The Legend of Puddles and The Great Backer-Upper

As trite as it may sound, the one thing I will miss about my current job should I ever find a “grown-up job” is the number and variety of people I meet.  Sure, there are a few sort of stock characters which you are bound to see:  the sweet old lady who acts like—and quite possible is—grandmother to the world; the curmudgeonly old man who, in spite of how much you can feel his complete loathing of everyone and everything around him, you cannot help but love; the poor, confused old man whose family dumped him and never comes to see him; and although it is heartbreaking, the young people who have had extremely tragic accidents or birth defects which have required professional care.  These people are the ones that make me enjoy what I do.  Even when faced with the incredibly sad situations in which some of these people live, they make me feel good about what I do and remind me that it makes a difference in their lives.  So, naturally, this post is not about them.

Should anyone be unclear about what exactly I do for a living, my friend Matt describes it as follows:  “Mike drives around old people with his partner.  At night.  In a van.”  Another, far less creepy way to say it is that my company picks up mobility-impaired customers who do not require medical care from hospitals and drives them to nursing homes, rehabilitation facilities, and doctors’ appointments.  For the most part, our customers at night are nursing home residents who have fallen out of bed or pulled out their feeding tubes, were checked out at the emergency room, and need a ride home.  However, every now and then, we get some far more interesting characters.

About a month ago, I received a call from the emergency room at the county hospital asking us to take a customer back to his nursing home.  When we arrived at the hospital, the customer turned out to be a short, middle-aged man, and he was sitting on the edge of the gurney in his room.  The nurse said, “He just told me he needed to go to the restroom.  Do you guys mind waiting a second?”

I told her this was not a problem, and she helped the man stand up and walk to the restroom.  He was a little wobbly on his feet, but this is not uncommon with many of the people we transport.  Once he was out of the room, I noticed that the sheet on which he had been lying was soaking wet.  When he returned from the restroom, this man—whom I shall call “Puddles”— was almost completely soaked from the waist down.  Again, this is not all that uncommon.  However, as he got close to me, the overwhelming smell of stale booze was beyond overpowering.  Whether the smell was coming from the copious amount of beer which had been spilled on his shirt and had subsequently dried into a thin crust, his breath, or his urine was unclear.  It was probably a combination of all three—the “booze-breath-piss trifecta,” if you will.

While it does not happen frequently, Puddles was not the first intoxicated customer I had transported.  Nursing homes usually send the average Drunky McResident to the emergency room either because they are a danger to themselves or because they have already fallen and need to get checked out.  After a few hours at the hospital, Drunky McResident will have started to sober up and generally be content to pass out on the stretcher for the ride back home.  Of course, this time, such was not the case.

Puddles had a high-pitched voice with a strong southern accent.  He asked an almost endless barrage of questions.  There were two problems with this.  The first was that almost every inquiry began with the words “what,” “where,” or “when.”  When he would begin these questions, he would inevitably stutter over the initial “w” sound, meaning that he ended up sounding like a high-pitched, hillbilly version of the eponymous Sasquatch from Harry and the Hendersons.  “Wawawawawa…What time is it?” he would ask.  Or “Wewewewewe…Where are we?”  Or “Wewewewewe….When are we going to get there?”

Except for the one time he asked me how much farther it was to Cleveland (a city to which he admitted he had never been), these were the only questions he asked.  This was the second problem.  He repeatedly asked these questions, each time in the exact same order.  Puddles would ask his three questions, apparently find the answers satisfactory for about ten to fifteen seconds, and then return to the first question.

One of the roads that I normally take for this route was under construction, so I had been forced to take a road with which I am not quite as familiar.  Because of this, I was unprepared when I came across the railroad tracks at the bottom of what appeared to be a massive canyon running across the street.  I tried to slow down as quickly as I could, but I still managed to hit the dip going a little faster than was preferable.  Anyone who has ridden on a stretcher can attest that even the slightest bump in the road makes those things jiggle around more than an epileptic fat kid.  Hitting a chasm like that one can be downright frightening.

Rather than panicking, though, Puddles seemed to find the experience exciting, as he screamed/sang, “Like a rhinestone cowboy!”  Apparently, these were the only lyrics he really knew from the song, as he continued to hum the melody until he got to the next refrain.  “Like a rhinestone cowboy!” he shouted again.  This continued for a couple minutes until he seemed to lose interest and began his questions again.  “Wawawawawa…What time is it?”

As we neared his nursing home, an epiphany seemed to strike him.  As anyone who has ever seen the inside of an ambulance knows, the foot-end of a stretcher always faces the rear of the vehicle.  Although we drive modified minivans, the same principle applies.  This fact, however, seemed to elude Puddles, as he ceased his regular cycle of questions and asked, “Wawawawawa…What’s your name, driver?”  After I told him, he proudly stated, “Mike, you are the best backer-upper I’ve ever seen!”

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “What’s that?”

“Man, we musta gone thirty miles and you did the whole thing backerds!  That’s damned impressive!”

Rather than explaining that we had gone less than ten miles and that it only seemed like we had been going backwards because he was facing the rear of the vehicle, I just said, “Thank you.”

My Superpower is Alienation

As many of my friends can attest, I have a tendency—some might call it a preternatural gift—for saying exactly the wrong thing in social settings.  I am almost never trying to be mean or upset anyone when this occurs.  Instead, there's a part of my brain that seems to say to me, "Hey.  You'll be really awesome if you say this."  This part of my brain is an idiot.  What it really means to say is, "You're going to sound like a giant asshole, and all of your friends are going to wonder why they continue to invite you out with them."

The more troublesome variety of this occurs when something shoots across my mind and I catch it before it comes out of my mouth.  Somewhere along the way, I realize it is a bad idea to say this particular thing.  However, rather than dropping the idea entirely, I will still feel the urge to say what I am thinking and try to phrase it "nicely."  This scenario leads to even more awkwardness than usual.  Most commonly, this happens when someone asks my opinion about something.  No one else will have told this person what they truly think, and so I am stuck looking like a jerk trying to explain that when I said that your haircut looks like you paid a special needs six-year-old to hack at your head with garden shears, I meant it in a good way.

One such occasion was when an acquaintance that was getting married showed me a picture of the wedding dress she was going to be wearing.  This woman is rather large, and, since no one has worn sleeves on a wedding dress since about 1983, her dress was sleeveless.  When she asked for my opinion, I told her that I thought the dress was nice but was curious if she had considered wearing a wrap.  She said, "No.  Why?"

I fumbled because I would be an even bigger jerk if I had said what I was thinking, which was something to the effect of how no one is going to pay any attention to her dress when they were so focused on those giant sacks of oatmeal that she was trying to pass off as arms.  Instead, with the grace of a manatee trying to ride a bicycle, I ended up sputtering out, "Because you might get cold."  The she reminded me that she was getting married in the summer.

In Texas.

Outdoors.

So I was left to bumble through an incredibly awkward conversation in which I finally let slip the following sentence: "I just thought you might look better in the dress if you wore something that covered your arms."

As soon as I heard the words, I knew I had made a huge mistake.  In retrospect, I know that I should have kept my mouth shut.  However, at the time, I felt like I was doing her a service by giving her the honest opinion that no one else would.  I hardly expected her to raise me over her head victoriously while chanting my name for telling her that her fat arms were going to make everyone nauseous, but I thought that she would appreciate my honesty.  She did not.  After a long argument where I tried to convince her that I really was only trying to help, I was informed that it might be best if I did not attend her wedding.

This is why I think there needs to be a service that allows people to anonymously tell others things that need to be heard.  No one likes to be told, "Yes, that tattoo will, in fact, make you look like an asshole" or "You should probably keep your baby covered up when you go out in public because it looks like a gremlin."  However, sometimes people just need to know these things, and no one will tell them.  Until such a service arrives, I suppose I will continue bearing the brunt of everyone's inability to share an honest opinion.  You're welcome.

(Disclaimer:  As I write this blog, my friends and acquaintances are probably going to notice that they will end up in here.  I hope that they will have a good sense of humor about things and realize that the ability to laugh at one's self is one of the things I love about my friends.  However, should you be one of those friends who lacks such a sense of humor, then I will tell you this:  I am most certainly not talking about you.  I meant that my other friend's mullet makes him look like a child molester.  Yours is simply majestic.)