The Endless Concord, Chapter 2

II. Grand Larceny

At around 6:30 P.M, two-thirds of the way through the day shift, a man appeared at the front gate pressing frantically on the buzzer. I went into the office to buzz him in and within moments he was sitting in one of the roller chairs.
“Who are you?” I asked, eyeing him over.
“Lance Bennett,” he said quickly, and shook my hand. “Lord almighty it’s blazing hot!”
“Can I help you?”
“Nope…just here on orders.”
“Are you a new guy? Did Willis send you?”
I pictured Willis at home, probably leaving Randall at the social security office over eight hours ago and expecting me to train this man. Textbook Willis…
“Oh yeah…oh yeah…” Lance said absent-mindedly, picking up a newspaper on the countertop and making himself at home. “I finished staff training about a week ago and applied here at this location and he hired me right there. I didn’t even have to take my coat off…ha…just think about it! Right there!” he said, pointing at a space between the refrigerator and the microwave.
“Right there?” I said to myself, studying the space between the refrigerator and the microwave.
He shuffled the newspaper in his hands and focused on a headline that read, “House Administrator Administers Meetings,” above a picture of two large men wearing suits and thick glasses shaking hands in what looked to be some kind of boardroom. “Can you imagine?” he asked thoughtfully.
The phone rang and Lance picked it up before I noticed anything was happening. He’s good, I thought to myself.
“So you say you were the victim of grand larceny in 1996? Uh huh. How many of them were there? Eleven you say? All minors? Yes, uh huh. Okay. Uh, Lance Bennett. No problem. So let’s get down to business…” Lance said, pulling a pen out of the jar; opting for one of the squiggly ones Dorothy bought at the stationary store. The pen had a rubber alien on the clicker that lit up and said, “take me to your case manager,” whenever you pressed on it.
“…Now don’t get me wrong here but there is something going around. I hear you. Something you’ve got to look at real hard. You get me? Yeah. Ha, ha.”
Probably one of the relatives of a potential client trying to organize a screening; emergencies aren’t taken down with squiggly pens.
“So first things first,” I said after he hung up, trying to sound authoritative but somehow not getting it right, “let me handle the intakes…how did you learn how to handle an intake anyway?”
“Staff training…I’ve been filled in on all of the…uh…protocols…”
“Really? Wow. Well just in case, let me handle the calls…it could be Willis…”
“You probably get all kinds of business calls and whatnot over here…in a place like this…” he said looking around the office.
“Yep, just let me handle the calls.”
“No problem boss man.”
“Not the boss.”
“Whatever you say.”
Marvin appeared in the doorway and starred at Lance long and hard. His belly hung out of his tight yellow sweater and rested somewhere on the straining thighs of his skinny legs. He was clean shaven as always and his thin white hair was well groomed. He had on his perpetual girlish smile. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, doing it quietly but with a slight twitch of difficulty in the eyes; as if at any moment he were going to urinate. He did look like a pervert.
I watched him closely wondering if the two had met before. Marvin had bounced around a lot after his release from the hospital so it’s possible that Lance may have worked in one of his facilities.
“Marv, can I help you?” I asked after a few moments.
“What is he doing in here?” he asked in his soft and feminine, slightly accusatory voice.
Lance starred him in the eyes for a while before finally waving him off. “I’m doing what I gotta do, now you go to your room and do what you gotta do,” he said quickly.
Marvin shrugged and disappeared into the maze of corridors while Lance jumped up and quickly paced around the office rubbing his chin. He was walking in three-one tiles like the way the knight moves on a chess board. I told him Marvin is always like that and not to worry, “hang tight and I’ll show you around later.”
“You’re the bo…” he began, interrupting himself and smiling sheepishly.
Lance had thin straggly hair tucked away in a blue beanie. He was wearing a crusty black leather jacket and jeans stained with coffee. He looked middle-aged, if not older. He looked like just about everyone I trained with.
“Where are you from?” I asked after a while. The pacing was making me nervous.
“Oh, well, I’m from, well…way out there you know? Way out on the line, ha!”
“What kind of line?” I asked, tilting my head and raising an eyebrow, unable to keep from smiling at his comical demeanor.
He seemed to kind of vibrate. Probably caffeine, I deduced. I’ve seen many co-workers cross the line with it. In this line of work one reaches a point where drinking coffee, doing the crossword, and rattling off into oblivion is the last refuge. This man was on that last stage; a point where the mind can no longer handle the sting of baby-blue walls and florescent lights. I wondered how long it would be until the office just swallowed him completely.
“Ha! A fishing line I guess. Man, where I’m from there’s all kinds of guppies and yuppies, and whatever else. Hot, white pavement everywhere, you can fry an egg! And the strip malls, Jesus! Try having a child-hood in a place like that, you know? You think, ‘keep it together man. Keep it together.’ But then, what? What is there to hold together? The whole place is nothing but parking lots! What do you have to hold together man?”
I leaned above the l-desk and removed Justin’s case-file from the shelf and opened it to the shift-report section and began writing while Lance went on talking behind me.
“…you look at something from an angle and expect it to be what it is, but it’s not. It moves along a course…and deteriorates along the way. You get me?”
“Yep,” I replied, not turning around.
Justin was especially agitated today, bouncing up to the counter muttering something about Asian imperialism…‘the Vietnamese not quite dead’ and so forth…
“…and as much as you’d like to appreciate someone for what they are, you can’t. Because you’re your own thing, and the two of you both see different angles. Ain’t nothing to talk about I guess…”
His case file leaves a lot open in his history. Is Justin a veteran? Will ask Terry to look into it.
“…and all along I’m thinkin’, ‘well, where do I stand?’ You know? Like, ‘just who is workin’ the gears here anyway?’”
“Yep,” I muttered again, still working over Justin’s case file. Lance’s voice sounded like a distant drone.
His medication adherence is so highly irregular, with an overwhelming amount of psychotropics running him dangerously close to the line. How is it the prescriber stays on top of him with such little inquiry into his history? Is this trial and error? Should we be doing this?
“…and anyway, the problem here is malpractice…”
I dropped my pen and spun around in my chair. “What was that?” I asked quickly.
“Their whole operation man! Haven’t you been paying attention?”
“Oh yeah, sorry.”
I finished up and put Justin’s case-file back in the shelf and watched Lance pace a little more. We talked for a little while longer, although I was unsure of what about. And then after some time, leaning back in my chair I nodded off to sleep.

I snapped to attention with the howling of the fax machine. Lance was standing above it and, yes, he was actually sending a fax to the fax machine. The client case files lie open and scattered around the desk. A cigarette had been crushed in a coffee cup. The air-conditioner rattled at something like 40 degrees.
I looked at the wall clock. I was out for eight minutes.
“Jesus God, turn that thing off!” I yelled.”
“This one has a kind of punch to it, it really kicks out at you!” he hollered over the beeping. “Sometimes you wonder if the phone is ringing even though you can’t hear it, and you pick it up. You expect some reassuring telemarketer, but no, it’s that other sound; no ones on the line, and you think, ‘what am I doing? I have to hang up! I have to hang up the phone!’ But this fax machine just cuts right to it, you know? I mean, you know when you have a fax.”
That’s true.
The rest of the evening Lance continued to answer phone calls and send faxes to the fax machine despite my repeated insistence he didn’t. I often tried getting between him and these objects but he was just too fast; there would be no slowing him down.
Ten after 8:00 I decided to show him how do to the med-count as our system is a little different from the way they teach it in training. Night pass would begin at 8:30 and I thought it would be good to let him watch and then, halfway through it, have a little fun and throw him right in there and see how he does. They usually panic. I panicked my first time. Clients barking at you from all directions, blue pills, green pills, dioxin, Benztropine, blood draws, pressure checks, the general hysteria that fills the room when twenty oscillating schizophrenics line up in front of a small window where there is this man with hardly any real training standing in a box with a florescent light. That man in this case being me. It’s the kind of experience one can only read about, because even when it’s happening, in that very moment, it’s far too surreal to manage itself in the sphere of everyday life. And so it doesn’t, it remains elusive even during the event. There is nothing more removed from reality than med-pass at the Plaza.
Maybe he’d make a few minor documentation errors I could correct with him afterwards.
As for med-count he was doing pretty well. He was able to identify all of the generic names, proper pronunciation and everything. The man knew his drugs. Willis would have promoted him right there. “Right there,” I laughed to myself, thinking about the space between the med-cabinet and the lock box.
Another phone call at 8:25; grand larceny in 1996, all minors. This would be the third time I’ve heard it. This time I decided on listening in on the other end.
I left him with the med-room phone and went into the office. There was a steady light on line three. I picked up.
“Put Clement on the phone Goddamn it! Put him on the fucking phone!” I recognized Willis’ voice.
“…There were four fifteen-year-old girls? And they were all smoking cigarettes? Curious.” Lance’s voice sounded distant and removed. “…And eleven-hundred irritated lesbians banging on the door right? Ha! I hear you.”
“Hello?” I said finally. “Lance, hang up the phone.”
Lance hung up.
“You let that man answer the phone? He’s been answering all evening! Did Randall come back yet? What's going on?” Willis yelled, startling me.
“You know… I thought he was helping some hysterical client. I was just showing him how to do meds and…”
“Meds? I hope to god you are joking!” Willis screamed into the phone so loud I could hardly hear him.
I knew what he was going to say before he said it. I hung up.
We’re willing to offer you $9.50 an hour.
While reeling towards the med room the gravity of my predicament began to take hold. So much so that I felt a kind of psychological shock, as if already immune to what I was going to see in there. The training manuals and instructional courses flickered through my head like an old stop-animation movie; images of a big man in a small jacket kind of huffing and kicking out at the air in front of a black board with the words, “Axis II. Behavioral Disorder” next to a brief description of warning signs written on it, a balding man with a pink tie and a bright smile standing with good posture next to a tray of cookies, a series of metal chairs with navy blue backings, a curly haired woman with turquoise eyeliner and thick red lipstick reiterating the danger of careless upbringing.
Who is Lance Bennett? I thought.
“It’s nothing personal,” his glittery eyes seemed to suggest, excitedly engulfed in the measure of colorful pills being shoveled down his salivating throat, “it’s nothing personal.”