The title is Phillip Seymour
Hoffman but this could be a post about any number of famous and creative people
who have drunk or doped themselves to death in the last 40-50 years.
Around 20 years ago, I’m thinking
it was our 30th wedding anniversary, Marilyn and I spent a long
weekend in San Francisco. We stayed in a boutique hotel near Union Square, had dinner Saturday night at Absinthe, went
to North Beach, hit Biordi for some window shopping, and had a wonderful time.
I don’t remember where else we ate except that the hotel had a breakfast deal
with a café on the corner. When we
finished breakfast I think we had plans to shop Union Square, have lunch and
head home. We walked out the door of the café and started toward Union Square.
About mid-block a small crowd had gathered. They were watching a guy who was
lying on the sidewalk in obvious distress. Clearly one of San Francisco’s many
homeless and probably addicted to something that served him badly, he was
shivering and semi-conscious. Someone in the crowd had gone to phone for help.
I advised the other bystanders not to touch him (you never know with druggies
and I had some experience at work with people whose chemical balance was
unbalanced)
I don’t know who this guy was, I
don’t know if he was ever a beloved son or brother or worse a father, He was
too young to be a Vietnam Vet and likely too old for any of the Middle East
conflicts. I don’t know if he lived or died. The EMT crews in big cities call
them frequent flyers because they take them to the emergency rooms so often. In
many cases they know them by name or at least by some street name. Fifty years
ago they abused alcohol, the police picked them up, judges sent them to work
farms and once in a while they got sober and became productive members of
society. Now we give “support groups” grants to “help the less fortunate”.
Every medium to large city has a population of the “less fortunate”. They don’t
have to work, they receive better medical care than the working poor, and their
“helpers” make good salaries helping them. It’s a win-win. Except when they are
lying on a sidewalk in the center of one of the most beautiful cities on the
planet possibly dying of a drug overdose. Surrounded by visitors to the beautiful city.
How does this relate to a
brilliant actor who at the age of 46 with three children put enough Heroin in
his arm to kill himself. Except for one thing it’s exactly the same. Millions
of people loved Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s work, nobody that we know of loved
the homeless guy on Geary Street. And nobody cared enough about either one of
them to make them stop, or find out who was selling them the drugs and make
that person stop. It’s our loss. We lost
both their work products. We don’t know what those products would have been. We
just can’t afford to keep doing this. And it doesn’t have anything to do with
helping the “less fortunate”.
