The Woman Writhing On the Street

Again

I start my days with gratitude prayers. I didn’t always, but I do now. I think G-d for keeping me alive, relatively healthy, for Loviefluffy and my mom and my close friends. For my jobs, and that I have a place to live. Then I thank G-d again for Loviefluffy. We often pet or hold paws while I pray in the morning and night. I’m raising my cat Jewish, after all. I should learn some prayers in Hebrew to say with her. I’m sure she’d like that. She likes Hebrew so far.

Every day I am reminded of how little some people have. The homeless or poor enough to beg are omnipresent in my neighborhood. I can’t walk outside my door without being asked for money. It’s gotten to the point where I no longer give money. The guy who accosted me, aggressively, four times in one weekend with the story that he saw his grandson eating grass was the last straw (of grass?) One of my friends said, “You sure he wasn’t smoking grass?” I do like how that friend, a conservative Jew from New York, always manages to have a funny take on tragedy.

The other day I was going to our local hippie overpriced but the only place close by to get food co-op where people asking for money camp outside the door. You can’t go in without being asked for money. Of course the hippie co-op will not oust these people, so it’s just part of the price of going there. A guy with a half full bottle of whiskey was sitting there, asking for a dollar. I thought, “If I were going to buy you a drink, I’d take you to a proper bar and buy you a drink.” I didn’t give a dollar. I just don’t anymore. Sometimes, if I’ve had a windfall of some kind, I’ll buy someone some food. I bought a woman a bag of chicken wings that she said she could use to feed her kids. Okay.

It’s not so much that I judge what people do with the money. I don’t much care. It’s that a) I don’t have enough money to give all the time b) if I did, I’d give to a legitimate charity, not random people on the street c) I don’t want to support the begging economy. It’s not good for the people doing the begging, and it’s not good for the people who have to live with it.

So I don’t usually give.

Today as I was leaving the dollar store, I saw one of our most unfortunate neighborhood fixtures. A rail thin black woman, writhing on the sidewalk, muttering or yelling incomprehensibles. She has been doing this for years. I see her on different sidewalks up and down the main road in the neighborhood, Baltimore Avenue. Years she has been writhing on the street. I assume she is in some kind of drug withdrawal or drugged out state. She is clearly not of sound mind in any way. She yells and asks for money. I once gave her some change and she yelled imprecations at me and said it wasn’t enough.

Enough for what, I wonder? What would be enough to get this woman off the street?

Today she was in front of the dollar store. Often she is in front of the liquor store next door. You can’t go even a half a block in this hood without running into the liquor store, a bar, or a beer store. It is constant. Some of the bars are actually quite fun, but it’s not precisely a healthy environment. No wonder everyone driving appears to be drunk and/or high at all times as they run the stop signs without even looking or slowing down.

It’s a hot day out. I was walking to the corner store to buy some more diet tonic water, my favorite non-caffeinated beverage. I’ve been working so much that I haven’t gotten to the real grocery store in awhile, so I was forced to pay corner store prices. The poor stay locked in poverty with high food prices in places where there is no real grocery store. At least I have a car and can get out.

A bottle of water seemed like a small expense, so I bought one and brought it to the woman. It was only 75 cents and nice and cold. I put it next to her and said, “I brought you a bottle of water.” As I walked away, I could see that she got up and had taken it and walked away.

What kind of society lets a woman writhe in misery on the sidewalks for years on end?

But what are the alternatives?

Those of you who know me know that I am, in general, against forced commitment. I was illegally forced into a hospital detox ward twelve years ago after an idiot ex called 911 saying I was suicidal, and I came out with way more trauma than I went in with, trauma that has taken years to overcome. I won’t even say I have overcome it - between that and an even more horrific hospital experience, I have come to be afraid of medical care and avoid it unless I am going to a doctor I trust or I have someone with me. Yes, after all these years, stone cold sober, I’m afraid to seek medical care unless someone is with me. That’s how bad the trauma of being imprisoned in a healthcare facility is. I would not wish it on anyone.

That being said, when I see people who are obviously too sick to care for themselves writhing on the street, I wonder if this is what can be called liberty.

I read Sally Satel’s article in the Free Press today on Trump’s executive order about civil commitment for those in homeless encampments. My good friend who is a therapist hates her, and I’m sure with good reason. In general, those of us who believe in harm reduction oppose any kind of forced treatment. I’d much rather see the Portland Hotel in Vancouver model implemented where possible. But what is possible, once someone is so far gone?

The public has an interest too. Clinically psychotic homeless people are a problem in cities. If you do not live in a place where you have to confront clinically psychotic people in order to go about your daily business, please consider the perspective of those of us who do. It’s bad enough where I live - I can imagine how much worse it is in places with giant homeless encampments. In fact, I don’t have to imagine. I spent months talking to Democratic voters in Southern California who told me in detail about the apocalyptic nightmare that homeless encampments have created. Hundreds of people told me similar stories. When we have to share space, we have a stake in how that space is used and what behavior is tolerated in that space. I no longer feel that the homeless and/or psychotic person’s interests are the only interests that matter. The public has an interest in safe streets and parks too.

I’m fairly confident that I have more friends who use or did use illegal drugs and have been homeless than 90% of my readers or more. I’ve spent a long time in harm reduction, and some of the people I respect most in the world lived on the streets addicted to drugs. One of my close friends who was homeless and on heroin and crack until the week before I met her in 2016 just lost her long term partner, last week, to xylezene. He had battled addiction for as long as they had known each other, and his broken body finally lost the fight. She spent the last few years, in addition to working two jobs and going to school at night, dressing his wounds and trying to get him to eat. There is no suboxone for xylezene, so there was no way he could detox outside a hospital, and even that was not guaranteed to be an experience he could live through. At eighty pounds and over six feet tall, his body was unable to survive. He had lost an arm and was losing the other. A once strong carpenter without arms. My friend has rescued her life, with help from a harm reduction organization called Prevention Point, and is now one of the most amazing, productive, law abiding citizens I know. Others of my friends are leaders in the harm reduction movement. I do not believe in punitive approaches to drug use. They don’t work, and I don’t hate people who use drugs the way some people I know do (a story that I will tell in another forum soon.)

I have actually loved a lot of people who use drugs, and I can confidently say “There but for the Grace of G-d” and the fact that I’m terrified of breaking any law go I. I am in no position to judge anyone who uses drugs or has a mental illness.

But there’s a big gap from uses drugs to unable to function writhing on the streets. There must be some better way for a society to take care of those who truly can not use their own minds at this point. That’s why I wrote, “psychotic” instead of just “has a mental illness.” Lots of people have mental illness and are able to basically function. Writhing on the sidewalk in misery for years on end is a far cry from even severe mental illness. This woman is in a state beyond what community services can handle, and obviously she’s not getting any of those.

I don’t have any easy answers. I’m glad I gave her a bottle of water. There are times when all you can do is pray, so pray I will.

And pray for this country, that in the midst of strife and chaos we can find ways to work together to bring a bit more life, liberty and happiness.