The
Conard File
[begin November 15, 2019]:
Sarah
made her first batik and gave it to me as a present. It was a fish. She was
unilaterally in love with me. She was 43 and I was 28 and this was in San
Francisco. We were residents of the halfway house Conard for mentally ill
people.
Before
I moved in I was at the Chinatown YMCA, renting by the month. My father had put
me there after I was released from Napa State Hospital. The year was 1977 and I
already been homeless once. When I lived at the YMCA I ate mostly Chinese
cream-filled buns at a pastry shop at Wavery Lane, an alley off of Grant
Avenue, the main street of Chinatown. My father had given me $1,000 and some
nice clothes. He figured that I would bounce right back into economic life, but
I disappointed him, because even at age 70 today, I never made it back to the
workforce.
How
do you account for yourself, mister? When I take occupational preference and
skills tests I always get accounting and it tells me to work for the FBI and
the CIA. A bit of forensic accounting will flush out the criminals and their
money trail. I smell the money, I smell the green. It is because I am good in
math. But such a job is drudgery as far as I am concerned and it is not that I
am unable to work physically or mentally, but it is that I am emotionally
unable to work. And there is a reason for it.
“They
told him to go back to work, and he pleaded that he wasn’t ready. They said
that his disability compensation was over and he needed to go back to work. That
night he jumped off the roof and died.” It was not Franz Kafka who juried his
disability; it was the State. And the man who related this story was the
brother of the said dead man. This was not a major event in a big US city. It
was the small town of Aberdeen. When logging and fishing ceased in this small
town, there were a lot of alcoholism, teen pregnancy, and crime. I lived here
and when I was very young, I started working. An independent contractor was my
first job at age 12. I had a paper route. Then the jobs got heavier and heavier
but that wasn’t why I broke down.
It
was a built-in genetic time bomb. It reminds me of the cartoon in a terrorist
training camp. The teacher demonstrating suicide bombing said to the student
terrorists around him and said, “Now watch very carefully! You are only going
to see this once!”
And
when I was exploited by my family and the State sufficiently I judiciously
broke down. Even a machine needs oiling but I was not perceived to have any
needs. And when one is pulled from both ends vigorously enough, he will snap in
the middle. All that is left of this man now is the sad and urgent lesson not
to treat others this way. For in the long run, you cannot whip the horse
forever to go at top speed and never feed it grass. But maybe “grass” was part
of the problem. The government didn’t take care of its youths well enough and
offers no guidance. Thrown to wolves are many young and impressionable young
men and women. They are sold a false paradise.
