Donald's story

[See the last blog entry for background on this story.]

Donald was a pleasant-looking man, a visible minority in the context of an innercity Chicago shelter (i.e. he was white). He was almost violently inoffensive, in a world where so many are brash and prickly. He spoke little and kept to himself. He was part of the day program (something that involved doing some classes, volunteer work, and frankly, a lot hanging out and watching tv) without ever really being part of it. In fact, he was always there without really being there.

Donald wasn't well. The majority of the men sleeping overnight with us had some sort of problems with mental illness (and many of their addictions amounted to a sort of self-medication), but Donald stood out. It was obvious when you spoke to him. He was always very polite, but his words seemed to come from a distance and cost him some effort.

He didn't really seem able to relate at all to anyone else. He was completely by himself even while surrounded by people, and the complex social system of the shelter and the streets. There was something a little child-like about him, and people looked out for him – partly just by leaving him alone.

During my last few months at the shelter, Donald starting getting worse. He would talk to himself a lot, and smile and laugh. His personal hygiene slipped; his hair stuck up at odd angles.

(It's hard living in a shelter 24 hours a day for weeks and months on end; it is highly stressful being crammed in with so many people, and such a volatile group at that. I can't imagine anyone's mental health doing anything but deteriorating in such a place).

Finally Donald snapped. He went on a loud, profanity-filled rant where he claimed to be Jesus and that he owned the shelter, and threatened to cut everyone's throats. (Threatening people's lives pretty much automatically led to being temporarily banned from the shelter).

My friend and co-worker Scott had spent the most time with Donald, and he did what you are 'supposed' to do in situations like this. He called the police, and filled out a form requesting Donald be placed in 'protective custody' – this is for people that haven't commited a crime (so they can't be arrested), but that are sick enough that they have become a danger to themselves or others.

In theory, this would lead to Donald being mentally evaluated by a professional, which would hopefully lead to him getting some help, even if this involved getting commited.

In a way, this should have been a blessing in surprise. Living at the shelter was not good for Donald, and he needed far more help than we could give him. Now we had something more concrete than 'he's not all there when you talk to him' to tell mental health authorities.

(Yet as you do this, you feel guilty and worry that these mental health authorities won't do him any good, but you have to hope they will).

But the two cops that showed up didn't buy it. They refused to take him into protective custody, or do anything for that matter.

Meanwhile, Donald (understandably) felt hurt and betrayed because we had tried to do this to him. In his own mind he was perfectly fine, and I'm sure he managed to speak quite well and calmly to the police. He was angry with us and determined to leave. Yet all the shelters in town were perpetually full. We tried to track down some next of kin that could come look after him, but he seemed to have no one.

So he left. Would he even be able to survive, to look after himself? As far as I know, no one from the shelter ever saw him again. Scott was almost inconsolable.

Resolution

Almost exactly six years ago, I started working at an overnight shelter for homeless men run by JPUSA, (Jesus People USA, a Christian commune in inner-city Chicago). In a lot of ways, it still feels like one of the most affecting and defining experiences of my life. And yet, if also feels like I have done nothing with it - even just in terms of talking about it, or even personally assimilating and processing it into my brain and heart. I wrote a long paper about my experience living at JPUSA, (partly, frankly, to record and deal with some of my experiences and memories), and have had a fair number of conversations with people about it, but nothing like that has taken place with the shelter.

It is easy to talk about living communally with five hundred people in an old hotel, apparently, but not about working at a homeless shelter.

I joke, but it's true. (And it's a special band of brothers, those of us that worked there. All of us walk with a limp, is the best way I can think of expressing it.)

The whole thing seems so far out of the frame reference of the rest of my life - and the lives of just about everyone I know - that it seems impossible to do them justice - and by 'them' I don't mean the disembodied abstraction that is a set of experiences, I mean Them, the men whose lives I witnessed and got to be a part of.

But I'm starting to forget. Names are slipping away, and the details of stories are getting fuzzy. The least I can do is bear witness to the pain and tragedy and beauty, more and bigger and blacker than anything I've ever tasted.

Until now I have mostly just bore witness in my head. But I can externalize and objectify, so that these memories of interpretations of experiences and of statements people make about their experiences become a little more concrete than fading electrical signals passed through the network of my brain. Yes, they can become electrical signals passed between networks of computers - and by undergoing this transmogrification they will be subjected to the violent inadequacy of language and communication. But maybe they'll light a spark in another neural net halfway around the world.

Maybe if I write one story a month (this is my resolution - I've never set goals for posting on this blog yet), each an attempt to remember one of the people I met, annd keep doing this until I can't remember anything more... well, maybe by then, I'll know what to do with those memories, how to be faithful, and live something out of them that means something.

(I left in September to go to university. The shelter closed a few months afterwards, a victim of local politics and NIMBY-ism. I don't know where any of the guys are these days, aside from one whom I know died shortly afterward).

It's not enough, but I'm going to start sharing their stories.

Cute

This was drawn by a friend of a friend. (Click on the image above).
She has a website here, which I would invite you to visit.

Happy New Year!

My attempt to capture what I improvised last night.
Obviously, it seemed more fun and funny at the time.

It seems even lamer in writing, but probably even lamer than that is missing the (bad) jokes because you can't make out the "lyrics," so I've transcribed them here just in case:

Happy new year, happy new year, happy new decade.
Happy new year, it's 2010, so where are the flying cars, and talking robots?
I thought this was going to be the future.
Happy new decade,
remember when we'd never heard of facebook, or texting or twitter?
I guess that's progress. (I like flying cars better)
At least we don't have a right-wing extremist
running the most powerful country in the world - now that's progress
(If only we could get rid of Harper - sounds like a good New Year's resolution).

Happy new decade
Remember when we remembered how bad the 80's were?
they couldn't be retro or cool
Happy new year
there are now kids in university
that were born after Aladdin came out
(That's kind of scary)

Hallelujah
We survived another year
without an environmental apocalypse
Let's try to keep that up!

Anyways, happy new year!