Before
waking at five thirty this morning to feed Saint Gregory and his sister
Georgina, (never actually calling to Greggie by his papal nomenclature) I had a
waking terror, at the break dawn. This is fairly common since I started my grating
downward spiral with JEVS Care-at-Home in 2018; nightmares with the sun, in
disposable tissue-stitched elastic I had never been previously forced to wear. These terr0rs usually
scatter, and I dissipate, returning to my static misery aging, burrowing my
umbrage towards Philadelphia’s color-coded majorities, and it isn’t because of
recent criminal events like the Ramadan shooting last Thursday. The disruption
that incident represented was an integral part of Philadelphia’s minority identity,
the undercurrent that the “brotherly love” actually blankets over, beneath that
adoption of that now careworn Nation of Islam rhetoric as well. Somehow this
city, molded by Quakers who the British couldn’t subdue or export fast enough
to suit the tenuous grasp of its Anglican largesse on the east coast, is just a
seedy tale of dereliction, and had those symptoms been made more manifest when
I was in intellectual foment in Chester, in its then one idyllic campus hotspot,
perhaps I would not have engaged such a destructive journey. My engagements at
Rusk Institute during adolescence, in Manhattan, over a twenty-four month
period, consecutive intervals during which I returned home for Ridley Junior
High down by the lake, prefigured later hard choices which would ultimately
unravel my life into this despicable travesty, but in 77? I had some mewing
hope that another stint in rehab would undo the brutality of Shriner’s Hospital.
Being
an in-patient once again would wind up an extraneous exercise, but it did place
Greg Hepburn in my path, and to a teenager, he was solidly defined for a
spastic gimp, like a compact Arnold Schwarzenegger, not so tall as the former
body builder, but well defined for a rough shod recreation therapist, stringy
blonde hair which brushed the shoulder of his form-fitting knit shirts, usually
sky blue in color; for casual wear his jeans and tee accented what masculine
virility he had.
It
might have been a virility I could have tested, had I not scuttled the fact
that I was a minor and a temporary in-patient who at least made a pretense out
of following the rules, and he was an empowerment hire, it didn’t matter. I was
slightly too passive to stroll on my wheelchair rims around my spartan,
laminated junior high school bragging “I have a long distance boyfriend in Manhattan,”
(even as the reflections of an increasingly confined woman wonders if she had
worn this medallion man as an active lie, would it have led to a healthier engagement
with my milieu?) but he was a figurine, however much flesh and blood, however prickly
our city boy to girl discussions, who became an internalized fantasy of a lonely
girl burgeoning into womanhood who couldn’t find her way amid conventional
teenage norms.
It might
be said, if the jolt from the subconscious wasn’t gone in a flicker, that the
dream sequence bore a certain similarity to Tony Soprano’s car ride while he
was recovering from his demented uncle’s aggression in hospital, but it was too
quickly vanished, my nearness to the Gregory Hepburn of yesteryear on the
passenger side of a Chevy Impala, his eyes reflecting red rimmed in the rearview
mirror, furtive, possibly absconding, like death on the lam.
