Baltimore Chronicles
Last week, I stepped out on my back porch to have a coffee in the cool morning air and heard someone humming and singing what my serenader later told me was a song by the band 3 Doors Down. I looked down and found a guy in a wheelchair in the yard beneath me, rummaging around the garbage for spare cans and such to sell. We chatted for a bit. His name was Jimmy, but because of his wheelchair he said people on the street called him Hot Wheels. He used to be a drummer and a guitarist, but lost his leg when it got infected in a nursing home a couple of years ago.
Earlier this week, while walking my dog Lilly - rescued from an alley about two months ago and now fully ensconced with the family, including eating home-cooked meals and sleeping in the bed - at the corner of my block I came across a man on the pavement, his body twisted into an almost pretzel shape. My first thought was that he might have been struck by a car but when I saw how he was breathing my mind went to any number of the intoxicants freely available on the streets here from K2 to fentanyl. At exactly the same moment, a young neighbor in his late teens and his mother came across the scene from the other direction and the kid casually called emergency services on his phone before I myself had a chance to react. Within a few minutes, an ambulance arrived and the man was roused from his unquiet slumber, confused but still alive, thank God, and put in the back. I was not able to determine from his slurred replies exact what was wrong with him, but my neighbors and I stood there until he was loaded into the rescue vehicle which then went on its way through the obsidian urban night.
Just a few minutes ago, as I was walking Lilly through the streets of Mount Vernon here, I crossed the path of a stopped, shambling, diaphanously thin couple who bore all the hallmarks of a life eroded by time on the street and the toxic lure of the various chemical escapes from the pressures that come with it entail. The man was trying to usher the woman who he was walking with, arms draped around one another, along, none too gently, it seemed to me. She finally slid down and came to rest on the pavement. I walked over and asked if they needed help and he said, yes, that I could lift up her other arm to help get her back on her feet. I adjusted the bag that carries the chemo pump that I have to carry around with me for the next 24 hours and helped them along for about half a block until we got to the doors of an opioid treatment centre near my house.
About a block later on the same sojourn, I came across a neighbor of mine, an elderly woman with a startling mane of dyed bright blue hair, engaged in conversation with a young man I had noticed camped out in a doorway for the last several days with a little dog. I had it in the back of my mind to strike up a conversation with him if I saw him there again today to see what his story was, but as I walked up and we started chatting it became clear that he had been evicted a couple of days ago and couldn’t enter a shelter because they wouldn’t allow him to take his dog with him. The woman, who is a known dog-walker around the neighborhood, had offered to take his dog to stay with her until he could check into a shelter and get back on his feet. The young man, whose name was Kevin - late 20s I would say, African-American, modified dreadlocks and some tattoos on his forearms - was bidding a tearful and hopefully temporary goodbye to the dog. He said this was the first time he had ever been homeless and that “This is not me, man, but I couldn’t just leave him,” he told us in reference to the dog. We gave him some ideas for resources he could contact that might be able to help him. I gave him my phone number and texted him so that when he was able to get somewhere and get his phone charged he could get in touch and we could follow up.
Making two fairly exhausting trips - only one of them successful - to Philadelphia and back over the last week and change in pursuit of starting another intensive round of chemo because there have been some “developments” in my condition can be fairly draining, as you might imagine. You lose hours and days you’ll never get back and you have so much you feel that you need to do. But even with all that, there but for the grace of God goes me, man.
Life was apparently not destined to put me in the marquee positions with legacy media, to teach at universities (though I love teaching and have enough feedback from students I’ve had to believe that I’m reasonably good at) or to be regularly invited to the roundtables where the great and good discuss the situations in countries many of them haven’t set foot in for years, but I’ve done my best to come to a kind of, if not blissful acceptance of that, at least a deep appreciation for the other path I’ve trod which has, above all else, led to the realization that there is humanity in all of those that society deems “throwaway people,” often more than those that society deems successful. We see them everyday, and as hard as it might be to do some times amid our own struggles, we should treat them like potential angels in disguise whenever we can. They had dreams too, once. They are more than their current condition. I would like us all to strive to live in a society where human beings have more empathy for one another without expecting to leverage it for advantage sometime in the future.
May something good happen for all of you today.
xo
M
