Missing the Big Picture (21 page)

About a month after Randy and I argued, I once again heard Carmine’s voice in my mind. It was strange because I had thought that all of those voices were permanently gone. I had stopped taking Zyprexa in April of that year, and Dr. Roberts left it as “no news is good news.” I never went back to a psychiatrist after January 2003. Carmine was still there, and we were able to have clear, detailed conversations, just like two people in real life. The voice told me about Eric, Randy, and Carmine’s girlfriend, the same girl he dated in high school. The episodes were happening infrequently, so I didn’t tell my mother or return to Dr. Roberts.

In the fall of 2003, I was apprehensive about going back to SUNY. I wouldn’t have Randy to spend time with in between classes. I had made a new friend who worked with me at Home Depot, and he was the complete opposite of Randy. Corey was a year older than me and was a sociology major at UAlbany. He had been raised in the projects of Brooklyn, but he didn’t have a gangsta attitude or crude exterior. He struck most everybody as an ordinary kid from the suburbs. During his years in Brooklyn, he had been in fistfights and been physically threatened. When he was twenty-one, he was robbed at gunpoint. Corey was quiet but had a dry and well-developed sense of humor. Besides knowing Corey from work, we also shared one class together, Sociology of Sexualities. The goal of the class was to learn about sexuality in American culture and to understand different sexual movements and how sexuality influences major American institutions, such as families, schools, and the media.

The class didn’t go as expected. When we were at work, we usually discussed Melissa Featherman, the graduate student who was teaching the class. From the minute that Ms. Featherman stepped into class, she intrigued her students. She was in her late twenties, overweight, and always dressed in tight clothing. She wasted no time in explaining sexually explicit topics, especially insights from her own sex life. She talked about how she hated waiting in line to buy condoms when two old women were starting at her. Many of the students didn’t want to listen to an overweight woman talk about sex. But as the semester evolved, we learned that traditional vaginal sex wasn’t all that Ms. Featherman was having.

Before classes began, I had met another graduate student who told me that Ms. Featherman had once attempted to start an S-M (sadism and masochism) club at the college—unsuccessfully. I first chalked it up as a rumor, but by the middle of the semester, Ms. Featherman was bragging to us about her extracurricular interests. She told us that she was the president of the Power Exchange, an S-M club that she unsuccessfully tried to start at the college. One day she sat outside the campus center looking for people to join. Nobody did, she said, but some girls stopped by and asked her where they could find dildos. Next, Ms. Featherman told us that there were a lot of misconceptions about sadists and masochists and that everything she did was safe and consensual. Through her experience with S-M, Ms. Featherman found that some individuals were hard core (they used whips and chains), while others preferred using more pleasant objects, such as feathers and ice cubes. During another class, Ms. Featherman said that a lot of people she knew said that S-M wasn’t about the sex. To them, she said, “Bullshit.”

Toward the end of the semester, the class watched a movie titled
Fetishes
, which documented this phenomenon. In the movie, a naked man crawls on all fours as women whip him and beat him. Another time, one of the women (a mistress) smokes a cigarette and uses a man’s mouth as an ashtray. She later puts her cigarette inside the man’s mouth and he swallows it. Many scenes showed women whipping naked men, some of whom found it so enjoyable that they climaxed.

One student asked Ms. Featherman if we were going to be tested on the video, but she told the class, “I wouldn’t know what exactly to ask.” Some girls walked out because they were so offended. Another boy joked, “Well, I’m going to have to rub one out after that.”

After the movie, a discussion about the film took place on the classroom website. One girl, Fija, responded that even though S-M behavior is deviant, it is important to remain nonjudgmental. The same girl made a comment earlier in the semester that
Playboy
was wrong and evil because it degraded women. So, according to Fija, we shouldn’t be judgmental about women hitting men with whips until they leave scars, but photographing a naked woman is wrong and immoral. Even though Ms. Featherman made some eccentric comments, she also made comments that were conservative and pro-abstinence. She told her students that she waited a long time to lose her virginity and that she was glad she did. I could not have survived this class without my friend Corey. I think I would have been too afraid to go class if he wasn’t in it.

We frequently would have to write research papers about music and how it defines sexuality in society. A large majority of the students chose to write about Christina Aguilera. Ms. Featherman joked that the students in the class loved her. She even suggested that in order to fix our grammar mistakes, we should print out our papers and read them to our Christina Aguilera posters that she assumed everybody had on his or her wall. One day as I was waiting for class to begin, a girl asked me if I had finished my upcoming research paper. I said, “Yup, I just have to read it to my Christina Aguilera poster now.” She looked at me very odd, as she was absent the day Ms. Featherman talked about the students reading their papers to Christina Aguilera posters.

As 2003 came to a close, I started to spend more time with my friends from work, and my high school and Geneseo friends became more of a memory. During the middle of my junior year, I began volunteering at the Crime Victim and Sexual Violence Center. I wanted to learn more about sexual abuse, domestic violence, and domineering relationships.

The more time I spent at the Sexual Violence Center, the more I enjoyed it. I learned that there were so many misconceptions about rape. I heard some stories that were truly shocking. One female babysitter molested two boys she was watching. Another one-yearold child was sold for sexual acts so that the baby’s mother could get crack. A man who came in for counseling had been raped in 1962 as an eight-year-old and still experienced trauma from the incident. Another male client came in for therapy because he was gang raped in prison. A freshman in college called the twenty-four-hour rape crisis hotline and said she needed to talk to somebody because her older brother used to molest her and she was afraid to return home for the summer.

The scariest part of my volunteering was that one day when I was entering client information into the computer, I actually recognized two names; they were two women I had previously worked with at other jobs. I never thought I knew any victims of rape, but given all of the people the average person works with in a lifetime, he or she is likely to know at least one.

In September 2004, I started my final semester of college. I was able to graduate a semester early because I had started with twenty-eight college credits. During my last semester, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I hadn’t spoken to Randy in over a year, and Carmine had graduated college in three years and moved to California. Randy was now engaged to an older woman. I had known a lot of college seniors who were still working at Home Depot because they couldn’t find jobs in their fields. I didn’t like working retail and the thought of working full time there just scared me. Jeremy my mother’s boyfriend, told me that his sister worked at the Center for Quality Living, (a pseudonym), an organization that provided an array of residential and day services to the developmentally disabled. I decided to apply there.

I started my new job as a residence counselor for a group home in the fall of 2004. At first I was apprehensive about working in a home with ten developmentally disabled adults. I didn’t want to wash anybody, tell somebody to wipe, or work with individuals who were violent. Thankfully, most of the residents were independent, and we had very few behavior problems. Within weeks, I loved my new job; it was the first job to which I actually didn’t mind showing up. I soon learned that the stereotypes about developmentally disabled individuals were mostly false. Most of the residents I encountered were witty and able to go out in the community; some even worked at the local grocery store.

I was excited that for the first time in years, I didn’t have any friends who knew Carmine or Eric or knew about the lies that they had told about me. On the first day of my job, I did notice that one resident, Anthony, had the same last name as Carmine. Anthony was very friendly and told me that his chore was to set the table. When I asked him if he was any relation to Carmine, he smiled and said, “So how do you know Carmine?” Turns out, Anthony was Carmine’s uncle. Apparently, Carmine wasn’t totally out of my life yet.

There were ten people living in the group home at which I worked. Most of them were developmentally disabled and suffered from mental illnesses. The staff was paid slightly above minimum wage, and we were expected to give medications, learn crisis intervention techniques, cook, drive, and take care of ten disabled individuals. Due to the gap between pay and job responsibilities, the house was short-staffed and included some irresponsible and untrustworthy employees.

One college student spent spend most of her shift talking on the phone or listening to music in the room of a resident who was on a home visit. Another time I saw the same employee just dancing by herself outside. Many staff members were found sleeping on the job, and not even during the overnight shift. One time a family member of a resident was picking up her son for a home visit and found an employee sleeping on the couch. Another staff member was known for giving tarot card readings to the other staff members during work hours. One employee actually had a hit-and-run accident at the home. As she was pulling out, she hit another car and left, not even telling anyone that she’d hit her co-worker’s vehicle. I kept the job at the Center until June 2007, working part-time after I graduated college. When I left I had three years of experience; and I was the staff member with the most seniority. The high turnover rate did have devastating effects on the residents.

I ended up graduating from the University of Albany in the fall of 2004, but I was still lost. I had worked very hard when I was in college, dedicating myself to completing research papers and studying sociological theories. I ended up graduating summa cum laude with a grade point average of 3.85. Despite all my academic success, I had no direction. I was always living in the moment, the here and now, and even though I loved the university, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I thought about being an attorney just because I wanted to be financially successful. Ironically, after I graduated with my bachelor’s degree in sociology, I just wanted to work full time at the group home. I loved it so much, and it didn’t matter that I was only making a little more than minimum wage. I knew that I could not do it as my full time job, only part-time. I did have an attitude that I was not going to work at just above minimum wage after I worked hard in college for the past 4 years.

After graduation, I had several job interviews: one for an auto insurance company and three for positions working with the developmentally disabled. I took each job interview very seriously and would harass the individuals I interviewed with to find out if they selected me. If I didn’t get offered a position, I would be overcome with disappointment and shame, and it would take me days to get over it.

I was eventually offered a job working as an employment specialist for people with developmental disabilities. The woman who was my potential supervisor was extremely kind. I originally accepted the position but called a few days later and turned it down, just telling her in a voicemail that I wasn’t going to work for her. I called her back a few hours later, and she encouraged me to meet with her in person to discuss my concerns. I went to her office, and she told me that I would be perfect for the position. She offered me coffee to drink and complimented me on my dress attire. I told her all my concerns, like how I wanted to keep my other job, and she was willing to work through all of them. I told her that I would call her the next day, and again in a voicemail, I said I wouldn’t be accepting the position. Ultimately, I didn’t take the position because it was only $11.33 an hour, or $20,600 a year. Financially, it would have paid all my bills. I was still living at home and had few expenses, besides my student loans. I didn’t think about moving out then, and I knew my mother wouldn’t want me to anyway. To her I was still a little boy who heard voices, and even though she never mentioned it, she always felt that she had to take care of me, like I was a patient in a mental health facility.

I look back at the situation and think that the one thing that always kept me from obtaining happiness was that I always wanted more. We are always greedy, always shooting for the best, and in a way, we are never really satisfied. This woman was so kind and generous, and I totally pushed her away. It was like I wanted to avoid anybody who was nice to me and instead acted as a magnet for anybody who would put me down.

After I turned down that position, my opinion about the group home started to change. The staff, mostly young girls, had become cliquey and chatty. So, I ended up working for a day habilitation program operated by another service provider for individuals with developmental disabilities. It was actually less money than the employment specialist position, but it had better hours so that I was able to keep my part-time job at the Center. The day program was tough. I was in a module with twenty-nine developmentally disabled adults, most of whom had psychiatric issues as well. I was making less than eighteen thousand dollars a year, and that was above average because I had a bachelor’s degree. The staffers without college educations started at fifteen thousand dollars annually. The program was usually understaffed and had high amounts of turnover. In the module in which I worked, the average staff member worked there only six months. Many clients had behavioral difficulties and extensive needs. Many hardworking staff members—a large percentage of them single mothers—endured getting beat up, spit on, and urinated on for several pennies above minimum wage. Even though I was making less than what the employment specialist position offered me, I knew my job there would be temporary. I applied to become a full-time graduate student to study social work.