The Volunteer
3
IT WAS ONLY A FEW BLOCKS to the General’s house. She was an old lady, retired from the Salvation Army. She had a modest house on the East Side, not far from the river. There, she lived an austere life, seldom straying from her living room. But it was known among a select few of the transients that she had half a dozen cots in her basement and no one in need of shelter for the night was turned away. G2 stood quietly at her door, waiting and dripping water on the steps. The door opened a crack and the General looked out. Then it was flung open wide.
“Heavens, man! You are soaked to the skin!” the General shouted. “Were you out in the rain all night?” G2 nodded his head. “Who are you? Is that G2?” G2 nodded again. “Haven’t I told you to come any time you are in need? Come in here and let’s get you dry and fed. Don’t worry about the water; I have a mop.” The General led G2 into the house and directly to the basement stairs. She grabbed a cloth shopping bag from a hook as they went. “There’s only Bill O’Reilly down here at the moment and I guess he’ll sleep another two hours. So here is a bag to put your valuables in. Empty all your pockets then throw your clothes out here on the floor.” She turned the water on in a corner shower stall. It began to steam and G2’s shivers shook him nearly off his feet. “Choose clothes out of the closet when you are done. I’ll wash these and you can have them back if you want them. You use that yellow soap all over, even your hair, and use a razor, too. I want you clean and shaved when you sit at my table.” The General left and G2 stripped and stepped into the steaming shower.
It took several minutes standing in the hot water before G2 stopped shaking enough to hold onto the bar of lye soap and scrub it on his body. It stung a little, but he knew it would kill the bugs that had infested his hair and skin. The General was fussy about cleanliness. G2’s last suit of clothes had come from the General’s closet. No doubt she would cut his hair off before nightfall. It would be cooler for the summer that way. Being clean and in clean clothes, the General would send him out to a job tomorrow. The General always had a job for you and you didn’t have to stand in line for it. You just went to a mission or a legion hall or even a church. You swept and mopped all the floors and cleaned the toilets. They gave you $20 and you left. It was good that you got that money, because you would be too clean and fresh-looking to make any money panhandling for a few days.
When he lived at home with his mother and sister, Gerald always had to be careful about how long a shower he took. If he used all the hot water his family would be upset, so his showers were hurried. By the age of fourteen he had become a speed masturbator. A few minutes in the shower with a bar of soap and Gerald could step out both clean and satisfied.
The General never seemed to run out of hot water, so unless there was a line of men waiting to get clean, there was no pressure to keep it short; but once he was warm, G2 felt no desire to stay in the shower as he had in his youth. G2 liked to be clean, but you couldn’t really be clean and homeless. It wasn’t that you couldn’t clean up, but no one gave money if you looked too well cared for. He saw it all the time. The first week was hardest on people who had been cast from their former lives and had to find a way to make it on the street. Like Jane. Of course she didn’t stay on the street too long—most women didn’t. Women mostly went to the shelters and they got them into a program. Once you went into a program, you were expected to do what was necessary to get off the street. They got you a real job, a babysitter, and even dressed you for respectable work. But a lot of women didn’t identify the shelters right away. They tried to make it on the street, sometimes living in their cars until the car ran out of gas and they couldn’t move it again. Then it would get towed and from then on they’d never see it again. No one who lived on the street could afford to get their car out of an impound lot. Jane had a car—and a baby. She ran away from an abusive boyfriend and suddenly discovered she had nowhere to go. She stood on a corner just off the exit ramp with a neatly lettered sign that said, “Homeless. Have baby. Need help.” The “have baby” was a nice touch because children moved people to pity, but at the same time, if you didn’t have the baby with you, they wondered if you really had a baby and if you did, who was watching it while you stood asking for a handout. And she didn’t look homeless. She was young and pretty. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail. She was dressed in a white blouse and dark pants. And no one stopped to give her money. That first day G2 saw her, he was the only one who gave her anything. It took four days before the freshness wore off. She’d been parking in the Walmart parking lot each night and then using their facilities to clean her and her baby up in the morning. She parked the little car that she drove just across the street from where she stood with her sign. That fourth day, the baby was wailing in the car and she couldn’t stand it. She wrapped the child up in a makeshift sling and carried her to the corner. Jane’s hair came down out of its ponytail and her white blouse showed the dirt and wrinkles of three days wear. She couldn’t get the baby to shush and before long tears were streaming down Jane’s cheeks, too. It all seemed too much. But that day, Jane got $14 in gifts. It was enough to get food and cloth diapers for the baby. Jane was at that corner for two weeks before she found a shelter that could take her and her daughter in. The last time G2 saw her, her hair hadn’t been washed in 10 days. Her clothes were rumpled because she slept in them as well as wearing them in the sun. The armpits were yellow and Jane cried almost constantly. But she got $15 - $20 each day standing at her freeway exit.
“And look at you, G2,” the General said. “Once you are clean and shaved you are a young man, not an old one. Why I could send you to work tomorrow and you could be hired full time. No more sleeping on the streets. You’d just need to stay away from the bottle.” Gerald was already feeling nervous about not having wine tonight before he slept. He was afraid he would start thinking again—thinking of what he had done and all that he had not done. If he went to sleep like that, he might think right through the night. Thinking like that could make you crazy. “I know you are not going to just quit drinking. G2. I’ve been there. A better Christian than I am would tell you that you just need to believe in Jesus and he will take away your thirst. But that sounds more like a threat to you than a blessing, doesn’t it, G2? You don’t want Jesus to take your thirst away. You are afraid of what might come instead.” Gerald knew he would get a sermon from the General, but she didn’t make you wait to eat while she preached. She sat at the table with you and scooped potatoes and boiled chicken onto her plate and preached with her mouth full. “People will tell you that life is too short to spend it at the bottom of a bottle, but they don’t know, do they, G2? It’s not too short, it’s too long.” The General took a long look at G2 and for a minute he thought she had finished the sermon before she finished eating. G2 scooped up a spoonful of peas covered with gravy, but almost didn’t get them to his mouth when the General suddenly stood and left the room. G2 was her only guest at dinner tonight. He wasn’t sure if it would offend her if he kept eating while she was gone. He sucked the spoon into his mouth and put it empty on his plate to wait. In a moment the General returned with a bottle and two glasses. “I haven’t much,” said the General, “but that which I have, I give you. In the name of Jesus, drink up.” She poured out what wine there was left in the bottle evenly into the two glasses. She took one and pushed the other toward G2. “It’s not much,” she said, “but it should keep the ghosts away tonight.” A tear welled up in G2’s eye and he whispered, “God bless.”
“I’ve seen you come through here once, twice a year for what now? Ten years? Fifteen?” the General mused aloud. “Those are the only words I hear you say. Well, it’s okay if you prefer just to listen. If a man chooses just two words to say in his entire life, you chose good ones.”
Gerald was eleven when the change started. It was a good year for most of his classmates. Most of the time, he could hide the thick bush of hair that grew in his groin. But his voice gave his early maturity away whenever he spoke. He spent a year excused from music class because he never knew what octave his voice would jump to when he sang. By the time he was twelve, that had been settled, but in spite of a sonorous bass voice that seemed out of place for his slight body, he couldn’t carry a tune, let alone a harmony line. Classmates nicknamed him “Radio” because no matter what he said, it sounded like he was announcing it over the air waves. The voice had done as much as his grades in getting him into college and getting the sales job he’d been offered after graduation. He could make smooth, easy presentations and people hung on every nonsense syllable he uttered. He hated his voice for sounding like a trusted authority, even when he had no idea what he was talking about.
His voice made a liar of him and G2 had decided long ago that he would no longer lie. It was his first week in on the street and G2 discovered how little he knew about living there. But he’d always found his amicable approach to people and his mellow voice to open any door, so the first night he sought shelter under a bridge, he decided to ask a group of men where he could get a bedroll and some assistance. G2 was still clean-shaven and smelled of the last shower he took in his apartment before he locked the door and left. He’d stopped at MacDonald’s for a double cheeseburger for a dollar, figuring he would make the twenty dollars he took with him when he left his apartment last. But his stomach was already complaining of too little to eat. He was still a few steps away from the men under the bridge when they stopped talking and directed their attention toward him. “Would you look at the college boy slumming,” one of them said. “You here as a class assignment? You doing research?” said another. They were decidedly unfriendly, but G2 was determined to make friends in his new life.
“I am a little new at being on the streets. I was wondering if you could help me out. I don’t even have a bedroll…”
“Where’s your camera crew, asshole?” a black man asked as he stood and stepped toward G2. “You puttin’ us all on TV?”
“No,” G2 explained. “I’m not a reporter. I’m just newly homeless and I was hoping someone would show me the ropes.”
“Ain’t no ropes here. You live or you die. Right now you closer to dying.”
“Sorry I bothered you,” G2 said. All four of the men were now approaching him and his heart was racing. He thought there was a kind of brotherhood among the homeless. They took care of each other. He just wanted a little information.
“No cameras, huh?” said a dirty man with a long beard and no teeth. “No one to see you get kicked in the nuts?” It took only a moment before G2 realized the man was not speaking figuratively. He keeled over clutching his privates. “Nobody to see us check you for a microphone?” said the black man who had approached first. He dropped onto G2’s stomach with his knee and ripped his shirt open to look for a wire. “Nobody to watch us check your pockets?” asked a man who looked like he was 80 and already had a hand in G2’s pants pocket. “Look here what I found! He’s got almost $20!” The fourth man, younger than the others, stood a few steps away and said nothing. G2 plead with him with his eyes, but the young man shrugged his shoulders and went back to the fire. “Twenty fucking dollars,” said the old man. “Go home and have a bath and wash the stink of us filth off of you. I’d kill you for fifty dollars. Twenty dollars, I’ll just kick you in the nuts again and tell you to get lost. And stay away from our bridge.” G2 stumbled away from the men, beaten, dirty, and penniless. He slept the night in a doorway of a warehouse and prayed that he could get back into his apartment in the morning.
“Bring your dishes to the kitchen,” the General said. G2 looked nervously at his wine glass, still over half an inch in it. “Don’t worry about the glass. You can take it downstairs with you.” G2 breathed a sigh of relief and brought the rest of the dishes to the sink where he helped wash them. He had learned long ago to ration his wine, just a sip at a time. His last bottle had lasted him three days.
“I know what G2 means,” the General continued in the kitchen. G2 looked at her curiously. He didn’t make a secret of his name; he just never used it. “G2 means God’s Grace. ’Twas by God’s Grace you survived the night. God’s Grace led you to my door this morning. Yes, God’s Grace kept me alive to be here to help you. God’s Grace will take us both to our final reward sooner or later. I don’t threaten you with hell or damnation G2, for how could you tell that from what you suffer day by day. I don’t threaten you because you live in a state of God’s Grace.” The General’s voice turned to a sing-song adopted by many evangelists, G2 noted, but its hypnotic cadence drew him into her trance nonetheless. “Jesus was a transient with no possession but the clothes on his back, and so there is a special place for the homeless in God’s Grace. Who else but the homeless, the downtrodden, the vagrant—who else but you, G2, could offer for the slightest kindness the two words that the world most needs—most desperately wants—to hear? God bless. You say those words and I am humbled for I hear in them God’s Grace. God bless you, G2. Now take your cup to a cot downstairs and go sleep in peace.”
The enthusiastic, if tuneless, voice of the General followed him down stairs. “’Twas grace that brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.”
It got terribly hot in the summertime, even this far north. G2 considered going up all the way to the Canadian border to see if it would be cooler there. There weren’t enough people further north, though. Perhaps it takes a village to raise a child, but it takes a city to feed a beggar. G2 had once tried to panhandle in the smaller towns but there simply weren’t enough resources. G2 didn’t mind moving from place to place, but with smaller towns and cities you had to move every few days. Some places were too small to stay a second day. In the city, moving meant a matter of blocks, not of miles. He could panhandle on Lake Street one day, Michigan Avenue the next, and at the expressway exit the next. He would never see the same person twice. People don’t like to see panhandlers at the same place day after day, G2 had decided. It confirmed suspicions they were lazy and sparked fears they had moved in to stay. But as long as you didn’t show up at the same place more than once a week, you were allowed to stay a few hours and then move on. Transient camps were another thing entirely. It seemed in the summer that wherever you gathered, the police were there in a day or two telling you to move on. G2 preferred to find a quiet spot to himself in the summer and although he moved frequently, he liked to stay near the lake.
During summers back home the family always went to the lake for at least two weeks, even after his father died. They would go “up north” with a dozen other families they knew and rent two room cottages on The Lake. Brian’s family had never gone to The Lake for more than a day or perhaps a rare weekend. It was too expensive and Brian’s father never seemed to have vacation time. But most summers Brian was allowed to come with Gerald for the whole two weeks. They weren’t more than ten when they graduated from the flat-bottomed tippy-canoes to the motor fishing boat. “Tippy canoe and Tyler too,” Gerald’s dad would chant from the shore as the boys rolled the canoe over in the water again, scrambling over the sides back into it to paddle it half-submerged to the shore. But the fishing boat with its little four horsepower trolling motor meant the whole lake was theirs to explore. They started off one day to circle the lake, looking along the shore for a secret pirate’s cove. It took them an hour to row the boat back across the lake from the far side when they ran out of gas in the little boat. No one actually used the fishing boat for fishing. The adults spent their time watching the children play—or sometimes waterskiing. They ate hamburgers or hot dogs from the grill for dinner every night and the children were left in the care of inattentive teenagers on Friday and Saturday nights when the adults went into the supper club in town. No matter what they got up to while their folks were gone, the kids were sure to all be in bed when the parents returned after midnight. After Gerald’s father died, Brian’s mother would sometimes join them for a week. She would sit with Gerald’s mother at the table or on the porch swing talking in hushed tones. Most nights half a dozen adults would gather at one or another’s kitchen table to play pinochle. When it was finally dark and the children were sent to bed, they could hear the low voices and laughter as the grown-ups played their games. After Gerald’s father died, however, his mother stopped playing cards. She didn’t have the energy to stay up that late any more, she said. When they turned 16, both Brian and Gerald declared that they didn’t want to go to any stupid lake that summer. Gerald’s mother seemed to breathe a sigh of relief at that news and cancelled the cabin reservation. They never returned to the lake as a family.
G2 returned every summer in his mind as he slept beneath a park bench near the water.
There weren’t many fat people among the homeless, and morbid obesity was almost unknown among those who had been homeless for a few years. William McKinley Smith III was a noted exception. Well over six feet tall, Mack as other transients called him, was also over 300 pounds. It was an accidental encounter that put G2 in Mack’s company headed for the local food shelf. Accidental in that Mack had fallen over G2 in the park late the night before. Mack had narrowly avoided crushing G2, having landed on his legs and not his torso. G2 thought that perhaps he should not have curled up in his bedroll so near the dumpsters, but there had been a soft bit of unmown grass here next to the trees. The trees masked the dumpsters from view in the park and thus hid G2 as well. It seemed ideal at the time, but the next morning being garbage pick-up, Mack was making the rounds to collect whatever he could find to eat. He had stumbled on a box with three stale donuts in it and was retreating from the dumpster when he stumbled over G2. He gobbled down his treasure and then lay down next to where G2 was and went to sleep. G2 considered moving elsewhere, but his spot of grass was still soft and Mack’s bulk blocked the chill breeze that was blowing off the lake. G2 fell back to sleep, comfortable in the knowledge that Mack would not ask to share his wine. Food was to Mack what wine was to G2. He loved eating and couldn’t care less what it was he ate. He didn’t love food; he loved eating. When he had eaten enough, he slept. Stories G2 had heard said Mack had money. Lots of money. But Mack chose to live on the streets and eat rather than living in a house and going hungry.
“You know the problem with this world?” Mack asked G2 as they lumbered toward the food shelf in the morning. “There’re too many fat people. Look at them. Mamas, babies, grandpas. All eating too much food instead of sharing with those in need.” It was obvious to G2 that Mack considered himself in the latter category and not the former. “The men in my family have always been big. My grandpa, William McKinley Smith Senior, had a special chair built at the head of the family table, just to hold him. It was a good chair. I sold it for $400 in 1985. The man who bought it was small by comparison to my grandpap. My father, William McKinley Smith Junior was said to have eaten a whole ham at one sitting—breakfast, no less. Now there was a man who loved his food as much as he loved his wife. We joked that if he ran out of food, she would be his next dinner. I’m as big a man as they were. It takes food to keep a body like mine going. If I ever have a son, he will be William McKinley Smith the Fourth and he will be a big man, too.”
Brian’s father was the biggest man Gerald had known when he was growing up. Howard was six feet five inches tall and dwarfed everyone else that Gerald knew. Once they had attended a Fourth of July parade together. Brian and Gerald must have been eight or ten, he thought. They were caught in the back of the crowd and Howard had lifted one boy up on each of his shoulders. There they sat through the entire parade, able to see every float and marching band and clown throwing candy. They felt like giants. Howard worked in an automobile factory and Gerald thought he must be so strong from having to build cars all day. He hoped that one day he would be big and strong enough to work in a factory like Howard. It seemed so much better than wearing a tie and sitting in an office all day like his father did. But Gerald had grown up slightly built, while Brian towered over him. Genetics were at work. Neither Brian nor Howard was fat, though.
“My mother, God bless her, used to say Dad and me would eat her out of house and home. I guess she was right,” Mack continued between great puffs of breath. “She’s been gone—oh—15 years now, I suppose. She left me the house in her will. But when I had to choose between food and shelter, I sold it. Just can’t see wasting money on things like insurance and electricity. “You can’t eat taxes,” my Dad used to say. When the doctors told him he had cancer and chemotherapy killed his appetite, he figured he’d rather die fast and save Mom the burden of wasting money on his healthcare. Wrestling his body out of the car in the garage took the entire fire department when he killed himself. But taxes paid for that service, at least. If there ever comes a time when I can’t feed myself, I’ll end it quickly, too. But in the meantime, there’s the food shelf. I’ll just thank you now for coming here with me, G2, in case I forget later.”
They entered the facility and took their places in line. It was too crowded for G2 under normal circumstances, but Mack’s constant talk kept him focused. Mack told him which items to pick, avoiding things that had to be refrigerated or cooked. Gerald would never have chosen things in cans because they were heavy and he didn’t have a can opener. But Mack insisted that he take as many cans of beans and of soup as they would allow. Three cans of Spam and a surprisingly heavy bag of carrots topped off their allotment. They carried their bags out of the food shelf and into the bushes where Mack had carefully stowed his grocery cart the night before.
That was something G2 did not understand. He had been given a cart once. It was very nice. A group of well-meaning folks started handing out grocery carts to the homeless. The carts had been modified so they folded out into tents. You had shelter anyplace you went and a place for your possessions in the cart. “Everyone should have a roof over their heads,” the happy social workers said as they shoved carts into the hands of the homeless. G2 kept losing track of his cart. He didn’t have anything to put in it and it seemed senseless to push around an empty cart to sleep under at night. When the weather got bad enough to need that kind of thing, G2 moved further south. One day he hopped a train and left the cart tent sitting beside the switch yard. He supposed someone had found it and taken it. He certainly wasn’t going back to Oakland just to find out.
“Now, G2,” Mack was saying, “you take these.” He handed G2 six huge carrots. “Nothing like a couple bites of carrot if you get to feeling hungry. Six carrots—why that might last a man like you the rest of the summer. And don’t think I forgot something. We’ll just walk over to Copeland’s now and get you yours. Push this cart for me till we get to the sidewalk there.” Mack was already scooping beans out of an open can into his mouth. G2 kept wheeling the cart while Mack ate, all the way to the liquor store. In return for his services at the food shelf, G2 parted company with Mack having six fat carrots and a fresh box of wine. It was worth having been almost crushed in the middle of the night.
Nighttime was always the worst. That’s when G2 felt the feeling that wasn’t there the most. There was supposed to be a feeling of deep joy or contentment or satisfaction or peace that made everything else okay. That was the way it was supposed to be when you did something good for someone—when you sacrificed yourself for a cause. But when everything was quiet and G2 had taken his last sip of wine, his brain went haywire and he kept thinking. He kept seeing things the way he’d seen them as a child.
Like the time his father took him fishing in the river. Dad always said he liked to fish. It was a real pain in the ass for Gerald, and somehow he got the impression that no matter what his father said, fishing was something he’d once done to have food, not because he enjoyed it, and he wouldn’t be doing it now if he didn’t think it was the right thing for him to teach his son. “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day,” his father said. “Teach a man to fish and he’ll never be home for supper.” Then he’d laugh a kind of hollow laugh that was supposed to mean they were sharing quality leisure time together when they both wanted to watch football on TV.
Gerald experimented with several methods of putting a long red night crawler on the hook. There was the one jab and throw it in the water method. Just stick the hook through the fattest part of the worm and drop your line in the river. The bobber would jump once in the water and Gerald would pull his line out, the hook empty. His father called that “feeding the fish.” “Too easy for the fish to eat and run,” his dad would say. So Gerald tried his father’s method—the accordion technique. You stuck the hook through the worm, then folded it over and stuck it again and again. This meant that no part of the worm was far from the business end of the hook. In Gerald’s experience it just meant the bobber went down two or three times before he pulled up an empty hook. “Clever fish,” his dad would say, pulling up his own empty hook. Gerald couldn’t remember if he’d ever actually seen his father catch a fish. He asked his dad if all this hooking a worm didn’t hurt them. “No,” his father said, “they don’t feel anything. Worms are natural fish food. That’s what they were made for.” That’s when Gerald came up with the thread the pipe method. He started at one end of the worm and threaded the hook up the length inside the worm. There was still enough worm left off the hook to wiggle good, but no fish was going to eat him off the hook. Gerald’s next big lesson was taking the hook out of a fish. With the worm still thrashing around in the fish’s mouth and the fish flopping around on the shore trying to figure out what it was doing out of the water and why it couldn’t get the worm the rest of the way down its throat, the slippery fish was almost impossible to hold onto. When Gerald finally got the hook out, the fish flopped back into the water before he could get the stringer through its gills. His dad said, “It was too small to eat anyway.” They packed up their fishing gear and left the river. On the way home, they stopped at the schoolhouse where the boosters club was holding a fish fry. His dad bought two tickets and they went in. “Give a man a buck and you’ll have all the fish you can eat,” his dad laughed. Gerald and his dad then proceeded to see who could eat the most pieces of fish, all the time making jokes about which one was the one that got away. “Take that you worm-thief,” his dad said while dunking a deep-fried perch in a big bowl of tartar sauce.
G2 still wondered if it was true the worms didn’t feel anything. They sure squirmed around a lot. He’d tried fishing once or twice when he couldn’t seem to find a hand-out anyplace, but the big carp he caught never seemed to cook all the way through and tasted muddy when he finally got a mouthful of the mostly raw fish in his mouth. It didn’t seem like the worm had all that much time to think about what it was feeling, though. They were born to be fish food. They got picked up, stuck on a hook and eaten. It took longer to kill, clean, cook, and eat the fish. The worm should have felt something in those final moments, though. Pride that it was being sacrificed for the greater good of humanity or something. Anticipation in knowing someday the executioner would be dead and the worms would crawl in and out like that grade school verse said. “When you see a hearse go rolling by, you wonder who is the next to die. The worms crawl in. The worms crawl out. The worms play pinochle on your snout.” G2 was sure the worms were crawling in and out of his father now, if there was anything left to crawl through. He wondered if his mother was still alive. It had been about thirty years since his dad died. What was still left? G2 tried to remember what the casket had looked like. No worm would ever be able to get through that concrete vault and industrial steel, hermetically sealed casket they’d put him in. How was the body supposed to return to dust wrapped up like that? G2 certainly didn’t want to be sealed up in some aluminum and concrete Tupperware. When Brian’s grandmother died, they burned her up. Nothing left but ashes and G2 was pretty sure the worms didn’t eat ashes. Maybe if G2 was lucky, he’d drop off a cliff somewhere and they’d never find his body. Then the worms could all be happy for a moment of triumph before another smart ass kid threaded it on a hook and fed it to the fish.
Comments
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