Wake-Up Call. Joaquin De Torres
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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