Durham and Wilmington, 2002–2003.
The months after David and Qwillpen’ s place were the kind of months that do not organize easily into narrative.
I was couch-surfing — moving from one borrowed space to another, each place temporary by definition, each arrangement sustained by the generosity of people who had other obligations and lives that did not permanently include me. I was aware, always, of not taking up too much space. Of not being the burden that made someone regret having opened a door. That awareness is its own kind of exhaustion. You do not rest when you are perpetually calculating your right to be where you are.
I met Elaine in January, in the cold. She was a friend of a friend — someone from the edges of the social world I had known — and she saw me in the street trying to find my way to the next thing, and she offered me a room. Initially, she said, there was no cost. She had the space. She could see I needed it.
I do not know what to say about that kind of generosity except that it exists, and that when you are in the middle of sustained loss you encounter it in unexpected places, and that it does not replace what was missing but it does sometimes keep you alive long enough to find the next step.
I was working at Eckerd Drugs by mid-2003.
The photo lab was the assignment that worked for me. One or two customers at a time. A contained transaction. A predictable pace. I had been diagnosed with Major Depression and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I was on medication. I was managing — which is not the same as being well but is the condition you aim for when being well is not currently available.
One afternoon I was pulled from the photo lab and placed on the main checkout register.
I understood immediately, in the part of my body that registers danger before the mind can process it, that this was not a good situation. The line extended back into the aisle. There were too many people. The fluorescent lights were too bright, or perhaps I was suddenly too sensitive to them. The sounds were overlapping — the beeping of the register, a child crying somewhere, the low constant noise of a retail environment that had never bothered me before and was now intolerable.
My vision began to blur. Not darkness. Something more specific — the numbers on the ID card sliding sideways when I tried to focus on them, the digits refusing to hold their position under the light.
A young woman stepped up to the register and presented her driver's license for an alcohol purchase.
I looked at it. I tilted it under the light. I looked up for a manager — once, then again. The manager was somewhere else. The line was still there, pressing forward with the collective impatience of people who needed to be somewhere and were not interested in whatever was happening to the person at the register.
I told myself: she would not hand me a false ID.
That was the reasoning available to me in that moment. It was not good reasoning. I knew it was not good reasoning even as I was doing it. But I did not have access to better reasoning, because the part of my brain responsible for careful decision-making was currently occupied with the work of trying to keep me from completely falling apart on the checkout floor of an Eckerd Drugs in Durham, North Carolina.
I let her go.
The manager saw her leave without being clearly verified. The manager called the police.
I tried to explain. I said I had been looking for a manager. I said my vision had gone blurry. I said I had been overwhelmed. The officers listened with the patience of people who have been told many explanations and whose job requires them to respond to what can be documented rather than what can be understood.
There was a citation. The citation required a court appearance.
I missed the court appearance.
I want to be precise about how it happened, because the word missed implies a casualness that was not present. I woke one morning and the knowledge arrived before my eyes were fully open — Court. Today. Oh God — and the panic was total and immediate, the kind that floods the system before reason has a chance to intervene. I spent time trying to figure out what to do. Who to call. Whether there was some way to explain or reschedule or mitigate what was already happening. By the time I understood that there was no good option, the window had closed.
They issued a warrant. When they found me, they brought me in.
It was the first time I had been inside a jail.
I was thirty-seven years old and I had no frame of reference for the physical reality of it — the door, the space, the particular quality of being in a place where leaving is not your choice. That quality is not abstract. It sits in the body in a specific way. The walls are a certain distance. The air is a certain temperature. You understand, in your muscles and your chest and somewhere at the base of your skull, that you cannot leave. It is a knowledge you carry differently than other knowledge.
I called my parents.
I was terrified, and I was calling them because they were my parents, and because some part of me — despite everything Qwillpen's phone call had already confirmed, despite seventeen years of evidence accumulating in one direction — had not yet fully accepted what that call had already told me.
They cannot come. They can't afford it.
I learned later that around this same time they had purchased a new dining room table.
My father was still working then, a highly paid engineer, and my mother also brought in income. They lived in a two-story house. Their children were grown and gone. This was not a household choosing between groceries and rent, or between heat and medicine. They had enough money to arrange a home around the impression they wanted to make.
The table, as I came to understand it, was for entertaining. For having people like Mary Jones and her husband over. For looking like the kind of family, they wanted others to believe they were.
I do not know what that dining room table cost. I have never been able to calculate the exact number. But I know it cost more than the help they had just told me they could not afford.
By then, I had learned something that should not have had to be learned: any caring parent would have been alarmed. Any caring parent would have asked, “What do you need?” Any caring parent would have understood that a son without a home, terrified and begging for help, mattered more than furniture.
But in their house, appearance had a place at the table.
I did not.
I did not stay in jail long. The charge was a misdemeanor. But there was still the matter of the appeal on the harassing phone calls case — the 2001 conviction in Wilmington, the case where John had represented himself with nothing but lies and a fabricated story, where my lawyer had produced no phone records because there were no phone records to produce because no harassing calls had ever been made. I had pursued the appeal on principle, because the conviction was wrong and appealing it was the correct thing to do. The consequence of having done the correct thing was extradition to Wilmington to answer for a failure to appear on that matter.
They transported me in December.
I was shackled and chained. I want to say that without elaboration, because elaboration is not what that image requires. A man in chains, in a transport vehicle, for a misdemeanor, for a case built entirely on the fabricated testimony of the person who had destroyed his career and his livelihood. The metal was cold. The ride was long.
When they released me in Wilmington, I walked out into December.
The daily low temperature in Wilmington in December averages around thirty-nine degrees. That is cold enough, when you have no coat worth having and no place to go, to feel like something the weather is doing to you personally. I walked. I went to the day shelter. It was closed.
I kept walking through streets that had been mine for nearly a decade — streets I had walked with Lynn, streets I had driven to therapy appointments as a therapist at my own private practice office - the office on Chestnut Street - streets that had once meant: this is where you live, this is your city, this is the place your life is happening. Now they were just streets. The city had gone inside for December and left the sidewalks to whoever had no choice about being on them.
I was one of those people now.
At some point I stopped walking. Not because I had arrived somewhere but because something gave way — not my legs, but some internal structure, some remaining architecture of holding it together — and I sat down on the cold ground and dialed 911 because I was afraid of what would happen if I was alone with myself and I could not think of anything else to do.
A police officer came.
He asked me what was happening. I tried to explain — the transport, the release, the shelter being closed, the specific quality of having no place to go in a city where I had once had a home and a life and work that mattered. He listened with a kind of professional calm. Then he handed me a resource sheet — a laminated card listing shelters, food programs, emergency services available to people in crisis in Wilmington, North Carolina.
I took it and looked at it.
The design was mine.
The layout, the format, the specific way the information was organized so that a person in crisis could find what they needed quickly without having to hold complicated structures in their mind — I had made this. In the spring of 1995, as a second-year social work intern at the Southeastern Center for Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities, and Substance Abuse Services, I had sat down with the deliberate intention of creating something useful for people who were homeless, people who were overwhelmed, people who needed help and didn't know where to find it. I had thought carefully about what such a person would need. I had designed the document with that person in mind.
Eight years later, I was that person.
The officer who handed it to me did not know this. He was doing his job, offering a resource, following a protocol. I held the card and looked at it for a long moment and did not say anything about who had made it, because there was nothing useful to say, because the information in that moment was only for me.
I stayed at the downtown shelter that night, on the floor.
The next day I called my father from a payphone and asked for help. I don't remember what he said. I remember the quality of the response — the same quality I had been receiving for years, the sound of someone who was processing the information without being moved by it, who was managing the situation from the safe distance of someone for whom the situation was not also happening to them.
Then it was Christmas.
Jean Arthur Jones called me. He had been part of the poetry community in Wilmington — a friend from the readings, from the years when the Coastline Convention Center was still the center of a life I recognized. He and his mother were going to dinner. He invited me to come.
I had things with me. Not many — I had lost almost everything I had once owned in the years of moving and instability. What remained fit in a bag. And the bag was visible, and the restaurant would be full of families eating Christmas dinner, and I was not willing to walk in carrying it. Not that night. Not into that room full of people with their ordinary lives and their ordinary presents and their ordinary assumption that the person sitting down to dinner with them had somewhere to put his coat.
I hid the bag in the bushes outside the restaurant.
I went in. I sat down with Jean and his mother. I ate Christmas dinner in a warm room with people who had chosen to include me in their evening. I did not explain the bag in the bushes. I did not explain anything. I simply ate, and was warm, and was among people who were glad to see me, and let that be sufficient for a few hours.
When I came back outside, the bag was still there.