It is on-again off-again raining. I am making yet another trip to the Social Security offices trying to straighten out yet another of my grandmother’s issues with them, playing their game of musical chairs&windows -- take a number, sit down in a chair, they call your number, you go to the window and explain what you need, by the time you get up from the window someone’s taken your chair, you sit somewhere else, you are called inside the offices, when you come out you go and put money in the meter and sit down somewhere else, they call you to another window, when you leave that window you sit somewhere else, they call you to the window again, you sit somewhere else, you get up to go and put more money in the meter and come in and sit somewhere else, and each time you are called to a window or the offices you have to explain each step you have taken that they have told you to take and that you are always told is the wrong thing to do by the next person you talk to, and then there are the people who clearly don’t want to hear your story because they have sensors that vibrate when they see that even intelligent patient reasonable people reach a jerked-around limit and so they pass you on to a supervisor who can make everything fall into place -- and no matter where you sit in the waiting room someone nearby smells of liquor, someone is talking to themselves, the guard is waking someone up, or telling someone to go outside to use their cel phone, and a lot of the people here are desperate, in desperate situations, one No away from insanity, incarceration, the street.

There are two private security guards sitting at a desk by the door. The guards are brisk and business-like; I feel like I know them, I’ve been here so many times, but I get nothing more than a dismissive look as I enter and exit, all of us here get the same brush-off, even the blonde in her mid-thirties wearing bellbottom hiphugger jeans and an orange tee-shirt with a white tie-dyed stripe that zigs all over the shirt, deep cut front showing the tops of her breast implants, platform Candies knocking loudly against the tiles every time she walks around the room which she does constantly. I’ve noticed at the Social Services office where I’ve had to go to take care of other parts of my grandmother’s business, how the young single mothers were all dressed up, too. On one of my trips out to feed the voracious meter this morning (I ran out of quarters eventually) while waiting for the light to change so I can cross the street, I spot a bundle of black material by a public trashcan; curious, I go over and see that it is a skirt, I pick it up and look at it, the skirt has a Casual Corner tag in it, size 6, a smudge of chocolate on the front, and I think of the fortunate woman with the luxury of throwing away a nearly new, perfectly good, hundred buck skirt on account of a tiny smear she couldn’t bother herself with.

Every so often one of the guards goes through the door that separates the waiting room from the offices, leaving one of the guards at the desk by the door to keep order. In the waiting room, most people are pretty much keeping themselves in order. In the first section I sit in at the far end of the room, two young white guys are leaning on the counter against the windows and one of the guys is saying, “This is bullsh-t,” and “F-ck this sh-t,” and so forth, one of those people that are a No away from losing it, or perhaps even less than that, the idea of waiting for Nothing pushing him to his limits. He is in his twenties, and he still looks fairly respectable from a distance, but up close his clothes are a day’s worth of dirty, his face is reddish-grey especially around the lips, and his hands already show clear signs of what must be constant hard drinking. When for the third time he lets loose with the bad language, I turn and say, “Excuse me, I don’t care how you talk but if you are going to use that kind of language could you please take it outside?” He says, and I can tell by looking at him that he is just a boy who is sick, “I can talk any way I want to,” so I get up and go and tell the guard, and after a moment the young man says loudly, “F-ck this f-cking bullsh-t,” and he leaves. Sorry but there are a lot of people in this room who are one No away from cracking, and that kind of language just grates on the nerves.

A man sitting in the chair in front of me has these curious round growths on the back of his neck, ranging from the size of a BB to marble-sized, those larger ones have baby growths. He is black; most of the people in the room are white men, but there is a large number of black men who as they come in and join the game of musical chairs&windows see each other, smile and greet one another; none of the white people are socializing, except for one woman in military fatigues, she starts chatting with the guy next to her, everybody else just sits and stares straight ahead at the windows, even when they have something to read, they end up staring at the windows. A white man wearing a knit cap pulled high on his head like a red hill is called to Window 3, he is middle-aged, with dirty blonde hair and coarse red skin, and thick-tongued, nearly dumbstruck, from the drink, and the woman speaking with him through the Plexiglass forgets to close the mike she uses for calling people and so we in the waiting room are listening to the discussion that should be private between them. He is asking about his check, and the woman is telling him there is no check, he keeps asking, and she keeps denying and he sits there telling her his story and she keeps looking in her computer and saying No and he continues to sit there asking if there is a check. The invasion of this man’s privacy so disturbs me that I start circling the room like I’m demented, taking pamphlets from slots, reading bulletins on walls, anything so as not to pay attention to what is being said. It is around this time that I am called into the offices behind the door and I say to the man who calls me inside, as we walk past the window where the woman is sitting who is talking to the man, “Could you please tell her that her microphone is on and everybody in the lobby is hearing what they are saying?” And the man goes and tells her and without turning she flicks a button, and I sit down, relieved, and we conduct our business, and the man tells me to go and wait in the waiting room. When I come out from that interview, I am sitting two chairs away from a white woman who is mumbling and groaning and shaking her head and gesturing; when they call her she stands up and she is very tall, basketball player height, and I wonder if she ever played ball in school.

The last time I got up from a window -- “It’ll just be twenty minutes” -- twenty minutes and twenty minutes and twenty minutes and before you know it your whole morning is gone and your afternoon ain’t looking too good -- I sat down in a chair at the end of the last row near the entrance. A tall black man sat down in a chair in front of me and started reciting a litany of his problems, fishing for a sympathetic ear, I turned my head slightly away and closed my eyes, but the woman sitting next to me with her young daughter started in talking to him, kindly and patiently, and her daughter (she was maybe twelve or thirteen) leaned against her mother’s breast and watched as the man laid out his issues, one after the other, and the woman offered advice that was far too practical and reasonable. The man started pulling out scraps of paper and business cards and form letters and his cel phone and his wallet and when I glanced over the woman was giving him a dollar and he laid all these things on the plastic chair next to him, a desk, if you will, and I said to the guard who rousted him because he was calling his doctor’s office on his cel phone, “He needs an office,” and I said to the woman next to me who had been chatting with him, “He needs a full time case worker for all his problems.” The guard brushed me off; the woman laughed and the girl smiled and showed a mouth full of braces.

So I’m sitting there with no more quarters for the meter because this has turned into a marathon and I am already planning to fight the ticket I am sure I am going to find when I get out and I fish the piece of paper with the number on it that the machine issued to me when I came in out of my purse (B589) to look at the time I got there (10:55:26 AM, it is now pushing 2:30), glad I saved it for evidence, and it is cold and raining outside, and the place is full, the chairs are all filled and people are standing and moving around and coming in and out of the offices, and one guard has disappeared behind the office doors and the other guard, a short little guy maybe five feet tall is about to talk to someone about something, he is walking along the back of the room, when at Window 3 a man begins to lose it. “Oh no,” the man says in an increasingly loud voice, “No I don’t want to hear that, I want my check.”

I turn and I look at the guard and it’s like he feels the vibe too, the one No has pushed this guy at Window 3 from desperate over into the insanity column, and he is now loud and demanding and angry, “I want my check! I want my check! I want my check!” So the guard comes up to him and says, “Sir, please come with me and we can talk about this outside.” “No! I want my check! I want my check!” “Sir --” “No -- I want my check!” So the guard takes his arm and the man is rising and he is at least a foot taller than the little guard and the guy screams, “I want my check!”, and as the guard tries to move him away from the window, the guy shouts, “I want my check!”, and punches the Plexiglass window hard with his fist, and the guard racks the guy up against the wall, twisting his hand back, and the whole time the man is shouting, “I want my check! I want my check!”, the guard is looking around for his partner, but there is no one, just him, we are all sitting there, watching, and business is being conducted at the other windows, and the guard manages to handcuff the guy and walks him across the waiting room and into a little room behind the desk, and sits him in a chair, leaving the door open, and then suddenly people are coming out of the offices, supervisors, and finally, the other guard shows up who claims he was using the bathroom, and someone calls for the Federal police and five minutes later the offices are crawling with Feds whose uniforms are dark with rain, and the man is yelling from inside the room, sometimes sitting, sometimes struggling, yelling the whole time, “I want my check! I want my check!” In between shouting he is groaning in pain and bending over and saying, “You didn’t have to beat me up,” and for good measure vomits profusely all over the floor, and I say, “OhforGodsakes,” and turn away.

The tall black man who had been sitting in front of me has been coming in and out and every time he comes in he stands there and asks real loud, “A02?” That is his number, he wants to know if he has missed his number. “A02? Did they call A02?” There is something whack with the board that shows the numbers so that the A number keeps jumping out of order, sometimes it says A89 or A90 or A91, which is correct, and sometimes it says A102 or A21, which drives the A people berzerk, luckily, it doesn’t happen when the man in front of me is asking, “A02?”, but anyway he never looks at the board, just keeps saying “A02? Did they call A02?”, until the nice lady next to me assures him he hasn’t been called, or when she is playing musical chairs&windows, I say, “No they haven’t called your number yet,” and so he goes out again to call his doctor about an appointment about his prostate cancer and when he comes in and people are sitting in his chair he says, “That’s my seat. Can I please have my seat back,” and when they move, he consults the papers on his chair desk, but the last time he comes in, there is an older white man sitting there wearing a faded red baseball cap and faded red shirt and faded beige pants and dirty wornout kicks, the baseball cap says USMC on the back, and the black man says, “That’s my seat. Can I please have my seat back?” and the white man gets all Clint Eastwood and is giving him the business about it not being his seat, and the black man interrupts and says, “Hey I’m a veteran too, I was a medic,” and the white man says something about not believing him, but at that moment the other people in the row, an older Asian couple, get up and move to the front row, and the white man gets up and sits at the other end of the row, and then the black man leaves again and when he comes in next is when all the fight is going down, and the black guy says, “Oh I know that guy, he’s a nice guy, his name is Tom. They don’t have to treat him like that. He just wants his check.”

By now there is a very fat black man sitting next to me, one of his buttcheeks pressing against me so that I am sitting on the very edge of my chair, and the fat man turns to me and says, “If he would just calm down he might get his check, but they ain’t going to give it to him if he steady acting a fool.” I said, and I knew better, but I had been there too long and had been reasonable and patient and it was (relatively) easy for me to say, “If you act stupid, people are going to treat you stupid,” and the fat man, who also knew better, said, “That’s right.” But when the black guy in front says, “Look at that, five police cars out front for one guy,” the fat guy says, “They don’t have to do all that.” I thought about that, briefly, that there were all these police and supervisors, now they were paying attention and why couldn’t they have paid all this attention before, why did it have to come to this. But by then I was exhausted with the whole thing and just wanted to get out, get out, get out, but I still had to wait and I could wait, I could outlast them if that was what it took, poor old Tom couldn’t but I could, I could sit myself in that chair and not get to the No that would put me behind that door handcuffed, screaming for my check, and puking my guts out.

So one of the undercover Feds who is standing nearby grins and says to the tall black guy, in that way they train these guys to do that is irritating as hell because when has this guy ever been there where Tom is, “Thank you, we just want to calm him down and get him to a hospital, he’s vomiting blood, the paramedics are on their way.” The tall black guy says, “Are you going to arrest him?” And the undercover Fed says, “Yes,” and the black man says, “Oh you don’t have to do him like that, he just wants his check.” The black guy starts going on and on and on about it, until I finally say, “You weren’t here, you didn’t see what happened,” and the black guy interrupts, bumping it up to evil not listening to you, and keeps talking to the undercover Fed, so I direct my attention toward the front of the office, and I see the guy working on my grandmother’s case looking for me through a window and I stand and he opens the door and says, “Sorry for the delay and for all the problems, here’s your grandmother’s check, expect the other one in a few days,” and I take the check and say, “Thank you.”

And I turn and walk through the crowd of supervisors and Feds in their steaming black unis and witnesses giving statements, and I say to the little guard, “You did a good job handling that guy all by yourself,” and he smiles and says, “Thank you,” and I walk out of the lobby filled with desperate people, waiting, one No away from insanity, incarceration, the street, past the door behind which there is a man named Tom who is in handcuffs, has been given a small wastecan to vomit into, is no longer screaming I want my check, I want my check, I want my check!, and I go out into the rain, check in hand, not thinking about all the things I have to do next.

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