The Parable of the Lost Sheep and a Fentanyl Smoker (Part 2)

I'd always written on the Ninety and the Nine prompt with my students, so why stop now? I sat down to write and...nothing...my mind was static.

Almost everything I write for publication is written in my head while walking. Then, upon returning home, I sit down at the computer and write what I've composed.

For three consecutive mornings, I placed the prompt at the forefront of my mind and set out with Elmer to write it up. As Wallace Stevens once wrote, “Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”

Or in my case, a walk around the duck pond and past the shipwrecked Oldsmobile SUV where I'd seen a man wearing a box over his head smoking fentanyl.

The next two days, a few ideas coalesced as Elmer and I walked in the early morning, but I didn't write on them. The prompt was proving very difficult to pin down. I shifted my beliefs constantly, something that never occurred when writing on the prompt with my students; I always knew the answer then.

Why was that?

The afternoon of the second day mulling over the prompt, Elmer and I took an afternoon walk through the park and from 30 yards away I saw two men emerge from the back seat of the Oldsmobile and start walking away. Whether one of them was the box-wearing man, who knew? I'd never seen his face.

One of them carried something under his arm that I instantly identified it because I'd been married to an artist—a large sketch pad for line drawings or watercolor paintings.

The fentanyl smoker who wore a box on his head while getting high was an artist? An aspiring one?

For a brief moment I considered jogging over to see about purchasing a piece of art, but I didn't have my wallet with me and the mood didn't seem right to me.

As Elmer headed the opposite direction of the two men, it hit me why I was stalled writing on the prompt. In previous writings on the Parable of the Lost Sheep, the sheep represented an obvious metaphor for a human being gone astray, and thus an abstraction. All those years ago, I had instructed my students to write about a lost metaphorical sheep, not someone corporeal, important and in distress from their lives. What a fool!

The new prompt related directly to someone in my neighborhood I encountered on a semi-regular basis, a person totally deranged by an insidious drug that would kill him sooner than later. He was not an abstraction. He often slumped over ten feet away from me. I knew his face. He had an origin story where he never aspired to this state of delusion and devastation. He probably had a family out there somewhere, maybe even a kid.

I didn't know him, but I knew another man, a former methamphetamine and fentanyl addict who spent time living on the streets and in prison. By own his admittance, he should probably be dead, but he survived, cleaned up with the help of family, sheer will and a dog, earned a degree, was attending graduate school to become a digital storyteller, administered a shower program for the homeless out of downtown Portland church, and became a close friend as a result of a mutual friend who put us together because of my writing about the homeless.

At one point in his life, he had been very much like the fentanyl man in my neighborhood, like many fentanyl men and women everywhere in America.

I know one homeless man in the neighborhood who uses fentanyl. I knew him as a kind, rational and gentle man who kept a very low profile and went out of his way to assist other homeless people, namely by fixing their vehicles. He once owned a dog grooming parlor in the neighborhood. He was a charter member of the Old Crow Book Club and I considered him a friend.

A year or so ago, word reached me he was using fentanyl. I never observed this myself, but his subsequent weird behavior in my presence and our bizarre conversations demonstrated his mind was wasting away. One time when I found him lucid in front of a convenience store, I braced him about his use of fentanyl. I'd never done anything like that before. Others got in his face, too.

He quit.

Now he's using again, and his nephew, also homeless in the neighborhood, recently informed me he had to administer several doses of Narcan to revive him. He's that close to dying and leaving behind a daughter, a brother, sister, and a niece and nephew.

I knew this man pre-fentanyl. He is most assuredly worth trying to save now. But I also know familiarity shouldn't be required to help someone.

The prompt again: do we as a society (or me as an individual) search for this lost man, who really isn't that hard to find, and try to render aid, or do we let him wander, lost in addiction, insanity, astray from everything decent in the world, whatever the circumstances of his fall, and let him die in front of us, because he will surely be dead at this rate very soon?

My response: yes. That's it. When I answer no, time to walk into ocean and return as rain.

So I said yes. That means policies matter, as do the people who formulate and implement them.

Jesus didn't go into policy about finding the lost sheep. He just talked about celebrating once it's found.