The Man in the Alley

Another day buzzed to life and all the characters were all in place on Third Street in Seattle between Pike and Pine.  A man appeared from the alley, squinting through a light drizzle misting the buses that endlessly drove by, clearing the ringing in his eardrums from the blaring siren that awakened him from a restless slumber of fears and delusions.  His parched face sagged off his bone structure, yellowed and pitted teeth last knowing the taste of real food 3 days past.  Vomit stained the front of a ragged brown sweater, recently given to him at a shelter, with the distinct odor of stale whiskey.  His ragged khaki pants, also gifts from the homeless shelter, hid his spindly legs and reeked of stale urine.  The man did not own socks and his shoes were only shoes in a sense that they were on his feet, but 3 sizes too big.  The blisters wore his feet to the bone, yet he could barely bleed as the scabbing from repeated blistering had hardened his skin to a mix of cartilage, pus and callous that prevented blood and oxygenizaton.  He raised a shaky, blood spotted hand to wipe the rain off his face and his first thought of the day entered his mind.  It was the same first thought he had every day and had had every day for as long as he could remember.  How was he going to get high or drunk?

The man remembered a dream a few nights back, or was it a month back, he did not know. Time had since stopped and had become as meaningless as his existence.  In this dream, there were people who didn’t have to live like this.  People that went to work and had a family, and smiled with each new day.  People that weren’t ravaged with the constant mental obsession to escape reality and to put the world on hold while squeezing every last ounce of the mind bending tilt of whatever drug he could get his hands on.  He asked himself if he ever had this life.  He was not sure and frankly, with all the problems that God had laid at his feet, a bit of drinking and drugging here and there seemed reasonable enough.  He was certain that it wasn’t his fault that life had dealt him this shitty hand.  He vaguely remembered it was the government’s fault for him not being a very smart man, and certainly he had tried to please his boss when he did work.  Was that last year?  If he remembered correctly, his boss had it in for him because he would not allow him to come to work at 11:00, after he was able to sleep off a normal hangover.

He stood there for a moment, people moving around the ant farm of the city, as oblivious to him as he was to them, pondering the word obsession.  The word had no meaning to him, not the way it had been described to him.  What he knew was that he needed to be high, to live and to survive in this world that had wronged him.  There was no other way.  Was that an obsession?  He thought not, for others needed air to breath and water to drink.  Although he must admit, that he felt that something was wrong today, obsession or no obsession.  The dim light of the day was refracting through the raindrops causing a faint effect on the people around him, like they were apparitions unable to hear him speak or notice his presence. 

He remembered a woman, a woman slight in build, dark hair flowing over her right shoulder, almond shaped face red with anguish, yelling at him, crying and begging him pathetically to stop.  She kept asking him how he could do this again, after he promised he wouldn’t.  In his mind, she asked this question a thousand times replaying the scene until the man’s head wanted to split in two, the pain of the question searing his soul.  “Stop what”, he would innocently ask, while sitting at an oak dining room table in a sunlit room.  He noticed his face in this vision was not the face he had today.  It was fuller, healthier, if not a bit red from good cheer.  He was wearing a tie, loosened at the neck, and stained.  There was lipstick on his collar.  He faintly remembered that this was nothing; he had been hugged by someone at an office party who had given him a quick kiss.  But she kept accusing him of ruining everything, and even had the nerve to call him a drunk.  He immediately felt a rush of self-righteous anger at this thought and buried it completely.  There was no such woman, and if there was, he certainly wouldn’t be answering to her caterwauling. 

The rain now was worsening and he wanted a cigarette, and just a sip of whiskey.  The voices and imagery in his head was moving in fast forward, or fast backward, he couldn’t tell, and he needed a drug for it to stop.  There was a glaring set of fluorescent lights blinding his eyes as the man gasped for air, searing his lungs as if he has never breathed before.  Men and women in white were bustling about, their voices in a muffled din.  The man in white said, “We saved him, he is alive again.”  A woman in white asked why they bothered to keep saving him, that he would just be back in the same condition next week.  She had the same sad eyes as the women who called him a drunk.  He hated himself and wished himself dead, that he seemed to be wasting these people’s time.  They could let him die, that would be OK and would show everyone once and for all that he didn’t matter.  The next day, he found himself sitting in front of the downtown hospital in Seattle, in a wheelchair, where the nurse had so unceremoniously dumped him.  He would be drunk again by 1:00 that afternoon.  The dreams never seemed to end, even on awakening.

In scanning Third Street, he saw the usual suspects:  the dealers, the users and the people actually waiting for buses.  The buses were the key.  This is where the drugs would come with the runners and would quickly change hands so that the dealers only had possession for minutes at a time.  But for the madness of this economic cycle to work properly, it was necessary for an endless amount of loitering.  This always shocked the man, because the police were often seen but did nothing, other than write an occasional jaywalking ticket to an office worker.  It seemed that the mayor of this city was far more concerned with honest citizens getting hit by the number 7 bus than fixing the scourge of the city.  The constant loitering led to the constant conversations about power, control and the endless ego and self-importance of the dealers and the relative pecking order of the users.

Two of the dealers were arguing about the same bullshit they had been arguing about for 2 years.  Pride and street cred were flaring up as one dealer was defending one of his ho-es (whores) right in front of her.  She was pregnant, her teeth in disrepair from significant methamphetamine abuse and teemed with a sense of controlled insanity that was fueled by her man sticking up for her.  It made her feel good that it seemed she was forgiven for getting out of line last night.  She deserved the beating for not having his beer cold when he got home from work, work being a day standing on Third Street dealing death.
A few of the users were having the same conversation that they had been having for 3 years running.  So and so was screwing them out of a fix and they would pay, dearly, for this oversight.  The government was screwing them because they were considering taking away their welfare checks if they kept spending them on drugs, alcohol, cigarettes and lottery tickets.  They had a lot of nerve telling them how they could spend their money!  Did everyone hear that Tanya was in the rehab hospital again?  That Tanya, she is a trooper.  Not sure why she keeps trying to quit, everyone knows that all of us our locked into this fate, this lifestyle.  There is no escape.

The man approached his two friends to bum a cigarette, and was considering how to finagle a hit of meth or crack, or just a sip of whiskey.  His nerves were frayed and the din of city life this morning was especially head-splitting.  But he could not shake the feeling that something was wrong.  He approached his friends and noticed that Jerry was holding a bottle of Jack Daniels in a paper bag.  Super nice, the premium stuff.  Hopefully he would share.

Jerry took a swig straight from the bottle and looked at Kelly; his red eyes already glazed from the sauce, and said “It’s a shame about Toby, choking on his own vomit last night and dyin’.  They found him in the alley this morning.  I took his $15 secret stash before they found him though, figured we could celebrate, and toast him.  He would have wanted it that way.”

Kelly added while taking a hit off his pipe, “Yeah, dumbass should know not to drink and fall asleep where he can’t puke out freely.  I also told him last night not to be mixing the crack and the booze like that, but he wouldn’t listen”

Jerry raised the bottle for another swig, “Well that’ll never happen to us, we is much smarter than that.  I knew that smart rich boy would never make it on the street.”

The man approached his friends and in a fog, the refraction of the rain on the city life getting progressively worse, making everything seem distant.  The noises of the buses racing by and the throngs of people heading to work were becoming more muffled and the man sensed that he could no longer smell, anything.  He reached into his pocket and in a final instant of clarity realized two things:  He was missing $15, and his name was Toby.