Monthly Archives: August 2016

Police Blotter Haiku: Back from County

For your abbreviated reading pleasure, here are a few more police blotter haiku.  A year has passed since I’ve published new ones.  Life’s been a little hard lately.  But every one in awhile I’m inspired to spit a few out.  I almost have enough for another book.  Almost.

Rest assured that America has not changed; and in newspapers large and small, harried city editors continue to publish  three-line crime stories about people who are neither too good nor too bad but simply, at a key moment, out of touch with good sense and impulse control.  Enjoy.

“So, what shall we eat?”
It seems a harmless question.
Yet police were called.

I’m fine, she told them
And ran down the street laughing
in her underwear.

Go home, sleep it off,
the cop said, but hours later
their paths crossed again.

Too many shrooms, man.
He needs some help, plus help for
his spectral girlfriend.

As he ran the reds,
they noticed from the sidewalk
that his eyes were closed.

He can’t find his wife!
And his wife is fine with that,
the police would learn.

At the wheel, asleep.
As a cold rain bathes her through
the open sunroof.

Sex on the white line.
While their bicycles rest by
the side of the road.

He and his vodka
watched movies all day at the
Elvis Cinema

Inside Laundry Land
a hand scrawls swear words backwards
‘cross the fogged windows.

 

 

Jeremiah

It’s a cool Thursday evening, and I’m standing in the parking lot outside St. Bob the Informal’s Presbymethertarian Church.  Inside, my wife Rhumba hosts a meeting of her knitting group.

St. Bob’s is well off the street.  Most of the campus lays beyond the view of passing motorists; and the parking lot is barely lit at night. I like to hover outside as the ladies come and go.  Just in case.

I also put out the tea and cookies.  I’m versatile.

Churches aren’t really public spaces, but they stand empty most of the time and as long as your dog isn’t digging in the geraniums or you’re not obviously casing the joint, we don’t say much.  A few Thursdays ago I had to gently persuade a homeless man to move his camp away from the front door so that we could enter.  No sir, the building’s not deserted, it just looks that way sometimes.  St. Bob’s is a small church getting smaller, as old members die and new ones fail to materialize.

But tonight, as usual, all is well.  A while ago, an old man wandered onto the campus and disappeared behind the parish hall.  But I’m not worried.  He had a newspaper under one arm, and there’s a little concrete patio back there with a chair or two.  It catches light and warmth from the setting sun. Not a bad place for an old man with cold bones to sit for a bit, and read.

The old man reappears from behind the parish hall and walks toward to the rear of the campus.  He sees me and says, a little defensively, “I like to come back here and check how the construction’s going.”

“And we’re very happy for you to do that,” I answer.

“The construction” fills the whole back half of the campus. Where once stretched a derelict field of weeds, now stands a substantial building, or what will soon be one.  The roof’s not on yet, but the framing stands tall.  And it’s big; two stories high, easily 100 yards wide.  They’ll have it buttoned up in a few weeks, and ready for business by spring.

“What’s it gonna be?” the old man asked.  His face was all vertical creases, like the shell of a walnut with human features superimposed.

“Subsidized senior citizen housing,” I told him.  He nodded.  “Forty-six units. You could apply, maybe, if you qualify.”

Just briefly: I live in a small, beautiful city that’s become too desirable. Investors from near and far swoop in to scoop up income properties.  Enrollment at the local university is up by 1000 students, and there’s little room for new housing.

Wealthy folks from Silicon Valley are buying second homes near the beach — which then stand empty 29 days a month.  We have a housing crisis, yet whole neighborhoods show but one or two lights after dark.

And the rents are crushing, and if you lose your rental you may never get another one.   Meanwhile, where do regular folks live?  And how can the town live, if regular folks cannot?

So St. Bob’s teamed up with a nonprofit housing agency and, after years of bureaucratic wrangling, put together the senior housing project. St. Bob’s gets a small chunk of change for a 99 year lease, and the nonprofit handles the rest.  Upwards of 50 seniors will live there. In what was once a messy wasteland, there’ll be lights and life and activity at all hours.

And St. Bob’s campus will no longer be dark and forbidding at night. To me that’s better than the money.  The money is welcome, but simply makes St. Bob’s a shrinking congregation with a nice bank balance.  Young families are the lifeblood of a church; and most of ours moved elsewhere years ago.

“The rent’s not all that cheap,” I tell the old man.  “Just cheap by local standards.  You know, you’ve got investors buying all the apartments and doubling the rents  And then everybody has to move out. Investors don’t care, it’s all about the money to those guys.”

The old man nods.  “You know what’s going to happen to them,” he told me. “They’re going to go to the court house, the big house, and the big man there, he won’t mess around with them, he won’t take any crap from them, because you don’t mess around with the big man, no you don’t.

“And the big man, at the big house, the court house, he’ll bring them down low.  Real low. Lower than the street. Lower than the ground.  Low, low, Low. And all their properties will be given to others.  You don’t mess with the big man, at the big house.  He’s tough, he’ll take them all down. Low, lower than the ground, and….”

And he repeats himself, and repeats himself again, and suddenly he is chanting to the air.  Over and over: the big man, the court house, the big house, the mighty brought down low, low, low.

Later I’d tell all this to my Rhumba, who knows three or four hundred thousand things about religion.  And she laughed and said, “You met Jeremiah!”

Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet who couldn’t keep his mouth shut, even though he asked his God to shut it for him.  And God wouldn’t.  Jeremiah, who for decades looks the people of Judea in the face and condemned them for their sins. He condemned them for turning to idols, to sacrificing their children to Baal, for ignoring the wisdom of a demanding God for the selfish good times of a pagan god.

God would send the Babylonians to bring the Judeans low, Jeremiah preached endlessly.  He frightened the people.  He made uncertain the soldiers.  He enraged the priests.  The powerful put him in the stocks.  They threw him down a well.  They sent the establishment prophets to discredit him. They imprisoned him. But he couldn’t stop preaching.  He wanted to, but his God wouldn’t let him.

Now, when random strangers like the old man rant at me on the street, I never interrupt.  Listening isn’t what they want to do.  I just move on. But I stood and listened to the old man carry on and on, about the Big Man and the court house and the mighty brought low.  I liked his message.  I agreed with it.

But he does go on, that old man; and the darkness comes on, and I haven’t brought my coat.  It seems to me, by his body language and the way he shuffles his feet, that the old man himself wants to leave.  But he can’t. He can’t stop talking.

So finally I say, “Look, it’s getting a little cold, so I’d better go back inside.”

And he ends his rant at once. “Don’t get cold, don’t get cold,” he says, shaking his head.  “Nossir, don’t get cold.” He turns and walked back to the street, paper under his arm.

“You neither.  Stay warm!”

Now, old Jeremiah’s dire predictions landed him in jail.  But they came true.  The Babylonians did come. They destroyed the kingdom of Judea forever and sent its people, or many of them, into exile — where they mended their ways and made a new, righteous form of Judaism that lasts to this day.  And birthed other great religions.

And lo, the Babylonians were very kind to Jeremiah.  You tend to approve of people who’ve told others that God sent you.  They set Jeremiah up in a comfortable home, and let him be.  His preaching done, Jeremiah set to writing down his teachings.

It seems to me this year that Jeremiahs are popping up everywhere.  Things are wrong, they say.  The old truths are now lies, they say.  And unlike in old Judea, people are beginning to listen.

A Jeremiah ran for president.  He did not win, but he carries on, as do his followers: some still walk behind him, while other find new paths.  Right here, right now, plans are under way to breach the walls of old Washington: once the center of justice, now a place of false prophets where lies are called “spin,” and evil gets a free pass.

And the battle may be long, but the Jeremiahs won’t stop.  They can’t. And someday, down at the court house, the big house, the Big Man will deal with the mighty.  You don’t mess with the Big Man, because he’ll bring you down low, lower, lower than the ground.  And your property will be given to others.

I don’t know who the Big Man is.  Justice, perhaps.  Perhaps, just us.  Perhaps we are our own Babylonians, waiting for Jeremiah to summon us.  But whatever happens, in the end, I hope that my old Jeremiah gets a nice one-bedroom apartment out of it. With a sit-down shower.

The Easy Way Out

I ran into Ruth the other day — not literally, thank God because she’s a parking control officer, and that would be awkward. I’ve known her since I moved here 30 years ago; she was the only teller at the Bank of America who knew the answer to anything. When they fired all the full-time tellers and replaced them with college students, Ruth joined the meter maids and I got another bank.

I see her every six months or so, cruising the streets in her Interceptor III ticket bomber. She always pulls over when I wave. But it seemed, the other day, that more time had passed than usual.

“How ya been?”

“Oh fine,” she said. “I dropped dead last year.”

And not at home in front of the computer or at the dinner table, either. No, Ruth dropped dead at the 12K mark of the Bay to Breakers, the San Francisco clothing-optional fun run for 50,000. One of her coronary arteries called a strike, and Ruth hit the ground like a stone.

But if you’ve got to have a coronary, Bay to Breakers is a great place to have one. Few of the runners are professional, much less in good shape or sober, and so paramedics lay in wait on every corner. They had Ruth in hand before she even bounced. Which was good, because seven full minutes passed before they could jump-start her heart She remembers watching the ambulance and its motorcycle escort drive away with her body in it. It was one of those memories that you’re not supposed to have.

Anyway, she looks really good for a former corpse, and she’s running again. She’ll retire one of these days. One of these days. Yep. One of these days.

The thing is, that a lot of people hope to die like Ruth. They just want to go till they stop: one minute, all systems go: then, shutdown; lights out; oblivion. The darkness. No muss, no fuss, no bother. Even more so if they’re broke. I’ll work till I die, they say. I’ve got no choice, so that’s what I’ll do. They want to die like Ruth.

Only, Ruth didn’t stay dead. Remember? The medics pulled her back in time. And she’s alive and well.

But what if she was alive but not well? Mobility impaired, perhaps even brain damaged. Maybe a stroke? Laid up for life? Who’d have taken care of her?

That is, by the way, an awfully popular question these days.

Everywhere I look, people of my age group, in their 50s and 60s, struggle to take care of elderly parents. The competent adults who raised them are now weak, unable to take care of themselves or manage their own affairs alone. Their aging children must see them through the hellmaze of modern medicine and make the decisions that their parents can no longer make or understand. As medicine keeps them alive, but not well.

Many of these struggling children, the ones that I know, have no children of their own. And to a man, and a woman, they see what their parents are going through, and have become, and wonder, who’s going to take care of ME? Who’s going to do this for ME? Because there is no one, no relative, whose duty that it will be. And their own years of decline loom in the middle distance.

My office mate has dealt with this for over a year now. I’ve heard her end of many calls. Endless arrangements for treatment. Loss of a father to Alzheimers. Endless, fruitless discussions on the phone with an angry distressed, 88-year-old mother who wants out, out, OUT of rehab and back to assisted living, even though she’s just had a stroke and is nowhere near ready. She’s be fine on her own, she’s sure. Meanwhile, all her complaints about life in rehab are completely true. Even when rehab’s not evil — usually, they try — it sucks.

And her daughter, my office mate, calms her down, for the nth time and all is well. Until tonight or tomorrow when she calls again and wants out, out OUT, right now! Come and get me! And my co-workers is in her 50s with little money and lives alone in a mobile home; and when her body and mind start to fail her, her only support will be a younger brother who can’t stand the sight of illness. And she asks herself, “Who’s going to take care of ME?”

Rhumba and I ask ourselves the same question. She’s just out of hospital and rehab, where we both had our hands full watching out for her. We made sense of the bureaucratic tangles. We turned back the nurses who kept bringing drugs she was allergic to, even after the orders had been changed. I put on gloves and helped the nurses treat her. I roamed the halls at night hunting down the staff who’d promised to change her dressings but were nowhere to be found. And, sometimes, roamed them with a box of fresh-baked cookies from the bakery down the road, just for the good PR: “Look, nurses, COOKIES. Courtesy of that kindly woman in Room 35, Bed B who so appreciates your attention.” I’ve got no shame at all.

And there was that horrible day when the rehab staff dispatched us by handi-cab to a long-awaited specialist appointment, and gave Rhumba a malfunctioning wheelchair to ride in. They fiddled with it a bit, gave up, and took us to the front door. And once we were outside the nurses turned back. We were on our own. Apparently, by policy and law.

One of Rhumba’s legs burned like fire; had been doing so for days thanks to an allergic reaction to blood thinners. I tried to roll her chair out to the street where the cab waited, but she wailed in pain every time that her foot slipped from the wobbly footrests and hit the ground. I dropped to my knees in front of the chair, bear-hugged the damned thing’s loose parts back into position and literally knee-walked it, and Rhumba, all the way to the cab. We had to get to that appointment. The specialist might be able to stop Rhumba’s pain. I would have done anything.

And yes, the specialist did treat her wounds, and her pain. Though when we got to his facility, we had to get Rhumba’s bad chair another 100 yards from the cab, through a hospital, to his office. Again, with no one authorized to help us. I’ll spare you that part of the ordeal. It was absurd and awful. It was modern medical bureaucracy at its worst.

So tell me; fifteen years from now, when we’re both a lot older and creakier, can we do all that again? Can we defend ourselves again? And if not — as I suspect — who’s going to take care of US?

“Maybe we should band together,” Rhumba’s boss said to me. She’s our age. She’s just seen her husband through a bad patch in a bad hospital; and if not for her intervention he might be dead now. “If there’s no one else to look after us, maybe we can look after one another.

“It’s an attractive thought, and I’ve heard it from others. There are volunteers who look after foster kids and make sure that they don’t get eaten by the welfare system. This would be the same. Is it workable? I have no idea. Is there an alternative besides, “trust the system?” I haven’t seen one, outside of never getting sick and then dying quickly.

God. Old age is supposed to be the time to ramp down, not ramp up. But the times are different now. More will be asked of us. Of that, I’m sure. Maybe we’ll be better for it. Or broken by it. I don’t know.

What I do know is that, hoping to die like Ruth, quickly and simply, isn’t enough. Old age and death is a process, a long one. Modern medicine makes it even longer, and also more difficult. It might be simpler to die quickly, but most of us will fade gradually. And we will need help along the way. It is past time to start thinking about that help, and how to get it to everyone.

Somebody’s got to take care of all of us. Even if that someone is us.