The Man in the Alley

The Man in the Alley

Another morning buzzed to life and the same cast of characters stood ready to play their part on the grand stage of Third Street in Seattle between Pike and Pine. A frail dredge of a man stumbled out of an adjacent alley, squinting through a light drizzle misting the buses as they bustled their passengers up and down the avenue. He cleared the ringing in his eardrums from the blaring ambulance siren that awakened him from a restless slumber of fears and delusions. His joints ached from the cardboard covered concrete bed where he slept. A filthy, wet wool winter hat covered his oily salt and pepper hair. His parched face sagged from a pronounced bone structure showcasing yellowed and pitted teeth which stuck to his dehydrated lips. He last experienced proper food three days past. Vomit stained the front of a damp, ragged brown sweater given to him at a shelter, emanating the distinct odor of stale whiskey and foul bile from a failing liver. His ragged khaki pants, also gifts from the homeless shelter, hid his spindly legs and reeked of stale urine. He did not own socks and his shoes only resembled foot covers in a sense that they adorned his feet, but two sizes too big, and torn, with the soles detached from the toes to his arch flopping when he walked. The blisters wore his meatless feet to the bone, yet he barely bled as the scabbing from repeated scraping hardened his skin to a mix of cartilage, pus and callous, preventing blood and oxygenation. He raised a shaky, blood spotted hand to wipe the morning rain from his face and tried to focus his bloodshot eyes.

The first instinct entered his being. The same initial conscious thought invaded his tattered mind each new day, spanning backwards through the littered minefield of his recent existence. How would he get high or drunk?

He remembered a dream a few nights back, or was it a month back? He did not know. Time had since stopped and became as meaningless as his existence. In his dream, people existed who didn’t live in an endless cycle of horror. They worked and had family and careers. They smiled upon each new day and exuded gratitude for the purpose gifted to them. The savage ravage of constant mental obsession to escape reality while squeezing every ounce out of the mind-bending tilt of whatever drug he could ingest never occurred to the normal population. He tried to recall being one of them, but the fog of extensive substance abuse blurred memories into a series of hallucinations.

In between the rancor for the normal, privileged folk, he again tried asking himself if he ever experienced that lifestyle. He was not sure. With complete assurance of the problems God laid at his feet, a bit of drinking and drugging seemed reasonable enough. Over time, he became certain it wasn’t his fault life dealt him this shitty hand. He possessed vague memories of where he blamed the government for his lack of intelligence and inability to succeed. When employed, he worked hard to please his boss, but things never worked out.

The struggle to recall former realities gnawed at him. Was it last year? Maybe. If he remembered correctly, his boss fired him because he would not allow him to come to work at 11:00, after sleeping off a normal hangover.

He stood for a moment at the alley’s edge, watching people clamor about the ant farm called a city, as oblivious to him as he was to them, pondering the word obsession. The word meant nothing to him. He knew he needed a high to live and survive in this tormented world, which wronged him at every turn. No other solution existed for the grinding mental pain and conflict.

The acute pain that dominated his emotional existence only muted with the practice of substance abuse. This endless cycle of hurt ate his soul and mocked him far back into what he considered a normal and happy childhood. The source evaded him, much like his memories of having a regular life.

Was his usage an obsession? He thought not, for others needed air to breathe and water to drink. Although he must admit he felt something amiss today, obsession or no obsession. The day’s dim light refracted through the raindrops, causing a faint blurring effect on the surrounding scenery, like apparitions unable to hear him speak or notice his presence. Normal, as working people would step over and around avoiding the society’s less desirable.

He remembered a woman, slight in build, dark hair flowing over her right shoulder, almond-shaped face red with anguish, yelling at him, crying and begging him to stop. She kept asking him how he could do this again, after he promised he wouldn’t. In his mind’s eye, she posed this question a thousand times, replaying the scene until the man’s head split in two, the pain of the query searing his soul.

“Stop what?”

He asked with childlike innocence sitting at an ornate oak dining room table in a sunlit room.

He noticed his facial features in this vision differed from the face he mirrored today. The full and healthy skin tone of his younger self was only marred with the slight reddening of good cheer. He wore a stained holiday tie, loosened at the neck. Lipstick smudged his collar. He faintly remembered this was nothing; a coworker at an office party gave him a quick kiss. The woman in this dream, or nightmare, kept accusing him of ruining everything and had the nerve to call him a drunk. He felt a rush of self-righteous anger at this thought, so he buried it in his subconscious.

The rain worsened, and he wanted a cigarette and a sip of whiskey. The voices and imagery in his head moved in fast forward, or fast backward. He couldn’t tell, and he needed a drug to make it stop.

A glaring set of fluorescent lights blinded his eyes as he gasped for air, searing his lungs as if he had never drawn a breath. Men and women in white bustled about, their voices in a muffled din. The man in white said,

“We saved him. He is alive again.”

A woman in a pristine white outfit asked why they bothered to continue saving him. He would return in the same condition next week. She shared the same sad eyes as the women who called him a drunk. He hated himself and wished himself dead. He wasted these people’s time. They should let him die. A just end to show everyone once and for all, he didn’t matter. In the past, when this happened, he would find himself sitting in front of the downtown hospital in a wheelchair, where the nurse dumped him after his treatment. He would be drunk again within an hour of leaving. These visions never ended, even on awakening.

Awakening. An odd term, to be sure. Had he ever been awakened? Life ran together as a seamless nightmare, moving from the horrors of each scene playing for his lone enjoyment in the movie of his mind.

 In scanning Third Street, he saw the usual suspects: the dealers, the users and the working-class people waiting for buses. The buses lynch-pinned the operation. This is how the drugs arrived. The drugs moved from the bus runners to sellers to users in quick succession, so the dealers only maintained possession minutes at a time. But for the madness of this economic cycle to operate, it became necessary for endless loitering.

The utilization of public transportation as a drug distribution system shocked him, because the police were often seen observing but did nothing. And while the officers were not involved in the dealing of death and the ensuing mayhem addiction forced into society, their inaction made them complicit. Their only observed action was the writing of an occasional jaywalking ticket to an office worker. It seemed the mayor was far more concerned with honest citizens getting hit by the number seven bus than fixing the scourge tormenting the city. The constant loitering led to futile and pointless conversations about power projection, control and the endless ego and self-importance of the dealers and the relative pecking order of the users.

This dreary morning, two regular dealers argued over the same mundane bullshit they had debated for three years running. Pride and street cred flared up as one dealer defended one of his whores right in front of her. The woman’s rounded belly on an otherwise frail and sick body showed pregnancy, while her teeth rotted in disrepair from significant methamphetamine abuse. Her aura teemed with a sense of controlled insanity fueled by her man sticking up for her. The bravado of forgiveness masked her terror stemming from getting out of line the prior evening. She deserved the beating for not having his beer cold when he got home from work. A job standing on Third Street dealing death.

The drug user community loitering in front of the bodega also repeated the same conversation they had shared for endless years running. Somebody screwed them out of a fix and they would pay for the oversight. The government shafted them because they considered taking away their welfare checks if they kept spending them on drugs, alcohol, cigarettes and lottery tickets. They possessed a lot of nerve telling them how they could spend their money! Did everyone hear Tanya entered the rehab hospital again? Tanya, she is a trooper. Not sure why she keeps trying to quit, everyone knows all of us are locked into this fate and lifestyle. Nobody escapes.

The man approached his two closest friends to bum a cigarette, and considered trying to finagle a hit of meth or crack, or even a small sip of cheap whiskey. His nerves frayed and the din of city life this morning split his already fragile headspace. He could not shake the dread of something awry. He approached his friends and noticed Jerry held a bottle of Jack Daniels in a paper bag. Super nice, the premium stuff. Hopefully, he would share.

Jerry took an oversized swig straight from the bottle and looked at Kelly through red, swollen eyes already glazed from the sauce.

He said,

“It’s a shame about Toby, choking on his own vomit last night and dyin’. They found him in the alley this morning. The paramedics tried to save him. I took his $15 secret stash before they arrived; figured we could celebrate and toast him. He would have wanted it that way.”

Kelly added while taking a hit off his pipe.

“Yeah, dumbass should know not to drink and fall asleep where he can’t puke out freely. I told him last night not to mix the crack and the booze, but he wouldn’t listen.”

Jerry raised the bottle for another swig.

“Well, that’ll never happen to us. We are much smarter than him. I knew the rich boy would never make it on the street.”

He approached his friends in a fog, the refraction of the rain on the city life getting progressively worse, making everything seem distant. The city bustle of the buses racing and the throngs of people heading to work became muffled and distant, winding away from his senses. The man sensed he could no longer smell. He reached into his pocket and in a final instant of clarity realized two things: He was missing $15, and his name was Toby.