The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (19 page)

“There are basically two types of clients: Apples and Onions,” she told me during my first day of training. “We mostly get Apples. We call them Apples because there’s a deep emotional core at the center of their being. They can be sweet, but when they get angry or fearful they explode—their emotional core causes them to do things they later regret. Onions, on the other hand, basically have no emotions. They have outbursts of feeling like anyone else, but what really motivates them are layers and layers of criminal-minded thought patterns. They’re always thinking about how to take advantage of the situation and they’re always two steps ahead of you. These are the kids who grow up to be sociopaths, the kind of people who can murder someone and feel no remorse.”

Tammy’s description of Onions freaked me out. Apples I could understand, but people with no emotions? They seemed totally implausible, like Vulcans or characters from an Ayn Rand novel.

“Are there any Onions in the house right now?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Chris. Biggest kid in the group. Classic alpha male Onion. Not to mention a total narcissist. You’ll meet him tomorrow on your first shift.”

Data:
During his first shift, New Staff took his shirt off during a basketball game at recreation time. Most of the clients had prison-house tattoos scrawled on their arms—hideous clowns and pot leaves and other shabby gangster insignias done with homemade tattoo machines. New Staff wanted to show these kids that he had his own tattoos—real tattoos,
cool
tattoos. Several minutes into the game, Chris fouled New Staff with an elbow to the ribs. When New Staff called him on it, Chris staged a tantrum and stormed off the court, then spent the rest of the shift glaring at New Staff and cursing under his breath. During the van ride home, New Staff confronted him on his language. “What the fuck you gonna do about it, tough guy?” Chris snapped back.

By the end of the night, Chris successfully turned every kid in the house against New Staff.

Assessment:
Taking his shirt off was clearly a mistake on the part of New Staff. It was more an act of vanity than aggression, but Chris had taken it as the latter, as a direct threat to his alpha dog status. Chris was a ridiculous white boy wannabe gangster; even so he left New Staff shaken. Here’s a kid whose modus operandi was to gain control, to humiliate, to win at all costs—a true Onion and a total asshole. New Staff was hit with the hard realization that his new job was more prison guard than camp counselor.

Plan:
Stand your ground. Learn to throw up some serious personal boundaries. Rejoice when Chris gets discharged after a month or so. Glare at him when you see him cruising around town in his father’s convertible sports car. Keep your shirt on.

Data:
Maki was a half-Japanese, half-black Crip from Denver. Well before his arrival at our facility, he’d gotten his sixteen-year-old girlfriend pregnant. Both families supported the pregnancy; they hoped fatherhood might be his ticket out of gang life. But six months later, both the girlfriend and her unborn child were killed in a car accident. Upon receiving the news, Maki went on a weeklong crack binge. Homeboy drove around Denver in a stolen car with a stolen shotgun, raging at the world, looking for someone to fire on, some red-wearing Blood or green-wearing Latino or white-wearing whale upon whom he might unload his towering rage and the tightly packed shell casings of his grief. He was finally arrested for grand theft auto and concealed weapons charges, and after nearly a year in jail, he came to us for “rehabilitation.” During his stay, he was treated with extra care by staff and therapists; he was on constant suicide watch and a heavy dose of meds for severe depression. Most of his spare time he spent making dark little sketches of graveyards and tombstones on his notebooks—
RIP, TLF, RIP
.

Assessment:
Despite his Crip status, Maki was a charming kid with poetry in his heart, a true Apple. One of my female coworkers commented on his good looks—high cheekbones and green eyes and perfect complexion—and how in another life he might have been a model or a movie star. Maki’s was the most profound grief I’d ever witnessed; I wondered if it would keep him out of prison or land him right back there.

Kill or cure, it was hard to say.

Plan:
Try not to upset him. Try not to say something ridiculous one day during group therapy about how maybe all his dwelling on death and graveyards is a disservice to his deceased girlfriend, who would want him to move on with his life, to be happy. He doesn’t know exactly what
disservice
means, but gets the drift, and doesn’t appreciate it one fucking bit, thank you. Leave this heavy shit to the therapists, the people with master’s degrees. Shoot hoops, give him his afternoon snack, make jokes, keep him away from sharp objects, and do your best to keep him moving, upright, awake, alive.

It was a relief to leave New Horizons and start graduate school, but I missed interacting with clients and our Sunday-night breakdancing sessions. I worked there for less than a year, but the kids and their stories stuck with me, became the subject of my novice attempts at fiction. And I found myself still thinking in DAP reports, applying the Apple/Onion label to literary characters, especially after I read
Moby-Dick
for the first time.

Data:
Client tends to either isolate in his cabin or pace the decks of the
Pequod
. Client has obvious impulse control issues; he’s fixated on the idea of exacting revenge against the white whale. Unfortunately, Client’s negativity seems to rub off on his men, most of whom blindly follow his lead. Client also uses his disability as an excuse for not participating in recreational activities.

Assessment:
Client’s elaborate revenge scheme against the perpetrator who took his leg is consistent with symptomatic patterns of post-traumatic stress disorder, as is his loss of spiritual faith and his suicidal ideation. Client wants to lash out against what he perceives as a blank, godless universe that has wrought so much misfortune upon him; Client views the white whale as the incarnate symbol of this universe. Client’s lack of empathy for his crew suggests he’s an Onion and possibly sociopathic. But Client does display some Apple characteristics in the end, for instance when he says, just before perishing, “
My topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief
.”

Plan:
Consider reassigning client to a below-deck post such as cook or steward, where he will pose less of a threat to himself and others. Encourage Client to empathize with the crew’s plight, to understand that his actions are affecting everyone on board. Place Client on twenty-four-hour suicide watch and discuss an increase in meds with his therapist. Client would also benefit from an increased exercise plan—encourage him to participate in recreational activities such as swimming or breakdancing. If these measures fall short, consider mutiny.

I
n May of 2006—two and a half years after moving to New York—I fly back home to Colorado for Kyle Grodin’s wedding. After arriving in Denver, I pick up a rental at Advantage Rent a Car and drive to my stepsister’s new house, which she explains is in a “rough” neighborhood called Five Points, a place that was considered notorious back in the eighties, but that has since started to gentrify. As I pull up to her street, I laugh inwardly at what she considers rough. It looks like a normal urban neighborhood to me—hell, it even has
trees
. And unlike my own Brooklyn street, it has no graffiti tags, rats, broken beer bottles, used condoms, or female junkies shooting smack in broad daylight. I have some trouble finding the house, so I give her a ring on my cell.

“Do you see me?” she says. “I can see you. You’re in a silver car. Look behind you.”

I turn around and there she is, standing in front of a brick Victorian with a newly planted yard and an unpainted picket fence, a good starter home for my kid sister the lawyer and her firefighter husband. I feel a little stitch of sibling envy—they’re probably paying less for a mortgage than I’m paying for rent back in New York. I park and undo my seat belt, anxious to give her a hug, but for some reason I can’t get the key out of the ignition. I sit there fiddling with it, until she taps on my window.

“Hey,” she mouths. “What’s wrong?”

I roll down the window. “The fucking key is stuck in the ignition.”

“
That’s
weird,” she says. She gets in the passenger’s side and tries to help me assess the problem. Two years since we’ve last seen each other, but we’ve yet to formally greet each other—no
How was your flight?
or
Great to see you!
For some families this would indicate distance, but for us it shows how close we are, the fact that we can forgo pleasantries and team-tackle the problem at hand. If we learned anything from our pastiche family it’s this:
Things go wrong, so deal with it
. Our parents actually divorced long ago, so technically we’re
ex-stepsiblings
—a complicated label that we mostly ignore.

“So how’s New York?” Steph finally asks. She’s messing with the gearshift, making sure it’s in park.

“Pretty much a disaster,” I say, still yanking on the key.

She looks up from the gearshift, scans my profile. “You look tired,” she says. “Better let me try.” She takes my spot in the driver’s seat; I find the owner’s manual in the glove box and stand in the street next to her, straining to read in the dim streetlamp glow. I’m baffled by what I discover. “
If a malfunction occurs
,” I read out loud, “
the system may
trap the key
in the ignition cylinder to warn you that this safety feature is inoperable. The engine can be started and stopped but the key cannot be removed until you obtain service
.”

“You have to be kidding me,” I say. “What
genius
American auto engineer came up with this one?” It’s after midnight; I’m tired and just want to go to bed, but now it looks like I’ll have to drive the car back to Advantage, or wait an hour or more for a tow truck. The other option is just leaving the keys in the car overnight, which in Five Points doesn’t seem like such a hot idea.

Like some excessive punctuation marks to that thought, just then I hear the sound of brakes squealing, tires skidding on asphalt. Suddenly there’s an ominous black SUV right behind us.

The back door flies open, apparently kicked from the inside, revealing a kid with a gun pointed right at us.

He has a blue bandanna tied around his face, Wild West style, bandit style.

“Get the fuck out of the car,” he tells me. Which is confusing because I’m not actually
in the car
. At first I think it’s a joke, some teenagers out pranking people with paintball guns.

But the kid jumps out, puts the gun to my temple, and makes it clear this is no joke. The gun is a revolver—an actual
revolver
with a round cylinder and six bullet chambers. It looks like an old gun, and maybe for this reason—and also the fact that I’m getting a distinct Apple sense from this kid, who doesn’t seem like he has it in him to shoot anyone—it doesn’t scare me as much as it probably should.

“Give me all your money,” he says, that old cinematic chestnut, and now here I am standing in the street, a
revolver
in my face, reaching into my pocket and pulling out
all my money
, which fortunately I have neatly folded into a faux-silver money clip, because it has occurred to me that in Brooklyn a money clip could be an advantage during a mugging, in that you can just slip out
all your money
without surrendering your ID and credit cards, thus avoiding hours of phone calls to all the banks and the DMV—yet now I’m testing out this strategy while I’m on vacation in
Denver
, of all places.

“Now get the fuck down on the ground,” he says, stuffing
all my money
into his own pocket—but again none of my credit cards or my ID, which by the way is still a Colorado ID, indicative of my ambivalence about being a New Yorker and my nostalgic attachment to this place where I’m about to be fucking
carjacked
.

Doing what I’m told, I lie down on the pavement near the rear tire.

There is no fear, just a sense of audience-like numbness.

It’s like watching everything through one of those wide-angled, handheld cameras in a skateboard film when it gets cold-cocked by an errant skateboard and subsequently tumbles sideways onto the street and despite a cracked lens still captures streetlamp shadows, voices, my own two ghostly white hands, the inflation valve on the rental car tire, the astronomical quantity of pebbles embedded in a foot-wide patch of asphalt.

Then the kid forces open the car door, starts yelling at Stephanie.

“I told you to get out of the car and
get the fuck on the ground
.”

But Stephanie slides across the seat, exits the passenger side, apparently
making a run for it
.

The other carjacker—this one much larger and more menacing—is there to catch her. He drags her by the shirt, forces her to lie down next to me.

“So
this
is weird,” she says.

“What the hell were you thinking, trying to run like that?” I whisper.

“I was trying to lie down in the yard,” she says. “I have a weird thing about pavement.”

The whole thing strikes me as comical—as the exact kind of thing that happens when even just two members of our former family attempt a reunion—absolute par for the course. But then a sinking realization sets in: my laptop computer is in the rental car, with the original, mostly un-backed-up files for the novel I’ve been working on for two years—a novel that fictionalizes the way my stepsisters and I always seem to find ourselves in just this kind of situation.

The younger kid is in the driver’s side, sort of inexplicably taking his time with the carjacking. I cobra myself off the pavement just enough to see that now
he’s
trying to get the key out of the ignition—a fairly odd move for someone about to steal a car.