Bleeders

Gar is an aging street poet and activist. He now lives out of an old guitar case on an inner-city sidewalk in front of a blood bank and gets by giving blood and shrouding himself in entertaining yet empty rhetoric. Then Helen appears. She is a quiet, restrained, middle-aged widow who has left the safe confines of her suburban home to picket an adult bookstore adjacent to the blood bank. In the encounter that follows in this often humorous and poignant drama, Helen and Gar engage in a near-mortal combat of words and more as they move inexorably toward revelation of the shared event that has brought them together. Ultimately, each is able to pierce the other's isolation—permitting them to feel, to bleed, and perhaps to be healed. Amidst this compelling tale of life in the late 20th century there is a compassionate study of the beauty of words and our inadequacy in using them to express ourselves and touch one another.