Lies I've Told

This is a view of Kirkwood Avenue at night, looking from the IU campus toward downtown. This hasn't changed at all from 1970. In 1969, I was attending High School two hours in the morning and working at a nearby restaurant in the afternoon and as a fry cook. I only needed two classes to graduate and they had a work program thing. So I got a job where I worked the lunch hour and prepped the dinner time and I had my evenings off on the weekends for the first time since I was 14. The trouble was that I hated the place. The boss was crabby, the kitchen was open so all the customers watched you every minute, so you couldn't even scratch yourself and it was me all by my lonesome for the whole shift. I made one friend, a dark curly haired waitress who was in Grad School at IU, but she was the only one. So I just quit. It was the first time in my life, I just called them and said, I quit. I'm not coming back. I assumed I could find another job, and I did.
I ran into the waitress an the street around here (above) and she wanted to know what had happened to me. I told her that I had a friend that had been desperate to kick his smack habit and I quit the restaurant to sit with him for a few days while he went cold turkey. She believed me. (Everyone believed me then, I don't know why) She said, why don't you come over for a meeting at this center we're putting together. You might be someone that could help. So I showed up. Her boyfriend was the leader, most of them were psych grad students at IU and had decided to form a crisis center for drug related problems. They had a donated house and were setting up training programs for counselors and the like. And the girl had repeated my story and they wanted my help. I went through the training and begin to work one evening a week manning the desk and talking to people on the phone. It was mostly being sympathetic. Most of the problems were college students on bad trips or some of the screw-loose people that hung around the college. The place was supposed to be non-judgmental about the drug use. Most of the counselors did drugs, just not while on duty. I actually made a connection one night while off duty. Anyway, Michael (I just remembered his name) was full of wisdom. The question he would pose was: "Do you want to help people or do you want to make them feel good?"

I was actually ok, I think. I left for a year and started volunteering again when I came back. Most of the original people had graduated and were no longer there. I had become, at 20, an old-timer counselor. In 72 the drugs and the problems had sort of moved on from acid and grass to other stuff and there were a lot of guns around. I was on duty with a real shrink-to-be one night and we spent the entire night with a guy playing with a pistol as he threatened to do himself in. We got him to a shrink at IU in the morning and he finally surrendered the gun. I realized that night that I was way out of my depth. It finally ended when I stopped by one night and a 'client' attacked me physically because he was nutso. He was a little tiny guy. (I'm 6'7") I thought by taking him down I could get him to calm down. So I maneuvered him so his back was to the lawn and then held him down on the grass until he seemed to settle. It started all over twenty minutes later, so I left. It was decided later by the staff that we should have called the police. The whole idea of the house was to have a place where the police didn't come. The original group had worked with the cops when they had set it up. I decided I was really not invested in doing it anymore and didn't know how people could do it as a profession and so walked away.

Anyway, this is what it looks like today. They do battered women and a lot of other programs and have other locations, etc. etc. One of my destroyed murals was a tree with branches and leaves that covered a wall in the first house that was torn down.