Brandon and Wilson at the Catch, Installment 35/40

Wilson

Wednesday, September 13, 1989

I’ve written nothing here for two days. Too wrecked. Monday, when I arrived home from school and found Mrs. Doubek in the cottage for the second time in a week, my heart sank. It was a Monday. The state would close the Catch on a Monday. She stood by the front door, back stiff, ready for a quick exit. She unfolded a statement to read to the assembled residents as we stood around the tables in the dining area. There was a lot of blah, blah, blah about changes in weekend staffing and needing to pull together in these difficult times, biding her time before the real news.

“Flycatcher no longer employs Mr. Duane Fellows. Mr. Lewis Wilkerson has replaced him on an interim basis. Mr. Kent Thompson, staff therapist, has offered his resignation and it was accepted, effective at 2 p.m. today. We anticipate that the state will remove the admissions hold on our facility by the end of the week as a result of these changes.”

It’s a repeating theme in my life. Losses come in bunches. Brandon. Duane. Kent. My collection of people, decimated.

Old thoughts resurfaced. I know them well. They come easily when I’m upset. They’re right here, dancing in the daylight, eager to be noticed and repeated regularly, fully aware of their devastating power over me, keen to be a driving force in my life once again. I’ve got no one. I’ve got nothing. I’ve got no way to make this better.

I started saying these words soon after my life fell apart when I was six, even before I was aware of an inner dialogue. I started saying these words more frequently, when I was ten, after I lost contact with the only person who ever visited me in my foster homes. The thoughts are with me now, somehow having grown stronger in their absence. I know these words are not my friends. I’ve learned what happens to me when I say them to myself. I say them anyway. Over and over.

I’ve got no one. I’ve got nothing. I’ve got no way to make this better.

Brandon. Duane. Kent. Banished from my life. And Jennings, not banished like the others, not taken, but gone anyway. Jennings and Brandon and Duane and Kent. We’d make a great family, these four and me. I imagine us at the dinner table together. They’d ask me about my day at school, Jennings wanting assurances that I hadn’t caused any trouble, Duane wanting to know what I learned, Brandon asking if I kissed any guys. Kent would want to know what I thought about kissing or not kissing any guys.

I’d answer their questions. I’d be an open book. I’d tell them about my family, my grief, my prior indiscretions. I’d tell each of them what they mean to me, how much I want and need them in my life, how much I appreciate each of them.

Yesterday morning, I spent my first waking hour cradled in Mrs. Coleman’s arms, crying on the couch in the common area, until she had to leave to start driving residents to school. All she said to me was, “I know, baby. I know.” She didn’t make me go to school this morning, at least not right away. I heard Wilkerson, who came to work at 8:30, say, “You’re coddling the boy.” He told me to get my Black butt ready for school. I didn’t.

As Mrs. Coleman drove off in the red agency van filled with the younger residents headed to their middle schools, I saw Mr. Big Catch walk into the administration building. Ten minutes later, I saw him escort Mrs. Doubek to her car, her head still held high, but her eyes slitted with anger. The woman who built her job around making sure nothing bad happened on her watch lost her job because something bad happened on her watch. I gawked at the train wreck the Catch had become.

I decided I’d rather be at school. When I was little, school was the best place for me, a place where a quiet child who did his work could be valued, earning the occasional, “Nice work.” Now, the banality of a high school classroom seems highly preferable to the ongoing disappointments of group home life.

I can see how Flycatcher is going to play this with the State. They’ll say, we got rid of the weekend staff who lost track of a resident who ended up dead. We got rid of the man who signed off on that staffing. We got rid of the therapist whose inadequacies failed to keep his clinically depressed client from killing himself. We got rid of the two frisky residents who were involved in some hijinks that may have contributed to the dead residents’ suicidal thinking. We even fired the director who sequestered herself in her office while problems festered outside her awareness. We’re all good now. Send us your grieving orphans, your maltreated children, your teenagers of incarcerated parents. We’ll take on your cutters, your fighters, your bullies, and your bullied. We’ve got plenty of room. We’re never too busy for your referrals.

I’ve got no one. No one here to admire, to help me become more sophisticated, to inspire me to do good, no one here who will come with me when it’s my time to leave. No friends. No lovers. No family. No one. I’ve got nothing. Nothing to do, nothing that will distract me from my woes or help me be the person I want to be, nothing to show for the years spent here. Nothing. I’ve got no way to make this better.

I’ve got no way to make this better. That thought butted against something else going on in my head. Kent. Kent appeared in my head, Kent in his creaky swivel chair, in his poorly decorated office, with his bookshelf half-filled with graduate school texts, with his earnest expression, and his cognitive therapy worksheets. Kent spent a year trying to teach me what to do when I found myself thinking that I had no way to make things better. He had a whole system, one I mocked for its paint-by-numbers lack of creativity. Figure out what goals are blocked. Find new strategies to keep these goals alive. Discover alternative goals if you can’t find new strategies to keep the old goals alive. Find new ways to think of things.

This was the system Kent used with me masterfully. The system that helped me decide to abandon my goal of finding a family worthy of raising me, to discover the new goal of finding a worthy boyfriend, and new strategies for that new goal, to abandon my stealing and dishonesty and develop some sophistication to attract the kind of man I envisioned. We came up with a whole new frame for how to think of myself, not as an abandoned and forgotten boy left to fend for himself, but as a budding young gay man with a life full of new experiences awaiting me.

Kent was a treasure. I shouldn’t have mocked him, for his simple formulas straight from some textbook, his lack of brand-name clothes, his cheap haircut, and even his skinny legs. God, I can be shallow. I decided to channel Kent for a few minutes and see where it got me.

Figure out what goals are blocked that are leading to your distress. I had plenty of blocked goals. Being with Brandon was top of the list.

Find new strategies to keep these goals alive. Not only could I think about how to get Brandon back to the Catch, but I could also think about how to get myself to Brandon. Granted, no one I respect would likely be in favor of an attempt to harm myself and get myself hospitalized, including Brandon. But still, the general idea intrigued me. I could wait to find out where Brandon goes next and get myself there. And maybe I could get myself to Kent and Duane.

Find alternative goals. This is where Kent helped me most, but this is also a place where I got stuck. I wasn’t ready to think about the next boyfriend, not to mention the next Kent, the next Duane, the next Jennings. But then I had this thought: there would be the next director of the Catch.

Find alternative ways to think about the situation. Kent was a master at this, or at least his worksheets were, but my first stab at this didn’t yield any thinking that thrilled me. “Brandon isn’t that great anyhow. He’s a heterosexual backward white boy. Good riddance.” “Duane isn’t that great anyhow. All ego and talk and probably homophobic. Good riddance.” “Jennings wasn’t all that great anyhow. Too unimaginative.” “Kent isn’t that great of a therapist. Too by-the-book.” The trouble with all that thinking was, every time I said those things to myself, my mind countered with how wonderful each of them was. And as soon as I started down that road, I heard myself say: I’ve got no one. I’ve got nothing. I’ve got no way to make this better. I’m clearly not ready for finding alternative ways to think about my situation.

Wilson

Friday, September 15, 1989

Yesterday at Douglass High, the junior class guidance counselor gave out information on something called the PSAT-NMSQ Test and scholarships it could lead to if someone did well on it. I had questions, but I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, to suggest to the assembled masses that I saw myself worthy of scholarships.

I know I want a lot in life. No one in my family ever had the things I want, a good job, fine clothes, and a decent man. I don’t have to go to college. It would be easy to not go to college. It’s the part of the plan that’s the most practical to drop. I wouldn’t have to worry about college entrance tests and scholarships and deciding what classes to take. Can I skip college and be a decent person? I certainly can. Can I skip college and be the person I want to be, with the man I want? I doubt it.

Maybe it’s not even right to reach this high. Maybe college is what rich white folks have decided Black people should do to keep us quiet and off the dole. Maybe becoming more sophisticated is a white person’s goal. Maybe I’ve simply accepted white people goals as my goals instead of figuring out what I want. Maybe the right thing, maybe the Blackest thing I could do is say no to college.

But Clara Luper, Oklahoma’s version of Martin Luther King, Jr., went to college. Duane and Kareem and Jennings, they all went to college. Leon did two years of college after the military and says he’ll go back full-time once Kareem finishes dental school. Do they know what a PSAT-NMSQT is? Maybe. Probably some of them do. They’d at least know how to help me find out. But Davey? Mrs. Coleman? Wilkerson? Ellen? LaTonya? Felipe? Terrance? Trey?

Help.

I asked Davey about his community college experience. He told me he “didn’t feel it” and, thus, stopped going.

“Isn’t there a lot you want to learn?” I asked him. That was the wrong question for Davey. I don’t think there’s much Davey wants to learn.

I shared with Mrs. Coleman that I thought I needed someone to help me figure out college stuff. She said, “You’re smart. You keep going to school and doing your homework and it’ll happen, sweetie. It’ll happen.”

“It’ll happen” is the opposite of a plan.

This is how dreams die. It’s not that people don’t want to support your dream, it’s that they don’t know how.