The Pup

It is night. I am on my way back – I was going to say “home” but then, I don’t have one – to where I sleep. There’s a yellow lab pup in the street surrounded by cars. He jigs and jags, side to side, panicked. He doesn’t know which way to go and the cars don’t know which way to go to miss him. They try to inch past him and, frightened by the movement, he runs – either straight in front of them or in front of another car. I try calling him to the sidewalk.

“Get out of the street, you stupid mutt. Do you want to get killed. Come here. Come here!” Clapping my hands and whistling. But he’s afraid of me, too.

Eventually, in fits and starts, bumpers missing him by inches as nervous drivers edge around him, he makes it to the sidewalk.

“Don’t go in the road, dummy. You don’t know how to handle cars,” I say as I leave.

I sit in the little park next to the street and have a smoke. When I look up at the curb a few minutes later, the pup is gone.

I finish my cigarette and head across the street to the same gas station/convenience store where I met Eddie. The pup has somehow made it across the 6-lane boulevard and is now prowling the parking lot, dodging cars as they come in to get gas and sniffing for food. Under the station lights I can see how thin he is, skin barely covering his ribs and tight around his neck and muzzle. He’s starving.

I had planned to buy something to drink and some ice cream from my dwindling supply of money. Instead, I go in the store and buy two cold cheeseburgers from a display case at $2 each. Outside, I break open the plastic wrapping and feed him the first from a distance since he won’t come near me. The second I take apart, throwing each half of the bun on the ground in front of me, closer and closer. I sit down on the ground with the cheese slice dangling from my fingers. Slowly, ready to run if I so much as flick an eyelid, his muzzle inches closer and closer to the cheese.

When he takes it, he takes it delicately with just the edge of his mouth. I let go. He snaps and swallows it in one gulp. I take the last burger patty and break it into pieces. He takes them from my hand just as delicately and carefully as he took the cheese. When he’s eaten all of it, I reach to pat his head. He skitters away out of reach, ducking his head and looking at me as if he expects to be hit. It doesn’t matter to him that I fed him. I’m still the enemy. Maybe that’s his history.

I walk away, heading to my sleeping place. A couple of blocks from the station, I look back. He’s following me. He’s about a block behind me, a safe distance. When I stop, he stops. When I start walking again, he slinks along in my path. Uh-oh, I think. But I have no more food to give him.

Six or seven blocks later, I turn into the street where the little copse of trees effectively hides my sleeping place. He’s right behind me, only a few yards away. He seems happy, loping along in my wake, all signs of fear seemingly erased. He could be my dog. We could be happily out for an evening walk. In another world maybe we would be.

He has no collar. Maybe he slipped it. But why is he starving? If he has an owner, who would do that to him, not feed him? I cross the street and head for the woods. He is next to me, 10 ft or so to the side until the moment I move up the path. Under the boughs I turn but he is sitting on the grass that fronts my patch of woods, not following.

I walk quickly up the path to the place where I sleep, lay out my sleeping bag, take off my sneakers. There’s no sign of him. He hasn’t come in behind me. Maybe he’s afraid of trees.

The Project

There should be some order, I think. This nonsensical, outlandish decision should at least have some semblance, some illusion of coherent purpose. I will also need places to stay. Who do I know? I know people online, that’s pretty much it. Well, why not?

I don’t even know what they look like. We have never met IRL. Nevertheless, I contact a dozen or so people with whom I’ve had somewhat personal, long-term relationships, and tell them what’s happened and what I plan to do – hike across the country for a job in California (which doesn’t exist, but I’ll get to that). I write emails explaining that I’m hoping to find places to crash on the way and asking would they consider putting me up for a day or two? Surprisingly, nearly half say they would. That’s a much bigger percentage than I expected.

One of them, I’ll call him Dave, suggests that since almost all of my contacts are – or were – bloggers, maybe I ought to consider writing a blog about blogging, using my contacts as interview subjects. Insanely, I think that’s a pretty good idea. Just like that, my trip now has a purpose beyond the mundane one of finding a job and a place to live. There’s a reason for it that puts my mere physical needs into a loftier perspective.

I have a Project.

I begin to line up the dots on a map. My idea is to concentrate on getting to the South as quickly as possible. It is winter in NE, colder than usual and featuring an exceptional number of snow and ice storms – 1 or 2 a week. I want desperately to get below the freezing line before I have to start sleeping outside. Can I pull that off? Maybe.

Look at the map: Pittsburgh, Philly, NYC, Maryland (near DC), Virginia, Texas, Arizona. If I move fast enough, I can be in Virginia without seeing a single night outside, but that will take traveling money to connect the dots. Hitching won’t cut it.

I’ll have to sell everything I own that I can’t put in a backpack.

The Pup

In the morning when I wake up I check the lawn beyond the woods. I half expect to see the pup sitting on the grass waiting for me but he’s gone.

 

Eddie

It’s Friday morning in Jacksonville. I stop at a gas station/convenience store for coffee. There is an elderly black man gassing up a truck almost as old as he is. He is tall, thinnish, and has a slight stoop though he still moves as easily as a man 20 yrs younger. There is white in his hair but not all that much considering he has to be considerably past 70.

He sees me heft the pack onto my back when I come out with my coffee and without preamble says, “Hey, you. You come with me. I need some help, not much. I’ll pay you a little something later. I won’t have anything to give you until 11.30.” It’s about 10am. “But you help me now and I’ll be back, give you something at 11.30. Won’t take but a few minutes.”

So far I haven’t got a word in edgeways. He pulls me to the back of his truck. There’s a lift attached to the back. Inside the grated sides is a stack of folded cardboard wrapped with metal straps. “I got to pick me up one of these dis mornin’ or it be gone. It’s alright. Don’t worry. I’m an honest man and I’ll pay you something at 11.30. That alright? You get in the truck.”

What am I going to do? I throw my pack up beside the cardboard and I get in the truck. The man is relentless.

He drives about 15 mi/hr below the already ridiculously slow speed limit, assuring me I don’t have to worry about my pack falling off the truck because he “don’t drive crazy like people nowadays.” The pack weighs about 60-70 lbs. It ain’t going anywhere unless he takes a corner at 60mph on two wheels, and even then all it would do is slide to the other side of the truckbed. I tell him I ain’t worried about it. He says his name is Eddie.

“I want you,” he says on the way to wherever we’re going, “cause you an old man like me. Not as old as me, I can see that, but old enough. I don’t want to hire any of these young mens around here, they just lookin’ for the easy way. They steal from everybody and they like to pick on old folks ’cause they don’t think we fight back. I just don’t have nothin’ to do with ‘em. You and me, we old enough to know that ain’t the right way.”

I remember all the times it occurred to me to steal somebody’s loose money, how when I was hungry and desperate I had almost talked myself into thinking I had the right to steal from somebody who had more than I did. I had a right to live, didn’t I? I never did it but in the face of this fierce old man’s integrity, I’m ashamed I even thought of it.

The Plan

I decide to leave, hit the road. I know it’s crazy even as I think it. At the same time, I know it’s what I’m going to do. Am I deliberately choosing a path to self-destruction? I’m not sure but I don’t think so.

How can I put this?

Since I was first diagnosed with prostate cancer, I’ve been moving in a sort of fog, my responses all automated and seemingly at a great distance. It’s as if they’re not really part of me and I don’t really care one way or the other what happens. When I get slapped with the diabetes diagnosis, I feel as though some part of me which had been dying has finally slipped this mortal coil and shuffled off to some hereafter while what’s left goes through the motions of living with mechanical exactitude but no joy or pain. It is, I suddenly realize, a sort of living death I’ve fallen into. I’ve become a goddamn zombie.

It scares me, the thought of the road. Never knowing where your next meal or your next dollar will come from. Never knowing if some drunken whacko will come upon you where you’re sleeping, knock you on the head and steal everything you still manage to own. Never knowing if the hatred of the poor and especially the homeless that the Right has been feeding a frightened population will result in some redneck murdering you because, after all, you’re a cancer on the society and anyway not really, you know, human. There are two cases of that happening that I know of and probably more that nobody ever figured out.

So I’m afraid, and it is ironically the fear that brings me back to life. Facing that fear – facing the unknown again as I haven’t since I was much, much younger – get my juices flowing, wakes me from my long sleep with an electric charge of energy and determination. Crazy it may be but what exactly, I ask myself, have I got to lose?

I turn grim and steely, set on not just surviving but on finding my way back to the living. I won’t say there’s joy in it and I can’t honestly say I’m happy about it. I am almost 60 and most of me would have preferred to find a cubbyhole somewhere and spent my last days surfing the internet and eating sugar-free ice cream someplace that was warm and where I had a bed of my own.

But if that is not to be, then fuck it. Throw out the half-measures, throw out the chicken-shit longings for safety and a quiet, slow, unencumbered demise. Grab the damn thing by the teeth and, one nmore time before the Grim Reaper swings his scythe your way, remind yourself what living on the edge means.

What living means.

With such sophistry and adolescent posturing, I convince myself I’m right to do what I was going to do anyway, no matter how wrong it is.

And, as Vonnegut would say, so it goes.

 

In the Jungle

I am in Jacksonville, Florida. In the Library. The city smells like burnt toast, don’t ask me why. The library doesn’t have a smell.

My first day here I wandered by something called The Cancer Survivors Park on Union Street. It is a small park outside a hospital, and it seems to be dedicated to bridge models. A man-made creek winds around less than a quarter-acre of land, bending back on itself again and again like a Japanese poem. Across each stretch is a miniaturized walker’s version of different bridge styles – arched, expansion, post-and-beam. There must be 7 or eight of them jammed together like the teeth on a comb.

In front of all those bridges is a sculpture. Of what, I’m not sure. People of various ages stand behind empty trapezoids as if they’re just about to duck their heads and walk through them. Are the trapezoids supposed to represent death? cancer survival? treatment options? I don’t know.

What is odd, even creepy, is that with two exceptions these life-size figures – an elderly couple, a young couple with a baby, an older couple with a 10 or 12-yr-old girl trying to escape their hold on her, a middle-aged woman clutching a purse, etc – have no expression. They stare into the distance as blind and uninvolved as ghosts, their faces blank, their eyes unfocused. Not just unfocused but unfocused as if they had never in their lives been focused. Not once. On anything.

The two exceptions are the old man and the 12-yr-old girl. She has a smile and her body shows an eagerness and liveliness the others don’t. She can’t wait to jump through the rings. He is sporting a scowl that would make Margaret Thatcher jealous, a vicious thing of snarling discontent. But at least it’s real. At least it’s human.

In the center of the park, below the clutch of bridges and surrounded by the creek, is a small stone bench. I rest there, dropping my pack beside me while I have a cigarette and try to remember how I got here from the untamed wilds of New England. It wasn’t easy. It took 3 years.

The Beginning

It is December of ‘07. I have run out of options. I have no job and can’t find a new one. My savings are gone, the $5000 my temporarily-flush brother gave me has been spent on rent and doctors and expensive medications. An eviction notice lies on the kitchen counter, mocking me. I have nowhere to go and no clue how to get there.

I will get no more help from my family. They are themselves strapped, my sister in the middle of a divorce after 23 years of marriage, both my brothers either sick or injured, unable to work. My father is still hale and hearty at 84 but that is not an option. Hasn’t been for decades. We get along well enough in short spurts, but moving in with him would eventually send one of us to an early grave.

Probably not him.

I’m aware that in many ways I’m not thinking too clearly. In many ways, though, I am thinking more clearly than I have in years. In the last 3 years, I have survived first prostate cancer and its treatment, then adult-onset Type 2 diabetes and its treatment. In both cases the treatment, while successful, turned out to be worse than the disease.

And more expensive.

There is no work where I live, at least no work that would pay enough so that I could live on it. I could work at McDonald’s flipping burgers or Wal-Mart stocking shelves for $6/hr. That would be enough to pay rent or buy food but not both. As a single man – white, not a veteran, not a minority, not yet eligible for Social Security (I and 59 and have 3 more years to wait), not disabled or insane, and having no dependents – I find I am not eligible for any govt help whatever. There will be no govt health insurance, food stamps, or subsidized housing.

I’m on my own.

The work, they say – what there is of it that hasn’t been moved to Sri Lanka by corporations eager to squeeze the last dying dime out of their expense sheet, and 3 cents-a-day labor costs is a ghood start – has gone South. “Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia!” people tell me. “Livable, not as expensive as here, and there’s lots of work.”

With few options raising their ugly heads, my clear-thinking mind and fuzzy-thinking mind agree:

Time to get the fuck out of here. I’ve been in New England too long. I came here for a woman 30 years ago and lost her 20 years ago, staying on because I lacked the will or the energy to go anywhere else. For a time I discovered my calling, and for 6 or 7 years it looked like I was going to carve out a life of my own, finally. Then George Bush came along and suddenly the calling for my calling evaporated. There was no money for it. The economy went into a tailspin, he started the Iraq war, and what I did went to the bottom of people’s list of things they were prepared to pay for. My profession shriveled up and all but died.

Yes, I had been here too long. Time to go. South, where it was warmer and there was tons of work.

So everyone said.