Pandemic Journal

March 20, 2020

Last night, I discovered what turned out to be a poor lost soul hiding in my garage. Here I was stuck at home like so many people, trying to adjust to life during a serious pandemic, and feeling slightly edgy with no visible provocation. Just a week earlier a policeman had been shot and killed a half mile away from my house, the first on-duty SPD death since 1932. People, not really knowing how to prepare, have decided that hoarding toilet paper eases their fear, like we're turning into Venezuela or something. At the very least, a lot of people are being forced to take a moment, a day, a week, a month for some serious self-assessment, ready or not.

I put down the book I was reading, Love in the Time of Cholera (I know), and ventured outside to close the garage doors, as I always do before heading off to bed. The garage is a separate building behind the house that has a small upstairs for storage. The upstairs is where our two indoor/outdoor cats hang out. It's not the best smelling place, but it's become their favorite spot for extensive napping.

The first thing I noticed as I approached the garage was that my newly installed motion-sensor lights did not come on. I found this mildly disturbing, as they were still new enough for me to muster a bit of consumer satisfaction each time they illuminated the dark spaces. Odd. I waved my hands around like an idiot. Nothing. Was that a cat rustling around upstairs? Then, I noticed that the sensor lights had been unplugged. I quickly plugged them in and went back into the house.

"Hey, did you unplug the garage light?" I asked my adult daughter, stuck at home with her dad during a pandemic while on hiatus from seasonal work out west.

"What? No. Why?"
"I think somebody may be upstairs in the garage."
"What?"

I returned to the garage and grabbed a baseball bat from a game tub by the door that contains frisbees, basketballs, old ball gloves. Turns out it was a wiffle ball bat, which wouldn't offer much defense, especially if the garage invader were armed. My mind raced. I stood quietly, wiffle bat in hand, until I heard a slight rustling sound above me. One of the cats, Louie Lamour, intently listened at my feet, tail fluffed. He knew something. I felt that unmistakable metalic rush of adrenaline. Somebody was up there, and I was poised to stun them into submission with blows from a plastic bat.

"Dude," I yelled. "I know you're up there, and you need to come down," I hadn't really thought about what to say. "If you aren't out of this garage in one-minute, I am calling the cops. Come down and leave. Now!" Silence. Then, he finally spoke just as I turned to go back inside.

"Can you help me? I need help," he answered in a feeble sounding voice. I was surprised the voice was higher pitched. I had pictured an older homeless person, or a generic, grizzled bad guy of some sort. Wasn't sure what to expect, really.

"No, I cannot help you," I yelled back. "Come down and maybe you can get some help. Come out of the garage now." No response. So, I went inside, called 911 and stayed on the line. While talking with dispatch, I saw him finally come out and begin walking tentatively, shakily toward my backdoor, arms outstretched as if to show he wasn't armed.

He was a tall, skinny kid with a buzz cut, wearing dirty, torn jeans. His face was in shadows. At that moment at least three police cars arrived. They had already been called due to reports of gun shots apparently. The kid didn't attempt to run. The officers approached carefully, calmly talking to him. At least one officer had his gun drawn. Within minutes, there were five officers surrounding the kid, and they persuaded him to sit down in one of my patio chairs by the umbrella table. Lights were on him, and I could finally see his face.

Over the next couple of hours, a group of four or five attending officers listened to a series of implausible tall tales and tried to figure out where they should take him. A couple of officers left for other calls. The kid was frisked, and police found a small knife, a pack of Newport cigarettes and a small amount of cash in his pockets. He told them his phone was still upstairs in the garage. He was trying to find a place to charge it. I went up to the cat haven with the officer to look around. There is absolutely nothing of value up there. They eventually found the phone.

His first story was that he was being chased by people with knives. Then, it was that his mother had kicked him out of the house. "Wait, okay. I'll be honest," he prefaced each tale. He refused to tell them his name and was overly concerned that the officers knew that he was "of age" to have his Newports. Of course, he wasn't.

As a former secondary teacher, I knew this kid. Not this individual kid, of course, but so many boys like him who were part of a second generation of lost boys in our town. Lost boys raised, loosely speaking, by lost parents, who depend on grandparents, teachers, counselors and social workers to provide at least an introduction to what might be "normal". In this case, the police were attempting to take that role, and they were exercising a great deal of patience in gently nudging him toward the reality of his current situation. If nothing else, this incident provided some real time insights into their daily work.

It turns out this kid, who, of course, was given a biblical name by invisible parents, lived with grandparents maybe a half mile away behind the Christian bowling alley. His grandfather had reported him as missing, as he had done many times before, and officers eventually learned his name and called grandpa. As officers attempted to load him in a squad car to take home, it became apparent that he couldn't walk and was getting sick. Eventually, an ambulance arrived, along with the grandfather, and he was taken to Cox Hospital for possible overdose. Grandpa told officers some Percocet was missing from the medicine cabinet. It was after midnight before everybody was gone.

Of course, all this happened under the pall of a worldwide pandemic that is all too quickly changing the way we view almost everything. I found myself wondering why the police who had frisked, propped up and, for a couple of hours stood well within a foot or two of this young man, were not wearing gloves or taking any apparent precautions.

And I thought to myself, well, this kid probably didn't fit the profile of a study abroad student just returned from Italy or China, and I was pretty damn sure he was not among those who defied health warnings to worship at the suburban mega-church down the highway (two positive cases so far). Just the same, I kept myself at a distance, as I was trying to train myself to do even with friends and relatives.

We live in exceptional times, trying times for sure. Lost boys like this probably aren't infected with the virus yet. But by now we should all know that it will be the lost people, the forgotten people at the low end of the social order who will eventually suffer most from this pandemic. It's just a matter of time. And I'm trying not to feel guilty that I didn't help this poor lost boy more than I did.