Rarebit

Rarebit is an anagram entombed in the word arbiter.

 
One late afternoon this past spring, I was driving home down Pearblossom Highway, a dirt-rough place dubbed Blood Alley for all its fatalities, small crosses with artificial flowers peppering the roadside along with scrub and brush. Jackrabbits. This is dog-breeding desert. The fish fryers at the roadside diners, the cash registers at Dollar General, the dogs, the trucks, the churches, the goats, the trains all screeched one long concerted outcry. As I rambled along, I saw there in the dust, on the side of the road, near a junk car lot and a shuttered motel, three stringy white guys, two of them jumping the third. The guy who was getting hit was all greasy hair and defeat. It ached to watch him get jumped. Memories of being a kid in a park—late nights with guys drinking 40s that always wound up that same way. Two, three, four, sometimes five on one. It was so unfair, but also something else. Something animal, something rageful in our cores, that came alight. Was it our nature?

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I saw it in my mother’s face sometimes when she shook me by the shoulders. The other face she so often showed to the world, the one she wore in church and at work long gone. This one—the angry one—was it her legit face? Was she always working to suppress it? Maybe so. Maybe she was aswang—a shapeshifting, baby-eating vampire. Secretary by day, soul sucker by night. I could see that. Maybe she was a witch; all these women who live alone, who know longing, they’re called witches. Maybe it was always there, hovering slightly, an electric hum in her blood. Prey drive. It’s like when my dogs see a squirrel running across the telephone line in the backyard. They jump and bark and howl at the sky and then sometimes turn on each other. What if the prey is tiny, like a squirrel? Like one boy against five? Like a child? A social worker?

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January 16, 2023, a woman with bruises around her eyes, blood around her nose and mouth, and a telephone cord wrapped around her neck stumbles, dazed, into the lavish lobby of the Biltmore Hotel and pleads, “Someone call the police.” The Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles: glamorous only in places, an indoor pool in the basement, and flashback-thin old service stairways that run along the spine of the building.

The woman is a social worker looking after a young boy, a foster kid placed in the hotel. December of 2021, former director of LA County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), Bobby Cagle, quietly negotiated with the hotel’s operators to shelter foster youth. Foster children were also housed at a Comfort Inn in Pomona and a Holiday Inn in Lancaster.

This deal was struck on the heels of many of California’s group homes shuttering because they were found to be unsafe and because of DCFS’s push for long-term foster placement or family reunification. Unfortunately, after the group homes were shut down, not enough permanent or long-term foster placements were made available in their place. The arbiters of care became withholders of care.

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The word arbiter is likely derived from the name Gaius Petronius Arbiter, the reputed author of Satyricon. A Latin work of fiction believed to have been written in the late first century. Satyricon is an example of early satire. Ironically (or rather satirically), the surviving sections of the original text detail the exploits of our narrator, Encolpius, and his young 16-year-old slave and intimate companion, Giton.  

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Rarebit is an anagram entombed in the word arbiter. To my understanding, rarebit is a Welsh rabbit stew that does not contain rabbit.

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Thinking of these kids taken from their homes placed elsewhere—hotel rooms, group homes, institutions—reminds me of Giambattista Basile’s Petrosinella. A tale written in 1634 about a woman who craved the parsley of a neighboring garden so badly in her pregnancy, she hopped the neighbor’s fence and stole it. Once caught, the witch who the garden belongs to makes her promise to give her child to her.

After the child is born, the witch continuously reminds the little girl of her mother’s promise. The little girl, Petrosinella, confused by whatever the witch is speaking of, turns to her mother and asks what the fuck it’s all about. Furious and annoyed, the mother relinquishes the girl to the witch: “Oh fine already, you can have her.”

Who knows how Petrosinella behaved in the witch’s care? Did she cry for her mother, did she demand all the best crops in the garden? She must’ve done something to irritate the witch because, eventually, she takes Petrosinella by her hair and locks her in a tower deep in the woods. A tower with just one window. 

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The social worker at the Biltmore Hotel was assigned to look after a 16-year-old boy, who she was given no background information on. She assumed he was no threat to her safety. However, according to an Los Angeles Times article, “he had been placed under psychiatric holds more than 20 times because authorities deemed him a physical threat to himself or others.”

The boy allegedly returned from the MLK parade that day, burst into the social worker’s hotel room, and accused her of stealing $600 from him. The social worker reported he began pushing her, disconnected the receiver from the phone, tied it around her neck, and assaulted her physically and sexually. A similar report was made about a social worker supervising a foster kid in the Lancaster hotel.

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I’m everyone in that hotel room. I imagine the social worker… there on the floor, the foster kid, and his rage, and his face… the face he revealed to her, grimacing, like when the dentist taps a sore tooth. Both of them wrestling to get out of the godless place.

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The witch uses Petrosinella’s long ass hair to get in and out of the tower. Inside the tower, she teaches Petrosinella magic arts. One day, a prince catches a glimpse of her long ass luxurious hair in the wind. Petrosinella is overly excited by this, another person, a guy, an age appropriate guy, one who is ogling her. She blows him a kiss. The prince quietly stalks her, and hears how the witch enters the tower, by asking her to let down her hair. Eventually, he does the same. Petrosinella is delighted. They fall in love and continue to do this every night. But a neighbor sees and informs the witch of the romance.

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I am The Foster Kid. In 1990, I entered foster care. Before that, my mother and I lived in a two-bedroom apartment. Cottage cheese ceiling, thick dark carpeting, fiberglass tub-shower combo. We had drawer sets made of cardboard from the Pic N’ Save. We had an old fridge, and it was my job to defrost the freezer and chip away at the ice with a butter knife. The building was full of poor people. Junk on their balconies, fried food smells, constant heat and blur, and pluck in the laundry room, the most persistent roaches. Like the others, we were poor. Thin-walled rooms, a vat of arguments, babies crying, my mother yelling, dueling television sets, rabbit ears extended with hangers and aluminum foil twisting everywhichway. We, all of us, were trying for a better life—and sometimes giving up. My mother working long hours, and me sneaking cigarettes on the balcony or out the window. Me swallowing half a bottle of Advil only to discover it’d done nothing. Absolutely nothing.

It’s difficult for me to know whether or not this was the right choice for my family, breaking us up, me being shipped to the witch’s castle. I do know money troubles were at much of the core of our problems.

How did I get here?, they might’ve thought and I can imagine all that had to do with that.

I have both lived in and worked in these shelters and institutions. After that apartment building, where I knew the dark scary mouth of Ma’s closet—a place I was sent to whenever her temper flared, skin, teeth, eyes alive with that feral rage—I lived in a group home called Stepping Stones, across the street from Santa Monica City College. The other kids and I listened to oldies, played gin rummy, and smoked cigarettes.

It was The Place of Odd Rules. For instance, the staff couldn’t give us cigarettes directly, but they could “drop them,” and if we came upon them, we could pick them up and smoke them. I remember having a fierce crush on one of the staff members, who eventually slipped me his phone number and asked me out once I left the place. I realized quickly I had a bad case of “group home goggles” wherein all the people from “the outs,” those who had access to the outside world, were considerably more attractive inside the group home.

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I am The Social Worker. In the early 2000s I worked as a case manager in the Hollywood YMCA, a program that housed women and single mothers. I spent my days there at the Y counseling the women, helping them with their resumes, setting them up with burner phones and voice mails, navigating the intricate bureaucratic web of Section 8 housing vouchers. Then at night and on days off, I was a phone hostess. I worked on a toll number and performed the part of a bodybuilder. “Muscle chat,” it was called.

I wound up dating one of the residents from the Y. I took her in. We lived together in my rent-controlled apartment, which was perpetually dark, shrouded in trees, on a street with permitted parking where I could not afford the permit, so I circled the neighborhood round and round and once I found a parking space I vowed never to leave it. I was now the witch, this apartment my vampire den. We’d stay inside, in the dark, sucking one another’s blood. And yet I felt I was doing her a favor by bringing her there.

She seemed so troubled. So in need of love. So confused. It was a mistake from the beginning. She had no idea how to be alone. Once I went to a reading with my cousin, and she drank all my alcohol and blew up my phone, calling me 15 times. When I got home to confront her, she stole away in my bathroom with my dog and tried to cut herself with my razors. In a panic, I pushed the bathroom door open hard, and she let go, and it hit her in the face. Livid about her taking my dog into the bathroom, I got right up in her face, shaking the way my mom used to shake. It was an ancient rage. One that screws my face up ugly and takes me out of that rent-controlled apartment in West Hollywood to some wholly dark unknown place that nothing beloved ever enters. I too was becoming aswang. I caught myself just in time. “Leave,” I said.

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Before that I worked in a residential treatment center for adolescent boys; they were housed by age unless their charge was sexual assault. If that were the case, they lived on the third floor, the highest level of the tower, where there was a sensor alarm across the threshold of each room. In one scene—a knot of boys fighting and the counselor breaking it up—we were trained in restraints and how to hold a child down. It was called “Nonviolent Crisis Intervention Training.”

This technique of restraining a child has continuously been revised due to child deaths. The restraint felt every bit as violent as the fight that was being broken up, all of us smashing the threshold of arms-distance, a misplaced thrill for some, sweat and skin, and fear and rage. The whole event would collapse into chisme later: Man, you fucked him up, or, Did you see how fast Mama Chula ran to break that shit up? For the staff, what was once terror became paperwork. 

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As we settle in on the child and the social worker, the mother is wiped clean from the narrative. When I was at Stepping Stones, that group home in Santa Monica, there was a day my mother came bursting through the house, barging from room to room. I hid in the bathroom crying while she screamed and hollered, “I want my daughter!” and, in my teenage perception, made a spectacle of herself. It was what I feared. It was what I wanted.

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Who knows what brought this child to the Department of Children and Family Services or what attacks his mother suffered? I recently acquired my own case records from the Department of Children and Family Services, and at the very forefront was an unexpected violence—a bill. My mother was given a bill to pay for her representation in the county court system she was subjected to.

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In another apartment in the early 80s I felt very much that I was in league with my mother—we’d just moved to Los Angeles, and she was attending UCLA and didn’t have a boyfriend so it was she and me and our little apartment in Westwood Village—calling bill collectors and getting extensions to pay things off, putting the dishes on layaway at Kmart, a SALE, a Contest, a PRIZE, a BARGAIN! They were tiny, lovely victories in our struggling life. It was then that I began to seek prizes with my writing, some creative act, some intellectual turn.

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The arbiter—that invisible hand—crafting the rules and circumstances that have brought us all to the Biltmore, a bloodied social worker, telephone cord wrapped around her neck. In 2018, former President Trump signed landmark child welfare legislation. The U.S. law, known as the Family First Prevention Services Act, ended federal funding for many residential treatment facilities and provided little to no alternative.

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In more than a dozen states, children are living in conference rooms, hotels, or in the streets. Last year, for instance, the Illinois Answers Project reported that, since 2018, Illinois’s state child welfare agency had more than 2,000 cases of foster children being improperly held in inappropriate settings, including offices, shelters, and psychiatric hospitals. The agency’s director was held in contempt of court 12 times last year for failing to provide an appropriate placement for foster children.

Which means the chances that this happened—that a homeless kid and a social worker found themselves trapped in a hotel room in an impossible situation—were kind of high. How did I get here?, they might’ve thought and I can imagine all that had to do with that. For me it was Ma and her broken picker and her own abusive father who likely had his own own abusive father and on and on like that. The military and its corporal punishment, locked in closets, standing on one foot, recitation, late night cleaning frenzies… a fit of anger that ran so deep and dark it brought terror to my young heart—a terror big enough to make me run. I ran toward bad. Forties and cigarettes and boys who sagged their pants too low and two-tone mean streaks we used to write on buses and street signs. This was the time that at night I became this other being, hot and alive not under the scrutiny of Ma. Or the courts. Or the group home staff with their dumb nonsensical rules. My aswang blood, driving me toward safety.

Meanwhile the arbiters—acting alone, well rested, in suits, signing documents, the ones at the helm, soft hands, no sweat, self-interests secured, not taking flight into the night, not looking back over his shoulder like I did, like the other kids, like single mothers in courtrooms, like social workers walking nights to their car doors, key poised erect between their knuckles, but at home—safe sound, watching it all in comfort.

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Petrosinella discovers that a neighbor blabbed to the witch and so she prepares by stealing three magic acorns from the surrounding garden. She uses the magic acorns as a distraction by throwing them at the witch as the witch chases the couple. The first acorn turns into a dog. The witch staves off the dog by feeding it a loaf of bread. The second acorn becomes a lion to which the witch feeds a donkey from a nearby field. The witch dons the discarded donkey skin as a coat, and so when the third acorn turns into a wolf, he mistakes the witch for a donkey and swallows her whole.

Melissa Chadburn’s debut novel A Tiny Upward Shove was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Debut Novel award. Her extensive reporting on the child welfare system appears in the Netflix docuseries The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez. She received a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, and teaches at Pitzer College. Melissa is a worker lover and through her own labor and literary citizenship strives to upend economic violence. Her mother taught her how to sharpen a pencil with a knife and she’s basically been doing that ever since.

Photo of Hollywood sign and Los Angeles by Songquan Deng, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Melissa Chadburn by Myung J. Chung / Los Angeles Times.