The
Pipes are Calling
Fog
approaches, tickles the air, grips branches, tarmac, pulls itself out of the
black above until it reaches those who live with cracked childhoods, broken
souls who welcome lost horizons.
One
of these souls touched my life, fleetingly.
His fog of choice was alcohol. He
turned to the streets at fourteen, wandered to my city.
I
met twenty-two year old Danny in a writing group. He wrote in anger, singed the ears of all who
listened. He spoke of the damage of a
child who filled his mother’s vodka bottles with water, hid them. He talked about the life of a panhandler and
how it destroyed the small amount of soul he treasured.
I
approached him in class and said, "I know more about Islam than I know
about street kids. Do you want to go for
coffee and talk so I can learn about your life?"
For
a year, we met weekly. Danny always had
a job – he drove the outreach van for a local society and, when they lost the
grant money, he carried on for nothing. He spoke to young streetkids about
options – education, housing. He told them the stories he also shared with me
about the Christmases drinking himself blind and sobbing, outside, alone, while
sleet fell around him.
When
the outreach job ended, he cooked at a coffee shop close to downtown on the
weekends. He knew the owners because the business was very generous to the
streetkids, gave them coffee and meals whenever they could. They gave Danny the
chance and he never let them down. I would meet him there as he closed up at
the end of the day. Sometimes other friends with names like Lazar or Dogpatch arrived
and, as we waited, I bought them coffee. The conversations bounced off the
borders of any life I knew.
I still
didn’t understand why and how he was there, but I saw the suction of that
life. I met some of his friends and felt
their vacuum, their brokenness, and their fractures.
There
were times when Danny stood proud, faced down the fog, believed he could find
the horizon, step over it and magically become whole.
"I
haven’t had a drink in four days," Danny said, but I knew the haze was
around the corner with his friends ready to pull him back and he always went.
Danny
shared dreams of a different life but he was unable to draw a picture of that
dream. It was foreign, beyond
reach. The anger that stretched beneath
his words and smiles remained unfixable, entrenched.
I
invited Danny to have dinner at home with my husband and me.
"Yeah?"
he said, "Really?"
"Really."
Then
he vanished. I couldn’t find him.
I accepted
that Danny had moved on from our friendship. After all, what could I offer.
Then the phone rang.
"Are
you the Barbara that Danny spoke about, the girl he met in writing class?’
"Yes,
I’m that Barbara."
"I’m
Danny’s father. I’ve been looking for
you."
Danny
had phoned his father a week before. "My
friend Barbara has invited me to have dinner in her home," he said, "He
was thrilled."
"I
want to thank you, but now I need to tell you something else," Danny’s
father said, "Danny hung himself a week ago – I wanted you to know. I found your card in his wallet."
The
fog filtered into an abandoned building where Danny drank. It wended its way through across the concrete
floor to a staircase where it formed a sheet, wrapped its tendrils around the
railing and around Danny’s neck. It crept
into the cracks in his broken soul, swelled and finally broke him.
Now
the fog is here, it touches my face and stings my eyes.
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