Member-only story
John’s Dream
Fiction and non-fiction
John leans to one side when he walks, always ready to fall, and he has a hard time keeping his eyes open. For years he was homeless, sleeping in the Rillito Wash, until some stranger finally helped him get into a state facility apartment where they make sure he takes his medication every day. He’s 56 years old, very skinny with a bad complexion and brown, crooked teeth. He’s never had a girlfriend or even considered that a possibility.
As a condition of living in the state facility, John has been given a job and a free cab ride to work. I pick him up 3 times a week in my cab. He works at a place where they employ people with disabilities, autistic people, Down Syndrome and others with hard-to-categorize problems. The building where he works is a big metal warehouse. The many hundreds of people who work there sit at long metal tables on hard metal chairs and do menial tasks, such as sorting bolts and nuts into boxes or screwing simple screws into the proper holes on small machinery parts or separating molded-plastic pieces to be ready for sale in stores. Some of the workers on the assembly lines are crippled, some of them can’t talk, some scream and moan and cry, some drool or go to the bathroom on themselves. Their ages vary from 18 to 60. At lunchtime there is a lunch counter where they can eat if they do not bring their lunch. The cost of the food comes…
