HOLLYWOOD — Before I wrote this column I made myself read the comments, because I intended to be angry at the comments and I try not to be angry at things secondhand.
I read four hundred of them, from the last week Vernon Teague was missing. I counted. Eleven asked whether he was safe. Perhaps thirty were cruel, fewer than I expected. The rest — the enormous, cheerful, ordinary rest — were fans. The Night Mayor protects us. This man is the last real one in Hollywood. Keep running, king. Posted at two and three in the morning, under videos of a 68-year-old man with untreated schizophrenia walking my neighborhood, alone, off his medication, narrating a pursuit that did not exist.
His daughter told this newspaper the thing I have not been able to put down: everything he said in those videos, he believed. The audience believed none of it, and that was the entertainment. The whole act, the whole following, was built in the gap between a man’s illness and a crowd’s certainty that nobody really means it — that in Hollywood of all places, everything said out loud at night on a boulevard is a bit.
I want to be careful here, because the easy column is the one that scolds two hundred thousand strangers, and the easy column is a lie of its own. I understand what they thought they were watching. I have lived here forty years; the Boulevard at night has always had its narrators, and this city has always paid its rent by not asking whether the performance is voluntary. The audience did not invent that habit. They inherited it, and an algorithm the size of a weather system did the rest. Most of them, had they passed him on the sidewalk instead of on a screen, would have worried.
But that is exactly the thing to sit with. On the screen was the entire visible man — his face, his voice, his location, his obvious distress — and the screen turned all of it into content so completely that worry stopped being one of the available reactions. You could like, follow, quote, remix. You could not, from inside the audience, do the one thing four weeks of watching should have produced. The platform had no button for it. An audience is a machine for watching, and watching, as a psychiatric nurse wrote on this page last week, has never once helped a person in psychosis.
Then there is Nadine Priester.
She works a lunch counter that stays open all night, and at twenty minutes to four on Saturday morning the most-watched missing man in America sat down in her section and asked for water. She had seen the videos. She had also — and this is the part I keep returning to — read the instructions. The family had spent a month saying, in this newspaper and everywhere else: do not approach, do not film, note the time, call the number. It is possible that no request in the history of this city has been ignored by more people at once.
She brought him his water like he was anybody. She went to the back. She called the number. Then she came back out and kept the counter calm until his daughter could get there and ask her father if he wanted eggs.
No part of that is footage. That is the point of it. The month’s astonishing arithmetic is now complete: two hundred thousand people watched Vernon Teague, and the sum of all that watching found him nothing. One woman on the night shift saw him — saw him the old way, the way you see a regular, a neighbor, a man at your counter — and the seeing took eleven minutes to bring him home.
He is in a hospital now, sleeping, fed, back on his medication. His family asks that the clips not be reposted, and I ask you, honestly, to make that the one instruction that gets followed the first time.
And the next time the algorithm hands you a stranger at 3 a.m. — magnetic, unwell, and further away than he looks — you do not owe him your commentary or your applause or your theory of the bit. You owe him what the counter server paid. Note the time. Call the number. Be a witness, which was never the same job as being an audience, and was always the better one.