Steve F. and the wisdom of the streets
It’s early morning in the heart of Oakland’s Skid Row, and Steve F. is coming toward us, me and Artie G., from across the street, bouncing from leg to leg, waving at us with one hand and balancing a styrofoam plate with a few pancakes in the other hand, grinning his maniac drug grin. I wait and watch, bracing for a emotional tsumani, apprehensive but also intrigued. “Oh boy…” Artie G,. mutters, then leans back on the empty storefront and takes out a cigarette.
On the street, there’s a line of bodies in sleeping bags stretched out like unwanted deliveries up and down Washington,left along the front steps of the Victorian buildings. Still, unconscious, anonymous witnesses. The morning is full of silence.
Steve doesn’t care.
He is a wild and wiry guy with a scraggly gray beard and an expensive goose down jacket from City Team Ministries, and he is shouting with enthusiasm as if he was the first guy to discover air.
He has just left his morning recovery meeting and crossed the street to pick up his free breakfast at City Team, and maybe he is jacked up on the syrup on the pancakes, or on something else.
I know Steve mainly through Artie G., who got to know him in an aimless way, between bouts of homelessness in the last dozen years. At some point, Artie gave up living in his car or hiding in the marshes by the bay and got into recovery. Steve preferred to stay out there.
“He says he likes the freedom,” Artie told me. “But to tell you the truth, I think he just likes drugs. He can retreat to the luxury condominium complex of his mind whenever he wants.”
Steve has come up to us, he’s in the street and we’re on the sidewalk with the curb between us and Steve is bobbing up and down, bursting to tell us something he can’t put into words. Artie watches him taking a drag on the cigarette, then asks quietly: “Steve: “Don’t you find recovery messes up your high?”
“You know what messes up my high?” shouts Steve, stepping back and flailing his arms in his overlarge LL. Bean goose down jacket again and grinning wildly. “You!”
“There I am, lying on my back by the lake, my arms spread out wide, thinking about my girlfriend, and I think of something you’ve said and that messes up my high!”
Artie smiles and not to be outdone, shouts back. “Well, I’ll tell you what messes up my recovery? Donald Trump!”
Steve grows serious, notices the pancake in his white styrofoam box, scoops it up with some syrup, shrugs and mutters:
“I don’t look for moral guidance from the President of the United States.”
Artie and I look at each other, then back at Steve, but he had already forgotten what he had said and was licking up the syrup from the bottom of the container with his tongue. His smile said it all: Nothing had ever been more delicious.
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