Joy Ride

July 11, 2006 Tuesday

My next door neighbor Myrtle made a big mistake when she said I could come over any time and hang out. Actually, the mistake she made was when she said I could come over any time and raid her fridge, wipe out her candy jar and use her phone. And all I have to do for these privileges is stick my butt on her couch for a while and watch the religious station with her while she tells me about her life growing up on the farm back in the old days. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a hassle. Chats with Myrtle are just as fulfilling as anything from her candy jar (although her fridge leaves a little to be desired, as all it contains is leftover oatmeal from breakfast and some cans of Ensure). I went over there today to use her phone because my cell phone bill was outrageous last month. She told me to feel free to use the phone in her bedroom, and she even turned down the TV just a little bit to accommodate me. (It was still louder than the voice on the other end, though.) I was sitting on her bed, on hold with my credit card company, when I noticed a curious device on her bedside table. It was a long cylindrical shape. It was giant. And it had buttons. My first thought was, Did Myrtle have a dildo?

No, it couldn’t be, I reasoned. She’s ancient. And that thing was huge. And even forgetful Myrtle wouldn’t leave that big hoss lying about.

Naturally, I picked it up and examined it. It had a few different settings and some different colored buttons. I looked through the open door to see if Myrtle was watching me. She wasn’t. She was deeply immersed in Jerry Falwell. I didn’t see an “on” button, so I felt free to press a couple of the orange ones.

Nothing happened. That was good. The credit card people suddenly came back on the line, took exactly ten seconds to reject my plea for a credit increase, and then I hung up. Just before I put the phone down, however, I heard a frantic knock on the door, then someone barging in.

“Myrtle? MYRTLE? You okay?”

It was Shawn, the nurse on call who had busted me on the toilet that day I accidentally pressed the panic button in my bathroom while reaching for a fresh roll.

“I’m fine,” Myrtle called, as Shawn suddenly came into view. She immediately looked over at me sitting on Myrtle’s bed with the contraption in hand.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said in a perturbed tone. “Why can’t you keep your hands off things?”

I held the mammoth dildo-like thing in my hand while Shawn stood with her hands on her hips. “Sorry,” I said weakly, as I finally noticed the small words “nurse call” next to the orange button.

“You’re like a little monkey,” she said. “You musta been a monkey in another life or something.” I agreed that that was indeed a possibility.

Now it is hours later and I am just dying to know what those other buttons do. The curiosity is killing me! I must go back to Myrtle’s tomorrow and investigate.

* * *

July 16, 2006 Sunday

At the time of this writing, it is 2am. I am sitting on my scratchy couch with my laptop and a cat on either side of me, reeling from the obnoxious smell of Old Spice and the voice of Johnny Cash in my head.

It all started around 11:30pm when I went down to the lobby to get on the internet. Nobody but Flora walks the halls at that hour, and that’s only on the nights when she forgets to take her sleep medicine. I thought I had the place to myself, just me in the big expanse of a retirement home lobby.

I did have the place to myself until I started walking back up to my apartment about an hour later. I was rounding a corner when I bumped into Earl stepping off the elevator. “What are you doing up at this hour?” I asked him.

“What are YOU doing up at this hour? I’m just going for a stroll. Can’t sleep.”

“I was on the internet.”

“Hm. Now where ya goin’?”

“I’m going back up to my apartment.”

“Hm.”

We stood in silence for a few seconds.

“Whatcha gonna do when you get there?” he said.

“I reckon I’ll eat something, take my pill, and go to bed,” I said.

“Hm.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Oh, I reckon I’ll do the same.”

Another few seconds passed.

“Earl, did you listen to that Johnny Cash CD I burned for you?”

“I done told you. I ain’t got no CD player.”

“Earl, do you want to come up to my place for a bit?” I asked.

His eyes lit up. “Yeah! Just let me go get that CD! Can I bring my wine?”

“Sure”

“Oh boy!”

He peeled off down the hall as fast as I’ve ever seen a man with a walker and came back to my apartment mere seconds later. He came in without knocking.

“Susie, did I ever tell you about the time I got drunk at the Red Lobster and fell down in the parking lot? It was in 1975.”

“I fall a lot too.”

“Well lo and behold I fell right on top of a twenty dollar bill!” he said, pouring wine into a plastic cup.

“Wow! I’ve never fallen on money before.”

“Yes indeedy.”

“What’d you do with it?”

“I bought some wine and a ticket to a picture show.”

The next hour and a half I heard more stories than I ever cared to hear about Earl’s drinking serendipity, punctuated by his random accompaniment to Johnny Cash and the occasional proclamation, “Get that damn cat off me!” Eighty-five-year-old Earl sat on my couch and sang and poured his heart out to me, the only young person in this building, and thoroughly enjoyed himself. I suppose it’s been a while since he drank a bottle of wine with a young woman at one in the morning.

“Who’s that?” he said.

Ah, old people.

* * *

July 21, 2006 Friday

I was just getting in from lunch at the Beacon with Old Friend (see July 1st entry) yesterday when I noticed a most curious sight in the hallway by the door. I’d seen similar things, as there is always the extraneous walker or wheelchair floating around in the hallways, but I’d never seen one like this.

“Oh no,” Old Friend said, as I snuggled into the seat with a maniacal grin on my face.

“This is awesome!” I said, looking at all the buttons and the little throttle on the right side. “I’ve never ridden in a motorized wheelchair before! It must be Grace’s. There’s an oxygen tank back here.”

“Oh, no.”

I played with the throttle. Nothing happened. Then I saw the green button. Green means go!

I pressed it and it lit up like a little motorized Christmas tree. I played with the throttle again and the chair moved forward. Whee!

Old Friend looked around for any onlookers. “You’re gonna get in trouble. Come on, let’s go. There’s a security camera, too.”

“I’m pretty sure that thing’s fake,” I said, buzzing around in my new toy. It scooted faster than most cars I’d ever driven.

“Come on!”

“Geez, okay,” I said, getting up. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have gotten up. I would’ve taken a joy ride around the halls, no matter how much Old Friend had bugged me about getting up.

But I knew. I knew that later on, when Old Friend was safely on his way back home, that I would be back in that motorized wheelchair. I just prayed that it was still in the hall after he left and everyone had gone to bed.

My dream came true. I went back downstairs around nine o’clock last night when I knew everyone would be in bed and it was still too early for Flora to roam the halls. When I rounded the corner and saw it sitting there, all by its little lonesome, my mouth watered.

I settled in, pressed the green button and flung the throttle forward. It charged forward and even left a little baby skid mark on the carpet. Whee!

I scooted down the hall as fast as it would go, barely missing corners, with my hair flying behind me. Man, that thing was fast! I headed towards Earl’s place, because I knew he’d be up.

The chair came to an abrupt stop. Knock knock knock. Earl opened the door. “Susie! What the hell is this get up? Did you fall again and break something?”

“No! I can walk fine! I just nicked it from down the hallway! It was just sitting there! Waiting to be driven!”

“Is that Grace’s?”

“I don’t know! Come on! Let’s buzz down to the lobby and see if Shirley left any cookies out! I bet my chair is faster than yours!”

And that was all it took for Earl to set his Super Walker aside and get in his electric wheelchair. We raced down the hallway together toward the lobby, my stolen chair clearly having the technological edge over his old lemon.

WHRRRR! My chair went. I looked back at Earl who was putt-putting down the hallway behind me. I let out a short evil laugh. WHHRRRRR!

I put it in reverse and scooted backwards a bit, just to tease Earl a little. Then I powered it up again and raced away down the hall.

WHHRRR! Whrrr! Whrr. Whr. Wwww. Zzzzz. Zz.

Shit!

Earl caught up to me as the battery died, like the turtle catching up to the hare. “Whattsa matter?” he said, grinning. “Did you lose your juice?”

Damn. Not only had Shirley not left any cookies out in the lobby (I walked down there and checked), but I had just raced the battery out of a hot wheelchair and had no choice but to leave it where it was. I made Earl pinky swear he wouldn’t tell anyone.

This morning I was heading toward the mailboxes when I heard a gaggle of old ladies talking in the parlor across the hall. I peeked my head in.

“Somebody must’ve just moved it,” Grace was saying, “because that sure ain’t where I parked it. The battery was dead too.” Some old ladies tut-tutted their heads in disgust. Who would do such a thing, they seemed to be asking themselves.

I kept moving. I went into the lobby (still no cookies) and chatted with our receptionist Shirley for a moment.

After we’d exhausted our conversation about the weather and the upcoming championship bingo tournament, I asked her.

“Hey Shirley, you don’t happen to know if those security cameras are real, do you? The ones inside the building?”

“Of course they are! They lead straight to the video cameras in the maintenance men’s office.”

Oh, shit.

* * *

August 2, 2006 Wednesday

Melinda, our activities director (and the official driver of the Old Fart Mobile), told me yesterday afternoon that we would be having a guest speaker at our Wednesday night get-together.

“We’re not having daiquiri night?” I said.

“Better. This guy is the guy who comes to talk about his world travels and shows his slides. Tomorrow’s presentation is about Japan.”

So tonight I went downstairs with a bag of stuff from my past. Contents of bag: a yukata (otherwise known as a summer kimono), pictures of me dressed as a geisha, a bag of Japanese fishy treats, some Japanese tea and miso soup, and an empty sake bottle (the same sake bottle that my friend Masako gave me before I left Japan the first time, the one with my name in Japanese on it and the date, August 6, 2004… the very bottle that was given to me when I was first sick with cancer, with special instructions that I only open it for the most precious of occasions).

After the guy’s slide show (which sported several pictures of Osaka, making me a little homesick) we busted out the contents of my little bag.

“…and this is my kimono,” I said, putting it on, “everybody in Japan wears these from time to time, even the foreigners like me.”

Oohs and ahhs.

“…and this is some miso soup, see the Japanese writing on it there…” Everyone whipped out their bifocals for a look.

“…and this is a pack of what I call fishy treats, a popular snack in Japan. Anyone dare to try one?”

A lady named Myra from the second floor dared. “Hey, these ain’t too bad!” Several old people leaned towards her and asked her for a bite. She passed them around and everyone nodded in agreement.

I smiled. I knew they’d either lost their minds or their taste buds, probably both. Personally, I didn’t mind the fishy treats, and neither did my cats, but the memory of Old Friend eating one popped into my head. I had asked him a few weeks ago if he wanted to try one, and when he did, he chewed for 1.5 seconds before he said, “I need water. Now.”

“…and this, ladies and gentlemen, is one of my prized possessions.” I produced my empty sake bottle

“Is that sakee?” Ms. Josephine asked.

“Well, it was…” I said sheepishly, “until my Old Friend’s thirtieth birthday last week. Now it’s just a bottle.”

They all laughed. I laughed too. Not because I was witty but because I recalled the memory of Old Friend and I doing shots in my apartment the night he turned thirty and the next morning it was the first time I’d ever puked in the retirement home from being smashed.

Like the good Old Fart Mobile driver she is, Melinda waltzed into the parlor with a tray of daiquiris and some brownies. A while later I found myself with the attention of all the old people in the room. “And you know what else Japanese people do that’s weird?” I said through my second brownie, “they point with their middle fingers.” I demonstrated.

“You mean they don’t mind the birdie?” Earl said.

“They don’t really have the birdie.”

Oohs and ahhs.

The guy originally doing the presentation was knocking back free daiquiris and letting me steal the show. I loved it. It was a chance for me to return to my former life, the life I had before the retirement home, in which I was a semi-normal foreigner in a land where I had friends my age and where people didn’t know about the birdie. It was a chance for me to revisit that strange place, to merge the old life with the new. When the slide show played through a second time and up flashed a photo of Osaka Castle, I felt tears coming to my eyes. I miss that life.

“So what about old people?” Myra asked. “Do they have retirement homes in Japan?”

Everybody stared at me waiting for an answer.

“Not places like this,” I said.

“Those poor people,” she said. “They don’t know what they’re missing.” A few daiquiri glasses clinked.

I staggered back to my apartment with tears fully running down my cheeks. Yes, I was drunk, but that’s not why. It brought tears to my eyes that the people here think of this home as a place to be treasured, not an old folks’ home with stinky old people beds in bare rooms and people in wheelchairs sitting around hallways with nothing to do. These people are still vibrant and industrious, funny and full of stories. And they are kind and naïve enough to feel pity for a country that doesn’t have a place like they have.

Earl caught up with me. “You wanna go for a spin on my wheelchair? I just had the battery replaced.”

“Nah, you go ahead,” I smiled.

“Okay, but you don’t know what yer missin’.” He sped away.

I sure do miss Japan, but I think I love this place even more.