Chihuahua Bites

The risk of having a family, especially a big family, is that on any given day, one or more of them will be "off balance." For the past few years, one of my brothers has been hogging that territory and even bought property there. To be fair, he has a legit diagnosis of bipolar disorder. He's not my first experience with that, but he does have the distinction of being the first one I know who believes he's the Second Coming of Christ (or as he likes to sign his title "SC of C"). Egos abound and flourish in my family, but as far as I know, he's the first one to take it to this level.

He's been in "the system." He's medicated. That stabilized his bouts of "let's drive across the country in two days without stopping to eat, sleep, or pee," but it did nothing at all for his "SC of C" syndrome. But as his state-provided team of psych experts will tell you, there are lots of functioning delusional people out there who seem just fine as long as you don't ask questions that probe their psyche. When properly medicated, some people with delusions learn to keep it to themselves - mostly.

In his properly medicated state, I traveled with him to California to help him find an apartment.
We saw a variety of overpriced run-down places before he became obsessed with a sinus infection that required medical attention. After being misdirected twice, we ended up in a ratty-ass clinic in Oakland where drug addicts were stumbling around like Extras in "Night of the Living Dead" and our rental car was the shiniest thing on the block except for a stolen grocery cart. After two hours of being the token white people in the waiting room, we found out that (a) the doctor had left the building, (b) he would NOT be coming back after lunch, (c) my brother has a really hard time filling out a pound of paperwork, and (d) he was not eligible for a Medi-Cal card without an address which (e) we didn't have because our apartment hunting had come to road-kill standstill due to his runny nose.
The good news was that, when we emerged, we still had all 4 hubcaps.

After 3 days of apartment-hunting and clinic-hopping, we had one happy apartment prospect in Temescal but apartment manager "Nick" wouldn't call me back. Maybe it was my brother's blank stare while I asked the functional questions about utilities. Maybe it was my brother's confession about his 2005 bankruptcy. Maybe I reminded Nick of his mother, so he wasn't going to call back even while I was offering to wave 3 months rent and a hefty deposit under his nose. Who knows? Ultimately, our pleas for a return call, fax, or email accumulated in the black hole of Nick's voice mail.

At the end of the trip, as we dragged our jet-lagged butts back into a 92-degree Atlanta evening, all I had to show for it were my toes. My BBF Berkeley friend Whit took pity on my grimy feet of the sainted sister pilgrimage and treated me to a really thorough pedicure. I chose the most defiant glow-in-the-dark orange-red on the shelf, "Chihuahua Bites." It's more than a color. It's a synopsis, a summary, a whole damn treatise.