- Another dreaded trip to the hospital, another person
dying. I felt that my job as an advocate/activist to the homeless had turned
into that of an official mourner, or a sentinel of death. Many never reached
this corridor of sterile indifference; they died outside in makeshift tents,
beaten or burned to death. A majority are involved in drugs (not the legal
prescribed drugs of proper society), alcohol, some have AIDS, a great number
have mental health problems. With the institutions closing throughout the
70s and 80s through deinstituionalization (to save money), most end up
on the streets, or our newest facilities for the mentally-ill, prisons.
Most of the homeless with their multiplicity of problems, don't meet the
criteria for the few programs available. Being poor, an individual is severely
limited to choices. Approximately 74% of welfare monies..now mostly non-existent..goes
to administrative costs not to those in need.
-
-
- You go because beneath all the grime and filth, beneath
all the traumas, abuses or wrong choices that have brought them to this
end, is a lonely human being afraid. Most feel trapped, hopeless and beyond
caring. Like the lepers of Biblical times, their presence in a community,
marring our manicured-satiated-materialistic lives, disturbs us. The unvoiced
fear; has us perhaps repulsed at the homelessness that exists within us
all. Devoid of compassion--empathy--kindness or concern, we are much like
the scarred and haunted countenances we see before us.
-
- If for a moment in time, our hidden jealousies, anger,
rage, indifference, abuses, arrogance, perversions, sniffed superiority,
selfishness and egotistical narcissism could be seen outwardly; we would
be just as filthy and wretched. Thankfully, our designer clothes, designer
cars, designer lifestyles, protect us from this scrutiny. Easy to judge
from a pedestal life of luxury--warmth--credentials--wealth--and a circle
of like-minded friends; who don't present us with the more sordid, distasteful
things of life. We care; feebly, from a distance.
-
-
- You go because they can't undo the choices; things have
gone past the point of return.
-
-
- I enter the small, sterile, colorless room. The curtainless
window overlooks the shimmering asphalt rooftop of another section of the
hospital. Through the distorted haze you see the crowded parking lot beyond.
"A nice serene view in your last hours," I tell myself silently.
-
- Don starts his litany of requests immediately, "Jelly-beans,
can you get me some jelly beans, and chocolate, I'm so hungry for chocolate.
What about magazines? Damn this pain. Jesus, I can't take it. They only
give me something every few hours, afraid I'll get addicted. Isn't that
some shit?"
-
- I open the bag which I've brought, while Don goes on.
He needs to talk, I can sense his fear. We both know that this is the end.
I spill out the brightly colored jelly-beans into a bowl and set out the
chocolate bars, magazines and bouquet of flowers. He starts to cry and
says, "You shouldn't have brought a bowl from home." I tell him
it's OK. He reads the card attached to the bag slowly, almost with reverence.
He looks up and says, "I can tell you put a lot of time into finding
just the right card.". I tell him, "Yes, it had to be special."
He asks me to tape it to the wall. It looks so forlorn, that dumb card
hanging there in this death chamber. I wondered silently if he was expecting
lots more, like the people in nearby rooms, who had walls covered from
their family and friends.
-
-
- He mumbles something, I ask him to repeat it. He states,
"Mark hasn't been here, not once." I sat on the edge of the bed
and held his hand. I replied, "Don, I'm not making excuses for Mark,
but some people can't take this, it hits too close to home. Mark won't
come, you already know that." Note: Mark and Don were close buddies
and had gone canning together for a bit of money.
-
-
- I watch as he fumbles around, trying to pour some milk
into a cardboard carton of cereal. I fix it for him asking why the hell
they're giving him skim milk? I remark, "Jeez Don, it's not like
you have to watch your calories!" He says they ran out of regular
milk. He plays with the cereal, not eating, and the johnny-coat slips off
of his skeletal frame. He smells of death and decay. His body is shriveled
down to a heap of bones, the ochre colored skin around his bones sagging,
loose or gone. His stringy blond hair is dry and dead. The great running
tracks on his arms show icy blue veins used up. He is as pale as death,
his body trembles, he does things slowly. He is turned inward with impossible
pain. His drawn gray face, looks grave, sad and even a little confused,
but mostly just terribly tired. He pushes the now soggy container of uneaten
cereal towards me and asks me to throw it out.
-
- I am numb with anger, grief and rage. I scream inside.
I wonder if I'm losing my mind? This man is dying and all I can focus on
is the cardboard box. I am enraged that he doesn't have a real bowl, a
real spoon and real milk. Somehow the splash of bright colors from the
jelly-beans and flowers makes the scene surreal. Jelly-beans and flowers
are signs of spring, and all I feel is the winter chill of death that permeates
the plaster and marrow of my bones.
-
- I sit again and we talk. We talk of stupid things like
the Gulf War, and the price of gas, as if it really matters. He tries to
get comfortable, he can't. His left arm is packed with mounds of bandages.
Somehow the blood has managed to seep through and the outer ace bandage
is caked. The tips of his fingers are grayish blue and swollen like spoiled
sausages. He tells me they are thinking of cutting his arm off to control
the massive infection. I know they won't. "He'll be dead first",
I tell myself silently.
-
-
- There are two tubes coming out from the packing of bandages
on his chest. Yesterday there was one. He tells me they were going to operate,
but instead they just put another tube in to drain the putrid fluid. I
am morbidly fascinated by the size of the clear plastic tubing that leads
to two huge containers at the side of the bed. They look more like hoses
that should be in a car engine, not embedded in someone's emaciated chest
wall. The tubes are clogged and the containers half-filled with a sickly
brown and greenish bile colored liquids. I feel sick and wonder how all
of this could come out of one skinny body, or how he managed to breath
at all? He coughs and spits up yellow phlegm constantly. I keep telling
myself not to throw-up. Not here.
-
- He talks of the pain, the unrelenting pain, as he fingers
the numerous medals hanging around his thin neck. I feel such a terrible
anguish watching him clutching at those cheap, tarnished medals as if to
ward off some unknown evil that he feels lurking, waiting to consume him.
I sense his overwhelming loneliness and fear, and ask him if he wants me
to pray? He bows his head and says, "Please there's not much time".
He makes the sign of the cross when I finish. I sense a peace and a tremendous
love for this man in his extreme suffering. He seems relieved that someone
didn't see him as beyond prayer.
-
-
- I give him a hug and kiss good-bye. My staying won't
stop his dying. He died two days later, the jelly-beans eaten, the magazines
unread; this soft-spoken, once upon a time, fireman and soldier. Don had
returned from Vietnam, like many a veteran addicted to drugs. Drugs that
helped kill the horror the stench of napalm, the bark melting from trees
from Agent Orange, his buddies blown apart, villages burning. The young
of one land trained to kill his fellow human-being in another. A youngster
sent to war amidst such inhumanity is forever changed, should he return.
Wars have long echoes and these echoes live under bridges, in abandoned
cars and alleyways. So much for supporting the troops. Robert McNamara,
Defense Secretary at this time, did write a few years back, that Vietnam
was a mistake. Tell that to the Wall and those forever haunted.
-
- For months, I tried to get Don to see a doctor, or let
me take him to the clinic. He'd have no part of it. He knew he was dying,
he just didn't want a name to it. Three years before, his best friend Mike
was diagnosed with AIDS. Mike was dark haired, tall, handsome only in his
mid-twenties. He was the son of well-to-do parents in New York City. Mike
went fast. His entire body became covered in purple lesions and he needed
a cane to walk just a few labored steps. I got Mike home to his anxious
mother, who had no idea of where he had disappeared to. He died a month
later. Not in a gutter thank goodness.
-
- After the death of Mike, Don finally got his own room
in a local crack house, the only place available. It, like many of the
other slum apartment buildings and homes, in the impossible side of town,
was owned by a local politician. The building was a piss-hole, a sewer.
It was absurd to call it a place to live. The house was dank with disease
and despair, littered with discarded bottles, trash, candy bar wrappers,
needles and crack vials.
-
- Don had one small 8X10 room, insufferably dark with virtually
no ventilation. The linoleum was creased and cracked with dirt ground into
the cracks. Four hundred dollars a month for this claustrophobic, wretched
room. Everything he possessed was stuffed in corners or under the bed,
including treasured hordes of canned goods I had given him. No thought
of leaving anything in the common kitchen. Junkies would steal pennies
off a dead man's eyes and the place was full of them. Night of the Living
Dead..that's how I thought about it.
-
-
- The last time I was there, was a hot night in July. Don
had come to my office, his arm a running, swollen mass of pus and blood.
He'd cut it scrounging through a dumpster of an upscale restaurant for
theater goers. He wouldn't let me take him to the hospital. According to
him, junkies didn't fare will in local emergency rooms. He didn't need
the humiliation. Once, he'd gone back to visit a nearby exclusive town
where he'd grown up and the police followed him the entire time. I didn't
have the supplies in the office, so I went down that night and sat on the
front steps, cleaning and bandaging it the best I could.
-
- I was used to this place, everyone knew me, and soon
the porch was filled with those anxious for a bit of talk. It's not like
they got much normal company (not that I claimed to be). Jean brings me
a glass of ice water. Rose grins ear to ear when I compliment her on how
homey she fixed the porch. She tells me she hasn't had a fix in a month.
I give her a hug and tell her I know she'll make it.
-
-
 A fancy black
sports car pulls up. A young kid dressed in designer clothes and gold chains
hops out. The music blares forth, money furtively changes hands and he's
gone. I continue bandaging. I hear a scuffle, screams and look up. A man
is being chased. They (the living dead) throw him to the street, punch
and rob him. Nobody says anything, we pretend not to notice. Rose whispers,
"He tried to rip them off."
-
- I go because Don is dying. I go because there's nothing
else I can do. Mark comes out, he hugs me. Young Mark, junkie Mark, now
he'd dying, I can feel it. I felt utterly useless and hopeless watching
this disintegration. Drugs turns a person into a craving animal. Every
moment is focused on the next hit. Personhood is gone, and in its place
is this craven, grotesque, hungering zombie never at rest, never at peace.
-
- They die with their throats slit, their hearts cut out,
alone in despair, eating out of dumpsters, that's repulsive. I see a women
I've hugged; slept outdoors with, begged shelter for, lying in a pile of
dead leaves, beaten to death---her head swollen three times its normal
size; purple, green bloated and monstrous. Lying there with her grimy hands
crossed over her chest, dead in my clothes. I didn't feel wonderful or
caring, I felt empty and terribly sad, just terribly sad.
-
- There's not much sympathy from the community in going
out to a bunch of dying junkies. "Let'em die, it's their own fault,
they asked for it, they're nothing but a bunch of thieves, liars and stinking
filth. Someone should line them all up and shoot them. What are you wasting
your time for?" These are some of the kinder remarks you hear. My
feelings are; that there are lots of thieves, liars and filth in the more
proper circles of society. A politician, his kids, movie stars, sports
star, music idols etc., get caught up in this world of insanity, and no
one is demanding they be lined up and shot! Privilege keeps them from
the crack houses, living under a bridge, or scrounging in a dumpster for
food. No jail time for them, but instead some private--exclusive clinic.
Next thing you know they're (well not them) writing a book or making a
movie. You go out, because to do nothing is worse. You go out because love
hopes all things.
-
- Don did leave a message. Shortly before he was hospitalized
and died, he saw me organizing some materials for a school presentation.
He said, "I'd go with you if I wasn't such a filthy bum. I'd show
them what drugs really do. You go, you tell them there's no high, no nothing
worth ending your life like an animal, a stinking junkie animal. Tell them
I said so. Tell them you got a junkie friend who's dying because of the
shit, and I can't stop."
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