I am a misfit...Part 4 (Charles)

in2itiveart (69)in #art • 8 years ago

Part 4

Charles, as I mentioned earlier, was 62 years old. He had had a mental health accident when he was 20 years old. He had gotten dosed on LSD at a party - Purple Ohm Domes. Owsley acid. It was a work party - he worked at the Lawrence Berkeley Labs. A doctor from the job had invited him over and had dosed the Sangria with supercalifragilistic acid.

Once he was tripping, he was given 12 more hits by the Doc's wife. All he remembers is that he was hitch-hiking on Rte 1 in CA and a state patrol pulled over to warn him about hitch-hiking. He was afraid that he was gonna get busted with the acid, so he ate all 12 hits.

He says he sat on the ocean beach for days watching the waves come in. Finally, I guess he called his parents. Dehydrated, sunburned, hungry, dirty, and tripping his brains out... This was 1976 or so. They did not know what to do with him so they put him in Napa. There, he was given the bad dope - Halidol, Thorazine, Risperidol… for a few weeks and then he was transferred to a half-way house for mental patients. He celebrated his 21st birthday in the funny farm.

His life was over then. He had been a Merit Semi-finalist with a full scholarship to join the PhD program at Princeton, and now he was another nut bag. Things did not go well from there.
His story is fragmented and non-sensical. There were some girlfriends. One common-law wife. There was a stint in a few different colleges. There were jobs - driving some rich people around Minneapolis in their car for a few years, sleeping in the back room a liquor store in Sacramento, paying for his way by unloading the beer truck, until the store burned down. Endless stints of homelessness.

His 4 brothers and sisters, all wealthy with several houses, did not seem to step up to deal with him. There were attempts - they would set him up in an apartment and buy him furniture and then leave him there alone. He can't be left alone in an apartment. He does not know how to live or take care of himself.

He developed this way of getting by on the street - he would talk out loud to himself, he would carry on conversations, loudly. He would rhyme. He is tall and formidable-looking. People were afraid of him. I don't know exactly how I became friends with such a character.

He's an artist. I guess I was sitting there drawing one day, and he came over and showed me some of his pastels. I gave him some watercolors and a pad and he started painting beautiful landscapes. I kept showing up at the Senior Center, and he would show up and talk to me.

We became friends. He was sleeping in the Catholic Worker Church Rectory on Addison and McGee with a bunch of other folks. Over the days>weeks that we sat there and shot the shit together, and I began to drive him around in my car, he decided that he wasn't going to lose me, I guess.

On his birthday, I took him out to my sister's house in Pt. Reyes Station. She was gone for a week and let me house-sit. I took Charles to the ocean beach because he is a Pisces. He hung out on the porch and smoked cigarettes and talked to the neighbors across the street or to the trees or to himself. We stayed up there for a week.

He would get very angry when I would drop him off at the Church before 8pm and go back to San Pablo. After the trip to Pt. Reyes Station, it got worse. He accused me of using him and just dropping him off.

What did he want me to do? I thought. Tim was NOT going to let him come stay there. I was still just working 1 day a week making that $100 a week. It basically paid my gas. Food stamps paid my food. And I cleaned Tim's house. That was all I had.

The situation at Tim's was that he had the rooms in his tiny little hovel rented out to 3 of us. He was a hoarder and a slob. I was doing my best to clean and organize the crap, but it was overflowing. Tim had a back yard that he could have let Charles put up a tent in, but he would not have it. It was out of the question. I guess he had enough to deal with with the wackos who were living there already. There was Lucy who went to rehab every month. There was Derek, who worked as a mechanic, but was also a drinker. He would get up in the middle of the night and pee all over the bathroom floor. And then there was me, the charity case. I can see how Tim could not handle Charles, but it was heartbreaking.

I could not stand the fact that Charles was outside, either. A 62 year-old man who had had a life of hard knocks, and there was literally NO hope. And the fact is there are thousands of cases like him - each with their own snarl-story that needs to be unraveled by a friend...

Charles had other ideas. After we got back from that "vacation", he "moved" to San Pablo from Berkeley. San Pablo is not like Berkeley. San Pablo is mainly a Mexican neighborhood. Non-white people seem to take care of their elderly and infirm, so there are no people on the street in San Pablo. It's clean, crowded, and poor working class.

Charles, as it turned out later, has a medical prescription. He was diagnosed Schizo-effective and bipolar. He was not taking it. It was too hard for him to take his meds while living outside. He had this big coat with a bunch of pockets where he filed his papers, and a series of backpacks. He got a monthly check from SSDI for $792. Part of that went to a storage unit where he kept stuff he found on the street.

The cops, for some reason, like to "roll" homeless people. They would hand-cuff him and dump his pockets periodically. He would have to spend 2 hours refiling everything. Taking his medication, on time, daily just did not work out.

Before the accident, when he was 18, he had joined the Air Force and had been honorably discharged for nose-bleeds. This would turn out to be the saving grace - that act of humility when he was a kid - when he decided to surrender himself rather than be drafted, would be the one right decision this guy made.

So, Charles moved to San Pablo. He stuck out like a sore thumb. The first night he was there, he slept in a churchyard and the neighbors called the cops who came and dragged him off to Martinez Psychiatric Hospital. There he was shot up with Halidol and kicked out the next morning. In the ambulance on the way there, he said, the EMT's just about suffocated him. It's just another day in his life, I guess.

Next morning, I get a call from him that he is lost in Martinez with no money. Tim and I drove out to pick him up. After that, he slept at the Community College on the lawn under the trees. The cops would come to wake him up every morning at dawn. Charles was not drinking. He quit drinking a long while before.

And so this became the routine for the next several months. I would sneak breakfast and dinner out to Charles. He would come and sit in my car and wait for me. We would drive around Berkeley running errands, etc. Tim began to lay down the law: Charles was not allowed to wait in the car outside his house for more than 10 minutes before I was going to leave. What would the neighbors think? And then the rainy season hit.

In California it rains for days. It's wonderful, if you are homed. But for Charles, now not able to sit in my car, it was horrible. I did not know what to do. I prayed. And I got an idea - it required a leap of faith. I gave Charles a set of my car keys and parked the car over by the Community College where the trucks would park overnight. Charles could then sleep in my car, and be safe and warm, and then I could bring him food and leave from there to run errands, etc.

It worked, and we did it for March and April of 2014. In the middle of April, a friend of mine - a veteran, happened to be passing through the Bay Area on his way back to Denver, and he stopped by for dinner. He met Charles and found out he is a vet.

Rob told us that Denver has great services for veterans where California did not. He said we should go back to Denver and he would help Rob get hooked up. Right after this, my cousin who I was working for, had a stroke. I no longer had a job. It seemed to be a clear sign that we should follow Rob's advice and move back to Denver. We had been talking about going there anyway, before Rob showed up, but now, I could not pay the rent, and was once again going to end up in a shelter - this time in Berkeley.

My family all got together for dinner before we left and told me they wanted me to stay, but none of them were offering a place to live. They had already helped me as much as they were going to, and now I had this mental patient attached to me, so they were dismayed. They wanted me to stay and figure it out and dump Charles.