Candy
This is s bit of memoir. The names have been changed (to protect the author,) but it's pretty much what happened when I was "Papa Smurf in a world of outlaw bikers and disorganized crime more than twenty years ago.
Seventy two years is a long time and looking back, I realize that Robert Service and I went to different schools together. There really is “a race of men who don’t fit in, a race that can’t stay still.” I’ve traveled a long way, from riding Air Force crash trucks in the 60’s to Shenzhen China today, with a lot of stops along the way. These have ranged from The Bowery of New York City as a Salvation Army officer, to the coast of Brazil on a C3 freighter. I have pastored small churches in Northern Maine and taught English in poverty stricken North Western China. I have known bankers and bank robbers, clergymen and con men, saints and sinners and found a little in common with all of them. Some were more memorable than others and Candy was certa9inl one of the most memorable. I met Candy many years ago but anyone who met her didn’t forget her easily.
When a party gets loud, when it’s at its peak, just before people start getting tired or mean or maybe sick, it can be easy to overlook people. In a roomful of standing, sort of drunk, pretty high people it’s easy to overlook a woman in a wheelchair but it wasn't easy when the woman was Candy. It was about impossible to ignore Candy even at one of Frankie Waters' Halloween parties. Frankie threw great Halloween parties and when they got rolling people could be ignored while they were committing felonies. Actually in those social circles it was simply good manners to ignore someone committing a felony anyway. The parties weren't covered by the society reporter, but a few of the party goers always turned up in the court report section of the local paper. One of the ways the parties were remembered was by the things that happened to the party goers and that was the year that Candy broke her leg. Two years before was the year Henny Nichols lost his license. Losing a license isn’t usually memorable but the way Henny did was. On his way home he drove his pickup truck into the city water supply. Henny heated his shop with a furnace that ran on used motor oil and he had three full fifty five gallon drums in back when it went into the lake, bringing the Exxon Valdez to Washington County. It was also the year that Frankie's rabbit got poisoned but that was an accident. I guess there was a lot of strychnine in the acid and rabbits apparently can't handle strychnine well. But anyways, more often than not the rabbit was forgotten and it was just: "when Henny lost his license." Anyways, this isn’t about the world class oil slick, it’s about Candy, and the year she broke her leg.
You could see that it was going to be a good night right from the time she got to the party. Candy went as a tank. We duck taped a couple of great big cardboard boxes together and mounted them on her wheelchair. Somebody found one of those long tubes that they put in the center of rolled up rugs and that became the cannon. After a little spray paint, it really looked like a tank. It was a small funny looking tank, but still, it did look like a tank. That's how she made her entrance, cannon first.
"Trick or treat assholes, gimme a joint!" Her voice came out of the cannon barrel poking through the broken screen on an open window facing the street. "I said gimmie a joint you assholes!" You can't say no when someone points a cannon at you so an arm wrapped in a ragged mummy costume reached over to the muzzle of the cannon: "There ya go baby." There was silence for twenty or thirty seconds, then a loud "BOOM,” and a burst of clearly not gunpowder flavored smoke from the cannon. Candy had arrived.
It was a good party. Frankie's wife was dressed like a saloon girl from an old Western movie: "Wadda ya think? Do I look like a two buck whore?" I told her she looked like she was worth every cent of that and she went away happy. A guy named Bob was a flasher wearing long johns under a raincoat with a foot long cotton stuffed athletic sock hanging from the fly of the long johns and when he whipped open the raincoat he did get some (at least momentary) attention. It was a good party, and Candy was holding court in a corner.
I don't know if Candy was attractive, maybe she was, but I'm not sure. I think she was she was too hard to be attractive but it didn't matter because she carried it off so well. Maybe if she had been someone else in that body she would have been pretty, but too many bad things had happened to her. The accident that had put her in the chair was just one. Even before the accident she looked hard. In the old pictures when she was with Boxcar she looked tougher than he was and it was hard to be tougher than Boxcar. He's six foot five and covered with prison tattoos and hair, Boxcar was hard, but Candy was harder.
There was a world in those pictures, a world that she missed. She missed the Wideglide with a rebel flag flying behind the seat, she missed being Boxcar’s old lady. He was "the prez," she was his old lady, and like the man said: "Better to reign in Hell," and she did reign. She missed that life because it was the only part of her life when she had any power, and now she was limited to going where the chair could roll. She missed that life and sometimes late at night when she had too much to drink and not enough to make her forget, she missed other things. She missed two children that she had given up for adoption. She still had Krystel. Krystel was twelve, but she missed the others. Sometimes she talked about going to Birmingham to drive down one particular street where she might see one of them. It never happened, but sometimes she talked about going there. She understood that there was no choice, she lived in her world and the rules were different there, but that was where she lived. She couldn't take care of those kids. At least she couldn't take care of them and live the life she was living, and that was just that way things were. And anyways, the money that the families gave her was important. That bought the bike, the Wideglide with the rebel flag behind the seat. It was a world where going to prison for rape didn't carry any stigma and dealing speed was almost white collar crime. Family values were seen in a different light among hard core bikers. Families were the brothers and sisters that you rode with. Children, kids, rug rats, ruggers, ankle biters, whatever you, called them, they were just rugrats. That was her world and it was Krystel's world too.
I guess at some time or other Krystel had a father but the relationship was never more than a cause and effect biological connection. When she was six or seven her mother hooked up with Boxcar. He was as much as a father as she ever had. She was lucky. She wasn't in the car when he rolled it and her mother was carried out with a broken spine. He didn't hang around long after that. He'd come around every now and then but there was no real connection. He'd show up every few weeks with coke or a bag of really good weed, but there was no continuity in the relationship. Whenever he did appear he'd hang out with Candy for a while then take Krystel somewhere for ice cream or to buy her something at the mall. He was always in the background and Krystel knew it. He wasn't a father or even a father figure, he was something else. I didn't I know what that something else was then.
Other times, when Candy had either too much or not quite enough to drink she'd talk about her mother. She had very little childhood, and it was strange to hear her tell about the life that had replaced it. Whenever she talked about it there was an alcohol induced clinical detachment. She was speaking from inside a shell that contained and controlled something that neither should nor could be contained or controlled. When she was thirteen years her mother sold her to a man. She didn't talk about it much. All she said was that her mother sold her to a man when she was thirteen. If you knew her you'd understand how much she was saying in that lack of detail. It was bad. When she told the story she didn't show anger. It was just one more of the things that happen in life. One more of the things that happened in her life, and just the way life is. That was the real horror, but still, by the one line, bare bones description it was worse than all the rest. It was all of the weakness, powerlessness and pain, wrapped up, focused, and lived, at one point in time. It was just the way life is, and at the same time it was worse than the rest of life. It wasn't what made Candy who she was, but it summed up all of the other things that did. All in all if anyone lived a life that taught them to be hard, it was Candy.
She may have been hard but she knew how to work a crowd. When she sat there, wheelchair or not, she was the center of attention and that's what she was doing that night. It was a great party until she stopped talking in mid-sentence, looked at me, and said "I gotta go home."
She looked to me because I was Papa Smurf. At the time there was a cartoon TV series about "Smurfs," little blue people who lived in mushroom shaped houses. Papa Smurf had to keep getting them out of trouble. That's what I tried to do. It didn't usually work but I tried. I fell into the situation by going to Candy's place to look for someone I knew. The apartment was a local hangout but Candy wasn't there at the time, she was in the hospital with one of the infections that finally got her. She used to go to the hospital every couple of months because of infections. They came from inch deep, two inch wide bed sores. The great fear shared by all paraplegics is tissue breakdown, pressure sores. They are avoided by constant motion, which for someone without the use of their lower body means a lot of work. It means doing pushups, lifting the body with the arms. Paraplegics develop a lot of upper body strength from doing them. Without that effort, pressure sores, "bedsores," develop. They come from sitting and the pressure that tiny creases in the fabric of clothing place on the body. Candy just sat. She didn't shift her body, she didn't do pushups, she just sat, and sitting without relieving the pressure on her body caused her body to break down. No one could talk to her about what was happening, her response was "it'll go away."
The first time I went there I was looking for someone, but it turned out to be an interesting place, and by the time she came home I was one of the regulars. When she was discharged from the hospital the bedsores, needed to be packed with Betadyne© soaked gauze but the visiting nurses wouldn't come to the house. One of them had come once. When she went into the bedroom there were big knives stuck in the headboard of the bed. It was just like Jim Bowie at the Alamo waiting for those Mexicans. She was ready for any thing but the visiting nurse wasn't and that was the last time the visiting nurses went there. There was one woman and her daughter that were helping out but they needed help themselves, so little by little I found myself doing more and more. First I was a helper but it wasn't long before I was doing everything from changing the dressings to dealing with the school when Candy’s daughter was having problems. Along with that, there were all the others who hung out there. I was referring women to shelters, and men, women, and teenagers to rehab centers when either alcohol or some other drug or drugs was becoming more trouble than could be handled. I was Papa Smurf.
But back to the party. Something had happened if she wanted to leave the party before the floor was covered with sleeping bodies. Because of her refusal to follow the rules, Candy had needed more medical intervention that was usual. She had both a urostomy and a colostomy. Her bodily wastes were piped out of her body into plastic bags. As she used to say: "I'm the fucking bionic woman!" Well that night she sprung a leak in the colostomy bag and she wanted to go home. Her apartment was only about a quarter mile away from the party so we should have been able to get her home and back without being missed. But it didn't work out that way. When Bobbie Burns said: the best laid plans of mice and men usually get screwed up, I don’t think he knew how right he was.
When we left, the entourage came along. It was a circus parade taking up half the street. Jim was the Grim Reaper and I was a pirate. Jennie was either a ballerina or the Tooth Fairy, and of course Candy was at the center waving a beer can and shouting "Faster Godammit! Let's move it!" as we rolled at a dead run down the center of the traffic lane. The chair dumped once and I guess it would have been funnier if the colostomy bag wasn't leaking, but maybe not. A paraplegic woman with a leaking colostomy bag rolling down the street from an overturned wheelchair and swearing at a bunch of costumed fools is something that most of us don't see all that often. It was the kind of experience that makes it a little harder to see anything incongruous or even unusual in surrealism.
After we got her home, Jennie and I cleaned her up, glued on another colostomy bag and were about to go back to the party when she broke her leg. Usually when we say someone broke a bone we mean that there was some sort of accident. This was different, Candy broke her leg herself. She had just gotten dressed and was lying on her bed drinking a beer when a massive spasm in her right leg splashed beer all over the room. She threw the half empty can across the room: "Son of a bitch!!!" And hit her leg with the heel of her hand.
I've heard that horses have a bone in their legs that's called the cannon bone because of the sound that it makes when it breaks. That's what happened then. From across the room we knew that the leg broke. It wasn't a "bang" as much as a "pop" but it was a serious pop. When you heard it you knew it was serious, something bad had happened and we got serious too. Candy had to go to the emergency room but it took us almost an hour to convince her, she wanted to go back to the party. She knew the leg was broken but since she couldn't feel it and it didn't work anyway, she might as well go back to the party. Besides, "it'll go away." We did finally got her to the emergency room but to do it we had to bring Frankie's party with us.
Before we did anything we had to call Candy's sister and tell her what had happened because Krystel was staying with her. The relationship between Candy and Helen was strange. Biologically they were sisters but the relationship didn't go much deeper. Helen was younger than Candy and had been taken from their mother when she was eight years old. So while they were sisters, they had few of the connections, either good or bad, that sisters usually have. Helen had two daughters, one was eleven and the other thirteen so they connected with Krystel. But even there, Krystel had lived in a different world, a world of outlaw bikers and various other criminal types. I think Helen's kids envied Kris a little for the no boundaries life she lived and Kris envied them for the stability and structure in their lives.
Krystel's life was lived in a world of carneys, grifters, scooter trash, and all of the other flotsam and jetsam of society. There weren't any frilly pink curtains in her room and the only big teddy bear that she had was one she got when she conned a carney at the County Fair. He wanted her to meet him out back of the joint after closing time to smoke some reefer and maybe have some other fun. As an added incentive he let her win the bear. Instead of meeting him she sent one of her mothers friends, Boots. Boots weighed three hundred pounds and practiced the great American martial art of the sucker punch on a heavy bag. He could stand relaxed, with his hands at his sides and bring up a punch that would lift a grown man off his feet before you could blink. The carney didn't even have a chance to call hey rube on him before he was flat on his back, coldcocked and missing his reefer. Everyone thought he really deserved it for trying to lure an innocent little girl off into the bushes and besides, the reefer was garbage. It was ditchweed that would have given her a headache. It just goes to show you that you can never trust a carney. Supposedly that was the reason the carneys took animal tranquilizer, mixed it into a paste, pushed it through soda straws, cut it off in little slices, and sold it as acid the next Saturday night. That was what people were eating when the VFW blew up in the biggest fight in local history. Maybe it was revenge but I suspect the carneys would have done it anyway. I don't think they needed a reason. Like I said, you can never trust a carney.
After we called Helen and told her what had happened we came face to face with the logistical problems involved in getting Candy to the hospital. The first was transportation. Candy didn't travel by ambulance (the EMT's always tried to tell her what to do) so we had to find a car and driver. It would normally have been easy but it was Halloween night and finding a driver who could go where there would certainly be police was a problem. We gave up trying to find someone sober and had to settle for someone who just didn't give a damn. That was easier but while we were looking, the word spread that Candy had broken her leg. Once the word was out, her friends, particularly all of her friends who had been partaking of consciousness altering drugs of one kind or another (which meant all of them,) felt that they had to be with her in this emergency, so we ended up with the circus parade on the road again. This time it wasn't just a few of us running along with a wheelchair. It was almost twenty costumed party goers in three cars, with none of the drivers capable of driving, headed to the hospital.
We got to the hospital at two or three in the morning. At that time in the morning most parties are beginning to wind down but this one was energized by crisis and running on the energy that drives that great American art form, the soap opera. There was a crisis and every one was enjoying it, Candy most of all. We were ready for anything. The backpack on Candy's chair was filled with beer. It was a forty-five minute ride to the hospital so she disconnected the urostomy bag and run the tube out through a rusted out spot in the floorboard. That way if the beer ran through her too fast it wouldn't overfill the bag and break the seal. Small quantities of illegal substances were spread throughout the entourage (never carry more than you can swallow.) And we were going to make sure that she got the best medical care that hospital had to offer
In any case we weren't stopped. We made it to the hospital and somehow were ignored by the police that are always in and out of emergency rooms. They probably took it for granted that we would never have attempted to come there by car and even if we did they didn't see it. Seeing it would involve them in a situation that would require more paperwork than any tired cop wanted to face at that time in the morning. The emergency room staff either knew Candy or knew about her so things went smoothly when we got there. Actually things went better than smoothly. Surprisingly (for Halloween night,) things were slow, so they treated us like some kind of road show. We were a break in the bipolar emergency room existence that usually swings from boredom to horror. We were entertainment so it was probably a bit of a relief. There we were, twenty or so costumed fools in various stages of intoxication, with Candy, a broken legged paraplegic at the center of the group, turning their hospital into a stage for some of the best street theater that could be found anywhere outside of the West Village of the sixties. It was also clear that Candy was going to be there for a while. Not in the emergency room but in the hospital, and that eliminated one of the great problems that came whenever she showed up there.
Other times that we had brought Candy in they had to watch us to make sure we didn't clean out the supply cabinets. Medicaid didn't cover the costs of dressing materials so whenever we ran out of supplies we took her to an emergency room. They'd change the dressings and whenever they would leave the room we would steal all the supplies in the cabinets. Usually one of these trips would provide enough dressing materials to carry her over for a couple of weeks. I'm sure that the hospital staff knew what was going on and I think it was accepted, but at the same time they did have to be cautious. Sometimes people got carried away and everything from blood pressure cuffs, to stethoscopes, to wheelchairs got carried off but that was probably to be expected. When a raiding party, whether it was a band of young Sioux warriors creeping into a Crow village, a bunch of Highland Scots liberating cattle from the lowlanders, or a gang of half drunk rednecks shopping for medical supplies needed for a friend in a hospital emergency room went to work, it was pretty difficult to establish boundaries, but this time was different. This time they didn't have to watch us because it was clear she was going to stay and she wasn't happy about it. It was hard to tell whether Candy was more upset about the broken leg or missing what looked like a two or three day party that was in the works. She calmed down a little when we promised to come back the next day when she was settled into her room, (her private room.) She was probably the only Medicaid patient in that hospital who always had a private room.
The next day, we found her settled in. All the nurses knew her and it was as if she was home. They knew, like the rest of us, that when there are ulcers that have rotted their way to the bone eating away at a woman's body, about all you can do is make life as easy as possible until the problems go away. I was in the first group to arrive, along with Jim, Jim's girlfriend Patti who was also in a wheelchair with one of those weird degenerative muscle diseases, and Jennie. We rolled in around mid afternoon and the rest of the party was there by evening. The nurses understood that what they were doing was as much hospice care as anything else so they let us get away with almost anything so long as we didn't disturb the other patients. They always gave a warning before coming into the room and once one of them reached in through a partly opened door with a can of air freshener and sprayed before she came in. It wasn't hospital smells they wanted to eliminate. This trip to the hospital, the one with the broken leg was the one that proved Candy was right when she said "it'll go away." They amputated both of her legs before sending her home. I guess they figured that the bones were too weak to hold together and all the legs were good for was to be sites for ulcers. Usually the hospital stays were short but this one was longer. She was there for almost two months and since Krystel couldn't stay with her aunt because of school, I ended taking care of her.
Candy wasn't more than a couple of days in the hospital when Boxcar dropped by. From then on every few days one of the brothers showed up. First it was Woody, then Space Shot. About a week after that Bulldog dropped in to say hello. Guys who never came by were there every two or three days and it was always about the time Krystel was getting home from school. They'd sit at the kitchen table, drink a couple of beers, and when she came in take her somewhere for a while. I never knew what they talked about but Krystel became a much more confident girl in those few weeks. She made it plain that no one was going to tell her what to do and if she was displeased she would call for help from her friends. She didn't have much to say to anyone other than "I don't think so." as she walked out the door. Her relationship with her cousins became more distant and it was rare for her to phone them. She had never cared much about school but even the little concern that was there disappeared.
I don't know if she saw it as the beginning of the end or just one more marker on the way there, but when Candy came home after this trip things changed. The mood changed and the parties got more rowdy. There was a kind of desperation in the house. The atmosphere was different, but it was hard to figure out what the difference was because of all the noise from the parties. Not only did the parties get louder but everything else got louder as well. That was when "National B&E (breaking and entering) Weekend" happened. It was two or three o'clock on a Saturday morning and a half dozen of us were sitting on Candy's bed playing poker for matchsticks when I looked out the window and saw someone moving around outside. A couple of minutes later Paul Crowley, looking like a brain damaged bear with a coat of snow on his hat, lumbered into the room: "Hey, anyone gotta screwdriver?" I told him to look in the junk drawer in the kitchen. About a half hour later I walked out into the hallway and looked into the kitchen, there were liquor bottles lining all the counters and all of them had those spouts on them like in bars. While I was standing there wondering where they came from the front door opened and Crowley and Jim lurched in with their arms full of bottles. There was a bar next door and Paul had first tried to jimmy the door with the screwdriver, when he couldn't do that he just kicked it in. They had made half a dozen trips between Candy's apartment and the bar making a path in the new snow, and carrying armloads of bottles on each trip. It took me a couple of seconds to recover and begin screaming at them to get rid of the bottles. At the same time, while I was trying to get them of the apartment, Candy's voice was coming out of her room: “Fuck that! Save me the Southern Comfort!" That was many years ago and I still can't understand why there was no raid on the apartment after that night. I've always wondered if it wasn't because it was a small city and just about everyone involved in illegal activities hung out there. It was a small police force and they probably couldn't afford many informers so as long as Candy's apartment was the gathering place, one informer could find out almost everything illegal that was going on in town. It could have been that or it could have been just God once more taking care of fools, drunks, and foolish drunks.
Whatever it was, it was getting a little too rough for me. Boxcar and all of the others were there more and there were a lot of more serious drugs and weapons around. Boxcar gave Krystel a dog, a Pitbull/Shepherd cross that we named Kitty Cat. He ended up being called The Cat, and when I finally left, he went with me because nobody there really wanted him. I was selling program advertising in variety shows that raised money for community organizations, and I got a good offer from the company I was working for. It would take me on the road and since things were getting so rough I decided to take it. I was becoming too much a part of the world that surrounded me.
I think I finally realized it the night in the bar with the midget barmaid. Everyone was drinking and smoking too much, and doing acid as well. The barmaid was a midget. A jet-black haired, almost albino white faced, short skirt, fishnet stocking wearing midget. Every time she brought another round of beer she would drape a large (for a midget) tit over my arm and I was enjoying it. It had become my world and all at once it clicked. It wasn't real life, it was a Fellinni movie and it was time to holler "Fredrico! Turn out the lights they're blinding me." That was the beginning of the end. I was beginning to belong and that scared m. I was becoming too good at being Papa Smurf. Two weeks later I ended up on the road, living in a box on the back of a pickup truck with two cats, Arianne and Sigfried, and two dogs, "Kitty Cat" (a pitbull shepherd cross,) and Charley, a big German Shepherd I had found in New York City a couple of years before.
About six months later I heard that Candy was right. It went away. She was taken to the hospital with one of her infections and died there. It wasn't a surprise; in fact it was overdue. It was peace at last. I put the whole time out of my mind until a few years later. I was living in New Orleans and picked up one of those hard core biker magazines on a news stand. There was a picture of a girl in it: a redhead somewhere between fourteen and forty, dressed, or maybe undressed, in cheap, sort of men’s magazine underwear. She was sitting on a bed with her legs spread apart in an almost lotus position. There was a big Confederate flag behind her. She sure looked a lot like Krystel.
When a party gets loud, when it’s at its peak, just before people start getting tired or mean or maybe sick, it can be easy to overlook people. In a roomful of standing, sort of drunk, pretty high people it’s easy to overlook a woman in a wheelchair but it wasn't easy when the woman was Candy. It was about impossible to ignore Candy even at one of Frankie Waters' Halloween parties. Frankie threw great Halloween parties and when they got rolling people could be ignored while they were committing felonies. Actually in those social circles it was simply good manners to ignore someone committing a felony anyway. The parties weren't covered by the society reporter, but a few of the party goers always turned up in the court report section of the local paper. One of the ways the parties were remembered was by the things that happened to the party goers and that was the year that Candy broke her leg. Two years before was the year Henny Nichols lost his license. Losing a license isn’t usually memorable but the way Henny did was. On his way home he drove his pickup truck into the city water supply. Henny heated his shop with a furnace that ran on used motor oil and he had three full fifty five gallon drums in back when it went into the lake, bringing the Exxon Valdez to Washington County. It was also the year that Frankie's rabbit got poisoned but that was an accident. I guess there was a lot of strychnine in the acid and rabbits apparently can't handle strychnine well. But anyways, more often than not the rabbit was forgotten and it was just: "when Henny lost his license." Anyways, this isn’t about the world class oil slick, it’s about Candy, and the year she broke her leg.
You could see that it was going to be a good night right from the time she got to the party. Candy went as a tank. We duck taped a couple of great big cardboard boxes together and mounted them on her wheelchair. Somebody found one of those long tubes that they put in the center of rolled up rugs and that became the cannon. After a little spray paint, it really looked like a tank. It was a small funny looking tank, but still, it did look like a tank. That's how she made her entrance, cannon first.
"Trick or treat assholes, gimme a joint!" Her voice came out of the cannon barrel poking through the broken screen on an open window facing the street. "I said gimmie a joint you assholes!" You can't say no when someone points a cannon at you so an arm wrapped in a ragged mummy costume reached over to the muzzle of the cannon: "There ya go baby." There was silence for twenty or thirty seconds, then a loud "BOOM,” and a burst of clearly not gunpowder flavored smoke from the cannon. Candy had arrived.
It was a good party. Frankie's wife was dressed like a saloon girl from an old Western movie: "Wadda ya think? Do I look like a two buck whore?" I told her she looked like she was worth every cent of that and she went away happy. A guy named Bob was a flasher wearing long johns under a raincoat with a foot long cotton stuffed athletic sock hanging from the fly of the long johns and when he whipped open the raincoat he did get some (at least momentary) attention. It was a good party, and Candy was holding court in a corner.
I don't know if Candy was attractive, maybe she was, but I'm not sure. I think she was she was too hard to be attractive but it didn't matter because she carried it off so well. Maybe if she had been someone else in that body she would have been pretty, but too many bad things had happened to her. The accident that had put her in the chair was just one. Even before the accident she looked hard. In the old pictures when she was with Boxcar she looked tougher than he was and it was hard to be tougher than Boxcar. He's six foot five and covered with prison tattoos and hair, Boxcar was hard, but Candy was harder.
There was a world in those pictures, a world that she missed. She missed the Wideglide with a rebel flag flying behind the seat, she missed being Boxcar’s old lady. He was "the prez," she was his old lady, and like the man said: "Better to reign in Hell," and she did reign. She missed that life because it was the only part of her life when she had any power, and now she was limited to going where the chair could roll. She missed that life and sometimes late at night when she had too much to drink and not enough to make her forget, she missed other things. She missed two children that she had given up for adoption. She still had Krystel. Krystel was twelve, but she missed the others. Sometimes she talked about going to Birmingham to drive down one particular street where she might see one of them. It never happened, but sometimes she talked about going there. She understood that there was no choice, she lived in her world and the rules were different there, but that was where she lived. She couldn't take care of those kids. At least she couldn't take care of them and live the life she was living, and that was just that way things were. And anyways, the money that the families gave her was important. That bought the bike, the Wideglide with the rebel flag behind the seat. It was a world where going to prison for rape didn't carry any stigma and dealing speed was almost white collar crime. Family values were seen in a different light among hard core bikers. Families were the brothers and sisters that you rode with. Children, kids, rug rats, ruggers, ankle biters, whatever you, called them, they were just rugrats. That was her world and it was Krystel's world too.
I guess at some time or other Krystel had a father but the relationship was never more than a cause and effect biological connection. When she was six or seven her mother hooked up with Boxcar. He was as much as a father as she ever had. She was lucky. She wasn't in the car when he rolled it and her mother was carried out with a broken spine. He didn't hang around long after that. He'd come around every now and then but there was no real connection. He'd show up every few weeks with coke or a bag of really good weed, but there was no continuity in the relationship. Whenever he did appear he'd hang out with Candy for a while then take Krystel somewhere for ice cream or to buy her something at the mall. He was always in the background and Krystel knew it. He wasn't a father or even a father figure, he was something else. I didn't I know what that something else was then.
Other times, when Candy had either too much or not quite enough to drink she'd talk about her mother. She had very little childhood, and it was strange to hear her tell about the life that had replaced it. Whenever she talked about it there was an alcohol induced clinical detachment. She was speaking from inside a shell that contained and controlled something that neither should nor could be contained or controlled. When she was thirteen years her mother sold her to a man. She didn't talk about it much. All she said was that her mother sold her to a man when she was thirteen. If you knew her you'd understand how much she was saying in that lack of detail. It was bad. When she told the story she didn't show anger. It was just one more of the things that happen in life. One more of the things that happened in her life, and just the way life is. That was the real horror, but still, by the one line, bare bones description it was worse than all the rest. It was all of the weakness, powerlessness and pain, wrapped up, focused, and lived, at one point in time. It was just the way life is, and at the same time it was worse than the rest of life. It wasn't what made Candy who she was, but it summed up all of the other things that did. All in all if anyone lived a life that taught them to be hard, it was Candy.
She may have been hard but she knew how to work a crowd. When she sat there, wheelchair or not, she was the center of attention and that's what she was doing that night. It was a great party until she stopped talking in mid-sentence, looked at me, and said "I gotta go home."
She looked to me because I was Papa Smurf. At the time there was a cartoon TV series about "Smurfs," little blue people who lived in mushroom shaped houses. Papa Smurf had to keep getting them out of trouble. That's what I tried to do. It didn't usually work but I tried. I fell into the situation by going to Candy's place to look for someone I knew. The apartment was a local hangout but Candy wasn't there at the time, she was in the hospital with one of the infections that finally got her. She used to go to the hospital every couple of months because of infections. They came from inch deep, two inch wide bed sores. The great fear shared by all paraplegics is tissue breakdown, pressure sores. They are avoided by constant motion, which for someone without the use of their lower body means a lot of work. It means doing pushups, lifting the body with the arms. Paraplegics develop a lot of upper body strength from doing them. Without that effort, pressure sores, "bedsores," develop. They come from sitting and the pressure that tiny creases in the fabric of clothing place on the body. Candy just sat. She didn't shift her body, she didn't do pushups, she just sat, and sitting without relieving the pressure on her body caused her body to break down. No one could talk to her about what was happening, her response was "it'll go away."
The first time I went there I was looking for someone, but it turned out to be an interesting place, and by the time she came home I was one of the regulars. When she was discharged from the hospital the bedsores, needed to be packed with Betadyne© soaked gauze but the visiting nurses wouldn't come to the house. One of them had come once. When she went into the bedroom there were big knives stuck in the headboard of the bed. It was just like Jim Bowie at the Alamo waiting for those Mexicans. She was ready for any thing but the visiting nurse wasn't and that was the last time the visiting nurses went there. There was one woman and her daughter that were helping out but they needed help themselves, so little by little I found myself doing more and more. First I was a helper but it wasn't long before I was doing everything from changing the dressings to dealing with the school when Candy’s daughter was having problems. Along with that, there were all the others who hung out there. I was referring women to shelters, and men, women, and teenagers to rehab centers when either alcohol or some other drug or drugs was becoming more trouble than could be handled. I was Papa Smurf.
But back to the party. Something had happened if she wanted to leave the party before the floor was covered with sleeping bodies. Because of her refusal to follow the rules, Candy had needed more medical intervention that was usual. She had both a urostomy and a colostomy. Her bodily wastes were piped out of her body into plastic bags. As she used to say: "I'm the fucking bionic woman!" Well that night she sprung a leak in the colostomy bag and she wanted to go home. Her apartment was only about a quarter mile away from the party so we should have been able to get her home and back without being missed. But it didn't work out that way. When Bobbie Burns said: the best laid plans of mice and men usually get screwed up, I don’t think he knew how right he was.
When we left, the entourage came along. It was a circus parade taking up half the street. Jim was the Grim Reaper and I was a pirate. Jennie was either a ballerina or the Tooth Fairy, and of course Candy was at the center waving a beer can and shouting "Faster Godammit! Let's move it!" as we rolled at a dead run down the center of the traffic lane. The chair dumped once and I guess it would have been funnier if the colostomy bag wasn't leaking, but maybe not. A paraplegic woman with a leaking colostomy bag rolling down the street from an overturned wheelchair and swearing at a bunch of costumed fools is something that most of us don't see all that often. It was the kind of experience that makes it a little harder to see anything incongruous or even unusual in surrealism.
After we got her home, Jennie and I cleaned her up, glued on another colostomy bag and were about to go back to the party when she broke her leg. Usually when we say someone broke a bone we mean that there was some sort of accident. This was different, Candy broke her leg herself. She had just gotten dressed and was lying on her bed drinking a beer when a massive spasm in her right leg splashed beer all over the room. She threw the half empty can across the room: "Son of a bitch!!!" And hit her leg with the heel of her hand.
I've heard that horses have a bone in their legs that's called the cannon bone because of the sound that it makes when it breaks. That's what happened then. From across the room we knew that the leg broke. It wasn't a "bang" as much as a "pop" but it was a serious pop. When you heard it you knew it was serious, something bad had happened and we got serious too. Candy had to go to the emergency room but it took us almost an hour to convince her, she wanted to go back to the party. She knew the leg was broken but since she couldn't feel it and it didn't work anyway, she might as well go back to the party. Besides, "it'll go away." We did finally got her to the emergency room but to do it we had to bring Frankie's party with us.
Before we did anything we had to call Candy's sister and tell her what had happened because Krystel was staying with her. The relationship between Candy and Helen was strange. Biologically they were sisters but the relationship didn't go much deeper. Helen was younger than Candy and had been taken from their mother when she was eight years old. So while they were sisters, they had few of the connections, either good or bad, that sisters usually have. Helen had two daughters, one was eleven and the other thirteen so they connected with Krystel. But even there, Krystel had lived in a different world, a world of outlaw bikers and various other criminal types. I think Helen's kids envied Kris a little for the no boundaries life she lived and Kris envied them for the stability and structure in their lives.
Krystel's life was lived in a world of carneys, grifters, scooter trash, and all of the other flotsam and jetsam of society. There weren't any frilly pink curtains in her room and the only big teddy bear that she had was one she got when she conned a carney at the County Fair. He wanted her to meet him out back of the joint after closing time to smoke some reefer and maybe have some other fun. As an added incentive he let her win the bear. Instead of meeting him she sent one of her mothers friends, Boots. Boots weighed three hundred pounds and practiced the great American martial art of the sucker punch on a heavy bag. He could stand relaxed, with his hands at his sides and bring up a punch that would lift a grown man off his feet before you could blink. The carney didn't even have a chance to call hey rube on him before he was flat on his back, coldcocked and missing his reefer. Everyone thought he really deserved it for trying to lure an innocent little girl off into the bushes and besides, the reefer was garbage. It was ditchweed that would have given her a headache. It just goes to show you that you can never trust a carney. Supposedly that was the reason the carneys took animal tranquilizer, mixed it into a paste, pushed it through soda straws, cut it off in little slices, and sold it as acid the next Saturday night. That was what people were eating when the VFW blew up in the biggest fight in local history. Maybe it was revenge but I suspect the carneys would have done it anyway. I don't think they needed a reason. Like I said, you can never trust a carney.
After we called Helen and told her what had happened we came face to face with the logistical problems involved in getting Candy to the hospital. The first was transportation. Candy didn't travel by ambulance (the EMT's always tried to tell her what to do) so we had to find a car and driver. It would normally have been easy but it was Halloween night and finding a driver who could go where there would certainly be police was a problem. We gave up trying to find someone sober and had to settle for someone who just didn't give a damn. That was easier but while we were looking, the word spread that Candy had broken her leg. Once the word was out, her friends, particularly all of her friends who had been partaking of consciousness altering drugs of one kind or another (which meant all of them,) felt that they had to be with her in this emergency, so we ended up with the circus parade on the road again. This time it wasn't just a few of us running along with a wheelchair. It was almost twenty costumed party goers in three cars, with none of the drivers capable of driving, headed to the hospital.
We got to the hospital at two or three in the morning. At that time in the morning most parties are beginning to wind down but this one was energized by crisis and running on the energy that drives that great American art form, the soap opera. There was a crisis and every one was enjoying it, Candy most of all. We were ready for anything. The backpack on Candy's chair was filled with beer. It was a forty-five minute ride to the hospital so she disconnected the urostomy bag and run the tube out through a rusted out spot in the floorboard. That way if the beer ran through her too fast it wouldn't overfill the bag and break the seal. Small quantities of illegal substances were spread throughout the entourage (never carry more than you can swallow.) And we were going to make sure that she got the best medical care that hospital had to offer
In any case we weren't stopped. We made it to the hospital and somehow were ignored by the police that are always in and out of emergency rooms. They probably took it for granted that we would never have attempted to come there by car and even if we did they didn't see it. Seeing it would involve them in a situation that would require more paperwork than any tired cop wanted to face at that time in the morning. The emergency room staff either knew Candy or knew about her so things went smoothly when we got there. Actually things went better than smoothly. Surprisingly (for Halloween night,) things were slow, so they treated us like some kind of road show. We were a break in the bipolar emergency room existence that usually swings from boredom to horror. We were entertainment so it was probably a bit of a relief. There we were, twenty or so costumed fools in various stages of intoxication, with Candy, a broken legged paraplegic at the center of the group, turning their hospital into a stage for some of the best street theater that could be found anywhere outside of the West Village of the sixties. It was also clear that Candy was going to be there for a while. Not in the emergency room but in the hospital, and that eliminated one of the great problems that came whenever she showed up there.
Other times that we had brought Candy in they had to watch us to make sure we didn't clean out the supply cabinets. Medicaid didn't cover the costs of dressing materials so whenever we ran out of supplies we took her to an emergency room. They'd change the dressings and whenever they would leave the room we would steal all the supplies in the cabinets. Usually one of these trips would provide enough dressing materials to carry her over for a couple of weeks. I'm sure that the hospital staff knew what was going on and I think it was accepted, but at the same time they did have to be cautious. Sometimes people got carried away and everything from blood pressure cuffs, to stethoscopes, to wheelchairs got carried off but that was probably to be expected. When a raiding party, whether it was a band of young Sioux warriors creeping into a Crow village, a bunch of Highland Scots liberating cattle from the lowlanders, or a gang of half drunk rednecks shopping for medical supplies needed for a friend in a hospital emergency room went to work, it was pretty difficult to establish boundaries, but this time was different. This time they didn't have to watch us because it was clear she was going to stay and she wasn't happy about it. It was hard to tell whether Candy was more upset about the broken leg or missing what looked like a two or three day party that was in the works. She calmed down a little when we promised to come back the next day when she was settled into her room, (her private room.) She was probably the only Medicaid patient in that hospital who always had a private room.
The next day, we found her settled in. All the nurses knew her and it was as if she was home. They knew, like the rest of us, that when there are ulcers that have rotted their way to the bone eating away at a woman's body, about all you can do is make life as easy as possible until the problems go away. I was in the first group to arrive, along with Jim, Jim's girlfriend Patti who was also in a wheelchair with one of those weird degenerative muscle diseases, and Jennie. We rolled in around mid afternoon and the rest of the party was there by evening. The nurses understood that what they were doing was as much hospice care as anything else so they let us get away with almost anything so long as we didn't disturb the other patients. They always gave a warning before coming into the room and once one of them reached in through a partly opened door with a can of air freshener and sprayed before she came in. It wasn't hospital smells they wanted to eliminate. This trip to the hospital, the one with the broken leg was the one that proved Candy was right when she said "it'll go away." They amputated both of her legs before sending her home. I guess they figured that the bones were too weak to hold together and all the legs were good for was to be sites for ulcers. Usually the hospital stays were short but this one was longer. She was there for almost two months and since Krystel couldn't stay with her aunt because of school, I ended taking care of her.
Candy wasn't more than a couple of days in the hospital when Boxcar dropped by. From then on every few days one of the brothers showed up. First it was Woody, then Space Shot. About a week after that Bulldog dropped in to say hello. Guys who never came by were there every two or three days and it was always about the time Krystel was getting home from school. They'd sit at the kitchen table, drink a couple of beers, and when she came in take her somewhere for a while. I never knew what they talked about but Krystel became a much more confident girl in those few weeks. She made it plain that no one was going to tell her what to do and if she was displeased she would call for help from her friends. She didn't have much to say to anyone other than "I don't think so." as she walked out the door. Her relationship with her cousins became more distant and it was rare for her to phone them. She had never cared much about school but even the little concern that was there disappeared.
I don't know if she saw it as the beginning of the end or just one more marker on the way there, but when Candy came home after this trip things changed. The mood changed and the parties got more rowdy. There was a kind of desperation in the house. The atmosphere was different, but it was hard to figure out what the difference was because of all the noise from the parties. Not only did the parties get louder but everything else got louder as well. That was when "National B&E (breaking and entering) Weekend" happened. It was two or three o'clock on a Saturday morning and a half dozen of us were sitting on Candy's bed playing poker for matchsticks when I looked out the window and saw someone moving around outside. A couple of minutes later Paul Crowley, looking like a brain damaged bear with a coat of snow on his hat, lumbered into the room: "Hey, anyone gotta screwdriver?" I told him to look in the junk drawer in the kitchen. About a half hour later I walked out into the hallway and looked into the kitchen, there were liquor bottles lining all the counters and all of them had those spouts on them like in bars. While I was standing there wondering where they came from the front door opened and Crowley and Jim lurched in with their arms full of bottles. There was a bar next door and Paul had first tried to jimmy the door with the screwdriver, when he couldn't do that he just kicked it in. They had made half a dozen trips between Candy's apartment and the bar making a path in the new snow, and carrying armloads of bottles on each trip. It took me a couple of seconds to recover and begin screaming at them to get rid of the bottles. At the same time, while I was trying to get them of the apartment, Candy's voice was coming out of her room: “Fuck that! Save me the Southern Comfort!" That was many years ago and I still can't understand why there was no raid on the apartment after that night. I've always wondered if it wasn't because it was a small city and just about everyone involved in illegal activities hung out there. It was a small police force and they probably couldn't afford many informers so as long as Candy's apartment was the gathering place, one informer could find out almost everything illegal that was going on in town. It could have been that or it could have been just God once more taking care of fools, drunks, and foolish drunks.
Whatever it was, it was getting a little too rough for me. Boxcar and all of the others were there more and there were a lot of more serious drugs and weapons around. Boxcar gave Krystel a dog, a Pitbull/Shepherd cross that we named Kitty Cat. He ended up being called The Cat, and when I finally left, he went with me because nobody there really wanted him. I was selling program advertising in variety shows that raised money for community organizations, and I got a good offer from the company I was working for. It would take me on the road and since things were getting so rough I decided to take it. I was becoming too much a part of the world that surrounded me.
I think I finally realized it the night in the bar with the midget barmaid. Everyone was drinking and smoking too much, and doing acid as well. The barmaid was a midget. A jet-black haired, almost albino white faced, short skirt, fishnet stocking wearing midget. Every time she brought another round of beer she would drape a large (for a midget) tit over my arm and I was enjoying it. It had become my world and all at once it clicked. It wasn't real life, it was a Fellinni movie and it was time to holler "Fredrico! Turn out the lights they're blinding me." That was the beginning of the end. I was beginning to belong and that scared m. I was becoming too good at being Papa Smurf. Two weeks later I ended up on the road, living in a box on the back of a pickup truck with two cats, Arianne and Sigfried, and two dogs, "Kitty Cat" (a pitbull shepherd cross,) and Charley, a big German Shepherd I had found in New York City a couple of years before.
About six months later I heard that Candy was right. It went away. She was taken to the hospital with one of her infections and died there. It wasn't a surprise; in fact it was overdue. It was peace at last. I put the whole time out of my mind until a few years later. I was living in New Orleans and picked up one of those hard core biker magazines on a news stand. There was a picture of a girl in it: a redhead somewhere between fourteen and forty, dressed, or maybe undressed, in cheap, sort of men’s magazine underwear. She was sitting on a bed with her legs spread apart in an almost lotus position. There was a big Confederate flag behind her. She sure looked a lot like Krystel.