Then I came to a story I couldn’t write. So I texted a friend.
Jeffrey Sharlet:
skimming through Skid Row photos looking for something there’s Alice.* Never wrote her story. Don’t think I told you: One day I get to Mecca’s shop early, around 5 am, which is just late for Mecca, to see the cardboard trucks come round and take people’s box beds. Mecca’s got an 18 year old girl there—got lost on Skid Row. Alice. She shows me her résumé. Bussed down from Fresno, I think, to find her favorite music star. Can’t remember his name. She’d been fucked by who knows how many when Mecca and Prophet Chris found her. She’d ask young dudes, “Are you So-and-so”—the rapper she loved—and they’d say, Sure, and then she’d let them fuck her. She was, you gather, crazy, actual 51-50, out of an institution, getting along, functioning, but then God told her to go off her meds and now here she was. Mecca and Chris held her in Mecca’s shop—her garage—and went thru her phone. Found her mother, called her 3 am.
A Neumann:
Damn
Jeffrey Sharlet:
I get there at 5 am, there’s a conference about what to do. Easy, I say—I’ll buy her a ticket to fresno. But we need to sit with her till the bus leaves. Then we walk the mile to the bus station, me and Alice. I get her a ticket. We sit in McDonalds and I look up her rapper, who it turns out doesn’t live in LA but Atlanta, she asks me where Atlanta is. Then she has to go to the bathroom. Ok. I consider—I can piss faster than she can, so I go, too. And, of course, when I come out she’s gone. I spent the rest of the day looking for her, got a cab for an hour so I could roll up and down streets, but I never did find her, and I can’t imagine what became of her. Or, bullshit, of course I can—I could look in any direction in Skid Row and see what became of her: Men fucked her till she wasn’t fuckable and then spice and then crack and now, likely, she sustains. This is how you get to Skid Row. I never did write it because I couldn’t. Such a sap. But here’s the thing. I look at the Alice pictures this morning—all blurry crap pictures—and it gets me in the chest, and I think, What a sap, any social worker has a million of these stories. And then that gets me, too—“a million of these stories” isn’t really, you know, consolation. It’s like an ocean and our seemingly stable lives are little boats we mistake for land. Thanks for letting me rant. Better get back to writing.
A Neumann:
Yes, keep going. Jeffrey Sharlet:
Maybe I use this one somewhere in the book instead. I must still have the ticket somewhere.
A Neumann:
Yes. It’s a better photo than you think.
Jeffrey Sharlet:
Thanks. She was middle class, or working class. Had a mother who tried to help her. Good student. Sort of a case for why you should say no to drugs: Everything cracked for her in 11th grade, I think, when she first tried weed. Of course, obv, she had other issues—she said she was schizophrenic—but it was like the weed activated it. Her mother put her through all kinds of programs, and some worked, and she got a job as a clerk, and was going to try to go back to school, but then, God spoke, and then Skid Row. That’s why this book is so much about [my daughter]. I don’t have the words: The fear that comes with the love that as soon as you have a child you can lose the child, that you can do all the right things and still it won’t matter. That’s Jared, the dude with the tattoos, whose mother found him on my Instagram, and then lost him when he OD’d. They tried. Dunno if I can.
A Neumann:
You can.
Jeffrey Sharlet:
Man o man the longer I think about this, the longer I linger instead of going forward, the more I see the problem with the way stories pile up in your head, too many stories of all the things we’ve seen. They don’t just haunt you. The haunting, that’s just the outer shell. They give you futures as well as pasts. Look at your daughter and see Alice or Jared. You realize just how fragile everything is. Instead of standing on land you realize you’re on a boat, and it’s a small boat, and the ocean is all around you, and the best hope is just to stay on the boat, because there is no land.
