by Curtis Bunn
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“You’re just dying to know why the homeless man is homeless.”
“No, I want to know why this smart man is such an asshole.”
“Because I killed my family.”
He looked at me to see my expression, and it was one of shock and fear, no matter how hard I tried to conceal it.
“Look at you now,” he said. “Scared.”
“I’m not scared. I’m confused. Are you serious?”
“You asked me a question. I gave you an answer.”
I was scared. Here I was, trying to save someone who killed his family. I didn’t want to be there anymore. I wanted to get into my car and go. But I couldn’t let him know I was scared.
“When you want to talk about it, I will listen.”
“I will talk the same time that you tell me why you’re so depressed.”
“You don’t want to know about me. You just want to say shocking and mean things to me. I don’t know why, but that’s all that’s going on here.”
I walked from the passenger side of my car to the driver’s side, never turning my back to Rodney.
“See you in the morning,” he said.
I nodded my head, but I didn’t know if he would see me or not. I felt like I needed a new routine, one that did not include coming face-to-face with a man who said he’d killed his family. He had to be serious. No one—no matter how sick he may have been—would joke about something so horrifying.
CHAPTER SIX: REVELATIONS
RODNEY
I didn’t have any feelings anymore. Well, anger . . . I had that. I could get angry and express it, and was angry about a lot. I couldn’t express sorrow or kindness or sympathy, though. I had cut off those emotions.
I didn’t feel sorry for myself. Whatever bad thing that happened to me—getting thrown in jail, beaten up by stupid teenagers, cursed at by strangers, marginalized by society—I deserved it.
That wasn’t my so-called illness talking, either. This wasn’t the meds talking. This wasn’t the lack of meds talking. This was the life I had chosen for myself.
That was the life I deserved. I was clear about that. I knew some people would say that was proof I was crazy.
Brenda was trying to help me, which was something I was not used to and didn’t know how to receive. What did she really want? I thought: Were there people who really cared about strangers, a stranger who lived on the streets? I’d been at shelters where people came and donated clothes and food and then they would be gone. Did the donation mean they cared? Or did it mean they had clothes they decided to not throw away? Or did they feel guilty about having more than some?
At the same time, what more could I have asked of them? I had been fighting with myself on all that stuff. I didn’t believe I was bipolar. I didn’t want to believe it. I had conflicts in my mind that canceled out each other and left me . . . nowhere. Other people had the same issues. Why was I bipolar and they weren’t?
Most of the time, I wandered the streets of Atlanta with no real destination. I just walked. I could walk ten, twelve miles at a time, carrying my backpack full of my burdens, with no problem. I took my time, saw the people, felt the neighborhoods.
I made my walk to the shelter slowly most of the time because I hated going there. It was somewhat of a haven when it was cold, but in the summer, it was hot and stinky. And I didn’t like the mentality of the people there. Too many had some twisted idea that someone owed them something.
But I could get a shower there. I could get fresh clothes there sometimes. I knew I stunk a lot of the time, but I didn’t like to stink. And then I would leave and find a comfortable place—a bench, a small park, a building front—and sleep. Couldn’t sleep in jail. It was always too much to see. Too much sad stuff to see, like young African-American men with no interest in doing right. Troubled at a young age. A system of injustice and harassment got them all out of whack. They’d just as soon die before letting bad cops and racist laws hold them down.
They were not like me. They were young and could have been anything positive. Institutional racism got ’em. Well, it got a lot of them. Something else got the rest. But for sure there was a system that had been designed to kill them and undereducate them and make it harder for them, in some cases impossible for them. But some of them were just bad seeds. I couldn’t deny that.
The system did not get me, somehow. My brown skin worked against me, but I made it through. Still, I blew my chance at a “normal” life; my chances, actually. No one did it to me but me. And Brenda came along and wanted to save me? If I couldn’t save myself, how could anyone else?
But I had to confess to myself: The fact that she wanted to do something for me meant something. Sometimes I thought she wanted to research the homeless life. Sometimes I thought she was pure and nice—and curious.
“Don’t leave,” I told her as she opened the door to her car. She said she was not scared, but she had to be. But I didn’t want her to be scared.
“You should stay—if you can.”
“Stay? Why?”
“You made me want to answer your question. I don’t know how, but you did.”
Her curiosity was too strong for her to leave. She looked into my eyes as she closed the car door.
“As soon as you are mean to me, I’m leaving.”
I nodded my head.
“Don’t you want something to eat? I’m hungry.” Brenda told me to stay while she went to a seafood spot not that far from the jail, on Peter Street. After about twenty minutes, she returned with meals for both of us. We sat on the hood of her car and ate.
“I want to say grace,” she said. “Don’t you bless your food before you eat?”
I didn’t respond—I didn’t want to get into my views on God with her.
“Please, Lord, thank you for the food we are about to receive for the nourishment of our bodies. Thank you for us meeting, and we pray that through discussion, we will become friends. Amen.”
I didn’t say, “Amen.” Praying and all that didn’t mean that much to me.
“OK, you can start,” Brenda said.
“I killed my family.”
“You already said that part.”
“That’s what happened to me.”
“That’s not something that happened to you. That’s something you did. And when you say ‘family,’ what do you mean?”
“I killed my family—my wife and two wonderful daughters.”
Brenda stopped eating. She put down her plastic fork.
“Then why aren’t you in jail?” she asked. I ignored the question.
“It was a couple of years ago. Everything was fine, great, wonderful. My daughters were home from the summer from vacation up north.”
I hadn’t talked about it in so long that I had forgotten how difficult it was to share. That surprised me. I had control of my emotions because I had rid myself of everything but anger. But I could feel something rising in me.
“Go on. What happened?”
I ate more of the shrimp and salad and sipped on the water. It felt good to have a decent meal.
“Listen, Rodney, if you don’t want to tell me, you don’t have to. We can talk about something else.”
“Something else? What else is there?”
“Like, where you’re from and what did you do before you, you know . . .”
“Ended up on the streets? Well, I’m from here. I grew up here. I’m full-fledged from Atlanta. There aren’t many of us around anymore. People come here in droves and don’t go back. Spent most of my childhood in Southwest Atlanta. It was a good upbringing. Just me and my cousin and my parents. We took vacations to Savannah. When I was a kid, it felt like we drove forever, like we went to this magical, far-off place. It shocked me when I realized as I got older that it was just four hours away.”
“But those trips meant something to you.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you brought it up. You could ha
ve talked about anything—or nothing. But you brought that up. And you probably didn’t mean to, but you almost smiled when you did.”
“I hadn’t thought about that in so long.”
“So what do you think about? If you’re not remembering important moments of your life, what are you thinking?”
“I think about not being here, about being put out of my misery. I think about the hypocrisy in the world. I think about how so many men that I have been around or seen in shelters or on the street were driven there by society.”
“What do you mean?”
“Someone like you, who have never been on the streets, believes it’s always the homeless man’s fault. He’s lazy and prefers to just do nothing over doing something. Well, that’s true in some cases, a small percentage of the cases. Many of these men have been damaged by drug abuse, which was a killer in the black community by design. No one can tell me different.
“We can get men on the moon in the sixties, but forty years later, we can’t keep heroin and cocaine and crack and meth and PCP off the streets of the inner city? Call me a conspiracy theorist if you like, but evidence is everywhere that certain people wanted to wipe us out.”
“Actually, I don’t disagree with you. And you know why? It wasn’t until white kids started dying from meth and heroin and other stuff that the government has taken notice. But in our neighborhoods, what we got was our men locked up for possession of even the smallest amounts of crack. So, at the time when our neighborhoods were infested with drugs the most, the laws on drug possession were the harshest. And we lost a lot of our men.”
I was impressed that she was aware and didn’t just blame black people’s problems on black people. I understood we make our own decisions and choices and do harm to ourselves. But to just lay it at our feet was a simplistic way to look at it.
“I had you for one of those right-wing people who thought all our troubles were our doing. I lay a lot of our issues on us because we’re strong enough to overcome the evil in people. But we can’t let them get a pass on how their evil and violence and corruption and immoral values created a system with all that evil and violence, corruption and immoral values and worked only against us. And, yes, I’m going back to slavery.”
“Rodney, listen, I talk to you and listen to you, and you’re clearly an intelligent man. Very intelligent. The question won’t leave me.”
“I know. What happened to me? I killed my family.”
“Rodney . . .”
“The family vacations we went on to Savannah were so great that I made sure I included them when I got my own family. My wife—her name was Darlene—and I had gotten over some things, including me being diagnosed as bipolar. But I kept a gun in the house and on me at all times because I had to protect my family.
“So, anyway, we took our usual trip and it was not the same because the girls got older and they didn’t really want to go. They had parties and friends to catch up with. But we hardly saw them anymore, so I was insistent on them going on this trip. I overruled my wife, who had said, ‘It’s OK, honey. As long as they are home.’
“But I couldn’t let it go. Those trips meant everything to me as a child. I never wanted them to end. I wanted my girls to feel the same about our trips as I did about the ones I took as a kid. Anyway, I fell asleep. I fell asleep on Interstate 75 South, just past this little town called Cordele. I was awake, I felt alert. . . but I fell asleep.”
“Oh, no,” Brenda said.
“We crashed. I broke my clavicle, fractured my wrist and broke an ankle. We flipped, people say, at least twice. I don’t remember any of it. Last I remember, a Michael Jackson song was playing, ‘Another Part of Me,’ and Diana and Joy, my daughters, were in the back singing it.
“Next thing I know, I’m upside down in the car, which was smoking. I was in a state of shock. I managed to look to my right and Darlene was there, bloodied, lifeless. It took me a few seconds to process that and I was spinning. I called out the girls’ names. No response.
“I used all my might to turn my body so I could look to the backseat. My girls weren’t there. Both had been ejected from the car.
“I looked outside the front window and I could see Diana. She was sprawled on the ground. My heart sank. To the left was her sister. Both were dead. I was pinned in the car and forced to look at my dead wife next to me and my dead daughters outside the window for about twenty minutes before help came. That’s when my life ended. That’s when I knew I didn’t deserve to live.”
“Oh, Rodney, I’m so sorry. I cannot even imagine the pain of losing your family.
“I can’t even imagine what you went through. But I know this: It wasn’t your fault. You have what’s called ‘survivor’s remorse.’ I’m sure you asked why you were the one to survive and wished that you would have been the only one to not make it. You’re carrying a burden not many people can understand.
“But you’ve got to believe that God has you here for a reason. He—”
“God? God? I ain’t got no love for God. I mean, this is the God that let my family die. My kids are dead. The only woman I have ever loved is dead. But I’m alive. That’s the cruel part. That’s my problem with Him, more than even having my family die. Why let me live through this?
“My family was my life. My family is gone because I fell asleep while driving. And your God allowed it to happen. And He kept me here to live with this constant nightmare.”
“I’m so sorry, Rodney. I can’t say it enough. But I wouldn’t be honest with you if I didn’t say that we don’t always understand God and what He does. But you’re here for a reason. I’m sure God does not want you to be in a living nightmare. I’m sure He wants you to honor your family by living.”
“I’m here. I’m living.”
“On the streets, though. I don’t think that was His plan for you. You have so much to offer. Let me ask you something: Did you believe in God before the accident?”
“Sure. We went to church as a family. Some Sundays. Most Sundays. But what He allowed to happen? No, I don’t have faith in Him anymore.”
“I don’t want to sound like some religious freak, because I’m not. But do you know that God has protected you on the streets? So many bad things could have happened to you.”
“Who said bad things haven’t happened to me on the streets?”
“I don’t doubt it. The thing is, there was stuff bound to happen to you that He prevented from happening, stuff you will never know about. He’s protecting you. That’s why you’re still here. As long as you’re here, why not make the most of it?”
“I am.”
Brenda was exasperated.
“So why has God allowed you to have your troubles? I mean, if He’s so merciful and all that jazz, why do you have so much pain in your life? And you’re a believer. I can see it in you. You have a light in you. But it’s flickering, not blazing.
“What happened to you? Since we’re being all open and shit.”
Brenda was caught off guard.
“Me? Well, a lot.”
I waited for her to continue. I had worked in corporate America for decades. I knew how to deal with people. She needed me to not push her.
“I used to be fine, as they say. I used to wear a six or an eight. I couldn’t maintain it as life started kicking me in the ass. I was married for about six years. My husband left me. I can’t even say why. He never gave a true reason. He said, ‘We grew apart.’ That’s code for something else. He probably grew closer to another woman.
“That hurt me. I never expected to be divorced. I never saw it coming, so it was a knife wound to the stomach. I actually felt like I didn’t want to live anymore. Eventually, though, maybe it was a voice or maybe it was a dream, but I remember distinctly that I heard a voice that said, ‘Get up.’
“And I got up, you know? I was depressed, but I started to live again. And eat. And eat. It seemed the food eased the depression. And look at me now—twice as big as I was at my best.
&
nbsp; “So, guess what: I was depressed over my weight, and the only thing that helped it was eating. Then, my sister’s son went to prison for conspiring to kill his girlfriend’s husband. It was hard to accept that, but my sister, who has always been fragile, just broke down.
“Our parents had died a little before then, and that crushed all of us. My sister took it the hardest. But her son going to prison, that broke her. She had a stroke and is in Piedmont Hospital. It’s me and Theresa now. We’re all we have left.
“Other stuff happened, too, including losing my job. So I’ve been doing temp jobs until something that fits my talent and experience comes along . . . So, nothing but food offers me comfort. I just eat and go to work and watch TV and repeat the cycle.”
“You might as well be on the streets.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s true. You’d have more excitement and you’d lose weight because you wouldn’t eat as much and you’d be walking.”
“Uh, I believe there has to be a way to lose weight other than walking the streets, living on the streets. That’s not for me.”
“I didn’t think it was for me, either. But I have no one to answer to. I’m free. For me, that’s important.”
“I don’t understand that. You mean because you don’t owe a landlord or a car dealership or a boss, you’re free?”
“It’s more than that. I don’t owe society. I’ve given all I can, all I love—my family—and got nothing in return. Uncle Sam can’t say I owe him. No supervisor can say I owe him. No bill collector can say I owe him. I’m free.”
“So why not live as a free man? You need help. You’re more depressed than me . . . Don’t look at me like that. You have to be to live on the streets. I don’t mean to demean you. But how do you go from having a home and family to living on the streets?”
“And I don’t how you go from being a small woman with a life and hopes to a big woman with no hopes and depressed.”
“Yeah, well, we’re quite a pair, aren’t we?”
CHAPTER SEVEN: SLEEPLESS NIGHTS