REMEMBERING SCOTT BENNETT

"Hey Scott-Man!" I yelled as I saw my friend navigating the crowds at SLO
Farmers Market. Scott was carrying a five-foot bamboo pole in his hand. I
asked him whether the pole was a didgeridoo.

"It might become one when I'm finished with it," he said.

Scott Bennett was killed two weeks ago while walking down Highway 1 after
being released from the County Jail. Although he was legally blind, Scott
didn't use a white cane or guide dog.

That evening at Farmers Market, I remember thinking that the bamboo pole
Scott carried might be some sort of resignation, a final admission that he
did indeed need some help negotiating the streets of San Luis Obispo.

Unless you watched Scott's eyes you wouldn't have known that he was blind.
But he wasn't embarrassed or shy talking about his disability.

Scott was good with his hands. On his massage table, or on the floor, he
would knead and pull. Commenting on my pain tolerance, he would give me my
money's worth and often gave massages for free.

I occasionally called him "Blink" and he would call me "Cyclops," for I had
lost an eye due to a detached retina. Scott's vision was almost entirely
gone from his degenerative disorder.

I first met Scott outside a neighborhood market in SLO where he would often
hang out with the employees and run a tab. I didn't notice his blindness at
first.

I had initially interpreted his behavior as a form of aloofness. His head
would follow my movements, but he never looked right at me. I thought he
was a snob behind his sunglasses. On our third meeting, I finally noticed
his reluctance to cross the street. That's when I realized he was listening
for traffic.

When I told Scott of my own vision problem, he joked about the "blind
leading the blind." He always walked quickly with a determined gait,
pausing to feel for the curb with his feet. Despite the weather, he always
wore sandals, tank tops, and shorts.

Back when we first met, Scott's massage studio was on Higuera Street. He
was living illegally out of his studio because of a recent separation from
his wife. She didn't like him smoking marijuana and drinking, he would
later tell me.

Scott also told me he turned most of his money over to his wife and
step-daughter, and that always left him short at the end of the month.
Eventually he sold his massage table and would often barter his bizarre
poetry that he wrote with multicolored felt pens as he held the paper an
inch from his nose.

Whenever he would come back into money, Scott would redeem his favorite
poems, often framed, only to resell them to someone else later. The poetry
was sometimes insightful, but the misspellings, intentional or not,
referenced a secret inner world difficult to decipher.

Scott hadn't been feeling his best for these past couple months. He had
given up alcohol which, when mixed with his medication, made his manic
episodes unbearable, mainly for those around him.

Scott would sometimes go on prescription-drug holidays, fortified in his
belief that he only needed marijuana to become mentally stable. He was
wrong about that. While normally having a mildly euphoric effect on Scott
when he was taking his lithium, marijuana enhanced his paranoia and
psychotic symptoms when he relied on it alone.

Scott's mental illness, like his blindness, was no fault of his. He knew he
was responsible for taking his medication. When he didn't his personal and
professional relationships suffered.

I remember Scott as a very smart, funny, perceptive man who would share
what he had when he had it. He could discuss quantum mechanics,
Christianity, and Jungian psychology with equal enthusiasm.

But I also knew of the unprovoked verbal attacks that came between the
smiling, quick-witted Scott and the alternately hyperactive and depressed
Scott. This was a Jekyll-Hyde reality to him. It2 was scary and very real.

Scott's judgement on intimate matters and his indiscriminate fighting with
friends and strangers were harmful to him in ways his blindness was not. I
last saw Scott the Saturday before Halloween when he stopped by to invite
me to a party. I now regret that I angrily told him to leave.

I had given up on helping him, financially or otherwise, and wouldn't
accompany him. I felt I'd endured more insults and threats from him than I
should have.

Perhaps I'm writing this out a sense of guilt for not having done more, as
if somehow I could have predicted that he would lose his life in such a
horrible fashion. Scott knew many people who also must wonder if they could
have changed his fate.

Scott was dealt a hard hand to play in life. Sometimes he finessed his
cards just right. Towards the end of the game the other players had left
the table; at least this one did.

Scott's mental illness does not excuse the negligence of the Sheriff's
Department, which I believe had an even greater duty to care for his
discharge from its jail, since he was doubly disabled.

Mike Groom is a psychiatric social worker living in San Luis Obispo.