by Bill Stauffer
Published in The Bollard, June 2024 Issue
The clouds looked threatening, but the rain held off that early evening in late October on the edge of Portland’s East End. I heard the outer door to my office open and shut. I hoped it was my wife, but it was one of our tenants, a therapist who works on the second floor.
“Someone’s asleep on the front steps,” she said.
“A vagrant?”
“Probably homeless.”
She left, and a few minutes later the door opened again. This time I hoped it was the tenant returning to tell me the person was gone. But it was my wife, meeting me for a dinner date. I told her I first needed to deal with a bum on the steps. She sighed, because this was part of our life now, caring for an historic building and making sure its tenants were safe.
How many times had I scrubbed graffiti from the brick exterior? Enough that I kept a yellow bucket with Goof Off, a metal scrub brush and a pair of rubber gloves in the basement. The worst were the January nights when the hot water in the bucket turned cold within minutes. The gloves rarely survived one scrubbing. The fumes went to my head like epoxy, and the brick, hand-laid a hundred years ago by masterful masons, never looked the same after a tag.
I didn’t mind the urination. The rain eventually washed it away, and what man hasn’t gone where he shouldn’t? Grosser was the human feces, more than the dogs’ for some reason. Sometimes it was better if we didn’t know about it for a while; drying and hardening made the job easier.
Most prevalent were the empty cans of Natty Daddy (25 ounces of 8% ABV beer) and the left-behind sweatshirts, jeans, backpacks and, occasionally, sleeping bags. On most weeks, we could identify what the Preble Street food truck was delivering by watching the gulls pick at unopened milk containers and discarded cardboard boxes lined with grains of greasy rice. I still don’t know if seagulls drink milk or just peck at it out of curiosity.
The cameras recording someone shooting up are awful to watch. We still talk about the time a man tugged on the passenger-side mirror of a tenant’s car left in the lot overnight. We thought he was trying to break in, but he just needed a mirror to get the needle into the right spot on his neck. The scream he made after injecting sounded like torture blended with ecstasy.
Sometimes we feel like we’re bothering the police with repeated calls about another person passed out or fallen over, face and nose bloody. But what if the person needs medical attention? What if they’re dead?
When I got to the front steps, there they were, under a ratty wool blanket, tucked into the corner, to the left of the front door. I didn’t kick the foot that stuck out, though part of me wanted to.
“You can’t sleep here. You need to leave.”
When the grizzly, antagonistic man I expected to see uncovered the blanket, I saw it wasn’t a man. She spoke so softly and quickly that I couldn’t tell if she had an accent. “Sleeping” was all she said.
“It’s not safe,” I replied.
But then I asked myself, What wasn’t safe? The woman didn’t swear at me and didn’t toss a beer can in my direction. She wasn’t urinating or shaking a can of fluorescent spray paint. She looked fatigued and she sounded tired.
I ran back to my office and called my eldest daughter, who previously worked for Preble Street, and asked who I could call to get this woman help. She gave me the number, my wife and I pooled our cash together (nearly 75 dollars) and I ran back to the front steps.
She was already gone.
My wife and I drove around for an hour looking for the grey blanket wrapped around her body like a poncho, slowing to peer into dark alleys and covered entrances. We never found her.
I think about her often, even though I know this is of no help to her. One of my hopes is that she gets through whatever makes her sleep on the street at night, becomes successful equal to her will and talent, and tells loved ones the story of the man who kicked her off his front steps one rainless October night in downtown Portland.
Bill Stauffer 