When you’re a social worker, you touch so many lives and hear so many stories, that your mind becomes haunted with the spirits and experiences of your employment. As the years roll by, your inner house of horrors expands and grows with layers of a virtual graveyard of clients past.
Occasionally, your life is touched by another in a deeper and more personal way.Usually the distinguishing characteristic, is time. If you spend months or even years with an individual, they carve out a space in your mind and spirit. When that happens, as you move through life, from time to time you think of these folks and how they touched and changed your life.
Most people (in the continental United States) don’t have the number of experiences that a social worker has with truly fucked up people, in fucked up situations. Since these old ghosts of clients past aren’t doing anything special in my mind. I think it’s only fair that I share one such spirit with you. Especially seeing as the holidays are coming up, I’m much more prone to reflect on the meaning of life, and the dichotomy between those who celebrate Christmas with family, praise, thankfulness and the anticipation of another years of abundant blessings and surprises.
Today I want to talk to you about this crazy white cat named “Dave”.
Dave was a serious trip. Born in South Africa, in his youth he was a feared individual on the streets of
San Francisco. When he was in his prime, he collected debts for various individuals on a freelance basis. This type of work was much more dangerous than working for the local loan shark with mob affiliations. No one messed with the mob, however, every third person tries to beat, stall, bullshit or take out the freelancer.
In this incarnation, Dave rode a Harley, usually with a beautiful woman, and kicked ass on a moments notice. Gradually he worked his way up to having his own legitimate construction company. One thing I quickly figured out is that the one thing ALL of my homeless clients shared in common was either a life of trauma, or a life rather ordinary, with a horrible tragedy that served as a transition point from Joe Blow, to the wretched of the earth. For Dave, this transition occurred when one day, he crashed his bike (or course he wasn’t wearing a helmet) and he fucked his head up. After weeks in a coma, and months recovering, he got out of the hospital a mere shell of his former self. His right side paralyzed, he’d lost everything and he began to drink a few 5ths of vodka a day.
Brain surgery was successful in removing the twisted knot of bleeding veins in his head, but the injury itself left him with frequent seizures. When I met him, he used to hold court out on hallidie plaza near the Powell Street cable car turnaround, a mere dozen feet or so from the hottest tourist spot in San Francisco.
At his point in his life, Dave was completely dependent on the kindness of strangers (and the cash incentive to crack heads) to push him around in his wheelchair. When he was broke, or alone, he frequently, urinated and defecated on himself. At night, he would use the blankets made of recycles fabric that we handed out to the homeless. With this makeshift curtain, he would cover himself and the end of a days performance as societies biggest outcast and pass out into a bitter, intoxicated oblivion.
On the first of the month, every month, Dave’s social security check arrived via general delivery at the Tenderloin Post Office. When he had several hundred-dollar bills tucked into each of his crusty, piss stained socks, he was everybody’s friend, or at least their target. About every other month, we would see Dave on the 1-4th of the month with a black eye, bloody and crusted nose and various scrapes and cuts on his face because some desperate crack-head would rob him for his cash. Sometimes he put up a fight. When that happened, he got robber and his ass kicked.
I remember the day he died. I knew I should have gone out to see him, but there were too many emergencies going on. It was one of those rare late summer days in Frisco when the temperature reached over 100 degrees. On these days our homeless “death prevention team” would hand out several cases of water to crack heads and dope fiends under bridges, in tents under underpasses, and industrial areas all over the city. But on this day, although I thought of Dave and how vulnerable he was, I didn’t hunt him down. Just before this heat wave Daves’ “brother” by the name of “Mike” had recently gotten out of San Quentin. Mike was broke and he wouldn’t let anyone get within 10 feet of Dave if he had more than 10 cents. This guy was one of only 2 homeless folks that truly scared the shit out of me. He was huge, as if all he had done during his 10 years in the joint was eat brass and kick ass.
When I got the news that Dave was dead, it wasn’t really sad. I felt too guilty to be sad. I had spent so much time with him, wheeling him around town to various housing appointments, all to no avail. He had burned down two apartments from fires from cigarettes when he had passed out. All of his clothes and possessions were so stiff with the ammonia from his piss that they would combust within 20 feet of a match. Anyone and everyone in social services knows that once you get arson or “fire damage” on your rental history, you were a dead man walking, or in this case, in a wheelchair.
The whole Dave era was hard to forget for me. So often I would come home smelling like feces and urine after spending hours with Dave on various medical and social service appointments. I would have to change my clothes outside my house before coming in, so that my kids wouldn’t cry when they ran up to hug me.
In summary, It’s strange working with sub-humans like Dave. I don’t mean that as an insult, it’s simply the truth. What’s strange is the fact that they can survive a single day on only vodka and lies. And yet, when they die, you are left to wonder what it was that took them out. After months and months of degredation, what was it that finally pushed them over the edge? I honestly didn’t know how they could survive on the street, but I was able to figure out that it wasn’t because they had something I lacked, rather, they lacked something I had.
The reason I could never spend the night on the street In 40-degree weather and rain, is because I knew that if I didn’t find shelter, I would be compounding my suffering by millions of seconds, night after night after night… that would be enough for me to do everything in my power to clean up my act. But for guys like Dave, they were protected from that type of cognition. They only lived in the moment, so that one second of suffering, was just one long interminable second. Yeah, lack of cognition and being blitzed out of his mind certainly didn’t hurt.
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