Category: prose

Second semester had a professor who used to give lectures at the beginning of workshop, like we were undergrads or something. Generally, self-promoting and of subjects such as how one should “network” for blurbs and never self-publish and other things nothing to do with the craft of creative writing. But I already wasn’t impressed with her, considering I had read one of her books and also because I knew at which university she worked. One that let me in.

In the book of hers that I read the summer before I entered grad school, I was struck at two things especially. One, that she seemed to have lifted an idea about a female protagonist with a prosthetic limb and a strange relationship with a neighborhood boy from Flannery O’Connor, and two, that she kept writing “stoop,” for porch, even though the story was set in St. Louis.

One day, I took this book, thumb still in the middle, livid, and marched across the street to my neighbor and when she came to the door, I said, inflamed, “What’s this?” indicating with my empty palm, waving down at what I was standing on.

Her eyebrows drew, quizzical.

“Concrete?”

“No. No. What do you call this structure? That I am standing on,” and stomped emphasis.

She and her teenaged daughter looked to one another, befuddled, then back to me.

“A porch?”

“Right!” I turned a circle, both hands in the air, looking up in celebration at the revelation. “Yes! Porch!” and turned back to her, glaring, “Not stoop.”

She shook her head a bit, half smiling, backed and opened the door wide to invite me in. I sat in a chair and she went to the couch and her daughter stood waiting in the living room as I explained what I was reading. I told her, I am from St. Louis and have never heard anyone call a porch a stoop in my life and asked if she ever had. Of course, she said no. We attempted to explain it to one another. She asked if this woman was from Boston or something. I answered, no, best I could tell she was from Arkansas and I couldn’t remember where she went to college, but not anywhere they say stoop, I didn’t think. She asked if she was new to town. No, I said, decades, it seemed.

“Maybe … because she’s from Arkansas,” I proposed, “she thinks St. Louis is, like, the big city,” in air quotes, “and the only experience she ever had with,” palms up, wiggling, “the big city …from growing up wherever-who-knows-where down in Arkansas, is from movies or TV or whatever and they say stoop in those because they are mainly set on the East Coast, so she assumes we say stoop in St. Louis.”

My neighbor snickered and her daughter smiled, lips pulled in, suppressing, on the verge of attending college and not wanting to get in the habit of laughing at a professor in advance, perhaps.

“That might be it,” my neighbor said, a smiling straight-man.

That was my first introduction to that second semester professor.

It didn’t get better.

In class, she reminded me of other professors whom I had as an undergrad who would spend most of the time – – my time – – that I was stuck in their classes, dropping names of people I never heard of and talking about which fancy school they got their PhDs from. I had one once, who, after she went on and on about it, turned to each student, one by one, to absorb the phony, or possibly occasionally sincere, reverence she expected to be conveyed then turned to me, expecting the same, and, instead, perhaps in retaliation for her wasting so much of my valuable time, I said, “But what’s a PhD mean, really? Other than … when everyone else completed their degree and went out and got a job, you just stayed in school.”

I won’t bother to tell all of it from the second semester, like the fomenting details of the night I finally dropped my forehead in my palm in defeat and said to her, after three attempts to explain a point I was making about a piece we were critiquing, “Just move on to someone else. You don’t even have the neural pathways to understand what I am saying,” but I will tell you about the night she used my words, verbatim, from a critique a couple of weeks earlier, as examples in her lecture-during-workshop of what a “bad reader” is.

In brief; a couple of weeks before, we read a first story from a new student that was so stupid that I thought it might be intended as irony. And I critiqued it that way. I encouraged the writer to go ahead and crank it up, because, though I understand and appreciate subtlety, there might be a few places where he could increase the absurdity for even more laughs and to ensure unmistakable identification of its genre for the reader. Not to go too far, though, I said. Keep it smart. Of course, I told the writer, if it was not meant as a satire, and instead was meant for a middle school audience, the level at which it seemed to be written, some of the subject matter might be a bit too harsh for them. So, that wouldn’t work. Otherwise, I went on, because the descriptions of police were so inaccurate throughout, and I pointed to specific issues within it, the only audience I could see where it would work was at a Ferguson protest, reading it into a microphone for trust-funder disrupters and naive enthusiasts who would buy into it. But anyone who is from the kind of neighborhood that seemed to be described in the piece, I added, and had actual experience with bad cops – – and I am one of them – – wouldn’t buy this, pointing to a couple of specifics, again, in the piece.

Since that is what I was supposed to be there for. Critique.

Take what you want and leave the rest.

But I never heard this professor advise that line. Instead, two weeks later (since I skipped the next week and she wanted to wait for my return to publicly demean me) she gave one of her lectures wherein she quoted me verbatim, like I said, from that aforementioned critique, repeatedly, while those of my classmates who recognized my words sat awkwardly and I kept myself in the room against all good reason. She ended with, after again quoting me without any formal attribution, “You don’t have to listen to people who say things like that. They’re just old women who don’t understand.”

But I already had committed to stay in school by the time she gave her bad reader speech. I had no plan. I had no idea what would happen. I was just going on faith. Not faith yet. Just hoping to hope one day. Not knowing why I had been saved twice from brain injuries that should have killed me. Wondering why there was always some occasional someone saving me, coming in the nick of time, encouraging me to follow my bliss and all that happy crap. Saying that God has a plan for me and shit. Hanging in. Doing what was in front of me. And this other professor had encouraged me to stay.

He had run into me in the hall one day in the first week or so of that second semester and asked how things were going. I told him that I was going to quit after the semester because there was no point of it, and he said, “Noooooooo.” He scrunched down and asked me to come to his office to talk and I refused. I told him I wouldn’t meet in his office because of how much I hated being in this building and even hated it as an undergrad because the only time I was in it, back then, was to see the advisor for the campus paper where I was the news editor, dealing with some explosion like the chancellor trying to get me kicked out of school for stories I wrote about all her little (big-ass) projects, having me stalked by administration officials sitting outside my classrooms to see if I was attending and digging into my financial aid records or some lawyer who was threatening to sue me over a story I wrote about a client of his when I didn’t have libel insurance or protesters coming into staff meetings and calling me a racist because the student government president had been arrested on campus, which led to me discovering that he was on work release and sleeping in a jail cell every weeknight and weekend and I had the audacity to report it or how the managing editor was stealing my by-line in the online edition with the help of his computer guru online editor for a story I did that went national so that CNN was asking for him instead of me or how that same man would not approve my travel expenses for the trip to Kansas City where I won Journalist of the Year from the Missouri College Media Association even though he paid the expenses of everyone else on staff who didn’t or whatever other bunch of bullshit.

I might not have said all of that.

But that was the mood of it. I certainly mentioned bad undergrad memories, in regard to the building. Maybe I also made some indication about the current situation. Maybe I let him know that this MFA degree was a detriment to whatever I had left of a reputation as a news writer. Death knell. I might have assured him that this degree certainly wouldn’t be added to my resume. So, it made no sense for me to stay. But whatever I told him that night, I know I told him that every minute in that building was dreadful and dread-inducing in the hours before coming. I definitely told him that it was all I could do to continue standing on that spot that very minute, so I wouldn’t be making any plans to meet in his office, to stay even longer. I clearly remember saying that. I clearly remember standing in that hallway after class feeling the elevator like an orbiting moon pulling at the ocean of my body.

He asked, what could we do.

I said, we could meet off campus.

“Somewhere away from here,” I said.

He agreed and we made a date for some three weeks later.

We met at a bar/restaurant on South Jefferson near my home in the city.

But a few things happened in the interim.

Like my brother got out of prison.

A five-year sentence. Thought I was safe. Thought I could make it through grad school and then, although I wasn’t thinking of it consciously yet, go back to California. But three and a half years in, he was out. My Aunt Janice told me. I tried not to think of it.

Until she called one day with grave concerns. He was doing things. Taking my mom places. My aunt was getting suspicious. She had overheard him talking to my mother about how I was a thief, stealing from her. At first, it wasn’t a problem for me. I was doing all the work and he was getting all the adoration and that was nothing I had to adjust to. Not unlike how she made a show in front of me of her plans to take him school-clothes-shopping the year after he dropped out of the tenth grade, the same summer I was fourteen and she told me to get a job and buy my own, even though I continued attending. Same ole. And I had my Aunt Janice helping me, doling out my mother’s complicated pill regiment and keeping track of her various appointments and reminding me when I had to come and cart around my mother so she could disparage me in front of doctors, causing the doctors to turn to me and plead hang in there, no matter the abuse and would tell me that I was appreciated by them, if no one else, and that my mom would die without me and I would look at them when they said that last line, stony, and silently convey … and … so … your point being?

But then it turned out my brother couldn’t live in the condo my mother had promised him. Too near in proximity to a daycare. Parole violation. That changed everything. Accelerated it. Then my mom’s financial advisor called me one afternoon, dropping hints within the bounds of her ethics, informing that my brother brought my mother to her office to find out where all her money was, telling me that I had the power of attorney currently and could make changes to secure things if I thought that was in my mother’s best interest and that her office opened at nine a.m. the next day. So, I drove out to the county first thing in the morning and signed all those papers. Then my aunt told me that a realtor came. My brother knew an unethical biker lawyer who had a shady notary and they had my mom sign a new power of attorney, even though everyone clearly could see her dementia. With that he put the condo she unofficially gave him up for sale. Then the realtor tracked me down, concerned that my mother was being taken advantage of. He said he wasn’t comfortable because it didn’t seem ethical and I told him there was nothing I could do, that my first priority was keeping my mother alive and I couldn’t fight my brother and his crooked attorney because I was too busy with grad school. I withdrew from the mess of the first condo. My second major concern, at that point, was that my brother also would try to sell the condo my aunt was staying in, which I had spent hours researching dense regulation on how to get transferred into my aunt’s name without triggering Medicaid disqualification due to fraudulent asset transfer, like what my brother was doing with the other condo. Mitigating the risk of Medicaid disqualification, the third issue most pressing on me, after keeping a place for my aunt and my mother alive, the latter of which my aunt was helping me with, daily. The thought of my mother kicked out of a nursing home – – that she really needed to be in and I had been working toward getting her into – – due to Medicaid disqualification, onto the street, wasn’t something I thought I could stomach.

And then, every now and then, when things quieted for a second, a barely perceptible voice from way deep down inside me screamed desperately, WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?

And I would hush that voice. And turn to the next thing in front of me.

Like 600 pages of assigned academic journal article reading. Or response papers on those pages very quickly. Or to read and critique a short story. Two. Write one. Or feed the animals that I never agreed to feed. And fill their water bowls also or travel to the pet store to buy their food.

And drink.

And drink.

And drink.

And then my aunt had a brain aneurysm.

I don’t have any reliable recollection of how it started, how and why I drove all the way out to my mother’s condo in Northwest County that day from South City. It wasn’t scheduled. I can’t say that my memory is fuzzy because I had some sort of breakdown that morning because I was so long past some several in a series of breakdowns that I don’t know what you call it. Compounded trauma? Maybe. But … fuzzy. I don’t remember going.

I remember knocking on my mother’s door and no answer.

My aunt was always there, or I would know if she had an appointment. But no answer.

She hadn’t been answering the phone, which is why I drove out there, maybe.

I went around to the back and tried the slider. It was locked. Unusual.

I cupped my palms on the sides of my eyes and peeked. Saw nothing.

I saw a couple of neighbors sitting on their porch across the grassy area between the condos and walked up the hill toward them but they got up out of their plastic chairs and went in and pulled closed the blinds when they saw me coming.

I went to the front again, looked for a key, maybe hidden somewhere around the entryway, out of desperation. Fingernailed at the door of the locked mailbox, ridiculously. Tried the front door again.

I went back outside from the entry, but just stood there. Couldn’t leave.

I started, tentatively, toward the back again, dizzy, not dizzy, feeling underwater, thickness, my heart squeezed, sick, off-balance, looking down at the uneven turf, trying to not fall and twist my ankle, heaviness, and I heard someone say something. I looked up. Wobbled. Stopped. Wobbled.

It was another neighbor. She was thirty or so feet away from me, stopped there and not coming closer, between buildings. She was bent, glancing over her shoulder. Saying things. Her mouth was moving, I could see. But I could not make out any of the words.

“DePaul.”

I heard that.

“What?”

“They took her to DePaul.”

“My mother?”

She looked behind again, turned to leave, hissed over her shoulder while scurrying away, “I can’t talk to you. Your brother. He’s saying things to all the neighbors. I have to go. I can’t be seen talking to you.”

And she was gone. So, I drove to the nearby DePaul Hospital.

I don’t remember driving there.

I don’t remember going in.

I remember a nurse appearing before me. I remember roofs of other buildings of the hospital complex through windows. The nurse saying words I don’t remember hearing. Muffled. A keyboard clicking. Rolling wheels on tile floors. Vibration of information. Colors and shadows streaming and trailing. Looking to my right. A room, the door open. My aunt on a bed in a hospital gown. Then my mother in front of me. A nurse on her elbow, guiding. My mother smiling. A butterfly bandage. Dried blood. My mother saying, “Hi,” brightly. Small bruises. Forehead. Cheek. Blood on her capris. Bandaged shin, blood showing through. Gauze tape. Red drip. My aunt on the bed with silver rails, white sheets. Clean. Movement. Was that a groan? Contracted. Fingers, hands, wrists, arms, knees, fetalling. Pressure on my forearm. My mother’s fingers. My rough panicked yank, as if repelled from a discovered spider, from my mother’s grasp. Her face, pinched, eyes, hurt, at my rash reaction to her touching me. A doctor. Pulling me aside. “Brain scan … Bleeding throughout.”

I don’t remember then.

I don’t remember driving.

I remember standing in my mother’s condo. My shoes on taupe carpet. Her beside me. Asking if I was hungry. Her heading toward the kitchen. My crisp, lashing answer, ordering.

“No!”

Standing in front of my aunt’s empty chair. Unmoving. My mother returning to my side. Pointing at the carpet in front of it. A darkened spot.

“Right there. See?”

“How long?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Hours. She wouldn’t get up. I tried to get her up, but she wouldn’t.” Shrugged. “I went for a walk, so I don’t know how long,” she said, looking down at the drool spot. “That needs cleaning.” She looked up at me, smiling, seemingly sweetly, “Don’t you think? Before it stains?”

No, thank you, I will not clean that, I remember thinking.

They told me at the hospital, best they could, how she got there, what little they knew, put together from the EMTs. My mother was walking on the busy road near her home that had no sidewalk or shoulder, falling more than once, falling into the street. Finally, someone stopped, got to her, police came. My aunt was somehow discovered on the floor at the condo. Maybe they were taking my mother home and found her. Then the ambulance came and took them both to the hospital where my mom was patched up and it was far too late for my aunt to benefit from any treatment.

I don’t remember who I got to come sit with her. I must have made calls. It wouldn’t be like me to just leave her there alone. So, I must have made some sort of arrangement. Maybe a neighbor. I don’t know. I don’t remember. Someone.

Then I was home standing in my living room on the phone with my brother with a list of things in my mind to get through to him. Like, first and foremost, telling him that he or someone he arranged would have to sit with her right away and he would have to find a way to make sure she wasn’t left alone night and day going forward. He kept interrupting, screaming. That’s not the right word. Too shrill an implication. Growling is too weak. Harrier jump jet hovering. That. I would wait, each time, for him to finish, for each barrage used in an attempt to intimidate to be completely expelled from him. It wasn’t working, but he didn’t know. He didn’t get it. Too tightly swaddled in his own ego. Machismo. Prison tinted. High on his own supply of upper body strength advantage over me. And, if he wanted to try that shit, I remember thinking, he would have to drive to the city and deal with my neighbors coming to check him. He didn’t want that kind of trouble. On parole. Felon, therefore, gunless. And I was so far past his ability to domineer me. He didn’t know. I waited for him, each time, same as I waited, dispassionately, in years prior, with a notebook and pen in hand, when an infuriated city administrator or crazed no-chance political opponent or angry resident or drunken victim of violence was spitting hostility at me, for the moment when I could ask the next question. But this wasn’t about questions. Just information conveyance. I was doing him a favor. And her. Above and beyond. My only duty left, that I could think of that minute, my aunt. I couldn’t help my mother anymore. Not with him in the mix.

He had never heard the phrase “Medicaid disqualification,” until that day.

That shut him up.

I gave him the basics. Quickfire. Five-year look-back for assets sold or transferred.

“Like that condo,” I said.

After a stunned pause, he barked something about how it was his, how she gave it to him, that that had been her intention, that she had said so.

“The feds won’t care what she said,” I answered. “But ask your lawyer. You know. The one who got you that power of attorney even though he knew full-well that she had dementia?”

Another gap.

I told him, I had researched a few nursing homes.

He roared, “My mother is not going into a nursing home.”

“Okay. Up to you,” I stated cordially. “All in your hands now. I’m out.”

Quiet.

I rattled off the names of a couple of nursing homes I had researched, their details, pros and cons and contact information, knowing he wasn’t taking notes. I told him how many doctors she had and their areas of specialization, too fast for him to comprehend, I knew. I said that she was on so many medications of all different kinds and ways of taking, like with or without food and how many times a day and at what time and everything, that it was way too complicated for me to even begin to attempt to explain and that I didn’t even know the names of but that all the information was on the prescription bottles in her condo. I added that I had been lucky to have Janice, so attentive, helping me, but that she was no longer available, as he knew, because that’s why I had just called, to inform him of that and other things.

I added, but of course, he could get all of this information on his own.

“Maybe start at DePaul,” my last tip.

He started to speak, more inhibited, but I interrupted.

“Like I said, I’m done,” and I ended the call.

The hospital phoned during the night. My aunt sat up in bed and insisted the nurse write down everything she said. She didn’t want anyone stuck with a hospital bill, conveyed prepaid funeral arrangements, and things in that regard. I was so relieved. They were wrong about her. She was still in there, just as I had been when doctors left me for dead in San Bernardino in 83.

I was spent. I slept a few hours and went in the morning. But no. No hope, they said. I’ve since read about the term, terminal lucidity, on death’s door, to come around for a minute, one last effort to impart something thought important. Maybe that was it. But I couldn’t have fought them. My strength was gone. I nodded and followed. Hospice, they said. A nursing home near where I lived. One I had been trying to get my mother in, coincidentally, so I was familiar with it. I went there after her and asked about the medical details of what would happen inside her and the answers made me even sicker and weaker.

I slept when I wasn’t in school or doing something else pressing, like drinking myself into oblivion when I could fit it in, for two days.

And after those two days, I went back to sign the papers, as had been prearranged.

“Yes,” I said, smart-assed flippant, “That’s the kind of person I am. Where do I sign? Gotta pen?”

And I signed with a biting smile in the face of it. The sweet young thing on the other side of the desk smiled too, sympathetically, but not in that professional phony way. She saw me.

“I know it’s hard,” she said as I signed. And as I handed her the clipboard she looked at me with pure authoritative kindness. “You go on now. It’s done,” and when I froze, pen mid-air, eyes wide, immobile, mouth slightly dropped open, she tugged it out from my grasp and added in the lilt of lullaby, “Go on now. Get to your appointment with that professor. It’s all over now. You go. Take care … of yourself.”

Then I drove from there to my meeting on South Jefferson.

“Yes, kill her slowly by withholding liquid until she dies suffering of dehydration in agonizing pain over some four or five days. Yes. That’s who I am. Where do I sign? Have a pen?”

Some of the first sentences I said at the bar/restaurant on South Jefferson where we had arranged to meet so he could convince me to stay in school almost immediately after he entered and approached me as I put down an empty glass except smoking ice cubes and picked up a second Mexican Mule on the bar and drank it down while lifting two fingers of the other hand to the bartender and said, when I put the second empty down, “Keep’em comin’.”

I told him every single thing. All of it. All of them. All I had been going through. Brother, father, former children, mother, aunt, that day, the last three years.

Outside on the bar patio, an hour or so later, I leaned in, hands splatted flat wide on the wire table between us and breathed out earnestly, “Why do I keep helping people who don’t love me?”

And he leaned right back in toward me and breathed out himself, enthralled.

“I. Don’t. Know.”

Seeming sincerely curious at what might be the answer.

We sat and we chatted and we exchanged flimsy vitas, played and bantered deep and shallow and I don’t think we discussed school much, if at all. Of course, at some point he did propose, what the bravest or least conscientious of men always suggested back then, things of romance he imagined might happen between us, which I promptly scoffed. But by the end of three hours and eight Mexican Mules in, after he brought forth several chuckles and unexpectedly impressed me as intellectually fit and quick-witted, and was realized might be so perfectly complementary to my knowledge base and life experience that it intrigued me, I thought I might have stumbled upon a new friend. So, over the course of that afternoon, I guess, latently, I decided to stay.

Photo credit: Ranney Campbell, 2024.