My Neighbor, Mark Harold Page #2

I wrote this story in honor of a big brother figure of mine who fell into the "War on Drugs" trap.

• Short story

								


And of course, the house provided alcohol products for those parties.  Neither of my parents consumed a lot of alcohol.  My father drank Miller Lite, but only a couple of cans after work; he was hardly an alcoholic.  And my mother rarely consumed alcohol, as the horrors of her upbringing where an abusive alcoholic stepfather and his violent tendencies towards her made that a thing.  Although I do remember her once getting completely gassed at one particular New Year’s Eve hosted party.  But that behavior was almost as rare as Mark doing speed before going into rehab.  It was also right before my mother and father separated for good.

Two years after Mark came out of rehab and started losing weight, his parents thought he was just “getting healthier,” but I somehow innately knew different.  How weird is it that a kid could see it but the parents or anyone else for that matter couldn’t?  Maybe the closer we are to something, the harder it is to see it?  And since they were family and I wasn’t, that might have been the case.  Nevertheless, when I hit the age of twelve, my mother left my father; we then moved in with my mother’s “friend” across town, only a few miles away.  But when you’re that age, four or five miles feels like fifty or more.  
And that was the last time I interacted with Mark on any level.

After that period, my life started spiraling; I left home at the age of fifteen, ended up on the streets of downtown Long Beach, semi-sleeping inside a Winchell's doughnut shop, across the street from the hospital I was brought into this world, and would eventually leave the state and end up in South Florida, arriving in Ft. Lauderdale on my eighteenth birthday.

Flash forward to 1995, twelve years after seeing Mark’s then frail frame, while I drove a truck, an eighteen-wheeler, for a nationwide company.  I received an order to deliver a load to a Target in my hometown of Lakewood.  Now, I had lived near the house I grew up in only three years prior to this trip, but when I tried to contact Mark, his sister told me he had been living on the streets and that she and the family had been estranged with him for a while.

After arriving at my delivery destination, about three miles from the old neighborhood, I dropped off the load and bobtailed across from the Lakewood Mall, which was only a mile or less from the street we grew up on.  I was hungry and headed for a restaurant to grab some lunch.  And the weird part of this story is that Mark was on my mind when it happened.  Thoughts of heading over to the old block swam through my mind as I parked the truck.  Maybe, I thought, but lunch had to come first.

As I climbed out of the rig, I noticed a homeless-looking guy dredging through the parking lot in tattered clothing.  This guy looked like a refugee from a foreign land.

His hair, unkempt, had curls shooting from every direction except for the top of his dome that held no hair; he was also cursed with a long, dirty, curly beard.  His face sucked up and was boney, I felt bad for the guy.  I walked over to him and asked if he could use a couple of dollars.  And when he looked up at me, obviously depressed, I recognized those eyes.  Yeah, it was Mark, I thought; it was tough to tell for certain, but something in him was familiar.  I said, “Dude, Mark?  Is that you?”  And it was like a flash of lightning hitting him.  He came back to me with, “Yeah?  Do I know you?”

I answered, “Mark, it’s Jimmy from next door!”  Shocked, he took a step back, looked me up and down, and said, “No way!”  He then hugged me.  Yeah, he stunk up the joint, but I didn’t care… much.  I had been homeless before and understood his plight and condition therein.  I hugged him back twice as hard.  

After we released each other’s embrace, Mark said, “What have you been doing with yourself?  That last thing I heard was that you were homeless.”  I told him my story of traveling the country, ending up in Florida, and some of the adventures that included my move out of state.  And sure, I had been homeless for a bit but went to truck driving school and received my Class A (CDL) license, as I pointed to the large truck a few yards from where we stood.  Mark transfixed on my appearance—a long beard and long hair myself—the last time he saw me, I was a pudgy freckle-faced kid donning short hair.

It was sad seeing Mark in that condition; he looked like a Holocaust survivor.

I asked if he was hungry.  He told me no, but I knew better.  I had to coerce him into the restaurant.  But the restaurant’s staff wasn’t too enthusiastic about that proposal.  They knew Mark well, too, as he apparently panhandled people in their parking lot from time to time.  They told me how they had to run him off a few times because patrons complained. 

I told the restaurant’s manager how he used to be my neighbor and how I hadn’t seen him in years.  And that he was a good guy who just lost his way.  Although I understood their concerns, especially his hygiene issues juxtapose their clean restaurant and health concerns therein, I still tried to get him a seat in the place, but to no avail.  

I ordered a to-go lunch for each of us, burgers and fries, and we ate it inside of my truck.  Yeah, sure, Mark stunk to high heaven, but I figured a few uncomfortable minutes with an old friend who fell mightily from “polite society,” a guy I knew as someone else as a kid—an artist—deserved simple human dignity.

We talked about the old days about his family and mine, and how I also fell out of the good graces of my mother and how she had succumbed to kidney failure while living in Oregon.  How I still kept in touch with my father, who still lived in the same house on the same block.  And how I had moved to upper Northern California, and although it wasn’t the same as growing up in Southern California, it was at least quieter, and there wasn't as much crime or traffic.

Then came the uncomfortable conversation about Mark’s addiction.  At first, he wavered; he didn’t want to discuss the obvious.  But once I started speaking of my addictions and how I had curtailed them enough to get my life in order, Mark started talking about his demons.  He explained to me how rehab turned him on to this guy who, at first, stayed clean with him but soon relapsed and then coaxed Mark into doing the same.  Their drug of choice was crystal meth, a bane on civilization worse than crack; I never thought that was possible to surpass crack cocaine as far as a destructive, life-debilitating force.  

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