J. D. Mathes II
Issue No. 21 • Spring 2020
They looked like they were mugging the old man. But what would a bunch of frat boys dressed in polo shirts with collars popped be doing beating down a homeless man in downtown Albuquerque during dinner hour? Normally that kind of depravity was saved for dark nights and back alleys or under bridges with exhaust stained dome tents by the light of pallet fires. Trolls didn’t live under those bridges, but they knew the route.
The young men held the old man up by his armpits as he wrapped his arms around a lovely deciduous tree in the full leaf of summer. In a family neighborhood, a tree like that would be redolent with hanging children and not a man looking like he’s suffering under the lash. The old man slid down the trunk as the young men released their grip.
I walked toward them after the helicopter manager, Shawn, had parked the Forest Service SUV. The pilot, Derek, paused when he saw what I was doing and followed me. Shawn and I still wore our wildfire Nomex clothes and Derek had on his flight suit as we’d come straight from the heli-base at the airport. The frat boys turned away with the awkward and embarrassed grins of those who’d stepped in shit and hoped no one had seen. The old man lay on the ground in the shape of a trembling question mark. He wore shorts and a Hawaiian shirt as if he should've been kicking it in a tiki bar instead of seized up on a city street.
I asked the frat boys what the story was. “Old dude is totally wasted. Every time we got him up, he just fell back down. We tried to get him to hold onto that tree, but he couldn’t hang on.” Another said, “Yeah, he’s stiff as hell.” “Super drunk,” another added.
He wasn’t dirty, but his skin looked as if he’d been out in the weather for months and he had the stink of booze and sweat. Some ugly scratches ran down his legs and forearms. Pieces of bark flecked his wounds.
They hadn’t called 9-1-1, so I did as the young men continued on their way. Shawn showed up with his medic bag. He put on nitrile gloves and started talking with the old man. “Hey, you all right? I’m here to help. Can I check you for injuries?”
The old man’s eyes rolled around. “Yeah.” He sounded pretty lucid. “Just don't call the cops.”
“We have to. We need to get you some professional help.”
“I’ll lose my bed.”
I didn't know what he was talking about, but noticed he wasn't all that old. Maybe mid-forties, like myself. “Sorry, man, I have to get you help.”
We were in the middle of the block, so I asked a man and a woman in business clothes passing by what street we were on. They had been angling away from us but stopped. The man looked at me as if I’d asked the way to Coachella, when the woman told me where we were. She asked, “He gonna be okay?”
Derek said, “He won’t get any worse now we’re here.”
Shawn started dabbing up the blood with some gauze. “What’s your name?”
“My friends call me Punch.”
“All right, Punch. I know it’s hard, but—"
“They’ll take my bed away. I have to be there by eight.”
Shawn paused. “You can’t straighten your arms or legs. I’m shocked you’re even talking.”
“They’ll throw me out of treatment. I’ll end up in jail.”
“Punch,” the pilot said. “Treatment won’t do you any good if you die out on this street.”
“You’re not going to jail,” I said. “They’ll take you to the hospital.”
“Man, if I get tossed on the street, the cops will haul me in.”
I shrugged. The very thing he needed treatment for was going to cause him to lose treatment and send him to jail. You’d think those who dealt with addiction would know the path to recovery included tripping and falling on the street. Within the year after starting treatment, according to Alcoholics Anonymous, only 1620 people out of 6000 remain sober. They figure the best-case scenario for recovery without a relapse is participation for at least eight years. That’s a whole lot of nights on the sidewalk if you can't keep a bed. It's like telling someone with tuberculosis to get out the sanatorium if they can't quit coughing.
His eyes rolled toward the pilot. “I had a job interview. Just one drink to steady my hands. No one will hire a man with shaky hands.”
“You’ll be fine, Punch.”
We three looked to each other, knowing he would not be fine, but at least we could get him to the hospital. I wondered if he was forced to find a job to stay in treatment or get benefits on an arbitrary timeline. Was he pressured to try and find work before he’d learned to cope with his addiction, before his hands quit shaking? He wanted to succeed and even took the drink to stop his trembling hands he knew would signal un-hirable to the employer. This was no image of the casual day-drinker out with friends on a Saturday, but someone in a panic to do well and consumed with anxiety. In his terror, he took his first drink and it led to another and another and left him collapsed on a sidewalk before 4:00 in the afternoon. An ambulance and a firetruck worked through traffic and parked along the curb. As the uniformed women and men swarmed about, he strained against his seized body as if from the memories of a thousand beatings.
“No,” was all he whispered.
Shawn began briefing them. “His pulse is 88, he’s responsive and knows what’s going on, but his body is in a state of seizure...” As paramedics readied a gurney, I told the old man to take care. He said thanks, but it was in that polite way a victim thanks the doctor who amputated a limb to save his life.
We wildland firefighters shudder at a death or the horrific burn injury of another firefighter, but not just at the loss of a comrade, but because we all know we’re one step away from being the victim. We look at the portraits of the fallen in their hardhats, yellow shirts, and the steady or playful eyes of those in risky professions, and it’s a mirror into our own mortality. There we are. As the paramedics knelt next to Punch, I saw myself. Alcoholics and addicts run through my family like fire through dried grass. In my head, I still heard the snickering around Sunday dinner or family gatherings like those walking by on the Albuquerque street with the head shaking and tsk tsking – a moral condemnation in any language. I’d done it myself as I grew up, misbelieving all someone had to do was stop. It’s free will, you deadbeats. The addicts and alcoholics were weak and lacked will power. But then I’d heard it directed at me when I’d struggled wasted along city streets or staggering supermarket aisles. How fucked up do you need to be to get sidelong looks in Las Vegas? How epic is your drinking problem when a hard-drinking fire crew tells you to ease up? I’d kicked drugs before the punishing fist of the state beat me down, but still drank and smoked and for the most part kept it in control. Only once in a while did I find myself in a haze wandering strange city streets or wake up not knowing where I’ve been or where I was. But even when I closed a bar down, I still managed to find myself at work the next day no matter how groggy or painful my headache, so believed I didn’t have a real problem. How far away had I been from an alcoholic seizure before five in the afternoon? About a step away from the mirror was all.
Some might say I’d kicked my drug habit and scaled back my drinking and quit smoking through strength of will, but I knew it was mostly luck. Addiction sews itself into your genes and like most mysteries, no one knows why some people are more affected than others. It’s in you and drives you and you need help learning how to cope with it - to keep it from driving you off the cliff over and over again. It was like one minute I’m sitting on the couch reading a book and the next I find myself walking to get a drink somewhere with book in hand. The statistics show what a monumental effort it is to stay clean and sober and it’s not about personal “life choices.” It’s about societal choices, about not investing in meaningful treatment. If it’s not in you, then you’re lucky and not morally superior any more than not having epilepsy makes you superior.
Punishing Punch’s addiction was a failure of thinking and human decency. It also showed how a lazy society copes with the hard work of finding solutions to complex problems and how instead of helping, spreads more misery. It made me think people had read Christ's story as a cautionary tale. If you take the unpopular position to help the poor, downtrodden, and the afflicted you will get crucified with thieves, who were probably stealing to feed their families, so beware! What good to provide salvation if the lesson of the sacrifice was ignored?
As the paramedics worked on Punch, we were spared those assholes who get pleasure yelling insults at the homeless who showed up. It seems to me those most repulsed and who brought the harshest judgment, are working-class people who yell at those who are clearly too downtrodden and broken to get a job. What is this moral outrage? Do they see themselves in the man with the cardboard sign or the woman with the Styrofoam cup and a dog at the intersection?
In my early twenties, I worked in one of those industrial cities on the outskirts of Los Angeles. We etched plates for gauges used in spacecraft. The room smelled of acid and sweat. The conveyor belt always malfunctioned and when the drivebelt slipped for the umpteenth time, I shut the system down and started to put it back on the pulley. As I wrestled with the belt the motor jumped, crushing my hand. My one-eyed coworker had powered up the system. Pain and fear shot through me. The supervisor bandaged up my hand and made it clear reporting it further would be trouble for me. A replacement was a phone call to a temp agency away. That evening on the way to the supermarket, my girlfriend and I argued. She insisted I call OSHA and report my injury and the unsafe conditions, and I tried to explain to her that I didn't want to be that guy. In the parking lot an old man asked me for money. My rage broke upon a human wall. I shouted at the bum to go get a job and quit begging from guys like me who busted their asses in a factory. Stunned, the old man backpedaled. The air left his body and he physically deflated as his eyes went wild with fear, and when the fear melted away, it shifted to a stunned emptiness drained of dignity. I stormed into the store ahead of my girlfriend, got whatever it was for dinner, and left. We lived in a rundown apartment on Melrose off Normandie. Herds of free-range roaches scattered with clicks of thorny feet across the linoleum when we switched on the light. We collapsed onto the futon with the weight of the day. I felt we were one injury away from living in the park. My hand hurt for weeks, but I was able to keep working. Luckily it healed, leaving scars and swollen knuckles. But that old man’s eyes I still feel in my bones and taste the bile in the back of my throat from what I’d taken from him that night.
Fyodor Dostoevsky said, “You can judge a society by how well it treats its prisoners.” He would know. We have allowed ourselves to lose a sense of community and look at ourselves as individuals who don’t need to help anyone else. We can judge the moral fiber of a society who incarcerates its addicted instead of helping them find a way out of addiction to live a meaningful life and bring solace to their families. Maybe we can’t rescue everyone, but we can rescue enough.
The problem of alcohol addiction made me think about the failed war on drugs. Tough on crime laws and mandatory sentencing has taken judgement away from judges and given power to prosecutors who only care about conviction rates because that’s what voters have been made to believe works. If we invested in drug treatment programs the way we funnel money into incarcerating a person, it would naturally reduce violent crimes connected to drugs and alcohol. About 20% of inmates are incarcerated for drug charges (which out of 2.3 million is 460,000 people in custody), indicating the bulk of prisoners are in for violent crimes. Which seems to say treatment for addiction won’t reduce the prison population in a meaningful way. The problem is violence doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is interconnected to addiction, making me wonder how many violent crimes are tied to addiction that isn’t reflected in the charges eventually brought or dropped by the prosecution. Afterall, the junkie who robs someone isn’t in on a drug charge nor is the meth-head who robs a liquor store, or the drunk who murders his wife in a fit of rage. How many violent crimes are committed by either addicts or members of violent street gangs and cartels driven by the drug trade internationally? We don’t exist in a vacuum either and not solving the addiction problem here means violence and chaos in other countries.
Overall, treatment programs in the long run would ease pressure on police departments and court systems and reduce the amount of calls EMS needs to make. It would mean less profits for private prisons, but they’re immoral and deserve to go bankrupt.
At the human level, though, investing in people will create productive members of society, bring hope to affected families. Reducing the demand for drugs would have a greater impact on the cartels and street gangs than all the helicopters and DEA agents. Rehab is boring and takes forever to see results. In America, we love the kinetic images of SWAT teams kicking down doors and gunfights, arrests with sketchy people in handcuffs, and prosecutors crowing about conviction rates and tonnage of drugs seized. We’ve been conned into believing it’s the only way, which doesn’t address the root cause of the problem, but makes great television.
We can find the root cause in our calcified cultural views ingrained over centuries that addiction is a moral failing of the individual and that the only way to deal with it is punishment. How can we make a fundamental shift in those who vote (they are the ones deciding which way the moral ship of state sails) to what would be best for society? Those who vote swelled the prison population without reducing the demand for drugs in the United States, increasing the power and violence of cartels, and it is up to them to solve the problem by putting politicians committed to making effective changes. We don’t pillory people anymore, but we have found new ways to inflict the state’s violence on people driven by the same outdated beliefs. How can we educate people who don’t read and don’t care because they think terrible people are getting what they deserve? How to make them see the shame in being the top incarceration nation in the world and not seeing each as an isolated person, but each as a member of the community? An essential problem with thinking about addiction, is not enough of us can look into a mugshot and realize we’re looking into a mirror. That could never be me, they think.
The paramedics loaded Punch onto a gurney. We exchanged goodbyes with our fellow first responders and wandered down the street. A block from where the paramedics stabbed an IV needle into Punch, we found the Brazilian restaurant a dispatcher at the airbase had recommended. One of those places where you pay a flat rate to eat all you want. Among the tables of diners, and tables laden with side dishes and desserts, a soup and salad bar, waiters rushed from table to table with hunks of meat on skewers and sliced off as much as you wanted onto your plate.
I ordered a beer. The other two grinned at me as if I had a revolver with one bullet. We talked about different relatives who had addiction issues and ended up in jail or prison because of it. I had an uncle who spent most of his life in and out of prison because of alcoholism and I think how even when an inmate gets support on the inside, on the outside it becomes nothing, and in most cases the probation office is just another agency focused on punishment and not rehabilitation. How many families, I wondered, had those relatives and were at a loss on how to help them and how many turned away in shame? The task of rehab so daunting to make even the strongest parent flinch at trying to rescue a son or daughter. Why do we start drinking when we see how it can go so horribly wrong? Because we think we won’t be that person. We can control ourselves and for many of us it’s true, but enough of us become the guy drinking whiskey out of a coke bottle trying to look normal in a bowling alley at lunch.
We three ate our per diem’s worth. Waiters never stopped coming with the roasted meat as if they were wooden figures gliding from a cuckoo clock's swinging doors every fifteen minutes when the bell tolled. We had to sit a while after we waved off the last waiter to emerge from the food coma.
Returning to the SUV, the street where Punch had a seizure was empty. We loaded up and went back to our hotel. I walked down to a convenience store and bought a six-pack of beer and a pouch of Drum tobacco. Back in the hotel room I drank the pain from my joints, wondering if I’d feel the need to walk the streets after a few, but ended up reading until I passed out in the bed that had been reserved for me by the government.
J.D. Mathes is a 2019/2020 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow, photographer, author, book critic, and librettist. While finishing his Bachelor of Arts in English at Lewis-Clark State College, he was awarded a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Scholarship that funded his MFA in fiction writing at the University of Idaho. Two of his books are Shipwrecks and Other Stories, and a memoir, Ahead of the Flaming Front: A Life on Fire, about his experiences fighting wildfire throughout the American West for fourteen seasons, including four years on an elite helicopter rappel crew. A single-dad to two daughters, he now teaches English at Bakersfield College. In the mid-80s, he was incarcerated in federal prison on a firearms charge, which destroyed his military career. The experience shattered him for years, and even as he still struggles with the darkness, he gets his flawed self out of bed every day to do the best he can.