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Julius' Mom, and Goodbye before/after There's no happy ending to this one. Julius was a weasally weird kid I inheretid from a piss-poor groupleader. Quiet, almost mouse-like. Not the type of kid you'd expect to pull off a car-jacking with a sawed off shotgun in broad daylight. After a look at his environment, and the kid, it started to make sense. Ghetto in the truest sense. And after a look at Julius's mom...well, perhaps some things are better left unsaid. I suppose it would be fair to say I never looked at things much the same way ever again. It was a callousing. Julius never really opened up, never let loose. Always controlled. After I met his dad, I knew why. Creepy fucker. Dad did come and visit fairly often. More than some. Mom might have come once. Julius's dad was a small petulant guy. Raging alcoholic, and a host of other problems, he reminded me of Mighty Mouse, had Mighty Mouse stopped working out and hit the sauce really hard daily for forty or so years. He had an attutude that was clearly much larger than his grasp on reality. Julius was probably beaten out of hand by this guy. He had a large silent wife that seemed devoted to him. She seemed cowed. I always had a suspicion that something was going on, like a scam other than the disability and welfare food stamp that was clearly in force to pay the alcohol bill alone. He had brown teeth. He probably was a small time crack devotee. Not a hustle and bustle dealer, just opportunistic. For he and his brood. He still had some involvement in Julius' mom's life, too, but I never could figure that one out. I think she fucked people for money and drugs. Because the times I'd visit her, she would be straight out. I'd have had the same conversation with people who are sleeping. The first time I visited her was in a non-descript building. She was probably a squatter. Refuse lay openly everywhere, dishes laying about and moulding. A guy passed me as I walked inside. I turned to say 'hi' and in that beat, he was gone. And roaches. Everywhere. On the floor, one the bed, on the walls, on the counter-tops and cabinets, on the table in front of me, on the chair I was offered, crawling and wiggling. She held a child that was silent. Another was crawling about, but she put it in the playpen, which seemed roach-free for the moment, anyway. She again offered me a chair, that I kicked around in reverse after shaking off the wild-life, and sat facing her with my arms crossed on the seat-back. "How's it going?" I said, and it sounded like an accusation. She stammered for a moment. Her speech was like speech, but not really. More like a collection of sounds and answers. I really couldn't think of anything to say or ask. I just had a gut visceral reaction. I tried to talk to her a bit as I casually gazed about the place. Junk everywhere. Stripped down, no real furniture to speak of other than a couch and the chair upon which I sat. Her bed had a bed-frame. What looked like Julius' bed lay on the floor with the roaches. I felt like retching. I pictured a fifteen year old kid, brushing roaches off of him as he slept. In one small part of me that refuses to die, I picture her waiting until he was incarcerated to sell that for heroin or whatever, but the truth likely falls far short of this. "Mommy, why do you want to let roaches crawl on me? Why won't you stop it?" I quit sitting. Couldn't stand it. Realizing I was getting nothing done with his mother, I just got the signature to verify that I had been there with her and left feeling dirty and creeped out, but less dirty than I did inside. I immediately called his FIA (Family Independence Agency) worker, and got voice-mail. I kept at it until I had her on the line, and like many government employess, she refused to do anything. Her jurisdiction. She said she'd visit, and it was tossed in her lap like a blame-grenade. I got back to the RTC and talked to Julius. I asked about the bedframe, and the child did not have an answer for me. Just like mom. I gently and over a long period of time let him know that the environment would have to be addressed, and that I was considering other options, which he seemed amenable to whenever I brought up the bed-frame. "Mr. Argentum, I really want to go home." he'd say. "Where's your bed-frame, Julius?" I'd ask. I think it was a metaphor for something deeper. His mom taught him to lie his way past it, I'm sure, because after a long while, he did, as if coached. Eventually, anyway. They visited a bit, and time went on and on. Having flipped all the standard switches and channels, I had the resposibility of evaluation of the environment. His mom had moved, but was still in the same mental neighboorhood. I visited the new house often. Better neighborhood, clean. I had a suspicion that she was fucking the guy who lived there or something, just for the meetings she and I would have. Some how she put the squeeze on him, because it was the same guy. Actually got his signature once. Three blocks away: tittee bar. She was unemployed. Sometimes late. Sometimes missed appointments. Gradually, after one truly numb episode where I tried to make contact with her she started becoming more lucid. That day she was awash of something, like a scream that had been frozen and slowly thawed out, muted. Dressed as though she was going to an interview, I pried for details about the new home and got, as expected, no answer. We sat in periods of long silence. I caught myself watching tv every so often. I think she caught me, too. But she was so out, it did not matter to me. She drifted between sleep and wake. Got some sort of response when I brought up the neighboorhood. And she said one of the two things that were ever clear statements by her. "Yes, I know. There's fewer niggers here." she said. And she said it plain spoken, not with the inflection of ghetto or slang, she swam up out of her waking daze and haze to say that and pronounce it like a racist WASP banker try to sell development properties. (I would like to give her credit for coming up with a sociological analogy that I put together later on my drive home from the city, that she was commenting on the injustice of it all, that I, a Tool of the Man, had forced her away from people of her own ethnicity to get her child given back to her, but I am quite positive that it was simply a statment in a bag of statements she could have made, much like anything she said, or any answer she ever gave me, a collection of things that may hopefully be the right one. Clawing furiously through her haze she latched on to one thing that flew by her and weilded it like a pickaxe to the skull. Then again, maybe this was exactly she meant.) After that she skipped more appointments and made some. The bedframe in Julius' room was gone before he got there this time. Julius wanted to go home, and time was short. I bothered the FIA worker until I got a decision, which she should probably be slapped for repeatedly, to send Julius home on visits since the living situation had improved. Apparently she had talked to someone, like Julius' mom's caseworker, and she said all was well to send Julius home. I didn't even know she HAD a worker. You'd think I'dv run into her at some point, rather than it not being mentioned ever. Still don't know what was up with that. Julius went home some, got his rank in the honor club at the RTC, and was doing well. He was doing so well they took him from me also, to stablize another group, whereupon he withered some. The last time I saw Julius and his mom, they had upgraded dwellings. It was a different city. Decent neighborhood. They sat on white couch playing video games. Julius' mom was unreally lucid and alert. Wickedly so. I suspected crystal meth, but didn't know. It was like an entirely different person, and twenty years younger. Giggling, talking, and making sense. Julius was reserved as usual, but looking good. Healthy. Confident. And I knew I was leaving by this point. I got the signature, did some termination chit-chat and that was it. Case-closed. As I left, Julius' mom called out sarcastically ,"Bye." giggling, as if she had pulled one over on me the whole time. I turned and said, "Seeya." non-chalantly, as if to say, "What difference does it make.". In a way it did, and also didn't. It was callousing. Told you there wasn't a happy ending.
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