Most mornings around 5:30am you can find me giving out food to the homeless that hang out around one of the three bodegas in my hood.
At around 8:30pm I serve dinner at the same locations.
The bodega that’s closest to my house I saved for last so that I could eat a meal with my friend Larry. There’s a bunch of Larrys in my hood so everybody called him dark skinned Larry wit the dreads.
We would eat breakfast and dinner together almost everyday. Talk about all matters of the world. Life, love, stress, and setbacks. He is an amazing bike mechanic, that lives in the alley behind the Valero on the corner of Moreland and Memorial.
The corner of Moreland & Memorial is an interesting place, and it’s kinda the place 911 forgot.
For those of you that aren’t ATLiens, it’s an intersection of 2 big streets on the Eastside, within city limits, and Moreland is the dividing line between Fulton and DeKalb county.
So when you call 911, even if you provide an exact address your call gets bounced around between City of Atlanta police, Fulton County police, and DeKalb County police for a minimum of 45 minutes before they decide which entity should dispatch an ambulance.
I’ve literally watched people die, bleeding to death while they figured out what ambulance they should send.
So the setup for this tragic story is important for 2 reasons:
Since I work with the homeless on a daily basis I found an organization that supplies me with both nasal & injectable Narcan.
Since 911 is a joke the people that work at the local bodegas call me instead of 911 to pull someone out of an OD. Recently I got a call from the homie Mike at Valero & he said someone OD’d.
I grabbed both a nasal and injection Narcan and burned rubber to get over there. I got there and the person that OD’d was my friend Larry.
I gave him the nasal, no luck, I gave him the injection…
He died in my arms.
I don’t know if there is a moral to this story, but it haunts me. He was my friend, he had his problems, but he was still a good dude. I just want to write this to let people know, I had a friend named Larry and he mattered to me.
