Looking out the window of my 7th floor apartment offers me a perspective I might not have otherwise from the ground. Yesterday was such a case in point as I saw how one insignificant and thoughtless act lead to a series of seemingly unrelated events that almost ended in tragedy.
It was late in the morning when I looked out my kitchen window. Below on the sidewalk there lay a bare mattress illegally dumped over night. This is Oakland and Oakland has an illegal dumping problem. I don’t know the story behind every dump but I imagine it’s just convenient to leave junk on the sidewalks and let the city eventually clean it up rather than take stuff to the dump oneself. Of course no one dumps their belongings in front of their own building. I live downtown and it’s a transient place: people move in and out all the time and that means lots of discarded junk. There are only a few of us old timers.
I didn’t think too hard about the mattress and had quickly forgot about it. When I came back to my building later in the day there was a woman, probably in her 40s, laying on the mattress in front of my building. She gregariously asked me my name and I told her but as soon as I did her attention was directed elsewhere and I proceeded to enter my building. She did have the look of one who might have found a space to sleep for the night and I hoped to myself she would be a quiet neighbor. During the pandemic a man took residence in the same spot for a couple of years. He was quiet and kept the place clean. All the time he seemed to be sweeping the sidewalk. I appreciated him. Whether it outdoors or indoors it only takes one bad neighbor to ruin the the shared living experience.
This woman, and we will call her Woman #1 for there will be another nameless woman important to this story in just a moment, was much more vocal. Once the sun went down she began talking to herself and was not using her indoor voice. She wasn’t indoors, of course, and she was loud and never stopped. When the hour struck 11 P.M. Woman #1, a white woman, began rapping. She was spitting verse after verse without hesitation. Some of the lyrics were familiar like Posse On Broadway by Sir Mix A Lot. She knew the words completely and never broke rhythm. It was impressive but went on for hours and something no one wants to hear late at night.
Occasionally a neighbor would yell out their window at her to shut up. This only inflamed the situation and made the woman, who is clearly having some kind of a psychotic moment, angry and caused her to yell insults as she walked continuously in a circle in the middle of the street while banging loudly on garbage dumpsters as she passed them. This went on until at least I went to bed around 1 A.M.
I am lucky enough that my apartment windows are double pained and so I shut them and then turned on my bedroom fan; that kept me from hearing all the commotion outside. I prefer to sleep with my windows open but it’s not the end of the world. Of course I have neighbors who had to endure that potentially all night. I felt for them. I felt for her too. She is having a mental health crisis and doing it in public. We all have our moments like that but most of us have the privacy of our own home to do it in.
The next morning was relatively quiet but that changed around lunch time. The lady out front began angrily chirping again. I watched her for a while from my window and decided to call Oakland’s mobile crisis responders to see what could be done. I’ve never done something like that before and I didn’t want to call the police. I didn’t want to criminalize her and I also didn’t want to be the one to start a series of events that would go badly. But I already had a feeling this was going badly and, perhaps in a selfish way, I would like to not have to hear her the next night too.
There are many people on my street with mental illness and who are homeless, and sometimes both, so it’s not that not I’m used to it. I am. There is a large residential hotel on my block reserved for folks who struggle with fitting into with “normal expected behavior” (I struggle too but can pass) and I’ve come to see the constant chatter and outbursts, along with the sound of a distant train horn and the garbage truck making its way down the street, as part of the city soundscape. Along with the cacophony of bird calls and songs in the morning…it all just becomes natural once I get over myself. It is natural. We too are natural.
Another lady in my building, and we will call her Woman #2, began yelling from her window at the lady on the street which only provoked Woman #1 to get more demonstrative. I was on the phone with a crisis hotline counselor at this point and she asked if there was a weapon. I said no and insisted that it hadn’t been violent but I was worried it could become so. I could imagine some unhinged neighbor going down stairs while Woman #1 was away and pour lighter fluid on her belongings and set them on fire. I imagined this because I too have dark thoughts when someone’s noise unnecessarily keeps me up at night. For me though that’s usually directed towards those with loud cars, motorcycles, stereos, and fireworks that sound more like bombs echoing through a silent downtown at night.
The moment I said the scene was not violent Woman #2, who was yelling at Woman #1 from her window, is now outside and walking right towards Woman #1…and she’s carrying in her left hand a machete. It shined in the reflection of the sun. I couldn’t believe it. And she walked right up her and held the blade side of the machete right on the neck of Woman #1. I tried explaining to the crisis hotline counselor what was happening but I fumbled over my words.
At this point a single move from the woman’s arm holding the machete would slit the other woman’s throat. Woman #1, who had slept outside and now had a large knife at her Adam’s apple was unmoved. Defiant even but without moving. The crisis counselor I was on the phone with was confused as I stopped making sense and so I put down the phone and yelled out my window “lady, please don’t do this. We can handle this another way. There is another way. Lady, please don’t.” No one even looked at me. It was though no one heard what I said.
I then picked up the phone and apologized to the crisis counselor promising her I wasn’t making this up and then, just like that, an Oakland police car pulls up, and the lady with the machete removed the knife from the other women’s neck and walked over to the officer to talk to him. Immediately two more police cars arrived and different officers were speaking to each of the women separately. I was surprised the police responded so quickly. They are notorious for hardly responding at all. I was also surprised how calmly they responded. No weapons were drawn.
There wasn’t much the crisis counselor could do now that the police were there and so I let her go. I decided to go downstairs and perhaps tell the officers that Woman #1 needed some kind of help…though I think they saw that. I don’t know if the police were the right kind of help she needed but they were involved now and my experience is once the police are involved there is no uninvolving them. But by the time I got downstairs, no more than 10 minutes after the police arrived, everyone was gone…as though nothing happened. The only thing left in front of the building was the discarded mattress and a few off the belongings of Woman #1.
I’m assuming the police arrested the woman with the machete and took the lady who slept outside in for a psychological evaluation. In the late afternoon I looked out my window to see if she had returned. She hadn’t and instead there were two big junk removal trucks outside with several men hauling away the mattress and other illegally dumped items. Clearly someone paid some money to have the stuff out before someone else inhabited it again…potentially the same lady.
As I watched the workers haul the stuff away I thought to myself two women could have been killed there today. First the woman who spent the night, Woman #1, very well could have had her throat slit by the machete wielding lady. At the same time the lady with the machete, a black lady, could had been shot by the police when they first arrived as she was still holding the knife. Luckily no one died. But this could have went all so terribly wrong. And this whole series of events started with someone dumping their discarded mattress in front of my building and whoever did would have never known. Oh I know that there were other more powerful forces and currents leading to what happened. But they wouldn’t have come together right then and there if it wasn’t for the mattress on the sidewalk. Life is like that.
A couple more hours passed and it was getting dark and I looked out my window again to see if on the off chance Woman #1 returned. She had not. But someone else had dumped two more mattresses in the same spot. Later that night, just before bed, I looked one more time out my window and there was a man moving around on the mattress underneath a blanket settling in. He was quiet and I was thankful. It rained in the early morning and this new occupant was gone before I got up.
