Portrait of a Man in Crisis

My most recent interview with a Street Roots vendor didn’t result in a profile for the paper. The vendor profiles are intended to introduce readers of the paper to the people who sell it, to give people experiencing homelessness and poverty the chance to share a bit of their lives and what’s important to them. This interview was the ninth I’d done. The previous eight had gone well, albeit with some folks needing to be drawn out of their shells more than others. I went into this ninth interview feeling quite confident in my ability to foster a conversation that would be enjoyable for both of us and productive in terms of gathering the information I would need to write a good profile.

Usually I conduct these interviews in person in the Street Roots office, but this one took place via video call, because I broke my foot quite badly in early March and had surgery, and am only now beginning to walk again. The interview before this one, for my eighth profile, had also been via video call and it had gone well. I’d been concerned going into it that I wouldn’t be able to establish the kind of rapport that these interviews really benefit from, but it had gone just fine. My expectation going into this most recent one was that it would also work out well enough.

The Street Roots staff member introduced the vendor and me on the video call, and then left him alone with the computer in a small office, and there I was on the other side of the screen in my own home office.

He opened with a challenge, saying, “Let me just start by asking you this. Do not insult my intelligence.”

He said this in a very calm, measured, deliberate way that told me that he was accustomed to people making assumptions about him, speaking down to him, perhaps, not taking him seriously. And, of course, I wanted to show him respect and listen to whatever it was he wanted to tell me. One of the fundamental things for me in these interviews is to give people space to tell their stories the way they want to tell them. From that I shape a profile of up to 650 words intended to give the reader a sense of who this person is in the way that they want to be seen. That’s important to me. The “truth” of their story is none of my business. It’s their story they tell, and that’s what I present.

That was my intention and my expectation going into this interview. I agreed that I would listen to what he had to say with interest and respect, and he said, “I’m going to tell you something that is going to terrify you. It terrified me. I am traumatized.” He then proceeded to recount a harrowing tale of what he referred to as an attempted lynching that had happened to him the night before. I don’t want to give any identifying details here. I want to protect this man’s privacy. So, let’s just say that he is an older person of color, and he was in an area of the Portland metro region where it was quite plausible that he might have been targeted for his race as well as potentially seen as an easier target because of his age.

It isn’t at all unusual for a vendor to have traumatic stories that they want to share over the course of our conversation. Street Roots exists to provide income opportunities to folks experiencing homelessness and/or poverty, so none of the vendors’ lives have been easy. In this case, I expected that I would listen to him recount a very horrible, frightening thing that had happened to him, bearing witness as he seemed to be asking me to do, and then we would move on to discussing his life and other experiences so I could gather the information I would need to write a profile about him. But as he went on talking, it became very clear that he was experiencing a significant mental health crisis and that the danger he had perceived himself to be in the night before hadn’t been real. (I’m not going to give details here of what he told me, because it doesn’t feel respectful to do so. He was in no state to meaningfully consent.)

He remained fairly calm throughout our call, but became less and less coherent and less and less consistent as he went on. I tried several times to redirect him, tried to explain, again, the purpose of our conversation, but he wasn’t interested. He had misunderstood my role as a volunteer at the paper, and was hoping that I would write an investigative piece that would expose a connection between McDonald’s workers and a kidnapping/organ theft ring. The call lasted 45 minutes. I naively kept hoping that I would be able to draw something out from him that I could use to write a profile that would be suitable for the paper, so that he would get the financial compensation that vendors receive for participating, but the only thing it would have been possible to shape from our conversation would have been the portrait of a man in crisis. He had no interest in giving me anything about himself apart from this story of trauma from the night before. Which…fair. He didn’t owe me anything. But I certainly wasn’t in a position to help him in the way he hoped I would.

If we had been in person together in that small office with the door closed, as I have conducted most of these interviews in the past, I can’t imagine that I would have stuck with it for 45 minutes. The buffer of speaking to each other through a screen gave me a false sense that, because I was physically safe, I could stick it out in the hopes that something useful might come of the interaction. I was thinking that even if I didn’t get a profile out of it, at least I was giving him an outlet to talk about this thing that had frightened him, and tell the story to a sympathetic listener. Maybe that was grandiose of me. It was certainly naive. Who am I to be receiving somebody’s paranoid story of trauma while they’re in the middle of a significant mental health crisis? Did I do him harm by letting him go on and on like that? I don’t know.  

He got kind of agitated toward the end when I finally was able to make him understand that I was not going to write the piece that he wanted me to write. He felt betrayed. He felt that he had given me something by telling me his story, and gotten nothing in return. This was exactly the opposite of my intention. I had perceived my listening as giving him something: my undivided attention, my interest, the respect of not insulting his intelligence, as he’d asked of me at the very beginning, but, man did I get it wrong. I got it really wrong. I should have ended the call much sooner. I was out of my depth, and should have recognized that.

He logged off feeling frustrated and let down. I logged off feeling sad and inept. I emailed my liaison at Street Roots to explain what had happened and why I wouldn’t be able to write the profile, and then I just sat and cried. I was sad for him, but I think it was also a delayed fear reaction. To have been face-to-face, with strong, steady eye contact, for 45 minutes with a person whose reality did not align with my own had been frightening, though my brain didn’t let me feel it until after the fact.

When the interview began, I saw a clean and well put-together older man, well-spoken and polite, asking only for respect, asking only that I not insult his intelligence. From that first impression, I would have never predicted that the interview would go off the rails the way it did. I wish that I had met him on one of his better days, because on those days I bet he has a lot to share. I wish that I had recognized sooner that I wasn’t qualified to deal with him on a bad day. I hope he is doing better now. I hope I didn’t cause him harm.