A Man Died Yesterday

A Man Died Yesterday
By
Robert Stanford


A man died yesterday. He died along the banks of my favorite creek. Nameless, faceless and labeled a transient, a man died of a drug overdose. I was not there that day or that night.

There was a telephone call made yesterday. It was made from a payphone located at a liquor store on a corner point. A frantic call. An anonymous call made in a futile attempt to rescue what may have been a fellow junky. Too little and much too late.

There was a short story in the paper today. So short, the story did not even have an author. It was as though it was just a little filler news. Preponderance. An insurance policy against a possible angry phone call. Why report anything at all? I am the only one that would have cared anyway, and I wouldn’t call the paper.

The police said he was probably a transient. I thought to myself, “of course…a transient. But from where?” It was as if I had been given an excuse as a gift.

An excuse to not blame myself.

An excuse to not think that I could have done something this time.

An excuse to not wonder if I knew the man that had been killed by a hypodermic needle full of deadly poison.

A gift to be coupled by a coincidental article I had written a few days before, that confessed my conflict to not dismiss individuals such as this man as nothing more than garbage – their problems leaving no one to blame, but themselves – repulsive and culpable. An article that confessed a spiritual struggle to remember that they were as important as anyone else in the eyes of God.

It may rain this evening. I won’t be able to do anything about that, nor the transients that will not make it to the mission in time for shelter because they have something more important to do - shoot up meth and heroin or keep that alcohol transfusion coursing through their veins to the point of numbness and possible hypothermia. Men and women. Every single one of them is just as important as my best friends in the eyes of God. But for the life of me, I cannot stay constantly mindful of this – not all the time – I just cannot. I become so frustrated with their blindness. With their refusal to look into a mirror and wake up from a nightmare they do not even know they are having.

So many times, I have cursed the Modesto Mayor for only seeming to rise to the occasion of standing firm against crime when tragedy strikes. Isn’t it just like the Lord, to slap me in the face with self-righteous irony, such as this? I feel so low and selfish when I realize how arrogant I have been.

So arrogant I am to think that these “transients” mean so little to me, yet when one dies, I fall into a depression of self-hatred and guilt coupled with anger at myself when a man dies on an evening that I forewent my patrol of the dry creek banks and the back streets of La Loma on throughout the Airport District, searching for people in this very same predicament – lives just as precious as the life of the President of the United States.

On more than several occasions, I have felt so tired, that I have foregone these patrols, which could have provided for me additional opportunities to call police dispatch with my cell phone’s speed dial, clutching the phone between my shoulder and ear, invoking CPR and running on nothing more than sheer adrenaline and urgency of a simple matter such as life and death.

So caught up in these moments and emergencies, that only the next morning would I think clearly enough to consider my own welfare and eventually show up at the county health department for HIV and hepatitis screening.

Fortunately, anyone would assume that it was in actuality not my fault the man died, but rather, his own, probably well deserved and effective for the reduction of blight in the La Loma neighborhood.

I am so fortunate to be free of this man’s blood on my hands. I won’t even have to worry about it coming up as a mark against me in this years City Council election. No one will ask me at a forum about the one junky that died that one night, and all because I skipped my neighborhood watch patrol.

No one will ever blame me as much as I shall forever blame myself for not taking my hour and a half walk through the parks and neighborhoods I so proudly claim to provide protection from and for “transients”.

I guess the thing that really bothers me most about this event – this situation, is that it is by far not the first time and I know that it will not be the last.

Perhaps, if I stay strong and do not run away from my self-perceived purpose, this man’s death will not have been in vein.

A death so powerful to me, that I do not need to know his name, face or whether I knew him or not. Just to know that he was – it’s enough to inspire me to try harder to prevent as many deaths as well as ruined lives as I possibly can in the future – in a geographical area that I have claimed and fought for as my own.



Copyright 2009 Robert Stanford all rights reserved.