I’m walking to work on a July morning, about 7:30AM, the sun beating relentlessly out of a hazy sky.
It’s already a humid 80°degrees, Fahrenheit that is; God’s difficult to understand measurements, used in the US, Belize, Liberia …, oh and I almost forgot to include the mighty Cayman Islands: This temperature would be 28° degrees in that atheistic, Celsius measurement, which the US sniffed at and rejected, but which is used by all scientists, school kids (even in the US, and probably in the mighty Cayman Islands), and every other country in the world.
In a quixotic effort to cool myself from the effort of being a human office worker cruelly exposed to heat and humidity, I tug at the neck of my shirt, and am rewarded with an unrecordably small amount of perceived cooling. Woe to the office worker not safely ensconced their air-conditioned office, which can be sometimes so cold you have to put on a goofy sweatshirt, but that’s better than being coated all over with a sheen of sweat.
Rounding a corner, there’s a homeless woman, standing by her wheelchair. She’s a regular on this street corner, probably sixty, maybe seventy, hard-hard years. She uses the wheelchair as a carriage to carry her life’s possessions, and occasionally to rest the body within which lives her tumultuous, life.
She never asks for money.
Rarely makes eye contact.
On extreme weather days, she’ll park the wheelchair next to a Starbucks air-vent, and sit there with a grey, homeless-shelter blanket tented against the vent: Hot air in the winter; cool in the summer. On the rare occasion when her eyes are visible, they rove and snap away from any contact in a manner that signals; behind these eyes lies wracking turmoil.
Today she’s got both hands leaning against the Starbucks wall, no blanket, and she’s screaming into the air-vent.
“She’s trying to kill me. I tell you; I’m going to be murdered!”
As I walk past, holding my breath – because that’s how a modern human gets safely through tough situations – she spins around, but doesn’t register my presence: her brown irises frantic against the white of her eyeballs.
“She’s a fucking murderer!”
Spittle flies from her weather-raggedy lips, eyes blazing.
I keep walking, finally breathing again; tugging at my shirt collar, squinting rancorously at the sun.
From behind me she yells: “A murderess!”
Two blocks on, breathing again, but now sweating profusely, the Dept of Public Works is engaged in a street sweeping operation, that let’s say, has gotten a tad over-muscular:
There’s an orange DPW truck, in the bed of which is strapped an enormous loudspeaker, that looks like they bought it used from the makers of the 1953 War of the Worlds movie.
“ALL VEHICLES MUST BE REMOVED FROM THIS STREET IMMEDIATELY,” a recording blares out of the speaker in back of the truck.
“ALL VEHICLES PARKED ON THIS STREET WILL BE TOWED TO ALLOW FOR THE COMPLETION OF ESSENTIAL CITY SERVICES.”
Behind the DPW truck, in a cruiser, with blue lights flashing, a cop taps plate numbers into the cruiser’s built in computer; while another cop, leans his considerable weight on his thumb, as he presses impatiently on the doorbell of an apartment building – offering the car owner their final chance.
Behind the cruiser, three tow trucks hover, like hawks waiting to swoop.
Well behind the tow trucks two street-sweepers whine along the curb, their bristle-brushes spinning wildly. One of the street-sweepers suddenly wheels across the street to clean the other side; the bulky vehicles glides on its tiny wheels with the secretive urgency of a post-apocalyptic cockroach
The tow truck drivers’ elbows and faces hang out their windows. Smoke snakes up from the cigarette jammed between the first driver’s fingers, an anxious scowl on his twenty-something face, as he watches a fourth third tow truck hurriedly hook a green-grey Prius.
The tow truck’s hydraulic pump squeals as the three thousand pounds of metal fashioned into a car, of sorts, in Japan, and shipped to the US gets hoisted for a trip to tow-yard.
The big cop backs up from the apartment building doorbell, shakes his red, jowly face.
“HOOK ‘IM,” he yells at the first tow truck driver, pointing at a silver-grey Honda Civic.
“ALL VEHICLES MUST BE … ,” the refrain continues.
I keep walking, quixotically flapping my arms, tugging my shirt, wiping my brow.
Three blocks on I see yellow police tape.
There’s an unmarked police car parked at an odd angle, closing a whole street. One end of the yellow tape is jammed into the unmarked’s closed door, the other end cinched around a streetlight.
Now my eyes rove, searching for something sensational to break the heated lethargy of this morning.
In the doorway of a she-she coffee shop lies a perfectly laundered, white sheet, barely a crease in the fabric.
Sticking out under one end of the white sheet, is a pair of red New Balance sneakers, the heel worn through, the side of the sneaker so greasy it’s almost black.
The shoes of a homeless man.
They’re not moving.
They won’t move again.
Standing in front of the white-sheet-covered body of a dead human being is the driver of the unmarked police car: Tall, muscular, hair buzz-cut, tree trunk legs in tan khakis, folded arms bulging out of a white golf shirt, police badge clipped to his belt. The thirty-something detective, nod-chats down to a short-paunchy uniformed cop.
The dead man – I’m presuming a man based on the size of the shoes; probably a poor presumption given that homelessness doesn’t typically allow for fussy footwear choices – is presumably, here I go presuming again, a homeless victim of the opioid epidemic. Even if I do presume too much, this is likely not a bad presumption, because every single day in Massachusetts, abuse of prescription opioids such OxyContin, Codeine, Fentanyl, takes the lives of four mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters.
Across the whole US that death count runs up to one hundred and twenty-eight humans dying every day from misuse of “legal” prescription drugs.
No problem there.
If the much Trumped up MS13 gang killed four people every day in Massachusetts, we’d have an FBI-ATF-State Police task force kicking in doors and arresting half the Hispanic population of Massachusetts: If the MS13 gang killed a hundred and twenty people nationally every day, the Trumped-Up-Feds, in the name of National Security, would napalm Chelsea and East Boston, and clamp the burning neighborhoods under siege.
But this particular human dealing, that costs so dearly in lives, is the perfect confluence of Big Pharma and the illicit drug trade; two powerful, fifty plus year old industries, enabled by a small number of money grubbing doctors and pharmacists, who shredded their Hippocratic oaths in pursuit of that house in the Caribbean, … oh and a plane to get there. So, instead of actually doing anything, we just talk about it, … a lot.
My feet keep me moving, even as my body sweats and my mind swirls.
“He can’t hit, it’s that simple-stoopid,” the paunchy uniformed cop complains to the detective, his chubby, red-brown forearm rising to shade him from the sticky sunshine.
“I mean if I’m the Red Sox, how can I afford to pay a guy thirteen million a year, … thirteen, to sit on a bench in Fenway Park. I heard he don’t even like ta fly, so he begs outta a lotta the road trips?”
“And you gotta sell a hell of a lotta shirts to make thirteen large,” the detective smiles wryly, shakes his head, but cold-eyes my rubbernecking the white sheet as I glide past with office-worker anonymity.
Just around the corner from the white sheet, a uniformed sergeant jawbones into an iPhone held a few inches from the side of his head.
“He’s gotta pick one or t’other,” he half-yells at the phone. “It’s gotta be U Lowell or Salem State. I tol’ ‘im I can’t do no outta state schools, not this year, but he’s gotta pick. You gotta taulk to ‘im.”
He stops to take a breath.
I stop and stoop down, with considerable cost in sweaty discomfort, to fake tie my shoelace.
The sergeant interrupts the machine-gun burst of angry words emitting from his iPhone speaker:
“I’n tellin’ ya, I just ain’t got the detail hours. I jus’ can’t do ‘em, not with the ankle like this.”
His free hand stabs the air; the reddened flesh around his eyes narrowing.
“I can’t stand on the goddam thing for more than four hours. An’ them scumbags lawyers from the cruise company is fightin’ me toot’ n’ nail. It aint my fault they didn’t
clean up the water on the basketball court; I don’t give a hot shit if I spilled it or not. It’s still their responsibility!”
The verbal machine-gun out of his speaker starts up again. He pulls a white facecloth from his pocket, wipes his entire face.
I can’t hold out fake tying my shoelaces any longer without looking suspicious.
I stand up; stretch; feel a large drop of sweat run down my back.
“Next yeah, next yeah, if I get the cruise ship money, an’ construction holds, then UConn might be an option. But he’s gotta pick one! I aint picking, you gotta … .”
The machine-gun burst starts up again.
He flashes a this-is-the-shit-I-gotta-deal-with look, holds the phone out toward me, still squawking in machine-gun bursts.
I nod back with fake empathy, walk on, tugging my shirt neck, uselessly.
A tow truck, yanking a silver-grey Civic whines past, cigarette smoke rising from the arm leaning out the window.