To The Dogs
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here was a time when I, a surgeon to the lifted and sucked, spent the greater part of my day contemplating bums.
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I observed their seedy figures and the smoke from their morning cook fires as I cruised past the park on my way to work,
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spied on their noon time bench naps from behind the white velvet drapes of my fifth floor operating room,
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studied their late afternoon actions and reactions and inaction from the parking lot after catering to a day’s spate of rich and spoiled, often expending hours on end.
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You’re a lazy bum yourself !!!, hollered my ex-wife via email when her alimony check arrived tardy, a declaration that while perhaps prophetic was hardly generous to me (or to the bums, for that matter) and not exactly accurate, not considering that I was, after all, still a producing plastic surgeon . . .
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. . . who is going to the dogs!!!, the hysterical punctuation of which now causes pause and suggests at least the possibility that Rita's pronouncement may have been more of an eerie curse than a thoughtful analysis of human character.
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Because not too long thereafter, I became a bum.
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My interest in the downtrodden was kindled purely by happenstance after my sweet and then still-legal mate, bless her, crated away all of our furniture one day and ran off to craggy mommy wailing about spousal abandonment and marital infidelity, charges which were clearly exaggerated if not patently false.
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For one thing, Rita and I were already filthy rich with every luxury, so whether or not I continued to generate a steady flow of income was irrelevant to the question of material support. For another, I'd come to have no interest in sex whatsoever, and so really—how unfaithful could I be?
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I mean, damn!, here I thought we were happily married!
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I slept so much only because I was overused and undermedicated, and my loss of appetite was, in truth, a godsend to a set of coronary arteries so clogged by Helga's high-sludge power meals.
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(ah, sweet Helga—our twenty-seven year old Swedish live-in who couldn't clean to save her life, although—boy!, could she ever . . . um, actually, never mind.)
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Anyway, my initial encounter with the bums was accidental or at least as accidental as any meaningful first encounter ever is.
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I was on my way back to my palatial office after a morning of hectic hospital surgery (hectic because I’d arrived late, late because I'd overslept, overslept because I'd spent half the night feeling sorry for myself, feeling sorry for myself because I'd grown so bored of turning old faces new).
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With only a half an hour before the start of my afternoon schedule, I zipped through a McDonalds drive-thru, pulled into the closest parking lot, and, so as not to spill food on my Italian calf-leather upholstery, walked over to a vacant wood bench and sat down.
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There they were, a group of them about fifty yards away, clowning around in front of an old brick wall, having fun and wasting time.
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The attraction was immediate.
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I watched them as if hypnotized while I downed my burger, melted cheese dripping freely onto my Versace wool pants, amazed that I couldn't recall having ever noticed anyone there before.
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I must have observed them this way for well over an hour before my pesky pager summoned me back to an office full of nervous staff and edgy patients.
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That evening I carried my Quarter Pounder and chocolate shake back to the very same bench and chewed slowly and deliberately, trying hard not to appear conspicuous behind my opened L.A. Times.
I observed the bums until it grew too dark to see, sucking on the plastic straw long after my cup had run dry. Once I got home, I found it hard to think of much else but them and fell asleep still fully dressed.
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The next morning I awoke to a newspaper headline entitled The Vagrants of Friendship Park. Apprehensive that something bad had happened after I'd left, I jumped into the text only to discover that the article was Part Four of an on-going human interest series featuring the homeless in and around the city of Santa Monica.
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The text dwelled on the usual explanations for adopting the lifestyle (undereducation, minimum wage employment, liquor and hard drugs, welfare reform, mental illness—all of which, I can now say with authority, have very little to do with it).
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What intrigued me about the article were its photos, which revealed not only the park encampment in more detail than I'd been able to discern from my bench but several black-and-white photos of a bum called Dave ("not his real name").
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A Vietnam vet and former C.P.A., Dave had resided (that is to say, slept) inside of a cardboard refrigerator box reinforced with tin foil and duct tape in Friendship Park for the past eighteen months.
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What I found so mesmerizing about the man had nothing to do with the author's sob story (for sure, sanitized and dramatized for print) or Dave's dark and stubbly face, all sundamaged with poorly-sutured scars.
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What grabbed me was the intense look in his eyes.
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His eyes appeared pale, I presumed a light blue in real life (although I can now say without guessing that they're the drab green of a worn dollar bill, quite identical to mine). His chin was held high and his gaze directed at the camera, an expression suggesting an Apollonian nobility without embarrassment or confusion or fear.
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I studied Dave's picture and noticed how he seemed to be staring right back at me (yes, me, and only me). The longer I stared at him, the lighter grew his eyes, not just becoming bright but an otherworldly sort of white, as shiny as poached albumin.
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Then suddenly—I swear!—his eye turned deep blue and he winked.
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From then on were we linked, as if a strong force was now pulling us together.
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Of course, now I understand that what I actually recognized at that moment was one of life's most basic truths: that somewhere inside of every plastic surgeon lives a bum while inside of every bum lives a plastic surgeon—or something to that effect.
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