Bagels and Grits Jennifer Anne Moses

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.Intravenous drug use will do it too, as will unprotected sex with any of a variety of HIV-positive partners.Though I’d been a hypochondriac all my life, even I didn’t lose sleep over the thought that one day, if I spent enough time among the sick at St.Anthony’s, I too might contract HIV.What I lost sleep over was cancer.But I really was scared.Scared that at any moment one of the residents would sniff out my mealy-mouthed, do-gooding pretensions, see right through my perky exterior to my barbed and cramped heart, and expose me.Scared of my incompetence, my lack of center.What was I doing there? I was a struggling writer, a nice Jewish girl with a history of depression from a wealthy East Coast family, the wife of a university professor, a person who obsessed about the contents of the New York Times Book Review and spent her summers on a crystal-clear lake in Maine.That first day at St.Anthony’s I felt like I was standing on the edge of the abyss, a hair’s breadth away from chaos.Everyone looked like an inmate of Auschwitz, only, unlike most Jews, most of the residents of St.Anthony’s were black.Chuck told me that volunteers put in an average of six months.That gave me until February, when I’d be able to quit with some semblance of self-respect intact.That being said, my job at St.Anthony’s chiefly involves running errands and reading the New Testament aloud, which at times, given 9the anti-Jewish passages, is discomfiting.Also, hanging out with the residents—most of whom are destitute, barely educated, and addicted—and taking them to doctors’ and dentists’ appointments.That’s why I’m out now, driving around Baton Rouge on a typically disgustingly hot and humid day.Lorraine had wanted to get cigarettes.Then she wanted to get a six-pack of Coke.Then she wanted to go back to the discount cigarette store and get a lighter.One problem with the job—I’m thinking as Lorraine and I tool along—is that it’s boring.Drive to the KFC for a tub of drumsticks.That’s all drumsticks—I don’t want no breasts.Go to the one on Tom Drive.Yeah, it open now.Open at ten.Drive to the Winn Dixie for a package of hot sausage.Got to be spicy hot sausage, the kind that come in the four-pack, right? Drive to the Wal-Mart for some underwear and also I want some Halloween candy and also some hand cream.Damn this stuff so expensive, got a dollar you can lend me? Hang out, watching Little House on the Prairie reruns.Hang out, watching the mosquitoes swarm on the patio out back.Hang out, talking about Miss Marie’s ex-husband, the damn scum, no child, didn’t need no more scumbag husband hanging round me, I go get me a divorce.The other problem is, people die.Geraldine died in November 1998.She was my first.She was also the first resident who I felt comfortable with.When I started volunteering, she was the only woman among the eleven men living at St.Anthony’s and by far the friendliest toward me.At the time, St.Anthony’s was filled with strong personalities, most of whom had carved out specific roles for themselves in the life of the little community.There was Tommy, who mainly lay in bed staring off into space, but who, it turned out, had once been a high school math teacher.Now he was gentle and hopeful, proud of his degrees from Southern University, and close to his sister, a social worker who came every morning to visit with him before going off to work.Every time I came to see him, he asked me if I had ever gone to college, a question that never failed to astound me.Didn’t I look like a college graduate? With my long, prematurely graying, dark curly hair, which I wore tied back into a thick braid, my penchant for flat leather sandals and 100 percent cotton blouses and billowing cotton skirts, I sometimes felt like a parody of 10an overeducated East Coast liberal.Then there was Harold.Harold was huge— huge—with arms and legs like rump roasts, hair like a helmet and shining with grease, trembling with barely contained outrage, mainly over how poorly the world had treated him.There was no real meanness in him, but you kind of had to tiptoe around him anyway.Little Chuck (who was called “Little Chuck” to distinguish him from Chuck Johnson, or “Big Chuck,” the resident manager) was the only white guy in the joint and St.Anthony’s most senior resident [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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