May 16, 2004

• The Felony Flats Follies

  These
  pics from last fall are for illustration, for those of you who didn’t
  see or don’t recall that blog from around my birthday last year. 
  Greyfox has lived in both of these cabins.  The small one on the
  right is where I waded through the litter of empty cans and bottles and
  picked him up out of his puddle of urine after his last binge. 
  The larger one with the dogsled on the roof is the one he moved into
  later last summer, and moved back into this spring.  That
  porta-can has been moved to the other end of the strip, near where he
  usually has his stand, so now we have to walk a little farther to the
  “bathroom”.

  My morning phone call from Greyfox included the news that Mike had
  gotten the clutch on his rolling roadside stand (Roger the maroon Dodge
  Colt Vista) fixed and they have set a tentative date in two weeks for
  him to replace the bad wheel bearing and fix the starter.  This
  means that the entire burden of fetching and schlepping between home
  and town is no longer on Streak Subaru and me.  Probably
  Wednesday, Greyfox plans to come home, bring his laundry and do mine
  while he is doing his.  Yaaay.

  
  One of these three cabins is
  next door to Greyfox’s, which is set back between it and the little
  cabin next to the big barnlike building with the murals on the walls,
  where the office is.  That porta can between the one on the left
  and the middle one is still there, now the closest one to Greyfox’s
  place.

  Friday night there had been a party in and around the house next door
  where I heard the dope-adulteration argument Thursday.  When
  Greyfox set up his stand in his front yard yesterday (instead of down
  the strip in his usual place, since his car was out for repairs at the
  time) he cleaned up a litter of beer cans around the place.  All
  was quiet there most of the day, with the usual suspects apparently
  elsewhere.

  He said that the denizens of Felony Flats outdid themselves last night.  Well, it was
  Saturday night, after all, but what difference that makes to those
  otherwise unemployed dope dealers and ne’er-do-wells, I dunno. 
  Maybe some of their customers have jobs.  After they showed up
  late last night, Greyfox noted one conspicuous sign of comparative
  affluence:  they were passing around a bottle of whiskey, not
  nursing their individual cheap beers.

  The first disturbance of the night was when one of the female members
  of the crowd was dropped off by a male associate in whose company and
  car she’s often seen.  Greyfox’s attention was grabbed by her
  banging on the roof of the guy’s car, screaming, “Give me my fuckin’
  phone… gimme my phone!”  An hour or so later, when Greyfox went
  out to the porta-john (none of those cabins has indoor plumbing), the
  woman was sitting on the front steps of that cabin next door, alone,
  sobbing.

  Then the normal party noises started.  When it reached a crescendo
  sometime after midnight, Greyfox looked out.  The phoneless woman
  who had been sobbing was lying in the gravel in a fetal position and
  another woman was bending over her.  There was a bunch of
  unintelligible whooping and hollering going on, and the usual loud
  thumping music.  He thought the situation looked appropriate for a
  call to 911.  While he was talking to the 911 operator he was told
  that someone else was phoning to report the same incident.

  Shortly thereafter, the alpha male of the group started shouting for
  everyone to shut up and get inside.  Two minutes later the
  troopers showed up.  All was relatively quiet after that until
  about a quarter past four this morning.  Since the 911 operator
  had told Greyfox to let her know if there was any new development next
  door, but the resumption of shouting and cursing, and thumping bass
  from the stereo didn’t seem like an emergency, he tried calling the
  Troopers’ non-emergency number from the phone book.  That got him
  a recording, so he tried 911 again.  They gave him the correct
  number to call.  He’s entered it in his speed-dialer.  He
  said, “You know you live in Felony Flats when you’ve got the State
  Troopers on your speed-dial.”

  To clarify some stuff from yesterday’s blog, Sarah was right, I do know
  that tears let us excrete the toxic chemicals of stress.  The
  chemistry of emotional tears is different from that of “mechanical”
  tears induced by wind or foreign matter in the eyes.  I was not
  apologizing for weeping, but for my discomfort with doing it openly, my
  vanity and the persistence of my parental programming.  The
  programming I received in group therapy, the Reality Attack Therapy
  provided by the junkies of the Family House heroin rehab program, has
  made me wary about and uncomfortable with apologizing, so every time I
  apologize I feel it necessary to apologize for it.  As my friends
  the junkies said (in addition to “Once a junkie, always a junkie” and a
  lot of other wisdom), “Sorry don’t cut no ice.”  But one’s
  earliest parental programming does not extinguish easily.  I was
  taught the three sets of “magic words” (please, thank you, and I’m
  sorry) as soon as I could talk.  I can say them in six
  languages.  One of the best signs of my increasing awareness, of
  my “enlightenment” if you will, is that now when I say them, I mean
  them.

  Doug just surprised me by coming out of his bedroom.  He’d gone
  down about four hours ago, around the time I got up.  He said a
  disturbing dream woke him.  He and I were in a hospital where I
  was functioning in an unoffical capacity doing psychic healing and
  comforting patients.  He was there helping out with some sort of
  youth basketball project.  The disturbing thing was that a
  mysterious heavy-set man was going around “sabotaging”, injuring
  patients.  One of his actions was to swab the cheeks of a patient
  with caustic chemicals.

  We talked about the dream a while and he has gone back to sleep. 
  What makes it interesting to me is that I’ve been thinking for some
  time about working with terminal patients, either in a hospital or a
  hospice setting.  I haven’t mentioned it to Doug or anyone (and I
  don’t often have to speak my mind for him to know it), but what I’d
  like to do is read the Bardos, the Book of the Dead, to those who are
  willing to hear.  Hospitals are focused on life support and
  resuscitation, and hospices are mostly interested in reconciling people
  to the end of life, making their bodies comfortable and helping them
  resolve relationship issues.  I’d like to get in there and say
  that death is not the end.  I don’t think anyone was ever harmed
  by the words, “Go to the Light, the pure White Light.”
  

  • 4:54 pm
  • 5 Comments