Saturday, February 14, 2004

LIFE OF BRIAN 6: We meet I established a correspondence with Los Angeles Department of Social Services, and in particular that pesky social worker, Betty Ledig. As the bureaucracy creaked forward with my inquiries and requests, I prepared as much as I could. I volunteered three hours a day three days a week at Chico's Joe McGee Center, a sort of day care program for adults too severely developmentally disabled to participate in work training programs. I made a lot of friends there and came to love them very much. Each of them deserved to be celebrated in some way. I also read a great deal, and my search for words indirectly provided me with the most important knowledge I'd ever get, all I really needed to know. It sounds mystical-magical or at least yet another instance of self-mythology, or maybe it only seems that way to me. Maybe this sort of thing happens to everyone all the time and it wasn't as important as I think it was. Anyway, I was scouring the shelves in the psychology section of a used book store one afternoon. A very tall, elderly Catholic priest perused the spines of some volumes nearby. He was in full uniform, black-suited, even black-hatted. He wore thick glasses and had an enormous cloud-like white beard that sort of floated around his face. His papery skin was dead white and his lips the color of raw liver. Sorta scary, actually. He noticed the books I was pulling from the shelves and asked what my interest was in mental disability. "I'm hoping to bring my brother here to live and I don't know much about his condition," I said. Ah. He had a friend who worked with retarded adults. It was a heartbreaking business. Just what in particular was wrong with my brother? "He has Down syndrome." His expression became very serious, very intense. He even took me carefully by the upper arm to turn me in his direction. His friend, a nun, had devoted her life to her work among people with mental disabilities. She had shared with him that, where those afflicted with brain damage or who were retarded for other reasons learned and developed just so far and that was that--they each had a personal limit--in her experience Down's patients were very different, very special. They had no such limit. They retained the capacity and willingness to learn their whole lives if people would just not give up. They were slower by varying degrees than the rest of us, but they just learned differently, and they always got there eventually. This may or may not be true. I've never seen it in print. But this conversation provided me with all I'd ever need to know about living with my brother, and it has served us both well. In September 1981 I was allowed to meet my brother in person and spend a few minutes with him. I drove the 10 hours down to Los Angeles and the next morning followed the directions the social worker had given me to the Brown Home. I knocked at the door and waited. I held a gift, an inflated transparent plastic ball filled with twirling butterflies. I was only slightly apprehensive. A housekeeper answered the door--Mrs. Brown was traveling (Mrs. Brown, bless her, was always traveling)--and led me into a neat, homey living room and asked me to wait there. She walked to a door at the far end of the room, opened it, walked down a short hallway to another door, and took out a set of keys. She unlocked the door and opened it partway, revealing darkness beyond and admitting the bleats and murmurs of some TV show. She called Brian's name two or three times, and then out he burst: a small, pale, Gollum-like creature streaked full-tilt down the hall and into the living room, where he ran around and around with the housekeeper close behind protecting the knickknacks. She got him to pause long enough for an introduction, and snatched away the ball (looking truly distressed) as I tried to present it. Finally she backed into the kitchen, looking worried, to give us a moment of privacy. Brian hardly noticed me. I was just another bit of furniture, a sofa. He kept running from object to object around the room, reaching and touching and vocalizing weirdly. He wore a wild, sort of ecstatic expression. His teeth were small and a little discolored, his blond hair was cropped close to his scalp. At 13 he was the size of an 8-year-old. I finally got him to sit on the floor with me. I snapped his picture with a little Instamatic I'd brought [I've spent days trying to find this photo; no luck yet] and then handed it to him and showed him what button to press to take a picture of me. The housekeeper flew back in--"Oh no-no-no, you don't want to do that"--and took it from him. Brian didn't say anything I could understand during this visit. I don't think we even made eye contact. The housekeeper put him through his paces--he said his prayer and gave me my hug and kiss--and then locked him back up in the TV room with the others. He'd seemed utterly unconnected with the world of humans. He wasn't the least bit beautiful. He smelled funny. His behavior was that of a poorly trained pet. And I found I wanted him with me more than ever. (The Brown Group Home group. 1981.) 12:56:45 PM    say something if you feel like it []

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