Group Home

Shane Kraus

Two weeks into training as a counselor at a group home for boys I was on the night shift by default. I couldn’t handle the days. Anyone paying attention could tell I was at least incompetent if not a total fraud. I couldn’t handle disciplining, restraining, reading to, or cooking for the children. I couldn’t handle them following me around for whole days pelting me with volleyballs while calling me cocksucker, or manipulating me into admitting, in what I thought was confidence, that yes, I had looked at Playboy perhaps once or twice in my life, and then telling the whole staff. The only thing that kept me from burning the place down was an apparent ally I had in a child named Chad, who I lost for giving a timeout he didn’t deserve, sending him into a kind of pre-adolescent seizure that required another counselor and me to engage in one of the aforementioned restraints, while he bawled and told me he was going to kill me for nearly an hour. The other day Damon, the oldest, most deviant and blatantly evil one in the group grabbed me after I’d been at the center of some other turbulent incident and said: listen man, I see you’re not doing real well, but we’re all pretty sure you'll be gone in a week, so you can’t expect anybody to care about being nice to you. I watched him walk away, thought briefly about tackling him, but didn't.

At night though, I'd see almost no one. I was responsible for little more than being awake in the event of an emergency. I sat with the hum of lamplight waiting for the sun to exhale blue beyond the Marin hills. The worst that happened was a kid that couldn’t sleep because of a sore throat, or awake with nightmares about horrors I imagined must be worse than war, and we played checkers until he slumped over and I carried him back to his room.

On Thursday I was at the desk as the last counselor was leaving. She reminded me of a few things and I nodded to her, not listening. After a while she was gone and about half an hour later a child was standing where she had been. The office door was open and he was standing still, about as tall as a lawnmower.

We stared at each other. I wondered how long he'd been there, what I had been guilty of in the last thirty seconds.

I think I wet the bed, he said.

I nodded and didn't move. My hands were flat on the desk. I panned the office as though there might be a more capable individual somewhere in the room who would handle this, and then stood up and walked over to him.

He led me into the hallway, through the black broken only by little beacons of red nightlight, and to his room, which he shared with two other boys – Garrett and Angel – both of them wide-awake.

The bed wasn't what I’d pictured: sheets and blankets drenched in yellow, a flood of urine. There was a small wet spot in the middle of the mattress and three sets of eyes waiting for me to do something about it.

You have to change it, Angel said.

Yeah, I said, not moving.

You should change him too, Garrett said, all of us looking at Cole, the one who’d set this in motion.

I sat back and examined things. Silence was appropriate. It was better to have them thinking I was in deep concentration on something adult and responsible than to speak and prove otherwise. After a solid minute or two of the four of us standing around I turned to Garrett:

Why don’t you change him, and I'll take care of the bed? I said, trying to phrase it like a directive rather than a plea.

Okay, he said.

We all moved according to our appointed tasks. Garrett and Angel argued briefly about which underpants Cole should wear and eventually agreed on a simple white pair with no designs. It occurred to me while this argument was underway that I’d made a terrible mistake in assigning this responsibility to them, as many of them have had all sense of physical boundary obscured through abuse; but because I hadn't read the files on them, I didn't know specifically who, so should have applied a blanket policy to all, but we've already been over my deficiencies.

Then there was the issue of whether or not Cole should shower. I argued no, but eventually deferred to the better judgment of nine year-old Angel, who suggested that he might get a rash if he slept like that. I had no idea. It seemed plausible. I decided allowing him to take a shower in the middle of the night was better than even the possibility of a rash produced by him sleeping in his own urine. Ok, I said, but you put him in the shower and then get out, that’s it.

He’s too little, he doesn’t know how.

He’ll survive, I said.

He might drown.

He’s not gonna drown.

It will be your fault if he does.

Fine, I said.

Fine, he said.

Fuck you.

(I didn’t say that.)

I stepped back into the room and stared at the bed having no idea where the sheets were kept. Garrett picked up on this, tried not to smile, failed, slid a chair to the closet, climbed onto it, and retrieved a set of blue and yellow sheets with superheroes on them that fit Cole’s bed. He bounced from corner to corner tucking and folding with an efficiency that seemed impossible. You will save me, I thought.

Now Damon came into the room. Hey, he said to Garrett, not looking at me, hopping onto the bed Garrett was trying to make.

Damon made me nervous. His presence meant people were up in his room, which forced me to consider the possibility that this might be escalating into a full-scale child insurgence against me. If there were people up in his room, that made two of the six rooms fully awake, which could mean collusion, escalation, a confluence and overflow of repressed orphan rage. I started calculating and preparing. I would take Damon out first. I would lock him in the time-out room. I would not beat him, but if necessary I would use duct tape. Duct tape was acceptable.

Who’s in the shower? he asked.

Cole, Garrett told him.

I stood there listening. I was in charge.

Did he get sick? Damon asked Garrett.

Wet the bed.

I'm gonna shower when he’s done, Damon said, looking at me. I looked at Garrett.

You know you’re supposed to be in bed, Garrett told him.

I looked at Damon, trying to appear menacing, as though I could do anything to stop him if he wanted to take a shower or run across the countertops naked and pissing into the cabinets. He retreated to his room and this felt like a kind of victory.

So now Cole and Angel came back from the shower and Cole was crying. There was little question this was Angel’s fault, but I avoided the issue for fear of having to do something about it. I told Cole to take it easy, it was fine, come on now, and handed him a stuffed horse. It wasn't his. He looked at me confused. I told him to be quiet.

A few minutes now, and two more of them, Alex and Donny came out of Damon's room. I hadn’t even considered the other side of the main living area. They were up too. I pushed through the growing collection of kids loitering about the hall and went into Damon's room where he was again standing on the bed, slowly moving his arms and fists in a decent approximation of Thai Chi. His roommate, Jake, was playing a Gameboy.

Damon, I said to him, I mean it man, get in bed. you’re gonna have serious timeouts.

Why? Everybody else is up?

Yeah, Jake said, staring down at his game.

I didn’t like Jake. I didn’t care that he’s had the shit kicked out of him by three different sets of foster parents. I often thought about opening his window and packing him a bag, so that if he woke in the middle of the night, it might occur to him to run away.

For the moment I couldn't argue with them. I went back to Cole’s room where thankfully, Garrett had the bed made, had Cole dry, in underpants and a t-shirt. Angel was cleaning the room, telling me he was sorry for making Cole cry, and offering to make me hot chocolate, which I accepted, because though incredibly sweet, Angel was by far the most explosive of the group, could have the house ransacked and three or four of his peers murdered in seconds, and I was fine with him working peacefully on hot chocolate rather than setting the place on fire.

Now, of course, Damon had followed me, heard this, and also wants hot chocolate:

No, I told him.

That’s bullshit.

Why?

Cause you’re letting Angel have some.

That’s a special case.

No it isn’t.

Yes it is.

You're a piece of shit.

Ok, I sighed.

I mean it.

Fine, Damon.

No, seriously, you're a fart in a sock, dipped in shit.

That's really stupid.

I don't care.

I think you're a goddamn idiot.

You can't say that to me.

You just told me I was a fart in a sock, dipped in shit?

It's different when I say it because I'm the kid. He was walking away and talking over his shoulder. You can’t give one of us hot chocolate and not the other, he said, that isn’t the way to do it. you’re new so you don’t know, but that isn’t how you do it. For a second I stood there astounded at the sophistication of sarcasm contained within that small person walking away from me and then snapped out of it.

I checked in on Cole now. With his mouth wide open and on top of the blanket, he’d fallen back to sleep. I didn’t like this. I felt like he should be up. I felt like he should be suffering for his inability to control his urine. I wanted to grab him, shake him, tell him you can’t just sleep you little shitbag, you started the whole thing, but I didn’t. I didn’t. I closed his door and went across to the other side of the main area where Chad and Donny were seated on the floor, playing chess. Apparently one of them had made a move that the other thought was illegal:

The horse doesn’t move like that, one of them said.

I know how the horse moves. You don’t even really know how to play. I showed you.

It’s not like checkers. You can’t jump shit with your fucking horse.

Yeah, you can.

Both of you go to bed, I said.

They were both looking straight down at the board.

Everyone else is up, one of them said, neither of them looking at me.

Yes but they're going to be in trouble.

I'm sure they will be in big time trouble, one said.

We don't even know who you are, the other one said.

When did you start working here? Like an hour ago?

I'm gonna fucking lose it, I mumbled.

What? One said.

Did he just say fuck?

They both looked up.

No, I didn't.

You did.

I tried to close their door and walk away, but they were already up and following me into the kitchen.

Everyone was up now. It was 1 AM. I was trembling. I couldn't speak. They were on fire. They were alive. The mutiny burned through all of them. This was a language I didn't understand; a cryptic, indecipherable orphan code. I lived for what they felt right now. Angel was handing out paper cups filled with hot chocolate. The cabinets were open, their contents spilled on the floor. Garrett was sitting, aware of the degree of misbehavior going on and unable to pretend otherwise. Damon was moving from refrigerator to pantry to stove eating everything he could find, showing off his cooking ability, running several projects simultaneously. Jake, whom I’d forgotten about, was in the middle of the living room, balancing on the back of a couch, throwing a basketball at a set of cubbies, retrieving the ball and repeating. He looked at me periodically, turned on by the destruction, his face glowing with hate for me. I weakly tried to tell him to come into the kitchen, and he laughed as if we both knew how ridiculous that was. Chad went over and started playing with him, trying not to make eye contact with me. Two more got up. They came from the other side, goddamn them. I didn’t know their names; I didn’t even know they were here. This made ten, maybe twelve now, all bounding about in the arousal of their impudence. I sat down with Garrett, the only one still moderately composed. I was giving in. He looked at me through the chaos with an entirely genuine empathy. He was conscious of so much that I was not. The two of us said nothing, ate, drank and watched the tumultuous progress of a game that combined the basic principals of football with wrestling and intentionally upending couches. A fight started, then another. I got up and walked outside.

I would just leave them, I thought. My car was right there. I was making $10.65 an hour. I belonged in San Francisco, where people were beyond repair too, but responsible enough to torture themselves for it.

I walked over to another house, knocked on the door and a girl opened it.

Hi, I said.

Hi.

Ah, I’m over there, at that house. I pointed.

Yeah.

I’ve lost control of things. They all got up. Everything was quiet, and then they were all up.

She took a step out the door to look and her voice rose with concern. What’s going on? Is everybody okay?

I don’t know. I shouldn’t be here.

What do you mean you shouldn't be here? You have to go back. This happens all the time, and I’m sure it seems a lot worse than it is, but I can’t leave here. There is somebody we call for this kind of thing. I'll call, but you have to go back.

I went back and sat in my car and stared at the door imagining the nightmare of carnage and violence brewing behind it; the older ones using the blood of the younger ones to write their names on the walls; Damon leaping from countertop to table in his underwear with the fire extinguisher; Angel loosening the valve on the gas line; Cole crying and dowsing a sleeping orphan in lighter fluid.

The emergency person showed up in a small pickup about three minutes later. I waited for him to go in, then followed. Things had quieted. The basketball was gone. The food was put away. The fight was over. No one would look at me. In minutes this man had established absolute control over the entire group. He smiled at me with warmth and tolerance and it melted me down into a puddle.

Another half an hour and he handed me off to the lead counselor for my house who had been called in accordance with standard protocol to come and officiate closure of the incident. She pulled me into the office and told me not to take this too hard, that this kind of thing can unfold really quickly, that I would be better the next time, that I was really good with Chad the other day and”

Thank you, I told her, I’m sorry to interrupt you.

It's ok. Go ahead.

I don't think I can do this.

We sat for minute or so before either of us made a sound. She sighed. I was looking at my hands on her desk.

I didn't want to be another one that quit, I really didn't.

So don't.

I have to.

Are you sure? She asked, not looking up. You haven't finished training yet?

I think so.

It's too bad.

Yeah.

She nodded. I nodded. She told me I could pick up my last check on Tuesday, and if I wanted, I could say goodbye to some of the kids then, but I didn’t want to say goodbye to any of them. She held her hand out and I shook it and left.

Pulling away I decided I would write Damon a letter. I would explain all the things he doesn’t know about me. I would enumerate his many ignorances. They would be listed and categorized. I would allude to the fact that he cannot vote or drive, that he's barely old enough to have an opinion, let alone insight, so he couldn’t possibly understand anything about anything. I would make clear that I was never suited for this kind of work, that I only took this job because I have a friend in Arizona that does it, whose lead I often attempt to take on things, regardless of how difficult that lead is to follow–my friend being somewhat unreasonable in his saintliness–and because my mom was in the convent before she met my dad, so I’d expected to be disposed to service–perhaps not to veterans or the terminally diseased, but certainly to youths–and its clear now that I am not. I’m not the guy, I would explain. I would have done harm. It takes specific qualities to do what the counselors do here, and I don't have them. You think I copped out you little shit, but you're wrong. I did you a favor. You think you understand some things, but you don't. No. Nothing.

Acknowledgements to Paradigm, the Mitchell Issue.