I work at a residential care facility, and we have a resident there named Jimmy-something. He’s on 24-hour watch. It’s not for suicide or anything like that, it’s more for manslaughterous geronticide in the third degree. Some seventy-five-year-old lady came shuffling down the main hall a few days ago, as an illustration, and without so much as a glance—bam! Stiff-arm to the ground. Like the unopened bowl of ramen he’d been carrying was a rugby ball, and she was, well, like a seventy-five-year-old lady trying to tackle him. Which she wasn’t. She just had to go to the bathroom.
He was in the Navy for a few years, and as soon as he got out, I guess the sheriff’s department was like, “Hey, citizen, you know what? Welcome to being a citizen again! We’re charging you with a crime of some kind and we’re putting you in Pelican Bay for the next thirteen years.” The guy spent thirteen years in prison. He is wiry and he is muscular. Probably because of the prison.
He’s also got a hair trigger. He’s been in the nexus of almost a dozen serious incidents with other residents. Who sometimes weren’t old ladies half his size.
For instance, we have a 325-pound gentleman at the facility. Ex-Navy, too. Name of McCracken.
And McCracken loves to instigate trouble with the other residents. And anybody who’ll bite, he loves to draw into the Octagon. Even other caregivers. It’s like the easiest thing in the world to avoid, but some people just can’t get past the bitch slap at the ceremonial weigh-in.
Now, a lot of the people I work with are the ever-last—they could’ve been born in Jupiter, Florida, Bel Air, St. Petersburg, Russia—a lot of them maybe born in the 1920s or ‘30s, you don’t know. But what’s in the center of every one their cells are telomeres ridiculously longer than all the other people who were ever born at that time. These people’s cells have been dividing and replicating, and they’ll keep on going, and God knows when they’ll naturally clock out. They’re the fraction of the fraction of the fraction of the people who were born at that time, and they are time capsules in-and-of themselves. But you push them down, or bump them under a disco ball, and they’re dead in like three days.
The people I work with are wobbly. And they have old bones. Sitting down on their ass too hard, too: dead in like three days.
So, I’m wheeling a resident named Dolores into a room right across from the dining hall. And I look in and see Jimmy and McCracken flicking mashed potatoes at one another, amidst the other wobblies, and I stick my head in and say in my cheeriest British butler voice, “Gentlemen! …Please.” And, usually, that’s enough. They’re both at the same table, right next to one another, and when the potatoes are all gone, they drop their spoons and start pussy swiping each other. I immediately run over and jump between them. At that moment the McCracken throws all his weight at both me and Jimmy, squishing the two of us together into the corner like a smashburger. All the nearby residents were just staring blankly through the mashed-potatoes, but the other people working at the time were all women, and I hear someone suddenly shout, “Oh my God! Staaahp!” S-T-A-A-A-H-P. In any fight documented since the dawn of man, recorded with an audio track, you will invariably hear some female in the background shouting, “Staaaaahhhp! Staaahhhahahahp!” And, sure enough, the stork came to drop the ‘Staaahp’ baby on me that day. And it has never stopped a fight, ever. All it’s done is distract the person trying to actually stop the fight. And, on a cellular level—a cochlear level, even—enraged the two men engaged in fighting even more than they were before.
Then they start to stand up, because Jimmy—he knows this world. He’s been in many fist fights, his age does not matter, and he is very fit. And he starts pushing me and I start pushing back just to keep my balance. He’s hitting me in the back with rights meant for a dude he can’t quite hit; he’s trying to push past me to get to the big dude, and the big dude isn’t quite good at throwing punches, but he’s good at throwing himself. So, he’s trying to sandwich me between him and Jimmy, like the figurative gabagool I am, and I’m like, “Okay, now it’s over. Now. Okay, now it’s over. Nnnnow. Okay, now it’s over. Aaaaand…now it’s over,” like that substitute PE instructor on his first day inside a juvenile detention facility. And then my nearest co-worker, Peggy, who was like a little too Zen about the whole thing, finally snaps to and moves to calm them down, and, just like the whole thing never happened, I turned to Dolores back in her wheelchair and am like, “Okay, Dolores, let’s go and get you in there!”
Despite the seriousness of it, I’d learned at a very young age how to handle situations like that. Because I used to work in the movie theater industry.
Ever since I started there when I was sixteen, I remember my old boss Chuck McLachlin telling me if there was ever any problem of any kind, in his sideways, high-pitched, mush-mouthed Jersey accent, “No matter what happens, you have to go in there and sawlve it. You, as ushers at a movie theater, no matter what happens—you have to go and sawlve it. There’s a fiyah? Those people will die if you do nawt do something. Somebody’s smacking somebody? You stawp it. That man will knock that baby’s head right off and it will roll down the aisle if you don’t stawp it. You are an usher. This is long and prestigious lineage you are a pawrt of.” I remember he told us, “If there is a fiyah, and you do nawt know what to do, while people are trying to leave the theater, go to the front and sing ‘The Stawah Spangled Bannah’. Because: it will make them feel at home, and they will nawt panic.”
And so the whole time I worked there, I was like, “I gotta brush up on the lyrics of the ‘Star Spangled Banner’, gotta brush up on the lyrics,” because I really didn’t want to be like…
REPORTER
Everybody was okay, until the usher forgot the lyrics to the song
he was singing, and then everybody started to panic again.
Multiple freakouts have been reported.
It was like it had happened at one point in Chuck McLachlin’s life, and nobody knew the lyrics—there had been a small fire in the theater and people started to panic, and it got really bad. “People are in the dawrk, and they don’t know what’s going awn. They get disoriented easily. If there’s drunks, it will make them vawmit.”
He was like from the ‘50s, that was when he’d gotten his start in the industry. But he’d come from a long and prestigious lineage of ushers, himself, dating back to before 1919 when the Supreme Court said people couldn’t shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater or they’d go to prison. Before then it was perfectly legal. People did it all the time, because they’d get bored or whatever. Preparing for a possible human stampede was part of the initial training, and somehow he’d inherited that.
But you remember people like that. Chuck McLachlin. He didn’t empower me, he didn’t instruct me, he commanded me. Like a Marine drill sergeant: “If you’re gonna take that ridge, and you don’t have enough ammo, you run at ‘em singing the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’. They’ll think you know something they don’t, and they’ll start to freak out. And if they don’t, we’ll send you home, and we’ll pay for the funeral. Because on Tiger Ridge in South Korea, January 7th, 1951—when even the snow was freezing its ass off—the battalion had one mortar shell, a pair of tongs, and what we’ve come to call board shorts between them. Leon Jenkins III, who did receive a Congressional Medal of Honor, put the mortar in the board shorts, and convinced the North Korean foes that it was, in fact, Frankie Avalon. And while they were attempting to get ersatz Frankie Avalon’s autograph, he detonated the mortar at a range of ten meters, losing his hearing, but winning Tiger Ridge in the process.”
The Navy, prison, sissy slap fights in the lunchroom—all of these had nothing on the will of Chuck McLachlin to show me how to deal with life’s most troubling issues.
