Across the Great Divide

Memory's Invisible Coil.

After a winter morning ride down the hill, my cable does not want to uncoil enough to secure my bike to the rack.

The shape-memory of the metal keeps it curled, and though I can wrestle it through the wheel and frame, warmth makes the job so much easier.

On today's trip it feels like spring has sprung.

I'm told "Fargo," fresh out of jail, showed up at the Day Center yesterday looking chipper. The courts are likely see him as a frequent flier with a shoplifting habit and anger management issues. When he's here, though, he's among the rare ones who'll grab a broom at the end of the day. (Although maybe he was just working off his community service hours. Still, he was good about it.)

This morning he arrived wasted, looking for a shower and a washing machine.

Later, as he folded his clothes in the vestibule, he stared hard at a woman who is touchy and dismissive on her best days, so I kept an eye open for an impending explosion.

Instead, he got her laughing. They chin-flicked away the tension.

Jason gave high-and-tight haircuts to Keith and Jeremaiha. As Jason worked, I talked to George, who grew up near our neighborhood in the Twin Cities and worked at the Minneapolis Club before coming here about 15 years ago. He's been sober now for two years and he's ready to start a job next week.

My boss told me to get a gentleman's haircut before I came in, George said. Is there somebody who comes here to cut hair?

I told him a number of people cut hair, myself included.

Could we work something out? he asked.

It's free.

Can you trim eyebrows, too?

Yeah, I'll even do mink eyelash transplants, but that'll cost you.

As I was cleaning up the clippers, Fargo reappeared.

I can do it, he said.

His hands seemed steady. I checked his eyes. What the hell. I can watch and make sure it doesn't go south.

Fargo left it longer on the sides than I would have but George was happy and looked quite presentable, not at all like someone who'd just gotten a haircut. 

Tomorrow, there's a board meeting, and our director was rounding up a few volunteers to go testify about the Day Center. Of course, the folks are selected from our more advanced guests because the organization likes to put forward success stories and people who give money like to feel their support makes a difference.

But we agree that success most days isn't about getting someone into housing.

It may be helping a man cope as his dead toddler's birthday approaches. Or getting George cleaned up for his new job. Or letting Fargo hit the pavement and bounce back after his weeks of bologna sandwiches.

We measure our days not just by the success we produce but what we absorb, what we quiet or avert, what we start rolling. Much of this will never get to the board meeting because it doesn't qualify as lasting change.

The world can be cold even on the hottest days. Memory's grip isn't visible from here on the sidelines, but we understand that six feet of man might find barely two feet of stretch. 

Most days, two feet is enough.

“The dog down there is on too short a chain. Change it, lengthen it. Then he’ll be able to reach the shade, and he’ll lie down and he’ll stop barking. And the silence will remind the mother she wanted a canary in a cage in the kitchen. And when the canary sings, she’ll do more ironing. And the father’s shoulders in a freshly ironed shirt will ache less when he goes to work. And so when he comes home he’ll sometimes joke, like he used to, with his teenage daughter. And the daughter will change her mind and decide, just this once, to bring her lover home one evening. And on another evening, the father will propose to the young man that they go fishing together… Who in the wide world knows? Just lengthen the chain.”

— John Berger, Here is Where We Meet 

 

Acknowledgements.

Last week at a book club, I met a landlord named Ted who told me he had rented rooms to four of the men I mention in the Acknowledgments for my novel, Inhabited. 

Ted had gotten into low-income housing when he bought an old hotel at the edge of downtown. It had one shower for 19 roomers, plus any street people who'd sneak in, and he was delighted when the Day Center opened nearby. For a while, he volunteered there.

We chatted about how we both derive some of our comfort from poor people. Ted collects their rent money. I collect their life stories. And so, perhaps, we owe something back.

Of the four, one is in jail now and one continues to be a Day Center regular. We'd each spotted one of the remaining two on the street but don't know for sure how they're doing.

A few days later, I saw fifth man we know in common, sitting at the bar at Hot Tomato in Fruita.

Since a 2012 arrest in Canada for possessing child pornography, "Mack" had been going through therapy in Grand Junction. As a registered sex offender, he had few choices of where to live. One of the places he stayed was a small house near the library carved up into rooms. It was also owned by Ted.

"Mack" was a regular at the Day Center for several years, often first in line for a shower when we opened. I'd lost track of him sometime after his name showed up in the paper.

Accompanied by his therapist, Mack had taken his computer into the Police Department and told them the hard drive had images of children on it. He asked if they could remove them and return the hard drive. Instead, he was arrested on a warrant for some other charges. It looked serious; Homeland Security gets involved with child porn investigations. 

When Mack stopped showing up in the morning, I assumed the worst—that he'd gone to prison.

Now, there he was having a beer and looking pretty together. I asked a few a general questions about his welfare, skirting the past. He talked about coming back to the Day Center to volunteer—"to pay back for all those showers."

Later in the week, I did some research on the questions I didn't want to ask in public. 

His case dragged but last year a jury found him not guilty on all counts. The judge sealed the arrest and criminal records in the case. Mack's real name was taken off the sex offender registry. 

Then on Wednesday another familiar face appeared outside the Day Center.

Last April I made a list of mundane Day Center encounters that show "most of the day is not full of drama and sadness."

One item on the list was, "Curt inherited a house."

"Curt" rarely spoke around me but always made eye contact. His wry grin seemed permanent, as if his homelessness were a disguise he was letting me in on. He'd recently fathered a child with a woman who was also homeless and using for a long time and now was going through a program with Human Services so she could keep the boy. 

That's when he left for California to deal with his father's estate, which was apparently substantial. Another man I figured I'd never see again. 

But here he was, straddling a bike, his light stubble, knit billed cap and black apparel making him indistinguishable from your above-average coffee shop hipster.

I went out to say hello. He seemed confident, clear-eyed and talkative. He'd returned to see family, he said. He was buying his mother a house. And he had some other property where he had established a marijuana grow operation. From the way he told me, I assume it's a legal one, but just in case, he will remain "Curt."

"It's so much better than what I was doing before," he said, making a bud-trimming snip with his fingers.

What isn't, I wonder, remembering the two of them coming up from the river bottom, Curt in his coveralls, "Sharon's" belly bulging over stretched-out sweat pants.

The climb from zero to middle class remains quite a haul for a couple only a year ago living rough, and for a former sex offender whose last five years will remain a blank.

The people who knew and cared about them are still rooted along the river, at the Day Center and in the park a block away.

Does it help that we who remember are still here, or is it better we be left behind, our lips like sealed records?

I think of Ted with his remaining properties and me with my dwindling stories, watching them go by. We can only wave at their passage.

But right now, it's enough. It's enough to see Curt standing outside, measuring the distance he's come and to hear Sharon come up behind to ask if she can take a picture book for her son.

Of course, I say.

It's been waiting for you all this time.

 

 

 

Sources of Salvation: Sunglasses, Superglue and Living Among the Swiss.

When I saw Carl last winter, he looked bad, although maybe not according to the standard of scary men on the street. His grey wool overcoat still had some formality left in it, but he seemed ready for the rag bag.

Usually even strangers note your approach when you walk with a happy dog. But Carl passed right by, eyes averted, showing no sign of the cheerful, ironic personality I knew.

When I finally saw him again this week, he was cracking wise and speaking of salvation with the quiet enthusiasm of a man just plucked off a raft long at sea. 

He owed his renewal, he said, to coming off his court-ordered dose of Prozac.

As he changed into brown dress shoes from a pair of blue-and-white Reebok football cleats, Carl updated me on the other changes in his life.

He was wearing dark sunglasses all time now because of his surfer eye, acquired after thirty years in the California sun. He showed me his eye, but I didn't know what to look for, so I just nodded.

He'd scored the fancy wrap-arounds on Super Bowl Sunday outside a bar. A disgruntled New England fan leaving at half-time had flung off his shades and left them broken on the sidewalk. Carl repaired the frames with a dab of super glue from the Dollar Store. 

You could only see the crack if you looked for it.

Before the holidays, a woman with five cars in her yard had offered to sell him a '98 Bonneville for $300. Inspired, he gathered up all his stuff for a garage sale, put on his Santa hat and sat in her driveway all day without selling one thing.

Anyway, the deal's off. The woman moved away.

She could have just given me the car, he said. What's $300?

He removed a coverless paperback from his backpack and sniffed it.He said his camp had gotten soaked by rain recently and now everything smelled like urine. He didn't want to stink when he went to church that evening.

He asked me if I'd read Living Among the Swiss. It's one of the best books he'd ever read, he said, along with that book they give you in prison... Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life. 

According to the polarized reviews on Amazon, the self-published account of life in Switzerland is either "in the satiric spirit of Mark Twain" or "arrogant and ethnocentric to an extreme."

Carl had picked it up from the free library at the Senior Center, two days before they 86-ed me for life.

Apparently senior citizens find mania less charming than depression.

At the end of the day, Living Among the Swiss appeared abandoned on a chair in the vestibule.

It did not smell like urine.

 

 

 

On the "Day of Welfare," Four Homeless Men Who Want to Work.

Today was the first of the month, a day when balances show up in public assistance accounts. The first has always been well-known as a time of, let us say, increased discretionary spending by pensioners and people on disability.

Extra money in the pocket can mean fewer folks showing up at places like the Day Center that provide support for the poor. Today's traffic seemed about average, though one friendly but quiet man talked with unusual animation; one wobbled in to do his laundry smelling strongly of drink; a regular exhibited symptoms of meth use; and another individual was suspended for smoking weed on the back patio.

So much for the stereotypes. Four other men engaged in long conversations about finding honest work.

Oliver, an African-American who's originally from Minneapolis, is an experienced breeder of exotic birds. In the past, he's made a living charging people $5 to have a photo taken with his cockatoo. He has been raising a bird that will soon be mature enough for him to go back out on the street and become self-supporting. 

Nathan has also spent time in Minnesota and North Dakota. I asked if he had followed the oil boom to North Dakota.

Yes, he said, but he found he could make more money selling frozen shrimp and crab than he did working on the rigs. He and his friends would pick up a truck load in Minneapolis and drive to oil patch towns where they'd hawk the seafood from parking lots.

Ernest is in his sixties, with a cascade of nicotine blonde hair gone white and the rugged face of a drinking man. Or so it seems.

He has worked construction throughout the country, particularly as a plasterer. Now, he works irregularly after having been severely beaten in a robbery in Santa Fe. Two heroin addicts jumped him outside a grocery store, clubbing him across the face with a tree limb and leaving him for dead.

Fortunately, a bread truck driver saw Ernest behind the store and called 911.

The robbers were caught and sentenced to 15 years in prison, Ernest said, which is fine, but I had to have my face put back together and I'm in this shape forever.

Ironically, the two robbed him because they knew he was making good money on a construction project. But all they got was $7 because Ernest had his pay directly deposited to his account and made purchases with a debit card.

Now he receives $836 a month disability. He has plans to buy a used car and once the snow in the mountains melts, he'll head for Pagosa Springs where a woman has a cabin on two acres of land that's for sale for $11,000. She's offering a contract for deed that would cost him $169 a month.

The woman made sure I knew that it was remote, Ernest said, that once winter came I'd be snowed in or snowed out. But that doesn't bother me. There's no building code there. I can make improvements on the place as I go. It has solar for electricity and I can cut firewood and haul in groceries, spend time with the outdoors and the animals. More and more, I prefer solitude. And when I die, I don't have any relatives. I'll leave it to the Boys Club or something.

You'd have no trouble picking out the guy who calls himself Maverick—a fit, Chuck Norris look-alike in a western hat with a rodeo belt buckle.

Not a cowboy (they deal with cows), he's a wrangler who has worked seasonally for ranches in Colorado and Wisconsin. For 11 years he installed carpets. He's been a security officer and worked outdoor labor jobs that paid $10 an hour if you had tools and a truck, $8 if not.

As a veteran, he's been through several training programs to give him the skills to obtain steady work. The first go-round, he obtained a Microsoft Office Skills Certification but discovered the temp agency customers were looking for women.

Upgrading his skills in video editing and photography, he found temporary gigs, such as producing video promotions for a western wear store that was going out of business. The local Fox affiliate called him in for an interview after seeing his reel, but they were only offering $9.25 an hour for a producer job.

His seasonal work on the ranches ranged from great to not so great. The ranches typically provide room and board and, theoretically, a pocket money salary that may be paid monthly or at the end of the contract.

At the end of each season, he's unemployed with little cash accumulated. He said he's never gotten the separation pay he expected, and in one case, when he got nothing, he was told to go ahead and sue.

This season, he's considering not going back to agriculture and instead riding with his horse and a pack animal through the major towns of Colorado. His hope it to raise awareness that there are people who want to work, yet are homeless. Currently, his winter camp is serving as a training site for his nights as he passes through the mountains.

A living wage plus affordable housing equals no homelessness, Maverick says. Despite his skills and work ethic, though, that's not how it's worked out for him.

His blog tells more of his story.