Barbara Gladys Grace Jean Schikowski
I’ll call her Barbara for short so I don’t have to keep writing the whole thing out… but trust, in real life, it was required to say the whole thing out cause god-forbid if you didn’t call her the right thing. You see she changed her name every day. She usually stuck with Schikowski as the last name for some reason. She wasn’t a Schikowski, she was a Hilton. Betty Hilton in fact. One time I called her by her real name to piss her off cause she was annoying me and my mom slapped me.
Apart from changing her name every day, there were more reasons why Barbara was residing in our mental home. She was bat-shit crazy. She was born every day, she had babies every day, she talked to Satan (actually talked to him), she was born on the planet Pearl… from a Buick. There was a car dealership across the street from us and they would have to call us every time someone was taking a car off the lot. If they didn’t she’d go running and screaming across the street after the car saying they were stealing her cars.
Maybe I should describe what Barbara looked like. You know that purple guy that hangs out with Ronald McDonald? Her body was kinda shaped like that. Like a big triangle. She had no teeth, well she did, she just never wore them. She had stringy light grey hair. To top off her beauty, she had a quarter-sized mole right smack dab in the middle of her forehead. If she were sane, she’d be amazing for the movies. But she wasn’t.
Barbara despised my mother. My mother had apparently taken her husband (my father) and stolen her teeth (my mother had braces for a bit). She was enthralled with my father. She’d follow him around like a little puppy. He could tell her to sit on a burning stove and she’d do it with a smile. Barbara also was in love with my oldest brother, Jeremy, but not like the love she had for my dad. She saved all her hatred and rage for me and my other brother, Ryan. You see Ryan had also stolen her teeth because he had braces from a mountain bike face-plant, whereas I supposedly stole all her hair because I had long blonde toe-head hair. We were the bane of her existence and did everything to fulfill that position. God she was so easy to piss off. I definitely remember running from her many, many times cause she’d sneak up on my and try to kick me in the ass. (Most likely from something I totally deserved.)
Like I mentioned she talked to Satan. Well, that’s not the full truth, she also talked to God. Fortunate for her (or maybe unfortunate?) when she talked to God… it wasn’t just in her head. You see at the mental home we had an intercom system. Usually this is something I did with Ryan, but sometimes if I wanted to impress a new friend coming over I’d do it with them. She’d be sitting in the Rec room watching tv and the intercom room was right next to it. I’d get on the intercom and in a really low deep voice say,
“BARBARA, THIS IS GOD.”
“Yes Lawd!? I hear ya Lawd!”
“BARBARA, YOU’VE BEEN VERY BAD.”
“Oh Lawd, I’m so sorry Lawd.”
Then we’d usually ask her to do some ridiculous thing or other. Get us something from the kitchen, slap one of the other residents on the butt, pick her nose… what can I say… we were kids being raised in a mental home with license to an intercom.
This one time she kept complaining about snakes in her basement. “Barbara, you don’t have a basement.” Apparently there were some damn snakes in her damn basement. After about a week of hearing this I got in trouble for something. Most likely playing poker with Charlie, the autistic American Indian. When you live in a mental home and you get in trouble your punishments just aren’t normal. They can range from having to do all the residents laundry (that’s a crapload of laundry), helping cook meals, cleaning out the horse shit in the horse stalls, and then there was cleaning the residents rooms (oh god ew). Well, I apparently only got in “2-room” trouble… not that bad. But I wasn’t able to pick which two rooms I had to clean, my mom did. Barbara’s was on the list. As I was changing Barbara’s sheets on her bed I noticed all these long tube socks at the bottom of her bed under the covers. I didn’t think much about it cause frankly when you’re cleaning mental patients rooms nothing seems too out of the ordinary. The next morning at breakfast Barbara bursts through the door and runs up and down the tables, “The snakes are gone! The Lawd has come and taken the snakes out of my basement! Praise Lawd!”
Betty Hilton Barbara Gladys Grace Jean Schikowski (born ? - died ~2002)
