One Day in Chinatown...

I’m sitting at my desk at work, it’s Friday afternoon, twenty minutes past the time when I should have left for home, and I’m still here. Why? Because we had another shooting outside and I saw the shooter leaving the scene of the crime. He doesn’t know I saw him, he didn’t see me because I was upstairs and inside, looking out the gap in the door that leads to the back porch/balcony.

But I saw him, and once the 911 operator finished her questions, she asked me to stick around in case the officers had any other questions for me. So here I sit, knowing I won’t get my grocery shopping done on the way home, nor will I pick up those toe socks I wanted from REI.

My painting of Nicholas Nickleby and Smike (Roger Rees and David Threlfall of the RSC) - they were homeless when they ran away from Dotheboys Hall

When I leave here I will walk out the door still shaking inside. I will drive home and take refuge in my apartment, take comfort in the fact that I have locks on the door and that I’m surrounded by military folk who live in the other apartments and are there to study at Defense Language Institute in Monterey.

It didn’t even occur to me not to call 911. It didn’t occur to me not to acknowledge that I thought I could recognize the young man, even if my description wasn’t perfect or in the greatest detail.  When I spoke with one of the residents in our transitional housing program, who had also been around, that individual said they told the person with them to look away, so they couldn’t identify the shooter. Survival instincts, learned on the streets,

I can still feel the adrenalin coursing through my body – is it in the veins? Funny, I have no idea. All I know is I can feel it. I can type, but there’s a weird kind of numbness in my fingers. I’m hungry, and wondering when I’ll be able to go home and eat. Wanting in the worst way to get some comfort food, and knowing that no matter what I get, it will be hard to swallow it. And I won’t get comfort food, because I won’t want to stop for anything on this trip home. Once I get in that car I want to go straight home.

This isn’t what I’d planned for my blog. But I have to do something as I wait.  Don’t I?

An empty lot after a "sweep" - hours before, this lot was jammed with dozens of tents filled with people, pets, as well as trash and debris - after the city did the sweep, the property owner put up fences to keep the homeless out - they moved their tents to the sidewalks and spilled over into the streets

While I wait, I’ll give you a little bit of background on why folks are shooting outside at 4:10 pm on a sunny Friday afternoon. First of all, the time is easy – that’s the shift change for the police. Most of them are still at the station at that time, so the chances of not being caught are better.

We’ve had a rash of shootings in Salinas, six over Labor Day weekend. Here in Chinatown, the neighborhood of the homeless and the drug dealers, we’ve had more than our fair share. Strange expression – what is a neighborhood’s “fair share” of shootings? In any event, we’ve had more than a few.

We’ve also had stabbing deaths and one young man who was punched, fell and cracked his head on the curb. He died a few days later.

One thing I didn’t know about the chronically homeless before I worked here (those who are homeless again and again, not just someone who loses their home for a short time in an emergency), is that often they experience mental illness of some kind. In Chinatown it was determined by one of the local service providers that more than 90% of the community suffered from some form of mental illness or another. Many of these folks are not capable of holding down a job or taking care of themselves, yet the system makes it incredibly hard for anyone else to take care of them.

Did you know that many substance abuse programs won’t take people with mental illness, and many mental health facilities won’t take people with substance abuse issues. So if you have a dual diagnosis (both mental illness and substance abuse) then there are very few places you can go. There are groups trying to address that, but it’s a serious problem, with not a lot of help out there now.

So the folks living all around this neighborhood are the least able to take care of themselves, and in the midst of that, we have the drug dealers who work on the streets of Chinatown, but generally don’t sleep here.

According to media speculation, we have a gang war over drug territory here in Chinatown. We used to hear about the shootings or stabbings or fights that happened at night or on the weekends. Now it’s in the middle of the day, the middle of the week.
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I’m home now. It’s more than 24 hours later, and the victim of the shooting has died. In the meantime, another young man was shot and killed in the middle of the night, right in the same area. I wondered if it was the shooter, though that seems unlikely. Why would he hang around?

I got a text from my boss letting a couple of us know that the police are setting up a mobile station on the block this weekend. I don’t envy them, and I wish they were going to be there when I go back to work on Monday.
 

Me with my faithful Pongo

This is the first time I’ve written today. Saturday is normally one of my days to dive into the second draft of my novel, but not today. Tomorrow, maybe. It’s not as if I spent all day thinking about the shooting. I guess I should now say the homicide. The police never did call to ask about my seeing the shooter. The news said there were a number of witnesses, and they probably had some that actually saw the shooting, which I did not. Okay by me.

I did some of my usual Saturday things – went to the laundromat, watched the IndyCar qualifying for tomorrow’s race, played games on my iPad, visited Animal Friends Rescue Project and played with one of the puppies for a bit. I didn’t go write at Asilomar, but I did go down to the beach for a bit. There were some sea otters hanging out offshore.
I love sea otters. I could spend all day watching them at Monterey Aquarium; I love the way they float on the water so in the waves you can see their noses and head, and their toes (I don’t think they’re really toes, but from a distance, who cares?). Like many wild animals, they are beautiful and appealing and do not want to play with you.

Can you see the sea otter in the middle left of the water? All of that white water and he's just chillin'

The only exception I’ve ever seen to that were the squirrels and baby spotted skunks at Tassajara. I’ve had a squirrel jump up on my lap while I was reading, and place its front paws on my arm and look up into my face as if to say, “Well, don’t you have a treat for me?” I never did, because I know it’s not good to feed them, but boy, that one was sure cute. The spotted skunk babies, during my last summer at Tassajara, became so comfortable around humans they would skitter around under and over foot in the dining room, trying to find scraps.

It seems crazy that these things exist in the same world, and they do. In an episode of West Wing, President Bartlet says of some home-grown terrorists, “They weren’t born wanting to do this.”

The young man yesterday who killed another young man apparently burned his fingers on the barrel of the gun, that’s why I saw it in his hands – it was too hot to hide in his pocket or jeans. An experienced killer would have known better. That doesn’t excuse him, nor does it mean he shouldn’t be caught and take responsibility for what he did. But he wasn’t born wanting to commit a murder. No one is.

I don’t have any great wisdom around any of this. I just wanted to share it. I’m grateful that I can.

Take care – seriously, take care,

Doc