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Obsessively clean Aziz is just a mess, slouching under the cherry blossom trees far from his usual buddies, slopping ramen into his festering mouth, not having shaved or changed clothes for months. Very slowly I make my way there, pausing to greet longtime friends, helping out when and however I can.  I learn from one of them – a minder/informer of sorts I've treated for high blood pressure – that ‘Ziz quit his AIDs RVTs and Haldol when word got out his nephew was arrested in London as part of last week's foiled terrorist plot.

Raven (nicknamed for the straight flight path his Canadian Football League passes took back in better days) raves about the pain in his tired throwing arm, charms me for Percodan which of course I don't give, each of us playing our parts in the decade-old game that always ends the same. When I hand him a whole Costco bottle with almost five hundred Kirkland Advils left, the huge black man grins and bends down to plant a wet good-bye kiss on my forehead.

My schizophrenic alter ego (we attended the same grade school on the Southside of Chicago) bikes in, a transistor radio hanging from his handlebars blasting techno-trance. Wheels still turning, fingering a nose zit, he accuses me of conspiring with California’s sun to kill him slowly with squamous cell carcinomas – then says, "Just kidding! I've given you such shit over the years, I wanted to thank you for the kindness, I've really needed it ... but damn it, write me a Viagra script before you leave forever; my Johnson doesn't work without it."

A new drop-in center arrival looks exactly like Star Wars’ Jedi Plo Koon.  Fluorescent plastic blue tubes and skinny long probes taped to her head extend from cerebral lobes to jaw and to vents on a nosepiece.  None of which get in the way of her ingesting bag after bag of day-old microwaved popcorn. Her only words to me are, "The Force be with you, brother, though Yoda you're not.  If you're some real deal healer, why you caught in a crummy joint like this?"

Hector, hacking phlegm from a tubercular cough, takes offense and sets her straight quick, "The Doc been here ten years on his own dime.  No one else could care less." And for emphasis, H waves the laminated green computer print-out sign "T H E  D O C T O R  I S  I N” – the same one he so proudly made a decade ago to announce my black bag services  –  inches in front of her exquisite glow-in-the-dark turquoise face.

A barefoot rail-thin hallucinating young gay Asian man I’ve never seen before stays clear of everyone, pretending to read a book while he waits at the end of the line for a bag lunch.

A paranoid young German woman repeats like clockwork whenever she sees me, “Herr Professor, why won't you do my small bowel transplant?”

A community mental health non-worker schmoozes over coffee with staff instead of doing client intakes.  "They'll let me know when they're ready to get helped," he says, over and over, like a mantra.

Maria brings a bottle labeled "True Calm" over to ask if it's a “good vitamin.” I tell her that the ingredients (Mg and niacin) are dangerous for some people. She throws it in the trash; Marcel waits five minutes before he retrieves it, putting the loot in his backpack.

Antoine screams, demanding to know why he can no longer get a free bus token for the hour and a half two-transfer bus trip to San Jose’s Valley Medical Center.

After looking in the left ear of a spaced out young girl complaining of pain, I give her Ampicillin for a straightforward infection that a Stanford medical student evidently treated with Advil yesterday.

A Filipino man lost his Redwood City metal plating job four months ago, then lost his glasses in a Mountain View motel room.  Every since, he’s been sleeping in his car in the Menlo Presbyterian Church parking lot, not able to afford a new pair of glasses without which he can't work. I have no good ideas, but another client overhears and offers that Samaritan House dispenses glasses for free.

Ike pulls me aside, whispers he’s a feral rat just waiting for his April 1 SSI check so he can bet on the horses when Golden Gate Fields opens Saturday.

A new guy rolls over, demands Demerol in Spanglish for war wounds. An oldtimer in the queue tells him, “Doc don't prescribe pain medicine.” Ten minutes later, the guy climbs out of the wheelchair, gets on the back of a motorcycle.  His buddy burns rubber, and they're off.

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