The Gene Pool, Day One
Hi. Welcome to this thing, The Gene Pool, whatever it turns out to be.
One thing it will be is honest, untethered to a corporate entity. So I am going to tell you an inside story, and then tell you a second story related to the first. This chat will happen at one p.m Tuesdays and Thursdays. Thursday is when you get the Invitational, so stay tuned.
Several months ago, Rachel Manteuffel and I went out to see a play, and then have dinner. Rachel is my fnorf, which is a word I invented a couple of years ago to replace "girlfriend," a word I consider misogynistic, since Rachel is 38, hardly a girl, and I am a dessicated old babbling fool whom she somehow, improbably, loves. My point is, this semantic thing is kinda complicated, and "girlfriend" does no one any justice.
The overarching narrative is that this is a story Rachel and I wrote together a few months ago, after a singular experience in downtown D.C. We submitted it to the Washington Post magazine, a venue that appreciated unusual stories with complex, universal themes. They accepted it. It was edited by one of the best feature editors in the country. He helped make it better. It was Done. And then: Nothing. No response. No date for publication. It took a month or so until we realized what was probably going on.
The magazine was dying. Everyone was about to be fired. People were diving out of windows, basically, holding their noses as though they were vacating the Titanic and about to hit the waters of the north Atlantic, instead of macadam. The management of The Washington Post -- the features folks, not the Opinions folks who currently employ Rachel and are completely beyond reproach -- apparently had decided there was no longer a place in the newspaper for stuff like this: Weird, troubling stuff that merely illuminated the entire complexity of human existence and challenged people to examine their own presumptions in words of two syllables or more, the sort of writing that wins Pulitzer Prizes, unsettling stories that encourage people to confront the nature of existence, readjust their thinking, become better and wiser humans . But perhaps I am just being bitter. The fact is, the magazine died, and with it, this story.
So the story never got published, until this very moment, 1:01 pm on January 3, 2023, at the occasion of the birth of The Gene Pool, destined to become the most important site for narrative journalism the world has ever known. Buckle up, buckaroos.
This is all true and happened exactly as described.
A young couple was standing ahead of us on the street, near a retaining wall next to a condo.
He was handsome. She was pretty. They were in a tight embrace, swaying, as though they were slow dancing. They weren't.
She was nearly comatose -- the medical term is ataxia -- and he was trying to hold her up. Her legs were buckling and useless, like a newborn giraffe's. He had scalp and neck tattoos. She wore yoga pants and a vintage Washington Football Team t-shirt with the number 21, an homage to Sean Taylor, the all-star safety who was shot to death in 2007 by a home intruder while trying to defend his girlfriend.
It was dark but not late in downtown Washington. There were many people within a long stone's throw, but nobody was closer than 50 feet, except us.
"Is she okay?" we asked. "Yes," he said, a little too loud and a little too testy. She was slipping out of his grasp, her head sharply lolling backwards, sometimes toward the cement pavement, sometimes toward the brick wall. We came close enough to catch her. "Are you okay?" we asked her. "Do you need help?" She didn't seem to hear any of it, or if she did, she could not process it.
We asked him if she was merely drunk, or impaired in some other way. He didn't answer. She did not smell of alcohol. She was not slurring her words. She called him "Baby." He called her "Baby." She barely seemed to know where or who she was.
We said we were going to call 911. That was the thing to do. Right?
He glowered and said, "You are going to ruin my life." He spoke with a sibilant accent, possibly French. This place, he said to us, is no longer safe for persons like him. "They're going to deport me, Baby" he said, to her. He implored us to leave, assured us he was in control, but she kept lurching and staggering, something he was only half-heartedly working to prevent. He told us he worked for a large grocery store nearby, as though this was somehow proof of pedigree and good intentions.
We were a man and a woman with similarly unprovable good intentions. He didn't seem to be taking her anywhere or have a plan, and in her conscious moments she held on to him. To do the right thing for her, strangers would have to trust each other.
He seemed sober. He kept letting his Baby fall. We kept holding her. Rachel eased her down to a sitting position on the ground, and sat behind her, in case she fell backward, Rachel's legs encircling her, Rachel's arms wide and ready, in case she tipped sideways. She slumped against Rachel for a few moments, seemingly unconscious, and then awoke and recoiled in disgust, finding herself pillowed by a stranger.
"Where does she live?" Rachel asked the guy. " Does she live here?" she asked, pointing to the condo building behind us. "Yes," he said.
"We'll help you get her up to her place. Is there a doorman?"
No answer.
"I live in Maryland," she blurted.
The woman struggled to her feet, then swooned again. We both grabbed her. Her shirt hiked up, exposing her bra and the bottom of her breasts. The guy seemed not to notice, or care.
A woman passed by, walking her dog. "Is everything all right?" she asked, and then moved on before getting her answer. She clearly felt she had done her job.
The pandemic has had a peculiar psychological impact on people worldwide, studies have shown. We are lacking active empathy for others. It seems to be about feeling personally vulnerable, circling our wagons, taking care of Number One. We do feel compassion -- that has actually increased -- but we tend not to act on it as aggressively, probably because it is defeated by self-interest, and fear. We reach accommodations with ourselves. We compromise our kindness.
It's always been hard to know what to do in situations like this. The so-called "bystander effect," made famous by the Kitty Genovese case in New York City in the early 1960s, suggests that witnesses to mayhem don't want to get involved, and are inclined to withdraw if they feel someone else will help. They look for excuses to back away. The theory was based, in part, on a dreadfully inaccurate initial crime story in the New York Times that overstated the number of people -- 38, supposedly -- who saw the fatal stabbing of a young woman and reported nothing. No one actually saw it all, and some, in fact, reported it. But the theory resonated because it seemed familiar. People feel it, about themselves.
People seem to be feeling it, even at the tail end of the pandemic. We are resisting it. We want to recover in body and mind. But things are complicated. The urge to help got a lot of people in trouble this pandemic. In the last year alone, an immunocompromised emergency babysitter -- 30-year survivor of a heart transplant -- got infected from a child and died. A conference of Emergency Medicine workers, meeting to plan life-saving strategies -- turned into a super-spreader event that infected countless others.
"We'll call a cab," we told the guy, "and we'll pay for it, to get her home."
Rachel called a cab company. They needed to know the ultimate destination. The woman could not, or would not, provide it. Neither did the man. For reasons good or ill, why wouldn't he want a cab?
The guy dragged her to her feet, then let her go, perhaps to persuade us she was fine. She staggered and fell, and Gene held her up, under the armpits, as her legs struggled to gain a purchase on the ground.
She spat at Gene, as though he was a molester: "Get your hands off of me."
Rachel reached for the woman's pocketbook, which had fallen to the pavement, to see if she could find a name and address for the cab company. The woman grabbed it back. "Fuck you," she explained.
She seemed moderately better, standing on her own, if slanted and swaying.
Rachel and Gene looked at each other, then at the guy, who was taut with fury, telling us about the horror we would cause if we intruded on their personal crisis. He had a point; it is a more complex social world. Things sometimes have cascading consequences beyond the immediate -- decisions that once seemed easy, now, sometimes, don't. There are other things to consider.
Was her condition entirely of her own making? Had she been roofied? No idea, but she seemed to trust her Baby, so maybe not.
Were his fears justified, and even if they were, should they matter? Would life be better or worse for her if he was forced out of the country?
Should we entrust her to the police, who have often proven they are not without flaws in such situations?
Should we urge him to leave, to assure that he was in no legal jeopardy, and promise that we would take care of her? Maybe, but wouldn't that deprive a scared and vulnerable woman of the only person she considered safe, accompanied by strangers she'd asked to leave her alone? Was that really best for her?
Should their anger and suspicion matter, in our calculus of what to do?
They were maskless; were they sick? Was all this holding and cradling ... unwise?
Should we call an ambulance, and maybe saddle her with a $10,000 debt afterwards?
She did seem to be a little better, we assured ourselves. Anger at us had woken her up.
We told the cab company never mind, and walked on to our car.
Like the lady with her dog, we concluded we had done our job.
We wonder if that lady also felt tormented by guilt.
What a wrenching story. I have an acquaintance who died, drunk, in the cold a few years ago. No one knows who, if anyone, walked past her. She was a person like us with a job, an apartment, a kid, and a drinking problem that she mostly managed.
And… this woman you saw did have someone with her. I probably would have done what the other person did and scuttled along. I appreciate the calculations: cops, ambulance, medical bills.
But on the other hand: Narcan, a wake up call in one’s life to stop doing so much shit (whatever it is), maybe even sobriety.
This kind of column gives people like me a thought experiment. So that when we encounter the situation we have a plan.
But I still don’t know what mine is.
So long as we're waiting....Kevin McCarthy lost on the first round of balloting.