Johnny

Johnny wandered into Rio de Janeiro streets At Friday nights. The new psychiatric treatment allowed him to leave Pinel Hospital in the weekends after he had took his medicine. He would had to stay with his aunt that lives in the outskirts of the city from Friday to Monday. Without money and hungry, he often went to Lapa, a neighbourhood near the business part of the city. Friday's nights in Lapa reunite young people. Students, workers, businessmen and artists went there to have fun, playing music, talking and drinking. Ilegal drugs made part of the substances ingested during the night. Johnny came walking from the hospital. Something about four miles by feet. People that knew him gave to him this nickname. Nobody knew what his real name was, nobody cared. People gave him beer and other drinks. Gave him marijuana to smoke. Those drugs together with the psychiatric medicine he took at the hospital made him confused and disoriented. Johnny began to talk without pausing, people liked it and started to laugh hearing his stories and yelled at him: “€Go Johnny, go”€・ When he was starving he begged for food. Nervous his dentures danced inside his mouth and everybody laughed. He got angry but he never attacked anyone. A police car eventually would peak him up and took him at the hospital again. The policemen knew him. Two weeks later Johnny was killed by an unknown driver that did not stopped to help him. He tried to cross an avenue at dawn. Before the accident people saw him at Lapa, acting crazy as he always did. They laughed and yelled at him again: “€Go Johnny, go. Go, go.”€