Homeless ChroniclesDispatches form a real deal healer by Gerry Sarnat |
El Camino Real – The Real Road – is a transparent Berlin Wall separating two alien and unequal Silicon Valley epicenters. On one side is Stanford University, Stanford Shopping Center and the manicured lawns and woodsy country homes of the moneyed class. On the other, a community primarily without homes – or hope – camps on the pavement of a parking lot, effectively banned by local police from crossing over. Today one captain of industry flits between east and west, working both sides of the street. Viet Nam vet Mark, showing clear signs of psychoactive drugs (at least two of them legal pills I prescribed) wears a scruffy jeans jacket covered with buttons, including, "WARS DON'T DETERMINE WHO'S RIGHT, ONLY WHO'S LEFT" and "DEFEAT BUSH AGAIN." Ever since the City Council passed an anti-panhandling law, he humps a lowlife living convincing others to sign special interest referendum petitions. His addled manic brain spits out a run-on-and-on stream of consciousness: Hey Doc $988 in 1999 was my best day I made $11.50 a signature 100 percent top line ‘cause my validity score was above 72 percent otherwise I'd make $44 per day as a temp but with the bubble bursting there ain't no more of those jobs now Wal-Mart only charges $11.23 for generic Vicodan while Walgreen's charges $28.15 I'm just back from the shopping center where 97 percent skated by without even a glance… Mark hopes for better luck enrolling folks here at the slower-paced homeless center, a drop-in facility that has served the homeless of Palo Alto for almost a quarter century. More than 150 people a day come here to have breakfast, get toiletries or other basic survival gear, make phone calls, pick up mail and get free transportation vouchers. It is here I established and ran a medical clinic for ten years. I’m from the other side: a Harvard/Stanford educated board-certified internist, a past Stanford professor and a CEO. Mark hands
me a tattered filthy sheet of paper. It’s a price list: Sweet Jesus shuffles over to shake hands and hug, belly and feet swollen from diabetes, eyes mostly blind from the sugar, lion's mane and beard gray white from all the years on the street. Wearing his black T-shirt and pants, rose-colored sunglasses and a great big smile, he's the spitting image of a reincarnated Jerry Garcia. When you spend basically 24/7/365 outside, weather dictates mood. This glorious spring morning warms those without indoor housing. Gerard (Baghdad shrapnel-related intractable low back pain) shows up with a boom box, places the speakers twenty feet apart. His girlfriend Linda (insulin-requiring diabetes; the syringes might find other purposes, but at least start out clean) pops in a Marvin Gaye CD. For the first time I've ever heard, music enlivens the scene. Crazy Gail (my prescribed antidepressant and mood stabilizer – plus god knows what else) begins to dance alone. Others follow. An elderly woman named Ruth sways in place while waiting to pick up powdered eggs. I try to arrange salt-free packaged goods from our food closet to minimize her congestive heart failure so she can use her modest Relief Office subsidy to pay rent and avoid homelessness. A neatly dressed anonymous middle-aged bourgeois-looking white couple with matching black roller suitcases (and what’s whispered to be a gambling problem) give each other a whirl before heading out on the bus to Reno for the weekend. Arthur’s a laid off Cisco midlevel manager. Last May when I first met him, I thought he was a volunteer because his chinos and white-collar shirt looked just like mine. He rummages through the clothes closet, unaware of what’s going on around him, mutters something about Lysol to clean his live-in car, asks for a razor and soap. A few older men continue playing chess. Molly strolls by to thank me for delivering her, wondering what we might arrange for the next baby she's carrying. Moll suggests considering Stanford – although we both know she's eighty. |