It seems fitting that my first introduction to desperation and an end came on the bridge. I was traveling home post work with my mom as a kid and the driver stopped the bus full of passengers in the middle of the bridge and attempted to talk someone off of jumping. I don’t know why that stuck with me but at that moment I realized how delicate it all was and the value of human compassion. .it was also at this point that I realized it was a place to an end.
In an episode of “lost” jack (played by Matthew fox) stops his car on the bridge and attempts to jump. When I saw that scene it resonated with me because that was almost me a few times.
The doctor is a nice gentle blonde woman she’s apologetic the entire time and maybe a little more welcoming than I originally expected. She had theppreliminaries but has to ask anyways. I tell her life is dire, it doesn’t get easier and it doesn’t get better. I live in this zone of nothing. I worry about the future and I find myself unable to sleep, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and start crying. I’ve never told anyone any of this before
She tells me she’s sorry that she won’t be able to help me since it’s her last day and tells me I’m going to be reassigned. She realizes she’s too apologetic and that I probably need something, anything to show I’m not crazy or alone.
It’s the middle of the night and I’m thinking of the worst. I’m at the arches on the bridge when suddenly another bike comes up and Stolzman is there, a calvalry, he made it and makes sure I am safe, talks me down from whatever part of my brain is am locked into. We get on our bikes and head home.
She composes herself ” I think you have ptsd relating to incidents from your childhood, it’s like this.. your brain just goes into fight or flight mode. Think of something primal like if there was a Dinosaur or something your reaction is instantaneous. Sometimes something happens to people and they find themselves constantly in that place, that’s where you are.” I cry.
It’s a little over a year before the bridge is supposed to come down and Jesse and I are on the bridge when I see someone sitting down with their back to the wall, something that never happens there, some sort of new type of person you see at nowhere, not there for bootyographia or anything just sitting there on the floor facing the arches, greatest view of downtown in front of him and he doesn’t care he’s sitting there in his own head. I tell Jesse one of us should make sure he’s ok, Jesse goes across the street and comes back says that guy says he’s all right. A half hour later I decided I am not satisfied with that answer since he’s still just sitting on the ground, head lowered
“Hey, you’re not thinking of jumping or anything are you?”
He looks up, young guy with sporadic tattoos, just like me. “No, why have you seen it happen here before?”
“Maybe”
His name was Gato, quinn (more on him another time) told us that he was there when it happened. Says the police showed up, an old man tried to talk him down, and suddenly I flashback to us leaving and him sitting on a light post and me not thinking much of it because he assured both of us he was all right.
” He jumped and they were inflating something to put down there but it didn’t work this time, he jumped and I looked over and I saw him lying there, broken, eye out, trying to still breathe” He apparently lived for awhile. Quinn is upset as he tells us this and tells us of another time he was woken up by a young man by the spot he sleeps, sitting on the ledge, quinn gave him a lot of the ” I don’t know what you’re going through but it’s not worth it” dialogue and after he was sure the kid was ok he went back to sleep, cops woke him up shortly after asking if he had talked to the kid who had just jumped.
Part of the reason we did good on the bridge and at nowhere is because we were tthere on a weekend night and often we talked to people or kept people from doing something. There was a young lady once drinking a liquor bottle who told us she didn’t have custody of her kids, thought she’d reconcile but she called her kids and found out there was another female living there now. She was alone on the bridge for no apparent reason, something to do. We talked to her (I introduced myself with “It’s ok, I’m gay, are you all right?”) She ended up taking to us about her life and how much she missed her kids for a good thirty minutes. She left and we made her promise she’d live.
I leave the doctors office and meet Stolzman in the lobby, I don’t say much, I can’t say much. We get our bikes, catch the red line to downtown and bike over the bridge as we normally do. It’s day, suns out peaking behind clouds, but it’s raining, I’m biking as hard as I can up that hill toward the first metal arch from the westside and rain falls on me and I’m laughing. I’m alive.