by Sam Brighton
Nonfiction
The voices outside my bedroom window were what woke me, before the explosion. With the advent of May’s warm breeze, before bedtime I had wiggled the locks loose from winter and slid open all the windows. I rent the upstairs of a duplex in the outer reaches of Portland and sleep half the year with windows wide open without concern for someone crawling inside. The air drifted in, cool and earthy, and lifted my curtains, then dropped them. I fell asleep that night feeling the wind glide through my hair and listening to all the sounds of cityscape: traffic on the freeway, distant music, the occasional hot-rodding jackass with some machine-gun engine, a chorus of dogs yipping, the neighbor then barking at them to shut the fuck up. The voices outside my bedroom window that woke me grew talkative, like benign chatter—not worried or excited, no one voice louder than another, but from where and why, at this hour, somewhere deep in the nighttime, I could not imagine the likely explanation, though maybe this was a dream. I let the current carry me back to sleep.
My life right now affords no loss of sleep. Every Sunday night, sometimes Friday and Saturday nights too when my kids stay with their other mom, I work night shift in a detox facility, in part to pay for my graduate nursing program, and on my more noble days, because direct patient care feeds my soul. When I clock out on Monday mornings, as the birds whistle and the crows scream from the power lines and splatter our cars with shit, I pass the crowd that has gathered outside the facility, many still intoxicated, hoping for admission to an open bed. I race home to shower, fling my scrubs in the laundry basket, change into the business casual attire befitting of a nurse administrator, then jam on over to my day job at the neurology clinic. If my day is scheduled full of meetings that carry the threat of making me talk, or if I triage symptom calls, a mixture of caffeine and adrenaline keeps me functional. By midmorning, I scavenge the break room and eat to stay awake—I’m trying to knock that shit off. The Cup O’ Noodles available to me for free at 3 a.m. is resistible, but by 10 a.m. I’m Venmo-ing a dollar to the Snack Shack for the same damn thing—it makes no good financial sense, not to mention nutritional. Whenever a sensation of doom arises on Mondays, I remind myself that I haven’t yet slept, best defer this hand-wringing until Tuesday when I’m equipped to handle the weight of the world.
As soon as my midafternoon clinic operations meeting ends, I zoom out of the parking garage. (I work nine- or ten-hour days the rest of the week, so those with opinions around cutting Mondays short can bemoan the injustice to my boss.) On my way home, I call my mom to share whatever recent adventures. I started calling my parents daily on my way home from work during the pandemic, when it occurred to me that my parents—or even I—could die. From there I sleep a cool fourteen hours and wake up at 7 a.m. for an AA meeting, and then life as a regular daytime worker resumes. To keep these shenanigans rolling, I must protect my sleep.
Until BOOM!
My eyes open. A gunshot probably. Fireworks, maybe, big ones. Voices and the clopping of footsteps rise as they pass my window and then fade—I imagine—out of the streetlamp glow and into the night. I stay put. Nobody has cried out in agony. I’m not trying to peek outside and catch a bullet in my face.
Rarely I hear gunshots. In Oakland, back when I was married, the crack of gunshots woke me sometimes several nights per week. What chills me most is the light whistle of a bullet whizzing through the air near my window, only a screen protecting me from the world.
Eventually my bladder drags me out of bed. I peek out the window on my way to the bathroom. Black smoke roils up into the dark night. Just as I reach for my phone to dial 911, blue and red lights dance in silence off the houses. A fire truck pulls up; a few voices casually call out to each other. Nobody sounds alarmed or in distress. The hose activates and the fire sizzles as water meets flames. I crawl back in bed, turn on a stand-up comedy show, and before the comedian can utter five words, I’m back to sleep. The next day I spend the day indoors until I drive the kids to their other mom’s house at six in the evening and then head to detox for my overnight. It’s not until two days later that I notice the black charred fence, the grass below it bald and scorched.
A tent had been there. A person lived there. I don’t pay attention to who is living at the end of the street. It changes regularly—sometimes an RV, or a van with flat tires, an old Buick with a busted-out back window, sometimes a tent or two. Given the minimal fanfare, possibly a propane tank blew but nobody got hurt.
At detox, many of my patients live without homes. Some couch surf or move in with family members. Maybe half have no jobs, according to their histories, which baffles me how they juggle the costs of addiction. (My own alcoholism from twenty years ago emptied my savings account.) Rather, I’m certain that I don’t want to know how that works.
Fentanyl is measured in “blues”—blue pills that apparently are smoked, not swallowed—or in grams of powder. Meth is measured in eight balls or daily dollar amounts—five dollars a day, or twenty. Alcohol is measured in fifths or gallons or cans of specific brands—White Claws, High Noons. I’ve been away from drinking so long I no longer recognize the newfangled drinks sold from the cooler at 7-Eleven. Cigarettes—really the least of anyone’s problems in the scheme of the opioid crisis—are measured in packs per day.
I used to monitor the sales in the grocery mailers delivered every Tuesday afternoon for thirty packs of beer. Sometimes I drove well out of my way for cheap beer, with the bonus of anonymity. On Tuesday of Thanksgiving week, the clerk asked me how long it’ll take me to finish my sixty cans on the counter. I don’t remember how I responded, but it was a lie. That beer was not the only alcohol I drank over a four-day weekend, by far, but it was all gone by Sunday. That’s when I began rotating liquor stores.
Eighteen years ago, I began my own recovery in a detox facility. Caught brooding in the dayroom, a nurse summoned me to the nurses’ station. Life as I knew it had suddenly unraveled, and apparently I wore it on my face. The nurse said consoling and empowering things to me. She prompted me as she spoke, over and over, to look at her, to look her in the eyes. “Keep your chin up, hon. You’re in the right place. You’re doing this for yourself. Hold your head high.”
That was back when nurses used terms of endearment, before it was considered inappropriate. Sometimes I wish that still worked, to show professional affection in that way.
While my detox stay wasn’t the reason I eventually became a nurse, it was the reason I wanted to work at detox once I became one. Mostly my patients just want to sleep, and I let them, so long as they keep breathing. If they want to talk to me about their recovery, I listen and encourage them, but I let them lead. As the night nurse, my role is to make them comfortable and make them sleep, the doctor reminds us at nurse meetings.
“You know they call this place the candy shop,” a nurse once retorted. “They come here to get our good drugs.”
The doctor shrugged. “Better they sleep at the candy shop than die in the street.”
The job doesn’t pay enough to live on. Occasionally, I get a keep-your-chin-up moment with a patient, which fuels double-shift Mondays far better than caffeine and Cup O’ Noodles.
As I turn onto our street, I review with the kids what’s going to happen—while I make dinner, they’ll fold and put away their clean laundry, showers tonight, dinner, TV and cuddling, then lights out at 8:30 sharp. If the TV interferes with the evening chores, it’s going off and we’ll listen to music, and I’m in an Indigo Girls kind of mood. They groan even though they know the lyrics to “Closer to Fine” as well as I do. Their other mom lets them stay up past nine and doesn’t manipulate them by withholding screens to the extent that I do, and, I’m told, doesn’t make them hassle with laundry, but when they’re young adults maybe they won’t set multiple washing machines on fire as I once did.
“What happened there?” my son says. “Why is that in the grass?”
“Why is the what in the who now? Baby, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“There’s a cross at the end of the street? Did somebody die or something?”
Holy shit.
I didn’t see a cross, but I know what he’s talking about. I want him to be wrong.
As we unload the car, I give him permission to go up the street and investigate.
“Come here, quick,” he shouts.
He leads me down the sidewalk to show me. A white cross reads R.I.P., planted on the seared earth before the charbroiled fence, a pile of sunflowers on the ground at its base.
Holy fuck.
No commotion had unfolded, no police tape marked off the scene, nobody in uniforms had knocked on my front door with questions. No chalk outline of a human. Just a nonchalant hosing down of fire, noises fading into the depths of sleep.
The crowd. There had been a crowd of people, their voices and footsteps, unless that was a dream. Was this death a homicide?
I spend cuddle time distracted, searching online for a newsclip, the police log, neighborhood gossip, anything. Nothing.
I’m on a smoking jag, even though I goddamn well know better. Every week when I look at brain scans with the neurologist to evaluate for signs of dementia, I see what smoking does to the tiny blood vessels—not to mention to one’s lungs, all the albuterol inhalers at the bedsides of my sleeping alcoholics and addicts. Just this one pack, just to get through this day or week or spell, when the future is so far away, makes for such easy justification. As I lean against my car, I can see the charred fence, the white cross in the gray evening dusk. The blackened wood looks so brittle, so easy to snap. As I study the cross, the “R.I.P.,” I try to contemplate the human life that ended there—why and how, the loss of a life to tragedy just half a block away.
On the corner of the main road is a plasma donation center. A series of worn-out RVs line the back of the building: roofs thatched with blue tarp and duct tape, a tangle of twisted bicycles mounted to back bumpers. Sometimes jangled vertical blinds mask the windows, or tightly stuffed belongings obscure the view inside. Then suddenly the RVs disappear. New ones replace them weeks later. During the pandemic, I donated plasma there. Twenty to sixty bucks in cash for ninety minutes of quiet time that I was going to use studying for school anyway was a nice way to generate grocery cash. In those days I shopped for groceries only with my plasma cash to teach my kids about sales and making choices. Is the pudding really more important than milk? I stopped donating only when my new psoriasis medication disqualified me, lest parting with my plasma cause me harm. So pissed at those fuckers.
During the pandemic, tents multiplied on grassy strips alongside the roads and across city parking lots. Admittedly I had paused picking up food from my favorite Thai restaurant because of anxiety around parking my car inside a tent city with my kids for hot fragrant chicken pad see ew. One day all the tents had vanished. Giant immovable rocks materialized in their place, a hard and cruel “… and don’t come back” gesture from the city. I wish I knew the solution, given current realities, because this isn’t it, but I don’t. Seems nobody does.
A thumping bass from an approaching car crescendoes down the street. The headlights bob on the houses ahead of us, near the charred fence, as the car jumps the speed bumps. I ignore the car and pretend to scroll through my phone, just to engage the universal language of I’m-not-paying-attention-to-you. The car screeches to a slow roll right next to me. “Fat bitch,” a man’s voice calls out. Laughter spills from the windows as the car zooms away.
It takes me a moment to process what I just heard. Fat? Actually, I’m more ashamed of the smoking.
The people who live outside a half block away, those who reside in the RVs behind the plasma donation center, make no spectacles aside from the piles of trash nearby—a given since there’s no infrastructure for public trash disposal. I’ve never personally felt threatened. My greater concern is these fools, cruelty dispensed at random, unprovoked, for apparent recreation. What I find most shocking, though, is that they actually gendered me correctly.
I idle beneath the overpass on my way to detox, waiting to turn left onto the freeway entrance. A woman, the same woman every week, walks the median, holding a cardboard sign. Usually the sign declares her need for propane, sometimes her need for food. Anything helps. Though I see her at least weekly, I never think about her being there as I pack up for detox. So easily, I could make an extra sandwich or assemble a quesadilla, grab one of the dozens of blankets that drift between the kids’ beds and the couch. It’s not until I see her, hair pulled back in a ponytail with a gaunt face and sunken eyes that make their eyebrow ridge look prominent, that I remember she’s usually there on weekend nights. Rarely do I carry cash, only when I’ve paid for lunch at work and someone wants to give me something to cover their portion. The woman always wears shoes, shorts in the summer, a jacket during the cooler months. When it rains, she stands dry beneath the overpass. This reassures me, or is possibly something I tell myself to justify how, most of the time, I give her nothing of me.
I wonder about her story, her life before this underpass, what she was like as a second grader—assuming she went to school—what brought her here, will she find housing and live a more conventional life. Will she be among the people who freeze to death outside every time there’s a blizzard. Sometimes I want to invite her to detox—a guarantee of a shower, three meals, warm dry clothes, a bed with industrially sanitized sheets, and all-you-can-eat dense carbohydrate snacks under the supervision of nurses. But not knowing her life, her affairs, I never do. Some women use meth to stay awake all night because sleeping at night makes them vulnerable to assault. The shelters can only offer a waiting list, and some people prefer to sleep outside to keep their pets, or to avoid trouble at the shelter—theft and interpersonal conflict. At detox, I’ve taken care of stab wounds and assessed bruises that occurred right outside shelters. When I pass with my kids in the car, they’re apt to round up loose change lying around the back seat, or I give them a dollar whenever I have one to hand to her from the window. Last winter, on my way to detox, I gave her a twenty. It had been raining and that day her hair was wet, and a twenty was all I had. She started crying. But tonight, and most nights that I pass her, I don’t have any cash.
A couple months pass. I look for the charred fence and the cross every time I drive by, until the day they vanish. The four or five fence panels have been replaced, factory fresh, not yet weathered like their neighboring panels, and no more cross.
It’s time to move on.
I still look at that spot, every time I drive by.
A new tent has established itself there. I wonder if they know.
Every so often, I sift through the local news online, looking for stories of fires that involve the homeless in Southeast. Usually I avoid local news, a catalog of local violence and carnage. Violent deaths and assaults, deaths of despair. In the national news, there’s the war going on the other side of the world, now two. Floods killed more than 1,700 people in Pakistan, more than 1,300 civilians perished in a surprise attack, a hundred swift deaths in a fire that raged across Lahaina, twenty-two people in Mississippi killed by tornados. Almost sixty fucking thousand people in Turkey and Syria dead from an earthquake. All this year.
Nothing mentions the fire in Southeast, the death of a person in a tent, half a block away.
What will my turn look like, I wonder.
Maybe I’d be lucky to live long enough to die from my smoking.
The stoplights at the intersection are unlit, and a trail of cars bumble their way through what we’ve collectively agreed upon should be a four-way stop, even though none of these Portland motherfuckers follow the rules of four-way stops. Portland drivers so consistently fail at this concept that I looked up Oregon’s driving laws to see if I was the mistaken one, if the people driving forward through the intersection are supposed to yield to those turning left. Nope.
“Come on, drive that motherfuckin’ Prius, go,” I holler. My window is rolled up; I’m in my safe space. I have to watch myself sometimes because people can hear me when my windows are down, and I don’t intend for people to actually hear me. I never honk or extend my middle finger. I’m not even that asshole who darts between lanes of crowded freeways. I just yell inside my car when the sensation of stagnancy feels intolerable.
“Your car insurance is watching you,” my nine-year-old says from the back seat. It’s true, they are, and they’ve jacked up my rates because I agreed to this monitoring to finagle a discount. They ding me for hard braking, though it would be far more costly to just plow into whatever thing in my way.
“I know, honey.” I take a deep breath. “Thank you for the reminder. Jesus H., have you nowhere to be? Step on the goddamn gas.”
Crossing town at a leisurely pace is a privilege. Oh to go somewhere, anywhere, and not be in a hurry.
We roar up the city streets to the skating rink for roller derby practice, a four-hour affair on Saturday mornings—one hour of practice, one hour of scrimmage, one hour break, and then one hour of travel team practice.
Resigned to the red light, I sit back and drink coffee from my thermos.
“Sorry, I’m sorry for being an asshole. I’ll try to cool it.”
“Oh, you’re not an asshole, Mom, you’re just crabby.”
Yes.
I reach my arm to the back seat and we hold hands for a moment.
“One day, I’ll teach you how to drive and you’ll know, you’ll understand.”
I turn on the radio and we sing.
Somewhere after the fourth time I mop up vomit, I lose count. I’ve slung everything I have at this patient’s ailing receptors. I pin the phone receiver against my shoulder so I can type the doctor’s instructions into the computer, a series of if/then scenarios, proactive planning to prevent me from calling and waking her and whomever she sleeps with during the overnight hours. Already, I’ve interrupted her at a concert—it’s Saturday night. Girl punk music fades with each “Hello? Wait, can’t hear you. Hello?” The aide next to me opens yogurt. A stink of strawberries and sour cultures billows, too similar to the scent of digestive fluids. Through the window, my patient leans over the side of his bed, rears his head up and then down. Another slop of liquid silently splashes to the floor. “Goddamnit. He doesn’t even try to aim for the bucket,” I say, mostly to myself. “Gross.”
I push the mop under his bed. Clear viscous fluid has oozed underneath and toward his neighbor’s bed. He’s curled up, his knees to his chest. I bump the mop stick against the bed. “Oh, sorry,” I whisper. He opens his eyes and watches me. Perhaps scooping this pile of partially digested noodles and carrot squares with a paper towel will break me of this relationship with Cup O’ Noodles.
He asks me for another blanket. “A heavy one? Like this one?” I pick up the corner of his comforter. He nods. In the linen room, I grab the ugliest blanket off the shelf—solid tan. Let him barf on something ugly. He snores as I return, his head now at the foot of his bed. I unfold the comforter for him, pull the end over the mounds of his feet and tuck the other side under his shoulders. He opens his eyes and watches me. “Hope that helps,” I say. He stares at me. Dick.
Sometimes I wonder what’s the point—why am I doing this, any of this.
This is despair speaking, or sleep deprivation, maybe both, in this moment. Don’t grab onto this, don’t let it swirl, just let it pass on through.
I don’t feel like this most of the time.
To stay out of my head, between barfings, I chitchat with the aide. I ask about her plans for Disneyland, her dreams about someday becoming a nurse. Let me bask vicariously in hope.
The door slam next door wakes me. Muffled voices scream at each other.
“Just leave me alone you fucking bitch,” a man yells. “You always do this, telling me what to do, and you know what? Fuck you.”
“No. Fuck you,” the lady screams.
Their voices soften for a moment, until “Get the fuck away from me.”
I wait, tighten my grip around my pillow, wait for the sound of injury, wait for a gunshot. I want to flee to my living room couch, but I stay. Maybe I need to call the police.
Often the man dumps pails of rocks into the yard below my window and then hoses them down. I don’t know why. They’ve parked a couch in the grass strip between their house and mine, right below my bedroom window. At night, their weed smoke drifts inside my room. Last month, I found an empty box with my name on the label stuffed beneath a bush, my $8,000-per-dose psoriasis medication gone. My intuition wants to blame them, but I have no proof.
Earlier this summer when out smoking, I overheard them arguing about buprenorphine injections, long-term treatment for opioid addiction. I don’t wish to tangle with those neighbors.
“Go to hell, you damn dirty goddamn bitch.”
Another door slams. Moments later, music fills the silence, so loud it could be broadcast from my own speaker on the bookshelf. It takes me a moment to place the song. It’s “Never” by Heart. I listen to the lyrics for clues.
Anything you want, we can make it happen. Stand up and turn around, never let them shoot us down.
I don’t know what that song is about, what Heart meant by singing it, or why that song is now at full volume during a domestic conflict, and is that woman being bludgeoned to death to its tune, but as I listen, I consider all the pain that boils over in the house next door, the pain that steams through the neighborhood, across the dead grass and hallowed ground of that homeless person’s death, among the people in beds at detox, all the hurt in the world—the power of my reach, to add to it, or to seek its counterbalance.
When the song ends, the music stops. A dog barks in the distance. Cars pass on the freeway. Minutes later, the woman flings open the front screen door—apparently on the phone—and chatters and laughs through a one-way conversation. She shuts the car door, turns the engine, and drives out of their yard and away down the street. Maybe it’s the man who’s dead. I turn on lesbian stand-up comedy and wait through the set, feel the breeze in my hair, waiting to fall asleep, until I hear the clatter of rocks fall from a bucket, the spray of a hose.
I need cigarettes. Tonight is my third detox overnight in a row, and I have to work at the clinic tomorrow. Weekends without my kids feel so lonely and quiet, it’s a blessing to have somewhere to be, a job to do. As I wait at the stoplight outside 7-Eleven, a woman hobbles across the street. She wears one shoe, one sock on the other foot. Her arms dangle from her shoulders. She walks a little sideways. Whether she’s on something or experiences neurological dysfunction, I cannot tell. I roll up my window and lock the car doors, aware that I’m an asshole. I’m not on the clock.
Outside 7-Eleven, I peel off the cellophane encasing my cigarettes and stuff it in the trash can outside the store. It would be better if I didn’t light up wearing my scrubs, lest the smoke stink linger on my clothes. People at detox aren’t allowed to smoke cigarettes and as consolation, we issue nicotine patches. Some nurses won’t hand them out before bedtime because they cause nightmares. If the patient understands the risk, I don’t fight that battle—these people are adults. But I’m on my way to work, I need a cigarette, so the scrubs will have to do.
I lean against my car as I smoke. The woman with one shoe staggers across the sidewalk in front of the 7-Eleven entrance. She peers into the garbage can, reaches inside, shuffles some things around, and then moves on. She turns and looks at me. I hold her eye contact and smile. Not because I want to engage, Jesus I really don’t, but I want her to know that I see her, a person.
She steps into the parking lot, toward me.
“Hey honey, you got a cigarette I can buy?”
“Sure,” I say. “You don’t have to pay me—I’ll just give you one.”
I pull out four cigarettes and hand them over. The more I give out, the less I smoke.
“Thank you,” she says. “Thank you so much.”
“Need a light?” I say.
She nods and I flick my lighter. She cups her hands close to mine to block the wind.
“Are you okay?” I say. What a stupid thing to say. The woman has one shoe.
“I’m ass out right now,” she sniffles. “Shit out of luck.” I watch her as she cries. I don’t have any cash. I really need to get going to work in a minute.
“Seems like you’re having a hard time,” I say. “Can I get you anything? Something to eat?” I point to the store.
She turns and looks to follow my hand. “No, I’ll be okay, but thank you.”
We stand in silence. She wipes her tears off her cheeks with the sleeve of her sweatshirt.
“Here, take my whole pack, and here’s a lighter.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I have another pack in the car.”
We smoke.
“How are you doing?” the woman wearing a single shoe asks me.
“Doing okay,” I say. “Heading to work in a minute.”
“Do you, sorry if this is weird, do you think I could get a hug?” she says.
My fear tells me to stay away from her.
What if she stabs you in the kidney with scissors?
But she’s a person. Somebody made her, and held her as a baby, and talked to her—at least some, that much at least is true. Maybe someone misses her, wants to hear from her, keeps something of hers, thinks about her before they fall asleep. She’s a person, and she needs a hug.
Plus, I can probably run faster than her.
“Sure” I say. “Sure I’ll give you a hug.”
Certainly 7-Eleven is getting this on camera, should I be assaulted.
I approach her. We both hold our lit cigarettes away and hug with the other arm. I aim my chin toward the deltoid side of her shoulder, in case her hair has lice. Not a close solid hug with full bodies pressed together, but not a half-assed side hug either. A standard hug.
We pull away. “Thank you,” she says.
“There’s a pay phone inside 7-Eleven. If you dial 211, it’s a resource line—they might be able to help you get what you need, maybe some shoes,” I say. “Hang in there, friend.”
She nods. “I will.”
She shuffles back across the parking lot. By the time I buckle my seatbelt and check my mirrors to back out of my parking space, she’s gone.
Sam Brighton (she/they) has published creative nonfiction in Kitchen Table Quarterly, The Rumpus, River Teeth, and Memoryhouse. Their first publication was an honorable mention in Exposition Review’s Flash 405.