Open Door Klinic–1973
The clinic was founded by Jamie Love to fill a need in Anchorage for a place where street people could find some of the services they needed. Jamie went on to work with local and national public interest research groups. The last time I saw him was a few years ago. He was “James Love”, doing a TV standup in front of the Supreme Court building in D.C.
When I arrived, the clinic’s services included first aid for minor injuries, crisis intervention counseling, and information about birth control, sexually transmitted diseases, street drugs and related issues. The majority of our work involved “intake and referral”. We listened to the stories of our callers and then steered them toward other social service agencies where they might find help. There was a suicide prevention hotline in town, so we tried to pass along all the “I’m going to kill myself,” calls to them.
There was no rape crisis center in Anchorage then. We were encouraged to refer rape victims to the police. We didn’t make an issue of it if a woman did not want to report the rape. Our first concern was her emotional well-being. I’m sure that my experience as a rape victim and my willingness to speak openly of it were considerations that helped me get the job, along with my street experience and my instructor-level Red Cross first aid certification. I became the clinic’s semi-official rape counselor. Other staff members would tell their clients to call back on the weekend to talk to me.
I got together with a number of people from women’s groups and the local media while I was working there, and we started the S.T.A.R. (Standing Together Against Rape) hotline. A major force in organizing it was Herb Shaindlin, a TV newsman, on the surface an unlikely character to be involved in such a project. I’m sure that his high visibility brought many people into the project who would not otherwise have become involved. Last time I checked, STAR was still doing its job in Anchorage, a city with one of the highest incidences of rape in the U.S.
At the time of my arrival, Open Door (known to many street people as the O.D. clinic) had responded to another social need, and were allowing people to pitch tents in the yard. Construction had not yet begun on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, but hordes of boomers were already in Anchorage and Fairbanks looking for jobs. When I started working there, we had five tents in the yard. Within a few weeks the yard was full, with over thirty campers living onsite. They used our bathroom and kitchen facilities, and some of them did the janitorial chores that would otherwise have fallen to me and the other counselors.
Few jobs were available, but some of our campers did get work at the fish cannery, sliming salmon. They brought culls back to the clinic to cook, fish too far gone in decomposition to be usable by the cannery. The homeless, penniless yard campers were glad to get a share of the stinky fish. At first, I was happy to eat it, too. Salmon had always been a rare treat in my home, an expensive delicacy. But one can eat only so much half-rotten fish before it begins to pall. The clinic always smelled like rotten fish, and for a decade or so after that summer, I couldn’t stomach salmon.
Soon after I started to work there, Open Door received a federal grant, “pipeline impact” funds allocated to local social service agencies to help us cope with the crowds of boomers and the added problems presented by the boom. Until those funds came, every agency in town was stretched to the breaking point. The clinic staff had faced the reality of having their paychecks bounce two months in a row before I got there. Each time, within a few days, the account had been replenished and the checks made good, but when I got my first paycheck I encountered an unwillingness among the first few merchants where I tried to cash it.
It was Saturday, I desperately needed the money and banks were closed. The volunteer who took over to let me get out for meals was minding the crisis phone, and I was running around downtown Anchorage with a worthless piece of paper, trying to get enough money to buy lunch. I finally found someone, just down the street from the clinic, who was willing to cash my check, but he asked me first, with a wry grin, “Is it good?” He was Doug Meyers, owner of The Source metaphysical bookstore, which shared store space with Doug’s other business, The Black Market, a head shop. Doug became one of my first Anchorage friends. Years later, after he moved to a larger space, I did Tarot readings in his front window, as did a lot of other local readers over the years. The Black Market was raided recently by Anchorage cops. At a time when Anchoragua’s homicide rate is higher than ever, they decided to start enforcing the ordinance against selling drug paraphernalia.
I realize that the word “clinic” might conjure some sterile and businesslike images for my readers, so before going any further, I want to describe the place where I was working. It was a small, old, two-story wood frame house set far back from Sixth Avenue. Behind the building, off the alley, there was barely enough room to park three cars, with a bit more parking space beside the house. A picket fence surrounded the front yard full of tents. The fence was missing a few pickets here and there, and it, as well as the house, could have used a coat of paint.
Inside, rooms were small and ceilings low, the standard in Alaskan houses, for heat conservation. Two rooms and a bath upstairs were tucked under the sloping roof–the social worker’s office on the east and the “consulting room”, a private space for various uses, on the west end, with bath between. Downstairs, the north half of the house had a similar arrangement: two former bedrooms with a bath between. One was the director’s office and the other was the nurse’s office and exam room.
The only functional door to the outside opened into the kitchen. That door was never locked, hence the Open Door. Often when I would be in my office on the phone, I would hear the door open, hear sounds indicating that someone was getting a cup of coffee, then they would leave. The coffeepot was always on. There was usually a small rush on the coffee in the hour after the bars closed, because our location was about midway between the 4th Avenue bars and the low rent housing projects of Fairview. Especially in winter, I could expect an influx of inebriates in the wee smalls. Some of them still recognize me when we run into each other on the street on one of my infrequent trips to the city.
Off the kitchen was the living room of the house, big by Alaskan standards. It was furnished with a couple of sprung sofas, some chairs, a few end tables and a coffee table, supplied with a collection of underground comix, The Mother Earth News, and an assortment of books and magazines that was always in flux due to donations and ripoffs. This was where I had my job interview, and where the staff met each wednesday to share information and vent frustration. Everyone there knew that it was a high-stress, low-pay, thankless job, and we worked as hard at supporting and counseling each other as we did with clients.
Off the living room, extending into the front yard from what had once been the house’s front door was the counselors’ office. The house’s former owner had built an attached mini-greenhouse there, a teeny little solarium with small panes of glass framed in wood. It contained two chairs, a 2-drawer file cabinet and a table just big enough for the phone and the “green binder” which contained all our referral information and relevant phone numbers. With all that in there, and with some difficulty, two people could just barely squeeze in and sit.
I had been there for two or three weekends, the first one supervised by the man I was replacing. I had dealt with some crises of various sorts: overdoses, choking babies (Ever tried teaching the pediatric Heimlich over the phone to a panicked teenage mother? The baby lived.), lovers’ spats (AKA domestic disturbances), and a young woman ready to out her father’s incest.
Walk-ins had ranged from coffee drinkers and the endless line of campers waiting to use the bathroom to a well-known local psycho (paranoid schizophrenia) who stood in a corner and talked to his hand, and a guy with a six-inch gash on his calf from an unfortunate slip of the foot. For that one, I cleaned the wound, applied three butterflies to hold it shut, and told his friend to keep pressure on the bandage on the way to the ER. The ER clerk had to assure the injured man, on the phone, that they would, indeed, suture his wound even if he didn’t have insurance or money.
Staying up forty-eight hours straight on that job, on those summer days, when there was no chance for a nap, was no problem. Sleeping at all, even on days off, was a problem. It didn’t get dark at night. Little kids were out playing in their yards at midnight. Our yardful of street people and hard-luck blue-collar types from the Lower 48 never slept. Some of them weren’t getting enough to eat, either. In the nature of things, there seemed to be more people around with booze or dope to share, than with food. Tempers flared.
I was between phone calls, sitting in my office reading the green binder, familiarizing myself with the social service resources of Southcentral Alaska, when raised voices in the yard caught my attention. I looked up and saw two men facing off. One was Al, a short, wiry, one-legged black Nam vet from Chicago who liked to sit in my office with his prosthesis off, massaging his stump while he vented about the injustices of civilian life and reminisced about the war. He had a knife in his hand and was glaring up, almost nose to nose with the bigger guy looming over him.
The other man was a redneck good ol’boy with an attitude that a lot of people found abrasive. I didn’t see a gun, but I knew that he owned one. I got out there as fast as I could untangle my feet from the chair and shove through the crowd in the kitchen. I had to push through a small cluster of people standing back six feet or so from the disputants. I didn’t even pause. I walked up and put my hand on Al’s wrist, the one with the knife. My other hand, I flattened on good ol’boy’s chest and gave him a shove, sending him back a step.
As soon as the big guy backed off, Al relaxed. When I asked for the knife, he handed it to me. The knot of onlookers moved in and spoke in support of Al’s version of events. I didn’t even have to ask the redneck to strike his tent and git. When one of the onlookers suggested that he should find another place to camp, the man started pulling up pegs.
That was the first adrenaline rush on that job. I did that weekend shift, 48 hours a week, every weekend for a year, with a year’s worth of wednesday morning staff meetings in between. One of the requirements of the job, when I was hired, was that I had to be willing to sign a year’s contract. It’s at least one or two more blogs.
!
Yesterday I got all the flats, bags and bottles back onto my bed, and by the time Greyfox got home from town (dusk, just after sunset) it looked like this: little bottles empty and all lined up to be filled with pills from the big bottles.
While we watched an excellent episode of The West Wing, and a better-than-average Law and Order, I got 3 out of the 5 daily doses bottled up. These are the ones that must be taken on an empty stomach. The two daily packs to be taken with meals remain to be sorted out.
.
