Mom is out of rehab now, which is stupid — she should still be there (fuck the insurance company).

That said, we’re not missing the place. It sucked.

It’s a “skilled nursing and rehabilitation center,” according to the sign above the front door. In Mom’s six weeks there, though, we saw only three nurses, and usually just once daily, for only a few minutes.

One is “the boss” and isn’t directly involved in patient care, and the other two are nurses, which is certainly a skill, but “skilled nursing” isn’t what the place offers. Seeing that sign every morning made me chuckle or pissed me off, depending on how the day before had gone.

Virtually all of Mom’s ‘care’ came from nursing assistants, other employees who seemed to be just employees, and a kinda spooky black nun who wandered the halls and sometimes helped with chores but, thankfully, never talked about Jesus.

Two doctors dropped in, once each, for about fifteen minutes, over the course of Mom’s six weeks there. For both doctors, we had to explain why Mom was there; they hadn’t looked at her chart.

♦ ♦ ♦

In American health care, it’s pretty rough being in a hospital or nursing home, if you’re not well enough to advocate for yourself and you don’t have someone pulling for you.

Mom received much better care than most of the rehab patients, simply because my sister Katrina was there from before breakfast to after supper every day, to watch and speak up when things weren’t right. Which was constantly.

The food was wrong every meal — simply not what we’d ordered.

The medicine was often wrong, too — pills sometimes wouldn’t come at all unless Katrina reminded the right people, and a medicine discontinued by Mom’s doctor kept arriving every evening, etc.

Diaper changes were often delayed or skipped.

Four times Mom fell out of bed during the night, but the rehab center had no beds with rails, so instead they lowered her bed to about a foot off the floor, so the falls wouldn’t hurt much.

♦ ♦ ♦

Mom has two major issues: general weakness which has her unable to walk, and mental confusion that has her often unsure of things.

For the physical issues, rehab offered pretty good physical therapy, but the PT workers are contracted — they work for a PT company, not the rehab center.

For the mental issues, rehab offered nothing, really. But five or ten years ago, someone in the family bought Mom a vanity-press printing of her very brief memoirs. It’s an all-profit scam where customers answer 20 questions on a website, and the company prints a dozen copies of the answers as a very thin hardcover book — about 40 pages, with no editing or even proofreading. All of Mom’s typos were included, along with (inexplicably) a few URLs scattered into the text. I read it, but disliked the book because the printing is so super-tawdry, and I promptly (but accidentally) lost my copy.

But with Mom’s memory malfunctioning, I borrowed my brother’s copy of the book, and brought it to the rehab center. Most days Mom and/or I re-read a few pages, and I’d ask questions about what she was reading, which often triggered more detailed remembrances than what was in the book. It was helpful, I think, at rewiring the neurons and reconnecting her to who she is.

It’s still a loose connection, but once in a while the clouds clear and she’s Mom again. She remembers every hymn she’s ever sang, and amazingly, so do I, so we often sing “The Old Rugged Cross” and “How Great Thou Art” and all God’s greatest hits. Kinda reminds me of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as Dave was pulling out HAL’s memory banks and it started singing “Daisy.”

♦ ♦ ♦

If you have a loved one who fades in and out of comprehension, you might not want her to have a stranger for a roommate, and certainly not the roommates Mom had.

For the first two weeks, it was a woman who had no visitors, and kept eavesdropping and butting into our conversations.

Me to Mom: “What did you have for breakfast this morning?”

Mom’s roommate, from behind the curtain: “Oatmeal. Everyone got oatmeal.”

Another day, me to Mom: “Do you remember what Clay said about Easter, when he was here yesterday?”

Mom’s roommate, from behind the curtain: “Clay is your brother, right? He was talking about taking his grandkids to the Easter egg hunt.”

Me: “Yeah, I’m trying to see what my mom can remember, not what you can remember.”

That lady relapsed with whatever brought her there, which got her sent back to the hospital, giving us one joyous day without a roommate.

Then the next roommate moved in, stayed for a month, and she’s still there. At least the second roommate never interrupted us, because she never woke up, never said a word.

But every day, that silent roommate was visited by her loud family of Republicans, talking at great volume to be heard over her too-loud television. With only the curtain between our half of the room and their half, the soundtrack for most evenings was endless stupid conversation between two or three of the roommate’s visitors, plus whatever stupid TV show they were watching at the same time they were talking.

Three times on three different days, I asked the roommate’s family to be quieter, but asking got me nothing but loud indignation.

“Could you turn down the TV please?”

“She’s hard of hearing!” was the reply, with “she” being the comatose patient. As if she was listening!

And Mom was sometimes confused by the jibber-jabber of their loud conversations. “Who is that?” “What are they talking about?” “Why are they so loud?”

Because they’re assholes, Mom.

♦ ♦ ♦

Speaking of assholes, let’s check in with Mehar, the rehab center’s “activities director.” After the piano and Easter awfulness, she wasn’t much of a problem, because I avoided her, and steered Mom away from any activity Mehar was running.

Still, she popped into Mom’s room to invite her to each afternoon’s events. Mehar would cheerfully describe the plan — board games, beanbag tosses, whatever — and Mom would usually reply, “I don’t know what you’re saying,” because Mehar’s accent was darn near indecipherable.

Which is, I’d say, 25% of the reason I disliked Mehar so much. Mom was (and still is) having trouble making sense of plain English, so maybe speak plain English?

Is that racist of me? Probably. I’ve had immigrant doctors, dealt with overseas accents and English-as-a-third-language on helplines, and I shrug, but putting an immigrant with a triple-thick accent in charge of what’s supposed to be brain exercises for cognitive-challenged people — every last one of whom spoke English — just seems contrary to common sense.

The other 75% of me disliking Mehar was what Mehar did — the piano, and every time I remember it, I still seethe about her asking all the patients, “How do you feel about your loss of independence?”

♦ ♦ ♦

Maybe Mehar isn’t the worst employee at the rehab center, though. That might be the social worker, someone I never met and whose name I don’t know.

As we checked out, panicked with only 36 hours notice from the insurance company and Mom not really ready to come home, the social worker arranged to have a wheelchair and hospital bed delivered to Mom’s home. Katrina was initially pretty happy about that, and so was I, but the wheelchair is wrong for what Mom needs — it’s too wide for their narrow house, and Katrina would’ve preferred a transfer chair, not a wheelchair. They’re much lighter, and Katrina struggles to fold and lift the wheelchair.

The hospital bed hasn’t arrived yet, but based on its description in the paperwork, it sounds (same as the wheelchair) like something bigger and fancier than Mom needs.

The social worker never asked what Mom and Katrina needed, and never explained the financial facts of all this equipment. Katrina has her hands more than full just taking care of Mom, so she’s asked me to look through the paperwork for the wheelchair and bed. Both are rentals, and the rates seem sky-high — $59 p/month to rent a wheelchair we could buy brand-new for maybe $200? And $120 a month for a bed?

The rehab place says they’ve billed the insurance company for the chair and bed, but the coverage is still listed as ‘pending’, so Katrina & Mom could be on the hook here.

I’m suspecting that the rehab place has a contract with the medical equipment house, and gets a kickback on every rental agreement. But it’s not quite an agreement, because the line where Mom or Katrina were supposed to sign is blank, so everything might be going back.

♦ ♦ ♦

And here’s my bottom line on the rehab center: I hated the place, but I’ve seen worse, and never seen better, so maybe it’s average. Grading on the curve, maybe it’s spectacular. Doesn’t matter — it’s still a dump, where you can wait half an hour after pushing the “call nurse” button before anyone comes.

Mom wasn’t ready to come home when she came home, and it’s still a struggle getting Mom to stand and take a few precarious steps.

But at home the food and medicine are both right, diaper changes aren’t delayed or skipped, and nobody’s being rushed into a financial commitment they don’t understand.

4/27/2026

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BARTed to Berkeley, as usual, to sell fish, but never made it to Telegraph Ave. I walked to Jay’s house, where the fish cart and materials are stored, but when I got there Jay said Judith had called, hoping I’d work for her today. Jay said she was OK with it, and I guess I’m OK with it too, so I got traded like a shortstop sent to Pittsburgh.

Judith had called me, but I don’t have a phone, only a voice mail service I hadn’t checked since Thursday. So she’d called Jay instead. And what do I care? I get five bucks an hour either way, so I shrugged and reported to Three Rivers Stadium — er, Judith’s house, where I’d lived until a month ago, and where I’d worked on Tuesday.

It’s vaguely cosmic, because Jay and Judith both live in Berkeley, less than a mile apart, but they’d never met. They both sent me three bucks for Pathetic Life and both liked it, and Jay offered me a job, and Judith offered me a place to stay, and somewhere along the line I introduced them to each other. 

♦ ♦ ♦   

At the messy old flat, I didn’t knock. Knocking makes the dog go crazy, and I still have a key. Soon as I stepped inside, Lugosi licked my legs, and I picked up a note someone had dropped through the mail slot. “Please, please,” it said, “do something to keep your dog from the front window. He has barked yesterday and today non-stop.”

I gave the note to Judith, and she glanced at it without much interest. And you know, I like Judith and I like Lugosi, but he’s a dog the size of a Shetland pony, and he’s never been trained. He shreds the mail and a couple of times he’s nearly knocked me down the stairs, and he barks and he bites — there’s an order from Animal Control that Lugosi must be leashed and muzzled whenever he’s outside.

Now he barks all day? That’s new, but everything’s changed since Cy and Joe and I moved out. When there were five of us, someone was almost always home, but now the dog is left alone for hours at a time, and I guess he’s not handling it well.

Judith isn’t handling it all that well, either. “They didn’t even sign the note,” she said, “and he’s a dog. Dogs bark.”

“True on both counts,” I said, “but if Lugosi’s barking all day, your neighbors are gonna hate you, and they’ll probably call Animal Control again.”

“Oh, well,” she said, and that was that and then Judith showed me the work she’d needed me for. And to my pleasant surprise, it wasn’t cleaning. It was interior redesign. 

We disassembled and dragged the bed from the guest room into Cy’s ex-room, moved a desk from Cy’s space into the guest room, carried chairs from all over the house into Cy’s room, and a big table from the living room into my old room, etc, etc. It was a whole lot of heavy lifting and schlepping things around, but Judith had a vision and it slowly started coming into focus.

While I was beating a dog’s worth of hair out of a rug I’d drug from the guest room down the stairs and outside, she took a knife to the bed we’d moved from Cy’s old room. She hacked and carved its foam rubber mattress into smaller pieces, lashed them on top of a dozen milk crates, tossed a pink sheet over it, and it became a new couch for the corner. A clever and comfy couch, I might add.

Then I brought the now-mostly-hairless rug into what had been Cy’s quarters, and with another hour’s rearranging and some sweeping and vacuuming, Cy’s room became a second living room, just as Judith had planned.

Then we (mostly me) assembled a new bookshelf she’d bought by mail order, and we (mostly me) moved a few hundred books from stacks in the corner of the old living room onto the new shelf in the new living room. Then we (mostly me) moved all the chairs we’d moved earlier, again, into different rooms. My old space seems to be becoming an auxiliary laundry room, and Joe’s old room is where the clutter goes to die.

As for me, I’m exhausted. I’d worked the same five or so hours I would’ve worked selling fish, only instead of sitting on my butt collecting colorful stories of street life, I moved furniture all day, collecting a backache, two sore arms, a face covered with sticky sweat, and a nose full of dust and dog hairs I’ll still be picking out tomorrow.

Tomorrow, while I’m selling fish, I hope. Trade me back from the Pirates, please.

♦ ♦ ♦  

At the phone booth in the hotel, I checked my messages, and yup, Judith had called twice yesterday trying to hire me, before she’d given up and called Jay.

Of more interest, there was a phone message from Corina. She didn’t say yes and didn’t say no to my Spike & Mike invitation, but she said she’d written a reply and I should have it within a couple of days.

Was she being coy, or was the phone call a prelude to an almost certainly lipless kiss-off? I couldn’t tell anything from her tone of voice, and I sure can’t afford to call her back long distance. (I’m still broke — in the confusion this morning, Jay forgot to pay me, and I forgot to remind her.)

It’s a weird situation. Ever since they were girls, I’ve hated asking women out, but they never ask me. Asking a woman for a date is like being the little wooden duck at a sideshow carnival, and the woman goes blam and shoots me down. Asking by mail is easier, but it’s odd, and a reply via voice mail that says the answer is coming by mail? That’s even odder.

Also got a message from a man named Elliot, who’d seen my “I’ll do anything” flyers in Oakland. He said he’s looking for a carpenter to work on his summer cabin in Philo, way up in California’s north country.

I called him back and explained like Bob Dylan but without singing, that it’s not me he’s looking for. I’m not a carpenter. If I had a hammer I’d hammer my thumb.

“Even if I only use you as a gopher,” he said, “five bucks an hour is a good price.”

“You’d have to cover my transportation to Philo and back every day, or pay for my housing there,” I said, and we agreed that the whole idea was crazy. He still thinks I’m a maybe, though, and I never argue with someone who insists on giving me money. It sounds like a rotten deal for him, but I’ll do it if he pays me, plus expenses.

The gig wouldn’t start until June, and he said he’d call again in a month or so, but I’m sure he can find a better man by then.

Pretty sure Corina can find a better man, too.

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I woke up earlier than usual, and it was still early when I pushed the cart to Telegraph. Only two other vendors were set up on my designated block. One was a guy I don’t particularly like, and across the street was Jasper, a guy I particularly dislike.

Sure, I could’ve claimed a space all by myself, and would’ve liked to, but a man’s gotta pee sometimes, so vendors need neighbors. And what the hell, it’s time Jasper knows I’m on the Ave to stay, so I parked my cart right beside his table and started unpacking.

“Oh, Doug,” he said politely, “good morning, but — could you please set up a little further down the sidewalk? I’m saving this space for a buddy.” Fuck off, I wanted to say, but what he’d asked was within the perimeters of routine vendor etiquette. Heck, Brenda saves a space for me some Saturdays. So I acquiesced, leaving fifteen feet of open sidewalk between me and Jasper the ass.

When his “buddy” showed up a little later, it was Bo, one of the few vendors I actually like, so that worked out well. I got to work beside a semi-friend, but also I got to wondering why a decent guy like Bo would be friends with Jasper. It’s childish and ridiculous, but it kinda hurt my feelings. Not counting cops, Jasper is the A#1 Jackass of Telegraph Ave, but he’s pals with someone I’m pals with?

Mid-afternoon, Umberto stopped by and said hello. He’s another vendor I like, and we talked for a minute. Then he said hello to fuckin’ Jasper, and they talked cordially for several minutes. And that bugged me too.

These are of course the very slightest of slights, but people I like should hate the people I hate, shouldn’t they?

Ah, grumble grumble, mumble mumble. Not even 40, I’m too young to be a curmudgeon, but it’s my destiny and I’m working on it.

♦ ♦ ♦  

Jacque came ’round, handing out cigars. His wife had the baby. Congratulations, it’s a boy, or a girl. I don’t remember, and I don’t smoke so I declined the cigar. Shook his hand, though, and of course Jacque invited me to their house again.

“Soon,” I said, and smiled and meant it, but now it’s six hours later and I’m telling you about it here at my typewriter, and really in no hurry for that “soon” to happen.

♦ ♦ ♦

Because I’d gotten up early, I fell asleep early, until a little after midnight, when a fierce pounding came from the exposed pipe leading to the radiator in my room. Klunk, bang bang, etc, on and on, as if someone somewhere in the building was pounding the pipe for the hell of it.

The hell of it continued, so I put on pants and followed the banging, down the stairs, down a hallway on the floor below me, looking for the source, and of course, that’s when the noise stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The pipes were quiet for the rest of the night.

When I came back upstairs and toward my room, I met my neighbor from across the hall, room 404. White guy, about my age, needing a shave and holding a beer and obviously fresh woke up against his will, just like me. It was 12:30 in the morning and neither of us much wanted to talk, but we had the annoyance of the noise in common, so we talked about that for a minute.

Didn’t catch the guy’s name, but he seemed like a typical schmuck, and I’m sure I did, too.

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