As a bonus to my preferred customers, I offer this, another stopgap in the process of getting the ol’ book finished and available to a thirsting Public. This is the last section of said publication, and has never been presented for open consumption.
That said, the time draws near for my masterpiece to be put out there. Once done, I assure you I’ll be back on a weekly basis, in more or less the same fashion you’re all accustomed to.
Afterword:
What This Was About
Thirty years, and that’s it? A fair question, but the only answer I can give is: Yeah, that’s it. Flashes and glimpses, singular situations. That’s all you get, and it’s what you work with. Both places are where the frailty and folly of human existence come to their most wretched realizations. A person does not get admitted to a locked psychiatric unit by living a quiet, well ordered life. You don’t end up in a morgue by dying with dignity. Working in such places, you’re not privy to the full story. You may get the particulars of what brought somebody to either place, pertinent details strictly related to what got them through the door, but that’s it. In the psych ward, it’s often just re-reading the same chapter in a life. In the morgue, all you get is the ending. There is no well plotted, flowing narrative, complete with a thrilling climax and satisfying denouement. Through these thirty years, I’ve never encountered a Frances Farmer or an Elvis Aaron Presley, though I’ve encountered dozens—if not hundreds—of people whose lives could have been parallel but for the absence of fame and notoriety. Fate has provided me no fodder, nothing I could write that would be sensational or titillating enough for viral, mass consumption. Nope. All I’ve ever encountered were . . . people.
Without a TMZ bio or a resume’ of headlines and lead stories, it’s hard, if not impossible, to view them as no more interesting than extras in a film. Incidental characters, filler with no significance in the real story.
I was called out to pick up dead man lying in the middle of the street. He’d hopped from the curb into traffic. The first vehicle swerved around him. The next vehicle could not. The driver didn’t have enough time or space to react. The entire incident probably lasted no more than three seconds. The first driver got a wicked scare. The second driver killed a man. The guy I was standing over got what he was after.
It was a cold night, but not dead winter cold. It was just above freezing. Our guy in the street was wearing layers; three pairs of pants, three or four shirts, a coat. Tucked in all of this were a couple pairs of socks, some underwear, a T-shirt. The impact had knocked him out of his shoes. They appeared new, but were cheap, the kind you might find in a drugstore bargain basket. We went through the pockets of his outside layers looking for some identification. All that was found were rolled up wads of public restroom toilet paper. When he was moved to the cot one of these wads dropped out of his coat. One of the cops wanted to know if I needed to take it with me. I didn’t, and did not.
It wasn’t a careless assumption on my or the cops’ part in believing this guy to be homeless. To assign him some degree of mental illness was a reasonable postulation as well. He was certainly suicidal. It is also not unreasonable to assume this man’s life had been miserable, miserable enough to throw himself and everything he owned into traffic. To take it further, I’ll assert that anybody who encountered this man in the months, weeks, days, even hours before he made the decision to let a stranger end his life, perceived him as miserable in any and every way you could define it. At a glance, in a snap judgement, his presence would not be welcome in your place of business, in your home or sitting beside you on a bus. He was one of society’s rejects. In turn, he rejected society by forcing an anonymous citizen to kill him.
Incontrovertible respect is the divine right of every human being. Society promulgates and preaches this but often fails to deliver. I won’t even qualify it as an assumption to state this man hadn’t enjoyed much incontrovertible respect. Those days, however, were over. From the moment he was transported from the middle of the street to our cooler, he would be the recipient of honest and unmitigated respect. It’s too bad he had to die to get it.
Right, wrong or anything in between, this sort of thing will go on forever. For some reason, this incident stuck with me longer than others. I’ve long since learned that allowing such occasions to linger in the head too long isn’t much different than adding sand to your pockets every time you’re involved in one. Over time you’ll end up so weighed down and sluggish you’ll quit moving. But this one dragged me back over twenty years, and wouldn’t let go until it made some sense… in my head anyway.
Of all assumptions that may have been made at the scene, by me, the cops and the driver of the rig, I was probably the only one who could add this one: This dead man, this machine the ghost had voluntarily fled, had surely strolled on that treadmill as those same people I’d left behind in the psych ward. Unlike most of them, this man had literally leapt off it. Why? I rarely bother with “why?” It’s a waste of time in that you rarely get a satisfactory answer. But the “why” that popped up this time was different. It wasn’t why this guy jumped off, but why did the others stay on it? I can’t give you a satisfactory answer, either. But I’ll give you what satisfies me.
Those that remained were not about to allow someone else determine the quality of their lives. Despite its agonies, they valued the life they were given enough to be determined to get every ounce of good they could get out of it. If society has a rough time handling their existence, and the manner with which it is dealt allows little consideration in regard for dignity, self-determination and respect, it’s hard to blame them for telling that society to fuck themselves on occasion. They didn’t ask for it, but are still trying to make what they can of it. That satisfies me. It tells me that whatever miseries I find in my own existence are mostly piddling by comparison. Those patients I worked with never hesitated to tell me they’d gladly swap their problems for mine and feel blessed.
That’s what this was about. What a privilege it is to witness such things from the viewpoint of a life intact. What it means to be blessed.
Thanks for reading this.