[Philadelphia, 11/12/11]
My next Amazon self-published book is shaping up. Its working title is Stressed, Blighted and Circumscribed Lives. Below is another chapter. We’re in Philadelphia in June of 2013:
John is 46 but looks two decades younger, with not a single white hair or whisker. His grungy style is also an age retardant, he thinks. If all goes well, he’ll be one wrinkly, mottled and perhaps amputated Kurt Corbain inside his cardboard coffin.
His mom was a registered nurse, then secretary at a garage. His dad sold car parts and, in the evening, drove a mail truck from Philly to Harrisburg. “I’m not doing as well as my parents, but I’m not trying as hard either,” John confided as we sat in McGlinchey’s. This late afternoon, it’s still quiet. Only intermittently were we interrupted by a jukebox regurgitating tiresome tunes. On four televisions, golf balls sailed or skated around cups.
I had come in after recording a segment for Press TV at a nearby studio. Seeing me in suit and tie, the bar owner, Shelley, grinned, “Coming from church?”
On Iranian television, I had assumed a grave, knowing face to talk about how China will try to muscle the US away from the Western Pacific, and of its scheme to supplant the US dollar, first by trading with nations in their own currencies, then by having a gold-backed Yuan.
I pointed out how China is intertwining itself with Europe via increasing rail links and commerce. Already, freights can travel by land from Holland or Belgium to the Middle Kingdom. Unlike America, China has a long term economic vision. Losing his bite, Uncle Sam won’t growl much longer.
Underemployed and malnourished, John is a pioneer of sort in this deep dive towards destitution. His survival strategies may serve you well as inspiration and tips.
Three days a week, John scrubs and mops at this lowlife bar. Twice a day, he also goes to Shelley’s house to walk the dog. At his massa’s residence, John can relax a bit on an actual couch to stare at a TV with more than two channels.
“Yo, John, how much do you make a week?”
“Ah, I don’t want to tell you, but most of what I make goes towards rent.”
“I can’t see how you make enough to eat!”
“I don’t eat that much. I drink beer, and I get my beer here for free. This is also food, you know.”
“How much do they give you?”
“Two pints.”
“Two pints! That’s not enough! How can you stop at two pints? Once I’ve had two pints, I must drink more. Why won’t they give you four pints, at least?”
“Maybe you can say something to Shelley about that. You can be my lawyer!”
“Yeah, I’ll say something to Shelley. Cheap motherfucker! But you haven’t explained how you manage to eat on almost no money? How do you eat?!”
“I already told you, man, I don’t eat that much. I haven’t eaten in days! Actually, yesterday, I had three ounces of spaghetti.”
“You count your ounces?!”
“I know because on the package, it said six ounces.”
“Frozen shit?”
“No, man, I don’t even have a fridge. It’s this moist, microwavable shit.”
“OK, OK, but how do you stop eating at three ounces? Why didn’t you eat the whole damn thing if you were that hungry?”
“I don’t need to eat that much. Look at your beer. Can you knock that down in one shot?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“But I can’t do that. My stomach wouldn’t be able to handle it. I don’t need to eat or drink that much. Some weeks, I only spend five bucks on food.”
“That’s ridiculous! What do you buy for five bucks?”
“You can always buy rice. Rice is cheap.”
“You’re right, rice is cheap, especially when you buy a huge bag, but do you ever shoplift, you know, like shove a can of tuna down your pants?”
“No, I have never done that.”
Writing about someone, I must make sure to get everything right, but with John, I need not fret as much, because he doesn’t know how to use a computer. A man who can barely eat is not going to pay for wifi. There, too, John’s ahead of the curve.
In 2014, how can any American under 50 living in a major city not know how to use a computer? Even cave dwelling hermits spend at least 16 hours a day staring at internet porn.
“What’s up with you, John?”
“Ah, man, I just can’t figure it out, but I don’t miss it. Who cares. I don’t have any tattoos either,” and he showed me his untinted arms. Nodding towards a waitress sitting nearby, bent over her laptop, John continued, “Once she spent twenty minutes trying to teach me the computer, but I couldn’t figure it out.”
“She can’t get off the computer, and you can’t get on!”
After his two pint allotment, John slunk out of the bar. From Shelley, I found out he lives at the Parker Spruce, a residential hellhole that charges $250 a week, plus an extra 10 bucks for a microwave. A crappy TV would have cost $10 more. His bathroom, he shares with another tenant.
Just to visit a Parker Spruce resident, you must pay six bucks at the desk, though condoms are free, courtesy of the city’s health department. After a ride in the musty elevator, you enter a moldy hallway redolent of urine and Clorox. Taking the stairs, you might step over a dime bag or two. Whole families take refuge here, not just hurting singles, drug addicts and whores. A McGlinchey’s bartender, Bernadette, lived here for seven years. Though pets are banned, you can hear a caged canary as you walk past this door, for example, and inside this cell is a black cat.
At the end of each hallway, windows have bars to prevent jumpers from diving, permanently, into their final hell. Don’t lose heart, though. If you go straight to the roof of this 12-story building, where the view is indeed spectacular and the air fresh, nothing will stop you from flying for a second or two before splashing onto the adjacent row house’s tar roof, which must be fixed every few years, after yet another corpse is removed.
Before Shelley hired John as dogwalker, he employed Casey. She also dwelled at the Parker Spruce. In her dresser were bread, peanut butter, jam and pop tarts. In winters, cans of Bud Ice could be kept cool in a plastic bag hanging out her window.
“So you trust John, huh?” I asked Shelley. “He doesn’t steal like Casey?”
“You know about that too!” Shelley smiled. “Casey only stole small things from me. I went to her place once and saw all these little things that looked very familiar, like salt and pepper shakers I used to own. Everywhere I looked, there were little things I used to own.”
“Yeah, and she stole from me! I was talking to Casey at Frank’s one night. It was her birthday, so I bought her a couple of beers, but when I went to the bathroom, she stole one of my camera lenses. It’s very expensive, you know, more than 500 bucks, but then Casey returned it, because she felt bad, I guess. When I called Frank’s the next day, Sheila said, ‘Hey, we found your camera lens!’ I knew it had to be Casey because I never took the lens out of my bag.”
“It was Casey.”
It’s not too bad yet. Most sidewalk sleepers aren’t violently stripped of shoes, belt, jacket or a reasonably nice pair of jeans. In Berkeley, I did meet a white haired man who had been robbed by another homeless four times. His coat and shoes, he managed to recover in nearby trash cans, “but the photos of my wife and children are gone.” As we talked, a young woman gave him some leftover from a restaurant meal. “But I can’t eat it,” he lamented, “I don’t have any teeth.”
“You can eat it,” she smiled. “It’s only rice.”
Without fork or spoon, he had to scoop the brown rice with the carry out container’s plastic top.
I never hinted to Casey I knew she had stolen from me, but after that incidence, I kept my distance. Adopted, Casey has never been able to find her Puerto Rican birth mother. On each of her sneakers is scrawled “ESPERANZA.” Casey has worked as a cook and waitress, including at McGlinchey’s. Last time I saw her, Casey announced she was getting married, so I waved at her bride, a mirthful, squeezable lady standing across Broad Street. They had found an apartment in Point Breeze. Idyllic sounding, it’s another Philly free fire zone, though slowly gentrifying. It did spawn the Heath Brothers.
Seeing me chatting with Casey once, some bald, middle-aged dude advised, “You shouldn’t talk to her. She’s ugly. You make yourself look bad by talking to such an ugly woman.”
That hideous bit I actually expanded into a monologue, played by a fine actor, for WHYY TV. Anyway, this guy looked like shit himself. Ugly and uglier, we’ll slog forward.
The current waitress at McGlinchey’s is only 23 and genuinely pretty, so why not meet her?
“I never went to college, because I don’t like school, and I also can’t afford it.”
“But you said you’re into languages?”
“Yeah, I studied French for five years, and the other day, when I met some French students, I could speak to them, maybe because I was drunk,” she grinned, “and I can pronounce Russian words. I read Camus’ The Stranger five times in English, but when I finally read it in French, it was so much better.”
“You read it in French from beginning to end?”
“Almost.”
She also knows scraps of Sanskrit and Japanese, which have proven useful at SugarHouse, Philly’s very first casino. Playing roulette, she has won up to $100 while chanting “sa ta na ma.” She thought it meant, “all one none sum,” though it’s actually, “birth, life, death, rebirth.” Sometimes she mumbled “nam myoho renge kyo.” On full moons, people win more at casinos, she said. Perhaps this Pisces should also use a Magic Marker to scrawl “HOPE” onto her sneakers.
For the trapped, mapless or clueless, magic incantations are as good as any. Give us this day our three ounces, at least, and lead us not onto the no-fly list, not that we can afford even a Greyhound ticket.
In 2010, I witnessed a religious procession at San Francisco’s Civic Center. Mostly Filipinos, they carried this banner, “Praying the Rosary for America… As human efforts fail to solve America’s key problems, we turn to God, through His Holy Mother, asking for His urgent help.”
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