Anniversary Post: Priscilla and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day

Or "April 19, 1995, Remembered." You do not necessarily want to share these memories. Cute, warm and fuzzy kitten post to follow. If depressed, wait for it. 

I wrote this a few years ago in response to someone saying they didn't believe in "bad days." It seemed apropos to post today, since the topic was "trending"...

I’m not sure I believe in “buried memories.” If people could completely forget things just because they didn’t want to have lived through them, why are my memories of April 19, 1995, so clear?

“Patriots Day,” a traditional celebration of Paul Revere’s ride in the Revolutionary War, is not much celebrated in Virginia. (In grade eight, my class did memorize Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem about it.) It was just another ordinary day.

For me, in 1995, an ordinary day began at 3 a.m. when I bathed and dressed and walked four miles to meet a car pool and go to Johnson City, Tennessee, where I had been invited to set up shop as the masseuse at a tanning parlor. The car pool arrived in Johnson City at 5 a.m.

This was a better idea in theory than in practice. One reason is that tanning parlors need to be heavily air-conditioned to compensate for all those hot lamps, while massage rooms need to be warm so that people won’t start shivering as their blood pressure drops during an effective massage.

Another reason is that I’ve never wanted to tan my skin all the way to leather. Anacostia, D.C., used to be infamously hostile to White people but Black people in Anacostia never gave me as much of a hate stare as those legally White co-workers did. I kept wanting to shout, “So I’ve never fancied skin cancer. How bad is that?” every time I walked through the building, and “You still look White, y’know!” .

Anyway, from 5 to 8 a.m. I would sit out on the sidewalk and read. I would be literally bored stiff before my work day even started.

My work day would then consist of going into a chilly little tanning bed booth with the tanning bed pulled out and a massage table set up in its place, and knitting or reading or going through mail, and waiting for people to set up appointments. In April mornings were still chilly. When a client did venture into my booth, I’d crank up a space heater and lay out warm sheets and towels, but the patient would be very much aware that the thermostat for the whole building was set at 62 degrees Fahrenheit. Above the discordant drones of the space heater fighting the air conditioner, patients might also hear the discordant rhythms of soothing massage music fighting stimulating gym music. Even as warm oil was being poured over their backs, patients would be shivering. One grey-haired matriarchal type bolted up off the table just as I’d smoothed the warm oil down her back, and the cool air had hit her oily shoulders, bellowing “I’m not going to pay to be so miserable!” She had a valid point...and I had zero income for that day. There were several days like that.

The nineteenth of April was one of those days. Legitimate masseuses were still rare enough, and well enough paid, that I could live for a week or two in between massage jobs. I could even afford to go across the street and buy lunch, so my employer didn’t worry about me and I was part of the local economy. Across the street was a bagel shop. (In Tennessee? Why not? That special taste and texture produced by boiling a piece of bread dough before baking it, brought to New York City by Eastern Europeans, has become popular all across North America.) I liked bagels; they made good ones. I was just beginning to notice that I had celiac sprue. I did not have monthly cramps. I had daily cramps. I enjoyed my daily bagel but it was making me sicker every week.

Since I didn’t have any massages to do that day I had to work on something really unpleasant—namely, tracking down witnesses to testify against the lousy creep who’d shot my once-in-a-lifetime pet cat, Black Magic, and then tried to blame a harmless disabled man for it. If I knew another living soul that nothing that had any reason to live had ever wanted to harm, next to Magic, it was that disabled man. When Dad moved out he’d ordered me to keep a gun and ammunition in the house, ordered my boyfriend to teach me to shoot, and told me I was responsible for protecting my anti-gun mother and depressive sister. I kept a 12-gauge and a 20-gauge shotgun and at least one full box of shells for each one, in my bedroom, always ready to practice blowing up empty plastic bottles with the boyfriend. A part of me really wanted to lay the 12-gauge against the lousy creep’s head, the same way he’d laid his shotgun against Magic’s trusting little head...but I couldn’t quite do “temporary insanity.” I kept remembering that the lousy creep was the one who belonged in jail, not me.

Life can be very unfair. Because I was the victim of a crime, I’d been automatically assigned the free services of a recent law school graduate who was hardly worth what I was paying him (attention). Because the lousy creep was married to another distant cousin, he’d been able to hire my family’s lawyer. My state-subsidized lawyer was so thoroughly intimidated by my family, including but not limited to our lawyer, that he didn’t even want to try writing some necessary letters to some other relatives. I had to write those letters myself. I cried.

Finally it was 4 p.m.—time to meet the car pool. Usually the car pool was at least radio-free. Not that afternoon. The print shop worker was a Seventh-Day Adventist, and greeted me with “End times may be beginning.”

Seventh-Day Adventists are post-tribulationists. The Bible foretold a time when Christians would be persecuted, when there would be a “falling away,” from Greek apostasis, literally “standing aside” or “staying away.” If you try to understand this in the light of a different prophetic statement that “we shall all be caught up in the clouds,” you might be convinced that the people who “fall away” from the persecuted church will be swept up into Heaven; I can’t prove that that’s not what the Bible meant. If you work with the literal meaning of apostasis or the English derivative word “apostasy,” you understand this “falling away” to foretell that many ex-Christians will either abandon the church to its fate, or turn against the church and participate in the persecution of real Christians. If you’re a Seventh-Day Adventist, a member of a church whose understanding of religious persecution was based on still-vivid memories of Protestants being persecuted by Catholics, you understand it to mean that even some Christian churches—Catholic, and some of the blander Protestants, and probably Mormons—will join the Powers of Darkness in persecuting real Christians. So when a Seventh-Day Adventist starts talking about “end times,” you’re about to hear some bad news.

“Some lunatic blew up a government building out West, and they’re saying it was revenge for David Koresh, who they think was an Adventist.” (All through the 1990s all Adventists' main concern seemed to be reminding the world that Koresh was an excommunicated former Adventist, barely literate, with a head full of bizarre private interpretations of the Bible. Not many Jews cared to remember that he was Jewish, and had studied the Bible in Israel, either; but his coffin was draped with the Israeli flag.)

Wanting to dissociate oneself from David Koresh was probably a natural human reaction. He was a scruffy-looking little creep, the kind of guy you'd expect, after you'd moved away from him at a party, to go creeping around your house and trying to make a pass at your baby sister. Koresh really did that; he claimed "spiritual marriage" to his wife's baby sister in order to give her a legal right to move into his house at age fifteen. Some claimed this sister-in-law had expected to be treated like a sister. Koresh demanded that she consummate the "marriage" and have a baby. At fifteen this girl supposedly already "knew" she didn't like sex. Some claimed the only way even Koresh, much less his wife, could have done this was that the girl was being abused in some way that was even worse at home, but nobody knows exactly what went on. However, under existing laws, the easiest way for teenagers to run away from abusive homes or schools was anything they could claim as "marriage"--and several other teenagers moved in with David Koresh, claiming "spiritual marriage."

Koresh had become a gunsmith, mainly because his only talent was for machine work and the auto mechanic in his group hadn't wanted to give him a job. He ordered everyone living with him to practice using guns safely, and talked about preparing to defend themselves if "end times" came upon them, though how dangerous even a hundred homeless people could be to our federal government was a topic for much morbid humor at the time. He left guns, parts, and ammunition lying about in a big house full of people, including toddlers and dogs. Part of the house was insulated with straw. In winter part of it was heated with Coleman stoves. Koresh was not tough or violent, was a weak man in every sense of the word, but it's hard to imagine his "Mount Carmel House" qualifying for fire insurance.

And among those who read what's survived of his writings or listened to his record album, there was a consensus that, if Mark Twain had been living, he would have said Koresh deserved hanging for his crimes against music and literature. He was one of those self-proclaimed rock stars who get by on gigs in clubs where drugs are handed out. All Koresh positively admitted using was marijuana and alcohol but he did once come in after a gig and flop down on a cot already occupied by a ten-year-old girl. 

He had invited Norman Allison, a better-looking and more talented rocker from London, to join his band, but that didn't last long. Allison had a few actual fans. Koresh didn't welcome competition. Allison didn't want to go back to England--he said he couldn't afford plane fare--so he slept in the garage where he did some work for that mechanic who had refused to hire Koresh. The mechanic was a sixty-something-year-old cardiac patient; after Koresh had gone into the gun business the mechanic had hired another member of the group as his full-time assistant, a Vietnam veteran. (In the 1990s Vietnam veterans were young enough that some of them also fought in the Gulf War, and were perceived as unpredictable, crazy victims of post-traumatic stress.) The mechanic and his full-time assistant always carried guns. Allison, being British, had never formed that habit.

This background detail was important because in 1993, when federal agents first attacked Mount Carmel House, the three men at the garage ran a mile to see what was happening. At least the Vietnam veteran ran a mile. Someone shot him. Allison saw him fall and ran back to the old man, who was floundering and clutching his chest, and half-carried his employer back to the garage. There, Allison was arrested as a conspirator. The scene certain agents were setting up--some said in order to get rid of four colleagues, whom they shot in the back on that day, though nobody could prove any such thing--needed a conspirator. The most plausible suspect, unfortunately, had been killed by that single shot, but Allison was young, tall, and Black, so he looked like a suspect. I had written some letters to some people about that. Allison was guilty of the crime of overstaying his visa, and should have been deported sooner, but he didn't belong in jail. Neither did Ruth Riddle, an otherwise law-abiding typist who should have been sent back to Canada but was kept in U.S. prisons for about a year.

Anyway, now it was 1995. The radio news broadcast came back on and poured out the gruesome details of the Oklahoma bombing. A few hours later the bombing would be conclusively blamed on Timothy McVeigh. During the long car trip home the broadcasters were still referring to “John Doe #1” and “John Doe #2,” and focussing on those trying to rescue any living toddlers, or at least identify the dead ones, where these two men had apparently deliberately targeted the day-care center in the building.

In a certain profoundly sick way, that was “revenge.” During the Waco disaster it was widely believed that David Koresh had had some sort of “suicide pact” or some other way to force about a dozen young mothers and their babies to stay in their burning building. Forensic evidence proved that what really happened was that Rachel Jones Howell (Mrs. Koresh) had  been leading the women (or girls—most of them were in their teens) and their babies to a side door, apparently hoping they could rush out and surrender to the FBI, just as a federal agent driving a bulldozer dumped several tons of rubble outside that door, blocking the exit. Within minutes two pregnant young women went into spontaneous abortions, before the house crashed down on top of the trapped women and their babies. If you don’t think young children have lives and minds of their own, or believe they feel pain, McVeigh’s rants about killing government workers’ babies to avenge the deaths of other babies might have made sense to you. I believe young children have lives, minds, and feelings of their own. About McVeigh I never felt so sure. He was a Gulf War veteran, admittedly sick. He looked like a zombie.

I hadn’t tried to make sense of what I’d heard about the Waco disaster before I was paid to do that, later in 1995. I'll admit, I had the same reaction for which some mutual acquaintances blamed George Stephanopoulos. Accepting whatever preposterous story we'd heard was less appalling than trying to make sense of the evidence that trickled out to us. I wouldn't have been able to parrot a crazy story on national television, but I can understand how that was possible for him. 

However, although much that was reported in 1993 ranged from mistakes to outright lies, by April 1995 McVeigh and his associates would have been able to identify the individual men who shot David Koresh—the only man, including McVeigh’s immediate family, who’d offered homeless, jobless McVeigh a place to sleep if McVeigh had wanted to look for work in Waco. (Koresh had vowed to offer anyone who needed a home the use of his home, and his housemates included several old people, teenagers, and divorcees, but Koresh was a gunsmith by trade and also the kind of man who, not being either big or strong himself, particularly admires big strong men.) It was widely reported that McVeigh had also made contact with some “Neo-Nazi” types...possibly because an attempt to avenge David Koresh could have been construed as a Jewish plot. You just about had to be a homeless person he'd offered to help in order to miss David Koresh.

McVeigh could easily have learned, as I did, the names of the men who’d shot Robert Williams in the back and told that melodramatic lie about how many of Koresh’s housemates “kept pumping bullets into him, long after he was dead,” just as if they hadn’t realized that a forensic examination would trace the bullet that killed Williams to a federal agent’s gun. (The lying agents took their inspiration from the fact that they had wasted many bullets on Koresh’s walls and floors, to intimidate the residents.) McVeigh was bigger than those men and at least an equally sure shot. He could have walked up to them, like an old-school avenger of blood, and said, “David Koresh was a friend of mine. If you know any prayers, say them now.” It is possible that the reason why he didn’t do that is that people might have sympathized with that kind of gesture. McVeigh wanted the death penalty. 

But...babies? Babies of hapless frazzled file clerks who probably didn’t even know the men who’d killed David Koresh? Obviously McVeigh was another thing with no reason to live.

People would ask, for the rest of the 1990's, "Did you know any of those people?" I didn't know anyone who was in Waco or in Oklahoma City on either of the Days of Infamy, but I spent some time, in the summers of 1993 and 1995, verifying this. I had met several Seventh-Day Adventists and several federal employees from the central States, in Washington.

I left the car pool and walked up the road to the Cat Sanctuary. At the bottom of this unpaved private drive was a sleek pale blue Lincoln Continental, old but maintained to look new, that a grateful patient had willed to my mother the private nurse.

The house still looked to me as if it ought to have Magic on the porch. Magic was not on the porch. Her heirs, Tabby and Calico, never were the same. The house wouldn’t feel right, to me, until another social cat family were rescued from the streets of Kingsport, Tennessee, in 2007.

I walked in, and my mother said “How was your day?”

“Terrible,” I said. "Have you heard the five o'clock news?"

“Well, you deserved it,” said Mother, pointing to a baking dish soaking in the sink. “You left dishes in the sink all day long!”

Naming a rather horrible local nursing home I said, “Would you like to go there, right now? In the trunk!” I said this intensely enough that when I stepped forward, Mother stepped back, and went back to her Continental and her paying patient.

The rest of the day was less memorable. I probably took a long hot bath, and read in bed till I fell asleep with the light on. I probably cried.

If we leave out days on which people died and consider only the kind of “bad days” on which everything goes wrong and nothing goes right, I think April 19, 1995, is a strong contender for the title of Worst Day in My Life.

Looking back, more than twenty years later...I don’t remember that day as funny, although I could be tempted to use it in a piece of comic fiction about someone who Had a Bad Day.

I don’t remember it as inspiring the kind of drivel some people spout about Thinking Positively and Counting Blessings, either. Yes, that terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day was part of a year when I did have some blessings—such as living parents—that I miss, now. It was also part of a year when I had not yet received some blessings that I received and enjoyed later, such as a husband, or even a social cat family. And it was still a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

I don’t understand people whose own depression is apparently so all-prevailing that they feel a need to go into what they probably learned as “suicide prevention” mode every time someone else is Having a Bad Day. To me it’s just part of life: most things don’t affect our emotional feelings, some things bring happiness, some things bring sadness or anger into our lives, and we feel those emotions, not trying to hide them and not wasting a lot of time on them, and get on with our lives.

The reason why people tell other people that they’re Having a Bad Day is not hard to understand. They recognize that they’re in an emotional mood that is less pleasant than their baseline mood. They want the other people to know that the emotions the other people notice them feeling are not necessarily the other people’s fault. They also want the other people to double-check whatever the other people are about to say to make sure it doesn’t aggravate their existing bad mood.

When women, at least, are Having a Bad Day their mood is usually more exhausted than violent, so the actual usefulness of such legislation might be limited...but I seriously think that an addition to existing legislation along the lines of, “If a citizen A has given a citizen B the information that A is Having a Bad Day, and B has uttered some sort of inappropriate, unhelpful reply like ‘Well, just snap out of it’ or ‘Why would you choose to label a day bad?’, and B is still alive, however badly injured, then when B is able to express sincere and appropriate gratitude for A’s forbearance the state may legally release B from the hospital,” would be appropriate.

We need to agree that if you have approached someone who is Having a Bad Day, appropriate reactions include (1) silence, (2) backing away, (3) completely closing your mouth, (4) finding something else to do, (5) breathing deeply and mindfully through your nose with your mouth shut tight, (6) getting out of the other person’s sight, (7) asking someone else to do whatever you might have been about to ask the person who is Having a Bad Day to do, (8) not saying one single word about the person who is Having a Bad Day, and (9) when you see that person again, making sure that your only comment on the person’s Having a Bad Day is, if you really feel a need to make one, “Thank you for warning me not to make a Bad Day worse. I’m grateful for your patience and forbearance.”

It seems so logical...how is it possible that some of us didn’t learn to back away when other people were having a Bad Day? I don’t see this as primarily one of the social problems we as a society have built for ourselves by trying to normalize extrovert behavior, although that’s probably a factor. The problem is that we’re all born more selfish than polite. Even introverts have reasons why we want to talk to other people, right now, and since nearly all of us were brought up by older people who thought their feeling of urgency was more important than whatever a baby or toddler might be feeling, we all grew up absorbing a misbelief, “At least some of the time, at least some people have a right to demand that other people stop doing what they’re doing, thinking what they’re thinking, feeling what they’re feeling, and snap into a mood of delighted compliance with whatever the first people may be about to demand of them!”

And although this was not child abuse in the sense that beating, rape, or starvation is child abuse, and did not leave us in need of professionally supervised primal-scream therapy, it was miseducation; it taught us a counterproductive way to relate to other people. Instead of learning to tell ourselves, “I can see that X doesn’t want to talk to me, play with me, touch me, right now. I’ll find something else to do and wait for X to approach me,” inside we’re primally screaming: “If he doesn’t answer the phone the first time I call him I’ll call the competition—even if they turn out to be less satisfactory. If she’s not in the mood to go out now, it’ll be a long day without water before I invite her to do anything again. If I can’t pick up that animal and stroke it when I feel like stroking it, I’ll send it to the pound...and how dare a child ‘have a bad day’ when I...” We want to be like the people who taught us this wrong attitude toward others, rather than practice respecting others’ moods and thereby earning the attention we want.

Peer pressure among adults sometimes spoils young parents who are trying to treat their infants like, basically, short uninformed human beings. Usually even before the child is put in school (or, these days, in day care) the parent trying to teach a child to show respect for self and others is likely to hear, “You let a two-year-old tell you not to pick her up, tickle him, dress her up, take him to...”

How many times I’ve met a small child who clearly would rather have been at home in its own little bed. I wave at it, say something inane like “Hello, baby,” and try to move right along with grown-up conversation, but one of the baby’s elders isn’t satisfied. “Don’t tell me you don’t want to hold that baby! Give her that baby, Jane! Quick, John, snap a picture of the baby with its Cousin Pris!” Wondering whether that child will ever in its life spontaneously want to go to me, I avoid dropping it while muttering, “I’m sorry, kid...” And the baby preverbally screams “Nooo! Mommy! Don’t leave me with this stranger!” and has a bad day.

I would so much rather carry on talking to grown-ups, and knitting, and singing, and cooking, and gardening, and whatever else I’m doing, until the child decides it wants to toddle up and watch me. Children who are allowed just to watch adults, and possibly “help,” rather than being snatched up and cuddled against their wills, are likely to decide they want to be held. That I enjoy. So do the children.

Likewise, animals who aren’t “caught,” but merely offered food, are likely to come up and invite humans to pet them. For the herbivorous animals, Monty Roberts claims, walking away after making eye contact is a crucial part of getting acquainted—it says, “I’m not a predator, at least not on you and your young. I come in peace.” An animal who doesn’t know you well is likely to fight or flee if you barge directly up to it; it will usually follow you, watch and listen to you, and within hours or minutes invite you to groom its coat, if you meander slowly off to the side.

Human relationships can be more complicated, but basically, when an acquaintance is having a bad day, there are three general kinds of possibilities:

1. What person means by a bad day is, in this case, a horrible day. Their house was swallowed up by an earthquake. A loved one died. They just found out they have a malignant brain tumor. This situation is not going to improve right away, and unless you are the person upon whose shoulder they want to cry, the best thing to do is go away. Emulate Job’s friends and, for the next seven days, sit still, having seen that the person’s grief is very great. (They got that part right.)

2. What person means by a bad day is an ordinary bad day made up of lots of little annoyances, frustrations, and dissatisfactions. The alarm clock didn’t go off, the dog was sick on the rug, the car didn’t start, the bus was late, the Internet was down...If you have something to say that you’re absolutely certain the person will (not “should,” but will) agree is good news, you might ask, “Would good news make it better?” (Just don’t drop any little relationship poison pills like “Well, Jesus loves you! So you should be happy”—i.e. snap into the mood I demand of you, on command. Jesus never said anything like that and never knew anyone who did.) If your purpose was not to deliver news, another verbal equivalent of walking away from an herbivorous animal might be something like, “Would you like to go/do..., anyway?” Most of the time, the best thing to say is “If you feel like talking, I’ll be...” as you move in the direction of wherever you’re saying you’re going.

The purpose of moving away from the person who’s having a bad day is to make sure that you don’t add to the person’s existing level of angst, but also to help the person who may be in a different kind of mood:

3. What person means by a bad day is just another ordinary boring day in per extraordinarily boring life. Everybody has known at least one of a type of bore I’ll call Agatha McAgony the Drama Queen, although they can be male too. Ag’s basic problem is that not much is going on in her head. She has extroversion, a serious emotional problem, or both—or she’s just an insecure teenager who’s learned that people flock around and say nice things about her when they think she may be suicidal, so she’s learned to act as if she just might be suicidally depressed all the time. With Agatha McAgony it’s not just that the car didn’t start and the bus was late. It’s that, if the bus was on time and she found a seat and the computer worked and she did a good day’s work and nobody said anything unpleasant all day, she’s afraid to cook dinner because she just knows a day like this has to be building up to the kitchen exploding. And the atmosphere is full of demonic spirits that are really going to stick it to her if anybody laughs.

Agatha needs help...and friends who walk away with a positive invitation for her to follow may be just what she needs. What went wrong with Ag started with a parent, or parents, or parent-figures, who trained her to solicit affection by being Mommy’s Poor Sick Baby. She’s undoubtedly known people who just dumped her, avoided her, or made fun of her—in her mind they probably fit into one big package labelled MEAN PEOPLE. She’s probably also known a few people who prescribe serotonin boosters, which may do more harm than good, as a continuing reward for being Doctor’s Poor Sick Baby. She may, however, have never had a friend who modelled a healthier way to get attention. Following your introvert instincts might help Ag, too.