Roaches

Based on a true story. Creative non-fiction. Written Spring 2016.

My grandmother never kept herself healthy. She would keep herself clean, but when you saw the interior of her house, you knew she wasn’t healthy. I still remember when I would wake up in the middle of the night, she coming home from a late shift at her work gifting me a Southern Crispy Chicken Sandwich with pickles form McDonalds. Sometimes I would stay up listening to songs on an old, rickety mp3 player just to see her come home. Sometimes I would deliberately call her to see if she was bringing me a sandwich. I sat up on my bunk bed, eating that sandwich each night after kissing her goodnight.

She worked for a group home. Eight to ten ladies, all needing assistance to live, in a single three-bathroom house. The ladies there were intriguing. Anna, a taller woman that reminded me of Owen Wilson, had schizophrenia and would outburst at people when she didn’t get her way. Ruby was a fun loving woman, with the biggest bosoms I had ever seen on someone; one time she had no idea what was going on, and as I sat in the living room, I turned around to see that her breasts were hanging so low they were showing out of her shirt. Scarred me for life.

The rest of the ladies were characters themselves, some came and went, and my grandmother stuck it out through it all. Even her co-workers changed. People couldn’t take the pressure or risk of being around these dangerous and mentally-ill women. They would either leave for better jobs or simply quit due to stress. Yet my grandmother stuck it out. She understood what these ladies had to go through. My aunt was hit on the head when she was a child, and now has to be fed, wear diapers, for her whole life. My grandmother tried to take care of her in her later years, but couldn’t keep up with her when she was fully grown. She had to put my aunt in a group home up in my grandmother’s hometown, Poplar Bluff.

I still remember when we would go on a three hour drive to see Janet, my aunt. My grandmother was always happy to see her, and surprisingly, Janet knew it but never had a smile on her face. Janet would get fascinated with what we did though; mainly when I played video games or when we watched TV. I would bring my old Game Boy Advance and she would stand behind me watching, subtly. She would also stand in front of the TV and block our view, in which my grandmother would jokingly say “You’re not a window, sweetie!” and have me guide Janet back to her seat. She gave a mother’s love that some people would have gave up in the situation. I, at the time being not even a decade old, just thought she was a nuisance.

So she had experience with these kind of ladies. She could help out with what they would need, and also help them do what they may have forgotten or just don’t want to do. The home would make the ladies clean their clothes, do dishes, sweep and mop the floors, all of the usual household things. Each would take turns to not get bored doing the same thing every day. It was a change of pace compared to Janet, as she could not do anything for herself.

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One day, my mother had come home and found my grandmother on the bathroom floor. She had slipped on the wet floor, and messed up her leg even more than it had been already; she had broken her foot years before she worked at the group home, and had to have knee surgery, both related to working at an old factory that provided giant heaters for industrial reasons. This set off a chain reaction.

“I can’t take the stairs.” Sharon, my grandmother, said to her boss.

“You have to be able to check on these girls at night while they sleep.” Kelly stated to her as they sat in the back office.

“Well I can’t. The doctor says I should not be taking stairs.”

“Well I don’t know what to do.”

“You can take my day shifts!” Linda, her coworker, said from the third office desk. The office area was basically just a small study, with a boss desk on one wall, two on another, and the adjacent corner having piles upon piles of filing cabinets and stray documents.

“Yeah. That seems like the only option.” Kelly looked at Linda for a second and then returned to her conversation with Sharon.

“Well, if I have no choice.” Sharon preferred midnight shifts during the summer as her grandkids were up more often during the day and not at school. But for the sake of her health, she accepted to work during the day if it meant keeping her job. The strain of working days, during the summer, ended up putting more stress on her than walking up a flight of stairs. The ladies wanted to go everywhere, and having to walk more often than usual, her legs just kept getting worse and worse. The night shift had the steps, but most of the ladies were asleep in their beds, gaining what little strength they had so the more conscious ones could go to work for a couple hours the next day.

Once again, she fell while at home in the bathroom. This fall did little to nothing; the damage to her legs were already bad. Then she fell a third time, this time randomly in our kitchen, and the doctor decided for her to take leave to get into better health. Having our grandmother at home all the time was a change of pace; we always had her to come home to and she did still take care of us to a certain extent. She was able to get disability money to live off of for the time being, and vowed to get back to full health and reclaim her job. We started eating healthier. We tried getting her out and walking her a little more, keeping our eye on her so she didn’t fall again and make everything even worse. We would stop on our walks so she could take out a machine and stick herself to continue on, struggling to prick herself in the right place with her unsteady hands.

The day I left for college hit her hard. She had been doing well about keeping as active as she could and eating better than getting McDonald’s at least once a week. I feel like me leaving was the tipping point for her. I was considered her ‘little fella’, and she constantly called me the boy she never had. She stayed with me when my mother went to work and school. She was a giant part of my life. And after leaving, I found out how important I was in hers.

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My decision to leave for Rolla came from multiple directions, but mainly the fact that our house was disgusting. We never did the proper upkeep, leading to mice for the longest and in the last two years of living there, it being infested with German roaches. The tipping point was my step-dad ordering me to take out our dog’s bowl container. It was a bowl that had a compartment to store food inside it. We noticed that our dog, Sam, wasn’t eating, and we found out why. The compartment had been completely infested with the slimy creepy-crawlers. When my step-dad ordered me to pick up the pest covered thing and take it outside, I could’ve swore I was just one big pile of flesh with goosebumps. I shiver just thinking about that experience, and decided to leave for Rolla so I didn’t have to get freaked out at all of the bugs crawling around the entire house.

Once I left, my grandmother hadn’t called after the first couple of weeks. It didn’t faze me for a while, me basking in my new experience at Rolla. I found it very odd when my grandmother hadn’t called in months.

“How’s grandma doing? I haven’t heard from her in months.” I said to my mother over a weary night phone call.

“She had to go to a nursing home”, my mother explained. My grandmother had fallen once again, this time doing some major damage to her legs. With both my mother and step-dad working, they wouldn’t have the time to keep an eye on my grandmother 24/7. So the doctor my grandma was seeing suggested being put in a two week program to help get her knees better as she waited for surgery on those knees as well as getting her hands worked on to help the carpal tunnel.

“Can I come see her?” By now it was almost time for winter break anyway, and I was ready to come back for a couple weeks until the Spring Semester started up.

“Sure.” My mother had moved on practically already; they were wanting to separate from my grandma and get a new house anyway. When I arrived, I could tell that either they continued to not keep the house clean or the household really did need my grandma as glue. The infestation was worse, and they had spread to practically the whole house instead of the kitchen and bathroom. I slept there for a couple nights, not getting much sleep on the crooked reclining leather couch, with their new addition to the family, a pit bull named Edgar, staying close to me as he had never seen me before. After those first couple nights, I was talking to my mom and I found a large, mother roach crawling on my arm. It was brown and tan with a large black strip down the middle, with its antenna’s shaking and its prickly looking legs crawling on my padded skin. The worst part was, it still had the giant ootheca in the back end of it, meaning it was almost ready to give birth to more of the fuckers. The fact that one large as well as at most fifty tiny roaches we sitting on my leg made me completely lose it. I whipped out my arm, sending the roach flying across the room, and after leaving that day, I never went back into that house again. I ended up staying with my dad’s mother (my other grandmother, Kris) for the remaining time I was back home.

Kris picked up kids she considered her grandkids on Wednesdays, and it just so happened that my grandmother was at a home practically down the street. She was going there based on physical conditioning and was supposed to get out in two weeks to a month at most. Kris and I would go and visit her once I was back home from Rolla. We would take my grandmother out to eat and catch up with her while she was in this home.

“Two weeks! That’s it and I’m back out.” She enthusiastically said as she took another bite of her chicken strip. “I can’t wait to get these surgeries and get back to work!”

“I bet! I hope you get well soon.” Kris and Sharon weren’t really acquaintances before all of this happened. They just traded me, the grandkid, off every once in a while to share me. Being so close to her on Wednesdays, Kris decided she could give the occasional visit to keep her spirits up when I was finishing out my time at Rolla. Now that I was back for Christmas break, we were able to go up there each Wednesday for those four weeks I was home. When I left back for Rolla, she was still there, waiting for the surgeries to start.

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I kept up with her now that she bought a new phone for herself, as well as had a tablet to keep herself busy. By May, she was still in the home, awaiting the go ahead for surgery. The worst part for her was she was put in this home that was for mainly physically and mentally unstable people. She had to deal with people slamming wheelchairs into her legs and thinking it was funny. She had to deal with talking to people that weren’t in their right mind.

“Go fish.” Sharon told one of the ladies sitting out in the common area, which she engaged with card games. “So yeah, my grandson is off at college and I was only supposed to be here for at most a month. It’s been more than half a year, and I’m still here in this nut house.”

“Oh I know what you mean. And the worst part is when your grandkids don’t come to see you. I haven’t seen my three little babies in years.”

“I have the same problems, my two grandkids that still live in the city never get to come out because my daughter and her husband are ‘too busy’. I know they just don’t want to come out here and see me!” My grandmother tried to hold tears back.

“My kids come every once in a while, but they never bring my grandkids to see me. I don’t even get phone calls.”

They sat in silence for a minute.

“Got any sixes?” Sharon tried to keep the game going.

“Huh? What are we playing?” The woman, Gladys, was so confused at what they were doing that she got up and walked away. The aide, Jackie, came by and sat down.

“Mind if I play with you, Sharon?”

“Of course, Jackie!”

“So you were talking with Gladys again, eh?”

“Yeah, we were talking about how our grandkids never come to see us.”

“Your grandkids?” Jackie set up the cards to play War.

“Well, yes, but she was also talking about her grandkids don’t come out to see her.” Sharon and Jackie flipped over their cards. Sharon won the first round.

“Really now?” Jackie wasn’t really paying attention to Sharon’s conversation, looking at her cell phone with the occasional card flip. Sharon won again.

“I understand my grandkids have lives too, but it wouldn’t hurt them to try and come see me.” My grandma flipped over a card. Jackie won.

“Look. You just got to give up on them. Being in here, most of these people get a visit twice a year. Birthday and Christmas. Which is a bad sign for you as your birthday is near Christmas.” Jackie won. “Some of these people have been here for years. You may have only been here for a couple months, but it’s happened to most of these people.” Jackie won again. “I know you are younger, but it’s useless to keep trying if they keep resisting.” Jackie won.

“But I was supposed to be out of here in two weeks! Why am I still here?” Jackie won. “I’m not crazy like most of these people. I just need that surgery and I can get out!” Jackie won.

“I’m not sure. I’ll look into it.” Jackie won again. “Well, I don’t think you’re going to win this. Want to call it quits?”

Sharon completely forgot they were playing War and handed Jackie the little bit of cards left on her side.

“So what about Gladys’ family? Is there any way to reach her kids and grandkids?”

Jackie put the cards in the deck box and looked at Sharon like she was crazy. “Gladys? She doesn’t have grandkids. She doesn’t even have kids. Her sister had to put her in here.”

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I visited my grandma once again once I returned from Rolla for the summer. She had told me a lot of what had been happening there; the lady that had a PVC rigged walker that was also a chair continued to slam into her in the hallways, a man would pull down his pants and start fondling himself right in front of everyone, a woman that was jealous of Sharon getting visitors would come to her room and piss on the floor, just for s***s and giggles. My grandmother was fed up. She felt like she was cheated by being put in a place, wrongfully, similar to where she had worked just a year before. She had to bear the roaches that infested her livelihood.

“I’m not crazy, Kris.” She told my grandmother and me. “This place is making me crazy. I’ve been talking with Jackie and she knows that I shouldn’t have been here this long. She’s talking to the board to have me be in charge of something so I don’t feel like I’m completely rotting away here.”

“What do you think you can do?” I asked her.

“I don’t know yet. I asked if I could be in charge of birthday cards and such. I’ve always been good at that.” She was. Not only for family members, but for the ladies at her work too. “I haven’t seen anyone for a while, and I haven’t seen Janet in forever. Now I know how she would have felt if she could process things properly.” I looked at my grandmother as this place had truly battered her. She was losing hair, and was in the worst condition she had been in for a while. It hurt to see her like this.

It wasn’t long before she was approved to be the card manager for the home. She was motivated to do things for the facility, and continued to deal with all the hell that place gave her. Yet, she still had no news on the surgery. She decided to give a call to the doctor that put her in the home to figure out why she had now been there for about a year.

“Have you been taking your medication recently?” The doctor asked her over the phone.

“Yes, all of it!”

“Really? Because I keep getting reports that you haven’t shown any signs of improvement through you medication. You are taking four pills every six hours, right?

Sharon tried to recall the many pills she shoved down her throat every day. “I take three in the early morning and four every other six hours.”

The sound of the doctor flipping papers filled her ear. She sat listening to him shuffle through paperwork for at least five minutes, and finally got a reply after putting him on speaker. “You should have a fourth pill in the morning you are supposed to take every day. It’s supposed to help with some of the pain.”

Sharon sat with her eyes bulged, and the biggest scowl she had ever had. We had seen the wrath of Sharon before, and it was very rare, but when she showed it, she was determined and focused. “Thank you, doctor.” She hung up and went to the office that was conveniently right outside her new room for the more sane of the residents.

“Am I not getting a pill I should be getting?” She stood in the doorway holding onto the doorframe. The person running the office at that time checked the medication list. The office runner then picked up the inventory list.

“I am not sure do you have the medical documents?” Sharon went back to her room and gave her the documents.

“Yes, it says you should be getting a pill in the morning… but we haven’t had this pill in stock for a while!” The lady called up the head of the home and it was investigated. Sharon told me about what had been going on, and got word about it in a couple weeks when she exited her room in the morning. I bunch of workers were being escorted out of the building and Jackie was sitting in the corner shaking her head.

“What’s going on?” Sharon waddled her way over to Jackie.

“A bunch of the workers grouped together and stole medication from us. They started by not giving the unaware ones their meds and keeping them for themselves, then they started stealing in bulk the lesser used medication.” Sharon sat in a chair next to Jackie and folded her arms on her lap. “Are we going to be able to get that medication back?”

“Said they already sold it and stashed the money somewhere. But from now on we will get it in.” Sharon sat and watched as some of the workers that she had taking care of her were being escorted out of the building.

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“I get out in a couple weeks! Going to have my own apartment at a senior center!” Sharon had been taking the medication she needed and was back to walking with simply a cane over a walker. She was sitting up straighter, eating better, and keeping active as much as possible. Kris and I stood there, looking at her joyfully climb up into the car to go to Red Robin.

“We are so glad that those people were caught stealing your meds! You probably would have never got the approval for release.” It had now been a year and a half since she went in, and about half a year since the employees were taken out for stealing the medication. “How is your hand doing?” Kris continued with a smile, turning her car on.

“It is working fine,” my grandmother replied, raising a hand with a black sleeve on it. “I go for the other one in a couple months once they see this improve well enough.”

“I’m glad grandma,” I said from the back. “We have a surprise for you when we get to Red Robin.”

Her eyes bulged like they did when she got excited or frustrated, in which right now she was both. “It’s still a while until my birthday!”

“Trust me, it’s better than that.” Kris pulled up to the parking lot and we went in and sat down. The upbeat atmosphere of Red Robin kept her spirits up as we ordered our drinks. We sat in silence for a bit, Sharon wondering what the surprise was. Then, from a booth across the room, a couple people approached us.

“Hey, Grandma!” Both my siblings ran up and gave her a gigantic hug. Lights filled her eyes as she was seeing her other grandkids, my brother and sister, for the first time in a long time. They were followed by my mother and stepfather. We all sat down and ordered our food to celebrate the liberation of my grandmother. She had been in the hellhole more than a year over what she should’ve been, and all because the staff at the home were completely corrupt.

“I felt like I was not long before in their shoes,” my grandmother said about the faculty. “One slip up and the lives I took care of would have been off-kilter. I sorted through meds, took them places, kept them from killing each other. . . and there it seemed like there was no order! I stayed with hundreds of lunatics while I they hid me with my physical condition like a needle in a haystack.” She started to tear up. “I don’t want to be anywhere near anybody like that again.”

My mother looked at me and nodded. “Well I think we can change your mind with that.” I pulled out my phone and opened Skype. I started ringing a person and put my phone in front of my grandmother. She watched, puzzled, as she was trying to process all the different buttons. Then, a voice emerged.

“Hello?” The voice was unfamiliar.

“Hello?” My grandmother asked. I pushed the video button on my phone to show her face.

“Oagh! I don’t want to see my face when I’m talking to someone!” She pushed the button on the tablet and turned off her video feed.

“Oh, here it is.” The voice emerged with an elderly lady’s face blankly staring at the screen. The timing was off, so it showed her moving her lips before talking.

“Hey! There you are!” The woman said.

“Hey! Who are you?” My grandma looked at the screen as a bug landed in the woman's hair.

“Oh, you have a bug in your hair, girl!”

“I’m Merle!”

“Oh that’s nice, but why are you calling me?”

“What? I have a bug in my hair?” The woman swatted at her head and then returned to the camera.

“Got it?”

“Well you’ve called me and told me a bug was in my hair, that’s why!”

“What?”

“Got what?”

They were silent for a minute.

“I think it is slowing us down. Go ahead.” It took a minute for the lady to reply.

“Oh, well the young man told me you wanted to talk! We’ve been trying to get a hold of you for a while.” The woman disappeared from the camera and changed its orientation. My grandma started tearing up inside of Red Robin with excitement and joy.

“Hi Baby!” I handed her a napkin to wipe her tears. Janet appeared on the screen, looking blank as ever. My grandmother, with joyful tears escaping her face, looked at the daughter she hadn't seen in years. I pushed the camera button and let my phone load up her picture.

Janet smiled back.