“Got a lot of trash,” Henry said in a tone of voice that left me wondering if it was a question or a compliment. He stood still, peering over his glasses at me as if he wanted to discuss my garbage.
I was not going to talk trash with Henry! I knew what he really wanted to do: go through my trash and salvage the good stuff. So I tried to change the subject. “Hi, Henry! How are you?” I asked.
“Still kickin’,” he said with a muffled laugh. Then his eyes returned to my trash cans.
Henry seldom threw anything away. He saved old newspapers, used pencils the size of cigarette butts, and washed out milk containers in which he saved some of the other things he saved. He even peeled the labels off tin cans and used the cans to store nuts, bolts, buttons, and pins. Henry had seen the advent of the automobile and the television. He had fought in what they called The War to End All Wars—World War I—and he had lived through one of the epic events in the history of the United States: the Depression.
The Depression was the great equalizer for the national ego of the United States. People did not eat. They slept in the cold and shivered. They lost everything. They were homeless. Hundreds of thousands needed help.
And the poor helped each other.
John Steinbeck wrote in The Grapes of Wrath: “I’m learnin’ one thing good. Learnin’ it all the time and ever’ day. If you’re in trouble or hurt or need—go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help—the only ones.”
The souls who lived through those years suffered and therefore looked at the world in a cautious way.
I grew up at the beginning of the “throw-away” age. My trash included such things as milk cartons, newspapers, magazines, diapers, plastic bottles, cardboard boxes, paper towels, tin foil, and aerosol cans—just to name a few.
“It’s a throw-away world these days—people, too,” Henry said, shaking his head as he watched me stuff my trash cans to the brim and then struggle to lock the lids in place. I knew what Henry meant. If he lived much longer, his kids (now fifty) would put him in a “home” where he could get the “proper care.”
“It is,” I agreed. I knew even then what he meant, but I didn’t take it to heart. I didn’t embrace it. I was busy at twenty-seven. I had not lived through the Depression. I had always eaten, and I had always been warm. I did not understand it then, but all I had and all I was going to have—and eventually lose—was given to me by the grace of people like Henry, who had lived through the Depression. When I was a young boy, it was those people who paid me fifty cents to shovel the snow off their walks. It was they who hired me as a sportswriter. It was they who taught me to think and to do. They lived in small houses on tree-lined streets with sidewalks, and when a neighbor was in trouble, they were there to help.
But Henry knew he would be thrown away. He would be placed in some human storage unit where he could be managed. His social security checks would cover the costs, and he would get a small allowance to cover his basic needs. It would be so antiseptic, clean, and tidy—breakfast at seven, lunch at noon, dinner at five. The family would finally clean up the firetrap he called a house and throw away the old newspapers, the old tin cans, and the milk cartons. They would sell his vintage baseball trading cards of Berra, Podres, and Schoendist and his prized, dusty editions of The Saturday Evening Post with Norman Rockwell paintings on the cover. They would then have a big garage sale and dispose of the rest of his “junk.”
“Turn right here,” Jake said. “Pull around back and we’ll case it out.”
We had barely rolled to a stop when C and Jake threw the van doors open and headed for the dumpsters. They were like kids at Toys“R”Us, excited about getting something—anything.
“I’ll take the one on the right,” Jake said. C acquiesced to the elder statesman of dumpster diving and walked toward the one on the left. Jake lifted the lid on the big green metal dumpster and looked in. “You’ve got to be careful,” he said turning back to me. “You’ve got to avoid sharp objects and diapers. Looks good! It’s about half full,” he added as he grabbed onto the rim and then climbed into the dumpster.
Jake stood for a moment atop the pile of trash and then pulled out his rolling papers and cigarette tobacco. “I’ve been doing this for thirty years now,” Jake said as he prepared his smoke. “I’ve eaten out of these things to survive,” he said as he licked his rolling paper, formed his smoke, and lit it.
I was in the presence of the Master of Survival.
“Here’re some donuts, right off!” Jake announced. He opened a large box, picked a donut out, and took a bite. “A cream-filled Bismarck. Still good. Here, you want one?” he asked, handing the box to me. “Take a couple. We’ll take the rest home.” He started digging deeper. “Let’s see if we can find something to wash them down with,” he said.
C was throwing trash bags full of stuff out of the other dumpster.
“Aha! Found the roasted chickens,” Jake said, holding up greasy, cellophane-wrapped chickens in each hand. “Man, they throw six or seven of these away every night. Here, put these in the van,” he said, pushing them toward me.
“I found some potato salad and bean salad over here,” C yelled. “We can have a picnic!” C climbed out of dumpster number two. “I need a bag to put this stuff in,” he said as he picked up one of the plastic bags he had tossed out earlier. He turned it upside down and the contents tumbled to the pavement.
“What’s this?” he asked as he bent over to look at the stuff on the ground. He picked up several photos. Some were torn in half. He studied them for a minute. “Looks like another broken heart and another dream that came to an end,” he said. “A bunch of family photos. A husband, two kids, a dog—no, two dogs,” he added as he sifted through the pictures.
“Any rings in there?” Jake asked. “Check for rings!”
“Not in this bunch,” C replied. “We’ll have to look in the other bags.”
Jake jumped out of his dumpster. “Let’s take a look,” he said, grabbing one of the bags. “This one is kinda heavy.” He ripped it open. “Picture frames, photo albums, a couple of ties, an old smoking pipe ...” He was taking inventory. “Hey! Here are the rings!” He picked two rings off the ground and held them up to the light. “In this light it’s hard to tell if they’re worth anything,” Jake said, squinting. “You never know. Could be worth ten bucks or ten thousand.” He added the rings to C’s collection of photos. “You found them, C.”
“I’ll share the money if they’re valuable,” C said. “It was your idea to come here.”
Jake reached down and picked up an eight-by-ten photo. “Nicelooking man and a pretty woman. Great looking kids—all smiles then! I wonder what happened. Did she leave him? Did he leave her? It’s a shame.”
“It’s a throw-away world—people, too,” I said, echoing old Henry.
Jake picked up a photo album and slowly flipped the pages under the flickering security light. “Here’s the vacation pictures,” he said. “Looks like they went to the Grand Canyon. Yep, here they are at the canyon rim.” He picked up another album and opened it. “Here’s Christmas,” he said. “They had a big tree that year. Here they are in front of the tree—he in his Santa hat, she in her Santa sweater. Looks like they had a great Christmas! Better than I ever had,” he added, tossing the albums back into the dumpster. “Let’s see what else we can find.”
C and Jake kept at it for another half an hour or so. I never did jump in. When they had had their fill of perusing other people’s discarded possessions, we left.
Chapter 18
VINNY DIES
Chef Pat, adorned in her hairnet and plastic gloves, was looking pretty perky for eight o’clock in the morning as she greeted her hungry flock for breakfast at Sally’s.
Her boys were happy with Tater Tots smothered in sausage gravy, with a cinnamon roll on the side. Pat took pride in her cooking, and as chief cook, server, and bottle washer, she was on the front line each day to see the response.
“She�
��s a fuckin’ good cook when she’s got somethin’ to fuckin’ work with,” Lenny said as he liberally shook salt over his food. “This is fuckin’ good, man!”
I wondered if Lenny used the f-word in every sentence to accentuate the passion of his feelings, or if the habit had just become so ingrained that it was an integral part of all his communication. “Maybe I was just being a snob,” I thought. A “fuckin’” snob, at that.
The breakfast crowd at Sally’s was usually made up of homeless men. Many had shivered through the night in their cars, if they were lucky enough to still have them, or under some makeshift cardboard shelter in a doorway or alley. They needed something hot in their stomachs. Some had gone job hunting at seven a.m., only to be turned away. There were no jobs—at least, no jobs for them.
The tweeters and the alcoholics were still sleeping.
C and Jake came in, looking a little beleaguered, and hit the serving line. I figured they just got into some bad dope the night before. The two men received their portions from Chef Pat and headed for our table. Jake sat down without delivering his usual morning greeting. C wasn’t himself either.
“Everything okay, Jake?” I asked, breaking the silence.
Jake cleared his throat and brought his eyes up from his food.
“Vinny died last night,” he said, his voice cracking. “I was there when he left us.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Jake was silent for a moment. “Oh, I know it’s best that it’s over. The pain has finally ended for him.”
We sat there without speaking for a few minutes, some of us halfheartedly eating.
“Vinny was a fuckin’ good guy,” Lenny said, shattering the silence and then belching. Jake and C rolled their eyes.
“We’re going to have a short service on Wednesday,” Jake said. “Just C and me and a couple of other guys who were in Nam with Vinny. Would you like to come?” Jake was looking directly at me.
“I’d be honored,” I said.
“It’s going to be at the cemetery on Naval, about one o’clock. It’s that cemetery up on the hill. Nobody’s going to be there but us. Do you know where it is?”
“I’ll find it,” I said.
“Hell, I’m not very hungry this morning,” Jake said, picking up his tray and dumping the remains in the big garbage can by the kitchen door. He returned to the table and slipped on his worn jean jacket. “I’m going to find a place to get stoned.”
“I’ll go with you,” C said, and they left, heads down.
Many Wednesdays had come and gone in my sixty years. I don’t believe I particularly remembered any of them.
But I will always remember the Wednesday of Vinny’s funeral service with Jake, C, Charles, and Rodney.
As I pulled into the Naval Avenue cemetery on that Wednesday, I saw the four men on a small hill. Three of them were standing and the other was in a wheelchair, with two large white dogs sitting by his side. Willow jumped out of the van when I opened the door, thinking it was the park. “I guess you can come along, too,” I told her.
As I approached the men, I saw that the three Nam vets were dressed in their old army uniforms, now nearly forty years old. There was a light mist beading up on their wool jackets. The grave was covered with dozens of flowers—roses, daisies, tulips, and lilies.
“Richard,” Jake greeted me. “Glad you could make it. Meet Charles. That’s Rodney on wheels.” Charles was a big bald man who obviously had long outgrown the uniform he once wore. He could fasten just one button and his stomach stretched the jacket to its limits. Rodney was too big now to button even a single button on his jacket.
It was obvious that Jake was stoned for the occasion.
“Look at all the flowers,” I said.
“Yeah. C and I found them all in the dumpster behind the flower shop last night,” Jake said. “They’re still pretty.”
It was time to say goodbye to Vinny.
Jake reached out his hand to C, and then we all joined hands and made a circle. “Let’s have a moment of prayer,” Jake said.
The dogs seemed to know that this was a solemn moment. All three of them were lying quietly in the grass.
“Well, Vinny, old man ... It’s time we say goodbye to you.” Jake cleared his throat. “We wish you were still here, but we understand why you had to go. We will miss you. You were our friend. So no matter where you go, you just give ’em hell.” Jake’s voice was cracking and fading away.
“I have something I would like to read, if it’s okay with you guys,” C said. The men all nodded, so C took a book from his well-worn duffel bag. He flipped the pages and cleared his throat. The book was by Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan.
C read to us—to Vinny, really—about death being our eternal companion and how a man must learn to deal with that through his life as a warrior-hunter: “A warrior-hunter deals intimately with his world, and yet he is inaccessible to that same world. He taps it lightly, stays for as long as he needs to, and then swiftly moves away, leaving hardly a mark.”
“Peace. Be safe,” I heard C whisper, and we all joined in “Peace. Be safe.”
Tears filled all five pairs of eyes.
“Let’s have a smoke,” Jake said. “One last smoke with Vinny.”
So C got his stash out of the duffel bag, and we all sat down in the grass.
“Well, we sent him off the best we could,” Charles said. “He didn’t have anybody—any family, I mean—did he?”
“No,” Jake replied. “His doctors tried to find some aunt he talked about in California, but they couldn’t find anyone.”
“After Nam, he became a roll-in-the-gutter drunk. Even I didn’t want to have anything to do with him then. Mad at the world. He weighed ninety-eight pounds when he died. The cancer had eaten him up. He was over one eighty in Nam,” Charles said.
C was passing the first of his joints around the circle.
“Yeah, he was a mean drunk,” Rodney added. “He spent some time in those bully missions in Los Angeles and San Francisco. He got the shit beat out of him a couple times.”
“Hell, we’re all lucky to have lived this long,” Jake said. “I thought we’d all get it in sixty-five. We should have died then, in the rice paddies. You remember those Goddamn rice paddies, don’t you boys?” Jake reminisced. “My feet were wet for three months. I could never keep my socks dry. I got that fungus. Hell, Rodney, you lost your legs there. They sent you home before you got to see much of the jungle.”
“You remember those fucking ants, Jake?” Charles asked.
“Those jungle ants?” Jake shuddered. “Those fuckers seemed to be the only things that survived Agent Orange. They’d wrap themselves in the leaves of the short trees somehow. I don’t know how they did it. Then they would reach out and bite you when you brushed up against them. They had the sting of a fucking wasp. Talk about chemical warfare! A year in Nam and I never saw a spider, a snake, or a monkey alive. But I saw plenty of those fucking ants. Sometimes when they would sting you, you thought it was a bullet from some sniper and you were going to die right there. Hell, it’s been thirty-seven, thirty-eight years, I guess, and I still don’t sleep well at night.
“We would have all been better off if we had died over there,” he finished solemnly. And then there was silence as each man seemed to drink in and reflect on Jake’s statement.
That is when it came to me—the concept, the knowledge I needed to help me understand these men.
All of our wars were carried on the backs of the poor and the sons of the poor. The poor were the first to fight and the first to die. Boys from Bremerton, Terre Haute, and San Diego all found a home in the military. They found dignity and camaraderie. It was the poor, rough, toothless, and uneducated who won at Saratoga, as it was the thieving and obdurate who fought at Antietam. The poor died first and last in World War I, World War II, and Korea, and fifty-eight thousand Americans died in Vietnam, many of them paupers.
The big military and industrial conglomerate
s pocketed billions during the war in Vietnam. But when these men—gathered on this knoll—came back from the killing fields, after surviving hell in the jungles, they came back poor—poor monetarily and poor in spirit. America had lost. It had run. It hadn’t just retreated to fight another day. It had left people behind to be tortured and killed. There were no parades or parties or dancing in the streets like after World War II. No breast-beating pride or songs of victory. It was a moment of shame in United States history. The returning soldiers were ignored. There was the GI Bill, but many fell through the cracks. They fell into a void; Jake and Charles and Rodney and Vinny all fell into it. It was a void where a couple of joints and a bottle of whisky made the journey of any given day a little more bearable.
According to the National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers and Clients, veterans make up twenty-three percent of America’s homeless population. The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans conservatively estimates that one out of every three homeless men is a veteran. Nearly fifty percent of these men served in the Vietnam War. It was, in part, because of the sacrifice of these men that the real estate salesman, the attorney, the developer, the banker, the car dealer, and the professional athlete could build fortunes. If the world were fair, Donald Trump would be handing these guys hundred-dollar bills, Alex Rodriguez thousanddollar bills, and Bill Gates million-dollar bills.
“You know,” Charles said from the silence, summing up exactly what I was thinking, “none of us have shit after all these years. I’ll bet we don’t have ten bucks between us.”
“You got that right,” Jake said.
“Vinny handled it better than any of us ... the war, I mean,” Charles said. “He didn’t seem so—you know—scarred. Vinny was a warrior.”
“I swear I could feel it the moment he was gone,” Jake said. “I was watching TV and I could hear him moaning. Then I heard him sigh. Then he was quiet. I got so used to hearing him moaning and talking to the pain, the quiet let me know the time had come. I walked into the room. He was still. I called out to him, but I’d seen them die in Nam and I knew. I closed his eyelids, covered him with the blanket. I called 911 and told them someone died, gave them the address, and then I left. I didn’t want him to just lay there alone for days. I hated leaving him that way, but I couldn’t be involved, not with my record. I walked by yesterday, and they still had the yellow police tape and coroner’s notice on the front door. I left some stuff there: shirts, pants, needles, and syringes. I figure I won’t get them back.”
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