Experiences

My experiences with the police when I was in the mental health system shape my views of them now. I was routinely hauled off by the police to psyche wards. One time, when a cop was waiting in a room with me at the hospital he began applying the choke hold. I asked why and he said because he teaches the technique and needed practise. In the mental health system, living like I did, in the Benton Plaza, full of drama and crapola, one becomes a target simply because you are labeled.

When I was homeless one time, I had come to visit a friend, who turns out, was in the hospital getting his hip replaced, but he had left word I could stay at his place. He had a pistol. Despite being nearly blind from diabetes, he kept that pistol on his fifth floor windowsill, window often open, beside him, where he existed in his wheelchair, in front of his TV.

I had asked his brother to get rid of that pistol, when he was in the hospital, because he was going to let me stay at the apartment. His brother did so, hid it somewhere in the apartment.

In the meantime, I had been friends with Cindy forever, a woman who later killed herself. When Cindy was young, she had fried her brain on acid, sometimes doing over seven hits a day, she told me. We had been best friends, since I met her at the Benton Plaza, until some former big time hairdressor and drug addict and manipulator moved in, who latched onto Cindy like a leech. He had her paranoid as hell, into conspiracy theories, doing drugs again with him, acting like his slave.

He would take any drug, any pill, in mass quantities.

So, when Chris was in the hospital, I had been down at Cindy's apartment on the 4th floor. Rob was there, also. He wasn't happy with me. He never was happy if Cindy talked to anyone but him. So I went on up to Chris's. Rob had left first. When I got off the elevator on the sixth floor, Rob peeked out his apartment door, then quickly closed it. I thought that was strange. I went on in to Chris's place and turned on the TV.

It wasn't more than twenty minutes later that the cops began to call, that they had evacuated the sixth floor, that my friend Rob, who was no friend of mine, had called and stated I had a gun and wanted to kill police officers. I was totally floored and had no idea what to do.

Anyhow, I finally went out and was thrown to the ground by the cops and hauled off. They found Chris's gun under the bed. I demanded that they finger print it, which would show I'd never touched it. I'd never even known where it was. But they would not believe me.

Later on, Rob pulled a similar stunt on someone else. He'd overdosed basically because a person was in his apartment at the Benton with him and Cindy and he felt he was not being paid enough attention. In the end, she drove him to the ER. Cindy was drunk. The other woman, the driver, wasn't, but was fed up, and left Cindy and Rob at the ER. Rob told the ER people that she was drunk, out of spite, and they called the police and she was stopped and humiliated. She wasn't drunk and was let go finally. After that, she believed me about the gun incident. Rob was one sick cookie.

When Cindy committed suicide, her son found her. And M told me later that the first words out of Rob's mouth, when he found out, were "They're going to blame me." this says to me they should have blamed him. I believe to this day he had something to do with her death. He had a key to her place, was always with her, but claimed he hadn't seen her in two or three days. He by this time he had moved to the Julian Hotel. I never missed the Benton after leaving it for homelessness. Never had seconds thoughts about leaving that pit of drama and despair.

Rob had briefly lived with his mother again. He had "fallen in love" with some underage kid when he was working at the homeless shelter as a volunteer, and his mother walked in on him, allegedly, at her place, doing this kid, who was homeless. That's child molestation if it's true. I don't know if she called the cops or not.

He ended up living at the Julian, buying heroin through the window of his place in the alley from street dealers. And finally, he killed himself also. Chris had also died by this time, of a stroke.

Chris never did drugs. He was a middle aged overweight diabetic man, who had been an alcoholic, had become one when a student at OSU living in a fraternity. He still thought his fraternity life was the best thing ever, even though that time destroyed the rest of his life. He had finally kicked booze, but he'd been ruined already.

I liked his acidic sense of humor. I had nobody at the Benton, really. It was a horrible life, where one got over drugged into a zombie, an angry zombie often due to extreme psyche drug interactions, and then had nothing to do for the rest of their lives, but sit there and watch the world or stare at the walls.

I was often suicidal in the face of this hopeless useless existence.

There were nice cops, but the Benton had a reputation, so if you lived there, you were labeled a useless human being--expendable.

I understand that now, how we were seen.

I remember being arrested for offensive littering. I was outside Safeway. I'd bought a few groceries and some cat food. I fed the strays along the river. I was crying just a bit. Chris had just died the night before. And I was waiting for the rain to decrease, for the walk home. Along comes a cop in a car.

He wanted to know what I was doing there. I told him that I was waiting for the rain to let up. He said that wasn't normal. Well, it was normal. The Julian was about six blocks away and I didn't have a raincoat at that time. He came by twice more, to ask me who I was really waiting for. Finally I headed home. he followed me in his squad car, even down alleys, sometimes only three feet behind me. It was extremely scarey.

Finally, when he passed me within inches, in the alley, then was waiting for me out at the street, me on foot with my groceries, him in his squad car, I was exasperated. I threw the two bags onto the sidewalk and told him he was harrassing me for buying groceries, something I thought was legal, and if he was going to do that he could take those groceries because it wasn't right for him to harrass me like that. So he arrested me, for littering, and took me to jail. Your tax dollars at work. I was later found innocent and the cop was admonished for this behavior. Damage was done. I was scared of the cops by this time. By this time, I knew there were different classes of people--those the cops help and those they try to hurt. Like sport sometimes.

I still wanted to believe in them. I know some are good. I had multiple experiences with cops. Most of my river cats were killed in the Corvallis river project. I tried to save them. I spoke at public meetings, something I'd never done in my life. I was a low self esteem abused nobody, but the danger to those river cats turned me into something I didn't recognize. The river cats were my family. I was going to protect them.

The barge dumping the huge riprap along the banks was the culprit. Finally, the feds halted the riprap project temporarily. I read that headline in the paper and rejoiced. I also went down to the river, to try to find one of my river cat friends. Three weeks before, I came down also, to try to find a cat to hold for comfort, at the slabs, my sacred spot. Cindy had just killed herself.

It was late, but across the river, I could see an orange glow of fire on the barge that dumped the riprap. Fire! I thought 'I should just let that burn.' I didn't. I went up to Mater Engineering and had the janitor call 911. I went back down to my spot and watched as firetrucks raced across the bridges farther south over to where the barge was anchored.

Then, along came a Corvallis police officer. He shined his flashlight in my eyes and asked what I was doing down there. I asked him to get that light out of my eyes, that he knew what I did down there. I took care of the river cats and the cops knew I did this.

I told him I was the one who reported the fire on the barge, and motioned across the river. He was chewing gum, smacking it loudly, and said "yeah right". Then he left. Later, I was limping to my old car, a car I'd just bought for $100 that barely worked. I had badly injured my knee, too, which is another story. Anyhow, I'm limping to my car and up the bike path comes that officer in his patrol car. Just for fun, I think, because I'd asked him to get the light out of my eyes, he put his patrol car spotlight on me, right in my face. He thought it was funny.

I got into my car and pounded the steering wheel with my hands and sobbed. I'd had a horrible time at my parents house. I hadn't been back in years, because of my father's abuse of me as a child, because I'd had no car, too. I had injured my knee badly when down there, then my parents had told me, since my older brother was also visiting, that they had no place for me to sleep. I'd only gone down because I was desperate for love and support. Family is supposed to love you. They also said they had no extra blankets for me to use for sleeping in my car.

So, with a knee swollen like a cantelope, I slept in my car. They'd locked the door too, so I couldn't get back in to use the bathroom in the night either. And I'd been back in Corvallis only half hour when I got the news Cindy had killed herself. How is one supposed to take all these traumas?

Well anyhow, three weeks later I was arrested for yelling at the river barge I'd saved from fire. Although the feds had allegedly halted the riprap project, which is why I went down there, they were still working on it on the barge. So I yelled at them. I yelled they'd been banned from the river, so they sneak down there in the dark to work, stuff like that. I got arrested, for violent conduct. I believe one of the arresting officers then, was the same officer who ticketed me for illegal parking last week. The real irony is I had been beaten nearly to death a few months before on that psyche ward and nobody was ever charged. Justice for some.

These cops can make things much worse for people struggling so hard. Some do, that is, some even seem to enjoy doing it. They don't need to be so cruel just because they can. This is what made me refer to their behavior, when being ticketed for parking, as Nazi. I know there are good cops and I know it's a hard job. But some of them are contributing to social ills and creating hardships for people needlessly sometimes. Anyhow, got to go. The wind is whipping up and I am hearing crashes.