As an adult, the smartest thing my mentally ill and drug-addicted brother did was to move to the City and County of San Francisco. I was there the day it happened. I had just picked him up from the county hospital in Martinez after cleaning out his Berkeley apartment, scene of his last prolonged, life-threatening binge, at least so far. We were driving west on the Bay Bridge, en route to the Salvation Army in the Mission, where he would live for the next two years. How I had remained so entangled in my brother’s life after our parents’ deaths is an open question that I’m not sure even I fully understand. He has never married, has no children, no close friends. You’re all he has, my mom whispers in my ear from the grave. I suppose that forsaking him once and for all would have been a tougher climb than heeding my mother’s siren call. So here we sat, brother and sister, my brother crying next to me in the passenger seat and wondering what in the world would happen to him now. He was down to his last 15 bucks after blowing through hundreds of thousands of dollars of his inheritance, buying one-way international plane tickets for panhandlers who annoyed him, bunking at Big Sur’s Post Ranch Inn (over two-grand a night without meals) with his latest girlfriend, renting prostitutes by the week in Bangkok, on and on. So here he was, right back where he started before the cash rolled in.
About San Francisco. Any homeless person who doesn’t live in San Francisco is nuts. Though my brother did have to live there a couple of years before he was eligible to move into the subsidized flat three blocks up from the beach where he still lives today for $300 a month, his case manager and the city’s still-liberal politics together paved the way for him to live the life he lives today. This commitment to public support shows signs of fraying as cash-strapped younger residents move into one of the world’s most expensive cities, but for the moment it’s still holding. Courtesy of Medicaid, which most docs in the Bay Area ’burbs look down their noses at and wouldn’t consider accepting. My brother’s primary care physician is a staffer at UC Med. Ditto for his dentist and his audiologist, the latter providing both exams and hearing aids for “free.” When I point out to him that someone is paying for them on his behalf, the distinction is largely lost on him. He also has a three-day-a-week job doing intake for a homeless crisis center on Market Street. He says he’s happier than he’s ever been in his life.
Other cities should get over their “no free ride” prejudices and take note: Paying the upfront cost to house and employ people living high-risk lives on the streets is not only the right thing to do, it even costs less than paying for regular emergency-room visits, hospital stays, and other services that go hand-in-hand with living that difficult and dangerous life. It also lightens the burden on me and hundreds of thousands of family members like me. It doesn’t make the afflicted person go away; you’re still the brother or sister of your complicated, troubled sibling, subject to, in my case, periodic bouts of my sib’s irrational rage and random acts of cruelty. (He recently dosed a childhood friend with a massive load of liquid THC, and when he began to panic admonished that friend to “Be a man and take it.”)
My brother tells anyone willing to listen that he knows about only three things: Drugs, women, and Eastern religion. Of the three, his professed life-long devotion to the teachings of his guru is the most complex since it has neither blunted his explosive temper nor dimmed his essential acquisitive narcissism and vanity. (“I never said I was a saint.”)
For example, upon discovering the welcome surprise of his stimulus check in his checking account, he promptly booked four hours in one of San Francisco’s toniest hair salons and paid a stylist $500 (“$600 with tip”) to transform his thin, stringy, elbow-length hair into “a surfer dude’s” highlighted locks. Now pushing 70, the final result bore little resemblance to the young, tanned, long-haired surfers he doubtless recalled from his youth and envisioned in his own near future. Despite his professed spirituality he remains at heart a pampered suburban rich kid in perennial search of the next purchase: the sweetest fruit, the freshest vegetables, the most exotic shampoos and conditioners, preferably from India.
Right before the move to San Francisco my brother announced that he was moving to an ashram northeast of Sacramento to devote the rest of his earthly life to meditation and the teachings of his guru. My daughter and I loaded up my car with my brother’s worldly goods and drove him up there. The last 10 miles were brutal in the treeless heat as we crawled along a dirt road scraped from the flat, rocky earth. When we finally arrived at the ashram’s dusty cluster of buildings we unloaded his stuff in 100-degree-plus temperatures before gratefully returning to the very unspiritual confines of my air-conditioned car. My brother lasted a little bit more than a week before abandoning his spiritual quest. Working outdoors on landscaping and construction projects under the blazing sun did not jibe with his personal expectation of spiritual service.
What I’ve learned is that the siblings of the mentally ill and/or drug-addicted have a choice. They can help out where they can without being consumed by their sibs’ troubles and personal demons, they can become consumed by it all and ultimately develop their own troubles and personal demons, or they can cleanly cut the afflicted sibling out of their lives — or try to.
Over the decades with my brother I have met many who have made one of those three choices and concluded that the third option, seemingly easy in its black-and-white simplicity, is often the hardest. All those years shared in childhood, the theoretically breakable but nevertheless sticky bonds that bind siblings together, have a way of resurrecting themselves in unpredictable ways. Ignoring them doesn’t make them disappear. It only leaves you to wonder what the disaster is this time. The imagined dread is almost always worse than the familiar reality.
Really useful, much appreciated.