Tom, after giving a long eulogy for his brother, Frank, shook his head as he looked at the open casket and said, “He always had to have the last word.” As Tom tried to collect himself for a minute, Tom’s dimwitted cousin, Bob, finally asked, “How long should we wait?”
...
Our same Tom pointed to a man who was splattered on the sidewalk. He had fallen from the top of the building, and said, “I believe he’s dead.” Frank, not one to be outdone, said, “That or he’s severely deceased.” In a flash, Frank realized he had spent his entire life applying adverbs inadvertently. “Severely deceased,” he said to himself again. He realized Tom had summed up the man’s condition perfectly, but he had felt an overwhelming need to add something more, as if he had something to say that added greater clarity to a situation which needed no further explanation for those who had observed the event.
Frank turned away from the scene and began walking. Tom noticed and asked him where he was going. Frank replied, “To figure it all out.” Tom, perplexed, turned back to look at the body, almost as if he expected the dead man to get up and walk it off. Tom thought, “No, Frank was right. He’s severely deceased.” It struck Tom at that moment that he had come to rely on Frank’s second opinions to explain or confirm even the most obvious of situations. At first he thought, “What will I do without him?” Then he thought, “Shoot, I never needed him.”
At that moment, Frank was hit by a bus as he was crossing the street. Tom ran down the sidewalk toward the corner. When he arrived, he saw his brother Frank lying dead in a pool of blood. “Son of a bitch,” Tom said, “He’s severely deceased.” Tom felt a weight he never realized he had being lifted from his body. He believed, in that moment, that things happened for a reason. Frank died just a moment after Tom realized he didn’t need him to tell him what had just happened. “He’s dead and I know he’s dead and I don’t need Frank to tell me that he’s ‘severely deceased.’ Hallelujah!”
As Tom walked away from the scene, feeling no need to wait around for a dead man, another revelation struck him. “Damn. Now I’m responsible for everything.” The weight that had lifted was back again, but much heavier. “I didn’t realize how much of the load Frank had carried for me. And maybe I had eased his burden, too.” It took several months before Tom realized the added weight had come from loneliness rather than additional responsibility. As the weight on his shoulders became greater and greater over the years, Tom began to realize that loneliness comes with compounding interest. As he thought about it a little more he figured out what Frank probably would have said to him at that moment: “You miss me more every day.” For just a second, Tom felt like Frank was there with him. Then he was gone again, somehow even less there than he had been just a few seconds earlier.
…
Seems bleak, right? But it’s also a reality. A reality. I think of it like this: If after a lifetime of having my belly full I one day find myself hungry with the prospect of being hungry every day for the rest of my life, I feel a tremendous suffering over the sense of loss. Meanwhile, there’s a man who has been hungry his entire life. Maybe the same age as I am. When my belly was full, I looked at the man with pity, sympathizing with his plight but unable to really understand it. But now I am looking at the hungry man and wondering, “How in the hell am I supposed to get by?” The man I once pitied I now see has tremendous experience, knowledge, and wisdom in relation to hunger that I don’t. I’m experiencing hunger as an infant does whereas he’s experiencing it as a way of life, a long life. He’s my superior in this regard. If all goes well, he’ll take me under his wing and teach me how to survive while being hungry.
It’s that way for the newly homeless. The long-time homeless person has experience, knowledge, and wisdom that the newly homeless person does not. Will the experienced homeless people guide the “child of homelessness”? Maybe. There’s a sudden realization—or maybe not so sudden—that being a babe in the woods without being able to tell the difference between a shepherd and a wolf is harrowing. At first, you observe while following at a distance. Because of that, you find yourself at a church of some denomination you never knew existed, following other homeless people through the door and into a line for food. You grab a tray, watch the others as they go through the line, listen to the servers ask you questions or tell you something, and you wind up with a plate of food you never would have thought was worth eating. You sit down alone, wary, and eat. It tastes better than anything you’ve ever eaten. And the warmth of the church basement feels like a gift from a God you weren’t sure existed.
Then when you’re done, you walk outside, following someone else at a distance. You’re now in an area of downtown you used to avoid if at all possible. But that’s where you see people from the church who were eating and they are gathering here and there, inside and outside buildings. You realize some of these rundown places are apartments for the poor, some are shelters, some are organized day-time gathering places for the homeless kept open by some underfunded nonprofit organization or underfunded government agency.
But still, you keep your distance. How do you know who you can trust? At four o’clock you notice people are starting to walk to the west, away from the area where the church you ate at earlier. After walking half a mile, you come around a corner and see a group of people lined up, maybe 30 or 40 people with more coming all the time. You go to them, ask what the line is for, but most ignore you. A man in line finally tells you, “They serve food at five o’clock.” So you go to the end of the line and wait. And wait. And wait. You’re cold, it’s getting dark, but you’re about to get to the warmth inside and eat. Once you get inside and feel the warmth, you feel better. When you get your food, you feel better still. This time, though, there are no empty tables. You sit at one that has a couple seats available and immediately the filthiest old man you’ve ever smelled sits next to you. His hands are grimier than an old dirt farmer from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl of the 1930s. His presence is hindering your enjoyment of eating—but not so much that you get up and leave.
Others at the table are talking, including two men who are arguing over something. You can’t even understand the one guy as he has no teeth whereas the other guy, younger, is accusing him of stealing his dinner roll. Before things get completely out of hand, an older woman, a server, comes over with a dinner roll and gives it to the younger fellow. He thanks her, calls her “Betty,” but insists that that doesn’t make up for the fact that the other guy stole his roll. She nods and says she knows, but says that if he wants another when he’s done he can go back through the line to see if there’s any left. “I shouldn’t have to do that,” says the young guy. He continues grumbling as does the toothless old man. You think, “Well, no one at this table is going to be able to help me along.”
But as you leave, you notice the younger guy and the other fellow who were arguing are now walking together laughing. You follow them as they walk for nearly a mile, a different area of downtown that you also used to avoid at all costs. You see that they’re walking toward an old brick building where people are lined up on the street, many of them with shopping carts, some lying on the pavement with blankets, each person with some type of pack or bag of stuff that they, presumably, own.
You see the sign in front of the building and you recognize that it’s a homeless shelter. The line is ridiculously long, backed up nearly three blocks up the bridge that crosses the nearby river. So you walk up the sidewalk and get in line. You stand for a while, maybe ten minutes, then you sit when you realize it isn’t going to move for some time. You ask a woman of indeterminate age for the time. She points to the downtown bank clock. You see it’s a little after seven o’clock. “What time does the shelter open?” She says, “The doors open at nine,” then huddles back down under her blankets.
You have a small pack, a few changes of clothes, but not much else. It’s getting cold. You have a jacket you’re wearing, but that’s not enough. You realize you need to find a blanket tomorrow. And a hell of a lot of other stuff. Where do you go? You don’t know anyone any more, not here. You don’t know any phone numbers, you have no cell phone, and there aren’t any public pay phones any more, anyway. Where is the Social Security office? Could they help? How about the Department of Human Services? They must have an office somewhere? You realize you’re going to have to break out of your shell and start asking some real questions to people who are complete strangers and you’re going to have to recognize that they’re in the same boat trusting you when they talk to you. This is going to be hard. Really hard. And you’re going to make mistakes. A lot of mistakes.
You think there’s not much further you can fall, but before you even get to the door of the shelter, with all its bed bugs, they’re closing the doors. They are filled up. Now what? Some people are bitching, some are crying, and some are walking away in different directions. You look at the bridge where you were waiting. You think, “Well, they always talk about people sleeping under bridges.” When you get there, though, you see that it’s essentially a homeless campground and there ain’t much room left at all. You walk around a little trying to find a place to stay and you hear a voice cry out, “Go away! This place is ours!” Other voices, less shrill, say similar things. A couple helpful voices suggest such-and-such a park or an area of abandoned buildings further down the river, but someone yells out, “Nah, don’t go down river. You’ll get yourself jacked there. But if you’re strung out, then you’re going to have to go.”
You’re outside the outsiders. You realize now, “Damn, these people aren’t lazy at all. They’ve been working for a long time to find their places, get their communities together, learn who they can trust, figure out where to stay and stake a claim, where to go for the things they need, and what places to avoid—there are places even homeless people know to avoid!” You are now truly alone. You are cold and if the temperature drops enough—it’s not supposed to drop below freezing—you could die of exposure. It’s not supposed to fall below freezing on this night, though. Still, you don’t know anything about how to survive in the city without money, cars, houses, apartments, jobs, friends, family, and basic essentials like blankets, toiletries, and the like. You need to find a damned shopping cart if you want to get around with more than just a bag of clothing. And where are you going to shower? Are you going to shower? What if it rains or snows? Crap. Yeah, crap.
…
Well, Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday! Ha! No, I tell that story because when I worked as a peer support specialist for Luke-Dorf I had to learn how to help people who had difficulty with basic essentials like keeping housing (others worked with the homeless to help them find housing, but you’d be amazed at how much work there is for people just trying to keep the housing they’ve gotten), finding food, dealing with emotional problems, dealing with harassment, assault, and other types of violence (so many men and women living in residential facilities are “dating” homeless men or women—but that’s because some had once been homeless themselves), dealing with addictions, helping them find dental services, Social Security Disability paperwork and services, DHS paperwork and services, getting to the DMV to get an ID with a permanent address so that they can get and keep services, helping them figure out how their bank accounts work (for those who had incomes from state programs or through SSD/SSI), and on and on and on.
It was a hell of a learning experience. I assisted with a lot of stuff certain individuals couldn’t do on their own, but I also learned a ton about how people survive in the mental health system, in no-income and low-income housing, and more, but most surprisingly I learned about how the homeless survive. There was this one guy, Aaron, who had catatonic schizophrenic, was a former drug dealer, still a huge drug user, and one day I was supposed to lead him and three other “new” people to a church food service at 11:00 AM. We got there late and I didn’t know what to do. I asked Aaron, who had been homeless on and off for 20 years, if he had any ideas. He started rattling off the times that different churches in the area served food, provided clothing and blankets, and supplied toiletries for each place on each day of the week in downtown Portland, Oregon. I was trying to get him to stop at first because I just needed to know what was closest before noon, but then I just listened. He rattled off at least twenty places, times, and days where and when you could get “free stuff,” as he called it. He was literally a master. It was like listening to the Rain Man of free stuff in Portland’s downtown!
I have to admit, he was very intelligent. A lot of the individuals were. I often had to spend a little time with them to peel back the layers of some of their jibber-jabber language and emotions, but a lot of them were exceptionally intelligent. I was humbled. My situation was pretty crappy at the time, too, but after working with these people I realized, “Nope, my situation is really good compared to how life is for them.” I also discovered that the people I worked with were NOT on the bottom, either. They were receiving services. There were a bunch more who weren’t receiving services like housing and I met many homeless people, too. That’s a different level right there. Humbling, but also disturbing and even scary. In more ways than I can describe. It’s amazing what human beings can endure. It’s also powerfully evident that some people eventually encounter “too much” and need an entire team of people to help them. They are severely disabled in multiple ways. Their plight is difficult to witness without great sadness.
…
Now for the local news, our man in the field, Anti-Dada!
I’ve been getting physical therapy with some hand-assisted stretching and kneading of hands, feet, fingers, and toes. Ankles and wrists. Elbows and shoulders. Neck and upper back. Chest, abdomen, lower back, and along the spine. Lower abdominal, pelvic, hip, flute, and groin muscles. Thighs, hams, knees, and calves. Face and skull. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m talking about the whole body. Long, slow, grinding process. But the PTs I’m working with are excellent! The city has a few surprises now and then.
Aside from that, I placed second in the city-wide over-40 marbles championship this year. I was destroying the competition up until the finals—64 men and women made the cut after neighborhood regionals. Then I ran into Tubs Johnson, aka “Steely Dan.” His specialty was using smaller steelies, with their heftier weight and force, to knock out the larger marbles of competitors. A brilliant strategy, but only if one is a master marksmen. Steelies are tough to aim. They’re slick and if you have big hands the small ones can be almost impossible to shoot effectively.
But Steely Dan had small palms and long, lithe, agile fingers. He could simultaneously spin steelies between each of his fingers on either hand; he could balance ten tiny steelies on the upward-turned tips of his fingertips for over an hour; he was the 23-time City Marbles Master and had not been beaten in twelve years.
A lot of people thought this would be unlucky thirteen. The whole town—more like a few of the family members of the other participants—was cheering for me. I was told that my run was the greatest Cinderella story the town had seen since 1967 when Spinner Gibson, The One Year Wonder, upset Clickity-Clack Jack after he had won six championships in a row.
Turns out, the City has a long and storied marble competition history. It started in 1896 when Archibald “Sticky” Snackers formed a gang of marble thieves. For nearly five years they tormented the town’s marble factory and the outgoing railroad shipments. No one knew how many bandits made up Sticky’s band, but the estimates from the City Marble Division Records Office place the number between 100 and 150. While the City was a good-sized town at the turn of the century, over 20,000 people strong, a gang of 100-plus men was a formidable force. The town’s police department wasn’t formed until 1891. Even by the 1920s, it was a scattershot unit according to newspaper clippings from that bygone era. The number of officers serving at one time never eclipsed ten until 1924.
So 150 people or less banded together as a gang with a singular purpose—stealing marbles—and by doing so they kept the town on edge for decades. The local economy, primarily dependent on marbles in those times, went up and down and all around like a roller coaster. It was chaos, but the clamoring of the people fell on deaf ears at city hall. Some say old Mayor Kinkinady was in on the score. Outside of corruption, marbles have been the only constant in the city’s history.
Back to the match with Tubs! He was a wily one, a mibster of the highest order. Many suspected him of cheating on marble drops. When the marbles fell from his fine-tuned fingers it was as if he was placing them carefully in each spot, one by one. Sure enough, his marbles fell just right. My allotment was vulnerable from every angle. He could have his pick. Meanwhile, I was going to be lucky to knock any of his out of the circle. I got first shot and I went after one of his biggest boulders. I took aim with a midsize aggie. As I was knuckling down to make the shot, Steely Dan yelled out, “Let’s play keepsies.”
I wanted no part of that. A 23-time champion who had won twelve in a row versus me, a guy who until 2018 hadn’t played mibs since the fifth grade in 1981? I shook my head no. Dan reached into his pocket and pulled out a Latticino Swirl made of amber glass. The lowest-priced Latticinos of all types—Swicks, Swags, Swizzles, and more—ran about $5000.00. Word was that Tubs won it at an underground mibs tournament on Chicago’s South Side, one of the toughest places to play in the United States outside of Philadelphia and Terre Haute, Indiana. It was said to have once been the favorite Latticino of Princess Diana, but that it was stolen in what is known in conspiracy circles as The Secret Heist of the Royal Latticino. It’s value was estimated at $40,000.
There was no way to authenticate whether Steely Dan had the Latticino Swirl of Princess Di without going to the Official Royal British Department of Snoggy But Inscrutable Marble Queries. Doing that, though, would mean losing the marble to the Royal Family of England. See, the Inquisitor of Inscrutability has the authority to confiscate the Latticino Swirl even if there are no authentication documents to prove that the marble is, in fact, the Latticino Swirl formerly owned and possessed by Princess Diana.
This was a tempting offer, believe you me. Even as a newbie I knew the stories about Tubs, Princess Di, and the Swirl. Tempted as I was, I knew I was liable to lose no matter what. My marbles weren’t that special, though I had picked up a few really good ones in the spring just from playing corner keepsies with neighborhood hoodlums. My most cherished prizes were an oxblood bumbo, three keen bumblebee shooters, five nonstandard-weighted ducks, a clearie smasher, two beachball dobberts, a toothpaste thumper, and, best of all, a devil’s eye bumboozler. I didn’t want to lose those on a risky long shot against an all-time great.
Tubs wasn’t happy that I turned him down. No doubt he was probably bored with just winning. But I could see in his eye a fiery twinkle. He wanted to be the guy to beat the new Cinderella: me. The crowd was cheering for me. I hated it. It just made Steely Dan that much more motivated. You don’t want that man motivated in a marbles match! Even though we weren’t playing keepsies, Tubs was known to break the marbles of opponents when he became perturbed.
I missed my first shot. I suspected Dan was using illegally-weighted ducks, but it was too early in the match to make a challenge like that. Plus, it’s poor gamesmanship to make a speculative challenge. Tubs would likely be as angry as a bee in a bonnet, too. My marbles would have no hope. Instead, I sat back and watched as Tubs cleared my marbles from the circle. Sure enough, he’d smashed half of my commons. I was going to have to put some valued marbles out as ducks in the next match. It was a best-of-five competition and I was hoping to lose three in a row to limit the damage to my marbles collection. Only certain marbles qualified for a tournament of this stature. That meant going with my best stuff, even my best ducks.
Steely Dan mowed me down in three games. In the process, he destroyed one of my beachballs, my oxblood bumbo, and my toothpaste thumper. It was a bad loss. I thought about calling quitsies after the second match, but I didn’t want to disgrace myself in front of the socially elite marbles scene. Still, there were those in attendance who were shouting for me to quit, to give up, to stop the carnage. It was the third match, after all, when I lost my beachball and oxblood bumbo.
Still, I never gave up. I kept going in spite of the odds, in spite of the beating I was taking. Many in the crowd left as the third match got underway, not wanting to watch a dead horse get beaten yet again. One woman in the stands even threw a white towel into the circle and yelled for the officials to call the match, to spare me from greater devastation and embarrassment. But the officials knew, just as I did, that there was far greater humiliation in stopping the match.
I stayed in the game to the very end even though I lost my marbles. Ahem. Afterward, I was on my knees picking up what was left of them when Tubs walked up to me. He extended his hand to me, but he pulled it away as I reached out to shake. He laughed then stomped on one of my good marbles and ground his heel on top of it. He walked off whistling while I dug my blue-base clam out of the dirt.
Before I could sulk, though, I was swarmed by fans who had run onto the field from the stands. A few patted me on the shoulder and congratulated me on a great run and for toughing it out against Steely Dan. Before I knew it, they had lifted me off the ground and were tossing me into the air while shouting “Hurrah! Hurrah!” They carried me to Taco Tico and we all had enchiladas.
