America is a beautiful thing…
Two weeks ago, Jane fell and broke her patella (for those of you who don’t know me personally, Jane is my wife of 29 years). Tuesday, she had surgery. While she was in surgery, I sat outside Methodist Hospital in suburban Minneapolis on a white plastic chair at a white plastic table chatting with Michael Bartholomew, he was wearing a hoodie and had a 12-sprout goatee and a cross tattooed under his right eye. He was there for his grandmother’s knee surgery. He sat under the No Smoking sign chain smoking Kools and throwing the butts into the hydrangeas. It was a seventy-degree, blue sky morning. It was his birthday. He was 23.
We were bored so I told him stories of my travels, wandering Europe and north Africa when I got out of the army, of sleeping on the beach in Spain, of being attacked on the beach in Morocco and the next day being asked to marry a slim, dark-eyed Moroccan teenager by her father. I told him about living in Tokyo and riding a motorcycle around the world; SE Asia, Australia, Nepal, India, the African continent. He listened rapt, his eyes fixed somewhere distant, ignoring the cigarette between his fingers. His geography was quite good, particularly countries on the African continent. He wanted to know what continent I liked best. He said if he had $10,000, that he’d disappear into the world.
Michael had ridden the bus from Seattle for the surgery. The trip took two and half days. When he got here, he took another bus from his grandmother’s house to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) and spent the day at the Van Gogh exhibit. In elementary school, Michael read at the college level. I asked him what his favorite book was; Harry Potter, he’s read them all many times. There’s a library within walking distance of his grandmother’s house, he told me that. He didn’t graduate from high school and doesn’t have a GED. Or a driver’s license. He has an expired Georgia ID card.
Michael went to jail for the first time when he was fourteen. Since then, he’s spent almost five years in detention or jail. The girl he had a crush on when he was a freshman in high school was shot in the face with a shotgun at a house party. He cried for her when she was killed, he was crying when he told me the story.
He talked about his friends in Seattle and Baton Rouge and small towns in Georgia, friends he did drugs with and whose spare beds, couches and porches he slept on, about a cellmate who ratted him out for stealing a guard’s lunch, a crime that got Michael sixty days in the hole. He’d shared the guard’s lunch with the cellmate. He was in a gun battle with another friend over a stolen car, Michael had a 9mm with a laser sight, they shot at each other until they both ran out of bullets. Nobody was hurt.
He wanted to join the Army, he’d spent time at an ROTC high school. But with his criminal record and face tattoo, he’s not eligible. He works as a construction laborer. He’s installed tile and crown moldings, maybe that’s a career.
His mother’s a devout Catholic. She’d flown up from Georgia for the surgery. He told me a story about her refusing to let him out of the house and when he snuck out, chasing him in her van. He asked some “hillbillies” hanging around a shack, a confederate flag on the wall, to hide him, told them that it was his girlfriend’s mother in the van. When she stopped and asked if they’d seen her son, the hillbilly’s threatened her with a shotgun until Michael came out of hiding and begged them not to shoot her. They cussed him for lying. He doesn’t know his father.
He’s on a prescription drug for his chemical dependency. He stood and vomited into the trash can beside our table three times during our conversation. He complained about the drugs and said he was fine.
Jane’s surgery went very well. She’s home and comfortable and recovering nicely.