Holly Carignan

              “Can we just stop at the store?  Please?”

My client, Tina, said this while we idled at a stoplight.  She had just opened her purse and discovered an empty, crumpled cigarette pack.  She held it out to me.  The summer sun bore down hot and blinding through the windshield of my old Chevy pickup.  My air conditioning had crapped out weeks ago.  I needed the light to change so we could get going, so I could make it to my next appointment, so we could get some wind through the open window.

“I don’t know,” I said.  We had just spent two hours at Tina’s doctor’s appointment.  I had to drop her off and jet off to the other side of town if I had any hope of making it to my next client on time. I felt the first stirrings of hunger.  I had the jitters from a supersized coffee.  I forced a smile — ceaselessly polite, even with my anxiety hassling me beneath the surface, pushing me from the inside out.  “I’m going to be late.”

I used my old piece-of-shit pickup for my job as a community mental health worker.  My job title was “Service Coordinator,” though for years we were called “case managers” until someone realized it was unkind to refer human beings as a “case.”  Most of my clients called me a ‘worker’, though, which sounded a little too close to prostitute.  The same upper echelon that devised the term ‘service coordinator’ instructed us workers to call our clients “members,” which itself had an unwholesome connotation.  Members — like they belonged to an exclusive country club with tennis courts and hot tubs, as if they didn’t need the services of a mental health agency.  I carried through the days, months, years of this work calling my clients “clients.”  Even the clients called themselves clients. 

“Oh my God, you’ve got to understand,” Tina said.  “I really need this.” She put her hands together as if in prayer.

        I made shit money.  I drove my clients to medical and therapy appointments, grocery stores, AA groups, to court, to detox, anywhere and everywhere in a ceaseless effort to help them gain a toehold in the mythic land of mental stability.  I put some serious miles on my junked-up little truck – industrial green, dented and pocked, rusted in some spots and, on the truck bed’s door, an old peeling I Hate Mean People bumper sticker – it had appeared one day, applied, I think, by a stranger in a Wal-Mart parking lot.  I never bothered to take my truck to the carwash or remove the detritus I let pile up in the space behind the front seat, the Dunkin’ Donuts cups, junk mail, yesterday’s dirty gym clothes. 

          My clients had the usual diagnoses – schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, substance abuse, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder.  I imagined Tina saw between us a great gulf of experience and privilege, me a worker — self-actualized, employed, calm, centered, sage, content and healthy; she, a client – beaten down by circumstance and bum-luck neurochemistry.  The gulf she saw wasn’t a gulf, but a tenuous line drawn on quicksand.  I suffered my own biochemical and existential failings.  I took Prozac and anti-anxiety medication, which left me with a fine, chronic tremor that made my head and hands bounce about.  People often assumed I was either cold or nervous. It was me, this hot mess of a well-intentioned person who was supposed to teach my clients those good, God almighty “life skills.” Who cared enough to at least try.  I often felt the weight of a chronic exhaustion; I was single and lived alone, fifteen hundred miles from my family.  I longed for someone to take care of me for a change. 

The cars around us idled, engines thrumming.  Tina gawped at me and chewed on her fingernail, waiting for me to relent.

“Seriously, Tina.  I can’t.  I really can’t.”

She slunk deep into her seat.  “I’m desperate, don’t you get that?”

She waved her hand in front of her face and said, ”It’s so damn hot in here.” She started digging through her purse again as if God himself might have heard her pleas, might have stashed a whole, pristine pack in an unexplored corner of her enormous, cluttered purse. 

“Oh, God, God, God.  Please?”  She said.

Tina’s brown eyes, usually hard and suspicious, had gone soft.  She was always scamming, needling, wanting.  And I was always saying yes when I wanted to say no.  There was no end to my desire to please, to fit together all the dangling participles of everyone else’s needs. 

The light turned green and I stepped on the accelerator.  The rushing wind cooled the back of my sweaty neck.  Tina closed her eyes and stuck her arm out the window, opened her palm into moving air.  

“Just this one time?”  Tina asked.  

We workers were taught not to disclose our emotions, reveal to our clients our vulnerabilities, to always put them first, their needs.

The sweat began to evaporate off my skin, and I felt my relief like a glittery tingle. It brought out in me a surge of abandon, a generosity of the sort that would prove untenable later when my next client carped at my tardiness.

“Okay, yes, okay.  We’ll stop.  But you have to be quick.”  

“Oh, God, thank you,” Tina said, clasping her hands together and raised her double fist to the sky.

In truth, I liked Tina, a self-described former junkie, a woman with the kind of trauma history that could render Jerry Springer speechless.  She was sweet, smart, crafty, her talents and kindness wasted on devising ways to make her pittance from Social Security last an entire month.  She conned anyone in her orbit into her giving her stray cigarettes and loose change.  I learned early on not to leave coins in my cup holders.  Tina lived in a shithole apartment with a tiny Yorkie named Luna.  She subsisted on methadone maintenance and credited it for keeping her clean, off heroin.  “Gotta dress right and fly straight,” she liked to say.  She was around my age but looked years older – deep lines set her eyes and mouth in parentheses.  She had unchecked diabetes, COPD and walked with an arthritic limp.

I watched Tina now, her eyes still closed, her chest rising and falling with her labored breath, her arm still hanging out the window.  No one ever aspires to grow up into an addict with a felony record and hair turned brittle and brassy from years of drugstore dye jobs.  She had long ago lost all her teeth.  But she had a certain panache, an ease with which she exercised her survival skills.  We might have been friends growing up.  I imagined her convincing me to duck out of third period, the two of us sneaking behind an old, abandoned strip mall where she’d pull a fat joint out of her backpack.

Tina lived one turn off a complicated intersection with multiple one-way streets radiating from one traffic light like the arms of an asphalt octopus.  When we drew closer to her neighborhood, after we traversed ice-heave potholes left unfixed from the winter, when the rows of shabby multi-family houses came into focus, she said, “You’re the best.”  She directed me to a convenience store on a side street extending off the octopus. Tina opened her door before I came to a full stop.

“Just don’t fart around in there,” I told her, smiling.  She laughed, giddy, I imagined, at the prospect of fresh nicotine. 

As she hustled her limp across the street, I noticed a group of ragged men next to the store, clustered tall and close like a clutch of dehydrated reeds.  They conferred amongst themselves, tight and almost conspiratorial, didn’t so much as turn their heads as Tina pushed through the door.  A Connecticut Lottery sign hung in the store’s window and, beneath, another sign — $10,000 Winner Sold Here!  I thought about the rush of such a win, the realization that your luck has turned, the hope that it marks the start of a new beginning in life.  I wondered if Tina bought scratch-offs, figured maybe I should, too.  Weeds short and tall poked up through cracks in the sidewalk.  The apartments had sagging decks, dirty siding, chain-link fences.

I lived on the outskirts of this rot in a tiny cottage house on a dirt-road right-of-way.  After harsh winters, the snow melt turned into a soup of mud and garbage that always seemed to overflow from my neighbor’s trashcans and land in my yard.  My bulkhead door was rusted shut and mice sometimes crawled into my house through a hole in my floor under the stove.  Tina lived in the margin, and I rattled my cold bones in a neighboring but no less fraught margin.

When Tina returned, she yanked open my door and fell into her seat.  I looked at my clock — I was well past late.  A choice lay before me: take a series of turns up and down the one-way streets to land in front of Tina’s apartment or pull a U-ey.  I scanned front and back, side to side, weighed the pros and cons.

“No one’s here,” Tina said while she slapped her cigarette pack into her palm and pulled off the cellophane.  “You can do it.  People do it all the time here.”  

I made the U-turn and sailed through the intersection, made a hard left.  Tina removed a cigarette, turned it over and put it back in the pack facing up for luck.  As I eased off the gas and slid to a stop in front of Tina’s building, a razz and a whoop sounded behind my truck.  Tina – again – opened the door before I stopped the truck.  Another razz and whoop.  I saw swirling red and blue lights in my rearview mirror.  Tina left her door cracked open and settled back into her seat.  She kept one foot propped on the door.  “Shit,” she said.

“Fuck,” I said.  “The U-turn.”  

Tina, who had never heard me curse, cracked a quick grin that faded when the cop’s form appeared at my window.  He held his hand over his holstered gun.  I rolled down my window and looked up at him, his young face edged with baby fat, his sandy hair stiff with gel, carefully arranged, neat.  His partner stood with a wide stance behind him and trained his unblinking eyes on me.  He, too, hovered his hand over his gun.

“Know why I pulled you over?”  

I shook my head.

Tina tossed her cigarette pack onto the dash, melted back into her seat and closed her eyes.  Cars slowed as they passed us. The heat shimmered off the pavement in rainbow waves.

To me, the cop said, “License and registration.”

I pulled my license out of my wallet, fumbled through my glove box for the registration.  Jacked up by adrenaline, anxiety, hunger, dismay, caffeine, my usual trembles escalated into a full-on quake.  My hand bobbled as I handed my documents to the cop.

“Know why I pulled you over?”  The cop asked me again.

“No.”

“You didn’t use your turn signal at the intersection,” he said.  “You know that?  That’s why I stopped you.”  His hand still floated over his gun.  “Why are you shaking? Nervous?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why you nervous?”  

So it wasn’t the U-turn?  I shrugged at him, wondering what this guy’s game was, what he was playing at, what answer he had expected.  

He pointed at Tina.  “ID.”  

Tina opened her eyes. “I don’t have one,” she said.  It was true.  She had lost her ID, left it on the city bus weeks ago and tried to finagle money from my work’s petty cash to get another.  My boss had told her no.  All she had was her food stamp card, which she fished out of her purse – it was free-floating in a stew of crumpled dollar bills and empty cigarette packs.  She reached over me toward the window and handed the card to him.

“I said ID,” the cop said.  

Tina, calm and steady, said, “That’s all I got.”  She didn’t look at the cop, but past him.  She folded her steady hands on her lap.

“Why are you shaking?” the cop said to me.  “You got something to be nervous about?”  He bent at the waist, peered into my window.  “What am I going to find in here?”

He scanned the filthy interior.  He struck me as ultra-neat, his tidy hair untouched by the humidity, the fresh powder smell of his aftershave, his skin unblemished.  He seemed like the kind of guy who ironed his jeans and made his bed every morning, the kind who saw pathology in clutter, who considered disorganization an unforgiveable character flaw.  He narrowed his eyes as if he could see past my truck and into my house – had a direct line of sight to the dirty dishes piled in my kitchen sink, the mildew in my bathtub, the tumbleweeds of dust drifting across my hardwood floor when the air conditioner kicked on.  Maybe he could glimpse my thoughts, my memories bare and exposed, my history, my mistakes, the tangled trajectories of all my bad choices.

Tina began humming a quiet, generic tune.  I imagined she was, by now, well-versed in this kind of intrusion, her mind, home and history subject to the kind of search and seizure wrought upon her by people like me.  Hospitalizations, arrests, substance use, children taken by the state, all of it exposed like an opened cadaver.  Maybe she could see inside me, too, right into the white space of my depression. She understood, I realized, how it felt to dwell there.  

The cop repeated himself.  “What am I going to find in here?”

“I don’t know, junk, crap, trash.”  I felt the hot acid of my anger slip through my clenched teeth.  Tina placed her hand on my knee.  She pushed her cool, thin fingers into my skin.  She looked at me through the side of her eye, shook her head ‘no,’ mouthed the word ‘don’t.’

Another cop car, its sirens wailing, pulled up behind the first car.  Two more cops got out.  The baby-faced cop turned, lifted his chin in greeting, turned to say something to them.

“Jesus Christ,” Tina muttered, rolling her eyes.  “Don’t worry,” she said to me, like she knew this would all end, like we had just gotten caught in a passing cloudburst.  She leaned back.  “Stay cool.  This’ll be over soon,” she said, her hand still resting on my leg. 

It felt odd, her touch, the unholy comfort of it – we “workers” had been taught not to develop personal relationships with clients, to maintain a physical and psychic distance from them, to keep physical touch limited to a handshake or a brief hug.  I had, in fact, shied away from most forms of touch in my regular life as well, cringed when someone patted my shoulder or brushed by me in a crowd.   Tina’s hand sat both light and heavy on my leg, easy and strong, almost electric.

The cop turned to face us again.  “What’s back there?”  He moved closer, stopped just short of poking his entire head through my window.  “Why you nervous?  What’s in here?”  The three cops stood behind him like a bored firing squad.

“What am I gonna find on your record?”  He asked.

“A ticket.  From twenty years ago.”  It was true.  I lived a desperately quiet life.

“No, really.  I’m gonna find something.  What am I gonna find?”

“One ticket.”  

“You got drugs in here?”  The cop said.  I didn’t drink alcohol – any little drop of it went straight to my head, made me sick.  One glass of wine will send me bowing to the porcelain god. Weed did nothing but make me sleepy. The Percocet I had gotten from a long-ago surgery made me stupid. I had bottle of Prozac in my center console, legitimate, with a prescription.  I pictured myself getting dragged out of the truck, getting thrown against the side, handcuffed, trying to explain it. 

“I was parked by that store.”  The cop said to me now, turning and gesturing at the intersection.  “I saw those men standing in front of that store.  I saw you talking to them.”  I remembered that group of men I had seen earlier, those rangy men standing tight in their own private conference, the ones minding their own business, the ones who didn’t look up when I parked near the store, the men who didn’t flinch when Tina opened the store’s door right next to them.  They’d had no interest in us.  

“I didn’t talk to them,” I said.  

“I saw you.  You said something to them.”

“I didn’t.”  

“They’re known drug offenders, those men.  You know that?  Yeah, you know that.  What did they say to you? You got drugs in here?” 

         I felt so tired and hot sitting with Tina in front of that cop.  I sat stiff, said nothing, leaned my head back and shut my eyes like Tina.  This cop, he wanted me to relent, to confess, admit to some phantom pharmaceutical transgression.

          I’d had enough.  You want to search my truck, tear it inside out?  Maybe you’ll find a stray Prozac in that space between my seat and the center console, the area I called the black hole because I was always dropping crap down there and couldn’t fit my hand in to retrieve it.  Go ahead, officer, impale me with the ice pick of your judgement. But Tina’s hand, still on my leg – I felt the weight of it, the covalent-bond electricity of it.  I realized that I owed him nothing, and so I gave him nothing.  I said nothing.

The cop turned his gaze from me to Tina.  “You got a record?”

“I’ve been clean ten years,” she said, shrugging.  I’m clean, straight.”  It was true.  The methadone clinic tested her daily, would have called me bitching if she came up dirty.  I saw, for the first time, this side of Tina, this ability to shrug off shit luck and bad circumstances, just keep going, keep moving, carry on with the business of survival.  I pictured her hauling herself across town to the methadone clinic every day, sometimes hitching a ride, sometimes walking, no matter the weather.

The cop let out a snigger.  “Yeah, we’ll see about that,” he said.  He went back to his car, leaving his cohorts on the street outside my truck.  They relaxed their hands from their guns, huddled together into a chit-chatty clique.

Tina exhaled.  “What a dick.”

“Seriously,” I said.  “A little-dick dick.  It’s probably a useless nub.”

Tina snickered.  “Nub,” she said.  “I like that.  Nub.”

That word, nub, it filled me with this lightness, the funny sound of it, like when you say a word over and over until it doesn’t even sound familiar anymore.  I let out this carbonated laugh, felt myself get lighter, felt like I was almost floating above my seat, like only the truck’s ceiling stood between me and a lilting drift into the stratosphere.  Tina took her hand off my knee.  She looked impassive, her face relaxed. Her hand, which she had removed from my knee, rested lax on her lap.  She looked ready to abide whatever the cop wrought upon us.

The cop strode back, his mouth a thin slash of a line.  He handed us our documents.  And then, improbably, this: He let us go.  He waved us off, no explanation, just an admonition about using my signal – still nothing about the U-turn.  I imagined his disappointment, finding our records and seeing nothing but wide swaths of blank space.  Maybe he called his sergeant hoping to find some angle, some way to worm his way into my truck and dig for the buried treasure, those golden, mythical narcotics. I pictured that conversation, his pleas a series of “buts” ending with one resolute “no” from his boss.  Tina patted my knee and stuffed her food stamp card back in her purse.  The cops returned to their cars, turned off their lights and pulled away. 

“See?” she said.  “It’s fine, we’re okay.” She opened her door, unfolded herself from the car, clambered up the uneven, broken brick walkway and inside her apartment building, back to her dog Luna, back to life, because her work here was done.