Ok, here’s something I’m trying to process. So I’m just going to tell the story of it.
We were outside demonstrating my fiancé’s electric skateboard to one of his best friends — I should say he was demonstrating it, I was standing on the curb with my hood up, watching. It was kind of a big moment. BFF, as I will call him, described his mixed feelings at the fact that his friend now had something they’d both dreamed about for years. He’s a much better skater than me, my fiancé said, handing over the controls to watch BFF, who caught on immediately, carve down the street — I’m not sure exactly what carving encompasses, but anyway. A grinning driver waited for them to get out of her way; people are either amused or annoyed (or, reportedly, amazed) at my fiancé and his electric skateboard, depending, I theorize, on whether they think he’s as cute as I do — though maybe this time she just picked up on the guys’ overall stoked-ness.
I see, then, in my periphery, a girl walking down the street towards us. How do I know she’s homeless? There’s something wrong about the way she’s walking. She’s shuffling. I can hear her saying something, too. I try not to hear what it is. I’m trying to keep looking ahead, as if by doing this, she will disappear.
“Can you help me?” I hear, while rejecting the words, so they don’t make it to the part of my brain that processes meaning. I look at her, though, I can’t help it. She’s wearing a bright yellow safety vest. I think about the homeless people, 20-somethings, at least one of them a girl herself, who killed a woman my age in Golden Gate Park when I was living in the Haight.
“Can you help me?” she asks again. She is looking right at me, her blonde hair is dirty, curled in loose dreads, and there’s a pained look on her face, like she’s about to burst into tears. That pained look is directed at me, and it’s a primal playground feeling I get then, that she’s a classmate I’ve unintentionally betrayed. She stops walking, maybe 10 or 15 feet away now, and asks again.
I’m used to being on my way somewhere. It’s essential that I have somewhere to be, so I can walk faster and pass by, averting my eyes. I can’t do this with her. I’m in my own front yard.
The boys, who were in the street, are now standing by me in the sidewalk, the electric skateboard come to heel like a faithful dog.
“Can you help me?” She’s saying it to all of us now. My usual response is still unavailable, and I still find it impossible to speak. I just need a minute. I look desperately back at the two of them. Maybe I’m paralyzed because they’re there, and I want them to tell me what to do. I’m grateful, but also somewhat ashamed, when my fiancé steps in.
“What do you want us to help with?” He’s using the higher and more enunciated voice that comes out in tense situations, a voice I tend to find patronizing. “Are you in danger? Do you want us to call 911 for you?”
“Yes,” she says, looking relieved. That’s not what I was expecting.
“Yes?”
“I’m suicidal,” she says, her face reddening as she starts to cry.
It’s unnervingly timely, given the recent death of Anthony Bourdain, closely preceded by Kate Spade. We had just been listening to his audiobook on a drive, his voice brave and sensitive and wounded but ultimately optimistic, and I was messed up for a few days, I wanted someone like that to believe in the world still — to be live in the world still. I followed a link and watched him on a therapist’s couch, which had been played for TV as a quirky cultural encounter in a country with “more shrinks per capita than anywhere else,” but now echoed like a plea for help, and it made me upset, the therapist seemed pathetic to me, even harmfully dismissive. That day I wrote a story, just for myself, about a celebrity suicide counseling group that serves as a kind of purgatory, where a Bourdain character, desperate to get out of there for a smoke, finds himself talking to a Robin Williams character. But I realized halfway through, of course, I don’t know anything about suicide.
I don’t know what force was working in this girl in front of us. I should say young woman, but in the same way I think of myself as a girl, I think of her as a girl. We all, as discussed later, assess her pockets for weapons, doubt their existence.
The boys briefly confer, and then BFF calls 911. No one wants to, but what are we supposed to do?
While he’s on the phone call, which seems to last forever, the girl comes closer, and I keep trying to look everywhere but her, except I don’t want to not look at her now either, and so sometimes we make eye contact, which is a deep and staring eye contact. She has almond eyes the bright, light green of seaglass, and the darker ring around the irises just makes them prettier. They shine in the rest of her face — a crooked nose, acne, some extra weight, and a tan that I somehow know is dirt.
“They’re on their way,” BFF announces.
“They’re on their way,” fiancé and I repeat to her.
We do some more staring. Some more of those weird, forced smiles at each other and her, a smile that stretches my face and then falls when I can’t hold it up, because she’s still crying and still looking at me in that intensely pained way, although now there’s also something like interest behind it. She’s looking mostly at me, or at least it feels that way. I know it’s a fantasy, but it feels like she’s thinking she and I aren’t that different — wondering how she got to be here, instead of on the other side of the sidewalk, by the boy with the electric skateboard. It feels like she’s looking into me, pulling my privilege out and turning it over in her hands.
“It’s going to be ok,” I say, thinking that at least this can’t be the wrong thing to say to someone suicidal.
“What?” she asks me, with that underlying interest, as if I might have revealed some secret.
“It’s going to be ok. Help will be here soon.”
She doesn’t look calmed by this; if anything, she’s disappointed that was all I had to say.
BFF starts to ask her some questions, with a soothing but assertive bedside manner that makes me happy he’s headed to nursing school. We learn her name, we learn she’s the same age as us, we learn she’s also from SoCal, like me, though a less affluent city. In one of the silences, I want to tell her she has pretty eyes, but I worry that might make her stare and cry again, and the moment passes.
She’s not saying a lot, but when BFF asks some open-ended questions — something wise like, do you remember a good memory from when you were a child? — she suddenly is telling us everything, and it doesn’t make any sense. There’s violence in it, sexual things, things being done to her and put inside her, closets she was kept in, a man’s name that she says without introduction, as if he were a celebrity we should know, pills that make her all spaced out. Her mother, and other women, feature negatively, she doesn’t understand why they have to stalk her, why they have to do lesbian things. It’s sort of like someone telling you about their dream — it’s not possible to follow, and the emotions that pass on her face, her insistent repetitions, draw a kind of strained sympathy that might leave her lonelier than before; there is something essential that can’t be communicated.
She relaxes, though, from the talking. She asks if she can sit on the brick edge of our flower bed. It’s a misty San Francisco June dusk, and she looks cold, and I ask if she wants a blanket, and get a nod from BFF and run into the house to get her one. She drapes it over her knees, where it keeps slipping off her and almost falling onto the sidewalk until she grabs at it, half-successfully, like a child might.
Cheered by this, I ask if she also wants a glass of water? I go into the kitchen and spot some bread I’ve made, and start to saw off a slice — who knows when the last time was that she ate — but then I remember something about how you shouldn’t give people food if they’re on drugs, I don’t know if that’s real or not, but I decide against the bread and, feeling like I’m taking forever, fill a glass of water and bring it outside. She sips and then also swings this around as she talks, the water almost, just barely not spilling.
We slowly get the impression that she thinks she’s already dead. She keeps saying things like “that’s why I suicided,” past tense. BFF tells us later that this is something he’s seen before with the mentally ill. I wondered what she was seeing when she stared at me. If she thought she was in a kind of purgatory.
The police car pulls up, and as the cops get out I almost immediately have the thought — wait, the glass, that was so stupid. As if to make my point the officer, a young man not much older than us, serious-faced and precise, moves the glass (which she’s set down by now) out of her reach in a way that is calculatedly casual, and then starts to talk to her.
The discussion hinges on whether she has a plan to kill herself, or a plan to hurt other people, a terrible thing to be talking about, and especially in such logistical terms.
“I need to know if you have a plan to kill yourself, otherwise I can’t take put handcuffs on you and take you in the police car.”
“I’m suicidal.”
“Do you have a plan to kill yourself? Do you have a plan to hurt anyone else?”
“No.”
“You can walk to the treatment facilities, there is a women’s shelter at such-and-such address, you can get someone to take you there. I’m not a taxi.” The police officer says all of this, over and over, firmly but without frustration.
Crying: “I don’t get it. I’ve already told you, I’m suicidal.”
When two more cops arrive, standing bored in the background — when they run up against her idea that she has already suicided before — we decide it’s time to go inside. I’m not sure I want to, I feel invested, but I trust the boys on this one. I already have my blanket; the cops thought it was hers, and she explained while dropping it on the ground and apologizing tearfully to me, and I took it and it left me cold, too. She kept telling the cops that we, “these people,” had been so nice to her; this was important to her but it didn’t fit into the discussion about hurting. At one point she said emphatically that we were like her family, and I felt sad for her, used by her, and afraid of her, and paralyzed again by those feelings colliding.
We’re all quiet inside. The electric skateboard rests against the wall.
I mostly feel awful about giving her the glass, and say as much to the guys. “I thought about stopping you for a second,” BFF agrees, and they discuss the best possible water delivery method.
“Would have been pretty hard for her to have hurt herself on one of our Giants cups,” my fiancé muses.
“I really didn’t think she was going to do anything though,” I say, more to reassure than to defend myself. Her body language had never been violent, right? Well, at most, cautious and wounded, the kind of potential violence of a hurt animal. I have to admit, in this dialogue with myself, that I’d never really known what she was capable of; she thought she was dead. And I’d been so focused on calming her, I’d stopped thinking, let my own guard down.
There’s something I’m trying to put into words. Something about the line between self-preservation and charity being a difficult line to walk. On the one hand, you want to live in a society where people help each other. On the other, when it comes down to it, you want to protect yourself.
“I think what you’re saying is that you don’t want to be put in this kind of situation,” BFF says, and starts talking about solutions for homelessness, and we gradually move on to other things, but that wasn’t what I was saying at all. I was trying to look at this dilemma in the face, in the seaglass eyes, and not turn away.
Now I think he’s right — there is no escaping the dilemma, except perhaps saintly transcendence that could be a kind of suiciding, and we did the best thing, minus the glass.
Out the window, we saw her get taken away in the cop car. Maybe she finally said the magic words. I want to say I hope she’s ok, but I don’t know if that’s in any way realistic, so I hope she’s better.
And I do want a different situation, one where help is less fraught.
Thanks for listening; I get it now. I’m going to start volunteering.