Angela

Yesterday I met a woman named Angela. She was screaming on the street below our window as Kristina and I made some Hangover Potatoes. We glanced down like we often do, expecting to see a man piss on a wall or vomit on his already stained and worn shoes. There is a detox center on the corner of our street (coincidently run by St. Vincent de Paul, the organization I now work for) and things like that aren’t so uncommon. People lose their minds from time to time, detoxing off this drug or that, and sometimes things can get loud or volatile. But when we looked down today a woman was slashing at her wrists with a piece of dull metal.

Not knowing what to do we ran down the stairs. A woman who worked at the detox center reached her before I did, grabbed the woman’s arms and slammed her wrist against the wall forcing her to drop the piece of discarded metal that she had been stabbing at her wrists with. I was frozen. I didn’t know what to do. The woman from the center was a professional, she knew what she was doing and I didn’t want to get in the way. I didn’t want to make things harder for her. I asked her how I could help and she asked me to call 911 but all I had was my cell phone and that wasn’t going to work. She looked at the woman crouched in front of her and she held her arms firmly with concern, trying her best to keep her from clawing at her own skin. She looked at her and said, “Angela, shh shh shh, it’s ok. You’re going to be ok. You’re going to do this. We’re going to get you some help. Shh shh shh Angela”. I offered to find someone inside to call, but I could tell that wasn’t what she needed. So I sat down next to Angela, put my arm around her back and held onto her. The two of us sat there, listening to Angela wail about how she couldn’t do it any more, how she had tried so hard to get clean, and how he was coming for her. He was coming for her. He was coming for her. She threw her head onto my shoulder and her hands flew up to try to scratch at her face and quickly I pulled them down into her lap, close to her body, where they would be safe.

It had occurred to me that she might be dangerous, that she might try to hurt me. But as she sat screaming, arms tugging at my restraint, I realized the only person she wanted to hurt was herself. I was holding her on my own now, her face pressed into my chest, my hands wrapped around her wrists spotted with blood as she cried. The other woman took the opportunity to go inside and call the paramedics and I sat alone with Angela, huddled in a doorway. She returned with another woman that I knew. Her name is Michelle, I had met her when I’d taken a tour of the facility on my first day of work. Michelle and the other woman talked in calm ordinary voices, trying to convince Angela that she was safe and that she could do it. She could be ok. They said, “You know honey, maybe it needed to get this far, maybe this is it, you can do it. I know it’s hard, but you can do it”. Angela responded by calling them bitches, screeching at them to shut the fuck up, leave her alone, all the while holding tighter to all of us.

I sat mute, not knowing the woman in my arms, not knowing anything about what she was going through, not wanting to say anything inappropriate or insensitive. Meanwhile Angela ranted incoherently about getting out of prison, going back to her mothers house and the father that had raped her since she was a young girl, “He’s coming for me. He’s coming for me. How could she let him do those things to me? I tried to be a good little girl. I tried. I tried. I can’t do it no more. He’s coming for me.” We whispered that she was good, that she was going to be ok. Michelle assured her that help was coming and we all waited.

The woman I didn’t know wiped Angela’s tears away with a napkin and held the same napkin so she could blow her nose. Tears filled my eyes and then quickly dissipated. I remembered all the people in my life that use/used drugs to bury deep painful truths. I remembered being a young girl and watching my mother detox in the corner of her room, biting down on her lip so hard that it bled. I remembered every person that has tried to convince me that “junkies” weren’t people, that they didn’t feel or care. And I remembered all the woman I know in my life that have been beaten, raped, assaulted. The woman in my arms was just barely hanging on. She was in a place so raw and so humyn that it seemed impossible to do anything but love her and hold her.

Over time police started to show up. Two men with guns, then four, then six. Michelle reassured Angela that they were only there to help, that they weren’t going to hurt her. For the most part they left us alone as we waited for the paramedics. They stood across the street, talking to one another, laughing about something that had happened earlier in the day, completely detached from what was happening right in front of them. Angela panicked at the sight of them and we did our best to console her as she thrashed her arms around. We were still holding her, doing our best to pin her arms down with our hands and knees when one of the officers came over to ask us if we wanted her cuffed. “No!”. He walked away. The paramedics arrived and Michelle and I did our best to stand her up so that she could walk over to the gurney. But as we lifted her up, after having sat with her for the past 20 minutes listening to turmoil spill out of her, we were told by an old white man who had arrived in his own separate car to leave her alone so that he could do his job. So we stepped away and a swarm of men laid her down and strapped her to a board. First her feet, then her wrists, then her torso. As they wheeled her towards the ambulance I waved to Michelle and the other woman and turned around to go back into my house.

Shaken I walked up the stairs to the bathroom sink and washed small smears of Angela’s blood off my arms and chest. I washed my hands several times, knowing full well the risk of HIV and other diseases, feeling guilty for thinking her blood might be contaminated. I had held her, listened to pieces of her story and then did my best to scrub her off of me.

I moved on with my day, finally eating those potatoes, taking a nap, steaming some artichokes for dinner. I don’t know what happened to Angela, I never will. I hope she received the care she deserves, that someone took the time to try and understand what it might have felt like for her to get strapped down to that board, or be driven so insane by memory that she would try to take her own life, but I know that many do not receive even the most basic of care. I’m still not sure how to articulate what it was she taught me. But I know it was a lot. And once again, I am grateful.