Warm corpse of junkie? Actually, not quite.
Warm, yes; body, also a yes.
Ashen face, check; no discernable pulse, afraid so.
But dead? Not quite.
Could the EMTs on the scene revive him by injecting marcaine into his system, a drug that is often nearly instantaneous in its effects, that of re-animating people deep under a heavy spell of opiates?
That would be a no.
In fact when the ambulance left, it left with what I, the staff, and the cops all assumed was a corpse. But it turns out that the scrawny kid who I crawled into the tiny bathroom after, the 21 year-old junkie from Florida whose body amazingly effectively blocked the door from opening, and who I had to spider-man in after, and then bodily pick up so the door could be opened and I could drag him out, was not totally dead. The staff at the hospital managed to revive him.
I don’t know if he’s still alive. I don’t know what state he’s in, vegetative or not. But together we managed to drag him back from whatever oblivion he’d managed to find, whether he wanted us to or not.
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful- I suppose. Maybe a good thing happened. Maybe somewhat thanks to me. Maybe I should feel good. But yesterday I was off my game. To an extent that I need to check my head.
I have a guy crashing with me, a guy who has the usual wheelbarrow full of issues. In the morning before any of this occurred I inadvertently managed to dislodge one of his issues. He and I were discussing all the progress he’s managed to make in the past week, and where he still wants to make progress, when suddenly, in the conversation with me, he started feeling under attack. (He now acknowledges that he was not under attack.) He responded by raising his voice. He also became slightly agitated while adopting an aggrieved tone.
Not in the mood for that, I asked him to relax a bit, just to be cool, but that didn’t help matters at all. As matters continued, I quickly started to respond to them inappropriately- to tell him that he needed to relax, that he needed to calm down.
But that was stupid of me. What did I know of what he needed? I don’t know what he needed just then. He probably felt the need to shout.
But that’s how it went. I started to mirror him, raising my voice as I was telling him to relax, and there came a moment when we were shouting at each other in my kitchen.
I’m not responsible for anyone else. I’m not responsible for the issues that anyone else has, not those of my house-guest, nor those of a kid that takes heroin. I’m just responsible for myself, and if I can’t stop myself from being “screaming guy” in that type of situation, I need to make damn sure that I stay out of situations that bring “screaming guy” out in me. Which might mean that the man crashing at my place needs to go.
But anyway, during the day yesterday, as I slowly came to grips with who I had turned into in the morning, my mood was foul. I brooded. And so I was not on top of my game when one of the staff behind the counter asked me what their liability might be, should someone be shooting up in their bathroom. ”Hey, Dave,” was their opening gambit, “you know about the law. What would our legal liability be, should [yadda yadda yadda...] happen?”
I didn’t get it. I backpedaled, telling them I knew nothing of the law despite teaching the LSAT, and then I wikied the term”legal culpability” for them, while insisting that I was merely a jackass with Google at a coffeeshop- and not to trust my notions.
The kid, please forgive me, just nodded his head distractedly while his eyes strayed continuously to the bathroom. As I wrapped up my spiel of what I guessed “legal culpability” would be in an instance such as this (probably none, unless perhaps nailed on “negligence”), he nodded and said, “That’s great. ’Cause a guy’s been in the bathroom for over half an hour and we think he’s shooting up heroin.”
I was at first thrown by this. I’m at this point so lost in my foul mood, and my feeling that I’d been an idiot drama queen that morning, that I’m having a hard enough time just engaging with abstract legal concepts, let alone concrete issues.
At least I managed to immediately tell him that it was more than a joking matter (for despite a measure of unease in his manner, his bearing indicated amusement as much as anything else) and that at other coffee shops I knew of, people had ODed in the bathrooms and ambulances had been called. His face turned slightly at this, and I went to the bathroom, pounding on the locked door with no response.
So here’s where competing interests got interesting. I hadn’t seen this guy come in, or enter the bathroom; I hadn’t glanced at the clock, nor had I any idea if anyone was in there other than their idea that yeah, maybe he was in there. They thought so, maybe.
I told them they needed to find the key, but they had customers. I told them they needed to call their boss, but they were disinclined to.
The manager/owners were not on the premises, and they did NOT like being disturbed with minutiae when at home. Was someone in the bathroom? The kids weren’t certain. I didn’t know the likelihoods of this and was having trouble parsing them. The kids behind the counter were having difficulty other than seeing big guilt/trouble brewing on any horizon no matter their actions. (Disturb boss at home for nothing-BAD) (Disturb boss at home, admit letting junkie use bathroom-BAD) (let junkie slowly die in bathroom-BAD)
Should I really turn into Rambo-Drama-Queen and kick down the door to an empty restroom? I returned briefly to my seat on the faulty logic of “either a Junkie IS or ISN’T in the bathroom shooting up, and which is really more likely?” But the faces of the kids behind the counter were turning steadily worse.
Do I call the police? I don’t really know what’s going on here, and I’m in a bad mood. I Google the non-emergency number on my phone but don’t call.
At this point, the kids behind the counter can do one thing right, and so are clinging to that- they’re waiting on customers. I tell the senior one he has to call the police or the owner, and after some brow-beating he calls the owner. He reassures me afterward that the owner will be there in two minutes. Pretty quickly I realize that that’s probably not true. He admits that he didn’t tell the owner of his suspicions of a junkie squatter who’s gone radio-silent for going on 45 minutes.
As he stated directly to me later that day, “When I got up this morning, I just wanted to serve coffee to other people. That’s it. Not to deal with matters of life and death.” He’s back to waiting on cutomers but I tell him that he needs to leave it to his 18 year old co-worker and get the door open. I get back on the key issue. I watch as he pulls keys out of drawers, and he grabs one, forces open the door and turns to me and says, “We need to call someone.”
His first thought is the owner. I say call 911. He affirms that he’s about to call the owner, and I say “NO. What YOU do is you call 911.” Then I ran across the street to the liquor store where a cop is always stationed outside on weekend evenings.
But the trouble is, is that I should have taken charge earlier. I should have taken charge more. I should have been on my game. That junkie kid is probably never coming back. If a person doesn’t immediately come out of it, thrashing and clawing, when injected by marcaine and under the influence of opiates, they’re not coming back the same.
Worse still. Dark confession time.
When I’d first become aware of the possibility of some Schrodinger junkie behind the door, and I was trying to weigh probabilities and options, I thought to myself- fuck him. If he IS in there, and it’s been half an hour, and he’s not responding, by the time we figure this out, and by the time EMTs arrive- what good could they do?
And I felt inside a weighing going on of all the times I could attempt to be drama-rambo-hero in my life, and how great a percentage of the time it would all be for shadows and ghosts rather than actual human beings, I had this feeling of fuck him.
That was an effect of the morning. I was a foul person yesterday and in my mood lay the difference to the long term functioning of a kids brain.
His state is not my fault. The state of my mind that I have, and the way by which I lead my life, these are my concerns. I need to be better. I need to be better,
I need to be better.
Oh yeah, I helped, I definitely fucking helped. Objectively I did good things.
But I did not live up to my conception of self.
