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The first time I saw the two of them doing something was also the first night I worked alone at the place. I was nervous from the start, and the woman on before me was a total alkie. As soon as I got there and clocked in down in the basement, she went, "They're all in bed and they got all their pills."
Then she was gone. I guess she walked off the face of the earth, because she didn't come back the next night, when she was due on. Never called or anything.
Anyway, I was walking up and down the hall of the old house after she left, nervous, like I should be checking on something. It felt like a haunted house, but I felt I belonged, like I was a ghost but didn't know it yet. I could hear the retarded people, all five of them, snoring and tossing and turning. Sleep's  never been so loud. Then I heard real intense moans coming out of the back bedroom. They didn't sound like they were from sleeping people at all.
I went to the door at the end. It had this great big poster on it of Michael Jordan shooting a basketball through outer space. The door was halfway open. Suddenly, the moaning became like some weird song. Like singing and going crazy at the same time. I slid the door open the rest of the way, thinking that somebody might have been having a seizure. I'd just seen the training video on that the other day at my orientation. They had this dramatization about a woman dying from drowning on her own vomit while having a seizure. God knows I didn't want that my first night. I'd made a decision from the get-go: I am keeping this job, no matter what. I was gonna stop living like trash.
I opened the door, turned on the lights.
Tom B. was on his knees in front of Tom A. They were both naked and very white. I didn't know either of them at the time, so I just stood there. Tom B. is skinny and short, and Tom A. is big-bellied with short legs and no butt. Both are about middle-aged or older. Tom B. has a burr cut, and Tom A. has curly dark hair.
So there they were, like that. Blow-job position.
I wanted to scream or laugh or cry, all at the same time. This was my first night alone, remember. I figured they shouldn't be doing that, but I didn't know what else to do, so I shut the door back, like a maid in a sitcom catching people in the middle of something.
Of course I forgot to turn off the lights. I was getting ready to open the door and turn them off when I saw that one of the Toms had already got it. Almost as  soon as it was dark in there again, they were making that same crazy silly sex music.
I went back to the living room. I lit up a cigarette, wondering if I should call somebody. Kate Anderson-Malloy, the home manager, told me when I saw that video the other day that if I had any questions just to beep her. "Just beep me," she'd almost yelled, smiling like a wacko left in charge, but you had to respect her enthusiasm.
I could still hear them. I smoked real deep and seriously contemplated just walking off. Not beeping anybody, just going. Two retarded men participating in a blow job. I mean, I'm not some Pollyanna by any means. But yes, it shook me the hell up.
I was about to go back there again, stupidly afraid that maybe Tom B. might get choked or something, I was on my way, when I heard footsteps. I stopped right toward the third bedroom and I saw Tom B., back in his pj's, tiptoeing back to his room. He had this serious face in the emergency exitlight. Half-demonic, half-angelic and dramatic, like he had gone off and now he was returning from his journey filled with beautiful new things to tell. I felt sorry for him, sort of. I heard him close his door real careful. Heard the rest of them continue with their loud, gurgled sleep.
Sleep deprivation and witnessing a retarded blow-job made me feel kind of paranoid that whole damn night. I kept smoking cigarette after cigarette. Kate Anderson-Malloy had told me at orientation that sometimes state people come out to check on group homes in the middle of the night to make sure the staff isn't getting paid for sleeping on the job. I kept seeing headlights scatter across the walls all night.
Plus there was my whole ex-boyfriend thing brewing too. I was being stalked, so to speak. He didn't know it, but his ass would soon be in jail. Anyway, to keep myself busy, I started snooping through the filing cabinets over by where the scales are, near the door to the basement, in the little makeshift office there.
I got out Tom A. and Tom B.'s files. I read Tom B.'s first. It said right at the start that Tom B. suffered from moderate mental retardation and also possible schizophrenia. He could talk but had trouble with his speech. He had lived his whole life in an institution in Columbus called the Orient, but was sent here when it closed down, as was Tom A. In fact, at that place, according to Tom B.'s file, both Toms had a reputation for being "obsessed with each other's presence" so much that they often had to be split up and put into separate parts of the institution. Usually, though, according to typewritten reports in the file, they found their way back to each other. Tom A. could not talk, and was more retarded than Tom B., so his file was pretty skimpy, except I read one part about when he was four years old, his stepdad burnt him with cigars. |
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©1999 Keith Banner and Hooksexup Publishing
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