Full Frontal Fiction (7 page)

The Wedding of Tom to Tom

BY KEITH BANNER

THE FIRST TIME I saw the two of them doing something was also the first night I worked alone at the place. I was nervous from the start, and the woman on before me was a total alkie. As soon as I got there and clocked in down in the basement, she went, “They're all in bed and they got all their pills.”

Then she was gone. I guess she walked off the face of the earth, because she didn't come back the next night, when she was due on. Never called or anything.

Anyway, I was walking up and down the hall of the old house after she left, nervous, like I should be checking on something. It felt like a haunted house, but I felt I belonged, like I was a ghost but didn't know it yet. I could hear the retarded people, all five of them, snoring and tossing and turning. Sleep's never been so loud. Then I heard real intense moans coming out of the back bedroom. They didn't sound like they were from sleeping people at all.

I went to the door at the end. It had this great big poster on it of Michael Jordan shooting a basketball through outer space. The door was halfway open. Suddenly, the moaning became like some weird song. Like singing and going crazy at the same time. I slid the door open the rest of the way, thinking that somebody might have been having a seizure. I'd just seen the training video on that the other day at my orientation. They had this dramatization about a woman dying from drowning on her own vomit while having a seizure. God knows I didn't want that my first night. I'd made a decision from the get-go: I am keeping this job, no matter what. I was gonna stop living like trash.

I opened the door, turned on the lights.

Tom B. was on his knees in front of Tom A. They were both naked and very white. I didn't know either of them at the time, so I just stood there. Tom B. is skinny and short, and Tom A. is big-bellied with short legs and no butt. Both are about middle-aged or older. Tom B. has a burr cut, and Tom A. has curly dark hair.

So there they were, like that. Blow-job position.

I wanted to scream or laugh or cry, all at the same time. This was my first night alone, remember. I figured they shouldn't be doing that, but I didn't know what else to do, so I shut the door back, like a maid in a sitcom catching people in the middle of something.

Of course I forgot to turn off the lights. I was getting ready to open the door and turn them off when I saw that one of the Toms had already got it. Almost as soon as it was dark in there again, they were making that same crazy silly sex music.

I went back to the living room. I lit up a cigarette, wondering if I should call somebody. Kate Anderson-Malloy, the home manager, told me when I saw that video the other day that if I had any questions just to beep her. “Just beep me,” she'd almost yelled, smiling like a wacko left in charge, but you had to respect her enthusiasm.

I could still hear them. I smoked real deep and seriously contemplated just walking off. Not beeping anybody, just going. Two retarded men participating in a blow-job. I mean, I'm not some Pollyanna by any means. But yes, it shook me the hell up.

I was about to go back there again, stupidly afraid that maybe Tom B. might get choked or something, I was on my way, when I heard footsteps. I stopped right toward the third bedroom and I saw Tom B., back in his pj's, tiptoeing back to his room. He had this serious face in the emergency exit–light. Half-demonic, half-angelic and dramatic, like he had gone off and now he was returning from his journey filled with beautiful new things to tell. I felt sorry for him, sort of. I heard him close his door real careful. Heard the rest of them continue with their loud, gurgled sleep.

Sleep deprivation—and witnessing a retarded blow-job—made me feel kind of paranoid that whole damn night. I kept smoking cigarette after cigarette. Kate Anderson-Malloy had told me at orientation that sometimes state people come out to check on group homes in the middle of the night to make sure the staff isn't getting paid for sleeping on the job. I kept seeing headlights scatter across the walls all night.

Plus there was my whole ex-boyfriend thing brewing too. I was being stalked, so to speak. He didn't know it, but his ass would soon be in jail. Anyway, to keep myself busy, I started snooping through the filing cabinets over by where the scales are, near the door to the basement, in the little makeshift office there.

I got out Tom A.'s and Tom B.'s files. I read Tom B.'s first. It said right at the start that Tom B. suffered from moderate mental retardation and also possible schizophrenia. He could talk but had trouble with his speech. He had lived his whole life in an institution in Columbus called the Orient, but was sent here when it closed down, as was Tom A. In fact, at that place, according to Tom B.'s file, both Toms had a reputation for being “obsessed with each other's presence” so much that they often had to be split up and put into separate parts of the institution. Usually, though, according to typewritten reports in the file, they found their way back to each other. Tom A. could not talk, and was more retarded than Tom B., so his file was pretty skimpy, except I read one part about when he was four years old, his stepdad burnt him with cigars.

By that next morning, which was a Saturday, I knew the whole damn story by heart. Since no one had to go to the sheltered workshop, Kate Anderson-Malloy had written me a note in the log that said they all could sleep in till eight. I made a big breakfast, to let them know I was an okay chick. I mean, the works. Now that I'm a full-time shift supervisor, lead direct care in fact, I just put out the boxes of cereal and gallons of milk and they go at it. But that first morning, I made waffles and heated up the syrup in the microwave, had some sausage patties that I also nuked. Full glasses of juice and paper napkins, picnic-type dinette table set, like the Waltons were about to come down and eat. It was ready around 7:45 that morning and no one was up, so I got antsy and went down the hall again, like the warden who makes breakfast.

When I woke up Tom A., he looked at me like the way—I'm sorry, this sounds pretty awful—like the way my cat does. Lonesome inside, without the capability to explain, and yet also relieved that he was off the hook from having to tell me anything. In fact he smiled at me, and I said, “Why, aren't you chipper!”

I almost added, as a joke, “Looks like you got some last night.”

But I didn't.

He sat up. His belly hung down quite a bit. He had a boyish face though. I noticed on his back all those cigar scars. He walked over to me and put his hand out, like a gentleman in a silent movie.

I shook it. He let out this huge scream that about killed my ears.

“Thanks,” I said.

I went and got Sally, this little woman with Down's Syndrome who may have had Alzheimer's too. She was in her canopy bed in her pink bedroom—that's the way her sister painted it for her. She had on a pink flannel nightgown and looked like a melted doll in a play-house.

I got Damon, a black guy with a big head that had water inside it. He had a pump installed in his skull that kept the water from drowning out his brain. I knew all this stuff from Kate Anderson-Malloy and from the files. I knew Damon used to live with his prostitute mother and she used to sell him out to freaks. He was very quiet and could only say, “Mona Lisa.”

Got Larry up. He talked too much. Soon as he was up, he started gabbing.

“Hello. You're new here. Your name is what? May I ask what?”

His eyes were open great big. He was sitting on a rocking chair in his room with posters of big-breasted women hung on the walls with black electrical tape. Tall and bony with a big bald head and very red lips.

“Anita,” I said.

“We ain't going out anywhere today,” he said, looking out the window. You could totally tell he hated going outside.

“Okay,” I said. “I made breakfast for you.”

He turned his head toward me and clapped his hands in an exaggerated, almost sarcastic way, but his voice seemed for real. “How nice,” he said. “Don't smoke around me. I have asthma.”

I said okay.

Tom B. was the last one, as his room was at the end. There was Michael Jordan staring at me. His door opened as soon as I got there, and he was in a pair of dress pants and a wrinkled mint green dress shirt, feet in brown vinyl slippers. He looked uptight and yet really wanting to please. His eyes still had sleep in them. I saw him from last night, naked, going down on Tom A.

“Breakfast is ready,” I said.

“Tanks,” he said. Speech impediment.

“You're welcome.”

His smile was unnerving, shaky around the edges, and it almost made me angry at him.

“Tanks berry much,” he said, and then started walking toward the kitchen.

I followed behind him. All of the retarded people were seated at the picnic table now, and the shock on all their faces almost made me burst out crying. It was like Thanksgiving with breakfast food. I know I'm sounding like some sentimental idiot, so I won't go on, but they really loved what I'd done, and it had been a while since I got that kind of reaction from anybody.

“Look at dis Tommy,” Tom B. said to Tom A. “Look what she did fow us.”

Tom A. smiled bigger. He grabbed his fork in one hand and his knife in the other, like any minute, any minute.

“Mona Lisa,” Damon said, his voice very low. “Mona. Lisa.”

My relief came in at eleven. She seemed a little drunk too. A lot of drunks work in group homes, like it's their way of paying penance: a vodka binge, then they go in and wipe up a retard's ass and they think they don't have to quit drinking. But this woman, named Raquel, could be drunk but it didn't seem obnoxious, even at eleven in the A.M.

Right when Raquel walked in and went down to the basement to clock in was when Archie called me, my drug-dealing ex-fiancé. This job was sort of my antidote to all I had just gone through with him, kinda like I was paying penance too but just for being a total fucking fool. But Archie kept following me. I mean, I was living with my dad, and I was moving all my stuff out of the town house we were at one time sharing, and every time I went to get more stuff he was there, hangdog in the face. Sometimes when I was going around doing my business and shit, I would see him in his Escort in the rearview mirror with that same hangdog, stalker look. Like he was having his picture taken for the cover of
Pathetic Small Town Dope Dealer
magazine.

“What? How did you get this number, you son of a bitch?” I was whispering, hoping Raquel wouldn't hear. Everyone was out in the living room, watching VHl, doing whatever. Tom A. and Tom B. were sitting on the love seat, of course. Holding hands. Sally was in her pink sweatsuit, on the floor, talking to a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Larry was really the only one watching the TV, while Damon rocked in his lounger with his eyes closed, kind of like Stevie Wonder does.

“I hired a private detective,” Archie said. He laughed.

“Bullshit. Listen, I'm at my new job, and I am trying to make something outta myself.”

“Okay, okay.”

“So it's over.”

“I love you so much.”

“Go smoke your crack, Archie. Just fucking go smoke your crack.”

I hung up. As if she'd been waiting at the bottom of the stairs for me to finish, Raquel marched up, her hair all ratty-looking, in a pair of nylon sweats and flannel shirt. She smelled like perfume and cigarettes and just the thinnest vapor of Jack Daniel's, almost sweeter-smelling than the perfume.

“Hey,” she said, not looking at me.

I had just finished up with the kitchen, so I was ready to go. Pulling an eleven to eleven was more than I thought it would be.

Raquel looked out in the living room. Then she got panicked sort of. She turned around and told me, “You're letting Tom and Tom sit out there like that?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Good God, if Kate found out . . . ”

Raquel yelled, “Tom. Hey Tom. Don't hold Tommy's hand now. You guys split up. It's time for some alone time. Okay?” Raquel's smile was nervous, like she was talking to someone during a hostage crisis.

Tom B. looked up, responding to being called Tom. He smiled. But his eyes were afraid at the same time. He blew out a sigh and let go of Tom A.'s hand and stood up and went over beside Sally on the floor, small and polite like a little Japanese guy.

Raquel turned to me. “If you let them do that, they don't know when to stop. They'll get so into each other, they'll not know when to quit. One time they locked themselves in the bathroom for a day and all they did was—well—you don't want to know. Let's just say they went through a whole bottle of hand lotion.” Raquel laughed into her hand. She flopped down at the picnic-type table, lit up a cigarette.

I smiled. Sally was talking to Tom B.'s foot now. I wondered just what the fuck I was getting myself into. Heard Archie's voice in my head, pleading. At one time, he was gonna do construction and I was gonna go back to community college for something in nursing. Ha.

“Guess I'll go,” I said.

“Yeah,” Raquel said, smoking.

She stood up and, with her cigarette dangling, walked out into the living room.

“Look at all my babies,” she said kind of loud, but then she looked up at me and her eyes were real clear. They were the eyes of a drunk lady who used to have kids but for some reason lost them and now she was in a roomful of retarded people that she was claiming as her own, and she was saying it like a joke on herself, on the retards, and on me. But it wasn't mean-spirited. It was pathetic and it was sweet.

I laughed a lot right then. Probably from being so sleep-stunted. Tom A. and Tom B. were trying to sneak off for a quickie, and I saw. So did Raquel, squatting next to big-headed Damon. She grabbed two throw pillows from the couch and tossed them at both the Toms, hard.

“Stop right there.” Her voice was joking and not.

They stopped, went to separate corners like obedient prizefighters. I wanted to give them permission right then. Go for it. I wanted to get the hell out of there worse though.