by Lars Eighner
But this sort of deception does not come easily to Billy, and as soon as he perceived I was prepared to be reasonable he abandoned the plot.
Tim seemed relieved too. All evidence of his violent mood swings was gone. He seemed pleasant enough, and he had not looked forward to the prospect of trying to force me into the ER. I assumed he had got over his grief.
I let Billy drive me to the hospital.
It was fortunate that Billy and Tim had not attempted to realize their plan. When I arrived at the ER, there was no psychiatric SWAT team. Had I been wrestled into the ER, the matter would not have been resolved neatly. Instead of a psychiatric SWAT team, I found a very reasonable and personable psychiatric resident. I told him he was supposed to be on the lookout for me, but he was baffled. Eventually he found a note about me, my name badly misspelled, amid a large number of notes on a bulletin board. “Jesus,” he said, “I’ve told them over and over about this shit!”
He stepped behind a glass partition and had an animated telephone conversation with, as he told me later, Dr. Stalin. The conversation ended with his slamming the phone into its cradle.
He approached me in a calm and reassuring manner, very unlike the falsely reassuring and humoring manner I had come to expect in my ten years of working with psychiatrists.
I had never had a life-threatening thrombosis. I had clots in my veins, all right. But they were too small to pose a threat. This had been discovered when I went to the ultrasound lab, while I was still an ER patient and the decision to admit me to the hospital had not yet been made. That was the reason, as I had noticed at the time, that the ultrasound study had been repeated several times. They expected big clots but turned up only little ones.
I was not going to die. And I would have discovered this fact if I had read the ultrasound report in my chart. (Evidently the report had not yet been reduced to writing when I went over my ER chart.)
I had been admitted to the hospital because Dr. Velasquez wanted to work me up for a psychiatric commitment. In reading the ER chart, I had assumed the order for the psychiatric consult was routine for admissions from the street. But it was in fact the only reason for my admission. The tiny clots could have been treated on an outpatient basis.
Before I made any of my stupid remarks and unfunny jokes, before I refused to use the bedpan and refused to eat so that I could continue to refuse the bedpan, before I began to act suspicious of what might be in my chart, before all of it, I was pegged for a psychiatric case.
There had never been any medical reason I should not have used the bathroom. By insisting I not use the bathroom, the doctors had hoped to convince me that any attempt to leave the hospital would be fatal—they had hoped to restrain me by fear because they had no legal means of restraining me physically.
If, believing I had a life-threatening condition, I had now returned to the hospital treatment, then clearly I was not insane enough for involuntary commitment. If I had not returned, that would not necessarily have been evidence I was insane because there was plenty of evidence that I had perceived in some degree that I was being deceived.
The psychiatric resident had tried over and over to explain to the medical staff that they could not commit a person just because they disapproved of his way of life. Mine was not the first such case. Perhaps the medical staff could not learn their lesson. If I did have a mental illness, it appeared to be a largely iatrogenic one.
The psychiatric resident apologized and asked if I wanted further treatment for my leg.
I told him I realized my values were at variance with those of the society around me. Perhaps it would have been the normal thing for me to have my dog killed that I might obtain three nights’ lodging. Perhaps a more normal person would steal or beg rather than dig through garbage for his sustenance. Perhaps I really was eccentric. But I did not think I was insane. And if I had no life-threatening condition, I desired to remain in the hospital not one second longer.
The psychiatric resident shook my hand and wished me well.
Billy had good news when he picked me up. His family had allowed him to cash a certificate of deposit his senile grandmother had put in his name. He would put me up until the tenth of September—for he figured he could not drink through the money before then.
He bought me a nice cane. I put my leg up and took aspirin. By the tenth of September I was well.
TEN
Alcohol, Drugs, and Insanity
There is no gainsaying that many homeless people are alcoholic or addicted to illicit drugs or insane. But I think the proportion of homeless people who belong to one or more of those categories is greatly overestimated.
This overestimation seems to stem from two otherwise opposing views. People who do not want to help the homeless seek to blame the homeless for being homeless. These people see alcoholism, drug addiction, and insanity as character flaws that somehow justify the condition of the homeless. This conservative line of thought is only one step removed from the conclusion that in addition to deserving homelessness, the homeless also deserve whatever mistreatment individuals or society may choose to mete out.
Those who wish to help the homeless, on the other hand, want to find a problem that can be fixed. Admittedly, alcoholism, drug addiction, and insanity are difficult problems, but something can be done about them. What is even better, for those who take the liberal view, is that what can be done for alcoholism, drug addiction, and insanity is likely to involve the creation of many jobs for social workers and administrators and other middle-class people. Although they find contradictory morals to it, both of these views subscribe more or less to a mythical history of the typical street wino. It is a myth that goes something like this: A man had a reasonably good job and reasonably happy home life. But he drank. At first it was only social drinking. But he drank more and more because he had either the disease of alcoholism or a character flaw that deprived him of the will to be sober, depending upon whether the myth is told in its liberal or its conservative version.
At any rate, he covered up his drinking for a while, but eventually everyone else realized he had a problem. Something dreadful happened at work, at home, or on the road, and the alcoholic had to admit, at last, that he might have a problem. Perhaps he tried one program or another, but without success because—as they say in the programs—he had not yet hit bottom. He lost his job, his family, and at last his home. And there he is, a wino clutching a brown sack, passed out in an alley.
Indeed, I met street winos who told this story of themselves. But in as many other cases I found the cause and the effect reversed: people who claimed to have drunk little or not at all until they became homeless.
Alcohol in some forms is cheap and readily available to people on the streets. The winos in El Paso favored Mogen David 20/20. In Austin, Wild Irish Rose was a favorite. The law in Texas requires a special license to sell wines with an alcohol content of more than fourteen percent, but every convenience store has one or two brands of wine that push as near this limit as possible. These products, of course, are not much sought after by oenophiles and are seldom served at intimate dinners. In Los Angeles, corner stores could sell liquor and I noticed the preference for wine was much less pronounced. For reasons I do not understand, malt liquor is favored in some black areas.
I do not propose to try to convince anyone that homeless people buy alcoholic beverages out of thirst, but many times when I could not find a water tap and had to buy something to drink, I noticed that whichever beer was on sale was cheaper than soft drinks or mineral water. I hope this will not be taken to imply that beer should be made more expensive, for my complaint is of the difficulty of finding nonalcoholic drink. When I could find it, distilled water was cheaper, but it would be found warm, on an out-of-the-way shelf, in unwieldy, unresealable plastic gallon bottles. Except that Lizbeth despises beer and I would not give a dog beer anyway, I am fairly sure I would have asked myself on several occasions: Why not get the beer?
Why not, indeed.
Alcohol provides a sensation of warmth and well-being. In truth, alcohol can contribute to hypothermia in the winter and to dehydration in the summer, but many people, homeless and not, are unaware of this. Alcohol is a fair anesthetic and its sedative properties can produce sleep in restless circumstances. Alcohol induces the illusion of potency in the powerless—I can identify, but not quite understand, a nexus of alcoholism and issues of power, else why would so many politicians be alcoholic. In a life that seems utterly without meaning and purpose, the quest for the daily dose is something to do, is a reason to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Perhaps many people, perhaps all people, deceive themselves in some way or another to make it through the day, to the end of the quarter, to the closing of the fiscal year, to the season when the children leave for college. So a homeless person may become a wino by deceiving himself that paradise is at the bottom of the next jug.
If there were no alcohol, society would still have no use, no job, no home for the men, young and old, who sit on street corners with brown paper sacks. If the cities were filled with sober hopeless people, I doubt that the comfortable would find the results much to their liking.
So long as I had hopes of improving my position, I avoided other homeless people. I did not want to be acculturated to the street or resigned to my situation. Beyond this, I often avoided other homeless people because alcohol was the organizing principle of the street life I saw.
According to my observations, the homeless, aside from the whole families I saw in downtown Los Angeles, occur as loners, like me, or in pairs, or in groups of six to a dozen. Loners who were alcoholic tended to be in an advanced stage of alcoholism. When there was a pair, one of the pair was the star and the other was the sidekick, but I never detected any particular pattern of alcohol use among the pairs. There were also relatively stable groups of men who occupied more or less fixed areas. In some of the groups the men camped together. Eight seems to be near the optimal number of members in one of these groups—much larger groups, I surmise, would have been perceived as a threat to the peace. I never ran into such groups of men that alcohol was not present. Some of the men in these groups certainly were thoroughgoing alcoholics. But many others cared as much or more for the company. Whatever alcohol any one of them had was shared, and everyone was expected to drink. The men who seemed to care less for the alcohol tended to be younger, to have some gear, and to exhibit, usually, some sign of caring for their appearance. Also, sometimes they got drunk, whereas those whom I identified as alcoholics did most of the drinking but were hardly ever drunk.
The men in these groups shared with society at large the belief that every homeless man drank. As I refused to drink with them I could not gain any acceptance from these groups. Over the course of many weeks one man from one of these groups offered me drink whenever I met him. Time after time I refused; the last time he reacted as if I had insulted him. But then he reconsidered and asked, “Is it maybe that you do not drink?”
That was precisely the excuse I had always offered to him and the group. He had not thought it was anything but an excuse until just that moment. Then he explained: Since the assumption was that everyone drank, the only explanation of my refusing to accept a drink from him or from the common stock of the group was that I had some private store of alcohol I was unwilling to share. When individuals or groups refuse to drink with each other, it is a sure sign of deadly enmity between them.
I am certain that many members of these groups would be called social drinkers if they were not homeless. Indeed, they might be called social drinkers more accurately than better-off people, because the drinking group was the only society I found on the street. People in better circumstances can find many associations and activities that do not involve alcohol. On the streets one must drink, or at least pretend to drink, to have any company or entertainment at all.
Of course, some of the people on the street who begin drinking socially in the drinking groups will become alcoholics—just as some people who attend cocktail parties will. But a businessman returning from a three-martini lunch who sees a drinking group on the street is likely to think that every member of the group is alcoholic. That is not so, and furthermore, I think that many of the people on the street who are alcoholic are so as a consequence of being homeless. That is, in many cases, homelessness comes first and alcoholism second.
I lied, of course, when I told the groups and the man who tried to befriend me that I do not drink. I will take a drink when the circumstances seem to me appropriate. On the street I seldom found the circumstances appropriate. I found survival on the street challenging enough with a clear head; I never understood how the heavy drinkers got by.
If I had a secure camp and I found a half bottle of a good wine or two or three beers in a Dumpster, I would take them to camp to have with dinner or just before I turned in. I always had a better use for whatever small amount of cash I might get than to spend it on alcohol. Needless to say, when I did find two or three beers in a Dumpster it was really only two or three and not upward of a dozen, which is what some people mean by “a couple of beers.”
I did find a considerable amount of liquor once—someone who was moving had discarded everything from a well-stocked bar, including a number of exotic liqueurs with unbroken seals. As it was late in a month, I called Billy and he gladly took the whole lot off my hands.
At one time I would have considered it hypocritical to refuse to drink with the groups on the street while I was willing to accept a rare cocktail in Sue’s or to have a couple of beers in camp. But I have come to think that keeping up appearances is not altogether a matter of deceit. I was not, after all, an alcoholic. It was no deception to refuse to appear to be one. Mostly I did not want to give Mr. Three-Martini-Lunch an excuse to think himself better than I.
Many in the groups did not drink much more than I, at least not at one sitting—although most of them did drink every day, as I did not. That they did not care how they appeared to a society that was otherwise indifferent seems entirely understandable. One of the yuppie excuses for not giving money to panhandlers is that the money might be spent on liquor. Surely the money would not be put to a better purpose if it were donated to an agency and used to make a payment on a social worker’s Volvo.
The truth is that the vices of the homeless do not much differ from the vices of the housed, but the homeless, unless they become saints, must pursue their vices in public.
Besides myself, I never knew a homeless person who would refuse marijuana. But I never saw more-addictive illicit drugs used by homeless people.
When I appeared in the university area, I was often approached by well-dressed students who wanted to buy “A” or “cid.” I assumed these were two new drugs, which like XTC had appeared after I stopped experimenting with them. When I denied knowing what the students were talking about, they sometimes accused me of being disingenuous. Well they might, for eventually I realized or I was told that “A” plus “cid” is “acid,” and I could be expected to know what LSD was. That the students were so bold in soliciting me for it led me to think that homeless people in the area supplied this drug.
When I met the drinking group in this area, I learned they did sell LSD, but my observations led me to believe that they sold LSD to raise money for wine and seldom or never used it themselves.
I gathered that those who used hard drugs usually were not homeless, but by trading in drugs themselves they usually had some accommodation, even if it were no more than a trashy shooting gallery. Of course, one can drink or even toke where shooting up would not be tolerated, so it is possible some people I met on the street concealed this activity from me, but I think I would have recognized the signs if that had happened often. Next to alcohol, illicit drugs were nothing among the homeless people I encountered.
As to myself, I am addicted to nicotine. The state asylum has adopted a smoke-free policy since I was compelled to resign. If I had been able to keep my job there, I am sure I would have los
t it by now anyway for my dependence on tobacco. Nothing seems to go well unless I have caffeine. Like many other people in Austin, I suffer from seasonal allergies and for them I take pseudoephedrine or phenylpropanolamine. The combination of caffeine, pseudoephedrine, and phenylpropanolamine is sometimes sold on the street for speed, but other antihistamines send me right to sleep.
I sometimes saved drugs I found in Dumpsters, but most of these were antibiotics or things of that sort that might be of value to someone who had no access to medical care, but that have no recreational potential. I think it unconscionable that poor people in the United States cannot buy such drugs over the counter, as they do in most other countries. I understand that society may not wish to provide poor people with medical care, but to make it illegal for the poor to care for themselves can only be attributed to society’s spite or doctors’ greed.
I saved two kinds of opiates. As my leg began to bother me I saved Vicodin in hopes of relieving the pain enough that I could continue to make my Dumpster rounds, or to take for my migraines if I ran out of ibuprofen. I have mentioned that dysentery was frequently a problem, so I saved Lomotil or paregoric when I was lucky enough to find it—over-the-counter medications for this problem are utterly ineffective. Not many sleeping pills, minor tranquilizers, or diet pills appeared in the Dumpsters, but I passed by those that did. I did not care for such things for myself, and although I knew some of them had a street value—just as I knew some of the other things I found could be hocked—I never thought of trying to sell them, by which I do not mean I thought better of it, but that the idea never occurred to me.