Thinking about trauma I cannot help but recall my years working in Christian street ministry and these next several posts will be drawing from my many experiences and very meaningful encounters with some of the most phenomenal human beings I have ever known. Some I have already blogged about elsewhere on these pages, likely in my Remarkable Persons series, but these encounters bear repeating, if in a rather different format and writing style.
I was thinking today of a conversation I had with an elderly woman over twenty years ago who was present with me during this experiment in Christian community as well as, for a while, being a close and very dear friend. She did have rather a conventional way of viewing life, being "a dumb old bourgeois", as she plaintively accused me one day of calling her (I never called her "dumb" or "old", and despite a nickname one of the local transwomen had given her of "Dopey" she was really in her way quite intelligent.) However, I am not writing today about darling old "Dopey", already mentioned elsewhere on this forum, but of two of the young street people I had been engaging with, Wizard and Spider.
Wizard, if he was still alive, would likely be forty or forty-one now. I think Spider, to my knowledge still alive, is a couple of years older. They were respectively fifteen and seventeen when we first met, living and begging on the street and sleeping in squats. Yes, they were doing drugs, tons of them. Spider also had a sweet little girlfriend, age fifteen at the time, who just a few years later radically turned her life around and began herself to work in a supportive role with street youth and homeless adults. Ironically, when I became homeless seven or eight years later, she was supportive in helping me find housing. What goes around comes around, eh, Gentle Reader?
So I would find them sprawled on the pavement, hair all brightly coloured, green in the case of Wizard, and hot pink for Spider and his girlfriend. Spider wore a massive Mohawk done up in liberty spikes. I would feed them, like pigeons or squirrels, or take them into a local coffee shop and feed them some more while hearing their stories and, in Wizard's case anyway, trying to sift fact from fiction. (He did claim to have nearly beaten to death his father with a lead pipe. Given his size--really little and scrawny--I found it hard to believe).
Dopey insisted that Spider was "less damaged than Wizard." Given her reference point, the dumb old bourgeois values, I questioned her position to her face and suggested that when you really think of it, we are all damaged. It's just that those who are all conventionally screwed up, like Dopey and, in some ways, me (I suppose) can get away with it, get an education, a job, raise a family and not seem in anyway unusual or defective because we all have bought into the same standard of dysfunctional mediocrity. Wizard, of course, did have his problems. He was violent, impulsive, and very angry. He also had acquired a very nasty heroin addiction. He also showed a formidable intelligence and was likely gifted. I am sad to say, that his inability to come to terms with his many issues opened up and sped his downward spiral to a very young death at the age of seventeen from a heroin overdose.
Spider, being only conventionally screwed up, went on to do okay. We ran into each other over ten years later. He was well groomed, healthy looking and smiling as he thanked me for the care and support I had given him while he was on the street. At the time, he was going to school and getting ready, in his late twenties, to take his role in the urban creative class.
I suppose I am happy for him. And for his girlfriend. I still feel a cold, gnawing sadness whenever I think of Wizard, whom I think held the potential to soar so much higher than any of us, and could have, had the help he was needing was available. It wasn't.
The day I learned of his death, I wrote this song:
Another day, another night,
Another life, another death,
We have no say, we've lost our light,
The dreaded strife draws our final breath.
The raven's wing obscures the sun,
His voice is heard throughout the land,
The robin sings that day is done,
We await the news that can help us stand.
Our stifled cries no one can hear,
No one can see scarring our face,
That pride denies the unwept tears,
We must set free for the human race.
The Golden Bird flies into the sun,
Rising far away in an eastern land,
His cry is heard by everyone
Who greets the day at love's command.
Dayspring rising in the east,
Dayspring rising in the south,
Dayspring rising in the west,
Dayspring rising in the north.
Rest in peace, Wizard.
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