she had other things on her mind.
“Mabel called. Said you promised her food stamps would be done today.”
“Yeah. But then you need this report on child care. ”
“Oh, the cases with no child care authorizations. Yeah, that needs to be in this afternoon.”
“So that’s why.”
“Okay. You get her food stamps tomorrow?”
“I hope so.”
“Okay, I’ll tell her.”
The monthly child care summary was offending someone’s sensibilities: there were people who were eligible for child care help, but weren’t using it.. The first on my list was someone whose day care just closed, so she’ll have a new provider in a few days. I could justify leaving that open. The next one’s authorization ran out two months earlier and I forgot to renew it; she hadn’t called about it, so it’s supposed she doesn’t care and the case will be closed, because they don’t like having these untidy cases with something open but unused.
“They”, whose sensibilities get offended are, as far as I can gather, someone in the state capital in Lincoln. Or, my supervisor’s supervisor. Or someone else who gets to complain about untidy reports.
I don’t have that luxury.
So it went, down the list, closing about two-thirds of the untidy children.
Amber has no kids. She was only non-parent on my caseload.
There’s a good reason for that. After her last kid was taken away, I transferred her to the department that handles adult-only cases But it turned out she’d had a bank account three years earlier, and there was no verification that it had been closed.
“How could she have a bank account?” I demanded. “She’s never had any money.”
“Nonetheless.” That was the official position – “nonetheless.”
A lady like Amber can’t get verification from a bank; she didn’t even know what I was talking about. The bank, of course, wouldn’t tell me anything without Amber’s permission. The proper department won’t accept her case without everything verified, so Amber is mine, and I am not trained for people like Amber, nor am I expected to be.
Amber gets no benefit from this situation. But, the reports are tidy.
The phone rang twice while I was working the child care list, and I ignored it. It might have been Amber, and I didn’t want to talk to her again because there was nothing I can do for her, and she’d ramble about nonsense for a while, plead for help, maybe cry. I’m not qualified to give her the help she really needs, which probably includes medication.
She landed on my desk eight months pregnant with her third child. The other two were gone, taken away by Child Protection at birth; this one would be, too. She had Medicaid while she was pregnant, and for a while thereafter, and food stamps, and it was thought I’d have her only for a short time. I laughed at her name – Amber Romander. I didn’t know then how unfunny Amber was.
“Hey there, you,” she said by way of greeting the first time she called. “This the President?”
“Who?”
”Man, I told them I wanted the president to handle my case.”
“The president?”
”Of the United States. I want the president. You ain’t him, are you?
“Can I help you?”
“There’s someone watching me. He has a red car. You have to know about cars, don’t you?”
“If you own a car.”
“No, this car’s just following me. It changes shape but it’s always red. So I reported, okay? Don’t bug me.”
We have to know about cars and bank accounts and stuff -- “resources”, we call them – because we don’t want people hoarding wealth while the citizens pay their way. We don’t have to know about every car on the block, though.
I called adult services, told them I think I had found a lunatic.
“We know about Amber,” the lady said. “Her baby will be put up for adoption.”
“And Amber?”
“That’s up to you.”
“Me? I just do her eligibility.”
“Unless she’s a danger to herself or others, we can’t do anything.”
“She might be, well, not all there.”
“No danger, “
No danger. Amber is mine.
There are dark corners in my cubicle, walls of verifications and applications and reviews and correspondence piled up in my impenetrable filing system. Some have to do with clients. Most are memos and e-mails from my supervisor, or administrators, or the central office. Truth is, I read them on the computer, think they’re important so I print them, hoping maybe to someday turn them over to an unspecified inquiry; then I forget about them. My filing system ins impenetrable because it’s irrelevant.
So my corners are filled and smothered in bank statements, copies of check stubs, letters from employers and landlords, all the documentation we can handle to verify that someone is poor, that they qualify for help. They’re in the corners because the memos and report forms occupy the center, and I can’t get to the clients’ things until I do the reports about the clients’ things.
The phone rang and it was her.
“Right now,: she said, very urgently, her breath excited, “right now, this instant, there are unimaginable creatures at the bottom of the sea. They’re weird, grotesque, monsters or squids, and right now, while I’m talking to you, they’re eating and moving around under the sea. It’s not just in books and cartoons. It’s happening now!”
“Listen to me,” I said forcefully. “Are you still living where you said this morning?”
“What? Just a minute.” She turned from the phone to ask someone where she was, and I could hear a guy say something. Then Amber said clearly: “It’s on Izard, forty something on Izard.” She stopped mid-word, took a breath and said “Up the block from a giant lizard!”
“So that’s different, Amber, from . . ..”
“It’s okay. I have to go.”
“Wait!” But she was gone. Forty what on Izard?
See, that’s the main thing I worried about: Amber was good looking, and every time I talked to her she was crashing at a different place with a different guy. I could see it happening: a pretty girl wandering somewhere, some slimy guy makes a pass, she ends up spending the night, or two nights, until the sex isn’t worth his putting up with her craziness . Maybe another baby, maybe another placement of the baby as soon as it’s born.
The phone rang again and I answered again, and an angry voice spat out: “Would it escape your notice if I dropped dead?” and she hung up, whoever it was, and of course it was Amber and the sad truth was that yes, it would escape my notice, and everyone’s, if she dropped dead. Amber was one of those people, one of millions, maybe, the human race has no use for them, no interest in helping.
They are no danger to themselves or others.
They disappear, inevitably.
Someday Amber will disappear, and no one will know, or miss her, or remember that she ever lived. That will include me: someday I’ll send her something, it will come back as undeliverable, she’ll miss a review, I’ll close her case, and will never know what happened to her. Some guy she crashes with one night will do it, or she’ll have a disease that never gets diagnosed, or she’ll go somewhere she shouldn’t.
Somewhere in there that afternoon, I remember, there was a call from a lady who had to go to employment training because she was out of work, and she was arguing that she was only out of work because her doctor put her on bed rest for a problem pregnancy, so why should she have to go to employment training? Rules are rules. I may have gotten angry with her. In fact, I know I did because Neil came over and asked if I was all right.
Neil’s cubicle is next to mine. We sit ten feet from each other, but it takes a minute or so if we want to talk face to face: his door is to his right, mine is to my left, so he had to leave his cube, go up a long aisle past half a dozen other cubes, turn left down a shorter aisle and then left again down my long aisle, past more cubes.
Did I say “Neil’s crucible is next to mine”? No, I guess I said “cubicle”.
Usually, we just yell over the walls. But there he was in my doorway. “You okay?” he said by way of announcing himself.
I stared at him for a minute, not sure if I should unload, or make a joke, or what. Neil wears a tie sometimes – he did that day – though it’s not required and usually only high level administrators wore one.
Yeah,” I said finally, deciding speed in chit chat was the wisest course.
“Clients just want things,” Neil replied, though his reply didn’t really take into account what I had said. “More, more, gimme, gimme. They’re all the same. It can drive you crazy, huh? They think it’s our job to take care of them, we know it’s not, just relax and go with it.”
“Yeah,” I said again.
“I hear the error rate improved again, so we’re doing something right, eh? Cheer up, you’re – we’re -- doing good.”
“You know, Neil, you’re right. I’m gonna unplug the phone and read for a while.”
He wasn’t sure that’s what he had meant, but after hesitating said “Okay, sure. Want a Coke?”
I didn’t. He left. A minute later I heard him in his cubicle, making a phone call. I grabbed Mark Twain and headed for the can. Again.
We call them “clients”, the families on our caseloads, and the clients are poor and all that goes with it: desperate, hungry, deferential, apologetic, mean, demanding, pleading. Poverty is not a condition one consciously tries to prolong, though we sometimes get jaded and think of poor people as leeches. We should call them “poor people” instead of “clients”. We might be kinder then.
I do maybe one thing a day that makes a difference to someone, that feeds a kid’s faith in his mother. I do many things that help “Them” compile and maintain statistics, determine our “error rate”.
Our error rate is important. It has something to do with how much money we get from the Feds. My area is doing pretty well. The error rate doesn’t measure hungry kids or people with their heat turned off. The error rate tells us that deadlines were met, that forms were filed in the right placed, that all child care cases have authorizations to go with them.
Our error rate is pretty good.
Amber is not a danger.
Maybe she should be. Then someone would care.
The first thing in Amber’s file, the oldest thing, was a summary by someone of a phone call. She had seen Patti LaBelle spying on her with binoculars, but Bono had taken over her computer, and he chased off LaBelle and then fathered Amber’s baby through hypnosis.
That was three years and three babies ago.
I doubt she has a computer.
I try to think of the people I deal with as parents. No matter how unsavory the mom or dad may seem, no matter what tricks or lies they may be up to, they have kids, and kids start out trusting their parents inherently and without qualification: Mom will see that they’re not hungry, that they have a roof and a bed; when they’re scared, she’ll be there to make things okay. I tell myself that I could have a profound effect on the life of a kid I’ll never meet, just by screwing up that trust. They say the traumatic events for a kid are moving, death, divorce. How about the moment the kid learns, understands, that the person he trusts completely can’t help him? What if I mess up their food stamps, what if the check is late or the heat turned off because I didn’t feel like doing it just now? What if some kid says “Mom, I’m hungry”, and Mom has to answer “Honey, there’s nothing I can do for you”?
But Amber had no kids, so Amber got less sympathy. Amber was just a phone call, an unverified closed bank account.
And I knew she’d disappear -- at least from me. Who know from whom else?
When I got to my little apartment that evening I fell asleep on the couch with a bag of potato chips on my lap. I woke up an hour later, made a sandwich and watched a little TV, until the guy in the downstairs apartment started blasting The Joshua Tree, as he did often, like it was the only CD he had. For some reason, though, this time it pumped some adrenalin into me, gave me that restless feeling you only get by letting music course through you until you want to sing it, but you can’t sing it so you do something else.
I went for a walk, out into the sweet air, the last low sunlight laying glumly across Park Avenue. Park Avenue in Omaha is a different species than the Park Avenue in New York. It’s nicknamed “Fellini Street”, because of the odd, largely burnt out characters, with faces like grotesque masks, that seem to gravitate to it’s old and cheap apartments. None seem old enough to have been damaged by the Sixties, or by Viet Nam; they just fall onto the street, bleached complexions and albumen eyes, greasy hair and no inhibitions. They’re not dangerous, not exotic. They’re just something in the current that’s not the giant sea turtles or colorful coral nibblers. They’re just something else.
You imagine lives for your clients, but usually just for a fleeting second, right after you talk to them or do something for them. This one is a tyrant to her kids, this one is a hustler, that one is trying so hard, one cries a lot. You think that for a second, then move on.
Here, you see them, the lives of the people who need help.
Amber would fit here, but not on her own. She’d drift into somebody’s sphere, he’d drag her to Park Avenue and think he had found a toy. He’d be right, and he’d play with her and show her off for a few days until one of them crossed the street without the other and forgot.
That’s Fellini Street, Park Avenue in Omaha, shadows of people, forgetting and forgotten. I lived a block off Fellini Street at the time, a mile from the Neptune Bar. It was darker now by the time I got that far, under the trees in full bloom, and I was so focused on sensing everything that I almost tripped on a guy lying face down on the sidewalk. He was all black and white, pale skin under long black hair, wearing a white undershirt and black jeans. I stared for a second – this was out of place, even for this neighborhood – and then shook him a little. I didn’t see any blood, and he was breathing, but he wouldn’t wake up.
“Is he still there?” the bartender said, and I understood that either there was nothing to worry about, or this was a tougher bar than I thought.
“You want something?” I think the bartender’s name was Rob. I’m not sure. I’d been here before, but not often, and not for a few months. It was a small place, a “Miller High Life” sign blinking in the window, and no TV, a juke box but no dance floor. It was a bar meant for drinking.
I ordered a draught and sat at the bar. There were some people at a table behind me but I didn’t pay much attention, mostly just staring at my hands folded around the beer glass in front of me.
So I wasn’t aware Rami was in the place until she was giggling in my ear.
“I need some dough,” she said, “and you need me!” She said it like she had solved a puzzle.
Rami had a young body but an old and suspicious face, framed by thick brown hair, long and set in no discernible style. Her smile was a nervous one, like its reason might be yanked away any second. There was a long scar on her cheek, freckles under her eyes.
“Hey,” I complained, mockingly, to the bartender. “She’s soliciting me.”
He stared at us for a second. “Don’t solicit people,” he said, bored with the routine.
“Mr. Big Social Worker gonna fix me all up?”
“I’m not a social worker.” I’m not. I’m determine eligibility. Strictly financial. I don’t give advice.
“Buy me a drink, then take me home, then I won’t be poor no more.”
Rami and I have met before, a few times, and I, I am ashamed to say, availed myself of her body once, about a year ago. She wasn’t asking for money then, though.
“You need a job, Rami,” I said, not even looking at her.
“I need a drink.”
I don’t remember what she wanted, but I bought it for her. Then she had to sit with me.
“Seriously,” I began. “You got to do something for yourself. You’re gonna just disappear one day and no one will care.” I was thinking of Amber, you see.
“You’ll fix everything, social worker.”
“I know people that happens to. Gonna happen to. You get a little nuts, then you lose interest in yourself, then you’re gone, Erased.”
“It’ll cost you to erase me.”
“Not a joke. You need a job.”
“I got a job.”
“Yeah, right. How much?”
“For what?”
”I don’t know. A night.”
“Fifty bucks.”
I snorted..
“It’s good money,” she snapped, indignant.
“Yeah, you spend two nights in one maybe.”
“Two guys?”
”Yeah.”
”That’s be free.”
“Dammit, Rami.”
She laughed and grabbed my change from the bar. She touched my shoulders as she slipped off the stool and toward the jukebox.
I swallowed the bottom of my beer glass, and as I reached the door Wilson Pickett, voice like a clenched fist, started “Hey Jude “. I wouldn’t have pegged Rami for a Soul Girl.
I think she called after me as I crossed the street and headed for the darkness under the trees. The guy on the sidewalk was gone, scooped away by the police or someone, or stumbling around on his own somewhere now. The sun was down, crickets squawked below the traffic noise, people stared from their porches as I walked by. I said Hi to the first group but they said nothing back, they stared like I was a strange species of fish swimming under them. It seemed like everyone on this street had a scar, or a welt, or something on their face that needed to heal. I didn’t think about any of this; I had often walked down this street before.
I had to imagine, as I often did, that most of the people on Park Avenue received assistance of some kind – food stamps, at least, and probably disability.
More likely, I thought, they’re now off of assistance, being unable to jump through the hoops we’ve set for them, the myriad opportunities we give then to fail. They couldn’t find the employment training, they forgot to get bank verifications for their closed accounts.
I slept well.
Neil was at the coffee pot the next morning. No tie. No smile. Great posture.
“You see the email?” he asked .
“Just got here.” I squeezed in between him and the coffee.
“They’re finally telling us what goes where in the case files. Got to flag things too. Bout time they made things a little easier for us, huh?”
I always like it when people complain about their jobs in a cute way. I smiled at Neil. “You’re kidding!” I said.
The phone was ringing when I got to my desk. It doesn’t auger well for a good day when the phone is ringing before you sit down.
“What’s this mean, I can’t get no help at all ‘cause I’m not a citizen?”
“No, you just didn’t provide proof of citizenship.”
“Course I’m a citizen. I was born here. My name’s Mary Ann, for chrissake.”
“We need to verify.”
“Last year I didn’t send in a pay stub, you just sent me a letter. How come you coming down so hard now? I need some help, man.”
“That was for failure to provide information. This is for failure to provide proof of citizenship.”
“That’s information. “
“Not as we define it.”
“It’s the same thing.”
”No.”
“Gimme your supervisor.”
“Okay.”
My supervisor popped her head around the corner of my cubicle a few minutes later. “I just got off the phone with Mary Ann. Good job.” She smiled.
“She doesn’t see the difference between providing information and providing information about where she was born.” I smiled back, kind of a “Can you believe it?” smile.
“I know. Well, you had one yesterday that wanted food stamps. Remember?”
“Mabel.”
“Okay. I need your monthly report, too. Oh, and check the e-mail. You have to flag all your case files now. It’ll be an error if the label’s not in the right place.” And her head disappeared.
There’s always an aftertaste when talking to her. It’s like something had been taken from me, like if food, instead of adding to you, instead dissolved you. It’s the same one I feel when reading memos or having team meetings.
I don’t know if that started before or after the Broken Spirit Team Meeting. We were discussing “timeliness”, which means that all reviews have to be done within thirty days of receiving the paperwork from the client. I pointed out that this deadline makes no difference to the client, that if someone is being denied food stamps, they wouldn’t have them equally on the thirtieth day or the thirty-first day, so we should have other priorities.
“We don’t make the priorities,” she pointed out. She smiled and ran her finger down her agenda, as if she thought we were moving on.
I said: “So if someone calls late one afternoon and says their heat’s been turned off, but I have a review that’s on its thirtieth day, I should blow off getting her heat back on and do the review – even though it doesn’t affect anybody’s benefits.”
“If helping people is worth losing your job, you go right ahead and do what you want.”
That was an awkward moment, let me tell you. The rest of the group lowered their eyes, she blinked in surprise as she heard her own voice, I felt a jab to my solar plexus. So my job was in jeopardy because of my complaining. At the same time, I had gotten her to utter the agency’s dirty little secret: human services was no longer the focus of the Department of Human Services.
Instead of getting to work, though, I called Mary Ann back.
“We need your birth certificate,” I said, “because we assume otherwise you’re a terrorist.”
“Excuse me?”
“We’re afraid of terrorists. We assume you are one until you prove where you were born.”
“Listen, I just got done with that boss of yours . . .”
She was about to cry “Gotta go,” I said quickly.
I was going to call Mabel to tell her she couldn’t have her food stamps until all my cases were labeled properly, but no sooner had I hung up with Mary Ann but the phone rang.
“I lost my job cause you closed my child care!”
“That’s interesting,” I interrupted, “but, sorry, I have to go to the bathroom.” I hung up, grabbed Mark Twain, and headed for the can.