by David Feige
My neighborhood is affluent by any standards, with even small apartments commanding prices suburbanites might pay for a freestanding structure and a lawn. There are four nice bakeries within a block or two --offering decaf cappuccino and a selection of baguettes and croissants that would make a Frenchman envious. At the Tasty Bakery on the corner, the friendly Slavic woman is already pouring my decaf by the time I order. Once I cross the river, the only places that have decaf are the Dunkin’ Donuts and the gas station. The Bronx is not a decaf kind of town.
Weaving my way up Broadway, I pass the fresh fruit display in front of the Fairway grocery store --plums and grapes and nectarines and strawberries shimmering red and purple, a world of fancy produce just a block away. My car is wedged into a spot on Seventy-fifth Street --a “must be out by 11:00 a.m.” spot. Those of us who can’t afford the several hundred dollars a month it costs to garage a car in Manhattan study the intricacies of New York City street-parking regulations like the Talmud. During my career I’ve been late for court, late to dinner, late to the movies, and late to parties, but I’ve never risked missing a parking spot deadline.
Heading toward the car, coffee in hand, I think hard about Cassandra. There are people you meet in my job who are so helpless, so hopeless, and so sad that it slices your heart up, people whose stories are so dire and desperate that they stay with you --a wound that never heals. Cassandra is one of them.
Cassandra is big and round and overweight, with a puffy, moon-pie face. Her eyes are set deep, and they betray no expression at all --ever. She speaks in a halting, childish monotone with the kind of bluntness that suggests she has long since given up trying to hide anything. Cassandra has just about all the problems a person can have --she’s drug dependent, deeply depressed, homeless, suicidal, and mentally ill. To look at her is to see someone utterly lost.
I first met Cassandra in 1997, when she was arrested for an attempted arson that was as much a suicide attempt as anything else. It took all of two minutes to figure out that like many people, Cassandra had needs well beyond what the criminal justice system could handle. So while she sat in jail, I started the long and complicated process of trying to get her into a residential mental health program.
Things went well at first. With the help of a social worker in the office, I found a suitable program. Cassandra pled guilty to reckless endangerment (arson convictions usually disqualify someone from residential mental health programs) and was released. More than six months went by without a hitch. But then, as they so often do with Cassandra, things began to unravel.
Cassandra got herself thrown out of the program. We got them to give her another chance. She got ejected again. We tried a different program. She didn’t last there either. This cycle continued for more than a year as we went through program after program, finally finding a place that she liked and that could deal with her. For a few years, everything was stable.
Until I got the call.
“Hello . . . , David?”
I knew her voice immediately.
“Cassandra. Hi,” I said. “How are you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Where are ya, darling?”
“Uh . . . I’m at the precinct.” She delivered this news with her usual lack of inflection.
“Sweetie, why are you at the precinct?”
“I robbed a taxi,” she said plainly.
“Okay, okay, Cassandra, I want you to listen really carefully.
You know the police are going to arrest you, right?”
“Yes, David. I know.”
“Okay, I understand what you did, but I don’t want you talking about it right now. Do you understand?”
“Yes, David.”
“Okay, now I’m gonna come right down there, and then I’ll be there again for you when you get to court, okay?”
“Yes, David.”
“I want to talk to the policeman now. Can you put him on the phone?”
“Okay.”
I learned from the detective that Cassandra was charged with using her index finger to try to rob a livery cab driver. I told the detective that I’d be her lawyer and that he should not question her, and to call me if there was going to be a lineup.
When I saw her later, after her arraignment, I asked her why she’d done such a silly thing.
“Well, I did it once before and it worked,” she answered simply.
“But, sweetie, why try it in the first place?”
“Oh,” she said. “I wanted money --I was feeling depressed and sad and I wanted to go buy a little alcohol or maybe some crack or something, to make me feel better.” She nodded and raised her eyebrows, and shrugged as if apologizing for her depression.
In junior high school civics classes we’re taught that all Americans have a fundamental right to a speedy trial. In fact, big-city justice often means epic delays and months in purgatory --which in Cassandra’s case was more like hell. She was kept locked up in jail for almost a year. It was a year punctuated by court dates designed only to momentarily release her so that we could drive her to interviews with psychiatric programs around the state. This time, no one would take her, and so at the end of the day we’d surrender her back to the judge, who would put her back in jail.
As his final official act at the Bronx district attorney’s office, an assistant district attorney agreed to let Cassandra withdraw her guilty plea to a felony and plead guilty to a misdemeanor. He knew how hard we’d been trying to find her a program, and he felt bad that she was sitting in jail because there were no programs willing to accept her. There was no weapon, and no one was hurt, so he figured the year she had already been in jail should suffice as a sentence. The plea deal meant that Cassandra went free again. Over the ensuing years, I saw Cassandra regularly: acting as her post office box when she was homeless; storing her eighty-nine-dollar check (her share of an uncle’s estate) until she could collect it; trying, as often as possible, to provide a stable, reliable place where she could feel welcome.
And then, just three weeks ago, Denise, one of our social workers, caught me at the door. I was coming back from a harrowing day in court --I’d just had a client handed the maximum sentence after he’d been acquitted of all the most serious charges in his case. The judge could have given him probation --instead he gave him up to fifteen years.
“Guess who’s here?” Denise asked.
“Let me guess.” There was something in her voice that gave away the answer --a schoolmarm’s disapproval of a disappointing pupil. “Cassandra?”
“Lorraine let her sleep in the interview room,” Denise said with a frown.
“Okay, good,” I murmured, lugging my trial bag up the stairs. “Let her sleep for a while and keep me posted.”
“Only because she’s yours, David,” Denise declared in a chiding tone. “She’s homicidal and suicidal, with attempts as recent as yesterday, and she’s intoxicated. If she were anyone else’s, I’d have already called the crisis team. But she said she wanted to talk to you, only to you, and she doesn’t want to go to the hospital --at least not one where there are any men.”
“Yeah. That’s a thing of hers --not really a big fan of men.”
Three hours later Cassandra was awake. The smell in the interview room was almost unbearable. Coming down the stairs, I could see her through the glass of the door before I ventured inside. Her hair was matted and nappy, and she was bundled in three mismatched coats.
“Sweetie,” I said, “I thought we sent you to detox?”
“Yes, David.” Her big brown eyes were glassy, and it looked as if she’d lost some weight. Her face, usually soft and round, had hardened into something more akin to an oblong.
“Well, what happened?”
“I didn’t stay.”
“Well, why not?”
“They kicked me out,” Cassandra explained, her voice dropping --a descending piano scale, every word one note below the last.
“I understand that, darling, but why did they kick you o
ut?”
“I didn’t like them,” she said, nodding. “There were men in there.”
“And you don’t like the men.”
“Riiiiight.” Cassandra nodded softly. “They look at me . . . you know.”
“I know, darling. I know.” Since she watched her father murder her mother when she was a little girl, men had been a complicated issue.
“I’ve been sad.” Cassandra nodded again, as if it was news to her too.
“And what have you been doing about that?”
“I tried to kill myself --get AIDS, lie in the street. It didn’t work.” She said all this matter-of-factly, as if describing last Sunday’s weather.
“Honey,” I asked, “why were you trying to get AIDS?”
“I thought they would take care of me then,” she said blandly. “I had sex with a man --he had AIDS. I told him not to use a condom. Didn’t work. I layed down in the street too --thought maybe a car would run over me. It didn’t --they were nice. The police. Took me to the hospital.”
“Sweetie, I think we need to get you back into a program --I think you need someone to look after you a little more than I can.”
Cassandra’s face should have betrayed some emotion. Instead it was blank.
“I know, David,” she said flatly. “Not today though.”
“Honey,” I said, trying to sound firm, “you know you can’t just show up and crash here.”
“I know, David, I know.” She nodded gravely. “But I been on the streets for a while, and I was real tired, you know?”
“I know, sweetie, but we’re going to have to do something about this.”
The odor was nearly intolerable --opening the door, I could see some of the kids from the youth program in the next office wrinkle their noses, look up in alarm, and retreat down the hall.
“Okay, sweetie, you know I love you,” I told her, leading Cassandra to the door to the courtyard, “but I need you to wait in the courtyard with me while we figure out what we’re going to do. ’Cause you’re a little bit stinky, and I can’t really have you inside right now, okay?”
“Okay, David,” she said with a resigned smile. “I know. I do have an odor. I do. I admit that.” She nodded as if considering the whole situation. “I’ve been on the streets for a lot of days too. Begging and drinking . . . people are nice you know . . . they give me soup sometime. And money too, real nice . . . everyone’s real nice.”
As I led her from the client interview room, the stench followed us through the library and out into the fresh air. Passing through the library, I noticed for the first time a little blister on her lower lip.
I was at a loss --I hadn’t seen Cassandra this disheveled in ages. From what I could tell, over the past six years we’d tried almost every program and shelter we could think of. Hospitals were unlikely to keep her for any more than a day or two; shelters and programs were essentially out. I could turn her back to the streets, of course, where her suicide attempts would continue, or she’d find herself back in jail, possibly for a long period of time.
Carefully positioning myself upwind of her, I proposed a radical solution --something that goes against everything I believe.
“Sweetie,” I said, “do you think a little time might help?”
I had never, in my entire career, tried to put someone in jail, but I had also never had someone whose mental health and addiction problems were as intractable as Cassandra’s. Downwind, Cassandra seemed to consider the question seriously, and there was a long pause before she answered.
“Yes, David,” she said, “I think so --maybe two or three weeks, a month maybe, just to clean up, to sleep.”
The idea filled me with self-loathing and a profound sense of failure --personal and systemic. It was bad enough that there might not be any better solution than locking Cassandra up at Rikers Island, but worse was that she could see it as a viable solution to her life’s problems. I felt tears welling up in my eyes.
“Is there anything you need right now?” I asked.
“Maybe some soup?” Cassandra said simply. “I’m a little cold.”
Raiding the food usually kept for the hungry kids in the youth program, I found a can of Wolfgang Puck’s egg noodle and chicken soup --a fancy last supper in a can.
- - - -
With Cassandra considering a jail stint, I started thinking about just how to get her in. I needed to think of a crime minor enough that I could control the outcome, but serious enough that a cop who might not otherwise want to arrest a malodorous homeless person (rather than just issue a summons) would actually have to take her in.
First I considered a ploy I learned from another homeless guy who used to come through the system at the beginning of almost every winter. When it got too cold and too hard to survive on the street, he’d take himself to a rib joint near Times Square --and order himself a feast. He’d eat slowly and deliberately, savoring his meal. When the check came, he would quietly but insistently refuse to pay or leave. When the police came, he was unfailingly polite, standing up and placing his hands dutifully behind his back so they could cuff him. When he saw the judge, he’d always plead guilty right on the spot despite his lawyer’s attempts to keep him from doing so --sometimes even asking for a little extra jail time, just enough to ride out the worst of the winter.
Sadly, there wasn’t any place Cassandra really wanted to eat, and she was so smelly and disheveled there wasn’t any place likely to serve her anyway.
“Is there something you’d like to do since you are going to get arrested anyway? Any crime that might at least bring you some joy?”
“No, David,” Cassandra said in her flat, vacant tone. “I’ll do what you say.”
Maybe turnstile jumping is the way, I thought.
“Okay, we’ll go down to the train station together,” I told her. “I’ll find a police officer and try to explain that he needs to watch because you are going to violate the law. And then when I say so, but not before, you try to climb over the turnstile.”
Cassandra just nodded.
Just before we set out, I went over the pre-arrest checklist.
“You know they’re going to search you when you get arrested,” I warned her, “so I want you to go through all your pockets right now and make absolutely sure that there is nothing in them that can get you in any extra trouble --it’s really important that we don’t have any surprises.”
Digging around in one of her many pockets, Cassandra came up with a small, round chipped piece of glass. The crack pipe was short --around three inches long and about the width of the barrel of a ballpoint pen. The end was blackened and sticky from the flame and the tarry residue of crack, the rest smudgy but transparent.
“I think we’ll need to throw this away, sweetie.” I sighed.
After rummaging through the rest of her pockets, Cassandra came up empty --seventeen cents and some rough deli-counter napkins, all she had left in the world.
“Cassandra, I want you to think really, really carefully now --have you been arrested since I saw you last, or have you gotten any tickets that you were supposed to go to court for but didn’t? Are there any warrants out for your arrest for any reason at all?”
A long pause.
“I think I got some tickets,” Cassandra said, nodding.
“Do you remember what they were for?”
“For loitering and having an open beer, I think, and maybe one for sleeping in the park.”
“Did you give them your actual name?” I asked, suddenly seeing a perfect way out of the whole problem.
“Yes, David.”
Ten minutes later, I was on the telephone with an incredulous sergeant at the Bronx Warrant Squad.
“You’re her lawyer?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“And you want us to come and arrest her?”
“Right.”
“You don’t want to turn her in voluntarily?”
“Right --she’s here now, and if we wait until tomorrow, I’m li
kely to lose her to the streets again.”
“And she knows she’s gonna be arrested?”
“Yes. That’s what we want.”
“And you want me to call you when she’s in court?”
