Larry

I meet Larry by the tennis courts in Forsythe Park, which has become for me, like many of the other street people, a kind of home base. We usually start there in the morning and finish up there at night before we go off to our various points of rest. It’s central to three of the soup kitchens, close to the churches that give away clothes, not far from the furthest southern point that the Free bus goes, and only a few blocks from the big library on Bull Street. It’s also one of the few places we don’t get thrown out of until after 11pm.

Larry is tall, very thin, in his late 60’s. He sports a white, closely-trimmed beard below a beaky nose and vague eyes that wander a lot. He never looks straight at you but always over your shoulder or off to some distant horizon at the side. His joints seem so loose that he reminds me of one of those wooden dancing men on sticks, arms flapping at a different pace and in a different direction from his knees, feet and shoulders going their individual ways. He barely seems connected at all when he moves, as if he’s been put together with rubber bands that are fraying, glue that is loosening, and the stitches up his sides are coming apart. I half expect to see a hand or a foot fall off like a bicycle wheel when the hub nut drops away.

It is night. I am over by the tennis courts because there are arc lights there bright enough to read by and I have my book propped in my lap, a thriller by Sandra Brown called Unspeakable despite the fact that nothing in it is. There are several benches lined up in a row here, for the benefit of players’ fans, I suppose. I am at the bench on one end of this row, Larry is at the bench on the other, hunched in a tight ball over a sheaf of papers. It seems impossible that a man that tall could turn himself into such a tiny clutch of flesh withouit something inside splintering, but he does it. When he stands, he unfolds like a crumpled piece of paper being straightened, first this part then that spreading, finding its old form. I realize I have seen him at the library, sitting at a table pouring over his papers. I had no idea looking at him then how tall he was.

He ambles in my direction, carrying his bag as if he barely remembers having one. I think he’s going to ask me for a cigarette and decide I’ll give him one. I only have a few left and no more cash but he looks like he could use it. His eyes are hooded and sad, his mouth droops, and he moves as if there was a weight on his shoulders that he’s been carrying for a long time and it tires him just thinking about it. But it turns out he doesn’t ask that. He doesn’t even smoke. He is what I used to call in the Pioneer Valley an “earthy-crunchy”, a vegetarian/environmentalist/progressive who eats tofu and keeps a compost pile in his kitchen when he doesn’t have the room in the yard.

He stops in front of me. I look up. And up. “Haven’t I seen you around?” he asks someone to my left.

I assume he’s talking to me since there’s no one else here. “Probably. At the library.”

He folds his arms across his chest, which is a bit of a production, like folding a complicated beach chair. “Are you new here?”

“Yeah, just a few days. I haven’t figured everything out yet.”

“Did you eat today?” This is often the first question one street person asks another, or at least the second, after “Have you got a spare cigarette?”

“Yeah, I did. Thanks. You?”

“Oh, I know where the food is. Have you figured that out?”

I tell him about Megan and her map.

“That’s good, that’s good.” He is looking across the street now. He has a deep voice as sad and tired as his eyes, and he speaks slowly and distinctly as if he thinks I may be deaf. He gestures toward the parking lot behind the courts. “That’s where they feed on Saturday afternoons. Did she tell you that?”

“No. She missed that one. Well,” I add, coming to Megan’s defense as if he was attacking her, which of course he isn’t, “she couldn’t tell me everything. She had to catch a bus.”

“Yuh.” When he says that, I know where he’s from.

“You’re from the mid-west, aren’t you? Minnesota?”

No, but not far off. He’s from Madison, Wisconsin. He seems surprised I’ve heard of it. I tell him I used to listen to a radio show from there. “Oh, Michael Feldman,” he says, and sits as if he has decided it’s OK because anybody who listens to Feldman can’t be all bad. He starts explaining about where the various feeds are that I haven’t heard about and carefully writes the day, time, and addresses on a piece of typing paper he takes from the bag that I now realize is a beat-up briefcase. As he writes, which takes a long time because he makes the letters so large and so carefully, he tells me a little about himself in a wistful, distant voice that could be describing someone else’s life.

He drove down to New Orleans in his panel truck after Katrina to help re-build. I ask what that was like but the answer is vague, indistinct. It has something to do with getting paid in food to stay with the tents and tables that a church group from Oregon uses to feed the refugees. He is to make sure vandals don’t steal everything, and he’s happy to do it because it’s a place to sleep and 3 squares a day.

He stays in New Orleans for a year, working on houses, but the money that’s supposed to be coming to help the poorer people re-build their homes never arrives and though there is a lot of work to do, there is no money to pay for equipment or materials. Eventually there is little he can do despite the wreck of the place and he finds himself trapped. He doesn’t have the money to stay or the money to leave. He has been living hand-to-mouth ever since, slowly working his way back north with the idea of going home. That was 2 years ago and Savannah is as far as he’s got.

Abruptly he asks if I need any money. “I can always use money,” I say.

He pulls a crumpled manilla envelope out of his pocket. There are a few bills in it, maybe ten. They all look like ones. He counts out four of them and holds them out to me. I’m not so sure. “You know, I’m OK for now. I ate today.” Actually, I’m broke but there are only a few bills and he’s offering me almost half of what he’s got. I’d take a dollar or two, probably, but not half.

“Go ahead. Take it. I have more in the truck.”

“You sure?”

“Sure. Hey, we’re all in this together.”

The next day I run into him again and ask him how he’s doing. He tells me he’s on the way to a friend’s house to borrow money.

 Philly – The Pack

It is a long, uncomfortable night. By dawn I am as stiff as a board. Everything aches, my eyes itch, and I have smoked way too many cigarettes so my throat feels like a dusty road assaulted by wagonloads of rocks. But at least I did not freeze to death on the street. I’m learning to be thankful for small favors.

Basically I am now marking the time until I can get my pack back. 7am. The last hour before 7 lasts several days, it seems to me. Finally it arrives and I go to the baggage counter but a woman there tells me I have to go outside the building and around the corner so I can enter through the outside door. I think that’s absurd with the counter right there and the baggage room immediately behind and an inside door behind that, a door that is slightly open making a crack through which I can see people…doing what? Why, moving baggage around. But I sigh, say nothing, and go outside into the cold.

The sun is up, sort of, and it is warmer than it was last night, sort of, but the wind still whips down those streets like a teenager in a hot car. I slide around the corner of the building. It is 7:03am. The door is run by electric eye, like the doors in supermarkets, and it’s supposed to open as I approach it. It doesn’t. I try to trip the eye several times. The door won’t budge. I peer inside. There is another counter but no one is behind it. Are they open or closed? Apparently somebody is late opening up. I go back inside the terminal to wait.

At 7:30 I go out again. The door still won’t open and there is still no one behind the counter. Did I read the sign wrong? No, it says the hours are 7am to 7pm. So where the hell is everybody?

I go back around the corner and into the terminal. I wait another half hour. At 8am I try again. The door still won’t open but this time there is someone behind the counter. He waves me in. I signal that the door won’t open by pointing to it and shrugging. His face scrunches. He doesn’t understand. He comes to the door.

“IT WON’T OPEN!” I yell through the glass.

He looks concerned for a moment then seems to have an awakening. He nods to himself and crosses to the door frame where he pushes a button or pulls a switch or something. Now the door opens. “Somebody forgot to turn the electric eye on,” he says apologetically.

I glare. “I’ve been trying to get in for an hour.”

“Sorry about that. How can I help you?”

I tell him. He disappears into the other room – the one I could see through the door inside the terminal – for a good ten minutes. When he comes back, he is dragging my bag. “That’s it.”

“Nine dollars,” he says, and stamps the ticket “Paid”.

“No, three,” I protest. “They told me I’d get six dollars back.”

“Only if you picked the bag up by eight am. It’s after eight.” Smugly pointing to the clock.

“Because I couldn’t get in here before that, remember? The goddamn door was locked.”

“Yeah,” he shakes his head, “that was a shame.”

He looks at me. I look into his eyes. He is flat, braced, unmoving and unmovable. I’d need a lawyer, a court order, and a dozen cops to get that six bucks away from him. I consider getting them. Or at least his supervisor. Probably I should, but fights over money always make me feel grubby, as if I’d been rolling around in slop. It’s only six bucks. I let it go, which is what he’s counting on of course.

One of many mistakes I will make over the next few months.