Poem for the Walking Dead

I. Repulsion

They slobber past you with their bodies, at once aimless and committed, a sort of slow-motion resolve in that stumbling post-COVID gait we now know so well. Never before have they existed in such casual profusion. There were more closed doors back then, places to hide, institutions to rely on. Now things are different. As long as drugs are more accessible than solutions, people will medicate their problems with the former.

You can kill yourself at Third and Pike now for eighty-eight cents.

It is easy for we the sober-minded to laugh, to marvel at the stupidity of strangers. Look at them, sagging their pants below the knees, fishing through litter, pawing at the cement not for scraps of food but for the smallest, most unlikely hint of a fix. Here is one sitting in a pool of his own excrement, another huffing down stolen ice cream to rebalance his blood sugar, snot glazing across his mustache and lips, feeding into blood from open sores. “They pay money to look like that,” a scruffy but drug-free passenger on my bus chuckled as he watched them outside, incredulously. “They actually pay money to fall asleep! Idiots. Dumbasses!”

Look at their muscles collapsing from the hips up, a new generation that stands with head and knees at equal height, legs bent and bending lower, keeling over from a high finally, reaching for the earth’s opposite horizon. The comical walk and Dickensian squalor of their clothes and skin, almost a dress code by this point; we call them lost, these haphazard solipsists, slinking ever onward in their knock-kneed gait.

They are so easy to ridicule. 

II. However

There is always a however, and never moreso than here. We the Sober can involve the future in our decision-making. We can consider others. The addicted brain does not. Its comprehension of the future only extends as far as acquiring its next fix: an hour maybe, or less than that. Life is measured in blinkered minutes. Only in such a tunnel can the decisions we see out here begin to make sense.

Do you know what an accomplishment it is, to resist a pill? To flush your supply down the toilet, say no, ask for help?  These are actions harder and more worthy of our praise than winning the Nobel Prize. The trepidatious tender courage needed moves me more than those who win elections, run companies, more than lofty resumes and mantles stuffed with trophies. Is an achievement somehow less, because it goes unrecorded? Particularly with what I know about addiction’s effect on brain chemistry, I bow to the person who finds it in themselves to refuse a drink, pill, straw, needle, powder, patch. 

These are the silent accomplishments. Imagine regarding your strung-out self in a bathroom mirror (at a gas station, at a mansion), and seeing those gaunt eyes staring back, as you remember who you thought you could one day be. Not this. You remember you can still start over, and then you do so. You act.

That is the battle these people are trying to win. It is a shameful and humiliating battle but they fight it in public, ignominiously, while the rest of us shake our heads and judge. These people deserve pity, not ridicule.

“They” were all you and me once, children with prospects and dreams, things that made them excited and sad and hopeful. They did not know they would one day start fights over nothing, soil themselves in public, walk into the road not caring if they live or die. 

They did not know the halfway point of their lives when it whizzed right past them.

III. Personally

I attended elementary and junior high school with a girl named Alana. Being the same age we shared many classes, sitting next to each other in Math and Language Arts, and again in Social Studies. She was pretty and kind and smart enough. Many years later she'd board my 3/4 with her Shih Tzu in tow, surprised when I remembered her full name. She recalled mine as well. We trundled down Third Avenue in good spirits. She was searching her cluttered bags for her phone, thrilled when it began ringing. “Bye, Nathan Vass!” she called out as she left. 

Everything seemed fine.

Then I would see her intermittently, across several years. A decline was underway. I began seeing her in the unforgiving back alleys of the city, too much makeup now, a puffy jacket and flip-flops in cold weather; with different men each time. Shame crept into her gaze, and then the rest. The only constant was her smile to me and the dog, always her faithful Shih Tzu accompanying her. 
“I'm glad he's always at your side,” I'd say.
“We've been through a lot together,” she'd reply.
Alana would die before either of us reached twenty-five. Alana McCrawley from Math class and Language Arts, who remembered my full name. Her dog would end up outliving her.

What was her final thought?

I stop for the people at 12th and Jackson. I don't pass them up, and they know that. I want them to know that. Somebody there will always wave if they want me, almost frantically, because they’re so used to being passed by. I respond with my own wave. Some of my favorite passengers out here. “Aw, it's Nathan,” one said recently, with happy relief. “He's not gonna fuck with us!” I want them to know my bus is a little different. This is the guy who cares, who doesn't look down on us. That's what I'm trying for.

Some of them will make it out and live to tell me about it. Some already have. Others of us don't know that we'll unravel, a paycheck or a bottle of pain medication away from Western society's most slippery slope. Maybe it'll be us one day, stumbling against glass and concrete dirt, another slipshod pants-sagging drifter in search of joy, meaning, conscience, belonging… wondering where it all went, baffled by how elusive those things are now. Who among them used to have it easy? Who among them once snickered, looking outside, really believing themselves as they laughed, that'll never be me.

Do not be too quick to sneer. The story is not over yet.

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More on this whole situation here: State of the (Seattle) Union