There’s no fluffy luck dragon in my version of the neverending story. Just a homeless guy with very bad luck, who no matter what endless misery he goes through at the hands of his fellow street people, will never ever ever ever ever forget my phone number.
This morning I got a tearful call during which he informed me that another guy had stolen the bag containing his new clothes and the painkillers he’d bought from Dis-chem two days ago, and all of which I’d paid for. He begged for help and said the pain from the stab wounds was terrible. I thought about the unused painkillers in my cupboard, left over from my c-section. I thought about having to fork out, yet again, for pills that would probably get stolen or lost. So I decided, screw it, I’ll take him the meds I have, which were probably the same ones Dis-chem gave him (assuming a pharmacist is allowed to dispense Schedule 5 pills – and why is Dis-chem selling a clearly destitute man such expensive medication in the first place?? Are they selling him a huge quantity? What about generics? I have so many questions.)*
*There’s a twist. You’ll have to read to the end.
So I scratched through various cupboards for any warm clothing I could give him – being smaller than him, and female, doesn’t help – and found a few jackets and warm socks. While I was out on the road, my husband asked if I could pick up cream on special from Superspar The Wedge, so I decided to pick up some bread, maas and other items for him at the same time, because I knew he’d want money for food and I am avoiding cash like the plague during, well, the actual plague. I thought about things like how difficult it will be to cook (homeless people generally don’t have access to electricity) and how nutritious the food is. I picked up someone’s abandoned bananas at the fruit stand – they’d save me the trouble of getting them weighed.
As I’m queueing to pay, I call him to let him know I’m buying him food, and he tells me please don’t, rather buy food with him at Debonair’s*, he can’t eat bread. So I abandon the bread and fixings and pick up pap as requested, though I’m not sure how he’ll cook it.
*Huh? The absurdity of wanting pizza when you claim you’re allergic to bread only struck me later.
As I drive around this strange, masked city, I think about a story about the RMS Carpathia I read about on Facebook this morning. The Carpathia was 4 hours from the Titanic when it got the distress signal, and it reached the site of the disaster in 3. It was madness to attempt in the dark, surrounded by icebergs, and yet its captain, crew and passengers didn’t hesitate to do the right thing. They saved more than 700 people. Am I the Carpathia? Is this why I’m doing this, because I know it’s right, even though I’m resentful and gatvol?
Long story short, I drive to Birnam to find him and give him the meds, the clothing and the food. He shows me his stitches – at least this story is true. Just the latest chapter in a gloomy and mostly uninteresting picaresque tale of trying to get someone off the streets and into a life with some kind of future. All of the attempts we’ve made have been thwarted – by police, by petty functionaries, by criminals, by others like the man who’s just stolen his clothes.
He looks terrible. His eyes are bloodshot above his mask, his hair long. I keep my social distance as I leave him the plastic bag of food and the bag of clothing. A security guard from the local laundromat, a woman, watches the drama. What do the others think, the people who lend him phones, watching this random white woman arriving when summoned, swearing under her mask?
He asks for money and I tell him I don’t have cash. I’m short with him, because I’m tired of this, tired of being the walking ATM who picks up the pieces every single time. He is a slow leak in my bank account, in my life, bleeding me dry.
A few moments ago, while writing this post, I got more messages from a strange cell number asking for money – for painkillers and electricity. (Why electricity? I wonder. Where is he staying? The place where his sister is is out near Vosloorus, and when he’s in the Rosebank/ Melrose area he’s either in the streets or in the shelter run by the Catholic church.) I tell him the pills I gave him are good, much better than Adco-Dol, and Adco-Dol is cheap.
Then I take a step back: Adco-Dol??!! That’s what he spent R400 on at Dis-chem?? Adco-Dol costs less than R50 for 40. I googled it. What did he spend R400 on then? I ask. Food, he texts back. This is not what he told me earlier. Then his story changes; now he needs stuff for his son. Please Sarah I need to give the phone back.
So I drove out there for nothing. I used up petrol I’m trying to avoid spending on, braved the traffic, met someone I should be doing my best to avoid, in a pandemic. I might as well not have bothered. I tried to help and it was for nothing.
The amounts he asks for are never small: R300 for taxi fare, R500 for food and electricity. Sometimes every single day. I may live in the suburbs and a cosseted middle class existence, but I do know what things cost, more or less. And I wonder: where is all this money going? Is he back on drugs? He admitted in a radio interview last year that he’d been on drugs, but swore he’d stopped. Whatever the truth is, he is a bottomless pit of need and nothing I do can fill it. Nothing.
I think about his life, how relentlessly, irredeemably terrible it is, and how I’ve wanted so very much to fix it, and how, in the same circumstances I would have given up long ago. How I would have fallen asleep in the street and prayed for death to claim me. Why doesn’t he give up? Why does he keep going? And yes, I am loathe to admit this but I will anyway because hashtag gruesome honesty: part of me hates him, and not a small part either, because I don’t know whether to believe half of what he tells me, and it’s always something, every single fucking day it’s something. Sometimes I hate him enough to wish he would just get this over with and die. It’s a terrible thing, to have thoughts like that. I shouldn’t be writing this.
Please don’t give up on me, he said to me yesterday. I think about all of the money, all of the tearful conversations, the begging and pleading, the guilt, the anguish, the hope and the despair and how it’s never, ever going to be fixed, it’s never going to be fixable and I need to stop fooling myself that it is.
I block the number. Enough. I can’t do this anymore.
discomombulated 