The Car Man

The Car Man

 

“The Lord says we got to love our enemies,” said the Car Man at the mental health center.  Angusto and I think though that the doctor murdered him because he complained too much how the facilities degraded over time and he depended on the place for his lunch and weak coffee. He often signaled us to walk ahead when we went to Ed’s to play Spades. “He is so fat, his heart is bad, and they didn’t give him a diuretic” Angusto is the guy who called up all the morgues to find and claim Car Man’s 350 pound dead body to have it cremated. I was the only guy at the mental health center who didn’t show up for the memorial because I am Chinese and it is my heritage that I got to stay alive if I think my friend was murdered, for I must save myself to someday revenge for him. Nobody knew that was the reason. They thought I was just sick that day. But the littler they know the better it is this way.

 

Car Man is Black but he wrote short stories against Jews. What do you expect from a mental patient? Half of my psychiatrists been Jewish and they are the better ones. Anna the nurse told me, “Chin, when you are fifty, that’s when your friends start dying off.” I was fifty. And my father told me that was the age a man was responsible for his face. He is from the old country and his English is not good. He meant that a man is responsible for his fate at fifty. I wrote a poem that I lean back from life when I became fifty and I knew I couldn’t do it alone anymore.  A young publisher in New Jersey published it in his rag mag, but someone liked it and it was a publication.

 

The Car Man was afraid to tell me where he lived though I see the Car Man five days a week, and I volunteered to cook the lunches, and Car Man and I hung out of the back door and smoked. He was not given a seat in the main lunchroom but I was. At first I didn’t have a seat either, until some “leader” found out I had been a math major and he was taken electronics for computer circuitry to get back to work. He was the paranoid type. People said he spent five years under a bridge. He was a Republican. Ed was a Democrat and was into mental health issues. They were good friends and both used politics to get out of work. The leader guy helped me to do side work for the lunch I cooked one day. I spent five minutes showing him how to slice a mushroom. “First you lay it so its stem is up; you chop it in half right down the middle of the stem. And then you turn one-half so that it is flat on the cutting board, and then you slice it with chopping motions.” The leader did exactly one mushroom, and then quit. He went to sit down and to drink his coffee and resumed his political talks and looked important again. I was the Chinese coolie. I didn’t mind it. The bible said, “Seek ye the truth and the truth shall set ye free.”

 

The nurse asked me what I am going to do with all of Car Man’s short stories. I said I was going to publish them someday. She then told me that her teen son had died mysteriously and the Car Man was the only patient who came to the funeral. She told me that the Car Man was crossing the street from his family’s barbecue eatery when he was hit by a car. It broke a couple of discs in his back. They were trying to kill him. He was lucky though there was not a real investigation. That’s how he got the name Car Man.

 

After 45 years beginning college. I got my BA degree in BS. The medicines have gotten better. But I hope people’s attitude get better as well, at least as it relates to mental illness.

 

 

Koon Woon

June 26, 2013