Dead Man's Honda

So I keep writing.

There is a very small lawyer here to likes to pop his head in ever so often and start discussing random, sometimes inappropriate, sometimes benign, topics. He lisps a little and counts everything off on his thumbs. Today he came by, popped his head in and said in a very serious tone: "Apparently that cubicle down the hall is sprouting gnomes."

"huh?" I said, pulled away from my work.

"That woman--with all the plants growing everywhere--she's growing trolls and a village and everything."He sounded very concerned. His eyes were wide--almost fearful.

I nodded, not surprised.

"Soooo weird. Maybe I should get a little gnome mountain for my office."

"Uh," I inform him "it's actuallya waterfall."

"Oh. Well perhaps I can get a train set then."

Yeah, I think to myself, cause that's where the logical progression was going.

"Hey," he adds, "I went to the chiropractor last night."

"Oh yeah?" I say, trying not to look as disinterested as I felt.

"Yeah...it's soo nice....I mean it's like a....hmmm......I don't really know how to explain it...."

"like a release of tension?"

"No," he says, letting his thumb hang there as if it might sprout the answer in front of him, "More like a shot of nitrate."

When I arrived at work this morning, Daniel came to my desk and announced:

"I have a treat for you!"

Oh yeah? I said, thinking it was probably something like a cookie.

"Yup."

And from behind his back he handed me.....(drum roll please)

A watermelon.

I'm not kidding.

My sister recently told me a story of when she went to pick up a client at the psych ward of a hospital. Her client “Bobby,” walked out of his room and saw another young man with his parents. This other boy was curled up in the fetal position with his eyes fixated on the ceiling. His appendages were stiff and gnarled, his face expressing the torment of his mind. The boy’s parents, my sister said, looked terrified at their son’s apparent psychotic break.

Bobby looked down at the boy and started giggling. My sister was confused by this odd response from a large, almost frighteningly buff 18 year old.

“Why are you giggling?” she asked.

“Because I know just how that kid feels.”

My sister has opened my eyes to something we failed to study in any of my social policy courses in grad school—the plight of emancipated foster youth. We studied adult homelessness and children in the welfare system, the foster care system, and the policies that affect all of those vulnerable populations. But emancipated foster youth seem to fall into a gap not easily analyzed by policymakers. And I don’t mean just U.S. policymakers.

When I worked in the Caucasus—Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—two instances of unique homelessness stood out to me: that of children, and the elderly. Though there are compounding factors contributing to the problems of both of those populations, one thing was certain: no one knew what to do with them.

No one knows quite what to do, exactly, with emancipated youth. This is for a few reasons:

One, their legal status shifts significantly. They are no longer children. They are no longer wards of the state. They are no longer obligated to receive some sort of assistance or protection from anyone.

Another issue is their developmental status. They are considered adults—both legally, and in some ways, socially. Unfortunately, however, many youth emerging from years within the foster care system (and accompanying abuses and problems) are not mentally developed enough to take on the responsibility of adulthood. If drugs or alcohol have been part of their lifestyle at all (and this is usually the case), their developmental and mental status has been stunted significantly. My sister says many of her clients consider themselves “sober” when they are “only” smoking weed.

Yet another issue, that my sister has brought to my attention significantly, is their mental health needs. In particular—medications. Most children within the foster care system receive some sort of mental health medical care. If they aren’t self medicating (through drugs or alcohol) they are often medicated for other reasons. According to a study done by the CA. Dept of Mental Health, on the percentage of youth being served by county mental health facilities in California, 3.85 % of all youths in CA (aged 14-17) receive care. However, of individuals aged 18-21, 1.84 % receive care (www.childsworld.ca.gov).

What is happening with this massive drop-off of mental health care?

There isn’t sufficient evidence in the studies I examined to give an accurate answer. But anecdotal evidence points to the lack of supervision, the neglect of mandates, and the insecure status of emancipated youth.

My sister says when kids aren’t forced to take their medications anymore, they just stop. Many of them don’t even know why they were taking them in the first place. Many of the youth she works with were homeless—they just didn’t have the inner or outer resources to transition into adult, functional living after the foster care system. And if a youth is enrolled in a program for such vulnerable, emancipated youth,(like hers) it is often difficult to get them the kind of psychiatric care they need if the program itself doesn’t offer it.

“Bobby” needs his psych medications. But since the program in which he is enrolled at the moment only has a psychiatrist for children, he can’t get them re-filled. Left without his medications, he could go through another psychotic break and wind up just like the young boy he so identified with in the psych ward. I’m certain my sister won’t let that happen—she’s a feisty one.

However, the amount of bureaucracy and confusion involved in dealing with the mental health needs of children emancipated from the foster care system is startling. It’s an area with where research is scarce, resources are slim (but growing), and vulnerable individuals are suffering.

In the Caucasus the elderly are primarily homeless because the social structure of the Soviet system dropped out from underneath them. The children are primarily homeless for the same reason---the orphanages are no longer required to take them, and their lifetimes of abuse and neglect have left them incapable of functioning in a fractured society. They are also denied a functioning justice system—contributing to the confusion of what to do with these “floating” youth.

Oddly enough, as wealthy and functioning as we are comparatively, the United States has the same problem.

This isn’t one of those odd things Honda and I see that make us laugh. It’s one of the ones that just make me sad.

Honda has been taken into custody for the day. I feel terrible for the poor schmuck who is not aware of her quirks and the fact that her breaks aren't exactly working up to par. The idle is going a bit crazy as well and causes her to lurch forward like a rocket. Not a good combination. After work I half expect to find her face down on the concrete below the fifth floor of the parking structure.

Anyway---overhead in the law office of Big Hollywood Studio today:

"How was the party the other night?" asks the little female lawyer with the very large voice.

"It was great! Really fun, the fourteen of us had a great time," replied the lawyer who looks, oddly enough, like a frumpy school teacher with a low voice and skirt whose belt sits high above her waist.

"Yeah?" asks the tiny lawyer who scares men four times her size.

"Yeah. Apparently 16 bottles of champagne were consumed."

"Oh wow."

"But....uh....we discovered after the fact that apparently none of the men drank."

"None of them?"

"None."

"And uh....well.....I guess a lot of the women didn't drink either."

"But 16 bottles of champagne were fully consumed?"

"Fully."

"So who drank it all?"

"Well, uh.....soo I guess it turns out that since none of the men drank and some of the women didn't drink....uhh.....four of us drank 16 bottles of champagne."

"Holy [explitive]!"

"Yeah. And well, it turns out that....."

"Maybe you and ________ were the only ones who drank the 16 bottles of champagne?"

"Maybe."

"Maybe?"

"Well, you know, I wouldn't really remember."

Of course not.

After being up in the mountains at the camp where I used to work, I heard someone say obliquely, "ah, people up there live in a bubble."

There have been times when I have thought that myself. Unfortunately, I discovered, we all live in bubbles, no matter how much we want to believe we are "engaged" with the rest of the world.

Occassionally there are times when something startles you out of your own personal bubble.

When Honda arrives on the lot and parks in between two ridiculously expensive vehicles, she tends to startle people out of their morning fog. Faces cloud over with confusion when they see her. Some people actually seem offended at her beat-up exterior, cluttered interior, and an idle that roars and undulates mercilessly. It is as if a car like that just isn't allowed on the road.

There's a woman in my office who shocks me out of my bubble because hers is so evident. She decorates her cubicle like the Amazon. I mean, she has more green, leafy plants and framed photographs of green, leafy plants, than the Huntington Gardens. Who frames a picture of bamboo and sticks it next to a large pot of real bamboo? She does. Is she trying to comfort the real bamboo with images of the mother-ship? Inspire the real ones to grow as strong and straight as those in the pictures?

Even more odd is the fact that she has a fake stone waterfall in her cubicle, surrounded by fake plants and animal figurines. Out of this mass of vegetation she emerges with her hair in a.....mullet? Not quite a mullet, but it's getting there. It's an evolved mullet. It's like a mullet attempting elegance--with long, luscious pieces flowing behind the layered, cropped, front. She slowly walks laps around the office, sighing as she goes, seemingly unhappy, and then returns to the cave of her cubicle. I've never seen anything quite like it.

Before you assume I'm simply writing to be cruel--let me tell you something that both Honda and Amazon Mullet Woman have taught me: people pay attention to aberrations. Even if they are inconsequential. In fact, that something as insignificant as an odd hair-do, or a beat up car with sounds coming from god-only-knows, can shock our sensibilities and lead us to comment, write or read about them.

How is it that such things can turn our heads, and yet we become nearly numb to the reality of human suffering? We, myself included, can become fixated on the most trivial of things, as long as they are a bit unique. Perhaps it is because trivial, odd, matters can seem like so much more of an aberration than the big issues that always haunt us. Maybe we're numb to the big issues in life, like dying children, because they are so pervasive. Much more pervasive than a woman who lives in a fake jungle in a corporate legal office.

For example: what story was the most emailed story of the NY Times online edition today? "Personal Health: Scientists Cast Misery of Migraine In a New Light."

I think people gravitated toward that story because it is a small, trivial aberration to the otherwise nearly-overwhelming constant stories of suffering in the news. This article was a small piece about hope. It was a small piece about framing suffering in a new way. It was full of weak, almost pathetic hope, but hope nonetheless. Sometimes we fill up our bubbles with these little hopes to protect us from the great desperation of the rest of the world. The desperation that sometimes threatens to swallow us whole.....

I don't know if that is a good, or a bad thing. I suppose, again, it depends on how you frame it.

Meanwhile, children in the Congo perish from ailments a bit more serious than headaches. But that story isn't even in the top TEN emailed stories of the NY Times online edition. Why is the picture of this poor child relegated to the kind of news we'd rather not share with our friends? Perhaps because it just isn't unusual enough. We definitely like our bubbles.

It was an average day in May two years ago when I first found her. She sat outside of a consignment store; ready to drive away; too cheap to resist. The catch? The man in the consignment store said I had to purchase her at the city morgue. "Yeah, the man who owned it apparently died with nothing but this Honda," he said in an accent worthy of the valley where Grapes of Wrath was conceived. My eyes narrowed. "So why the morgue?" I asked, wondering how such a simple thing as buying a car could turn so morbid. "Cause that's where the guy is."

Of course. Because that's where the guy is. Would I need to use his lifeless hand to sign some paperwork? I didn't know.

"Don't worry," he said good-naturedly, "He didn't die in the car."

I smiled with a "you've got to be kidding me" blaring throughout my head.

"I think."

Oh joy.

I call her "she" because in the last two years my car, (a 1988 brown Honda Civic hatchback) has survived intense, multi-hour commutes, the shame of being the only beat up vehicle on the campus of an upscale university overlooking Malibu, a fire, a couple accidents and a label from the insurance company declaring her "totaled". Only something female could survive all of that and still dutifully drive me on to the lot of one of the most successful Hollywood studios. Despite the fact that her front end is smashed in, and her side is crushed and the trunk refuses to open from the beating it took from behind, she stills growls her way into the parking lot--flanked by BMW's, Mercedez, and....you get the picture.

Occassionally, when I turn on the fan (the airconditioning doesn't work) I get a faint scent of something old. From time to time, I find white hairs from the head of the dead stranger whose death certificate I now own. I can't seem to get rid of the car because it reminds me of a life that expired with nothing other than Honda to show for it. It reminds me that life, though strange and sometimes messy, should never end that way. No one should die alone with nothing but an old car to pay for their burial.

I have found, however, in the last two years since she was purchased, that many good things can begin with a death. The dead man's Honda is one of those good things in my life (albeit strange and annoying at times) that have led me to believe that things are only good or bad based on how you frame them.

Here, on this blog, I will begin the stories that recount the history of my odd life with Honda, but also just what life looks like when you see it through the windshield of such a vehicle....or such eyes as mine.