Welcome to My World

by Curtis Bunn

  Rodney turned over and opened his eyes. His look was one of confusion.

  “Who is she?” he said, looking at the nurse. “Who do you work for?”

  The nurse was confused, but I wasn’t. This bipolar thing was serious, and he told me he often got paranoid when it set on.

  “It’s OK; she’s the nurse.”

  “Yes. You know that,” the nurse said.

  “I don’t know shit,” Rodney snapped as he sat up. “I don’t trust anybody in a goddam uniform. Who you working for?”

  “Uh, I’m going to leave now,” she said on her way out.

  “What you doing here?”

  I felt like I was looking at a person I hadn’t met before. It was freaky and a bit scary, too.

  “You don’t know me?”

  “I know you. Don’t know why you’re here, though. Who you working for?”

  “What? Rodney, you may not want to call me your friend, but that’s what we’re working toward. You don’t think so?”

  “What I think is that you need to get out of my room. And take your hidden cameras and microphones with you.”

  This definitely was not the Rodney I’d spoken to for hours a few nights before. This Rodney was scary.

  “I’m leaving. Here. This is my cell phone number. Call me at any time. I’m going back to my sister’s room upstairs. But I will come back in a few hours. Maybe you’ll be feeling better.”

  “Don’t bother. Spy.”

  I could only shake my head as I left his room. I had never experienced someone switch personalities. I had seen men act one way, and after sex, act another. I had seen former girlfriends turn mean and abrasive during their cycle. I’d never seen a man just flip into what I had seen with Rodney.

  It made me think. What if he flips when we are alone and gets violent? What could I do? He was a big man—about six feet three inches and lean and strong. And why wouldn’t he turn violent if he felt threatened by me, if he thought I was a spy or someone after him?

  It made me rethink everything. I couldn’t put myself in a position for that guy to flip and potentially hurt me.

  My stable mind told me I should stay away from any man who chose to live on the street instead of in a shelter. At the same time, my heart empathized with his story and his pain.

  Additionally, he was a smart man who had something to offer society. At the same time, he was sick and needed to be under a doctor’s care. I had told all this to Theresa, who I was sure would think I was crazy to be involved with Rodney on any level.

  I could hear her in my mind: “This is just like you. Remember that stray dog you kept out back for about two months before Mom and Dad found out what you were doing? And the men in your life—all of them had issues. Now you’re telling me you want to help a homeless man who doesn’t want your help? Girl, bye.”

  As I folded into the chair next to her hospital bed, I took those thoughts of my sister into my sleep. Then something strange happened: I dreamed about Rodney—and Theresa. I was sitting on a bench at the Piedmont Park, near the swimming pool and playground. Along came Theresa from one direction, wearing all black. And Rodney came from the other direction, looking worse than I’d ever seen him—and he’d never looked great.

  “This is Rodney. I was telling you about him,” I said to Theresa.

  “This is the guy? I understand why you are committed to helping him. I can see it deep in his eyes—he’s hurting. He needs you. You’re doing the right thing.”

  The dream felt so real. I woke up to tears streaming down my face. I hadn’t seen my sister up and moving and talking in so long. It made my heart feel good to see her talking and walking.

  It also made up my mind about Rodney: I was going to do what I could to help him. There was no turning back. Theresa had told me to, and I didn’t care if it was in a dream. It meant something to me. It meant everything to have my sister speak to me again. It was the first dream I had had with her speaking to me in it.

  So I held her hand and talked to her and told her about my dream and my ambition. I cried as I did it. The reality of her condition and the purpose of my life combined to bring tears.

  After a few hours sitting and sharing with Theresa, Dr. Teasley entered.

  “I was going to come in earlier, but I heard you talking to her, so I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “How is she doing? Any change?”

  “Not for the better, I’m sorry to say. Her heart rate is weakening.”

  Those words scared me. After seven months, I clung to a miracle happening.

  The truth was, I had lost Theresa a long time ago, though not officially, which probably explained why Rodney was so important to me. I needed someone in my life. I needed to matter to someone.

  Rodney had to be it, but I wanted to do or say something to make him comfortable with me. Theresa used to say, “People don’t write anymore. The person who takes the time to actually put pen to paper is a person who really cares.”

  A nurse honored my request and got me a pad and pen, and I began, not knowing what I was going to write. I just pulled every honest and raw emotion out of my body.

  “Rodney,” I began, “I’m in my sister’s room here at the hospital, Room 706. From here, as I look at my lifeless sister, who would do anything to come out of her coma, I think of you and what struggles you have. We all have struggles—some are just more serious and hard to overcome than others.

  “I see so much in you, and it bothers me that I can’t help you. You won’t let me help you. If you think it’s because I feel sorry for you, you’re wrong. Trust me: I don’t feel sorry for you. I feel badly for you.

  “That difference makes all the difference in the world. And this is important too: I need you to help me. Your outlook on life has impacted my outlook on life. I want to do better. Let’s help each other. The fact that you’re still here means you’re a strong man. My sister is not in a position to do anything about her situation. You are. And as hard as it is for you to realize it, you deserve more.”

  I gathered my mind and my heart and went back to his room to deliver the note and let him marinade on it.

  It was alarming, though, that his door was slightly open. I’d thought the nurse would practically lock him in there after what she saw. But I was not scared. Not anymore. I was committed.

  My knocks on the door went unanswered, however, so I slowly pushed it open. The bed was empty, which didn’t surprise me. But Rodney was not lying on the floor, either. His backpack, which was in a chair, was not there. He was gone.

  Worse, my card that I gave him with my cell phone number was on the bed, where I had left it. I turned to find a nurse to see about his discharge. She was at the station, filling out paperwork.

  “What happened to Rodney Bridges? You all discharged him already?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s not in his room and his belongings are gone.”

  I followed behind the nurse back to the room. There was panic in her steps.

  “I can’t believe it? Where did he go? I saw him in here, on the floor sleeping, about fifteen minutes ago. Isn’t he homeless?”

  “Yes, he is homeless.”

  “He shouldn’t be out there this soon after surgery. What’s he gonna do, sleep in the streets? This is crazy.”

  I was stumped. Didn’t know what to do or what to say. I put the note to Rodney that I had into my purse, turned and left the room.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: STREET LIFE

  RODNEY

  I hated hospitals. . . especially that one. Piedmont Hospital was the same place I was taken after the accident. My family was taken to Grady, the city’s trauma center, although their fate had already been determined. My trauma was mental. It would have been better if they had taken me to a psych ward.

  At Piedmont the first time, I couldn’t really feel the physical pain, despite my many injuries. The depth of my anguish was all in my heart. It was smashed.

  Returning there two years later ma
de all that pain overflow. I couldn’t sleep or rest. All I could do was replay my two days there two years earlier, and how it was in that place that I realized my world was over.

  So, I had to get out of there. I was weak and in pain, but I would have preferred to die in the streets than in that hospital.

  I did not stay around to get the prescription for the painkillers, but I didn’t care. I had to go. Being there ate me up. It was too much to bear.

  So, when no one was looking, I had pulled myself off the floor, gotten dressed into the clothes they had given me and had walked out of my room. Just like on the streets, I was invisible; the nurses did not take notice of me as I strolled past them at the desk to the elevator.

  My mental pain offset my physical issue enough for me to walk about a mile to the Amtrak station in lower Buckhead. I found a corner on the backside of a building, placed my backpack on the ground, laid my head on it and went to sleep.

  It was the kind of sleep I hated because it was a deep sleep, and I remembered my dreams. For two years, every dream I’d had was about the night my loved ones died, which was more than horrible. It was unfair.

  Before I slept, I thought about being home with my family, the four of us around the dinner table, playing Trouble, the old board game where each player had to push down on a clear bubble that housed a small block that determined how many times you’d move your man around the board.

  We played loudly and seriously, with the winners earning a second portion of dessert or deciding where we would eat out. Then I fell asleep and dreamed about the night of their death.

  That made me angry because my thoughts are always about how much I loved my family, always about beautiful memories we created. But my dreams were about that horrible night.

  It was sad because the reality of what my life was before the accident and what it had become after it was so dramatically different.

  Because of the drugs I had been administered at the hospital and plain ole fatigue, I drifted back to sleep after maybe ten minutes. At some point, I dreamed of the accident. It was not exactly as it had occurred; we were all in the car and I was so sleepy that I could not keep my eyes open. In the dream, we fell off a cliff and tumbled down for what seemed like several minutes.

  I could hear them screaming and I turned around to tell them, “it’s going to be all right”—as the car dropped toward the ground. But before it crashed, I woke myself up out of the dream. The damage had been done, though. I was panicked, heart racing and, after realizing it was a dream, again saddened by the reality.

  No way I could have fallen back to sleep. I was too shaken—again. I’d had that dream or a variation of it countless times. And like the previous times, my head was jumbled with horrifying images, so much so that physical discomfort from the surgery was minimized.

  It was dark—I could not tell what time it was, but I sensed it was late, after eleven and close to midnight. I could tell by the car flow on Interstates 85 and 75 and the pedestrian flow on Peachtree Street. Living on the streets, with nowhere to be, time for me was determined by the patterns of the day. I had given away my watch. I refused to get a cell phone.

  From 1 a.m. until 5:45 a.m., it was virtually still in the city. It was what most people would call peaceful, but for me it was haunting. The quiet made it noisy in my head. I could see my family. I could hear their voices. I could feel their pain. And sometimes I could hear other voices or feel other emotions. That was the disease in me.

  It all made me resent nightfall. The days were filled with activity, traffic, people. Noise. The nights were too quiet, causing me agony.

  I stopped at a CVS and stole some Advil. I grabbed the box, pulled the bottle out and dropped it in my jacket pocket and walked out of the store. The box with the sensor was on the shelf where I’d left it.

  Truth was, I could have paid for the pills. I had twenty-seven dollars in my pocket from money I had earned. It was earned because I had worked for it, either by helping women leaving Publix with their groceries, pumping gas for people at the BP gas station or asking for it. At that time, I considered asking for money a job.

  I reasoned that I had put in the time, as people did on their jobs, and got rewarded for it. The pay was lousy. But on a good day, I could “make” about fifty dollars.

  Every few hours, I took five of the Advil I had stolen and for the next three days rested, either on a cardboard box on the steps in front of St. Paul’s Presbyterian on Ponce de Leon Avenue or in its back parking lot.

  Other than the rats that came out from the sewers late at night, it was comfortable—relatively speaking. It took me about six months to get used to the ground as a mattress and the madness that came with staying at the shelter. I had given up my right to be comfortable. And when my body got used to sleeping on concrete or grass or wherever, it was no problem.

  Most days I stayed up from sunup until after midnight. I tried to wear my body down, so I would be exhausted and I could easily sleep. That way, I wouldn’t have the burden of the quiet. So I would walk and walk when it was not too cold.

  I was left with my thoughts as I walked, which could be painful, but I also had so much activity to take me away from it. Walking Atlanta’s streets, I had seen much.

  For instance, I saw a man making love to a woman at 2:30 in the afternoon, behind the Publix on Peachtree Road in Buckhead. They were in the back of the grocery store, near the loading dock. She was bent over into the passenger side of the car and he, with his pants down by his ankles, did his thing.

  A few cars passed by, but I noticed that none of the drivers looked to their left or right to see them. That told me they had been there before and knew they were in a space no one would suspect them to be.

  I solved a burglary once. These two guys pulled up in a Honda on Seventh Street in Midtown. One guy rang the doorbell and this unsuspecting white guy, who did not bother to ask who it was or look through the peephole, opened the door. Both the robbers rushed the house.

  I took my time and came from behind the lamppost, where I had been peeing, and memorized the car’s license plate. After about ten minutes, the fools came running out. They jumped into the car and sped off. No one else was on the street.

  The victim did not come out of the house until the police arrived about five minutes later. The man was shaken. He had nothing to offer the cops. I jumped in.

  “Can I say something?”

  The officer looked me up and down and dismissed me as a know-nothing bum.

  “Listen, mind your business and keep moving. And take a bath.”

  I looked at the victim. “Mister, since he doesn’t want it, maybe you’d like the license plate number of the car of those guys who robbed you.”

  Of course, he—and the cop—did. The officer put out a radio notice on the light-green Honda Accord with the license plate number, and, in a wild case of irony, the cops had caught the criminals several minutes later along my path down Tenth Street to Piedmont Park.

  The cop I had given the license plate number to was on the scene. He saw me walking by and came over. “I just want to thank you for your help. We got the guys.”

  I nodded my head and kept walking.

  Another time, over by the Kroger on Monroe Drive, I saw a young girl—could not have been more than fourteen—get picked up by this creepy-looking guy. It was after midnight, so it caught my attention that this kid would be out by herself at that hour.

  The man talked to her for about fifteen minutes. I sat by the sidewalk and watched as the girl resisted at first. Then the man pulled out a wad of cash. The girl stopped retreating. The man motioned for someone driving an Escalade to come over. The girl got into the car.

  I could only believe I had witnessed the beginning of a life of sex trafficking for the teenager. I eventually told the cops and gave him as much information as I could, but I never knew if they located the girl.

  Those were a few of the countless bad acts I had witnessed—without anyone noticing or caring
I was there.

  I also had witnessed acts of kindness that made me see the good in people. Once, a stray dog wandered into the street in Inman Park, near Highland Bakery. I was about to set up a makeshift bed just off the sidewalk when a car came careening around the corner and hit the dog, knocking it into the air and off the side of Highland Avenue. The driver kept going.

  But four people—two who were jogging, one who was sitting outside at Highland Bakery and a man who was driving by—had hurried to the dog’s aid. They had held the distressed and wailing dog down and had comforted it until a veterinarian had arrived. The vet had told them they had saved the dog’s life, and they had hugged each other after the animal was taken away, relieved they had bonded to help the animal.

  I also had seen an African-American kid get yelled at by a white man and woman for no reason once in a residential area on Ralph McGill.

  “Get out of here. You don’t belong here.”

  He had kept his poise and had walked on. Just ahead of him, a white kid, zooming down the hill on a skateboard, had lost control, hit the curb and gone crashing into the street, headfirst.

  Blood was everywhere. But that same black kid had rushed to the hurt child, taken off the shirt he’d worn over a T-shirt and had wiped blood from the kid’s face as he’d called 9-1-1 with his other hand.

  The man and woman who had yelled at him had come running to the scene; the hurt boy was their son. And the same kid they had wanted out of their neighborhood was the kid who had helped their child. When they saw the black young man they had harassed, they had apologized.

  And to his credit, the kid did not say a word. He’d looked down at the bleeding teenager and said, “I hope you keep riding the skateboard when you get better. I saw you. You’re dope.”

  That bleeding young man, stretched out on the ground, had extended his hand. I did not know how, but he knew that his parents had chastised the young man. The teenagers shook hands, and he had told the black kid: “I’m sorry about my parents.”