"… I was on BART and this guy came on asking for spare change. He got on right behind me and was standing like there, y’know, "Excuse me, people, I haven’t eaten all day," and no one was really looking at him. Y’know what I mean, everyone was just not looking at him. And he started crying. He just stood up there and cried. And everyone just kept like staring straight ahead."
There’s a pause. I imagine neither girl knows quite what to say next. I look up into the window for them, at their reflections across the train from me. "I mean it’s sad, but" she begins again in a lower, less bright tone. But I’ve stopped listening. I’m on my way home after working a Friday overnight shift, in the cottage of middle-school aged kids. And I need to close my eyes.
Around 3am that morning, a boy who’s been oppositional and defiant with me at the non-public school affiliated with the home came shuffling out of his bedroom half-awake, to ask if I could tuck him in. I tucked him in, and he asked if I could sit in the chair set up closer to the boys’ side of the house. I moved there with the file I was reading, and turned the pages softly and regularly, and in about 20 min. he was able to fall back asleep. "Nighttime can be hard for children who’ve experienced abuse," they told us in new-hire training. This kid has been on both the receiving end of violence from adults, as well as sadly the perpetrating end, acting out his own trauma upon younger children. I listened to him fall asleep, sighing and quieting, snoring like a child (- his roommate already snores like a teenager- ), interrupted, like the sleep of many of these children, by occasional whimpers and unintelligible protests, or tears that the child won’t remember in the morning. I actually had to leave the boys’ hall because a girl called me to their side of the cottage asking, "Is the fire alarm gonna go off?" She was homeless for a while, and this contributes to her many nighttime fears and desire to stay awake. Her file also indicates prenatal drug exposure and developmental delay, so her chronological age belies her actual understanding and emotional, psychological maturity. She was the first student to speak to me on my first day at Edgewood, and within moments she was screaming at me and having to be escorted from the classroom to a seclusion room, because she asked for a pencil and I had to look around and find one because I didn’t know where anything was. I sat in her doorway, turned away from her room– but enough towards her that I could see if anyone in the room moved from their beds . Because well, you just never know.
It was too dark in the girls’ hall to read, so I could only sit there for so long before I had to move back to the bright landing between the two sides of the house, so as not to fall asleep. I don’t know if she ever fell asleep again that night; if she did, it was so restless that she still sounded awake in her bed. All I could do was note it in the cottage’s log, and wonder if her meds were keeping her up, or her thoughts.
Now we’re going into the transbay tube, the train angling downward, the sound of the rails changing slightly, everyone’s ears popping as we all don’t look at each other. I think about the man standing in the aisle on one of these trains, weeping out loud while his ears pop, surrounded by people pretending he wasn’t there, a fluorescent-lit scene rushing through the stale, electrified air of the underwater tube. And pressing against the tunnel, the San Francisco Bay. Fish I guess, plants, lost watches and sandals, dropped eye glasses and ferry tickets. Run-off from the storm drains. Sewage from the north and east.
I wonder if he has any children. I wonder if I, or someone like me, works in their group home, will be tucking them in tonight, and helping them pack tomorrow to move to a new foster family. If they will suddenly disappear from the home, no explanation for the children who’d been living with them, nor for the staff who’d listened to them sleep, to be "rehabilitated" by the California Youth Authority. I had a close friend who I knew for years, who was homeless, who I could never get a straight answer out of as to whether he was a father or not. He used to be a big name in the Longshoremen, as well as in the local Black Panthers. We met when I was eighteen and he a tall, confident, personable widower (back then he said he had no kids) trying to live off of SSI and spare change, sleeping outside to avoid the men’s shelters. He asked me for a piece of bread when I was walking by with a bag from the bakery, on my way to drop it off at my dorm before going to (or probably skipping) class. I stopped and ate a piece with him, because he seemed very friendly and sane and I passed by his spare-change spot every day anyhow. And we just became great friends. He knew me as a fresh-off-the-plane Berkeley transplant, he knew me when I was a queer anarchy riot in boots, he knew me when I was pregnant and freaking out, he knew me as sad, he knew me as a new mother, he knew me as the mother of a child who’d been given a lifelong diagnosis. He knew me as strong. And I knew him as strong. He was a chatty and outgoing man who knew how to care about people, but found himself without many people left around to care for, or to care for him. I knew him as a sick man I would bring banana milkshakes to in the hospital as his diabetes spiraled beyond his control, I knew him as a stooped man frustrated that he had to use a cane, I knew him as a white-haired, sunken-eyed amputee in a wheelchair, hiding cigarettes when he saw me coming because he didn’t want me to know he’d gone back to smoking. I knew him for seven years; for five of those he never asked me for money. He just wanted us to eat together, and talk, or walk the street together a while before I went home and he went wherever he was going that night.
I don’t know where he is now. He just stopped being out on Telegraph Ave. I knew his brother for a little while, and he had a few different stories for where he might have gone, one of them being to jail for drugs. And now I don’t see him around either. But if we never see each other again, I know we were good friends for each other. I once heard him talk about his daughter. But it was towards the end of us knowing each other, when he was sometimes confused. I asked him about it. He said he didn’t know what I was talking about. And maybe he really didn’t.
