This has been a tumultuous week. Last Saturday, I was awoken in the middle of the night by a guy trying to break into my bedroom (the back door of the apartment is in this room). Then my girlfriend's sister had a lovely baby. Sadly, a close friend of their family killed himself the next day. The pop-culture backdrop to all of this has of course been the slow deaths of Terri Schiavo and the Pope (still hanging on - barely - at the time of this writing). And then last night, an event to really close out the week with a bang.
I was waiting for my friend S.G. to pick me up to go to a potluck dinner. I was watching for him through the living room window, playing the guitar. A few minutes before he arrived, I heard several loud cracking sounds, in quick succession. My first thought was gunshots, but I talked myself out of this possibility, just based on the sheer improbability. Besides, I was right near the window and, knowing my neighbours, I knew that people would be out on their balconies and looking out their windows if there had been an incident. The street was quiet.
S.G. pulled into the driveway a few minutes later. As I got in the car, I saw two children running down the street, clearly upset and scared. I mentioned this to my friend, and then started to tell him about the noises I had heard, starting to wonder out loud if there was a connection. But a few seconds later, we pulled up to the intersection of Ash and Favard, in front of the Community Clinic, and saw a crowd of people gathered around a man lying in the street. S.G. is a doctor, and I asked him if he wanted to get out and help. He parked the car and we hurried over. I was slightly in front of him, and I could see it wasn't good; the guy was lying in a large pool of his own blood, which was already going thick and gummy on the pavement. He had been shot in the neck and had bled out extremely quickly. A nurse from the clinic had come out and was attending to him (the doctors had already left for the day). Neither she nor my friend could get a pulse. I could see that the man's face was blue from anoxia.
The ambulance arrived a few minutes later and S.G. pronounced him dead at the scene. They threw a blanket over his body.
This morning, I walked over to where this had happened to see if the area was still roped off (at midnight when I went to bed, 6 hours after this happened, the cops were still down there investigating). The body was of course long gone, but his blood was still there. It was thick and brown and looked like wet, decaying leaves in the autumn or wet cardboard. It was raining lightly, just starting to rain for real, and the rain was slowly quickening the blood, turning it red again, and it was starting to run into the gutter. It looked thin and runny like the blood on the cellophane red meat comes wrapped in.
There were some reporters from TQS there. They wanted to interview me, even though I played dumb (I knew a bit about the circumstances of the crime from a subsequent conversation with my neighbour, a native of the neighbourhood who knew the dead guy, and I knew details from S.G. from his discussions with the cops and medics). The journalist was obscene in her quest for tabloid details. "Did you see him get shot?" No. "But he was still bleeding a lot when you got there, right?" No, he was dead. "Was their
un environnement de peur among the people gathered?" No, I think they were just sad. "It was street gangs, right?". No. I don't know.
Hopefully I was useless to her and they won't use the footage. Those people are producing entertainment, not journalism. At any rate, a shooting in a poor neighbourhood will hardly be a blip on the radar, given the impending illumination of the
purple cross.
