Lately, I’ve thought about the guys from the group home. I don’t know why they’ve come to mind, but there they are, still living with me in my memories thirty-one years later.
*****
If only I had known then that Dick—lunging at me with unsteady feet and incoherent speech when I stepped inside his house—would still make me smile decades later. But I didn’t, and his jarring welcome was our first meeting. My brother and I were already set to move in with the man and his two roommates, Allen and Tim. I assessed my surroundings—the stains on the plaid couch cushions, the smoke-filled atmosphere—and nervousness rattled me. What had we gotten ourselves into?
The house on Juno Avenue in Saint Paul—and the gig we had signed up for—was a coup, I reminded myself. College students like us couldn’t resist the offer. We would live at the group home rent-free as live-in staff and get paid for coming home each weeknight by ten o’clock to relieve the dayshift workers and make sure the men took their meds and went to bed. With extra money for weekend and holiday shifts, the situation was ideal, except for the dishes the guys may or may not have washed properly, the smell of cigarette smoke permeating every last thing, and the mystery coffee can on the closet shelf in Dick’s room.
The supervisor of the house assigned us to an unfinished room in the basement, the lock on the door our biggest amenity. The washer and dryer outside our room didn’t require quarters, so that was something to celebrate too. My brother slept on a narrow military cot, and I passed my nights on a mattress on the floor. My eyes wide in the musty darkness, I tried not to think about the centipedes I spied darting across the cinder block walls during the day.
Since our little TV didn’t get reception in the basement, my first paycheck bought us a VCR. And after we tucked in Allen, Tim, and Dick for the night, we scurried away to watch movies we had rented from a store around the corner. While we indulged in our cinematic escapes, we dreamed of moving out, finishing college, and making big money.
Oh, we’ll look back on this later and laugh, we told ourselves. But we laughed even then.
I refused to show fear the day Allen backed me into a corner in the kitchen, his intense gaze magnified through the smeared lenses of his glasses. Another time in a fit of rage, he hurled the decorated Christmas tree down the basement stairs. But that was all in the beginning. He soon let us into his harder days when he shuffled around in his mother’s old slippers and cried because he missed her.
Tim told us how when he was little he got a withered arm and one leg several inches shorter than the other. He used to be smart too, he said, until that car hit him. His sister picked him up for church on Sunday mornings, and he hobbled to the door faster than usual, Bible in his good hand and a smile stretched across his face. During our time at the house, Tim underwent surgery to lengthen his leg. When I got up in the night to turn the screws a quarter of an inch at a time on the metal halo that encased his leg, I asked him if it hurt. No, he said, shaking his head and smiling in that sleepy way.
Dick, the door greeter on our first day, clomped around the house in orthopedic shoes, his voice booming, and we reminded him to turn on his hearing aids. We shuddered when he spit in the coffee can in his closet and hid its contents away like a vile treasure. His seizures were the first I had ever witnessed, and after each one, he slept the rest of the day. When he awoke, the supervisor stopped in with York mint patties for him, and he squirreled them away in his room.
One day, I waved goodbye to Dick and watched him climb onto the bus bound for his day program. Twenty minutes later, the bus driver phoned, his voice edged with panic. At one stop, Dick had bolted down the steps and run away. I called the police, and they picked him up only a couple of blocks from where he had escaped his ride. He returned home in high spirits, rejuvenated by his morning adventure with law enforcement. I told him I had reported the situation—and never do that again, please—and admiration lit his eyes. From that day on he called me Cappy. My brother and I imagined the name was short for Captain, but we never found out for sure.
Oh, we’ll look back on this later and smile, we told ourselves. But we smiled even then.
*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.