Backpack Jack

The outlet mall at Flatwoods, WV isn’t very exciting.  The stores aren’t great—Tommy Hilfiger, whose clothes I won’t buy, is the only designer with a presence.  It is a good place to look for Christmas presents for newly apartmented, college freshman nieces and gadget-addicted (I’m sorry, I mean tool and I don’t mean addicted) husbands.  Plus, there is one of those Amish Bulk Foods stores that, I don’t think, have much to do with the Amish but do have lots of wonderful, bad-for-you sorts of things like bread-and-butter pickled beets and caramel-covered marshmallows.  So, I stopped yesterday on my way home from Thanksgiving in Huntington.

 

I got out of my car and heard someone barking at the top of his lungs, “…and all you God-damned Republicans are going to get what’s coming to you, all you fat fuck Jesus-freaks with your jacked-up pick-up trucks and…” Shit, I thought.  This is going to be someone I know. 

 

And it was.  Backpack Jack, who I met the first night I worked at Bartlett House back in the late 80s and who has been wandering in and out of my life ever since.  But then again, that’s what he does.  He wanders.  He labels himself a hobo and, if there is anything noble left in the call, he embodies it.

 

It seemed a civic duty to offer Jack a ride back to Morgantown; I’m a big fan of free speech, but I also think people should be able to bring their children to public places without being confronted by someone yelling obscenities.  Jack isn’t crazy, just bored and a little too in love with the idea of himself as an outlaw.  And, he told me, he had figured he wouldn’t get a ride to Morgantown that day and thought he’d just stand there yelling until the cops offered him a free place to spend the night.  Flatwoods doesn’t have a homeless shelter, and Jack says he prefers jail—fewer rules and no one who thinks they can save you.

 

The hour-and-a-half trip was like the world’s longest panhandle.  I guess Jack’s shtick is all he has left, because he kept it up long after I’d given him the five bucks he’d asked for and made it clear he wasn’t getting any more out of me.  That makes me sad.  Jack used to be more interesting.

 

We reminisced a little about his old running gang:  Cat Eyes, Big Al, and Steve who never did get a colorful nickname.  They’re all still on the road, although Jack says Steve was married for a while and is only just now de-trailered and single again.  We talked about the winter I had to cut through the duct-tape Cat Eyes used to keep his boots on to check for frostbite, and how sad it was that Big Al had ripped off a local shop-owner who is usually kind to the homeless and, as a result, wasn’t welcome in town by anyone these days.  It was a little like running into an old friend and a little like going back to a job I was no longer suited for, but mostly it made my car smell like unwashed man and wood smoke.

 

Still, it’s nice to live in a world small enough that I know the hobos on the road; when to stop, and when to keep driving.  The alternative—to always have to keep driving—seems both lonely and wrong.  I may be done letting homeless men live in my basement, but hopefully I will never have to stop offering them rides back to town.

And then we were three…

The homeless guy in our basement is gone. He made a brief trip to the regional jail for an old, stupid thing and now, as far as we know, is staying with a loose group of friends, possibly out of doors. We’d asked him to move out before the incident; after two years, he was no closer to being able to live on his own than when we’d first taken him in, and it was clear to us that he needed the case management services that he could only get by living in the homeless shelter. No one was pleased with the solution, but no one–not even the guy in the basement–argued against it. If any good was going to come of his being here, it seemed likely it would have come in those first two years.

Scotti, Lucy, and I live in the house alone for the first time since our marriage. My niece lived with us for a while, and a Korean psychiatrist who was here as part of an international exchange program. For a few weeks last summer, there was a second homeless man on the back porch.

I love you, I really do, but don’t ask to stay with me while you look for a new apartment or decide if you’re going to leave your husband. I’m sorry, but the guest room is full of Scotti’s papers and, as soon as I’ve put a fresh coat of paint on the walls, the basement bedroom is going to be full of mine. I am not a person who can safely have empty rooms–I fill them up with people too easily–so we are naming each room in our house something other than “the guest room” or “the extra bedroom.” We will have Scotti’s study, and my study, and maybe even a dining room again.

Dinner Times

The homeless man in our basement sneaks upstairs once he’s sure we’ve gone to bed and microwaves a half-dozen Jimmy Dean Griddlecakes Sandwiches for his dinner.  The dogs jump off the bed and scratch at the bedroom door as soon as they hear him in the kitchen and they whine until the stench of cheap microwaved sausage has faded into a sort of damp, mildewy smell and he has gone back downstairs.

Kevin said, “If he lives in your basement then he isnt’ really homeless, is he?”

I think about this for a long time; months.  He is homeless because, if he is not, then my home is also his home and not just a place for him to stay while he goes through the SSI odessy.  And if this is his home, I can never say, “Okay, you got your first SSI check, time for you to move out now.  Good luck.  Take care.”  And I need to know that some day I will be able to say that, or I will come running down the stairs one night, no longer able to take the reek of his Stouffer’s Family Sized Meatloaf that will linger until the smell of the morning coffee overpowers it.

*   *   *

For our dinner tonight, I made a sort of cheap and dirty cassoulet.  White beans in a rich duck broth with ham from Mike and Donna Eisenstat’s farm, potatoes, leeks, and carrots from Reed and Kathy Evans, herbs from my garden and the one next door, and an artisnal sherry that my father gave us last year.  We ate it with a baguette from A New Day Bakery and Bûche Noire from Firefly Farms.  There was more than enough.  I could have, probably should have, invited the homeless man in the basement to join us.  For the first year he lived here, I often did.  But the quality of mercy has grown strain’d. 

It is one thing never to take responsibility for something.  It is something entirely different to put it aside once it becomes burdensome.  I am not generous enough to invite the man in the basement to join us at the dinner table, but I am also not so stingy that I would throw him back onto the streets.  It could take another few years for his SSI to come through.  We all know this now, though none of us did when this arrangement was first conceived. Until then, we are all just trying to hold on to the moral middle ground.  We gave up trying to walk the high road a long time ago.

Among the Garbage and the Flowers…

My daily walk takes me past the encampment of homeless folk who live under the bridge toward the trail-head on Decker’s Creek.  I know their names , or most of them, from my job at the day shelter and am not afraid of them.  The people who are a threat to me, the ones who are still angry at my because I called the cops or kicked them out of Friendship Room for selling drugs or starting fights, live in a bigger camp along the river.  The creek camp is for the older, gentler, quieter folk.  It’s smaller, and has been there longer.  The people who live there are more likely to have a bottle than a pipe, and that seems to make all the difference in the world.

This weekend, as I was walking by, I saw the first daffodils of this spring on the embankment across the trail from where they pitch their tents during the night.  (During the day, when those of us privelaged with houses – and likely to be bothered by those who aren’t –are out walking the trail to work off our over-abundant diets, the tents are broken down and hidden.  I know where, but I won’t tell.)

It was a moment before I noticed the joke of this… the broken piece of drainage pipe laid up against the daffodils like a flowerpot.  I think I know who did it.  There is a man who lives down here who doesn’t speak, and rarely came to Friendship Room.  But when he did come, he often left behind little tableaus of found objects near his seat. A dollar-store bracelette with a broken clasp, the head of a Barbie doll, and used-up lipstick once.  Another time, a pile of sticks arranged artfully into a miniature bonfire, two toy soldiers covered in grime, and the most recent body-count headline from the local paper.

I don’t know why he doesn’t speak.  He nods, and points to things he wants, but he isn’t mute.  I’ve heard him talking to the people who enhabit his own universe, but he will not talk to those of us in this one.

I see his hand in this joke.  It’s been cold, and no matter how many blankets and sleeping bags he’s given, he can’t seem to hold on to any of them and he won’t live indoors.   I’m happy to see he’s made it to another spring.