A Long and Winding Road to Nowhere

 
It hurts when a childhood friend hits the pavement hard. It especially hurts when you can't do a thing to help him.

I'll call my friend "T."

I moved into a house next to T at the tender age of ten, way back in the late 1960s. He and his two brothers welcomed me into the neighborhood and showed me the ropes. What had been an empty house only hours earlier was now my home. And ten-year-old T was my newest friend.

I won't bore you with the mundanities of two boys growing up living next-door to each other--I'm sure you can fill in all the appropriate blanks.

T was a bright guy, and though we clashed on a variety of things, we managed to remain friends into the next decade and the one beyond that. But T was promiscuous in the area of, shall I say, chemical experimentation. (I remember seeing him smoke a joint and drink one of his father's beers when he was just twelve or thirteen.)

By the end of the 1970s, T was showing signs which alarmed me, profound changes in his personality. Owing to what he was putting into his body--substances that ran the gamut from alcohol to marijuana to LSD to hallucinogenic mushrooms to God knows what--I could only assume he was under the lasting influence of one drug or another. Throughout the 80s, he developed an irrational rage; by 1990, he was verbally lashing out at phantom adversaries of a grandiose nature.

Unbeknown to me, T had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1985. The news caught me off-guard, but it came as no surprise.

Now in his fifties, T is unable to hold a job or care for himself. He wanders the streets of Los Angeles, threatening people--some real, some conjured up from within his tortured mind--without provocation. As a result, he has bounced in and out of jail. Everyone seems to have a restraining order against him, or they're considering filing for one, and for good reason. Seldom capable of rational thought, he doesn't understand why people don't want him around.

T was rearrested this morning, and if the past is any indication, he'll be in LA County Jail for the next year. I don't know whether to be relieved or to cry for him. In the facility, at least he will have something resembling mental health care. Certainly he will have food and a place to sleep, and from what I understand, he will be with a group that is isolated from the true madness of a county jail, so he should be relatively safe.

Where this all began probably doesn't matter; surely it matters not an iota to his family and friends who care for him, and it means nothing to T. Taking his prescription anti-psychotic medication, something he vehemently denies needing due to recurring bouts of irrationality, might be his only hope.

Insulated from T by a thousand miles of interstate, I can neither help nor hinder his plight. But hope knows no boundaries, and I can hope that he is able to muster the presence of mind to take his medication and begin the long road back from his personal hell. At this point, little else awaits him but an open grave.

So I will hope from afar, and I will beseech the God of the universe, through prayer, that T might find his way back to peace of mind.