The Pipes are Calling - by Barbara Warman 2005

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.