Читать книгу Wake-Up Call - Joaquin De Torres - Страница 6

In retrospect, if I had knowledge of Doogie’s condition back when I first saw him, he would have already been under my care and I wouldn’t be driving around the Bay Area like an idiot.

I had been following his movements for about two months around the East Bay before I lost him. To my regret, I never bothered to stop and talk to him when I took these photos; never bothered to offer him help, or a ride, even in the rain. That’s not like me at all, but my case load was stacked, and I only saw him while on the road. And that’s what pains me; I didn’t just see him while on the freeway, but on streets and boulevards where I could have actually stopped. My normal route from my home in Concord to the clinic near the Oakland Coliseum took more than an hour one way in morning traffic, on a good day. So, needless to say, there was a lot of time sitting in the gridlock as thousands of commuters made their way towards the Bay Bridge to get to San Francisco.

Somewhere within that stretch is where I’d see him. Sometimes just off the freeway, but mostly along the streets;

Picking through dumpsters, meandering about alley ways or open lots, rummaging for food in restaurant trash bins, or just sitting on the steps of abandoned buildings. I’d slow down enough to see his facial expressions; always the same, clueless, indifferent and ignorant of the world and its trappings. I never saw panic or urgency on his face, though. I guess it’s true what people have written; that a homeless life is free of appointments, deadlines, tardiness, missed meetings, excuses, politics, and accountability. Instead, it’s a timeless existence. Hours of everyday are spent wandering, searching, gathering, hording, and hopefully finding a comfortable, safe place to sleep in order to do it again the next day.

But that’s a dangerous, volatile gamble in these neighborhoods. Oakland has the deadly distinction of making America’s Most Dangerous Cities list every year without fail. It also triples down by making America’s Most Murderous Cities list, and is the perennial number one on the FBI’s Most Dangerous Cities in California list. Other statistics are equally ghastly such as the fact that the city is ranked first in the nation for violent robberies. With a population of 396,000, Oakland has long been plagued with higher crime rates than other major Bay Area city. In addition, its residents are, on average, poorer than those in San Francisco and San Jose. In Oakland, 20% of people were below the federal poverty line from 2007 to 2011, according to U.S. Census data. This fuels the gang wars, massive unemployment, unending drug use, and prisoner recidivism that plagues the town. Over the years, deep cuts in the city’s police force have left the streets unprotected, so the wounds of rampant violence continues to hemorrhage year by year.

I can’t help but think that if something has happened to this guy, something tragic, I may not be able to forgive myself for my blind stupidity.

“Stop kicking yourself in the balls, Javier!” I spat as I continued my cruising and surveillance run. “This is your day off, so just keep looking for him until you run out of gas!” Between jerking my head between streets and squinting my eyes to check alley ways, I keep trying to convince myself that I can find him. But reality is what it is. After spotting him consistently for two months, I had lost him for two weeks. “Goddamn it! Why didn’t I do anything then?” My fist hammers the steering wheel in self-disgust.

I’d been on the road for nearly five hours now, checking places where I had consistently spotted him; parked the car and searched on foot within the radius of those areas. But Oakland isn’t a small town; it’s the seventh largest city in California, covering 54 square miles. Expand those miles exponentially because of the fact that I’m searching from within a car; shit! Doogie could have been anywhere! I got in the car, and decided to search “outside the box”. I began checking other areas of town that I had maybe overlooked or didn’t consider. Who knows? Maybe I’d get lucky.

Doogie wasn’t someone one could easily lose sight of; he stood out. He walked everywhere, and not very fast. He sort of lumbered about, sloth-like, stopping often to look around. Two months ago, when I began to casually watch him out of curiosity, I followed him as he skirted around public parks, behind the strip malls, along loading docks and construction sites, parking garages and behind shops and restaurants-anywhere where there were garbage bins or junk piles. He made his rounds carrying large GLAD garbage bags over his hunched shoulders, or pushing a rickety COSTCO shopping cart full of stuff he’d picked up. This was a stereotypical image: a homeless person pushing a shopping cart. But in Doogie’s case, it just looked different, and according to those I’ve talked to on the street concerning him, it sounded different.

After visiting the Tuckmans, it occurred to me how much Doogie stood out from the rest of his family. Blaine stood around five-eight, the same as myself; built thin and angular; Faye was a statuesque five-nine, and Brittany towered over all of us at nearly six feet. The contrast was stunning and saddening. The description I received from the orderly who gave me his file, the photo within the file taken five years ago, and the photos I took of him two months ago, in no way reflected the Tuckman bloodline; especially reviewing my photos, and my photos were the reality.

Doogie was only five-foot-four, 245 pounds; obese, with an unshaven, corpulent face. He looked like a short, fat bear in dirty clothes. His eyes were droopy, his nose bulbous and his mouth sagged down on the right side. He wore long sleeves even on the hottest days, buttoned up to his rolls of neck fat; and he had only two pairs of ragged, filthy jeans. He walked with a bob, and leaned to his left from what seemed to be some past injury to his hip. According to the orderly, he had a speech impediment which slurred his words heavily to the point of sounding unintelligible. It had grown worse while he was at the shelter. His diminished hearing in one ear forced him to almost yell his sentences. Cruelly added to his oral deficiencies was a stammer that further vocalized his mental retardation.

He was often taunted by the other tenants of the shelter. On the street, he was taunted by the public, from kids to passersby, who laughed or swore at him as he lumbered by or rummaged through the dumpsters. A month ago I talked to one kindhearted liquor store manager named Orlando Sikes, who was standing in front of his shop with a lead pipe in his hand. He told me Doogie rummaged through his dumpster out back every few days. The manager felt so sorry for him that he’d leave a bag of food and sundry needs like towels, toilet paper and bottled water for him to find. Doogie would come around the front and try to express his appreciation each time. This brought a smile to the African-American manager’s face as he reflected.

“I didn’t know what he was saying, but I felt so bad for that boy,” he said. “The way he is, his lip all messed up. I know he’s retarded and that just breaks me up because it’s hard enough to survive in this world as it is.” He pointed up and down the street. “This area is rough. Lots of shootings, muggings. These fucking kids with their gangs and their drugs. That’s why I stand in front of my store with this pipe.” His finger continued to point about. “I got video cameras inside and outside; a Cop Call button under the register; and a gun, too. I let ‘em know right from the get go, you mess around in my store you’re gonna get fucked up.”

He told me the locals made fun of Doogie at every turn. They called him many things: troll, beast, dump truck, fat fuck, along with the other gratuitous obscenities used by today’s indifferent and cruel youth.

“The White people call him the Village Idiot,” Sikes added. “No offense, man.” I shook my head to show him none was taken. “When they dare to come down this area, they say that. I’ve seem ‘em right here in front my store. They roll down their window and say, ‘There’s the Village Idiot!’ Makes me sick because that boy is harmless. He never hurt anybody.”

No, Doogie wasn’t hard to find, but he was missing. So, I stopped at Sikes’ place again, and found him standing dutifully in front with his lead pipe.

“No, Doctor, I haven’t seen him in like two weeks,” he said with a worried face. “Maybe it’s experience or intuition, but I think something’s happened to him. It’s normal for the homeless to disappear; but then, you know that already. I’ll keep the bags of stuff for him if he shows up. I have your card by the register, so I’ll give you a call if I see him.”

Sikes’ intuition was probably right. Two weeks is a long time for someone whose life was on the streets, to just not be seen anywhere anymore; especially someone as slow as Doogie. I couldn’t help but consider even more harshly, the disadvantages he possessed. I’ve started entertaining the idea of a new search tomorrow, but not on Bay Area streets. I’m considering locations like abandoned infrastructure projects, drainage ditches, construction holes, gullies, the woods-places one might find. . . a body. I should have gotten to him sooner, goddamnit!

As one of the directors for the Contra Costa Homeless Project or CCHP, an underfunded community mental health center, it was my job to find homeless members of the community suffering from severe mental disabilities, and bring them back to our shelter for treatment. CCHP was not a new program; we had been in existence for more than 18 years, barely avoiding the governor’s annual budget guillotine each year. What was new was our Severe Mental Disorders program, which I had introduced and was now the managing director. As more and more centers were cut throughout California because of the state’s ubiquitous debt problem, and of Congress’ indifferent approach to homeless initiatives, CCHP managed to survive largely because of an alarming trend in annual homeless statistics.

Since 2007, it has been recorded that between 40 and 50 percent of homeless people were mentally ill. According to statistics from several private and governmental authorities, between 150,000 and 200,000 of the homeless have some form of schizophrenia, manic-depression or bipolar disorder. The majority of these cases go untreated. The state’s budget cuts have been devastating in this regard. Newer facilities, wards and wings have been delayed or cancelled, forcing directors to look towards wealthy donors or corporations for sponsorship. Very few respond. Rich politicians or those owned by their corporate overlords don’t concern themselves with the homeless. Like the poor or minorities, it’s not their problem.

When our transportation budget was cut, we had to sell our vehicles that picked up our patients off the streets. Our aqua blue and yellow vans and buses, once seen throughout the East Bay, were no longer on the road. We suffered a double whammy because our patients were left without transportation, and our staff was going broke trying to pick up as many as possible with their own cars. It was virtually impossible to help them all.

Left to themselves on the street with no idea that CCHP was still available, patient traffic grounded down to a halt. Then the Bay Area began seeing a rising trend in homeless crimes. A good number of the victims were being treated by CCHP. Robbed, beaten, raped and murdered—there was no way we could protect them all. I took it very hard when those patients in my ward became victims because they were completely defenseless against the outside world.

I decided to do all I could to protect them and protect our facility. I was already an established author with several fiction thriller titles under my belt. I had earned enough money in advances, sales and guest speaking to invest a large amount in expanding our wing, and paying for more experimental research. I sold my house in Alamo and moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Concord. The $1.3 million I got from the sale went into helping CCHP. Still, it was not enough. There’s just not enough money to protect all the mentally ill homeless.

I’m a Bay Area boy. I studied at Berkeley where at any given night up to 1,200 homeless sleep on the streets, so I had seen the destruction of these people personally. When I transferred to Stanford, I wasn’t a Yuppie psych major with visions of sitting in a plush office where patients laid on my couch, and paid me to listen to their daddy issues or other petty insecurities. I wasn’t going to be a high-paid life coach. I was hardened by the hopelessness of the American homeless, and angered by the apathy of our politicians who neither passed laws to help them, nor gave voice to their desperate plight. I wanted to do something real in the mental health industry. When I finally got all the certificates and diplomas that most doctors proudly display on their walls, I rolled mine up and threw them in a box. I always felt those fancy embossed pieces of parchment only proved that you could grasp a subject well enough to pass the required exams; they didn’t prove you were committed or devoted to the field. I was determined to be both.

After my internship, residency and licensing by the state of California, I went straight to CCHP. After my first year, I used my salary and savings to repair parts of our facility, update our technical library, and bought three mini-vans for picking up patients. My next three books will guarantee another three vans and more facility upgrades. But I wasn’t looking to be a hero as many in my field and in the community called me. I actually found no value in heroic titles or in titles at all. Other than the stencil outside my office that reads:

DR. JAVIER FLORES, Ph.D., NEUROLOGIST

DIRECTOR of SEVERE MENTAL DISORDERS Unit

the only other thing that identifies my position is my desk plate and my calling card. And to keep my medical life from interfering with my literary career, I use a pen name: Jason Kaplan. Neither side knows that I’m the same person, and I want to keep it that way. In fact, CCHP thinks I get the money from a small fortune left to me by one rich aunt in Barcelona. That’s good. I hope it stays that way.

I left Sikes’ Liquors and reluctantly decided to make my way home. It was now 6:15 P.M., dusk was settling in, and I needed to get some dinner, prepare for tomorrow’s work schedule, and try to get a few pages of writing in before going to bed. I had been craving Asian food all day, so I took a couple of back roads to get to my favorite market on my way home. Another 20 minutes of driving off the main streets and into a few residential areas finally brought me to a small strip of stores, restaurants and boutiques on the north side of Oakland.

I pulled up in front of Fresh Mart Sato, a Safeway-size Asian market equipped with its own restaurant, take-out counters, as well as the aisle-by-aisle selection of exotic foods, vegetables and products from all over Asia. California is famous for these markets. Sato’s take-out line in particular, rife with steaming, freshly made delicacies, was ranked in the top 35 in the Bay Area, but it might as well been number one because I never went anywhere else.

I already decided mentally want I wanted, so this would be quick. The parking lot seemed pretty full, but I found a place near the far end of the strip mall adjacent to a park. It was a small park with copious benches, a bicycle path, walking paths, children’s playground, and a nice view of the surrounding hills marbled with houses. I’d had a long day, so I thought to eat my food in the park and relax, instead of taking it home. After I parked, I just sat for a moment to review my day, taking in the view of the park on my left, the row of stores and Fresh Mart Sato to my right.

You can’t save the world, Javier, I thought. At least you’ve given your best effort. You’ve got other patients, and more are surely to come. Move on, brother. Despite trying to suppress my dejection with encouraging thoughts, I was still saddened by the thought that those efforts would be for not. Doug Tuckman was probably dead.

I reached for the door handle when my cell phone chimed. It was a text but I didn’t recognize the number at all. Oh, shit! Now I know! It was probably the Alameda police department with information I had requested. Earlier I had received texts from the Oakland, San Mateo, Hayward, Richmond, Palo Alto, El Cerrito and Berkeley police departments to see if anyone with Doogie’s physical and mental description had been picked up lately. I had also made similar calls to several major hospitals and emergency rooms. They all answered with negative replies. So far, so good. Alameda P.D. was the last station I’d been waiting for today. In the coming days, I planned to go beyond the Bay Bridge and search in San Francisco itself. Doogie may have found a way to get across from Oakland to San Francisco by jumping into the back of a container truck, stealing aboard a Bay transport ship, hitchhiking over the bridge, or found some money to buy a BART train ticket. I don’t know. All I know is that San Francisco has about 7,000 homeless people. In a city just under 47 square miles, that’s about 140 homeless people per square mile. I had my work cut out for me.

The cell chimed again. Please, be there, Doogie, I thought with little enthusiasm. And please, don’t be dead. But when I read the message, I was pleasantly surprised to see it was from Brittany Tuckman.

Hi! Any leads on my brother yet? Let me know when you have time next week. Let’s do lunch! Brit

P.S. Now that you have my number, call me anytime. ;)

A dark cloud suddenly lifted off me. I needed that, someone to bring some kind of cheer into my long fruitless day. It was nice for her to say “my brother.” But although it was a nice text, I had nothing at all to report. I was about to check my calendar for next week to answer her when I heard a large metallic crash off to my left. I snapped my head and saw that a couple of teens on bikes ran into, or kicked down one of the large trash cans at the entrance to the park about 30 yards away, spilling its contents onto the grass and pebbled walkway. They laughed and just kept going, and I wondered if they’d done this to every trash can in the park.

This pathetic generation of youth! Assholes!

I retrieved a pair of latex gloves from the box I keep in my glove compartment, and got out to clean up the mess. I looked around and saw no one else nearby I could voice my displeasure to, so I got to work. I set the can upright again and took out the huge plastic bag within and began picking up the spilt trash. I looked in the direction of the perpetrators as they rode away and shook my head in disgust. After I cleaned up the pebbled trail, I moved to the smooth pavement of the bike path and cleaned that up. As I stepped onto the grass where most of the trash lay, I noticed someone beside me also picking up items.

“Can you believe this generation of kids? Delinquent bastards. Disgusting!” I spat without looking.

“D-D-D-D-DISH…KUSHHH…T-T-TING!” the person slurred loudly. I spun around, alarmed and astonished. Standing there with an armful of trash waiting for me to open the bag was Doogie Tuckman.