Mark and Game of Thrones
Mark from the Old Crow Book Club was sitting on the sidewalk in front of the grocery store on a weekday morning. I was carrying a bag of peanuts to distribute to the freeloading socialist squirrels of Sellwood who visit my back yard daily and vex Elmer to no end.
Mark was reading a fat paperback novel and smoking a Swisher Sweets cigar. He greeted me like he always does: with unbridled enthusiasm.
We caught up on his life in the Safe Rest Village. He was doing okay there, but the tweaker residents who worked on their bicycles doing inexplicable tinkering at two in the morning were pissing him off. I asked why management weren't booting these miscreants out and he didn't know.
Mark did say he had recruited an elderly woman, a current meth user with boils plaguing her body, into the ranks of the vendors selling the weekly newspaper advocating for the homeless. He was hoping it might turn her life around. I asked if she had the ability to interact coherently with the public to sell the publication. He thought yes.
Mark poured some malt liquor from a can into a cup and took a drag on the cigar. I noticed the title of the book: a volume in the Game of Thrones saga by George Martin. I had read none of them but watched the HBO series and found it mildly entertaining.
Mark had read all of Game of Thrones and was rereading them again because, well. he'd found the tomes in a street library and why not? I asked him if he'd seen the HBO series and he said yes. It was okay. Nothing beats the book, although 1984 starring Richard Burton and John Hurt came close. I told him there were various spin-offs of the HBO Thrones production and Mark just laughed and said, “The Game of Thrones will never end. Intrigues like that never do.”
My mind instantly wondered: will the intrigue of Trump ever end?
Yes. When he becomes America's Ozymandias after they excavate the rubble at one of his golf resorts.
Mark extricated a half pint of Old Crow from a bag and glugged a shot. He offered me a belt but I declined. My last taste of Old Crow at the book launch party a year ago had nearly burned a hellfire hole in my stomach.
I asked him the whereabouts of all the members of the Old Crow Book Club and he gave me the rundown. He'd seen them all the past few days and Anya wasn't doing well. She was back using meth and fentanyl, lost her subsidized apartment, had fallen against a dumpster, and gashed her head open. She had spent a couple days in the hospital recuperating before she went back to the streets. I'd seen her a week ago, prostate in front of a 7-11, twitching, twisted and torquing, half naked, totally out of her mind, savaging a whole pizza, and screaming at someone or maybe the universe. I thought about pulling over to render aid, but what could I do?
These moments of non action by me in these intense and obvious moments of crisis (EXPERIENCED BY PEOPLE I KNOW AND HAVE BEFREINDED) keep chipping away at my humanity.
And to think a year ago Anya was sober and brought a salad to the book launch party.
And there she was half naked, addled and covering herself with pizza in a parking lot.
Mark and I briefly discussed all the hardcore drug addicts hanging around the grocery store, in plain view of the residents of the wealthier neighborhoods in the city. I saw it all the time. I walked by it with Elmer almost every morning.
I asked Mark if he ever told these addicts, in moments of their partial coherence, to seek help, get off this dangerous path.
Mark took another slug of Old Crow.
“Who am I to counsel them on drug abuse?” he said. “I'm drinking Old Crow at ten in the morning.”
“It's 10:30,” I said.
“Well, I'll drink to that!” and he took another pull.
I laughed. It was a funny retort.