Part of what I do with my time is to travel to Lawrence once a week to open up the local AA hall for a meeting. It’s early in the morning, and frequently, I’m the first one there. For several months, there’s been a fellow usually waiting at the door. This in itself isn’t so unusual—I’m usually rolling in right at the meeting time—but the guy, we’ll call him K. has been there nearly every week for several months.
A lot of homeless people come to this gathering, especially during the winter. The reasons are obvious. We have heat. We have coffee. Hell, we have chairs. It’s an improvement, generally speaking. Quite often during the late summer and fall months K. and myself were the only ones in attendance, so I got to ask some questions of the guy.
My first observation of K. was that he was at the least above average intelligence. That didn’t surprise me at all, and I consider it a given that most people who can’t deal with themselves or others as it relates to addiction have this quality. It further seemed to me that the fellow had the capacity to work, and he had the ability to understand a line of reasoning in a constructive way. The context of the situation must be considered here: Most homeless persons have failed one or more of these tests by this point, leading naturally to their homeless nature. Those cases are easily understood.
I started asking K. about the logistics of homelessness. This all started back when the weather was nice, and I was essentially sleeping outdoors myself. (On the screened-in porch. I do have screens. And a roof.) “So, K., tell me a little about your camp.”
K. went on to tell me how he’d hooked up a working plumbing system at their camp (pumping water from the Kansas River, an on-site purification system, and waste delivery back), rigged up a makeshift shelter with a metal roof out of scrap materials he’d found around town, and how he’d tapped into the power lines to provide the camp with electricity. Hell, it sounded as good as a home, to hear him tell it!
“But don’t you miss having a home?” I’d ask the fellow.
“Not really. I don’t know what else I’d have that I don’t already get.”
And so it was. I’d found a motherfucker who simply preferred being homeless to having a home. The guy certainly wasn’t criminally insane—he just didn’t need the hassle. So I thought for a very long time.
Over the holidays, K. went out and got himself all drunked up. He’s come back to the club since that event, and is again a regular at the morning meetings. And one day, K. started talking about the events that led up to his drunkenness. “I probably would have been all right if it weren’t for those Autobots,” he explained to those in attendance.
He went on to explain that the Autobots, when they delivered him to their ship, had very different views about drinking, drug abuse, and domestic violence than the other people gathered there in the room. And the Replicants—he couldn’t really even tell if they were Replicants at all, or Autobots in disguise, but they certainly had their own ship. He could probably handle the Autobots without the Replicants, or vice versa. But both at the same time seemed like a real bitch to K.
They talk to him all the time. The only way to shut them up is to do what they say. And he’s not making this shit up. Autobots and Replicants are as real to K. as the sunrise and sunset to everybody else staggering around this rock.
Okay. This makes sense now. Schizophrenia can be a real bitch. Sometimes a person needs a helpful reminder of the very simplest of things for which we can be grateful.
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