Reunion

Odie went home. He had been with me since March while his human, my Very Anxious Client made his way through the seriously broken shelter system. While the client was in the shelter, we put in his application for mental health housing, and crossed our fingers. They bounced it back- “not mentally ill enough.” What??? Trying to keep this client halfway functional was taking a monumental effort from our whole staff. Doug revised the psych eval, elaborating on symptoms and how they affect the client's life. I do the same with the psychosocial and we resubmit. Now the serious mental illness is approved, but they are rejecting him for his housing history. “Not enough documentation of street homelessness.” How the fuck do you document street homelessness? It’s not like the park bench gives you a lease, or you get a receipt every time you sleep on the subway. I tried to explain this to the mental health housing reviewer. "Just document one time you saw him for each of the street homeless periods, she says." This is a complicated project because he had so many periods of street homelessness punctuated by shelters and stays with friends. So I go back through our records, jotting down dates on the back of the useless pieces of paper welfare includes in every letter to a client listing the languages they can opt for. This makes no sense because you choose a language when you apply, but most of what they send out makes no sense. I write up the visits, choosing one out of many for each period. We resubmit. At last, approval! The placement process is centralized now so we can’t target the applications to specific housing programs. We just have to wait and see what they offer him. The first offer is definitely not acceptable. I have been to that building and it’s nice, but it’s in Brownsville where people are still shooting each other pretty often. My client is small, white, transgender, Goth and has a habit of walking around outside late at night because he goes to raves. There is no way it’s safe for him in Brownsville. The second,though, is a brand new building in the Bronx. The client is a little hesitant about the Bronx, but one of our staff-Robin, who is himself in mental health housing- goes with him to look at the apartment and he is sold. The first couple days after he moves in are rough. He’s calling me all the time in a panic. I tell him over and over that this is normal. That when you’ve been ahomeless for a long time you get used to having people around. Whether you’re on the street or in a shelter or crashing on someone’s couch, you’re pretty much never alone. And now that he’s alone, he can hear his thoughts, including the ones he’s been running from. I tell him not to just sit there. Get out - find the laundromat, find the supermarket. Meet the other people in the building. Do stuff. After a couple of days, he is adjusting. Friends have donated household items for him. Dishes, sheets, a brand new litterbox. It’s wonderfully generous, but unfortunately they’ve sent them to my house and they’re forming a wall of large boxes which is totally in the way. Jeff B, one of our volunteers, gets in his car to drive out to my house in Brooklyn to pick up the stuff and the cat and drive back to the Bronx, but someone has tried to hotwire his car and it won’t start so the mission is canceled. The client and I ask around trying to find someone with a car in New York City, which is kind of rare. Our other volunteer with a car is in Philadelphia so that’s no help. Finally, P finds a friend of his he knows from the rave scene and we set up a time. I can’t have a client in my house, so when he calls to say they’re 20 minutes out I move all the boxes and Odie in his carrier out to the walkway. I take a few boxes to the bottom of the stairs, but I can’t do the heavy ones. As I sit on the brick stairs, waiting for them to come down the sidewalk, I’m tearing up. Odie is a sweet soft guy and I will miss him. But one of the many traumas of being kicked out and homeless is losing your animals. I remember the pain of that separation from my high school years. So when clients show up with cats they can’t take with them, they come home with me for however long even though I know it’s going to hurt when I give them back. Connor is actually the son of one of those cats- a trans client asked me to keep her pretty tortoiseshell lady, and as time went by she started to expand until one day she went behind the piano and gave birth. We could hear the squeaks of the kittens but we couldn’t tell how many there were until they got big enough to start exploring. Connor, “brave kitty” was the first one out, followed by his three orange brothers, so similar we had to put colored collars on them to tell them apart. By the time the client and his friend show up, I have managed to get a grip on the crying. The friend, older than my client, has driven them here and parked, but does not plan on driving back because he does not want to drive in the Bronx. This strikes me as kind of strange, but the client has received his check and tries to order a Lyft. The money is there, but some security feature gets triggered and it won’t go through and the client is starting to freak out. I say tell him to try the local Car Service and give him the number. It’s a 15 minute wait until they can come so the client, not great at holding still, wanders off to find a store leaving me with his friend. Curious, I start talking to his friend who tells me that he’s a cognitive neuroscientist. He also tells me that his current job has taught him that he is better off doing research than seeing patients. "I’m the other way around," I tell him. "I don’t mind research, but I’ve always been able to reach people." I ask him what he would research if it were up to him. Caught off guard he launches into a slightly incoherent ramble about the impact of our thoughts on our brains. “Neuroplasticity,” I say, seeing that he is getting lost in own explanation. He nods, and I tell him that when I was in school neuroplasticity was a brand new idea. I remember the day I first heard about it. I was sitting in one of our basement classrooms and my Advisor, a trauma specialist, who was an older man-but not one of the psychodynamic types that still populated the faculty - was lecturing. I was kind of following with part of my brain while he reviewed the basics of synapsis and neurotransmitters for the people in the class with less of a scientific background. As he started to explain the basics of neuroplasticity, the pieces all came together in my mind as though they were assembling themselves on a clear dry erase board in front of me. Dr. A must’ve seen an odd look on my face because he asked me what was going on and I blurted out the theory. Startled, he asked me if I’d read it somewhere or if I just came up with it. I told him it just makes sense. This was not the first time I’ve had a moment like that. One of them I still remember was at Hampshire. My advisor there was - at the time - a black lesbian neuroscientist who studied AIDS and she taught a lot of classes about HIV/AIDS. I was always her TA so I was sitting at the back of one of these classes listening to her talk about the emerging treatment approaches, reverse transcript inhibitors (AZT etc) and the protease inhibitors, which would eventually make the difference and turn the tide of the epidemic. I started seeing in my mind the reproduction process of the virus and when she paused, I blurted out "why are there no integrase inhibitors?" because that was the one other enzyme that could be targeted to stop the replication process. My advisor stopped still in the middle of her lecture thinking about this question. She started took to calling these moments of mine "flashes of brilliance," but flashes are not particularly useful. What you need is really sustained thought of that caliber not just lightning bolts striking here and there. I could never reign in my brain that way, to bring the full force to bear like a laser on just one thing, so science was too limiting for me. The car pulls up, and many drivers would’ve been daunted by the pile of boxes, cat carrier and the two guys, but luckily-because this is my neighborhood- I know this driver, Sammi. He and I have often talked about his life in Lebanon, his love of dogs, and jet skis, the years he spent driving for an executive at Goldman Sachs. So he gets out of the car and opens the trunk and starts rearranging the boxes like he’s playing a game of Tetris. I put Odie on the backseat to keep him out of the cold wind and tuck a 16 pound bag of cat chow at the client‘s feet. A few more boxes go in the backseat and the friend gets in the front seat. I had thought he might drive his own car somewhere, but he leaves it parked and goes with the client to the Bronx to help him unload. Once they’re gone, I survey the emptiness in my house, the space where the boxes were, and the spot on the top bookshelf where Odie cleared himself some room to lie down. That was his favorite vantage point for observing the room and the windows. I feel like somehing has been ripped out me, but also infinitesimally lighter, a few ounces shaved off my heavy load of responsibilty, one less life in my hands. A few hours later the client calls to tell me Odie has inspected the apartment, eaten, pooped and is now on his lap kneading, and I know their new chapter has begun.