Friday, September 7, 2012

A LIFE IN WORDS

    For the benefit of anyone blissfully unaware of the contemporary approach to treating mental illness, I hope the group in attendance today has taken its Paroxetine and Bupropion because the news I have may otherwise be unsettling. The glorious people’s future has arrived, comrades, and today we can announce without fear of contradiction that psychopathologies, neuroses and psychoses are no longer legitimate mental illnesses. Just as the pre-Freud world viewed psychiatric symptoms as essentially flaws in one’s character, today’s shrinks shrink from the notion of psychoanalysis or other interactive therapies and instead manage the ailments as if they were brain diseases. Depression, post traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, schizoaffective disorder: these and other Axis II aches and pains are all due to physiological maladies which in turn affect an individual’s perceptions and internalizations, thereby leading to undesirable behavior which can often be treated with drugs, hypnosis, or electricity. The field of psychology has, in other and less sarcastic words, come full circle, back to the halcyon days where causation is irrelevant, as are whatever pesky societal conditions such a term may suggest. This approach, of course, also eliminates social responsibility since the illness can be treated if only the patient can be made to cooperate. In other words, we as a civilization need not protect one another from the cruelties of war, torture, violent crime or personal violations because the cure is merely a pill, rapid eye movement, pinprick or jolt away.
    This tautology came to my attention first hand. After a series of personal losses, I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder, a somewhat benign problem in the scheme of behavioral health. MDD manifests in sad moods, low self-esteem, and a lack of interest in doing fun things that one used to do, like eating pizza and watching television. I had no argument with the diagnosis. In fact I believed that my feelings were entirely appropriate to my situation (a not uncommon interpretation for a patient to develop), just as I was fairly certain that with some good old-fashioned therapy I would be back to my own version of normalcy in short order. Things did not work out exactly that way.
    I went to a prominent psychologist who referred me to a somewhat less prominent psychiatrist who wrote me a prescription for Fluoxitine (Prozac) and signed me up for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing treatments, an experience I will reveal momentarily. But first: better health through chemistry. In the event that the reader is as unfamiliar as was I about the types of antidepressants available these days, here is a brief summary. Prozac, which was my personal hard core drug, is a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor, meaning that the pill helps in retaining the neurotransmitter serotonin. Four other popular brand name SSRIs are Celexa, Lexapro, Paxil and Zoloft. Serotonin Norepinephrine Reuptake Inhibitors (which tinker with a combination of neurotransmitters) include Cymbalta and Effexon. Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors (MAOIs), which are not quite as common as their cousins nowadays, go by the exotic brand names of Marplan, Nardil and Parnate. Until a few years ago, a fourth classification, Tricyclic Antidepressants (TCIs) such as Maneon and Survestor were also popular with prescribers. And finally, not to be outdone by either Serotonin or Norepinephrine, there emerged a Dopamine Reuptake Inhibitor, the most popular of which is Wellbutrin.
   So the doctor gave me Prozac. I needed help of some sort and sure enough, within four days I started feeling a little more chipper and a week after that I was popping thirty milligrams a day and actually looked forward to those doses despite an initial reluctance which the shrink described as militant resistance. Around this same time I read in a bulletin from the National Institute of Mental Health that in 1995 an estimated 35,000 adverse reactions to the drug had been reported. By adverse they meant hallucinations, assault, manslaughter and suicide. This same report cautioned that doctors were writing 65,000 scripts a month for this hard core drug. As recently as 2005 the worldwide population of Prozac poppers was thirty-five million.
    Disillusioned by what I suspected was Eli Lilly’s effort to confuse efficacy with causation, I stopped taking Prozac cold turkey. That turned out to be a mistake. Prozac has a long half-life, which means that it stays in the body for one to two months. Nevertheless, on the third day without it I woke up thinking I had the flu. Headache, stiff joints and a low grade fever were my symptoms and confused was my state of mind because I am very seldom physically ill. It turned out that what I actually had was Prozac withdrawal. I was now quite concerned over the fact that not taking a drug caused those kind of effects. What, I wondered, long term damage is this stuff doing? I responded by doing what Big Pharma spends billions every year urging us to do: I talked to my well-reimbursed doctor. She switched me to Wellbutrin. Although I did not know it at the time, I was in good company. Twenty million people take it everyday.
    The good news is that I stopped smoking due to the influence of this dopamine reuptake inhibitor. The bad news is that I missed the high strung sensation of Prozac. In fact, dopamine seemed to be the one neurotransmitter with which I needed no reuptake. On a subsequent visit I told my doctor that I was feeling depressed again. The solution was self-evident to her: I now take both Wellbutrin and Prozac and—truth be told—I am depressed much less than at any time in the last twenty years.
So what are my complaints? They are but three: Does the imbalance in serotonin or dopamine levels cause the depression? Does the depression itself cause the imbalance? Or is the efficacy coincidental or tangential? The answer to all three questions is that nobody knows.
    I grew up believing that events affect people. The loss of a family member, sexual abuse, witnessing genocide, overwork, and changes in one’s personal life compile until defense mechanisms are no longer useful and the resulting unhealthy interpretations and ideations converge to create illnesses which may be manifested in physiological ways but which have psychological roots. I actually said something like this to one doctor who replied that if something works, what sense was there in fighting it? What I wish I had said back was that there is little point in curing a person of mesothilioma if you are going to return him to work in the asbestos factory.
   My point here runs against the current grain. When I suggested to my Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing therapist that her treatment was a combination of hypnosis and cognitive behavioral therapy, she expressed a horror that led her to suspend the treatment. That was fine with me. I had simply pointed out that CBT (God, don’t they love abbreviations?)—which is based on the concept that thoughts cause feelings: control the thoughts and you control the behavior—by itself is useless because (a) patients do not think logically, (b) patients lie, and (c) patients resist. But hypnotize the patient and he or she can be led to overcome all three obstacles and be receptive to the cognitive aspects of EMDR. This might sound a bit sinister and it probably suffers under shades of The Manchurian Candidate. But the brain disease advocates cannot be dissuaded with bourgeois luxuries such as morality and logic. There are millions of nut jobs, head cases and psychos out there in desperate need of manipulation and the psychiatric community is not about to let ethics or reason get in the way of progress. Consider electroshock, or as it known today, electro convulsive therapy (note how that last word tempers the terror of the one in the middle) or ECT. Performed in the 1940s and 1950s to calm down people who had other ideas, ECT is today used in conjunction with anesthesia a few times a week on patients for two to three months. The treatment causes temporary confusion in the one million people who have endured it, although the confusion sometimes wears off. What often does not wear off is memory loss. Some people with severe depression may welcome a bit of selective memory loss, especially if ghastly events have led to the symptoms. Unfortunately there is no way to specify which memories are wiped out, some memories may eventually return, and the efficacy of the treatment is uncertain because the clinical prejudgment is against psychological-environmental catalysts and in favor of the physiological-genetic, which at the present is unproved. Although I have never had the dubious pleasure myself, I have met lots of ECT survivors. If you ever do, expect to wait a while between your questions and their answers.
    Having admitted to suffering from depression, my own credibility is probably in question. That strikes me as reasonable and I certainly take no offense, if such is intended. The fundamental issue, however, is not one of my creation. The issue exists with or without me: is mental illness primarily psychological or physiological, and since this is not a high school course, the correct answer cannot be “a little bit of both.”
    The lobotomist Dr. Walter Freeman said it was physiological. He treated the problem by giving the patient a few jolts of electricity and then by placing an ice pick beneath a patient’s eyelids and tapping it with a small mallet, puncturing the frontal lobe. Once inside, he moved the device about two inches into the lobe and tilted it from side to side. His goal was to sever the neural connections between the frontal lobe and the thalamus. Although his theory was inaccurate, the procedure did tend to subdue the nearly 3,500 people he practiced it on. So if, for instance, a patient had a tendency toward manic episodes, a few seconds under the prick and pick would do the trick. Hallucinations? Just let Doctor Feel Nothing apply some conductors. Take that ice pick out of the freezer and let’s get busy. The majority of Freeman’s patient victims had to be taught to eat and use the bathroom all over again. Rosemary Kennedy, for one, was an invalid for more than sixty years after this therapy. I may be forgiven (and if not, that is fine) for doubts about the propriety of not only the methodology of brain disease proponents but of their assumptions as well. Most people do not come by their mental illnesses quickly. They build up layer upon uneven layer until the fragile balance becomes untenable and then collapses. The suggestion of a quick fix is akin to giving a person Robotusin for lung cancer. Yet somewhere a physician shouts, “But it silenced his cough!”
    As of today, February 22, 2011, I have been off all psychiatric drugs for five weeks. I feel very good. Matter of fact, I have far more energy and people say I’m a lot more enjoyable to be around. I will not be returning to a drug regimen. Bear in mind, if some of you are taking these medications and they are working for you, that’s great. Have a nice day. But it does bear considering, I think, that simply spending quality time with nice people goes a lot farther than waiting in line at the drug store.

    It may not have American roots in the Great Disappointment of 1843, but the Salvation Army links itself with the hard labor of redemption in the purest sense of the domestic dream of the Protestant Work Ethic. Work hard, they say, then work harder, give of yourself, induce others to do the same, never let up, and the Kingdom of God is at hand. Oh yes, you also need to stay away from tobacco, drugs, and alcohol if at all possible.
    That interpretation may be straight out of the Southern Baptist Convention, but that was my impression of what some of the 122 countries where they operate call The Sallies, the institution that is the Salvation Army. I worked for them as a bell ringer for twenty-seven days, from the day after Thanksgiving through Christmas Eve, 2010. I earned for this charitable organization a meager average of $175 each day for a total just shy of five thousand dollars, a figure that is impressive only when multiplied by the other bell ringers in Phoenix, a number which, by season’s end, came close to only about thirty full time employees. It is a number which loses much of its panache, however, once I freely admit that at the time I had no idea whatsoever to what uses that money would be put. And that is fair enough, I suppose, considering I shook my clanging rattle for no other reason than to earn cash for myself, which turns out to be where some of the money went. People asked me the question often and loudly: “Where does the money go, fella?” to which I initially replied, “In the kettle,” and then learned to respond, “For food, shelter, clothing, and the occasional rehabilitation.” After the fact, I learned the fuller solution to this mystery, but before revealing it, I will offer an examination of the short happy life of a Salvation Army bell ringer, and thank you, Ernest Hemingway.

    Adherents call the downtown facility The Citadel, an image very much in keeping with the militaristic ambiance this community of warriors strives to maintain. The commander in chief of The Citadel is a prim, sixtyish chap who calls himself Major Lacey. He dresses in Salvation Army finery, straight out of the unit’s haberdashery, no doubt, featuring a starched shirt so white it would make ghosts blush, military bars on both shoulders, a thin belt that probably once belonged to Walter Slezak, and slacks and shoes neatly pressed and shined. His glance at this collective body of recruits comes angled through his tiny spectacles and the swollen red nose in the center of his face leads me to suspect that at one time or another in his life of service the Major may have been a drinking man. It is his adenoidal speech one hears on the voice mail and this garnering of Christmastime donations is very much his party, one he only appears to delegate to his subordinate, the stout and territorial Ann Girard. As the Major concludes his visual examination of the troops, he takes a few steps away from the lectern and signals his soldier to attention. Ms. Girard proclaims her seventeen years of service with a proud sigh and implies more than once during the two-hour orientation that she has seen, heard and smelled every scrap of nonsense the limited imagination of a seasonal bell ringer could conceive and that therefore it would behoove each of the original 150 of us to dismiss any notions of enjoying so much as an instant of this vital assignment. Major Lacey may write the edicts, but Ann Girard is his alpha dog.
    Even in celestial time, the orientation was long and only thirty seconds of it was devoted to the actual task of ringing the glorious bell. While Girard and her team of assistants (Shakey, Mad Dog, Bovine, Prune Face and Lardo, although we suspect these may not be their given names) reviewed such issues as invocations, daily prayers, the loss of many store locations, and the generally sad condition of the present day silent solicitor, my friend Lester Wolfe and I asked ourselves such questions as: Why a bell rather than some other attention-getting device, such as a fog horn or outboard motor? How and why did this unique approach to begging begin? What do the various Salvation Army symbols and slogans mean? And why would uninformed strangers feel inclined to slide their hard-earned currency through the slot of a little red kettle?
    The legend is that near the end of the nineteenth century, a crusty British ship captain named Joseph McFee, docked in San Francisco, was moved by the spirit of giving and set up a seaside kettle alongside a sign that urged donors to “Keep the pot boiling” with financial contributions, and in the year 1891 raised enough money to feed 15,000 Bay Area indigents over the Santa Claus holidays.
A little more than a decade earlier, a London preacher, William Booth, responded to the stodginess of Victorian England church officials by founding an assembly that would welcome society’s outcasts. This led, over the ensuing years, to the Army becoming involved in everything from feeding the poor to providing disaster relief to tracing family histories. Booth connected with expatriate Eliza Shirley, who moved from England to the United States in search of her own family. Lieutenant Shirley launched the first U.S. division of the Salvation Army, an operation that today splits the country into four divisions, ours being the Western, headquartered in Long Beach, California. Today it strikes some as peculiar that Booth opted to call his forces an army, what with most of the inspiration being more of a sea-faring nature, but perhaps he feared the repercussions of the naval acronym Never Again Volunteer Yourself.
    Our first day out was a long one: ten hours, plus waiting time. In the life of a fruit fly, ten hours is half a lifetime. It seemed the same to Lester and me as we stood on platform pavement, hollering, “Good morning! Merry Christmas! Thank you so very much!” while trying to develop some rhythm with the bell that would accompany such dubious holiday classics as “Bad Bad Leroy Brown” and “Oops I Did It Again.” The day being what some morbid malefactor called Black Friday, our kettles were scarcely in place before the folded currency disappeared inside the cast iron. “Thank you,” we said. “Thank you,” they responded. Lester Wolfe, perhaps having more sense than myself, hung up his red jacket and silver bell after that first day.     Thereafter, I was assigned to a Walgreens pharmacy in the north valley where I clanged and reciprocated jolly wishes day after agonizing day.
    It was not much fun. For one thing, those bells are tuned to a tone and pitch that caused more than one child and elder to flee into the store, hands pressed over ears, pleading for surcease. But the painful monotony of the tintinnabulation is small compared to the unending gravity of smiling in cold rain while the same gaggles of shoppers lumbered in and out of the store, rolling their eyes like dying calves while our knee joints and ankles screamed for an elixir of Icy Hot and Ben Gay. And all of this was exacerbated by the fact that we could not count on quitting once the day was over. So, for instance, after bell ringing from ten in the morning until eight in the evening, each of us had to wait around until a van driver for the Army showed up to collect our kettles, and while waiting an extra thirty to sixty minutes for this to happen, we were instructed to remain standing and to continue clanging, all without financial remuneration, a violation of labor laws, even in Arizona.
   Perhaps no amount of pay—and ours was quite low—would have served as proper compensation had it not been for the ample opportunities to investigate as participant-observers that most unreliable of realities: human nature. I noted, for example, that no one driving a yellow car ever once donated anything except a snarl. I also recognized why the Army forbids its recruits from sitting down on the job: the prospective donor likes to see the bell ringer making a sacrifice to both mind and body. I further observed that all that was required for a slew of contributions to transpire was for one person to approach the kettle with cupped hand hovering over the slot. Similarly, if one person ignored the opportunity to give up something for nothing, the next twenty hominids would respond in kind. I noted, too, with some optimism, that much maligned youth typically were among the most consistent and generous givers of monetary tidings. Show me a kid with a gage in his earlobe, a ring in his eyebrow, an embarrassing haircut and a pseudo-Asian tattoo, and I will show you a kid who will smile, shake your hand, urge good wishes your way, and put metal in the kettle.
    What do the Sallies believe? They consider themselves a Christian nonprofit organization committed to the belief in the God-inspired holiness of the Bible. They honor the triad of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and the faith that Jesus Christ is both God and Man. They believe in the Fall of Man from Grace and that only through repentance can man be saved. And repentance, they understand, is a full time job. They are also, according to the New York Times, opposed to hiring gay ministers and prefer not to pay health benefits to same sex partners. They also discriminate against toys based on Harry Potter or Twilight characters. Despite these and other controversies, the organization is media-savvy and tech-smart, with a nice website, bloggers, online donation devices, and links to Facebook and Flicker.
    Why the bell? The original bell ringers were British bodyguards who played songs to distract unruly crowds who were sometimes inclined to assault the Army’s soldiers. What’s with their flag? It is intended to be a symbol against sin and social ills. The motto of blood and fire refers to the blood shed by Christ and the holy fire that would certainly right the series of wrongs committed by the unworthy. Does the organization have a crest? Oh yes indeed. The crest in fact is the official emblem of the Salvation Army and if one looks closely, one can observe what looks very much like a dollar sign in the center, a symbol which, I am told, is purely coincidental. And as to the shield? Well, that shield represents the fact that the Sallies serve wartime functions such as ambulance service, chaplains, and Christian worship services.
    “What is this shit?” Lester moaned as he and I sat outside The Citadel’s inner sanctum, filling out the multi-page seasonal employment application. He was staring at the goldenrod-colored page that advised the prospective employee that a fat seventy-five dollar processing fee would be deducted from the worker’s first paycheck. “Christ, that’s ten hours pay right there! This can’t be legal.”
    All kinds of things turn out to be legal in “right to slave” states such as Arizona. But Shakey, the Parkinson’s-afflicted man who processed our paperwork, assured us both that we shouldn’t worry because they only selectively enforced that particular procedure if it turned out the employee had lied about being a convicted felon, which, his smile announced, could never be something that applied to us.
    It turned out the Phoenix Salvation Army used discretion in many regards. On the first morning of actual work, we met in the gymnasium at The Citadel along with throngs of homeless men and women sheltered in one of the central city warehouses, sitting in the midst of out-of-work teachers, laid-off technicians, and between-job laborers. Some of the residents of the shelters had been doing this bell ringing gig for many years and they were given top priority. These thirty-five folks were handed large red kettles and hauled into unmarked vans that took them out to the prime locations, such as Wal-Mart and Fry’s Electronics, where they would fair quite well. It was at this point that I realized that not everyone assembled here was going to be working today, and I hadn’t gotten up before seven in the morning just to be told to come back tomorrow, so I trained my eyes and ears on Ann Girard and her slavering minions. They were muttering among themselves about a Walgreens out in the north valley and how they didn’t want to spend gas money sending some unknown entity out there. I leapt from my folding chair and approached Her Majesty with a smile that I hoped said I was the solution to whatever problem that might be troubling this patch of divine humanity. “We have a car,” I said. “We can drive out there if you want. It’s no problem.” The others ignored me but Girard glanced up and studied my face for a moment, as if trying to recall any problems we might have had in our nonexistent past. At last she smiled and handed me two tickets, each bearing the name and address of the store in front of which Lester and I would shake our stuff.
    Lester called me about twenty times that first day, asking if I was ready yet to commit mutiny and simply run off with the kettles and forget the whole thing. I wasn’t loving life any more than he was, but I knew my roommate and I needed the money for trivialities like rent and food, so I kept assuring him that things would get better despite the fact that I knew such was not so. Sometime around 8:20 PM a van driven by a woman we named Bovine arrived in a huff to collect first my kettle and then, a bit down the road, the pot entrusted to Lester, the latter making it quite clear this was his last day and night of work for this organization.
   That was all quite fine. I knew I could last the remaining twenty-six days and that between this and a check for a magazine article I had written, the two of us would live to celebrate the forthcoming holidays in fine order.
    This was all despite the Salvation Army’s curious list of rules. I quote from a document called Bell Ringer Guidelines and Policies: Clothes must be neat and clean. . . The red windbreaker will be worn at all times. . . A badge will also be worn. Hair must be clean, well-trimmed, and combed or styled in a conservative fashion. . . A pleasant personality and sharp appearance are extremely important. Smile and be interested in your work. No smoking or eating at the kettle. No consumption of alcohol or drugs while at work! Acknowledge every donation with an appropriate response [such as] Thank you, Merry Christmas, God bless you, etc. Do not ask for donations. . . Do not wander back and forth from your kettle. Always stand near it, facing to the front. Do not leave the kettle unattended. Always stay on your feet. Do not lean or sit on anything. . . Do not take the kettle into the restroom or any other secluded area. . . No one is guaranteed a location or the opportunity to work. Whether you can work or not [sic] depends on many factors: punctuality, appearance, quality of your work, availability of locations, etc. Be courteous to all store employees. Do whatever they ask of you. If someone attempts to take the kettle by force, do not resist or put your life in any danger. No shopping while on duty. No headphones. No cell phone texting or long conversations.
    Some of these rules made a certain amount of sense, I suppose. I particularly approved of the rule about not leaving the kettle unattended. However, if any group of people should not only be permitted but rather encouraged to smoke, drink, and take drugs, it is the bell ringer. This combination of substances would likely ensure the smile that the Salvation Army so stridently seeks.
    There was one inconsistency that captured my attention and possibly that of others, although no one else mentioned it in my presence. In the first handout of rules, the date on which we would receive our final paychecks was listed as December 31. However, on a subsequent document and without any fanfare, the receipt date for the check was given to be January 4, 2011, a mere four days variance in human terms, but quadruple lifetimes in the existence of many bell ringers.
When I arrived at The Citadel the second morning, I discovered that Lester was not the only person to have baled on this adventure. We were down approximately twenty people from the previous day, a condition that did not surprise Ann Girard, what with her troubled years of dealing with those of us considered by many to be the dregs of society. But even with our number reduced, she nevertheless did not send out everyone. Again, about half of those gathered and shivering were told to come back at the first of the week and to not despair because surely others less committed to the glorious cause would fall the way of attrition. It felt as if we were at a recruitment meeting for the Politburo.
I must apologize if my tone here sounds cynical. But as Lester was quick to point out, many of the people in the Salvation Army’s employ were of the same economic stratum the Sallies claimed to want to help. And those poor folks were often treated in a very shabby manner. The constant waiting around and deathly monotony were bad enough. Added to this, however, was a daily ritual of rewards and punishments which would have sent the writers of The One-Minute Manager into fits of apoplexy. Employees began showing up at The Citadel a little after seven in the morning, hoping someone would remember to bring coffee and donuts. Around nine o’clock, Girard sashayed into the gym and her assistants proceeded to announce the names and dollar amounts of those who had earned a bonus from the previous day. A bonus meant that the bell ringer had brought in at least $150. The names and amounts were called out and each person thus identified approached the altar where Mad Dog would hand over three, four or five one dollar bills. I bonused that first day, as did the never-to-return Lester, and quite a few others, two of whom bear special recognition. An old white guy named Vincent and a young black guy named Johnnie Walker brought in more than six hundred dollars each day. This still seems impossible to me and yet I cannot bring myself to challenge the veracity of The Salvation Army in this instance only because I can think of nothing the nonprofit gained by making such assertions. Perhaps the two of them danced in drag and played “Oh! Come All Ye Faithful” on kazoo to prospective electronics buyers. Maybe they used loaded weapons. I never did figure it out.
One thing I did understand and quickly was Girard’s habit of singling out underachievers for selective humiliation. “Ellen,” she would say. “You were at the Food City all day yesterday and only took in $37.50? That is really inexcusable. If you can’t do better than that, you can’t work for me. Darrell? Where’s Darrell? Yes, well, I see that you only did $47.22 at the Rancho Market? I know that store, Darrell. I find it—suspicious. I’ll give you one more day there. That’s the best I can do.”
She could afford to publicly ridicule these folks because, again, there were plenty of people the first two weeks who were sent away without so much as an apology because the Army had failed to secure enough stores. If the underachievers didn’t like it, there were plenty of starving homeless to take their places, a somewhat disturbing attitude for a Christian organization to take.
On the third day of this misadventure the Phoenix weather turned cold and rainy. But we had no need to despair because our employer came forth with sanctuary. We were informed during the morning meeting that they would sell us knit caps and would even be so generous as to deduct the cost from our paychecks if we hadn’t the resources already. I was in the midst of trying to decide who I wanted to punch first when my consternation was further assaulted by the offer of a pair of paper thin gloves for an additional five spot. While I was in the fortunate position of needing neither of these “gifts,” that was not the case for the majority of my job mates and I was considering vomiting right in the gymnasium when I noticed that almost all of the gathered throngs were applauding the perceived generosity of Girard and her thugs. I flashed on that scene in Cool Hand Luke where Paul Newman antagonizes George Kennedy for endorsing the warden’s position on maintaining order. Then I fell silent as I remembered that Newman took quite a beating for his insolence. But I remained fascinated by the crowd reaction to their own dehumanization. “We probably won’t need many of you this Saturday,” Girard pronounced with optimism. “We have about twenty-five volunteers coming in and that’ll save us from having to pay many of you.” Now, one might expect that the notion of unpaid scabs coming in to do our work for free would be the last thing that homeless and hungry people would want to hear, but the reality was that her declaration was met with enthusiastic applause. And before I come off as too self-righteous to live, the sorry fact remains that I continued to work for this band of bullies for the entire season. The line separating the homeless from the well-housed can be a thin one.
Some good did come my way. To shatter the deafening monotony, I occasionally kept an eye on potential shoplifters. Under normal circumstances, I would have been foursquare on the side of criminality, but over the days and nights, I came to recognize and respect the amazing hard work of Margie, the Walgreens manager. So when two teenage girls fled the premises in a huff of diversion, I ran after them and managed to copy down their car license number which I turned over to the local LEOs. Subsequently, a young man with a wireless device pressed against his ear staggered out of the store, attempted to knock me over and called the hardworking Margie a bitch. I pushed him back and shouted “I didn’t hear you! Say it again!” He fell into the backseat of what I suspect was his grandfather’s car. I walked right up to the driver and told him the kid had better watch his mouth. The old man behind the wheel said that the kid wasn’t talking to me, so I kicked the side of the car and begged the young man to come out and repeat himself. They fled amidst a string of obscene gestures, none of them terribly original. The holidays bring out the triteness in many people, not least of whom being myself.
The most frightening incident came about when a rather puffy man on a Harley parked his bike in the handicapped space and went into the store without first turning off the bike’s motor. I recognized this happened because he was having trouble starting the cycle, but that didn’t change the fact that I couldn’t hear my own annoying bell over the roar of the idling U.S.-made monster. After a few minutes of impatient waiting, I walked over to the machine and turned off the engine. The silence brought bliss upon the vicinity, a serenity that was shattered when the biker emerged from the store with an envelope of photos and separated the distance between the two of us at an alarming speed, demanding to know if I had shut down his hog. “It was really loud,” I said, wondering what eternity held for my soul. His mangled mouth made a broken grin. “Suppose it was,” he said. “Sorry.” And with that he straddled the motorcycle and after fifteen minutes or so, roared off into whatever desolate Cro-Magnon cave from whence he had come, possibly hoping to share with his tribe the newly discovered secret of fire.
It was not all bad, however. I met a wonderful young girl named Lauren who helped me wile away the hours by discussing Christopher Moore, Philip Roth, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. She wanted to teach English when she grew up, she said. When you grow up? I asked. “I’m only fourteen,” she informed me. Jesus wept.
Then there was Marissa, another young lady on the threshold of the future. Marissa was a sales clerk at Walgreens who had just turned in her notice when I first met her. She typically stuffed some of her change and bills into the kettle while telling me how much she looked forward to her career in the U.S. Army as an interrogator. Images of Abu Graib clashed with my memories of her offering cigarettes to a homeless guy who often made the rounds of that neighborhood, as well as of her determination to overfill the kettle with as much money as she could conceivable afford.
Perhaps the most moving occurrence came during the second week when a boy on a small bicycle approached me and drew six dollars out of his jeans pocket and forced them into the red kettle. This child, who looked to be six or seven years old, frowned at me and admitted that at one time he and his family had been on the street and he hoped this contribution would help somebody else out.
By the beginning of the final week, the workforce of the local Sallies’ bell ringers had reduced itself to thirty. It was at this point that I became aware of a distinct upturn in the previously murky attitude of Major Lacey, Girard, and the stooges that attended them. When one of my paychecks was delayed due to what Ms. Girard termed a “processing error,” I protested and threatened to seek redress through the local headquarters. Much as she distained my arrogance, she did resolve the problem without delay. It was also at this juncture that my bonus “rewards” of three dollars per day began flowing regularly from their coffers and into my wallet. I even observed that Lacey, et al., began using the same courteous manner with me that they insisted we use with others. This shift in their behavior coincided perfectly with the drop in the number of active ringers which in turn correlated with the hastening approach of the Christmas holiday.
The final day of this project was December 24, by no means the shortest day of the year. By this point my legs and feet had taken on the dimensions of a triathlete’s and my mind sloshed like a bowl of tortilla soup tied to the top of a helicopter. I was exhausted and grouchy, although not a bit disparaging of the holiday or of the season surrounding it. I was simply looking forward to my duty being finished. This being the last day, I saw no sense in toeing to every last rule, so I made a point of periodic leaning, sent text messages to complete strangers, and expunged the words “thank you” from my vocabulary. In the words of the songwriter, I “tried my best to be just like I am.” It paid off. Two events, great in the scheme of things, occurred which left me feeling some of the festiveness we had been instructed to goad others into. First, I brought in $459 that day, my personal best, accomplished without breaking a sweat or with the use of weaponry. Second, and of far more importance, I met a woman named Joan who expressed a determined interest in joining in on the fun. She approached me with a friendly confidence that quickly caught my attention and proceeded to berate people who entered or exited the Walgreens without pausing to make a donation. “Come on!” she bellowed. “You people have money to buy things nobody really wants, but you won’t put a buck in the pot? What’s the matter with you folks? Come on, put some money in the kettle! Let’s go! That’s it! That’s the way to do it! Yes, keep it coming!” She was amazing, to say the least. Near the end of her participation, she said she would love to work for the Salvation Army next Christmas. “They’d probably fire me for being too aggressive,” she reckoned.
“On the contrary,” I said, thinking of Ann Girard. “They’d make you the boss.”