By Nate Levin
One of the New York City subway/elevated train lines terminates at the corner of Dyre Avenue and Light Street in the Bronx, a block south of East 223rd Street. Dyre is essentially a north/south street. There is a shopping district on Dyre, lining the block from the train station to 223rd. Many times, as I recollect, I picked a spot to watch a trainload of passengers walk out of the station. I don’t recall ever seeing the participant I was looking for among the quickly dispersing crowd. If it ever did happen, it was no more than once or twice.
Sometimes my assignment was to “maintain engagement” between the participant and the ACT team. On other occasions, and more urgently, my job was to spot them (or her or him), then call the ACT team psychiatrist, so that she could drive down to Dyre from wherever she was and persuade them to receive their due – or, more likely, overdue—injection of anti-psychotic medication. Generally speaking, the longer overdue the shot, the more difficult the persuading. Until the psychiatrist arrived, it was imperative that I hang out with the participant.
The NYC city limit is a few blocks north of the Dyre Ave. business district, running approximately in a transverse direction relative to the avenue. On the north side of the city limit is Mt. Vernon, part of the southernmost tier of municipalities in Westchester County. The ACT team’s catchment area was the whole of Westchester County. It really was too large an area for us, especially with the lengthy and severe periods of understaffing from which we suffered. Fortunately, only one or two of our participants lived in northern Westchester. Of necessity we kept in contact with them mainly by phone. We could afford to meet them “where they are” only once or twice a month.
A block south of the city line, Dark Street forms an intersection with Dyre. So the area where I sought our participant was bracketed by Dark Street and Light Street. It seems like a trope from a fiction writer, yet the street signs are there, as real as the pavement.
In my quests, I didn’t only eyeball crowds of disembarking passengers. I also walked the block, on both sides of the street, glancing or more than glancing into the store windows to try to find the participant. I remember a few occasions when, as I started across Dyre, I spotted the participant walking toward me. They had seen me first.
The owner of one of the shops on Dyre was a person of very great kindness and perfect benevolence. It was a balm simply to be in the same space with him. He was generous in many ways to our participant and—I have no doubt—to others as well. He was an immigrant from the Middle East. My take is that his benevolence was informed by his sense of his obligations to Islam. It became a regular part of my visits to Dyre to step into the gentleman’s store and ask about the participant if I had not myself seen them that day. Often the shop owner could tell me that the participant had been in the store to charge their phone within the last few days.
Many months later, well after the participant’s evasion of the ACT team had become final (but not, thank heavens, fatal), I was near Dyre again and hoped to stop in and greet the shop owner. I walked back and forth on the block several times but could not find the right store. Evidently the shop owner was now the pillar of a different neighborhood.