Compassionate Allowance

It had been twenty-four years since she'd last seen it, but the place looked exactly the same. And as before, it made her bilious. Seeing it shook her memory and made her queasy, the same queasiness she felt as a child when her father drove passed the building to reach school. The adjacent 34th precinct did not bother her. It could have. It serviced some of the worst areas in the city, but it was that dirty brown-red brick building facing the precinct that did it. The brown-red shade would make her ill and make her days start long and cold even before she sat down for another long day at school, for which she was usually ill-prepared.

The ninety blocks uptown will keep me busy, she thought, and away from drinking from the bottle. Ninety blocks uptown and ninety more back downtown and then I can return and open the plastic jug with less guilt.  

So, she planned a walk uptown to the old neighborhood, then return before her flight. She started out early afternoon and combed up Broadway, up through Harlem and up through the Heights. She walked past storefronts and bodegas, and churches and subway lines that looked the same as they did when she was a child. The garbage on the streets was more or less as before. There were less homeless now, she thought, or maybe they moved to different spots. She also wanted to see what was left of the Irish pubs that had green shamrocks in the windows. The signs in the pub windows stood out in her memory - everything except for the exact wording - which she remembered as being something like "two for one" or “3rd one free from six till dawn." 

She walked past Harlem and stopped at a steel memorial in honor of World War One veterans and sat by it wondering if her father ever knew it existed. The dark steel figures with bayonets seemed out of place sandwiched between the Presbyterian Children's hospital and a subway stop. And there was a woman selling corn on the street with a cardboard sign in Spanish. She used the sign to fan away the smell rising from the food cart and the smoke kept the girl warm as she stood in the cold.  

The subway station going uptown was in front of her, but she kept on walking the streets that she had not walked on for decades. Ten more blocks would be the bus station and past that would be the stores with bare window dressings and mannequins with loose limbs. And ten more blocks further up would be the brown-red building. She was not sure what the building was back then or what it was today but it held the memory of where the incident took place. The incident that left blood stains on the concrete and a small separate stain where a child landed near the building's entrance. There was rope and plastic body bags in various sizes for several days after the incident when her father drove passed the dirty brown-red brick building on the way to school. She remembered that the queasiness became worse after that day. She would enter the classroom and the smell of the school cafeteria would mix with her fear and sickness. It would mount in her stomach. Such were the morning rides past the building. And now she was there standing in front of it - that dirty brown-red brick building.

She stood staring at what she remembered to be the spot on the street where the plastic body bags were, and she slowly and quizzically walked inside. A security guard with a night stick looked at her as she stood in the entrance staring at the crowd and said, "What do you need, a brochure?" She heard herself talking out loud saying "A Social Security facility, that's what this place is, that's what it was back then?" The security guard looked at her and said, "if you're not here for a disability or an SSI claim, you have got to leave and clear the way. No loitering in this facility."  

She looked at the guard and took a torn brochure in Spanish, pretending to read it. She sat on a plastic seat and tried to recall the details of that day and the stains in her mind that followed. A woman with sheets of paper in her hand, forms of some kind, asked her if she had a pen. "No" she said, looking in the direction of the security guard. She left the plastic broken seat and headed to the entrance where a large banner hung with instructions of how to complete a disability form. It hung by a ripped edge of tape on a paint-chipped wall. Several posters tacked along the same wall painted a grim picture to the grey faces in the room - Payment in Case of Death? Disabled? What will you or your family Do?  

She looked around as if to find someone who she could ask about the event in that brown-red building twenty-four years ago. She stopped in front of the guard and asked "is there someone in the building who worked here years ago? I would like to talk to him." The guard looked at her, shaking the night stick and said, "Like I said, Lady, no loitering here. Take a seat or file from home."   

File from home. There was no filing from home back then. There was no compassionate allowance. You either won or you lost. The claim was your life or lack of it. She looked around at the grey faces in that room. Some of them would get lucky, have assistance, a good lawyer. They would live with their disability, their stain, but at least they would be recognized, and they would receive something - some money, some benefit. That family twenty-four years ago, she thought, they tried and lost and covered the floor with their blood in anger, but not her. She won. She won because that family and the building left a stain on her heart and a sick feeling in her stomach that was irreversible. She could not beat it down or find a release from the foul, queasy feeling that mounted in her stomach on her way to school. But she won. She won her claim years ago. She received her "compassionate allowance." And now she would turn around, leave the dirty red-brick building with the blood stains, and walk the ninety blocks downtown. The fear and sickness in her stomach on those morning rides past the building would remain, but she won, and that was all that mattered.