Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: PROCRASTINATE (08/04/16)
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TITLE: Post Mortem | Previous Challenge Entry
By Al Boyce
08/05/16 -
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Dumpsters come and dumpsters go. When police raid one camp, there is another to be built a little farther up the trail. You can always panhandle enough to buy booze to get you through the night. And your friends -- much BETTER friends when you have money in your pocket -- help keep your mind off anything real.
But some things you can't avoid. Some ideas won't be pushed into the coal-black sack of forgetfulness you've crafted from spider-web delusions. Things like family. Things like home.
This is the tale of two homeless men. We'll call them Bill and James. When reality called, each responded a different way and each reaped a different outcome.
Bill was living in an abandoned van in the woods, drinking every day when we met him. We learned he had come from California, had a pretty bad falling out with his family and was never going back.
James' beverage of choice was vodka, but he preferred heroin if he could get it. His father had slept with James' wife at one point in the distant past, and that unforgiveable sin had leapfrogged James into 20 years of homelessness and addiction.
Things came to a head for Bill like a sidewinder striking out of the brush. Somehow his mom Googled our homeless outreach website and, out of sheer desperation, she asked whether we by any chance knew a homeless man named Bill.
We laughed at that. Sure, yeah, we had a couple of Bills. We're only 3,000 miles away from California, of COURSE this is your long lost son!
Except it was.
When we mentioned the email, Bill fought it every way he could. "They aren't my parents," he said. "If they are, they don't want anything to do with me," he'd rant. "Besides, I'm nothing but a broken down drunk," he'd sigh. "I don't want them to see me like this. ..."
And that was the reality. Bill was never going to sober up, was never going to be presentable, so there was no point in discussing whether his parents wanted him or not.
Until he got hit by a car.
It wasn't a huge accident. Just long enough in the hospital to get Bill sober and let him know that 20 years of drinking was too much. He had cirrhosis of the liver and probably wouldn't live much longer without a transplant. And homeless men without insurance were pretty far down the waiting list.
But with his greatest arugment against going home suddenly taken away, Bill grudgingly took an offered train ticket for California. He ended up living with his parents. He got to meet a bunch of cousins and nephews he didn't know. He started a little business where he fixed the cars of people who were down on their luck, for free.
He got to be there when his dad died.
And when cirrhosis claimed his life, he died surrounded by family.
James' first wakeup call came when his two sisters came all the way from Pennsylvania to visit and try to talk some sense into him.
He was nice enough and promised he'd think about coming home.
A couple years went by and James found out his mother was ill. That galvanized him into action. He stopped drinking and got himself into a halfway house and stuck through several weeks of that program in the mountains. The plan was, as soon as he graduated, he'd hop on a bus to Pennsylvania and start mending fences.
But he left the program just a few days before graduation and was soon back on the streets, drunkenly proclaiming his worthlessness.
A few years later, his dad's health was failing. A local church offered to get him transportation back home. He came pretty close that time, too. But something came up. What was it again? He got in a fight with somebody and got beat up and ended up in the hospital the day before he was going to go. His dad died soon after, unforgiven.
A couple weeks ago, we got a call from James' sisters again. His mom had died. Her last words were asking about James. Where's my boy? I want to see him.
Too late now. Too late.
James is still on the street. There aren't many things left that tug his heart strings enough to get him on a bus to Pennsylvania. Or anywhere else.
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A very nice job with this story.