Reprieve

I was heading to the recycling center. Not the paper, plastic, glass or cans recycling center. I was heading for the hazardous household waste recycling center on Plano Road. It’s the place where you take things that cause cancer, brain tumors, and birth defects. 

Computers with dangling, mangled hard drives are stacked like steel containers on a ship. Plano Road is the perfect place for hazardous waste.

Plano Road used to be a two lane dirt road, and, later, blacktop, on a built-up roadbed that ran from the eastern edge of Dallas up to the town of Plano.

The road was straight and the land flat. Cotton fields spread to the horizon. The raised road gave a passenger the feeling of flying just a few feet above the rows of cotton. You could look down on the people picking the cotton, who did not turn and look at the passing cars.

The people picking the cotton for low wages were the descendants of the people who picked cotton in the same fields for white people who owned them.

As a kid, someone told me a ‘joke’ that had Plano in it. It was a racist joke.  I thought it was one of the ugliest jokes I had ever heard. It enraged me because it was told in the presence of a shoeshine man at a barber shop. If you don’t know the joke, good. I won’t retell it, though it is amazing how many times I have had to walk away from a conversation where someone started to tell that joke.

Since white people first showed up on this blackland prairie, and ran off the indigenous brown people and bought their first black people to pick cotton, this part of North Texas has had a race problem.  

Today’s Plano Road is six lanes wide. Industrial parks cover the cotton fields like giant repositories, encasing the evidence. Now, we dispose of our toxins there. Most of the time, “Plano Road” just sounds like a place I try to avoid. 

I was thinking about all of this and George Floyd as I came to a quick stop at a traffic light. The radio was talking about some of the more disturbing testimony and I wondered if the pain of George Floyd’s death could ever leave us.

I was in the center lane with a couple of cars in front of me. There was an 18 wheeler on my left. In Texas, we leave the right lane empty for the traffic that is turning right on red. We don’t do that because it is courteous or the law, we do it because people who want to turn right on red, but can’t, will shoot you. That might seem extreme but you can get shot in Texas for almost any no good reason, especially slowing someone down when they are in a hurry.

I glanced over to my right across the empty right lane and saw a police car pull up in the middle of the retail strip parking lot near the front of a convenience store. The police officer had stepped out of the police car door and stood behind it like a shield. 

There was a young man standing in front of the store. I could see immediately that he was mentally ill.  You could see it in his face. I can see it. I had many clients during my poverty lawyer days, who were bi-polar, schizophrenic, or mentally ill in some way. They would take a long time to try to explain their illness but they didn’t need to. I could see it clearly almost every time.

The police officer was talking to the young man. He was not agitated and was smiling as he spoke. He didn’t have his hand on his gun. In fact he seemed to be conscious to keep both hands in clear view so as not to arouse fear or paranoia. The officer was friendly but he wasn’t moving from out behind that car door. There was a familiarity to the officer’s approach, like he had dealt with this young man before, but not a trust.

The young man, considerably smaller than the police officer, was unaware anyone was talking to him. I am pretty sure he was unaware. He didn’t make eye contact and his eyes were searching the sky above the warehouses and 18 wheelers. He was smiling at the voices, only he could hear.

I am writing this like I had time to take notes and think about the moment. I did not. All of this happened in less than 30 seconds and felt like an instant. I had to put it all down later to try to understand.

I remember thinking, this kid has someone who loves him enough to make little braids in his hair, secured with colorful little elastic hair ties. But no one can get him to take his meds. That must be really hard for the people who love him. 

Never acknowledging the police officer, the young man started to walk away from the store, possibly to the bus stop. Unbeknownst to him, he was moving closer to the police car. He appeared to be hiding something in his right hand and the body language of the officer told me that he wished he could see if there was a threat in that right hand. 

I couldn’t hear the police officer, also a young, black man, because a car with a loud stereo had pulled up behind me. I could see the police officer being much more emphatic to the young man and he crouched a little and put his hand on his gun belt. Oh my god. Please, no.

The young man was focused on something else, origin unknown. The officer grew louder but I could only hear, “You need…hands…stop…hands…hear me?” Panic welled up in me. What was I watching here? It was terrifying. It was escalating. A police officer was trying to figure out if he was going to draw his weapon. I wanted to jump out of the car and intervene but I knew that could not possibly help.

An 18 wheeler rolled up in the right lane beside me and stopped, blocking my view. The truck started moving again and when it cleared, horns were honking at me. The light had changed. I was holding up traffic and they will shoot you for that in Texas.

The officer took a quick look at the honkers, the young man startled at the horns. I thought maybe I should just yell out, “YOUNG MAN! LISTEN TO THE POLICE AND DO WHAT HE ASKS YOU” but there was no time for that. I had to drive and make the honking stop. At least I could make it better if I could make that honking stop. 

I kept watching as I started to drive away. I watched over my shoulder and with my mirror and I could see the young man had become aware of the officer. He raised his arms out like wings and faced him.  

No one stopped to record the encounter. I didn’t stop.  I thought the situation was getting dangerous for the young man but then it passed, and the officer could see the young man’s hand and see that he didn’t have anything in his hand. I drove on, like everyone else. Nothing to see. 

Twenty minutes later, I was coming back down Plano heading home and there was the young man walking beside the road toward me. He was smiling and playing with his hair and laughing at something like a funny joke. 

I said something similar to a prayer for both young men. Somehow, they had made it through. I said out loud, “No one got killed today.” 

Then, I corrected myself talking to both young men as if they were there with me, “Well, you didn’t get killed and you didn’t kill anybody.” 

Somedays, for people like a young police officer or a young man with mental illness, that’s about the best you can hope for.