Where will you sleep? she asked him. Are you going somewhere?
He had a large duffel bag slung over the shoulder and a small suitcase on wheels.
I’m headed to a casino in Jersey, he said, you’ll keep an eye on my daughter, right?
All of this trouble for a clean, bedbug-free bed, she said to him.
In summary, she took a bag of drugs from work and exchanged it for a clean bed. To put it plainly, she had no right to exchange the powder for the clean bed, as the powder was not technically hers, a powder that turned out to be heroin, a missing powder that caused chaos in the upper management of her nonprofit organization, and a missing bag that brought out the police and a detective.
Unfortunately the man from Crown Heights never came back. The young woman stayed in the apartment with the man’s daughter for two weeks, until it was arranged for the daughter to live with a relative in California, and when the woman returned to her own apartment, the bedbugs were gone. In a way, it might be said, they all won.
The moral of the story is do whatever you have to do, but first do no harm!
New York City, a city so rich it funds poetry, also has the financial resources necessary to help people get back on their feet, but I want to suggest A NEW WAY, a radical approach without the intrusion of nonprofit organizations, the government, and people, who, though well-meaning, have never walked a day in your shoes.
Less than a year ago, I slammed my compass down and ethical shards flew everywhere. Those shards, when they were whole, did nothing for me! They were better as shards! I swept them up in a dustpan and threw them away. During times of desperation, one’s moral compass can shift, in fact, it can be radical to alter one’s ethical position. Ethical positions should never be laid in concrete, sometimes it’s necessary to shift one’s moral compass, and sometimes it’s necessary to destroy it.
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I made hundreds of copies of my pamphlet after I convinced a coworker to show me how to print them on our facility’s laser printer. I left them on subway trains, I gave them to people on the street who looked upset, I dropped them off at Marxist bookstores and vegan cafés. One day I helped an elderly Jehovah’s Witness down the steps of the A train station, and even though I was running late for work, I gave him one of my pamphlets; if one person could be helped by my pamphlet it would all be worth it.
I was so proud of it, I sent a copy to my adoptive brother, I took great care addressing the envelope, I signed my name extravagantly in green pen. After I sent it to him, he went out of contact for a month. When he came back into communication he never said anything about my pamphlet. I thought he would appreciate me sharing it, I assumed he would consider it a thoughtful gesture, as he enjoyed reading. I never forgot that he liked to read nonfiction thoroughly and in one sitting, and when we were young our adoptive parents thought we both read too much and that we needed to go out into the world more often to interact with the living. When he was in ninth grade his favorite book was about trees, Drawings of Trees in the Midwest, it’s possible he liked reading about trees because they spent their entire lives in continuous peace. He took Drawings of Trees in the Midwest everywhere he went, even to high school where hateful and disgusting kids made him a pariah for carrying around a book about trees. Eventually the book’s binding came apart and he threw the entire thing away. I was surprised at his lack of respect for an object that once gave him so much joy; he told me it didn’t matter, he didn’t need the book anymore, he had memorized the contents and he could see the trees precisely etched and shaded in his mind any time he wanted to, and I didn’t understand it, that he would want the trees inside his brain like that, why would he fixate on trees, it didn’t make sense. I myself had no particular interest in trees.
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One day our adoptive father picked us up from school. I was a senior so it was very embarrassing to see him waving at us from the car. I buried my face into my backpack. When I climbed into the car, I ducked down. My adoptive brother sat like a normal person in the backseat, and instead of going in the direction of our house, my adoptive father drove us through a small and complicated neighborhood, there were stop signs every block, and then we came upon an industrial space, then past the industrial space and into what appeared to be a new town. The car stopped. There were small stone and brick buildings situated on a well-manicured hillside lawn like an extremely wealthy person’s estate. In the center of the spread was a lake with swans. Someone was feeding them and someone else trimmed the hedges. I thought he was going to drop us off and let us start our lives over in a strange town with a new family, but instead he got out of the car, pulled my adoptive brother out, then dragged him to a small stone building where I saw a door open, and only my adoptive brother went in. Somehow I was spared the experience. I only knew it was a therapist because my adoptive brother told me. He told me that he told the therapist he wanted to be a therapist. Each week was an opportunity for a new lie. The therapist called my adoptive father and told him he couldn’t work with a person like that; it was too frustrating.
Think about what therapists have to listen to all day, said my adoptive brother. At least I was saying something interesting.
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