The Volunteer
1
A COLD WIND blew across G2’s face and he stirred in his sleep. He clenched his eyes shut against wakefulness, but the ammonia smell of fresh urine assaulted him. He could have slept through the wind. He just never got used to the piss. He didn’t think it was his, but his hand slipped down to his pants just to be sure.
G2 cracked one eye open. Wee Willy was still letting go with a gusher not ten feet away against a bush that was nearly dead from the frequent waterings. G2 should have put his bedroll further away.
Before he let go of the last vestiges of sleep, G2 assessed his situation as he did every time he awoke.
No. It didn’t feel that way.
There was no “make you feel good inside” feeling. No deep satisfaction. No heroic pride. No nobility. None of the things there should have been.
When you read about it in school—back in sixth grade or so—you always knew the hero had that feeling. Like that Union soldier who led the charge up some hill in the history books. He knew when he set foot outside the bunker that he wouldn’t make it halfway up the hill before forty musket balls peppered his body. But someone else would pick up the flag where he fell and move it further up the ridge. He knew he’d done his job—done his duty. He was brave and heroic and proud. He was satisfied that his life had meaning. He felt good inside, even while he was dying.
That was the way it was supposed to be when you volunteered, even if it meant you died in the process. You felt good about it.
Gerald Good, G2 to everyone else, checked again. He looked for the feeling. The satisfaction.
No. It didn’t feel that way.
Bad X was making his way through the camp, putting the touch on people to pay their “union dues.” Bad X was an organizer. It seemed there was one in every camp. G2 considered slipping out of camp while Bad X shot the bull with Greaser. It wouldn’t make a difference, though. Bad X would catch up with him tomorrow or the next day. You didn’t want to get behind on your dues. Of course, G2 could hop across the track and catch the train for Cincinnati that was leaving the freight yard. G2 was pretty sure it was in Cincinnati that he met his first Bad X, though, so it wouldn’t be any different there. Besides, if you didn’t pay your dues to Bad X, you couldn’t point to him when Bad Y or Bad Z showed up. You could always count on some bad ass coming around. You put the touch on folks at the supermarket and Bad X put the touch on you in the camp. Only most of the time you didn’t beat the folks at the supermarket to a pulp.
Shit. He might as well be working at General Fucking Motors.
“G2, my man.” Bad X grinned showing the empty spaces on either side of his one remaining front tooth. “Watcha got for me, brother?”
G2 reached out his hand and let his one crumpled up dollar bill fall out of it into Bad X’s giant paw. It took a minute for Bad X to smooth out the bill enough to tell what it was.
“That all you got?” G2 reached in his pocket and produced another quarter. He nodded his head. The weight of his chin seemed to drag his head down to his chest. Maybe Bad X wouldn’t beat him.
“When you gonna get your shit together, G2? Don’t know what I’m gonna do with you.” Bad X sat down on the upturned tin can next to G2 and slumped himself forward. From a distance they looked like identical statues—the kind of urban art you find at bus stops and random corners of public parks. “Brothers hearing the news” the artist would title the sculpture. People would read it and then walk all the way around the statue, trying to figure out what kind of bad news the brothers had just heard. “Death in the family,” one would say. “War,” would come from another. “Wall Street collapse,” a third would chime in. Whatever it was, it had to be terrible. Two grown men sitting there as morosely as if the world just ended. Some guy in a wool scarf would come by and look at them. The sculpture would “speak to his heart.” The next day he would come back with a friend and two more scarves. He’d wrap one around the neck of each of the bronze brothers and then sit beside them in the same position—chin lowered to his chest and shoulders slumped forward—while his buddy took a picture of them with his cellphone and posted it to Facebook. When they left, the guy in the scarf would consider leaving the scarves around the bronze necks for others to see, but then he’d grab them as he walked away.
“It’s the ’conomy, stupid.” Bad X chuckled at his joke. No one in the camp had ever got it. “You can’t even get sober for a buck. You go MacD’s and you still need the quarter to pay the tax on their dollar menu.” Bad X tilted his head to consider G2. “You been panhandling down in the district?” G2 nodded slightly. “Those rich shits don’t care about you. You gotta go to Safeway where moms with three kids hanging off their skirts will give you money to keep you away from their babies. They cover it up by trying to teach their brats about helping others. That’s okay. You get down there and be an object-lesson to the little ones.”
Having finished his lecture, Bad X stood up to move on. G2 didn’t move.
“G2.” He looked up. Bad X was holding the quarter out to him. G2 reached up for it slowly. “Bad X never leaves a man with nothing,” he whistled through the gaps in his teeth. “Put some more with this and bring a bottle of two-buck chuck to my fire tonight. We’ll call it even.”
G2 watched him go. Looked like Whiskers would be the next one Bad X touched. He looked back. G2 picked up his canvas bag with “Windows XP” stenciled on the side of it and headed out to work the parking lot at Safeway.
There was too much time to think, that was the hell of it. When that kid in the Civil War—or was it the Revolution?—when he went charging up that ridge, he only had to hold his thoughts of honor and bravery for a couple of minutes before they cut him down. It was over. He could spend eternity being a hero. Twenty years, though. That was too much time to think. That kid couldn’t have held his self-satisfaction and good feelings for five minutes if the first bullet hadn’t killed him. Twenty years going up the ridge—why that’d drive a man crazy. Had it only been twenty years? It seemed like forever.
G2 pulled the piece of church bulletin out of his pocket from last Easter. He had four of them stashed in his bag. He got them out of the recycle bin before the janitor chased him away. All the words to a hymn G2 didn’t know were printed on one side. A lot of Jesus and halleluiah. But the other side was blank. It was clean pink paper. He couldn’t understand why that rich church threw away perfectly good blank paper and then chased him away from taking it. Enough paper and you could do anything. One day he’d write all about what it was like—his life experiences. He’d sell the books to that rich church about how he was saved by the words of a hymn in their recycle bin. His experiences kind of all ran together after a while, though. He didn’t know exactly where to start. But he had paper. He dug the stub of pencil out of his pocket and chewed a bit of the wood back away from the lead.
“XXN417,” he wrote. Yes. That was definitely a good one. He hadn’t seen a license plate with a higher number than that. It wouldn’t be long now until he’d see one that started with “Y.” Maybe two or three months, or when he got back next spring. He put away his pencil and paper. Wouldn’t write down anymore today. It wasn’t like he was obsessed with it. He just liked knowing what number they’d got up to. There was meaning to the order. He would figure it out eventually. He held up his cardboard sign and a driver at the exit rolled down the window.
“G2,” the driver said. Well, of course he knew G2’s handle. It was scrawled on his sign right under “God bless.” G2 walked over to the car and bowed his head respectfully. “Have you eaten today?” G2 shook his head. “Here,” said the driver. G2 held out his hand hoping for a dollar and the driver put a wrapped granola bar in it. “That’ll give you a little something in your stomach.”
“God bless,” G2 whispered as he stepped back on the curb. The car pulled out of the parking lot onto 32nd Street and headed west. G2 put the bar in his canvas bag and waited for another car. Rule number one: Never let them see you eating.
Sometimes they were like that. They wouldn’t give you money because that just encouraged panhandling and drunkenness. But they couldn’t let you starve either. So they’d break into a six-pack of granola bars and give you one. Or they’d hand you a Jell-O Pudding Cup. Maybe they’d have a piece of beef jerky or half a sandwich. Stuff you had to eat today or it would give you cramps and the trots. They never cared about tomorrow. Why should he?
But when somebody gave you food, you never stood there and ate it. That discouraged anybody else from lending a hand. They’d see you had food and figure you weren’t bad enough off to need their help. It was like people who only played the lottery if it was over 20 million. Enough to make it worthwhile. That was the problem when there was a line of cars. If one person gave you something, that let everyone else off the hook. So you stashed the bar, the sandwich, the yogurt in your bag and waited until enough cars passed that those in line hadn’t seen you take a gift. Then maybe another one would feel generous and this time you’d get a buck. If you got enough… Well, five bucks would get you a liter-and-a-half bottle of cheap sweet wine. You could share that around the fire at night. Guys would give you their food for a taste of your wine. That was the way it worked. If G2 couldn’t make a few more bucks today, he’d trade that granola bar for a drink of someone else’s wine. G2 didn’t mind. He could go two or three days without food before his gut started tying up in knots. Going without wine was a lot harder. It made him think too much. That thinking. That’s what makes life miserable. If you just keep thinking about it, you’ll go crazy.
The line in front of the Job Corps office was long, as usual. Maybe even longer. G2 really couldn’t think why he got up to come over here this morning. They never had anything for him. He didn’t think they even liked him. Mexicans would get all the good jobs before he even got to the door. The Chinese lady who asked for your name and identification definitely didn’t like him. She got mad because he couldn’t understand her. Apparently her Spanish was better than her English because the Mexicans all seemed to understand her just fine. They grinned and nodded their heads and then they went to work. G2 wasn’t really sure if he would trust her enough to get in one of those trucks with the Mexicans, headed to some sort of job somewhere he didn’t know doing something he didn’t know how to do. He wouldn’t put it past her to send him off to a concentration camp. Maybe he’d disappear and nobody would know he was gone until they got sent to “a job.” They did that kind of thing. “What happened to G2?” Bad X would ask. Someone—maybe Bill White, black as night—would say, “I think he went to Cleveland. He been talking about Cleveland.” Like G2 would ever go to Cleveland. It was too cold there to live on the street and G2 hated the shelters that made you listen to the preaching and made you take a shower while they kept your bag “safe” and wouldn’t even let a bottle of cheap wine through the front door. He could stand the other if he could have a drop of wine. But no. It was like a concentration camp. If he got in one of those trucks to go to a job, he would disappear like a Jew in Poland and they’d dig his bones out of a mass grave in fifty years and say “Oh look. It’s G2. Guess he didn’t go to Cleveland after all.”
Two men walked across the street and stood in line behind G2. They weren’t day laborers. You could tell by their easy stance and the pack of cigarettes they shared. They must have come from across town to get the good jobs at the Job Corps. They were big men. G2 felt tiny standing in their shadow. He felt his heart beating faster. They would probably get nice clipboard jobs while G2 lifted boxes of fruit off a truck. That Chinese lady didn’t like G2. But she’d like these two. She would treat them special. “You want to work in air conditioned place?” she’d say to them in her Asian accent. Chinese? Japanese? Some nese. “I got nice supervisor position just made for man like you.” G2 just wished they wouldn’t stand so close behind him. There was a whole sidewalk there and they didn’t need to crowd him. G2 hated crowds. Crowds were dangerous. What was that story about people getting trampled in a football stadium? Or was it a nightclub? Didn’t make a difference. It could have been in line at the Job Corps. Newspapers would have headlines in the morning. “Stampede at Job Corps kills one, injures many more.” Would he be the one or the many more? That’s why he always put his bedroll on the far edge of a camp. Some people liked to be in the middle of things, surrounded by bums snoring and farting. You could die of ass-fixiation if you slept in the middle of camp. G2 had to get out of the middle. If he moved someone would be on him. Someone would step on him when they got up to take a leak. Some sloppy drunk would fall over him and then beat him up for being in the way. G2 didn’t like having someone walking around while he slept. It wasn’t natural. When G2 lay down on the outer edge of the camp, he could get up and leave whenever he wanted to. He might decide to catch that early morning train west and no one would be the wiser.
Gerald had once been in the middle of a crowd of cheering, happy people. How can people in a crowd be happy? It was in high school or college; he couldn’t remember for sure which. When did he play ball? He played ball, didn’t he? The team won a championship and people flooded onto the court. Everybody was hot and sweaty and stank. Not just the players. The whole crowd stank. Gerald had a sensitive nose. Crowds stank. He hadn’t been the star player, but he played. He was caught up in the frenzy of cheering, back-slapping, and hugging. Hot stinking bodies gripping each other in big bear hugs like some orgy was happening. First the team and the cheerleaders. That was nice. Then the coaches and students and parents and teachers. Were his parents there? Gerald struggled to place them in the crowd, but they didn’t materialize in his mind. They weren’t always in Gerald’s memories, so he must not have been very important to them. They weren’t there to see him score in the last minute of the game and they weren’t there in the crowd afterward. It wasn’t the game-winning point. Their team was way ahead, but he scored. The crowd and teammates and cheerleaders were all there pushing around him and touching him. It was a happy time. How could a crowd be happy? G2 tried to find that feeling he had of joy and excitement that made being in a crowd okay. But he couldn’t feel it. Even thinking about that crowded gymnasium with people pressing against him from every direction made his heart beat faster. And it wasn’t happy. It felt like he couldn’t breathe. He tried to find the excitement and joy, but only found panic.
G2 turned in the job line to ask the men to back off a little and let him breathe. Their smoke was choking him. Three more guys had joined the line behind them. Gerald stepped out of line. There were too many people standing there, waiting to get in trucks and be taken to concentration camps where they would be crowded into cattle cars and wouldn’t be able to breathe. He motioned for the two big men with cigarettes to move up and take his place as he walked resolutely to the end of the line. They looked at him strangely, but moved up to take his place. G2 stood at the end of the line, almost gasping for air. He saw another man approaching from across the corner. Abruptly, G2 turned and walked away. There weren’t any jobs there for him anyway. They didn’t like him at the Job Corps. By the time he got to the front of the line, that ’nese woman would be sending people away, saying, “You should come earlier. Don’t be so lazy.” There just was no use being there.
The Manhattan Club was a business district café where the almost-there businessmen took their clients and secretaries for lunch. The real executives didn’t go outside for lunch. G2 could imagine them sitting in their offices with secretaries feeding them some egg foo young prepared by their private chef. The Manhattan Club was for those who didn’t have private chefs, but they looked like important people, anyway. When the important people wanted to be seen, they sat next to the big windows at the front of the restaurant and looked out on the street. Everybody ignored the businessmen who took their secretaries and mistresses to the enclosed booths at the back of the restaurant. Nobody ever looked at them as they went in, like only their waiter ever actually saw them. G2 worked there as a busboy once and got fired for looking at a man and woman in a booth. All he did was look and they fired him. Between the show-offs in the window seats and the non-existent people in the booths, there was the boisterous crowd around the oyster bar, slapping each other’s backs and ordering another martini.
Bad X always told G2 he was wasting his time going to the business district. Executives didn’t want to be seen giving money to bums. Executives wanted the streets cleaned up and people like G2 put in jail. That’s what Bad X always said. If you spoke to an executive, just to ask for a damned dime, they called the cops. They ignored the signs you held up. It was no good going to the business district, Bad X always said. But G2 was drawn there like a fly to shit. One day that cheap bastard would hand him a buck and look him in the eye—straight in the eye. And when he did, he’d know and it would all be over. G2 to saw him here once. Maybe twice. It was always on a Wednesday, and that’s when G2 went to the business district. When G2 was in town, he sat outside the Manhattan Club on Wednesdays and waited. The guy always had a buck in his pocket. He would come out of the restaurant, talking to some guy or gal like he didn’t see anything else in the world. He’d reach in his pocket and drop the dollar in G2’s cup. It was like an automatic response to the presence of the bum on the street, even though he never looked at G2 or acknowledged his existence. G2 often wondered if he treated any other bum the same way or if it was only him. G2 never told anyone else about it because nobody else came to the business district to panhandle and G2 didn’t want them to. Sometimes another man in a suit would throw some coins in G2’s cup. But it was always a single, wadded up dollar bill from this one. G2 wondered if he crumpled up the dollar so he could imagine he was throwing it away. Maybe he made a statement that said this was just a piece of trash and that old bum is a waste can. Or maybe it was an old unbreakable reflex to crumple it up. Was he angry at the dollar and that made him wad it up? Was he trying to make it small so it could be hidden and no one would see him give it away and say “that just encourages them?”
Gerald looked into a bum’s eyes once—a long time ago. Really looked deep. At first, he didn’t see anything but two eyes. They were a little glassy with the pupils dilated. Then Gerald began to read the silent desperation, the deep pleading in the bum’s eyes. And Gerald knew he could help him. If he looked hard enough, G2 could see that expression in the eyes reflected back at him in the café window. But now he knew that he could not help, and the eyes retreated back into emptiness.
The man left the restaurant talking intently to his companion. G2 was sure the executive hadn’t even seen him, but his hand snaked out of his pocket and a crumpled dollar bill fell into G2’s cup. G2 watched until the man turned the corner and then he got up and ambled away toward the freight yard. Warm weather was coming. G2 reckoned he’d go spend some time up north.
He was riding the train across country to Disneyland. His parents had put the children to bed in the compartment next to theirs and went back to the lounge car to have a drink. There was never any alcohol in their home. His father didn’t even allow beer or wine in the refrigerator. Knowing his parents were having a drink sent shivers down little Gerald’s spine as he tried to go to sleep. Gerald had a vague memory of his father sitting at the kitchen table drinking a beer. He asked his father for a sip. It was a childish thing to do. Kids always want to try what their parents are doing, didn’t they? But little Gerald’s request shook his father. The man was at a loss for words. He looked at Gerald as though he’d never seen the boy before—had never contemplated the idea of being a father. In that long moment of eye contact, something unspoken passed between the two. Then, without saying a word in response, his father abruptly stood up and poured the beer down the kitchen sink. He opened the refrigerator, took out the remaining cans, popped the tops, and poured them out one by one. Turning to Gerald, his father said, “There is nothing to taste.” There had never again been beer or alcohol in their house as far as Gerald knew. But when his parents went out alone, or—as now—escaped from the children to a lounge car, they returned smelling of the sweet perfume of wine. His parents were always happy when they returned from these dates, as if a great burden had been lifted from their shoulders for a while. When Gerald turned twenty-one, he had still never tasted a drop of alcohol. Somehow the train was inextricably linked to this memory. Feeling the rhythmic bump of the rails filled his mind with images of his parents coming back to their compartment, bouncing against the doors of the sleeper car as the train swayed on the tracks out of synch with the swaying walk of his parents. The sweet smell of wine or champagne on his mother’s breath as she paused at their compartment to kiss the children in bed. The whispered good night to his little sister in the berth below him. The thoughts were neither happy nor sad. They were simply part of the rails.
G2 wondered if his sister still lived in Seattle. It was a temperate climate in Seattle, but G2 still didn’t like to spend the winter there. It was too dark. Even in the short hours of the day, the sky was dark with clouds. But his sister said she liked the area and that it was always green. She was 23 and newly married when G2 saw her last. That was a long time ago. He could tell she was embarrassed by him when she stepped outside her home to hug him and walk to a nearby coffee shop to talk. He didn’t recall saying much, even then. He would get his act together, he had said. He just needed sometime to see the country. His clothes still fit him back then. And he’d managed to grab a disposable razor from an apartment complex garbage bin so he would look clean for her. But she could always see through him.
When Gerald was fifteen and Marian was eleven, he was left at home to babysit. He’d had a clever plan. As soon as she was asleep, he would slip out and meet his best friend Brian in the park. He tried to get her to bed and asleep as quickly as possible, but she resolutely refused to cooperate. “I don’t want to be left alone,” she said. “And if I go to sleep, you’ll leave me alone.”
Even in the coffee shop, she knew he wasn’t coming back. She’d put a hand on the back of his and whispered, “Goodbye Jer-Jer.” Then she left him in the coffee shop with both cups of coffee and five dollars as she hurried home. G2 recognized that gesture.
Gerald must have been about twelve or thirteen when his uncle died. His mother’s brother fought lung cancer for three years before he succumbed. The mortician’s makeup couldn’t hide the emaciated remnant that lay in the coffin surrounded by flowers. Gerald and his sister followed their mother into the chapel and stood a respectful step behind as their mother stared at the corpse with tears silently streaming down her cheeks. Then she reached out and lightly touched her brother’s hand and whispered, “Goodbye, Donny.” She turned away, leaving Gerald and his little sister Marian staring into the casket. After only a moment, Marian mimicked her mother’s gesture and said, “Goodbye, Uncle Don.” Then she, too, turned to join her mother. Gerald hadn’t wanted to touch the corpse but was overwhelmed by a morbid curiosity to find out what it felt like. He expected cold, but not quite as cold as it felt. Nor did Gerald expect the plasticene smoothness he felt. The flesh was completely flaccid. It was like touching a plastic wrapped piece of meat in the grocery store. It surprised Gerald so much that he forgot to say anything—just turned and went to sit with his mother and sister while a man who knew Don stood to talk about all the wonderful things he had done and what a good friend he had been. All through the funeral, Gerald kept rubbing his fingers together, still able to feel his uncle’s dry, cold skin. When his father was killed in an automobile accident the next year, Gerald saw his mother and sister go through the same motions at the casket. Gerald declined to touch the man who had been his father.
G2 wondered if—in that coffee shop when his sister had said goodbye and touched him so many years ago—if his flesh had felt as cold and plastic to her as it did now to himself.
Comments
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