Chapter 6 

The main business of the Madison DO (District Office) was taken up with decent, God-fearing retirees with sparkling eyes and a Wisconsin glow to their cheeks. Even the disabled were, on the whole, disposed to look on the bright side whenever we screwed up their checks or reinterviewed them occasionally to see if they had miraculously healed. It was the SSI recipients, with their life-long unemployment and inability to mix with society which denied them SSA payments in the first place, who seemed to be the only ones the CRs and the rest of us talked about, charitably refering to them as "nut cases."

The most persistant nut case was a Milwaukee woman named Carolyn (not the Carolyn in the office, who was strange enough). She was about sixty years old and wore layer after layer of clothes that, in style and wear, looked as old. She was known behind her back as "Red," because of her indescribable wig. It looked as if it was made of yarn and chair stuffing, and she always wore it sideways, so the ragged part ran from ear to ear and one side covered her face so only her mouth showed. She had an ongoing disagreement with the SRs in Milwaukee over some aspect of SSI entitlement, and at least three times a week took a Greyhound bus the sixty miles to Madison to find a sympathetic ear. The first few times the CRs took her claim, only to discover that she was already receiving $300 a month through the Milwaukee office. After that, she was told each time she'd show up, with increasing vehemenence, that the Madison DO could not help her. It didn`t seem to register on her at all.

The one time I talked to her was towards the end of the course, when I was doing some SR work under the tutalage of Ken Anderson, who looked like Merlin Olsen standing in a hole. When the appointment slip was handled to Ken, he rolled his eyes and sighed. "Carolyn again. You talk to her."

I went up and called her name, and led her to one of the interview carrels. The waiting area had a beautiful view across the road to the Verona Hills, pretty much the same view as from my apartment, but the rest of the office couldn't see it because of a seven-foot partition which hid all the employees from the public. I didn't relish talking to Carolyn, and to keep from laughing at her ludicrious appearance, I looked at the sunlight flashing off the snowbanks. It didn't take long at SSA for me to view such people with annoyance.

"Well, Carolyn, what can we do for you today?"

She shifted a shopping bag from one side to the other and covered her mouth with her fist. This gesture, combined with the wig, completely hid her face. She looked like Cousin Itt.

"Well . . . I was talking to my friend Roberta . . . Roberta used to be in the films, y'know . . . knew Clark Gable, she did. . . " She sounded like a female Burgess Meridith.

"Carolyn, why did you come here today?"

"Roberta said the Government had this program . . . `S' something . . . "

"SSI?" I felt like a straight man.

"Yes, that s it . . . well, it sounded pretty good, so I thought I'd come check it out . . . see if I could get some . . . "

" Carolyn . . . "

" Not that I need the money, of course . . . My father, y'know, left me a lot of money - - a lot of money . . . ."

"Carolyn." I held up a thermofax copy of her microfilmed records. "You already get SSI, $311 a month. It's a gold check, comes the first of the month." Ken was snickering next to me. "Besides, you live in Milwaukee. They're the ones that handle your SSI check."

Her face, what I could see of it, clouded. "Oh, Milwaukee. I don't like them at all . . . you people here understand me."

I muddled through the interview and somehow got her out the door. It was a frustrating experience talking directly at someone, as carefully and as slowly as if to a child, and not being able to get my point across. Ken said I did as well with her as anyone could.

"Actually, that stuff about her father is true. Her grandfather, believe it or not, was one of the founders of Carson Pirie Scott -- which one, I don't know. She was left $9 million, but it's all tied up in court for some reason. A pretty sad story." He was smiling, though.

The most memorable weirdo was a young woman with whom I conducted my first SSI interview about three weeks into the course. Remember, one is entitled to SSI payments if one is a) disabled and unable to work or b) over 65, and in neither case covered by Social Security. This woman's disability, however, was listed on the microfiche as "heroin addiction." I asked Charlie Bullwinkle, my SSI proctor, about that before we went to talk to her.

"Yeah, isn`t that ridiculous?" Charlie was the quintissential bureaucrat, thin, balding, quiet, very methodical. "We're paying her $284 a month because she's a heroin addict? In my book, that's a self-induced disability -- if it's even a disability at all. The kicker is that she shows no income at all -- but obviously she's getting the stuff somewhere." He sighed. "Let's talk to her."

When I called her name, I was astonished by her appearance. She was tall, addict- thin, with long red hair that had seen better days. She had hollow, haunted eyes, sadder yet with the incongruity of happy yellow lines painted around them, radiating away like sunbeams. In blue paint, "Peace" and "Love" were written on either cheek, and a childishly- done flower highlighted her forehead. Her John Lennon glasses had no lenses. She wore a tie-dyed shirt and a demin vest covered with buttons and patches. I'd never seen love beads before, but assumed that her ugly necklace couldn't have been chosen for aesthetics alone. Her jeans were almost white with age and she wore winkle-picker boots. Over all this she'd thrown a ratty Republican coat. This woman would have cut an odd figure even in 1968, but in 1978 she was positively bizarre. She sat down across the table, ignoring my greetings, and started thumbing through a very worn copy of The Naked Lunch, which I thought was a nice period touch.

"Well, Heather," I said, getting her name off the interview slip, "what can we do for you today?"

She looked up at me sideways, as if I was interrupting something terribly important, and shrugged elaborately. I was startled by the complete lack of life in her dark eyes. It was like looking at two marbles set in dough.

I glanced at Charlie, hoping for some sign as to how to conduct my first interview with this burned-out relic. He was pointedly watching the traffic on Odana Road, leaving me on my own.

Heather rose up from her dark pool long enough to flash a ghastly smile. "Didn't get my check last month."

Ah, a clue. I looked at the record before me and found the "payments" section. It showed a check for $284 issued on the first. (All SSI checks, colored gold, were issued on the first of each month, while the green SSA checks come out on the 3rd.) I showed the record to Heather, and she repeated her earlier observation.

"Didn't get my check last month."

Charlie broke in at this point and explained, in tones of abject disapproval, the procedure for reporting a missing check. I watched Heather take this information with no sign of understanding or caring, and after Charlie gathered the proper forms, I guided Heather through them, filling them out as we went. Several times Heather appeared to doze off, then lazily come awake again as I prodded answers out of her.

As she left, shambling towards the doors, I felt absolutely awful.

Not all the nut cases came into the office, either. Renee kept a file of letters from recipients in her desk, and there was some very strange stuff in there that she would take out on occasion and let us read. There was the one woman, 78 years old by our records, who wrote on a weekly basis in 80- or 90-page tirades, mostly about her sex life. Her style was a fascinating mix of capital letters and underlinings, along the lines of "My HUSBAND won't FUCK me any more ----- only the LITTLE ASSES down at the school!!!! I hid his DENTURES! The LITTLE GIRLS won't FUCK him without them!!!" Renee always read every word, looking for events that might change the woman's check. "I have trouble getting through some of this stuff, though," she admitted, blushing.

Another of her correspondents was a woman who was convinced that the Smothers Brothers, of all people, were shooting "light beams" into her son's skull through the television set, causing him to turn against her. (Especially remarkable, I thought, when you consider that the Smothers Brothers hadn't been on TV in ten years.) She'd put mattresses in front of the TV, furniture, anything to stop these deadly beams, but nothing worked. Every once in a while, she'd write SSA, being the only Government agency she knew of, asking us to do something. Renee once wrote up a request for the area field representative to go to this woman's house and see if she was OK, but he refused to go after reading the letter. "My life is full enough of nuts as it is," he explained. That was the usual level of helpfulness we expected from the field rep, who spent most of his time visiting every bar between Madison and Sun Prairie.


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