Remaking Mr. Jones : Robert Shushan Had a Theory: Changing the Appearance of the Developmentally Disabled Could Transform Their Lives. And With James Jones, Who Was Ridiculed as ‘the Wolfman,’ He Put His Theory to the Test.
THE FIRST THINGS PEOPLE NOTICED WHEN THEY saw James Jones were his menacing walk, his thick, dirty beard, his long mane of black hair--and his teeth.
The front teeth, on top and bottom, were missing altogether, and next to the gaping holes were canine teeth that protruded from his mouth, almost like fangs.
When he was sitting on a bus reading the Bible or swaggering down a street muttering to himself, people either stared or turned away. A few of them called him names.
“Wolfman” was the name he hated most--hated so much he couldn’t even talk about it.
“What I want,” Jones said shortly before his 31st birthday last February, “is to look regular. What I want is to be a grown man and have a desk job.”
It was not much of a dream by ordinary standards. But Jones is not an ordinary man. He was born mentally retarded. At the age of 7, he was abandoned by his mother, separated from his brothers and sisters and made a ward of the state by his father. He spent most of his childhood in foster homes, and all of his adult years in government-subsidized group homes. He doesn’t remember how many.
Whatever fantasies he may have had for himself, no one who knew Jones over the years imagined that his lot in life could be any different--that he would ever be anything but a friendless day worker in a facility for the developmentally disabled.
Until Robert D. Shushan took an interest in him several years ago.
For more than three decades, Shushan has been executive director of the Exceptional Children’s Foundation, a private agency for the developmentally disabled, which has branches throughout Los Angeles. He had been looking for a person like James Jones to prove one of his long-held convictions: If you change the appearance of an individual, you can change the quality of his life.
It was not all that unorthodox a theory. Right or wrong, American society has long assumed that if you look better, you are treated better. Yet, little thought had been given to the appearance of the developmentally disabled. It was clear that they could be taught to read and write, hold jobs and even live on their own. But Shushan knew all too well that even when retarded people could do all those things, most people still regarded them as abnormal. They had odd expressions; they had peculiar ways of walking and talking; they wore out-of-date hair styles and ill-fitting clothes. They looked like society’s misfits--and were treated as such.
Shushan was convinced that it was possible to reduce or even eliminate the visual cues that call attention to mental retardation. He had tried with some success to explain his thinking to the families of the developmentally disabled and to colleagues at other institutions, but over the years he had come to realize that talking wasn’t enough. He wanted to demonstrate his ideas. He was determined to find a suitable candidate, hire a film crew and make a documentary of a real-life “make-over.” The documentary would be tangible proof of his theories, a legacy he could leave behind when he retires five years from now.
But it was not until the spring of 1990, when a member of the Exceptional Children’s Foundation board took Shushan to lunch, that all the pieces began to fall into place. The board member told Shushan that the foundation had received a remarkable offer: As part of its ongoing charitable work, a group of dental surgeons wanted to perform radical new restorative dental work, materials and time donated, on a retarded person. Shushan immediately thought of James Jones.
Was Jones interested? Shushan asked. The dental work could be painful. It would require time in a hospital and take six to nine months to complete. The other aspects of the make-over--teaching Jones how to dress differently, how to walk and talk in entirely new ways--would take even longer, and might never work. Was Jones willing to try?
Jones did not have to answer. A wide grin had spread across his face, revealing not only the gaping hole in his mouth but a hollow space in a soul hungry for attention.
“What I want, I tell you, is to look regular,” Jones said. “What I want is to be a grown man.”
With that, Robert Shushan and James Jones set to work. For the next nine months, specialists in maxillofacial surgery, prosthodontics, cosmetology, special education and psychiatry would put Shushan’s thesis to the test. The task would prove to be difficult. Mental retardation, after all, is not something that can be cured by cosmetics, anymore than a lifetime of psychological scars can be erased by surgery.
IT IS EARLY ON A SUMMER MORNING, AND JONES IS standing, as usual, in the front office of the Culver City branch of the Exceptional Children’s Foundation, telling counselors, secretaries--anyone who will listen--how to do their jobs. He has a broom in his hand and a Bible in his pocket. His shirttail hangs out of a pair of jeans that are too big for his reed-thin 5-foot, 11-inch, 137-pound frame. Around his head is stretched a sweatband. It reminds Shushan of an Indian headdress.
“I am 100% Indian, you know,” Jones explains in a loud, guttural voice that carries throughout the office.
“Me and my father got the same kind of blood: Cherokee. The doctors take my blood and they look at it and see it’s 100% Cherokee. You know about the Cherokee holocaust?” Jones asks, not looking to see if anyone is listening. He has a way of staring at strangers but always looking away from the people he is talking to.
No one at the foundation knows whether Jones has Indian blood. Some days he lapses into a perfect Bruce Lee kung fu imitation. Other days he wears a leather jacket and frowns, pretending to be a police detective looking for “suspicious characters.”
Shushan carefully observes the odd portrayals and patiently listens to the curious stories. A portly man in his early 60s, Shushan is as attentive and self-controlled as Jones is oblivious and intemperate. Shushan’s dapper gray suits are pressed. His gray beard is trimmed. His gray hair is patted and smoothed into place.
Shushan’s sharp eyes focus intently on every one of Jones’ flaws. But he also sees the strengths.
Except for his Bible, which he often misplaces, Jones rarely reads. Yet during the state’s 1990 election, he knew who was running for office on what platform and could tick off, faster than most voters, the unwieldy list of ballot initiatives. He knows the city’s bus system like the back of his hand. He has an almost photographic memory for dates and places. And he has an ear for language. Simply by listening to the conversations of fellow workers, he has become nearly fluent in Spanish.
Shushan is convinced that it will be possible someday to harness some of these talents. But for now, he’ll concentrate on the basics.
“When you come to work, James, you have to put on a clean shirt,” Shushan explains in one of their first conversations on the subject. “And tuck your shirttail in. You need to wash your hair and make sure your fingernails are clean. We also need to get you a haircut.” Jones stares at the floor and picks at unseen objects on his arms and hands.
“Do you understand?” Shushan asks. Jones nods without looking up and laughs out loud for no apparent reason. He wants to please but doesn’t always know how--and hates to admit to any limitations. But he does have his opinions.
When Shushan asks if he would consider shaving his beard, Jones’ grin disappears.
“No,” he shouts. He will not shave his beard. “People back in biblical days all had beards--Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Jeremiah, Jesus, Peter, James.”
For a moment, Jones looks Shushan straight in the eye. “I don’t know if I ever told you this, but I’ve been called to preach the word of God. God almighty . . . .”
“That’s fine, James,” Shushan interrupts, opening the door and ushering his pupil down a long hallway. They come to a huge, cheerful workroom.
Some of the more than 200 retarded workers who are assembling cardboard file organizers and other products turn to stare as the two men make their way to a far corner of the room.
“Now, James, what we are going to do now is to teach you how to walk. Not like a tough guy, leaning from side to side, but straight and tall, like a man with a desk job might walk.”
Shushan demonstrates. His own posture is perfectly erect, although a bad hip makes him tilt forward with a slight limp.
“Now you try it,” he tells Jones.
Jones hikes up his shoulders, tucks his chin to his chest and swaggers across the room.
When he returns, Shushan offers Jones a prop. “Here,” Shushan says, handing over a long wooden handle from one of Jones’ industrial brooms. “Hold this pole straight in front of you and don’t move it. Now try walking.”
As Jones walks, Shushan calls out instructions. Pull your shoulders down. Don’t lean. Relax. Keep your head up.
It is a bizarre version of modeling school. With his outstretched hands grasping the broomstick and his spine straight as an arrow, Jones looks like an altar boy who has just been promoted to crucifer.
“You’re doing beautifully, James,” Shushan says. “It will take time. You have to practice. I can’t be here every day or even every week to work with you, so in between times you’re going to have to work on your own. Can you remember to do that, James?”
At the end of the lesson, Shushan promises to work on Jones’ voice in the next session.
As they leave, a few of the workers mumble hellos and reach out to Shushan. He warmly shakes their hands and nods and smiles. Jones follows, bestowing his own greetings. “You need to work harder,” he says to one older man who is staring into space. He stops to help another man pick up a stack of cardboard.
“That’s it. You’re doing beautifully. Keep up the good work,” Jones calls out to no one in particular.
IT WAS A MEMBER OF SHUSHAN’S FAMILY WHO DREW HIM INTO THE WORLD OF the mentally retarded. The year was 1948. He was an undergraduate at UCLA when his oldest sister gave birth to a profoundly retarded son. She named the boy Robert after her beloved brother. For the 12 1/2 years that the boy was alive, the Exceptional Children’s Foundation, then a fledgling self-help group for parents, provided guidance and moral support to the family. When the organization grew to the point where it needed a full-time executive director, Shushan’s sister urged Shushan to apply. He took the job in 1958, giving up dreams of becoming a teacher and administrator in the public schools.
Shushan’s parents were Jewish immigrants who had fled Russia and the religious oppression prevalent there. They had settled in Brooklyn shortly after the turn of the century. Robert was the youngest of six children. In 1939, when he was almost 10, the family moved to South-Central Los Angeles, where his father set up a paint-contracting business.
Because appearances were very important to Shushan’s mother, she took great pains to see that everyone in the family was immaculately groomed. She was also fearful of wasting food, a concern that may account for Robert Shushan’s lifelong struggle with his weight. By the time he met Jones, Shushan had tried liquid protein diets, seven-day fast diets, vitamin and water diets. Nothing worked for long. Shushan was also concerned about his hair--or lack of it--and, at 42, started wearing a hairpiece.
But it was his own children who first convinced Shushan of the importance of appearance for the developmentally disabled.
One day in 1971, he was sitting with his wife and youngest child in the drive-in lot of a Bob’s Big Boy restaurant in Van Nuys when a car pulled into the space next to theirs. Noticing a child in the back seat of the other car, his daughter, who was 5 at the time, remarked: “He’s retarded, isn’t he, Daddy?”
At first, Shushan thought nothing of the question. After all, the child had the obvious facial characteristics of someone born with Down syndrome--slanted eyes, a flattened nose bridge, an oddly shaped head. Yet Shushan recalled that when his two older sons were almost as young, they, too, had been able to pick out retarded people from a crowd, even when they had no such physical characteristics. Shushan began to wonder: What was it that his children saw?
He decided that it was the way retarded people dressed; the way their hair was cut; the way they moved their heads, the looks on their faces. Long before they had had a chance to say who they were or show what they might be capable of, their appearances betrayed them.
Shushan quickly set up a study as part of a doctoral program he had been pursuing in special education and administrative studies at UCLA. He took “before” pictures of retarded people as they ordinarily appeared and “after” pictures showing them with stylish eyeglasses, becoming haircuts and touches of makeup. He then gave the pictures to separate groups of volunteers. The results were startling. The volunteers who saw the “before” pictures quickly identified the subjects as retarded. The volunteers who saw the “after” pictures didn’t recognize as many of the telltale signs of retardation, even in subjects who had Down syndrome.
Shushan was ecstatic. He set out to tell the world about his findings. When he wasn’t raising money and tending to his other administrative duties at the foundation, he was on the road, delivering nearly 100 lectures during the next 10 years.
At first, people were skeptical. “Bob, you know we don’t give a degree in cosmetology,” chided his dissertation adviser at UCLA.
But UCLA accepted the study and awarded Shushan his doctorate. Letters and calls soon began to pour in from around the world. Experts in special education called Shushan’s work “pioneering” and “compelling.” His study, they predicted, would be “a watershed” in the field of special education.
By the late 1970s, medical researchers in Israel and Germany went even further. They began to perform plastic surgery on children with Down syndrome. The preliminary studies on the impact of those operations confirmed what Shushan had predicted: Children who underwent transformations in their physical appearance were judged by both peers and teachers to be “smarter,” “nicer” and “less dangerous” than those who had not. With fewer physical stigmas, they could fit in more easily, which presumably made them happier, although that was not something anyone really knew how to measure.
Many of the parents of retarded children were not so impressed. Indeed, the whole idea of tinkering with appearance was abhorrent to them.
“I resent what you are doing,” one father in Washington told Shushan after one of his lectures. “I want the world to accept my son as he is. I don’t want to let you or anyone else make him over to be something he is not.”
Shushan had an answer. Gently but firmly he took note of what the father himself had chosen to wear that day: a three-piece suit, a neatly pressed white shirt, a handsome, red striped tie. Was he, by any chance, a lawyer? Shushan inquired politely.
He was, but what did that have to do with his son?
“Each of us tries to fit into our own world as best we can,” Shushan said. “Sometimes we try, almost without thinking, to look the parts we are asked to play. Sometimes, we rebel against those roles and dress or act in a way that makes us stand out, as hippies did in the ‘60s. But those are conscious decisions that we come by freely and for which we reap the benefits or pay the consequences. The problem with retarded people is that they rarely have such choices. They have to be taught.”
“OY, IT’S HENRY HIGGINS AND ELIZA DOOLITTLE. IT’S THE GOOD FAIRY TELLING Pinocchio if he works hard and is good, he can become a real boy.”
Don Brown, gray-haired and grinning, is sitting in his office in the late summer, trying to fend off telephone calls, catch up on paperwork and think about what Shushan is trying to do for Jones.
If Jones is becoming Pinocchio, Brown is his Jiminy Cricket, his conscience.
A quick-witted, 60-year-old former New York public school administrator, Brown, who looks 10 years younger than his age, has been counseling the developmentally disabled at the job-training centers of the Exceptional Children’s Foundation for more than seven years.
It is Brown who helps Jones keep track of the $200 or so he makes every two weeks sweeping floors and cleaning toilets at the foundation. It is Brown who makes certain that Jones is reasonably clean and well cared for in the group home in Inglewood where he lives. It is Brown who reminds him to take medicine to control his epilepsy.
It is Brown who has tried to teach Jones to stop throwing typewriters when he is frustrated and putting his fist through walls when he is angry. It is Brown who reminds Jones not to talk to strangers or to curse. It is Brown who reminds Jones that most people prefer not to hear Bible readings on the bus.
Yet with 40 other developmentally disabled clients, there had been only so much that Brown, or any of the other counselors and state social workers who see Jones several times a year, could do for him.
Brown often wonders what would happen to Jones if Brown were to leave. “Jaime” (the Spanish nickname Brown sometimes uses for Jones) would certainly survive. Yet Brown doesn’t relish the thought of becoming yet another name on a long list of people who have come and gone from this young man’s life.
“The problem is,” Brown says, “these people need so much help. It takes patience. It takes one-on-one work, day in and day out, year in and year out. Who can do that? A parent, maybe. But a lot of these people are like James; they don’t have parents who are willing or able to take care of them. They have plenty of caretakers but no one who cares.”
Brown knows the statistics all too well. It has been estimated that as many as one of every 35 babies in the United States is born developmentally disabled, the results of accidents of birth or genetic disorders. The vast majority of these, like Jones, are only mildly mentally delayed, which means they can live and work on their own. But to do so, they need help and special training. Many of them never get it, or at least not enough to make a difference.
There had been a time when Brown had been optimistic that, with the advent of new genetic tests and liberal abortion policies, the number of retarded children would start to decline. But experts in the field say the numbers probably have not changed all that much. There are still people who do not believe in abortions and, increasingly, those who have trouble obtaining them. There are still expectant mothers who, despite all the warnings, drink excessive amounts of alcohol, and a growing number of women who take drugs.
Just what caused Jones’ problems is not clear. For unknown reasons, he was born with an excessive amount of cerebrospinal fluid inside his skull. Doctors call the condition hydrocephalus, popularly known as “water on the brain.” Whether it was that physical trauma alone or some genetic abnormality as well, portions of Jones’ brain have clearly been affected.
Intellectually, Jones belongs with the foundation’s higher-functioning clients who work on special crews, mowing lawns on government property or cleaning office buildings in downtown Los Angeles. For some months several years ago, Jones was part of a gardening crew that worked at the federal building in Westwood. But, socially and emotionally, he didn’t fit in there. He talked too much and sometimes got into fights. The foundation’s counselors decided to bring him back to the Culver City facility, where they could keep a closer eye on him.
Here, largely on his own initiative, he has become the building’s daytime custodian, faithfully doing jobs that cannot wait for the overnight cleaning crew: changing light bulbs, restocking paper-towel dispensers, throwing out trash, cleaning up spilled lunches, fishing out shoes and whatever else the less manageable clients manage to jam into the toilets.
Jones loves his job. That he would want another--a desk job--probably is nothing more than an indication of his desire for a normal life, something he has never had.
“My mother gave me away,” he explains in an oddly offhanded manner when asked about his past. He was born in Texas on an Air Force base but has spent most of his life in Southern California.
“My father was drunk. My mother was drunk . . . That’s what hurted me so much. My father and mother didn’t have no work. We had no place to go. So we all got slipped into foster homes.”
His parents also divorced, but the worst part for Jones was that his two brothers and two sisters eventually went back home to live with their mother. Jones never did. Until she died in the late ‘70s “of drinking and smoking and cancer, I only got to visit my mother on Christmas and Thanksgiving,” he says.
It was in one of the foster homes that he lost his teeth. He was 12 at the time and suffering from an epileptic seizure. He fell; his face hit something, perhaps a piece of furniture or the floor. When he woke up, eight of his front teeth were gone.
When he was old enough, he grew a beard, perhaps on someone’s advice that it would hide the missing teeth. But the beard only made his appearance more off-putting. People started taunting him, calling him by the name he grew to hate so much.
“Hey, Wolfman, Wolfman,” they said.
Twice, Medi-Cal paid for him to get dentures, but, for one reason or another, he wouldn’t wear them. He took them out and lost them or threw them away. Brown never understood why.
“Maybe they didn’t feel good. I don’t know,” Brown says. “James has a way of being very self-destructive sometimes. Very self-destructive. He’s never been violent. He’s never hurt anyone. James never would hurt anyone--except James.”
ON AUG. 23, 1990, AT 5 A.M., JAMES JONES WAS ADMITTED TO VALLEY PRESbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys, where he underwent the first phase of what would be more than seven months of dental restoration. The estimated cost: $15,000.
The first step was a 2 1/2-hour operation in which his upper and lower gums were cut open and separated from the jawbone. Inside the bone were placed eight tiny screws, one for every tooth that had been missing for 18 years. The gums were sutured closed. In a second and somewhat shorter operation several months later, the gums were reopened and posts were screwed into each implant. And in the final stage, artificial teeth would be permanently implanted into the hardware. The particular operation performed on Jones, the Branemark System, was developed in Sweden nearly three decades ago but has been licensed for human use in the United States for only a few years. Among the first U.S. dentists to attempt the surgery were Dr. Robert Shuken and his co-directors, Drs. Stanton Canter and Jeffrey Foltz, at the Restorative Oral Surgery Center at Valley Presbyterian. The doctors also have a private practice in Reseda.
Shuken operated on Jones, Canter assisted, and Dr. Guillermo A. Roman, an Encino prosthodontist, would design and fit Jones’ artificial teeth when the time came. They had all agreed, before they even met Jones, to work for free. They do pro bono work every year for at least one needy patient. It is, among other things, a way to publicize the advantages of dental implants.
Before the year was over, Jones would make more than a dozen trips to the dentists’ offices and the hospital. Shushan did not go with him. In fact, Shushan never even met the dentists, focusing instead on his end of the experiment.
Considering everything, Jones was doing quite nicely. He was remembering to put on a fresh shirt most mornings and wash his hair at night. He didn’t have to be reminded as often to tuck in his shirttail. And he was working hard on his posture and voice. He still swaggered, and he hadn’t made much progress with his voice, but Shushan had some thoughts about what to do about that.
Meanwhile, Shushan wanted to get Jones a suit. His idea, he told Brown, was to have Jones pay for it. With prodding from both counselor and mentor, Jones managed to put away nearly $300 between October and December.
It took visits to three different stores, but finally Shushan spotted the perfect suit: navy blue, single breasted and on sale for $275. Shushan also picked out a white Pierre Cardin shirt and a red silk tie--all of which he took, along with Jones, to a tailor on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks.
EARLY ON A WINTER AFTERNOON, JONES AND SHUSHAN ARE SITTING IN A hair salon in Studio City. They have been waiting for only a few minutes, but Jones is already fidgety. He leafs through an issue of Gentlemen’s Quarterly. Suddenly he pokes Shushan in the arm.
“Look,” Jones says, “all the male models in the magazine have their hands in their pockets.”
Shushan nods absently.
But then Jones stands up and throws the magazine on the couch. He sticks his hand in his pocket and tries to strike a pose similar to the ones he saw in the magazine. He looks in the mirror and smiles. Without removing his hand from his pocket, he walks slowly across the room. As his confidence rises, his pace picks up.
Shushan can hardly believe his eyes. Here is James Jones walking around a beauty shop as gracefully as a model. There is not a trace of the old swagger.
“I’m becoming a grown man, right, Dr. Shushan?” Jones giggles.
Shushan does not have to answer. This time, he’s the one with a wide grin on his face.
EVERY TIME JONES MAKES A LEAP FORWARD, HE FEELS BETTER ABOUT HIMself. Yet, as he feels better about himself, he also begins to make more demands.
Dr. Shushan, it’s time I get a promotion, don’t you think?
Dr. Shushan, I don’t want to be a janitor. I want to be a supervisor.
Dr. Shushan, I found this desk at a used-furniture store. Will you get it for me? And a chair, too?
The staff members at the center who work with Jones every day are finding his demands increasingly difficult to take. Still, most of them love him and all of them care about his welfare. And the boss seems thrilled, so it must be a good sign.
“I don’t want him to be obnoxious, of course,” Shushan explains. “But I do want him to become a self advocate. After all, if a person doesn’t fight for himself, who will? A teacher, a parent, a mentor perhaps. But in the end, we’re on our own. Most of us have learned that lesson by the time we are adults. James is just now learning it. If it takes him a while to learn how to do it, well, that’s certainly understandable.”
Shushan decides to buy Jones the desk and chair. And he begins to talk to the counselors about a new title, trying to address both Jones’ need for more prestige and his supervisors’ belief that he should not be given more power and responsibility than he can handle.
“Maintenance monitor” is the title Shushan settles on for the time being. Jones isn’t thrilled, but, he agrees, it’s a lot better than his present title of “janitor trainee.”
There is something else Jones wants, he says. He is ready, he tells Shushan, to see his family again.
“Since I’m starting to look good,” he says, “it’s time to see my nieces and nephews.
“Now,” he says, “they’ll think I’m a good uncle.”
IN FACT, JAMES JONES DOESN’T LOOK ALL THAT DIFFERENT DESPITE THE months of work. His hair may be a bit shorter, his clothes a little neater. But there is still a gaping hole in his mouth. All that has clearly happened is that a lot of metal has been implanted inside the bones of his jaw. Jones is growing impatient. Despite the periodic lessons with Shushan and the occasional trips for checkups with Shuken, the bulk of Jones’ life continues just as before: a succession of lonely, tedious days.
On weekdays, he gets up at 5 a.m. and helps make breakfast and lunch for himself and the six other retarded people who live in his group home. He rides two hours on the bus to work and two hours home, usually reading the Bible along the way. At 5:30 or 6 p.m. he eats dinner, does some chores and watches a little television. His favorite shows are the nightly news, “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” “Adam 12,” “Dragnet” and “Police Story.”
At 9 p.m., he goes into the room he shares with another retarded man and meditates about God until it is time to sleep. The next day, he does the same things.
Weekends are different. Weekends are when he can do something for God, not just read about Him in a book or think about Him in bed. Toward this end, Jones has been a member of a series of churches. Because the state pays for his room and board and medical expenses, he can, when he wants, turn over the $4.25 an hour he makes as a janitor to the Lord. He often does.
At first, the older members of whatever church he happens to be attending fuss over him. They might see him as one of God’s innocents, a man whose mind and body may have been afflicted but whose heart and soul are pure and untouched. But then Jones will do something that doesn’t seem so innocent. He speaks in tongues, but even by evangelical standards, there is something extreme about Jones’ rantings and ravings in the name of Jesus. Sometimes he stands up in the middle of a service and loudly accuses one of the congregants of being a sinner. It’s usually at that point that the church elders ask him to leave--and not come back.
Fortunately there are plenty of churches in Jones’ neighborhood: old cathedrals, new evangelistic tabernacles, makeshift storefront gospel centers--all catering to black families.
Jones attends black churches because he lives in a black neighborhood. It doesn’t bother him that he often is the only white person in the congregation. What matters to him is that he is doing the Lord’s work.
One Saturday afternoon, Jones joins an event called the Christian Unity Rally, sponsored by a group of evangelists and their followers, many of them ex-convicts and former drug addicts. They intend to march through the intersection of two rival gang territories in search of converts. Jones is among the first marchers to show up.
Before the march begins, he spots a likely looking candidate for conversion in the parking lot of a doughnut shop. He is a young man, about Jones’ age, who is wearing a leather vest and no shirt. He has tattoos running across his arms and chest, a dozen rings piercing his ears, and the left side of his head has been shaved. Jones does not seem to notice any of the physical trappings. He is looking for souls.
“Over one soul, all the angels in heaven will rejoice,” Jones says, approaching the young man. “Give your soul to Jesus. Give your soul . . . .”
The would-be convert puts up his hand up for silence. “I’m from the Christian Motorcycle Assn.,” he explains.
“Praise the Lord,” Jones says, moving on.
He spots an elderly black man who has wandered by to beg a couple of quarters for a cup of coffee. “Bless you,” Jones calls out. “Turn your life over to Jesus.” The old man looks up helplessly. “It’s time to surrender,” Jones tells him. “It’s time to make a change. Repent. Repent, while you have a chance.”
Jones lays his hands on the man’s head and begins to chant: “We command you in the name of Jesus, in the name of Jesus, in the name of Jesus. Use this man in the name of Jesus. . . . In the blood of Jesus, take this man . . .”
Gone is the unintelligible guttural voice, the nasal twang. Jones’ voice resounds through the street like that of a Southern Baptist preacher.
“I WANT TO CAPTURE THAT VOICE,” SHUSHAN SAYS, SITTING IN A MARIE CALender’s restaurant a few days later.
It is mid-October of 1990. Jones and Shushan have just finished a voice lesson. At Shushan’s direction, Jones has been trying to hold his fingers in front of his mouth to feel if enough air is getting through. The idea is to improve the resonance of his voice by forcing as much air as he can out through his vocal cords, rather than letting it sit in the back of his throat or slip past his mouth into his nose.
Jones has not exactly grasped the concept. Nor can he understand why Shushan keeps insisting that he talk during the week the way he does on weekends, when he is attending to his ministerial duties. Don’t you understand? It’s not me talking, Jones explains. It’s Jesus. It’s Jesus in me. It’s Jesus who saves souls, not James.
“I don’t think I have ever told you I have been called to preach the word of the Lord . . . .”
As Jones talks, he puts his sixth package of sugar into a mug of coffee and stirs it with a knife. With his other hand, he tries to unhinge a wad of lasagna from the roof of his mouth. Some of it falls on his beard.
Shushan hands him a napkin. “Next time,” he says in a stern whisper, “you should excuse yourself and go to the restroom.” In a louder, cheerful voice, Shushan compliments Jones on having said “please” and “thank you kindly” to the waitress.
When they get up to leave, Jones stops Shushan before he reaches the door.
“You know something, Dr. Shushan? You walk kind of funny. You should work on your walk.
“You know something else, Dr. Shushan?” Jones says, glancing briefly at Shushan’s face. “You have a beard and I have a beard. You could be my father.”
IN EARLY NOVEMBER, SHUSHAN HAS TO FLY TO TAMPA FOR A MEETING. AS IT happens, that’s where Jones’ father had moved some years ago. It has been years since Jones has heard from any member of his family. But his father’s number and address are in the Tampa telephone directory. Shushan thinks of taking Jones with him. He calls a psychiatrist friend, who cautions Shushan to move slowly. Who knows what scars remain, what fantasies Jones has about his father, the psychiatrist says.
Some of the people who work for Shushan at the foundation wonder among themselves whether Shushan is giving Jones unrealistic expectations, setting him up for a big letdown. Shushan worries, too, about the obstacles facing Jones. He even briefly considered having Jones move into the Shushan home, but he and his wife decided they already had too many responsibilities.
What worries Shushan more than moving too fast is a tendency he so often sees in people who try to help the mentally disabled: Whether they are professionals or parents, they almost always move too slowly. They become frightened and overly protective. It’s one of the reasons, Shushan is convinced, retarded people are often dressed in clothing that is too youthful. No one will let them grow up.
Shushan is determined not to fall into that trap. He picks up the phone to call Jones’ father.
JONES’ MOUTH HAS BEEN HEALING JUST AS IT SHOULD. HE TELLS EVERYONE HE sees about his implants. And then, on Nov. 21, the day before Thanksgiving, he gets a chance to tell the person he most wants to know.
It’s the middle of the afternoon on the West Coast, nearly dinner time on the East Coast. Brown has driven Jones from the Culver City work center to Shushan’s office at the Exceptional Children’s Foundation headquarters in South-Central Los Angeles. As soon as Jones walks through the door, Shushan hands him a photograph, a snapshot of a small, thin, bald man with a dark mustache.
A huge grin spreads across Jones’ face. A giggle erupts from the back of his throat.
“That’s my daddy, all right. Hey, Pop,” he says, putting his hand to his face, confused, embarrassed, proud--all at the same time. “There’s my father,” he says, showing the picture to Brown. “He always believe in work.” Shushan sits Jones down and explains that he met with Jones’ father at his apartment in Tampa. His father is remarried, which Jones already knows, and is working as a dishwasher in the city’s convention center. Shushan has arranged for the father to be at home now to receive a call from his son.
Shushan spends a few minutes rehearsing with Jones what he will say to his father. Shushan then turns on the speaker of his phone and dials. The father answers.
“Hey, Dad, how you doing?” Jones says, a laugh bursting from deep in his throat. “How you keep yourself? You know I’m an uncle now. I have six nephews and nieces.”
His father corrects him. No, he has seven nephews and nieces. The wife of his brother Mike had a baby girl named Rebecca, about a year ago. His father starts to tell Jones about his new wife and her sons, one of whom is serving time in federal prison in Kentucky.
“It’s good you pay for what you do wrong,” Jones says. But what he really wants to talk about is his Indian ancestry. “We’re 100% Indian, right, Pop? You and me?”
Well, not exactly, his father says. It seems Jones’ great-grandmother was Danish. His father didn’t know about Jones’ mother’s side of the family. But it was true, his own mother, Jones’ grandmother, was half Indian. That made Jones about one-eighth Indian, his father calculated.
“You know how tall I am, Dad? . . . I getting to be a grown man. Dr. Shushan is helping me. But, I’m still your son, right, Pop? Did you know about my promotion, Dad? I’m a maintenance monitor. You know how much I’m making right now--$4.25 an hour. I never told you about my implants. I had this surgery done . . . I don’t think I have told you, I was called to preach the word of the Lord.”
A few minutes later, they have run out of things to say. Shushan motions to Jones. Isn’t there something else Jones wants to tell his father?
“Oh, yeah, Dad. I love you.”
AFTER A FINAL CHECKUP WITH THE SURGEONS IN FEBRUARY, JONES IS REadmitted to Valley Presbyterian for the second stage of the dental restoration. Once again, his gums are cut open, and the remainder of the hardware is installed.
Less than a month later, on March 4, Jones is ready to see Roman, the prosthodontist. Roman’s first step is to install a temporary set of artificial teeth to see how they look in Jones’ mouth and to determine how Jones will react to them.
Within a week of the visit, Jones manages to wiggle the screws lose and pull a tooth out of his mouth. He just wanted to see how they worked, he explains.
When Brown notices the detached tooth sitting in Jones’ hand, he is furious and yells at Jones as if he were an irresponsible teen-ager who had just wrecked the family car. Then, remembering that Jones is a grown man with the heart and mind of a curious child, he stops and gives Jones a sympathetic shrug and sigh.
“All right, Jaime, I’m sorry. Let’s call Dr. Roman and see what we can do.”
But Roman is not in his office. For days, he has been in a hospital intensive-care unit, where his fiancee lies near death from a rare case of meningitis. But when word gets to him about Jones, Roman returns briefly to his office. Unshaven and exhausted, he replaces the temporary tooth.
“It’s like promising to give a little kid a bike,” Roman says wearily. “You can’t tell them that something more important came up. You have to do what you said you would do.”
ORDINARILY, BROWN WEARS KNIT SHIRTS AND CASUAL PANTS TO THE OFFICE. But today is April 16, and he has on a coat and tie. “Look at him in that Richard Gere suit,” jokes one of his colleagues.
Brown is in no mood for joking. It’s the biggest day of Jones’ life and the young man is late. Brown has begun to wonder whether Jones will show up at all. “He’s very self-destructive sometimes. Very self-destructive,” Brown mutters half to himself.
“We’ve got the appointment with Dr. Roman at 10. Then we’ve got to go to the tailor’s. (The sleeves of Jones’ dress shirt have shrunk in the wash, and Shushan wants to have the coat sleeves altered to match.)
“Then, we go to the hairdresser’s,” Brown continues. “In the afternoon, we have to go by Dr. Shuken’s. And then we have to be back here at 3 or 4 for a party.”
A two-man video crew hired by Shushan will follow along, documenting the final stages of the transformation.
At last, Jones saunters in. He is wearing a light-blue shirt and a matching tie. Hanging over the tie is a huge silver cross, and showing through the back of the shirt is a brightly colored T-shirt with a big red heart on it. “I Love Jesus,” it proclaims.
“Are you ready for today?” Brown asks. “This is a big day in your life, Jaime.”
Jones grins. “I’m ready.”
“But what about your future, James? What would you like to do when this is all over?”
“Get my own place and have a family reunion,” Jones says.
For some months, Brown has been talking with Jones about the idea of moving into a place of his own. Maybe not quite yet, Brown keeps saying, but someday soon Jones will be ready.
And what about his desk job, Jones wants to know.
“You’d hate it, Jaime. You need to move around,” Brown insists.
Wasn’t it enough, he says, that Shushan had gotten him a desk from the secondhand store?
“Oh, hell, I like to continue working here,” Jones agrees.
“James, James, watch your language. There’s a lady here.”
Quickly recovering his best manners, Jones rephrases his thought: “I certainly would like to continue working here. I’m a busy man. But,” he adds, “I’d like my next promotion to be a manager.”
“Well, right now we’ve got to manage your day,” Brown says as gets ready to take Jones to the Valley.
When they arrive at the prosthodontist’s office, Jones is ushered in without waiting. Roman is in a good mood: His fiancee miraculously recovered and the two have been married.
Now, seven months and 16 days after the first operation, Roman is screwing in Jones’ final set of teeth, the ones he will wear for the rest of his life--assuming nothing out of the ordinary happens.
A receptionist, a nurse, a photographer--all stand staring in amazement. As the final tooth goes into place, Jones doesn’t have to look in a mirror to see what has happened to him: It is reflected in the faces of the people around him. A grin spreads across his face.
Shushan meets Jones and the video crew at the tailor’s shop shortly before noon. There, Jones changes into the white Pierre Cardin shirt and the red silk tie. With Shushan hovering and fussing, the tailor makes the final adjustments on Jones’ navy-blue suit.
At the hairstylist’s, Shushan is oddly quiet as he watches Jones getting his hair cut, his fingernails manicured and his beard trimmed. Shushan notices a copy of Gentlemen’s Quarterly sitting on a table.
“I’ll miss his old walk,” he says, admitting that he, too, may be becoming overly protective.
When Jones’ hair is cut and styled and his manicure is complete, Shushan helps Jones slip on his jacket, opens the door and watches as Jones walks out to the sidewalk and across the street.
When Jones reaches the other side of Ventura Boulevard, he glances at his reflection in a tall window of a bank building. He turns his head first one way and then another. He seems utterly dazzled by what he sees: a handsome young man in a well-tailored business suit.
He laughs one last time, turns from the window and slips his hand into the pocket of his suit. He begins walking down the busy sidewalk.
And no one even notices.
NEARLY SIX MONTHS HAVE passed since the formal phase of James Jones’ transformation came to an end. The dentists are delighted with their patient’s appearance. Shushan is pleased, too. Had he the time and opportunity, he would undertake transformations on other clients. As it is, Shushan will soon have an edited video, which he hopes will inspire professionals and parents to do for other developmentally disabled people at least some of what he has tried to do for Jones. Such efforts, he acknowledges, are more costly and labor-intensive than most people can afford. Moreover, it’s unlikely that there will be miracles along the way. Yet, Shushan contends, some improvement, however small, is better than none.
In reality, the outward changes in Jones’ life have been small. He still has the same job. He still lives in the same house. He still has no friends. And he still has not seen his family. Yet, he has gotten a raise to $4.50 an hour, and he has a new title, assistant chief monitor of maintenance. (It was Shushan’s idea, to remind Jones of his Indian heritage.) There is also talk at the foundation of finding him an apartment of his own and of seeking a donor to sponsor a family reunion.
He may be able to walk down a street or ride a bus without drawing stares, but for Jones, the most dramatic change seems to be internal. Whether because of his new look or all the positive attention he has received, he no longer loses his temper as easily, nor is he as quick to chastise others. Though he still needs to be reminded to tuck in his shirt and tidy his beard, there is a quiet dignity in the way he moves, a hopefulness in the way he talks.
“I thank Him that people have been nice to me,” Jones says, pointing skyward. “I hope I will become worthy. . . . I hope I will continue to grow.”
“Perhaps,” Shushan says, “that is what we have given James; perhaps it is what we all need--hope, the hope and expectation that people will be kind to us, that life can change, that we all are capable of growth.”