Last Wednesday morning, I spent 20 minutes standing in the rain outside Candy's door. My left hand w/a fist against her door. My right hand repeatedly pressing the redial button on my cell phone. She didn't answer, neither the phone nor the door. "Candy", I tried calling out through the door. I know it probably wasn't the smartest thing, to be standing on the corner of a street in Bayview Hunter's Point for 20 minutes by myself with the entire liquor store crowd watching me from across the street. I didn't want to stay, but I didn't want to leave either. I know it's a problem of mine, not really knowing when to throw in the towel. It was raining hard so I walked back toward my car, careful not to make eye contact with the liquor store crowd even though I could feel them watching my every move. I didn't see Candy that morning. I wondered if I ever would again. It was just an unpleasant feeling in the gut.
Candy is the newest addition to my caseload. She is a 59 year-old transgender African American w/metastatic breast cancer. The doctors say she has less than a year left to live. It's my job to help her make peace with her life, to cope with the excruciating pain she experiences from the cancer, and to support her as she faces the rest of her life. I try my best, but its hard because she's schizophrenic and developmentally challenged. I wonder how it is that this person I've really come to grow fond of has so much working against her.
Every session she is the same. Manic, disorganized, tangential. Through her pressured speech, I've slowly been able to piece together her life...all 59 years. There's her earliest memory of being told that her father tried to suffocate her during her infancy...twice. Her mother saved her and since then has always been God, capable of giving and taking away life. There's the magic trick, the one where the boys stuck her in a cardboard box and stuck sharp sticks through thinking they could remake the swords through the box trick. There's her expulsion from jr. high, how she was told never to come back to school after refusing to play football with the boys. And then there's the incident at the country club, where she was fired for walking through the front door instead of the back door. Somewhere between dressing drag in Hollywood and losing her teeth to the police in Oakland, there was a trip to Tijuana for the $50 silicone injections. And then there was the day she learned she had breast cancer. "It's leaking all over my body" she told me, "into my bones, back, all over, just all over".
I'm fond of her, she's a wealth of knowledge, a walking account of the civil rights era, a real life "Precious", a detailed character from a James Baldwin novel. Even so, I'm not going to pretend I enjoy our visits because I don't. She hurls graphic descriptions at me w/her brother's "doped up girl" taking a hammer to his knees and her mother dragging her out into the snow screaming "fag". I don't always feel like I can take it, but I do anyways.
She tells me she loves herself and her mother and doesn't care about anyone else. She believes in Jesus and the Baptist radio preacher, the one who tells her she's damned. "I know I'm going to hell" she says, "I'm a homosexual, but you know I haven't really had sex with anyone in a really really long time I try not to indulge in sin". I'm speechless. I want to know why she listens to the radio. I even try to convince her to stop. She shakes her head. "Excuse me, I listen everyday...every morning, because it feels good to know Jesus is out there for me and I hear Him through the preacher I am a believer of Jesus Christ I've always been I went to Sunday school read the Bible Jesus loves me but I'm going to hell oh well but I know my momma will be just fine so I feel good". I want to cry, but I can't. I want to run, but I can't. So instead I say, "Candy, girl you're right, Jesus does love you...so much" and then I squeeze my eyes shut for a few seconds.
We filed a missing person's report on Candy yesterday. I hadn't heard from her and neither had the case manager. I'd been thinking about her all week. She's tangential, disorganized, not the best at reaching out, but she's always picked up her phone and answered her door. Not an answer for 6 days, neither phone nor door. "Candy, girl where are you? Jesus does love you...so much".
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