Lives Lived and Lives Lost

Life #96: That time Harry and Tom were homeless

Skid Row, Los Angeles, USA, 2013

Harry woke up lying on a filthy sidewalk with a police officer looming over her, vigorously rubbing his knuckles over her sternum.

"Hey, hey, you with us?" Officer Mike asked while he removed his hand and sat back on his haunches. "You're lucky I had naloxone, girl, or you'd be a goner."

Licking her dry lips, Harry blinked up at Officer Mike as she tried to make sense of the many, many memories that rushed through her mind.

She'd died. That was the only way to get her memories back without meeting Tom. And she knew exactly how she'd died. A fentanyl overdose. Squeezing her eyes shut, Harry pushed herself up in a sitting position with trembling arms. She was a fucking fentanyl addict. What a shitshow this life already turned out to be and it had barely even started.

"I'm fine," Harry mumbled, looking around while her eyes refused to focus. Getting clean from an opioid addiction was a fucking nightmare and that was exactly what awaited Harry.

"Inez, you almost died, man," Dylan said, staring at her with hooded eyes. He sat against the wall a few feet away, face slack from his recent hit of fentanyl. Dylan was her 'boyfriend'. Well, what passed for a boyfriend between two young addicts stuck in a hellhole like Skid Row. Mostly they stuck together for safety and to score together. "Lucky thing Officer Mike was patrolling this street, 'cause you stopped breathing and everything and I didn't know what to do."

In other words, Dylan had been so fucking high himself that he'd watched his 'girlfriend' die without lifting a finger to try to help her. Yeah, that relationship, if one could even call it that, was well and truly over.

"I'm fine," Harry said with a bit of a slur when Officer Mike tried to stop her from getting to her feet.

"Take your time, Inez," Officer Mike said, giving her a stern look. "Is this your first time OD-ing?"

Harry nodded as she stood on unsteady legs. "And it's gonna be my last," she quietly vowed.

Officer Mike didn't look like he believed her, but then again, he must have heard that particular promise thousands of times before from Skid Row's inhabitants. Very few ever actually stuck by that promise. There were quite a few police officers that regularly patrolled Skid Row, but most of them had little sympathy for the homeless population there. Officer Mike, a black man who stood well over six feet tall, was one of the exceptions. He cared about what he saw around him and he always approached everyone he met with kindness, unless they gave him a reason to be unkind.

Harry stared down at the sidewalk as the reality of her current life sank in. She was a homeless fentanyl addict. She had nothing to her name, except the clothes on her back. She didn't even have a bag with some extra clothes and personal stuff anymore, since she'd gotten mugged a few days earlier.

"Try to get in a program," Officer Mike said with a smile full of careful optimism. "There's a lot of rehab places around the city. Go to the connection point to sign up for one." And with that, Officer Mike turned around and continued his patrol of Los Angeles' containment zone for the homeless, the addicts and the mentally ill.

Because that is what Skid Row was. An open air prison without walls or fences for those the rest of the city rather didn't find themselves confronted with. It sat smack dab between the more desirable districts of downtown Los Angeles. It was a run down area with little housing and few thriving businesses. Every sidewalk was lined with tents and other makeshift shelters constructed from blue tarps and whatever the owner could find lying around the street. There was garbage everywhere, so there was plenty to use for those seeking construction materials. And since there were very few public bathrooms, there was human waste everywhere. You couldn't walk down any sidewalk without stepping in human shit.