Drive-by Saviours (30 page)

“How can you be fired?” I asked. “It's volunteer.”

Abdul was at a complete loss. “They just tell me to get out,” he said.

I grabbed the boardroom phone and called the lab tech who had supervised him and left her a voicemail. Whatever the reason, his dismissal did not bode well for Abdul because his refugee hearing was on the coming Monday, less than a week away.

MY SENSE OF TIME SHIFTED COMPLETELY AFTER THE HANDOFF
of frontline client responsibility. The delicate balance of things that seemed correct and authentically me tipped over. It was liberating and disconcerting. With no clients to see aside from Abdul I could jam my forty hours in wherever I felt like, free from the constraints of office hours or the expectations of co-workers.

I made Monday morning in the park with Bumi and Lady Juanita a routine. The new commitment left me with a heaping to-do list so I dropped out of recreational sports, quit the volunteer board and art class and resigned from my volunteer post with the social workers' magazine.

Just as my Friday evening routine with Sarah was on the upswing I quashed it to save Bumi from
OCD
, save Abdul from deportation and save the health centre from bankruptcy. My sister was on her own. Fuck her.

What had always seemed like a great balancing act had transformed me into a pathetic busker who panned for laughs by throwing everything in sight into the air only to watch them crash back to earth again. If you have too many priorities they are no longer priorities. That was why I ditched the dead weight of family in the first place.

Maybe I had seen too many mega-corporations get away with this same kind of logic to realize that when you lack the power of multinational purse-string holders there is backlash. There is in fact accountability if the people whom you lay off are smart enough to check the books and strong enough to point out what you owe them.

The people in my life were far smarter than I, and at least as strong. The first to hold me to account was Sherry, who stormed into my cubicle as I left a second, more urgent, message for the U of T lab tech who had fired Abdul. Sherry stood with arms crossed, tapping her foot three times per second at my cubicle entranceway. This was beyond her usual report vulturing.

“What's this I hear about you dumping your caseload?” she said, dunking the phone back into its receiver.

“Sherry, there's just too much coming due right now. I couldn't keep up anymore.”

“Why didn't you come see me?” she barked with her arms outstretched and her mouth agape. With her short, hundred-dollar hair and oversized glasses she looked like a parody of Conan O'Brien. Even in anger her words were perfectly enunciated.

“Can we talk in your office?” I asked.

With brisk steps, Sherry led the way around the cubicle maze and into her office.

I had an extra eight inches on my legs so I was able to follow her swift movement and still look casual and unperturbed, but my heart was beating so hard my eardrums hurt. I closed her door behind me and flopped into her proffered chair.

She grabbed her desk chair and swivelled to probe me with massive blue eyes through massive pink glasses.

I couldn't hold that gaze so I scanned the collage of family photos that muralled her wall.

“So,” she said. “What's up?”

“My workload,” I said. I launched into an exposé of every minister I had to meet, briefing I had to send, media call I had to take, report I had to compose, piece of research I had to compile and proposal I had to write. “Connie, Maria and you all rely on me to do the fundraising, report writing, media work, public relations and accounting around here. When do I have time for clients anymore?”

Sherry reminded me that clients were the reason for our business and all else was secondary.

“Then why do you expect me to do all that other stuff?” I said. I confessed to her that I had been dumping clients for years to make room for the paperwork parade that crossed my desk. This latest dump was nothing more than a final purge.

My indomitable boss and of late irreplaceable ally put her head in her hands, just as poor Abdul had in the early afternoon. For the first time she said something to me that was not clear as air. I couldn't make out her words.

“Pardon,” I said.

Head still in hands, she muttered, “Does that mean you have no clients left?”

“I have one,” I told her.

“One,” she echoed. “Which one? Who?”

“Abdul Ali,” I said. “His refugee hearing is on Monday. I thought his chances were excellent but then he got fired from his volunteer job in the neuroscience lab and he says he doesn't know why.”

“Did you probe him on that?”

“No time for that. I've got two calls in to Tanya Reid at the lab to see what went wrong.”

Sherry finally lifted her head from her hands, fixed her hair and adjusted her glasses to the left and back to the right. “Jesus, Mark,” she said. “Maybe your clients are better off with the other social workers if you didn't even bother to probe Abdul on what he
might have done to get himself fired. Now he feels vindicated even if he was in the wrong, and he doesn't learn to take responsibility.”

I half-smiled at her and knew it could only get worse from there.

TECHNICALLY SHE WAS CORRECT. BY NOT FORCING THE ISSUE
with Abdul, by just accepting that he had no idea what he did wrong, I let him take the easy way, a route that any sentient being with any survival instinct whatsoever will take any time it can sense it. This easy way didn't give Abdul the opportunity to challenge himself, to adapt to a new environment and culture, to learn and to grow as an individual and to avoid repeating whatever mistakes had cost him his volunteer job.

However, forcing the issue would place the burden of proof on Abdul and ignore the vast and powerful external forces influencing his perceptions and feelings. “Imagine taking a stand for a personal belief,” I could have said to Sherry. “Like, say, against amalgamation. And imagine then being told that this particular opinion is illegal and treasonous. Imagine having to flee your home with the long, sharp teeth of an unjust law at your back until you land in Togo or Kazakhstan or Bolivia, unable to speak the language, access the institutions or even legally prove your existence. How would you feel if your social worker asked you to elucidate your own personal responsibility for your crappy situation?”

I could have pulled down the Ontario Social Worker's Code of Ethics from the shelf above Sherry's desk and asked her to show me where I was in violation, and she could not have done so, at least not on the specific level of not holding Abdul accountable for this volunteer failure. But I didn't argue. The truth was that the real reason I didn't bother getting Abdul's full side of the story was expedience.

My rushed approach had nothing to do with Abdul's impending refugee hearing. There was plenty of time to get his side of the story before then. My hurry had little to do with Abdul other than perhaps a mild dislike for his abrasive personality, and much to do with Bumi, Michelle, Sarah, Lily and her Year of the Migrant Farm Worker and a self-replicating pile of suit-wearing ninnies who demanded coordinated marches of numbers arranged in colourful patterns showing the myth of human progress. This never-ending game of paint-by-numbers allowed civil servants to help elected officials justify their careers to penny-pinching taxpayers in search of bigger bank accounts.

I was the idiot who had somehow become the paint-by-number artist and without my specialized skill the health centre's entire emotional health team would be deemed ineffective and wasteful, and would thus be wasted in lieu of enacting the recommendations of the latest report by the latest bi-lateral, non-partisan task force. Surely my time was better spent saving the jobs and asses of my colleagues than helping Abdul assess his shortcomings before some anonymous tribunal of assholes sent him home or underground. I skipped the counselling shtick because I knew it would be more efficient to negotiate something with the lab tech.

“SHERRY,” I SAID AFTER A LONG PAUSE, DURING WHICH SHE WAS
content to let her wisdom sink in. “The fact is you're right. The truth is I'm a better administrator than counsellor. That's why I transferred my cases. It's always been that way and that's why I always do the fundraising and reporting. Why don't we just make it official and re-structure a bit, with me as the assistant manager?”

Sherry thrust her arms into the air and shouted to the phosphorescent track lights, “Are you kidding me? You want a promotion for this?” She looked back down at me with her mouth agape again.

We negotiated for an hour and when I reframed the promotion as a lateral transfer and title change with no raise she agreed to take it to our executive director. In exchange I agreed to bring Abdul in for an interrogation.

THE SECOND PERSON TO HOLD ME ACCOUNTABLE WAS SARAH,
who, on the same day of my confrontation with Sherry, stayed up until I got home at
11
:
33
PM
, even though she had an early morning shoot.

Sarah had a map of avenues to express frustration with me: she could tease, laugh, shout, discuss, dismiss with a hand wave, cry or wrestle her anger in the form of me to the ground or bed. On this night she chose seduction and shifted to a more violent tack when I fell asleep, at which point she put a chokehold on me and screamed into my ear, “Why can't I seduce you anymore?”

I told her about Abdul, the lab tech, Sherry, and my eleven-hour work day. She told me that she missed Friday night dancing, wrestling, cuddling, love making,
QT
. “You've disappeared,” she said.

I held her because I knew her complaint was legitimate. I held her and she cried and I fell asleep with Yaty on my mind. I wondered if she still missed Bumi.

WHEN I WOKE UP I WAS ALONE AND LATE FOR MY APPOINTMENT
with Abdul. I wrote out a devious progression of increasingly probing questions to shift Abdul's victim-mode thinking so that he could better understand his own agency in determining his fate. It would be a painful but empowering process for Abdul.

Packed tightly between a young mother singing in Chinese to her sleeping infant and a forty-something Latino guy in workman's grease-monkey denim, I felt no disgust at my fellow Torontonians' lack of conscientiousness or will to offer the mother a seat. I didn't feel annoyed that the Toronto Transit Commission was an abysmal failure at providing any sense of comfort to its loyal customer or that its fifty-year slogan, ‘The Better Way,' was a crock. And I felt no stress at being late or dread at facing Sherry or succumbing to her will and tearing Abdul's fragile confidence to shreds for the sake of my own role shift. I felt none of the usual regret or numbness for having hurt Sarah to the point of tears. Fuck Sarah. Fuck everything. I was psyched.

Abdul would provide my redemption and resurrection as a social worker. Whatever our executive director decided about the fate of my career, I would accept her verdict gladly. At least I would have role clarity and could end my clownish juggling act. I would streamline and simplify. People were getting hurt in the process but their pain was a means to a greater end. They were collateral damage.

I popped free from the people sandwich and disembarked from the bus to run the two hundred metres to the health centre. With my head buried in my list of questions, I ran full flush into Sherry, who grunted and staggered backward, then invited me into her office.

“I have Abdul,” I said.

“Not anymore,” she said. “Come on.”

I followed her once more past the cubicle wasteland, wondering if it was for the last time. “What happened to Abdul?” I asked when we reached her office.

“He's with Connie,” she said. “You got your wish. We're creating the new position: Business Development Coordinator. You even got your raise.”

Sherry's perfect smile popped out from behind her stoic lips and she pumped my hand up and down in a deal-sealing congratulatory shake. I felt like I'd just negotiated the purchase of a
1985
rusted-out Lada with no tailpipe, one that I'd taken great pains to find. I got my wish. I got my monopoly on the paint-by-numbers sets and all it cost me was a bunch of needy people. Accountability.

THE OFFICIAL TRANSFER OF THE LAST OF MY CLIENTS LEFT JUST
two needy people in my life: Sarah and Bumi. Sarah wasn't needy by nature, just by the circumstance of having fallen in love with me. Bumi also wasn't the type to cling to others. His circumstance was the result of genes, corrupt politics and nosy neighbours. In both cases I had stumbled onto the scene flexing my paltry brain like some diplomat landed in the wrong country.

I suppose the same had been true for my clients, none of whom had asked to be put in a situation of dependency. Regardless of whatever role they may have played in their own demise, nobody wakes up one day and says “Hey, screw this independence. What I need is someone to tell me what to do.”

In the last months before my departure I surrendered my limited capacity to meet Sarah's needs in exchange for Bumi, who in all his years in my country had never had a Canadian offer a hand or take any interest until I invaded his fortress of extreme privacy. Sarah's acquaintances provided ample interest in her dark beauty, depthless drive, noble character and innovative mind. She would be fine without me.