Today was Jimmy G day and I only mention it because I think Paul M, one of my blog "Followers" and a mutual friend of both of ours might appreciate it. Jim is my 3rd cousin, a mentally handicapped artist who lives in Detroit. I have sort of been his defacto social worker for the last twenty years.
He calls whenever he has even the slightest problem, much of which is of his own imaginings, and we talk for hours on end.
For instance, for twenty years he’s had a phobia about opening his mailbox. He’s on disability for his handicap, has been since he was fifteen, yet he still fears every single day that he’ll receive a letter from Social Security telling him they’re cutting him off. Though he hates being on disability, it is still his worst fear that he might somehow lose it. I can give him all the logic in the world: he’s been in the system for thirty years, he has doctors who have documented his condition up the wazoo, he has a very long and solid history with them, there is no way he’s going to get cut off. And, even if he is, they'd send him a letter first telling him that he’s being reviewed, then the review takes anywhere from two to four months before they send him another letter saying that he’s failed the review, then he’s got a whole appeals process that he can work that will take at least another two years and even if all those options fail and he finally does get cut off, he keeps receiving his health care for two more years beyond all of that.
But none of that is ever going to happen. He’s been reviewed a number of times, which is the customary procedure, and he’s always passed with flying colors. It’s simply not going to happen. He’s got a thoroughly documented disability that is never going away and is so solidly entrenched in the system that it’s simply not going to happen. And even if it does, it will takes years for the process to play out. There is absolutely no reason why he needs to be afraid to open his mailbox every day. But all the logic in the world makes no impression on him. His mail comes around 3 p.m. Every single day around 1 p.m., he starts feeling very anxious. By 3 p.m. his heart is pounding. He spies on the lobby of his apartment building until he sees the postal carrier leave and then is almost sweating as he approaches his mailbox, turns the key, and winces for the final verdict. And then a big wave of relief when nothing is there. (He really loves holiday weekends because he gets one extra day that there will be no mail delivery.)
Of course, two or three times a year he does get a letter from Social Security, usually to announce an increase in benefits or a slight change in procedures. Every time he panics and is immediately on the phone to me. He doesn’t comprehend the letters, even when they’re good news. Instead, he makes a copy and mails it to me so I can explain it to him. Once he got a letter saying that they’d been miscalculating his benefit amount and owed him $4,000 which they were direct depositing to his bank. All he saw was the word "owe" and the amount and completely panicked. He jumped to the immediate conclusion that HE owed THEM the money. After I explained it to him, he claimed to understand but continued to be nervous about it until he actually saw the money on his bank statement. Even then, he was afraid to spend it thinking it might be a mistake. It was several months before he got around to believing it.
That’s what Jim’s like. His handicap is a rather modest one as handicaps go. He was born with a condition called Klinefelters Syndrome and I keep getting the numbers mixed up but it goes something like this. Even though it manifests many of the same signs as mental retardation, it is in fact technically the opposite. As I said I keep getting the numbers mixed but he’s either got one too many or one too few chromosomes. If retardation is one too many, he’s got one too few, or vice versa.
What does this mean? It means he’s a little slow on the uptake, doesn’t understand things very well, has very poor verbal and math skills, doesn’t express himself well, and can’t really do much of anything without close supervision. Additionally he is plagued with Schizoid-Effective Disorder, which manifests itself in his case with hallucinations. Since his teen years, he’s been seeing this little black-and-white man who looks like Rod Serling standing in front of a black and white television. Sometimes the man speaks to him. His medications help reduce these hallucinations but they make him groggy so he doesn’t like taking them. But the visions bother him more so he takes them anyway. Stress makes the visions worse which is why his doctors are not encouraging him to pursue work beyond the part-time things he’s always done.
Yet, the amazing thing is that he’s about as fully functional as a handicapped adult can be. He has a very strong artistic bent and got his bachelor’s degree on full scholarship at the College For Creative Studies in Detroit, which is one of the most highly regarded art schools in the world, especially for commercial art. He holds a job, he maintains his own apartment, and pays his own bills (though the time of month he dreads most is the day he must balance the two or three items that are on his bank statement.) He is amazingly independent and I never stop reminding him of how far he’s come.
When I first started hanging with him in the early 1990’s, he was afraid to even leave his apartment. But I talked him into starting volunteer work. It took some hard love but he eventually agreed to it. (Believe me, he’s the kind of person who needs hard love!) He started by volunteering in the library at the DIA and the next thing I knew he had a paid job busing tables and washing dishes at a nearby restaurant that has since evolved into "The Villa," a nice little sports eatery that is just a block from the original Model T factory. In fact, the Model T factory has in recent years been converted into a car museum and Jim has done some art work for them. And he gets along famously at The Villa, they’re very understanding of him and have become sort of a second family to him, all affectionately referring to him as Jimmy G.
So I’d say he’s accomplished quite a lot in twenty years and I’m quite proud to have shared in some of that. In addition to our many phone calls, we’ve also had a tradition of going to dinner and a movie every couple of months. Today was one of those days. We saw George Clooney’s new film, "The American," a review of which will be coming soon. But whenever we do get together, he still demonstrates that he’s still got a long way to go to combat his handicap, that he still stresses over tons of things the rest of us would not blink an eye at, tons of other things that are not even real, that he still lacks judgment, that he still lacks an ability to discern appropriate behavior from inappropriate.
Today’s demonstration of that could make a Saturday Night Live sketch. We’re having dinner at the Ram’s Horn after the film. As a thank you for a little favor he did me, I promised to pay for his dessert. As always when he gets something for nothing, he takes advantage and ended up having three desserts. I kept cautioning him that he was overdoing it and he kept assuring me that he could handle it. I have this running joke with him about this eject button for the passenger seat in my car that I will use if he gets sick on me and he always gets a big laugh from that.
Lo and behold, he starts complaining of a stomach ache about fifteen minutes after we’ve finished eating. As we attempt to continue our conversation, he is looking more and more distressed. I remind him of the eject button and tell him he’d better go to the restroom and take care of those cramps. He’s in there for quite some time. (He later confesses that he’s in there making calls on his cell phone. I always ask him to turn his cell phone off when we’re having dinner because it rings every two minutes.)
When he comes back out, I ask if he’s feeling better, did it help the cramps? He said a little. Then he suddenly turns to me with this disgusted look and says in a loud clear voice, "All I did was blow out a couple of REALLY BIG FARTS!"
I immediately cautioned him to lower his voice. "Jim, we’re in a public place. That’s something you could have told me in the car." "Hey, you asked!" "I asked if you were feeling better." As I said, he still regularly demonstrates his inability, even at the age of 45, to discern appropriate behavior from inappropriate. But this is something they could do on SNL and it would probably get a pretty big laugh.
Well, that ended the evening. I took him back to Detroit, and he was still complaining of a bellyache when I dropped him off at his building. Ooooh, Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy!
Addendum: Paul M? Or any of you, really. I have meant this as a tribute more than anything else. But since this is a public blog, if any of you feel that I have done Jim a disservice by writing about him this way, just let me know and I’ll delete the posting.
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