Rules of the Road 1: Food

Of all the difficulties of living on the street, it’s the simple things that cause the most headaches simply because they’re so hard to do and take so much time. Showers, for example. Trying to stay clean is hard. There are no facilities for it outside cities and even in the cities the only way to get a shower is to sign yourself into a mission. I’ve had to do that periodically just to get a shower. I didn’t need the food (there were soup kitchens) or the bed (missions are often so disease-ridden, so full of drunks and druggies looking for a fight, that they’re more trouble than they’re worth and I avoid them when I can) but there was no other way to get a bath.

In the old days, the Walt Whitman days, even the Neal Cassidy days, travelers would simply jump in a river. Nowadays, that’s either impossible or a really bad idea healthwise. Our rivers aren’t as poison as they were 40 years ago before the environmental movement (and Democrats) forced states to clean them up but they’re not very clean still. Especially in the South where corporate Republicans still call the shots, they can be little more than open sewers.

Where they aren’t, there are houses – vacation or year round – lining virtually every shore, whether river, lake, or ocean, and it simply isn’t true any more that water is public property. With rare exceptions, it’s considered the property of the people who own the house right next to it, as if the property lines extended out into the water on either side. Homeless people have been arrested for trying to take a bath in a lake in front of somebody’s house. This might be alright if there was as much open, public shoreline as private but there isn’t. It is overwhelmingly considered private land and even the few public beaches have ordinances forbidding bathing. Maybe it makes sense from their POV but it doesn’t leave us many alternatives.

Still, the biggest headaches are the obvious ones. Or maybe not so obvious.

You can’t find soup kitchens outside the cities because they don’t exist outside the cities. The Federal and state governments have gotten themselves out of the business of dealing with the homeless in the last few years and pretty much left it to the churches and their volunteers. In the cities, some churches have responded, and I’ll get to those eventually and in great detail, but rural and suburban churches don’t think feeding, clothing, and housing the homeless are any business of theirs. It’s not on their agenda. What they will tell you if you ask is that “there is no homelessness here”, that if they see any homeless people they are invariably passing through on their way to the city.

Well, yes, because that’s where the food and showers and beds are. Whether they admit it or not, towns and small cities avoid dealing with the problem by making not the slightest attempt to deal with the problem in the first place. No, they have no homeless problem because they don’t have any soup kitchens and anybody who tried to live on the streets in their little towns would starve to death in pretty short order. I guess that’s one way to keep down the homeless population.

It’s true that in most cities today you will not starve. That is, you won’t if you know where to go and when to get there. Every city I’ve been in has had at least two or three places that regularly serve meals to the homeless, if by “regular” you mean one meal a day, Mon-Fri. Only one of the dozen or so cities I’ve visited in 5 states has a soup kitchen that runs three meals a day, seven days a week.

One.

I hated to leave it.

Of the others, the most common element is the timing. The one meal that is served is almost always lunch, and that will start “feeding” as we call it, any time between 11:00 am and noon. They stop between 12:30 and 1:00 pm. The times aren’t deliberately staggered but in most places you can eat at the earliest place and still have time to walk to another. As one guy said to me, “Between the two of them, I can usually manage one total meal.” A lot of people, do this – rush from meal to meal between 11am and 1pm, wolfing down the first to have time to get to the second, wolfing down the second to be finished before the kitchen closes up shop. Other guys eat the first meal and put the second in containers in order to have supper. Since no one serves breakfast (at least during the week), it’s a long wait between lunches.

If there is a place that serves supper, it most likely begins around 4:30 pm and lasts until 5:30 or 6. That means that four hours after you finish lunch – possibly two lunches – you have to be ready to eat again or go hungry the rest of the night. The hours chosen for these meals are clearly not for our benefit but for the volunteers who cook and serve them.

The weekends are a crap shoot, especially Saturdays. In Charleston, only one church feeds one meal – lunch – on Saturday. Otherwise, you’re on your own. In Savannah, there’s a guy who, all on his own, no churches or governments involved, feeds dozens of homeless in Franklin Park – hot dogs. At 9am. On Sundays, though, the churches go all out (natch). If you missed the only available meal on Sat, you can make it up and then some on Sun. You can (once again, you have to know where to go) move from one meal to another, all given by churches, all day long. I’ve known people eat as many as six meals on Sunday, hoping, I guess, that they would take them right through the one-a-day week.

There is a message behind the schedule and homeless people pick it up immediately. All these godly do-gooders must be aware that even people without a place to live have to eat every day but they don’t bother to do anything about it except on the one day a week they think God’s watching. The conclusion we all come to, no matter how thankful we are that they do anything at all, is that their altruism is pretty self-centered. They’re doing it for their greater glory, not because it’s needed and it’s the right thing to do. It’s still the right thing to do on Tuesday but they’re going to the dry cleaners.

The other message we get loud and clear, no matter how pleasant or respectful are the cooks and servers and cleaners doing the work, is that the sponsoring institution is ashamed of us – our poverty, our weaknesses, our need. How do we know? Because the doors to soup kitchens, with very rare exceptions, are always back doors. Even at the Salvation Army, which brags about how much it does for us, the entrances for the feedings are always in the alley in back of the building. We are not to hang around in front where people might see us, or even come in through the front door. Back, back, back, you dogs. Back to the kennels. In some cases these entrances are actually hidden – impossible to find without explicit directions. You get the feeling that if they could figure out a way to feed you underground where nobody would even guess you were there, they’d bury you.

You try not to take this sort of thing personally but it isn’t easy.

FLASHBACK: Yardley – December

My pack safely on my back, I hit the streets. It’s barely after 8:00 am and nothing much is open yet, not even in a major city like Philly. Since I’m going to be taking a train out to Yardley to visit with my friend Stella for a day or two, I head over to the train station. Logical.

Penn Station in Philly is enormous, as big or bigger than it is in NYC. There are restaurants and shops on different levels and half the people in the place aren’t catching trains. They’re there to eat or buy. The interior looks recently re-done to make it look more like a mall. There are wood floors and curved walls. On one side are the waiting areas for the long-distance trains, on the other the waiting area for the locals. They are long, cavernous, and, at that hour, filling up rapidly with commuters on their way to work. In the mall area, nothing much was open and walking through it is like walking through a late 20th century ghost town.

I go outside to have a cigarette, secreting myself in a deeply recessed doorway to get out of the biting wind – a wind that never stops whipping at me the whole time I’m there. A tall man with a short beard and white hair walks by me on the sidewalk, then stops and backs up. He looks at my pack and says kindly, “There’s a mission right down the street if you need a bed for the night.”

I say Thank you but I was going to be taking a train soon to meet a friend I was going to stay with. He smiles as if he doesn’t believe me. “Well, Just in case, it’s right down there -” pointing “- a few blocks. You can’t miss it.”

When he leaves I wondered just how obvious it is that I’m homeless. Why not a traveler? a modern-day troubador? Last night Nate thought I didn’t look homeless enough. Today I look homeless enough to get invited to a shelter. Whose perceptions count here?

After a few minutes I drag myself back inside to be out of the cold. There are two sets of steps down from the ground level to the mall level, and they are long sets. It dawns on me as I struggle down them that I didn’t get any sleep last night. My energy is rapidly running out, my eyes as scratchy as if the lids were made of sand fleas, my muscles shaking with fatigue. I am practically dragging the pack down the steps.

“I’m too old for this shit.”

Not the first time I’ve had that thought and by no means will it be the last.

I knock around until nearly 10:00 am when I notice that the commuters have emptied out and the local trains waiting area is all but deserted. I go over and dump the pack on a bench, first sit next to it and then lie on it, close my eyes. doze.

A hand shakes my shoulder. “Sir? Sir, wake up. You can’t sleep here, sir.” He’s young, black, impossibly good-looking, and polite. But firm. He’s wearing the uniform of a security guard. “Are you waiting for a train?”

“Yes. I’m going to Yardley this afternoon and I was traveling all last night. I didn’t get any sleep.”

“Well, you can’t sleep here.”

“Not very well. Especially when people keep waking you up.”

“You can’t sleep here.”

“You said that. What if I wasn’t asleep? What if I just closed my eyes to rest them?” Lack of sleep is making me cranky.

“That would look like sleeping.” he says, and I think he might be suppressing a smile but then again he might just be getting ready to bare his teeth.

“What if I read a book?”

“Is it good enough to keep you awake?” Now he’s definitely smiling.

I wave airily. “Better. I’ll stay awake.”

He leaves. I have amused him.

I figure I can call Stella at 2:00 pm. Or maybe even while she’s at lunch (does she do lunch? I have no idea), say, noon. Well, only two hours.

It’s going to be a long two hours.

 

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.

 

The Kindness of Strangers

I am walking down the street in South Savannah not far from the library. It is near noon. I don’t have enough cash for a “senior coffee” (80 cents) at the McDonald’s down the road. I have 30 cents, counting the pennies – not even enough for a senior coffee from Burger King up and across town on MLK Drive (55 cents). My food stamps are almost gone, I used the last of the insect repellant last night, and cigarettes are about to become nothing but a memory (I smoked the last one sitting in the park next to MickeyD’s about 15 mins ago). An online friend offered to send money (I accepted, of course; no amount was mentioned) but it probably won’t be here earlier than Tuesday or Wednesday.

Today is Monday. Memorial Day.

As I cross the empty parking lot of a liquor store, a shiny new red Buick pulls in and swings around in front of me. I stop, thinking he’s turning around and will be pulling right out again. But he doesn’t. He stops. The window slides down. He extends his arm toward me but says nothing. In his hand is a bill. I move toward the car. He holds it steadily, bent slightly by his middle finger. There is no expression on his face.

I reach for it, thinking it is a one or maybe, if I’m lucky, a five. When I take it between suddenly nerveless fingers, I see it is a hundred.

A $100 bill. A C-note.

I am, not to put too fine a point on it, stunned. Flabbergasted. Floored. I stammer some kind of thank you. His expression hasn’t changed. He is my age, perhaps younger but more worn. His eyes are dull. He is giving what he must know is a great gift yet it gives him no joy. No emotion is betrayed by those listless eyes, the dead creases of cheekbone, the thin mouth. He is slumped in his seat. He hits the button and the automatic window reels closed. He drives away without saying a single word.

Why? What made him do such a thing when he clearly didn’t care whether he did it or not? When it gave him no joy, eased no pain, made him no calmer, no more content?

I don’t know but he has made my idea of driving a cab a possibility when I thought it little more than a day dream. A hundred dollars is almost enough to pull it off – the licenses, the fees, the physical.

We are all, down here, in some immoderate and desperate way, dependent on the kindness of strangers. It keeps us in beer, cigarettes, food, health and hope. Without it we will starve, shrivel, stutter and fall, perhaps never to rise.  Or perhaps we will rise but with useless legs and abandoned faith.

When the homeless get together and talk (as we do endlessly, endlessly, our lives filled with waiting, waiting, waiting – on food lines, shower lines, lines to collect clothes or shoes or a bed), we have only a few topics of conversation. The most common is work. The work we’ve done in the past, the jobs we’ve had, the accomplishments that came with them, the jobs we want, the jobs we’re currently trying to get. Second most common is shelter-talk. Where to get the best meal, which ones make you sit through services for how long before they give you a meal or a bed, which ones are safe, which unsafe, the rules each runs by (they’re all different), and which ones will actually try to help you get on your feet and which are in it for the money, for themselves, like the Salvation Army no matter where you are. Third is cops. Where they hang out, who will arrest you and who won’t, what the judge said that time when you got arrested at a bus stop when you really were waiting for a bus.

But then there is the kindnesses that you’ve been shown. They shine out of these dry, jaded faces, the faces of men just barely hanging on, as if they had been lit by unlikely shards of a sacred crystal. They cling to them as they never clung to wives or children. They are hope on a string, tied to you forever, keeping you connected to the idea that possibilities haven’t run out yet. No matter how many people treat you as if you’re invisible or the scum on the bottom of a grimy, sewer-drenched shoe, you know you’re still human when somebody gives you something they didn’t have to give you. Money, a ride, a job you know you don’t deserve. We are almost absurdly grateful even for the smallest favors and the big ones leave us breathless. We tell their stories for years afterward, garnish them with detail, polish them like trophies. They prove something. They prove our worth after all.

 

Philly – The Bag Lady

 

I spend the night in the bus station, cramped and uncomfortable in tiny chairs for smaller-bottomed people, wishing for nothing more in this life than someplace to stretch out and close my eyes.

I don’t find it.

It is a long night, a night that cuts. A woman dragging a large shopping bag sits at the table next to mine. I am watching a tv high on the wall. A black minister is telling me how much God loves me but he’s yelling so much I get the feeling he’s more trying to persuade himself than me. The woman is quiet at first, her feet demurely together on the floor as if they’re connected by invisible wires wrapped around her ankles. She occasionally looks up shyly and gazes at me. I ignore her.

She is old, black, wrung out. Her skin wrinkles like wet cardboard, a splotchy brown that reminds me of cigarette butts that get rained on and then dry out. Her eyes are restless, wild. They roam like animals watching for predators. Her hair is short and patchy, as if she’d cut some spots with a dull knife and ignored others altogether. I glance down and see the long neck of a vodka bottle peeking out of her bag but there is no smell of drink on her.

It is about 3am. The security guard comes over, a small black man about 30. His eyes are more on her than me but I am who he addresses first.

“Do you have a ticket, sir? I’m sorry but you can’t sit here unless you’re waiting for a bus.” Oddly, it seems to be the absence of the pack that stirs his suspicion. Normally it is the pack that marks me for a street person, but at the bus station the fact that I don’t have any luggage to cling to looks weird to him.

I open my winter coat where the top of the ticket cover (of the ticket that brought me to Philly, not the one I will leave on to go the next leg since that won’t even be a bus but a train, which I don’t tell him) pokes from my inside pocket. I make no move to show him the ticket but the cover seems to satisfy him. He nods and turns to the woman at the next table. He seems to know her.

“Lucy, you know you can’t stay here tonight.”

“It’s cold outside.” Her voice is surprisingly deep and strong, yet there’s the twitter of a child’s complaining in its tone.

“I know it is,” he says, “but you’ll have to go in a little while. You know that, right? It’s real cold so I’ll let you stay long enough to warm up but then you’ll have to go. Lucy? You hear me?”

“I hear you,” she says.

He wanders off into the other half of the station.

“He’s a prick,” she snarls to me. “One of them.”

“One of who, Lucy?” I ask, drawn in despite myself.

“They want to get me, all of them. They’re the reason I’m here. All of them.”

“He was nice to you just then. He said you could stay ’til you warmed up.”

“They aren’t real,” she says. “They’re robots. I know.”

Does she mean that literally? Or does she just mean “they” follow the rules, blind to kindness?

“They have tapes in their skulls that make a noise.” She hisses to show me how it sounds, her face screwed up into a fist. “I can hear it all the time every time one comes near me. The tapes tell them what to do, who to hurt. They tell them to hurt me.”

“Why you? Why would they want to hurt you, Lucy?”

“Because I know things.” She becomes wary, secretive, shakes her head. “You don’t want to know. If you knew then they’d get after you. All of them.”

She goes on for some time like this. It’s obvious she needs help and just as obvious she isn’t going to get it. I can’t help her, neither can the guard. We can only watch when he eventually ushers her out into the icy night as she lumbers away, muttering to herself and glaring back at us, the enemy.

There are, it seems, limits to the glory of kindness.

 

Happy Birthday, Bum

Yesterday was my 60th birthday. Happy birthday, bum.

I am sitting in Forsythe Park when it hits me that today is my birthday. I am 60. I’m drinking a 50 cent “senior” coffee from Burger King, which seems appropriate, and relaxing on a bench in front of the ugliest fountain I have ever seen. Plaster Pans spit water through their flutes, inelegant plaster geese shoot streams of water from their beaks, and the whole is presided over by a plaster statue of a woman in flowing robes lounging atop a very tall pedestal in the center. She is neither beautiful nor ugly, a classic example of Middle American kitch, formless, anonymous, boring. She wears no expression worth the name.

Nevertheless, tourists are lining up to have their pictures taken in front of this monstrosity as if it were somehow worthy of inclusion in their book of memories. Well, maybe it is. Maybe their book of memories is so bland, so empty of cultural or personal meaning that a picture in front of a monstrosity is better than nothing. But I suspect it is simply that they think the fountain beautiful, that they harbor the same stunted, morose, stultifyingly inane sense of beauty as the sculptor himself.

I read on a plaque that in 1988 hundreds of thousands of dollars were subscribed by the wealthier families of Savannah to “restore” this fountain to its original condition. I shudder. Had I been asked to donate at the time, I would have said, “What? For that? Let it crumble. Better yet, I’ll donate if you promise to rip it out and start fresh. Hire a sculptor with some talent. As it is, that thing would be at home in a trailer park or a Lillian Vernon catalog.”

I imagine I would not have been admired by Savannah folk for my taste.

I move on. It is early morning. The park is full of people (it is Saturday). The are bicycle-riders, dog-walkers, hand-in-hand strolling couples, frisbee-flyers, Japanese picture-takers, and a German husband and wife arguing over…something. She is dressed in a tight stretch blouse that doesn’t hide much (which is OK because she doesn’t have much of anything to hide anyway), lime green Capri pants, and sandals. She rolls her eyes at her husband’s opinions the way every woman ever born did, glares skeptically at him across the top of her sunglasses, and follows him with a sigh. He is as fat as you’d expect, with close-cropped white hair and brown tie shoes polished to a high shine. They could not be more out of place in this park on this morning than if he were wearing a tuxedo with a polka dot cummerbund.

It’s odd, this feeling I get that I am half tourist/wanderer, traveling to see the sights, and half homeless bum, lounging when I should be frantically working, or at least looking for work. The pack on my back screams “homeless man”, though only a few short years ago I would have been taken for a traveler, on the road, discovering (or re-discovering) the America of my dreams and nightmares. Now it is assumed I am busily avoiding work and am living off a govt check, as if there is such a check, as if it would be large enough to live on even if it existed.

There are many out here who do get checks, usually SSI disability checks. Usually they deserve them, sometimes they’ve scammed them. Mostly their checks are so inadequate they have to live on the street anyway because they don’t get enough to afford an apartment, no matter how small. If they manage to find one their tiny check will cover, there’s nothing of it left after the rent is paid and they must depend on food stamps and soup kitchens to get enough to eat. The myth that everyone on welfare is living the high life may be pervasive in some conservative quarters but there’s more substance to the story of the tooth fairy.

Last night I spent in a mission because there were supposed to be heavy t-storms accompanied by serious lightning. I don’t think it happened but I wouldn’t know. I was locked up on the second story of a near windowless concrete blockhouse trying to sleep on a top bunk in heat so intense I would have preferred to be out in the frying noonday sun. There was a fan blowing at the other end of the room but whatever air it was moving stopped moving long before it got to me.

If this is the high life, give me the low.

Philly - Nate

It is a long night. I wander the streets but Philly seems to have closed down even though it is barely 8pm. If there is action, it is somewhere I can’t find it. Even the mall down the street closes at 9.

The wind is bitter cold. I am wearing two shirts, a heavy, hooded sweatshirt, and a thick winter coat and still I’m freezing. I see homeless guys on every street, some of them stretched out in doorways, sleeping. They’re usually wearing sneakers and thin coats though everyone seems to have a wool knit cap pulled down over their ears. The lucky ones have gloves.

The ones who are awake center on me like rats on a dumpster – as a source of food (or cigarettes) – moving on me with a cheerful smile and an outstretched hand. Sometimes, depending on an immediate reading, I give them some change or a smoke. Sometimes I give them nothing. They are unfailingly polite whatever my response. One of the ones I turn down goes out of his way to tell me not to blame myself, it’s not my fault if I’m broke. Many assure me that better days are coming. “They have to.” Almost all the men are black.

As I return to the bus station a tall, wide black man approaches me with a plastic bag. It is full of DVD’s he wants to sell me. He opens his pitch with, “Sir, I’m homeless and I’m hoping you can help me out by buying one of these DVD’s. They’re all brand-new, not second-hand. See? The plastic wrapping’s still on them -”

I interrupt to tell him he’s wasting his time. “I’m homeless, too.”

He looks me up and down, disbelief written all over him. “You look awful good for a homeless guy,” he says.

“I just got homeless a couple weeks ago. These are what’s left of my good clothes.”

“Oh.” His demeanor changes. He smiles and his eyes wrinkle in sympathy. “Sorry. Lose your job?”

“Yup, and where I come from I couldn’t get another, at least not one that would pay the rent.”

“I’m Nate,” he says, then hesitates. “You got any money?”

I think, Here it comes. The pitch, the hit. “Some,” I say carefully. “Not much.”

“Enough for a room?”

“No, not near that much.”

He shakes his head. “That’s too bad. You a newbie, you don’t belong on streets like this. You sure you got no place to stay?”

“No.”

“Better stay inside the bus station, it be damn cold tonight. You freeze out here. Just keep movin’ so the bulls don’t roust you. You still got your ticket?”

“Yeah.”

“Show it to ‘em if they hassle you and they’ll back right down.” He sees my expression at the thought of spending the night in the bus station dodging security. “It’s your best shot. You don’t wanna be out here. Not tonight.” I must look truly depressed. He smiles again. “You beat it, you ain’t gonna be out here forever. Better days are coming.”

He’s a nice man but I’ll believe it when I see it.

 

Megan

I have been in Savannah all of an hour-and-a-half. So far I have discovered that the mission doesn’t want me, and that a gas station on Bay Street sells coffee for 89 cents. I wander up Martin Luther King Blvd until I run into a long clutch of benches at what must be a main bus stop outside the gates of SCAD – the Savannah College of Arts and Design. It’s hot, though there’s a cool wind that keeps the heat from being oppressive, and I slip gratefully out of the pack and plop down in the shade.

A few minutes later, a short, gamin-ish woman with dark hair, crooked teeth, and a wicked scar on her right knee drops a small pack next to me and says, “Watch my home for me, baby. I see you got one too,” pointing to my pack. “I gotta pee.” After which she promptly disappears. She has “street people” written all over her.

I watch her home.

When she returns some 10 mins later, she sits next to me and asks if I mind if she smokes. “How long you been here?”

“Just got here, like, fifteen minutes ago.”

“Then you’re a baby, baby. You don’t know anything.”

“Less than that.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll tell you everything you need to know. Just a second… Have you been to the Visitors’ Center?”

“Not yet. Where is it?”

She laughs. “Right behind you, baby.”

Sure enough, we’re sitting in front of it. I never looked to see what that building was. “Imagine that,” I say sheepishly.

“Stay right here, honey. I’ll be right back.” And she’s gone again.

But she returns much faster this time and clutching two maps, one of the Free Trolley’s route and one of the city. She explains where the soup kitchens are and marks them on one of the maps. She shows me where the missions are and marks them on the other. She goes through the whole routine, a special sort of travelogue for the new homeless – what services you can get where, how to stay away from the cops (“They’re bad here.”), who to stay away from (the Salvation Army, as usual), and a little about the city. She even hands me a contact, Guitar Bob who makes his living playing in the parks. “He’s trying to learn violin now,” she says, rolling her eyes. “The sounds are… Well, when he’s practicing his fiddle, my visits with him are very short.”

Then she leans in to me. There is drama coming. “It’s a black city,” she says in a stage-whisper as if she is sharing some dark and dangerous secret. “We got a lot of poor, there’s a lot of low-income here.”

“Then rents must be low.”

She makes a face. “Not really. You can get by, though. If you’re willing to live in the hood with the crack dealers, you can get an apartment for $300 a month.”

She jiggles, jumps, and jives with nervous energy. She talks a blue streak, as my mother used to say, or as my Uncle Harry would put it, “as if she’d been vaccinated with a phonograph needle.” She is charming, knowledgable, and a lot smarter than I’d bet most people gave her credit for. “What happened to your leg?” I ask when I think it’s OK.

She had an accident. She doesn’t go into details but it wrecked her right knee and thigh. The scar she points to is long and deep. “They never thought I’d walk again. I didn’t either, but then I decided I would. So I came back here. My man’s in jail,” she adds ruefully, as if to say, “Ain’t they all?”

I don’t ask what for.

She’s on her way to see him and keeps asking me what time it is. She’s waiting for a bus. I take my watch from my pocket and lay it on the bench so she can keep track. The bus is due at 1pm. It is now 12.45. ”I don’t want to miss it. There won’t be another one for an hour and I won’t get back ’til 4 as it is.” She ducks her head self-consciously. “Can you spare a cigarette?” I’m gonna get some later when I get back but I haven’t got time now.”

I give her two. “For all the information. And the maps.”

Philadelphia – December

I get into Philadelphia at night. It is full dark on a cold December and a bitter wind blows up the streets outside the Greyhound station. From the moment I step outside for a smoke I am beseiged by homeless men. They want cigarettes, they want any change I might have in my pocket, they want to sell me CD’s or DVD’s or their coats for the price of a burger, a cup of coffee, a drink. I give them the cigarettes thinking, “After all, it’s a small thing.” The two packs I have on me are gone in less than half an hour and still they come.

I don’t know where I’m going or how I’m going to get there but I can’t give away cigarettes forever. I don’t have any more.

I go back inside the station. I figure I’ll at least get rid of the damn backpack. I’ll put it in a locker like I used to do when I was traveling. For a quarter, your stuff was safe for a whole day and you didn’t have to drag it behind you. I look around for them but there aren’t any. Confused, I collar a large black man in a security uniform. “Where are the lockers? I want to tuck my bag away.”

He shakes his head and smiles. “We don’t have lockers any more. Homeland Security found a stash of C-4 in a locker and ordered them taken out. No lockers any more, not at bus stations, train stations, or airports.” (Later, I  check this story of the C-4 explosive in a bus locker on the internet but can find no mention of it in any data base.)

“You mean I have to drag this goddamn thing all over Philly?” I ask, incensed at this latest whacko edict from Bushie Tom Ridge. “Because Homeland Security is scared of bus lockers?”

He cocks his head at me. “You a Greyhound passenger?”

“Just got off here for the night. Tomorrow I’m going to Yardley.” I don’t mention that I’m going by train.

“Got no place to stay tonight?”

“Didn’t seem to be any point. It’s expensive and I’m leaving really early anyway.”

Well,” he says, “if you’re a passenger you can leave your bag in the Freight Office until morning for $9.”

“Nine dollars?! To leave a lousy bag overnight?”

“You have to give them nine but if you pick up the bag by 8 am, they’ll give you $6 back.”

The absurdity of post-9/11 paranoid America and the corporate exploitation of same. Where I used to be able to safely keep my luggage in a locker for 25 cents a day, now I have to pay a corporation $3 (and a $6 security deposit on my own bag!) to let it lay on their floor for 7 hrs.

If that isn’t a sign of the times, I don’t know what is.

 

Savannah

I leave Jax early Thursday afternoon. The sun is shining, the birds are singing. I walk 12 miles before I run out of sidewalk and strip malls. I cross a bridge over what I assume is the lower James River and am suddenly on a 4-lane highway. Jax is behind me, nothing much is in front of me.

It takes 4 days to go a distance that would be barely 2 hrs by car. I arrive in Savannah having walked almost halfway. The marvelous shelter CJ spoke of in such glowing terms no longer exists as a mission. It is now exclusively a drug and alcohol rehab center. The only other mission in town is pretty much the same as all the other missions and shelters – you line up every night and fight for a space. At least, I am told, you don’t have to sit through a religious service to eat – a condition the woman who tells me this calls, in the phrase I’ve been hearing for weeks now, “a blessing”.

Amen.

Savannah at first blush is a mass of uneasy contradictions, a hodge-podge of clashing styles. It shows up in everything from the architecture to the sidewalks. It seems to have been slapped together in pieces and the pieces allowed to remain even when they don’t fit the ones around them. An ornate Georgian townhouse sits between a concrete monstrosity of a blockhouse and a collonaded Grecian-front funeral home that must once have been the last word in Southern grace and elegance.

The sidewalks, even downtown, show the same ingrained split personality. They begin, perhaps, as ancient cobblestone, suddenly turn into a modern-eyed version of Victorian brick, neatly spaced and evenly laid. Then, just as abruptly, there is no sidewalk at all. Just unadorned dirt connecting to grass patches connecting to…more concrete.

Nothing about Savannah’s physicality makes any sense. Yet there is an eerie peace about it, as if its past and present live in some sort of harmony without either taking over. The other cities I’ve been in down here have the feeling that a war was fought between the overwhelming nostalgia for a Past of Glory that was never as glorious as it’s remembered and a blank, featureless Present of bland housing developments and long empty nights in front of the tv. It is a war the Present has won, a war it could not lose, and it is a victory resented by those who dream of hyacinths by the door and darkies working the fields, a life they define as “gracious” but never admit was in its soul brutal, heartless and monumentally selfish.

In Savannah it is as if the war ended in a stalemate where neither the Past nor the Present was able to vanquish the other. The tension here is the long-settled tension between neighbors with old grudges but whose wives want peace in the ‘hood. The terms have been accepted, the boundaries have been drawn, and the new good feelings after the last fun barbecue mix with the old bad feelings left after fights over who borrowed the lawn mower have receded into dreams.

It is an uneasy truce but a truce nevertheless. The fact of it is in the unholy conjunction of buildings that shouldn’t be in the same country let alone the same city. It is in the smell of the quiet in Forsythe Park, an odd mingling of jasmine and gasoline exhaust. It is mostly, though, in the true Southern pace at which Savannah moves.

It meanders. It saunters. Sometimes it stops altogether and rests in the shade of a cedar tree. Where every other Southern city I’ve been in has been injected with speed thanks to the invention of air-conditioning and the influx of Northern businessmen looking for cut-rate Southern costs – along with the flood of upNorth workers who followed them – Savannah has fought to maintain its leisurely pace. When a tall, stunning black woman crosses the street on the hop despite the fact that the traffic in Savannah moves as fast as snails making for a picnic tryst at some undefined date, even the newcomer thinks, “She’s not from here. She must be a Northerner.”

It is a speed-switch like running a 78rpm record at 33 1/3, and the newcomer has made that switch in the space of a single afternoon. In the heat of the day he slows his steps, shortens his stride, lowers the amount of energy and effort in walking. He discovers he sweats less. He slows his breathing, steadies it, deepens it and discovers he doesn’t care whether he gets to the library in 15 mins or 30 or at all.

He has been successfully Savannah-ized.

Pittsburgh Speed

There is a bit of the same feeling I remember from Pittsburgh, but there it isn’t really about speed – they move as fast as New Yorkers. It’s more about the quality of the movement. It isn’t as purposeful or as intense. There’s a sense in the streets that life is what happens away from work rather than at work. Work in Pittsburgh is just the thing you have to do so you get to do the things you really want to do. Leisure seems to be the point.

It’s a livable city and that attitude is part of what makes it livable. The restaurants and bars may be designer-mod but the people in them are Steel City ragheads and Once-Upon-A-Time Hippies. Gary drives me around one morning and shows me the neighborhoods, explains how they connect – or don’t – and how the Mom-and-Pop character of the Industrial Age survived post-industrial destruction in Pitt. Many of the houses in the neighborhoods he shows me have been rehabbed but it isn’t a guts-to-glory, foundation-to-attic re-do. It’s a fixing up and returning to the way they were with a few added modernizations. Nobody wanted the character of the house to actually change, only for it to be more like it used to be but with a wide-screen plasma tv in the living room.

I like it. There is only one misgiving that bangs against the back of my mind and it shows up the day I leave.

Gary buys me lunch at a sports bar and over a hamburger buys my bus ticket to Philly and gives me $60 in cash. “Be careful how you spend it,” he smiles. “Cheap food.” He has no idea how cheap.

When we come out of the bar to go to the bus station, it is snowing. Big white flakes falling as lightly as feathers wafting from a molting seagull, only much much colder.

Pittsburgh, I am reminded, is close to Canada and the Great Lakes. Winter there is as bad as winter in Buffalo, of which there is nothing worse.

I keep Pittsburgh on my list of possible retirement homes, but only if I don’t have to work. I don’t want to be forced to go out in this stuff if I have food in the cupboard and coffee in the pot.

South Carolina gets moved up higher on the list.

 

 

Lost and Found

Jax isn’t what you’d call an interesting place. Not much happens here, good or bad. Most people seem not to either like or dislike it. It’s just here, like tuna fish in a casserole, bland and moderately substantial, though not enough so as to disrupt your attention if it’s on something else. Tying your shoes, for instance.

It’s the kind of place that lulls you into a false sense of security, only most of the time it isn’t false. It’s just that one time when you’ve relaxed, when you’re sure you can take a small risk. You take it…and then pay.

I go to the library and, as I have before, leave my pack outside. I tie it to the bike rack like a cowboy looping the reins on his horse over the end of a hitching post. It isn’t going to stop anybody from stealing it but it looks secure. Inside I spend an hour surfing the news, and a half hour writing about one item, though my eye is on several others with more substance (there’s that word again). But the hard wooden seats of the library’s computer chairs – no cushioned desk chairs, shaped to your body and free to roll like in Charleston but severe, give-no-quarter oak torture devices, hard on the back and harder on the butt – have me aching for a break. An hour is about all I can take before I have to get up, move around, massage the lines of pain shooting through my thighs.

I go downstairs and outside, partly to smoke while I exercise my legs, partly to check on the pack. The cigarette in my lips and the lighter halfway up to my mouth, I glance at the bike rack.

The pack is gone.

It’s been stolen? I think with a species of wonder. Somebody actually grabbed a 60-lb pack and walked off with it?

Something doesn’t feel right. I search the park across the street, then the city bus station two blocks away. Thieves are notoriously dumb. For all I know, he’s sitting on a bench, going through his prize while he waits for a bus. Any money in here? But the pack is nowhere to be seen.

I am frustrated and depressed but not as much as I should be. Something’s not right. The pack hasn’t been stolen. Somehow, though I can’t tell you how, I know this with the certainty of an astronomer who knows the sun will rise in the east and Ursa Major isn’t really a bear. So where is it?

One of the only two places it could be. It’s either at the police station, where they’re about to blow it up because they think it might be a bomb (police depts all over the country have become excessively melodramatic since Tom Ridge told them anybody could be a target, a statement so monumentally absurd only an American could make it or believe it), or else it’s in the library, probably the security room, because somebody didn’t want it hanging around outside.

So I return to the library and ask at the security desk where they search all the small backpacks, the ones they let people bring in. Sure enough, my pack is in a room behind the desk. I see a raft of television monitors showing parts of the library when the door opens. A nice man hauls my pack out, explaining that they usually throw the packs they find outside away or let the police blow them up. He suggests I get a “buddy” to watch mine the next time.

I agree, apologize, thank him profusely for not exploding my clothes and medication, and throw the thing onto my back. I have no sooner actually touched it than another “knowing” slaps at the base of my spine like an ice cube.

I have to leave Jacksonville. Tomorrow. Next day at the latest.

Well, I was planning to anyway, but why this frightening premonitionary-type deal? Why all the drama? I don’t know but I believe it the same way I believed the pack hadn’t been stolen. I will leave, with or without money, in no more than two days.

Gary and Pitt

Gary (that’s what I’ll call him) is a kid by my reckoning, half my age. Or less. He’s good-looking, with an easy smile and a wicked glint in his eye. I like him immediately despite his appalling youth. He takes me to a bar in a section of clubs, bars, and restaurants that looks like it was once a back avenue of warehouses and grimy industrial eyesores clustered around the railroad tracks. Gary says that’s pretty much what it used to be but that it’s been yuppified, sort of.

The bar is an odd combination of modern chrome-and-glass antisepsis with down-home, shot-and-a-beer unpretentiousness. I like his bar, too. I write:

Pittsburgh has an identity crisis. Believed for years to be a dying if not dead industrial town devastated by steel mill closings and globalized outsourcing that’s a wasteland of boarded-up storefronts and empty apartment buildings, in fact it’s a lively little city that is anything but. It’s an eminently livable, affordable place that has maintained a blue-collar sensibility and a working class that’s still middle-class, one of the last such centers in the country. It’s staunchly Democratic (one of the reasons Pittsburgh’s economy hasn’t been hijacked by corporate raiders), strongly union-oriented (the unions are a prime component of the local political machine), and unafraid of embracing its blue-collar roots and even celebrating them.

“Pittsburgh is a small town,” Gary explains. “Actually a collection of small towns – 136 of them in Allegheny County. Even though Pennsylvania state politics is driven by what happens in Philly and Pittsburgh, the neighborhood orientation of Pittsburgh means everybody in politics here knows everybody else.”

Gary and Sarah’s house (not her real name, either) is bare practically to the walls. Most everytthing has been packed for the move, even the pictures that used to decorate the walls. They’ve left two couches in the living room, along with the tv, which is currently sitting on a packing crate.

Sarah is friendly but tense. I can sense that, for what I guess must be obvious reasons, she’s wishing I hadn’t come, at least not then. Can’t say as I blame her. I wouldn’t have if I’d had a choice but I am running on borrowed time as it is.

I try to make myself all but invisible.

As it turns out, that’s a skill I won’t need much longer. The homeless are automatically invisible, as I am about to find out.

 

Soon Outa Here

I am leaving Jax.

Taking CJ’s advice, I’m going north a ways, to Savannah, Georgia, where he says there is a shelter that is perfect for me – no alkies or druggies allowed (they check), you don’t have to fight for a bed every night, and they actually find you a job, not just point you in the direction of places jobs might be if anyone was hiring, which it always turns out they aren’t.

If there is room there, I will stay in Savannah for the next 6 months. If not…I don’t know.

Pittsburgh, PA

I leave New Hampshire at 3am, arrive at South Station at 5am, having been treated to nearly 2 hrs of The Beverly Hillbillies on tape during the bus ride. It’s still dark and I quickly discover I’m at the wrong South Station. There are two, you see. It takes me a full half hour to find the right one, kitty-corner across the street a block away. I have a coffee and a muffin that falls apart as soon as I touch it from the only place open at that hour. More of it ends up on the table than in my stomach.

I’m still hungry.

The train comes, I board, it leaves. I can’t sleep even though I’m already exhausted. I doze, half believing I’m still in NH and dreaming the clicketty-clack of the train wheels. The sun comes up over the Rhode Island marshes outside my window. The channels that run through them have sides so straight and even that they look man-made, as if some giant Japanese gardener had carefully crafted them with a hoe for effect. Tired as I am, I manage to summon up enough energy to appreciate their beauty before collapsing against the window, bleary and fudged.

There’s a stopover in NYC for an hour. I stumble through Penn Station looking for an exit. I want a smoke, not having had a cigarette in more than 3 hrs. I finally find the escalator that leads to the street doors. It’s warm for December, but I expected that despite the snow I left behind. My jacket is warm, my two PG Wodehouse novels secure in a large pocket. I take deep drags, forcing the smoke way down into my lungs. It wakes me up.

It also feels good.

When I get back to board the train I discover that both books are gone. Either someone stole them from my pocket without my noticing or else they fell out, probably when I staggered up the escalator. I prefer not to believe I’m so tired I didn’t notice someone with his hand in my pocket (and besides, what kind of 21st century pickpocket would steal books?), so instead I opt for the escalator explanation. It doesn’t matter which it is, anyway. The train is pulling out. The books are gone forever. I didn’t bring any more.

I can barely keep my eyes open but still I can’t sleep. Maybe it’s the lack of legroom, maybe it’s the harsh sunlight. Or maybe it’s because the train is moving. Back in the day, I could sleep anywhere, any time, on practically anything. Now I can feel the movement of the train beneath me, feel the shake, the roll from side-to-side. I can’t block out the creaking or the rattling or the rhythmic thump-thump as we go over the ties.

I think maybe food will help me either sleep or wake up enough to enjoy the trip. I go back to the dining car, which just opened. I have a hot dog, a small bag of chips, and a can of soda. That light, tiny meal costs $15.

It is the last time I eat on the train.

At least the food wakes me up. Either that or I’m asleep and having a very vivid dream about being awake.

Outside the window, an endless farm country. Barns, cows, miles and miles of empty fields (it’s too early for planting). It is what they call – for a reason, it turns out – “rolling” country. It rolls like a series of ocean waves frozen in time or by a still camera. After a couple of hours I think the train must be going in circles because we’ve passed the same barn about twenty times. But it’s not the same barn, of course. It’s twenty different barns that all look alike and all seem to have been put on the same chunk of land relative to the railroad tracks so I’m always seeing them from the same angle in a never-ending loop.

Behind me, in the dining car, the conductor and the guy who runs the snack bar play cards. The conductor is a big guy. His tight clothes make him look like he has just lately, maybe in the last hour since we left, got swollen from the bite of some enormous mega-mosquito. He puffs out, squishy and insubstantial given his size. He’s pretty young, too. Thirty, maybe. The snack bar guy is a lot older, lean and hard, a city bumpkin through and through, the kind who knows where all the games are hiding in which hotels and who’s got the best stable of girls if you’re looking for that kind of thing and where you can get a pint at 4am. He is polite in that brittle, “Don’t think this means anything, kid” way of born-and-bred New Yorkers.

Eventually the farms give way to the western suburbs. Pittsburgh is getting closer – or we are getting closer to Pittsburgh. I’ve lost the sensation of movement altogether. I still haven’t slept and the fudge has turned thick. It is as if I’m walking, breathing cake batter. Ginger snap, from the tang of it. Nothing is real, or if it is, I can’t prove it. Images of houses slide by, but are they real houses or dream houses or just pictures of houses? Am I living in a Power Point slide show?

The train stops a half-hour out of Pittsburgh. I’ve had nothing to eat in 6 hrs and haven’t smoked in 5. I groan. I’m not the only one.

We wait.

For nearly 45 minutes we wait. Finally the conductor (a new one - a woman with a large waist and exploding hair) explains that we have to wait for freight trains to go into Pittsburgh ahead of us.

Freight trains? A passenger train is waiting for freight trains?

I’m stunned. Back in my ancient train-traveling days that was unheard of. Passenger trains always went ahead of the freights. Always.

But in the money-grubbing present day, freight is worth more than people so freight goes first. It is a perversion of the real order of importance, a deliberate twisting. “You are worth less than a crate of Pop-Tarts,” the trains say. “You will wait. The Pop-Tarts must go through!”

For some reason I am angry. Seething. Gary, to my surprise, is waiting to pick me up. I’ve never been so glad to see a stranger in my life.

 

CJ

It is after dark. A tall black shadow speaks to me on the sidewalk near a small, neat park.

“Haven’t seen you ’round here the last couple days.”

“Haven’t been around. I know you?”

“No but you seen me.”

I look more closely at his face but at night with his black skin melding into the surrounding darkness, all I can see are the bright whites of his eyes and grinning teeth. It’s a little like staring at the Cheshire cat after he’s vanished. I can’t see so I guess. “You the one been sleeping over under that bench?” Pointing. This isn’t where I sleep but it’s on the way and I often come here to rest and smoke before moving on. I vaguely remember his voice though I don’t remember ever speaking to him.

He is staring at the gas station across the street. I ask, “You looking for somebody?”

“Hopin’ to see someone I know, can get a cigarette off of. But I don’t see nobody.”

I give him a cigarette. “Don’t tell anybody I did this or I’ll have to give everybody one.”

The tall man’s name is CJ and when we sit to smoke he begins talking and doesn’t stop for the next hour, pretty much. He has been on the road for 13 years, traveling around. “There ain’t a city in this country I ain’t been in,” he brags early on. He’s exaggerating but not, I think, by much. “I cain’t sit too long. Git restless, want to be movin’. I like movin’, tho’ sometimes I sit for long as a year. Been in San Diego this past year.”

His speaks clearly and well – no mushmouth – in a charming Southern drawl as he tells me where he’s been, about the time the two alligators damn near ate his leg off near Orlando, about the 2 weeks he spent riding around in a furniture truck helping a guy deliver who was working alone and willing to pay him for his aid and his company. First stop was Nashville, then Augusta, Charleston, Memphis, Dallas…. The city names roll on just like his truck.

He knows every shelter in every major city, every place to get a meal (“Truck stops. They take care o’ ya. Lordie, they kept feedin’ me til I couldn’t eat another bite. ‘Here, man. You eat. Take some mo’ o’ this chicken.’ Eat real good at truck stops.”), every place the police snatch you up or leave you alone. “Thirteen years, you learn somethin’ ’bout the road.”

His voice is pleasant to listen to, smooth, quiet, friendly. I suppose I’m half mesmerized. It’s not a bad life, traveling, to hear him tell it. He has the right attitude for it. He takes what comes, grateful for the adventure. “Miss having a family?” I ask. “Roots, kids, all that?”

His mood and his voice darken for a moment, then he releases the darkness with a sigh and flash of teeth. “I got a daughter in Miami. I be goin’ down there to see her and my grandkids next week. She says, ‘Dad, I’ll send you the money for the bus’ but I tell her, ‘You keep your money. Take care of those kids. I’ll find my way the way I want.’ And I’ll get there, too. I always do. Spend a few days playin’ with my grandchildren, sleepin’ in a big bed, eatin’ good. Then I be on the road again. That’s the way I live.”

I haven’t been having much luck finding a steady job or settling down. Maybe I should just chuck it and take up the traveling. I can find some day-work, more if I really concentrated and got lucky. I think. I don’t really know since I’ve been focused on getting a steady job and settling someplace.

Maybe CJ’s right. Maybe I’ve been going at this thing bass-ackwards.

The Departure

It’s early in the morning on the day I leave. My brother brings me and my pack to the bus station in his pickup. It’s snowing lightly and the road shows the tracks of cars through a patchy fog of thin white flakes. I slept last night but not well and not for long. I’m keyed up.

The bus is to take me to Boston’s South Station where I will catch a train for New York City, then change to another train for Pittsburgh. My first online contact lives in Pittsburgh, though in barely 2 weeks he will move to Vancouver. It’s a little out of the way considering The Plan calls for going South before winter sets in, but Gary (as I will call him) has been a friend to me and I really want to meet him before he gets out of reach.

My brother hugs me and presses some money into my hand before I board the bus. “Love yah, bro. I know you’re going to be alright. Stay in touch.”

“That’s what the celphone’s for.” I hug him back. He’s several inches taller than me, and it’s an odd feeling.

As the bus pulls away I wave to him through the window. He’s still standing there, snow falling on him and his hand raised in benediction, when the bus pulls into the road and I can’t see him any more.

 

Fishing with Baptists

If you go fishing with Baptists, be sure to go with at least two. If you go with two, neither of them will drink any of your beer. If you go with one, he’ll drink all of it.

A friend of mine told me that a few years ago, partly as a joke but partly as a legitimate warning. I didn’t know what he was talking about, really. When you live in New England you don’t have much truck with Baptists, there just aren’t that many of them. And if you do happen to run into any, they seem pretty much like everyone else.

After the past week in Jacksonville, I now understand what he was trying to tell me: hypocrisy is a way of life for Southern Baptists.

Jacksonville is owned by Baptists – literally. The First Baptist Church owns a sizable chunk of the property downtown Jacksonville sits on, including the building housing the police station. The church itself takes up 6 square blocks of prime real estate. It takes 2 sq blocks just to house their two 3-story parking garages. The “church” is enormous – 2 sq blks just for that. Another sq block for their 4-story religious school, and the last for their offices – a towering highrise. Duets of good-looking female devotees prowl the bus station all day asking if you’ve accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior. The missions subject the homeless to hr-long sermons before they’re allowed to eat. The sermons are mandatory and if you tell them you’re a different faith, as far as they’re concerned that’s all the more reason for you to attend, you heathen.

In Jax, and I suspect the rest of the South, the Christian religion is big business. There is one small church (it barely looks big enough to seat more than 100 people) whose Rev Pastor owns a Hummer. On one block I walked down, there were three churches. There were two more on the next block. Five churches in less than a quarter-mile. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are being tossed into collection plates all over the city every day – not every Sunday, every day. Lord knows what the take on Sundays is but the police have to shut down the part of town that surrounds the FBC to make sure traffic doesn’t grind to a halt as thousands of people leave the parking garages after the service.

Meanwhile, in the park across from the main Jax library, river rats skitter between the benches and fountains. Meanwhile, hundreds of homeless people sleep in the 3 crowded shelters and hundreds more all over the city in parks, empty lots, on the sidewalk. Meanwhile, according to the alternative paper, Jax’s state reps just voted for a $4M appropriation for PR, an attempt to sell the beauties of Jax to tourists. To help pay for it, they cut $2M from the children’s health program.

I sold everything I own to wind up here.

The Last Days

I’m in a fever. I pack, I sell whatever I can, I wonder constantly what’s going to become of me. One of my brothers hands me a couple of hundred dollars worth of winning lottery tickets, which I promptly lose while trucking things around to their new homes of their new owners. I tear the car apart looking for them. They are nowhere to be seen. The other brother offers to put me up for a couple of weeks while I “get my bearings”.

I take him up on it, and when everything is gone except the smidgen he can fit in his overcrowded barn, I take myself onto an air mattress he has laid down in his den after removing the oversized recliner and his desk. He leaves the tv, and it’s cable! Unfortunately, it only gets 12 channels as he only pays for the basic service and that’s all $35/month buys. 12 channels, including the shopping channel, the Spanish channel, two channels specializing in 24-hr infomercials, and Fox.

$35/month seems steep.

It’s a nice couple of weeks, though. My brother is 10 years younger than I am and we’ve never had much chance to talk. I left the house just about the time he became sentient, and I know him mostly through family hearsay.

He’s tall, quiet, centered. Nothing much fazes him. He has a wife and two great teenage daughters. They make me a chocolate cake to honor my visit, though I have some trouble imagining what that “honor” might be. The honor of my presence after years of absence, perhaps. Not something one would think earned celebration but I accept their misplaced joy and for a little while revel in what I obviously don’t deserve.

My other brother thinks I’m being crazy, and he’s probably right, but this one says he can understand my yearning for adventure and risk.

“You had cancer. You might have died. It makes sense that you’d want to really live the time you’ve got left.”

His take strikes me as a tad mordant at first, but later I can see both the sense and the truth in it. He’s right. My first reaction to the news that I had cancer wasn’t just terror of dying but regret for everything left undone and the lack of accomplishment that marked – or rather, didn’t particularly mark – my life. I suddenly wanted nothing in the world but more time. More time to do what I hadn’t done, more time to try once more to do what I’d never managed to do before. Another chance, is what it boiled down to. I wanted a second chance to muff it.

When I realized finally that I wasn’t going to die, that I had a decent chance of recovery and a very decent chance of living out my full allotted time, I sort of forgot about all that “second chance” junk. Or thought I had. But my brother was right. Somewhere inside me that “second chance” junk had survived, had even taken root, grown, sprouted wings. I did want my “second chance”.

Maybe, I thought as I walked down the frozen road past my brother’s house one afternoon, maybe this homeless thing is some kind of way of getting the second chance I wanted.

In Jax, they tell the homeless they’re “blessed”.

Well, maybe.

The day I leave, the lost lottery tickets turn up, sitting right in the open on the car’s passenger seat. My brother swears he didn’t put them there.

There are blessings, and then, I guess, there are blessings.