The paper was just inside the fence, maybe blown there by the wind. I bent down to retrieve it and unfolded it carefully to find “Lineup” written at the top—then, “Bob, second base; Jim, first; Larry, shortstop; Steve, third.” And tucked inside the paper were two ten-dollar bills. Some player had obviously put his lineup card and his hot-dog-and-beer money in his back pocket and then lost it.
I smiled at our good fortune as I put the money in my pocket. It was all we needed to keep us going for another day.
Chapter 25
CAMPING
When people grow so weary of their conditions that they can no longer stand them, there has always been a place to go—the wilderness.
The Venetians did it, cutting down trees and building a city upon them. The Jews did it, as Moses led them through the desert. The Pilgrims did it. Brigham Young led the Mormons to it. And Thoreau escaped to it.
The homeless men of Bremerton were doing it, too.
They were living in the woods behind the old Eagle Hardware warehouse, with shelters made of old blue tarps stolen from construction sites and black plastic garbage bags taken from dumpsters.
It was in these woods that they could drink their 40-ouncers, fashion the empty cans into giant marijuana pipes, and find peace.
But Willow and I still had wheels as our domicile. We had not reached the point where the woods were our only option for rest.
We were asleep in the Methodist church parking lot in East Bremerton when the sound of cars pulling in awakened us. Willow barked as the heads of three little children peered in the windows of the van. “Puppy! Puppy!” one of the girls exclaimed. It was Monday morning, and parents were dropping off their children for daycare on the way to work.
“Nicole! Alicia! Bobby! Come here!” a woman’s voice called out. “It’s time for school.”
“Look at the puppy, Mommy!” a child’s voice responded, as Willow scratched frantically on the window to welcome the children.
“Come now, I said,” the mother replied sternly.
I waited for them to leave, rearranged the furnishings, started the engine, and pulled out onto Sylvan Way. I needed to find a 7-Eleven where I could take a pee, fast!
As soon as I pulled out of the parking lot I was tailgated by a boom-box cowboy in a beat-up Buick. He got so close I could see the toothpick hanging from his mouth in my rearview mirror. We pulled over to let this early morning brush with evil pass us by, and we sighed. Willow needed to go to the park to pee herself, so we headed to the nearest grassy knoll and then for some breakfast at Sally’s.
It was a beautiful morning in August, the best time of year in the Northwest. When we pulled into the lot at Sally’s, it was already sixty-five degrees. “It’s going to be a hot one today,” the radio announcer on 710 KIRO said. “It might reach ninety! So get out and enjoy it, if you can.”
Sally’s was crowded, as it always was on Mondays. Three black men were talking hoops at one table. “The Lakers are going to win it all, man,” James told Sammy and Lionel. “They’ve got Gary Payton now, and Malone.”
“With Shaq and Snow and Kobe, they’re going to have the dream team,” Lionel agreed, swallowing a spoonful of cornflakes.
“Hey, I been wondering where you been, man,” James said.
“I just got out of jail yesterday,” Lionel explained. “Domestic violence, man. My third time. I’ve got to go to anger management classes now. It’s going to cost me thirty bucks a week for those classes, and I don’t have it. If I don’t go, I’m back in jail, man!” His girlfriend had asked him to come by and fix the leak in her sink, and he’d stayed the night. He had given her his hard-earned money to help with the rent because she said she was going to get evicted. Everything had been all right for a couple of weeks; then she got her check from the state and wanted him out. He’d given her all his money. Then she said, “You stink, man!”
“She didn’t say that when I was fucking her and giving her money,” said Lionel. “She pushed me toward the door. She went crazy, man. Screaming! I pushed her back. She called the cops and they took me away.” He’d told them about the sink and the money, but they wouldn’t listen.
“I told you long ago, man, to stay away from that woman,” James said. “She’s just using you. You’re her last-of-the-month friend—she only needs you when she runs out of money. When she gets that check on the first, you’re shit to her, man. Don’t you understand?”
“Yeah, but we got a kid together, man,” Lionel replied. “And I love my kid. He’s six now and he looks just like me. If I want to see him, I got to do what she wants. She says ‘You gotta do this, or you ain’t seeing the kid.’ Ever since I got busted for stealing that car, I ain’t got no rights. But I gotta see my kid, man; I gotta be with him.”
I was just finishing my Post Toasties and my stale chocolate donuts when C walked in. It was only eight thirty, but he’d been imbibing. “Yahoo!” C called out. “It’s a wonderful day in the neighborhood!”
It was as if he could read my mind this morning. “Richard! What do you think about going camping?”
“I like the idea!” I said.
C filled his bowl with cereal and poured milk over it with a flourish. “Let’s go to Illahee State Park,” he said. “It’s just on the edge of town.”
It sounded like a good idea: two homeless guys sleeping out under the stars, communing with nature, filling their lungs with fresh air, and finding peace in the wonders of God’s quiet places. It would be a welcome reprieve from the rigors of the boom-box beat of the city.
I should have known that the homeless would not be welcome at the state park. In fact, no one was really welcome at Illahee. Money was welcome, but not people. My first clue was that there was no Welcome to illahee state PARK sign as we drove through the entrance.
There were signs—129 of them! The first sign was Fee area, marked with two red flags to get attention. The second was pay here. Actually, there were twenty-nine pay here signs, twenty dogs must be on leash signs, twenty-four don’t litter signs, and six don’t Feed the animals signs. I thought of the sixties tune by the Five Man Electrical Band, “Sign, sign, everywhere a sign, blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind.” Four sturdy bulletin boards gave detailed descriptions of what you could not do and how you would be removed from the park if you did what you could not do. The word “please” was used once. The word “thank you” was never used.
The Washington state parks had been turned into profit centers. It cost five bucks just to get in and take a walk, sixteen bucks for a campsite, and a quarter for a one-and-a-half-minute shower. The once-friendly Ranger Rick had been turned into the park Gestapo; protected by flak jackets and carrying sidearms, the rangers cruised the park monitoring the visitors. Innocent families were tracked down by the rangers if they forgot to pay the five-buck fee and then threatened with a hundred-thirty-five-dollar ticket, or worse.
Undoubtedly the State of Washington needed the five-dollar fee for every family picnic so desperately because it had spent 360 million on a new baseball stadium, 340 million on a new football stadium, a few million on a new ice-hockey arena in Everett, on an ice-skating rink in Bremerton, and finally six billion on a new mass-transit train that could whisk passengers from downtown Seattle to Sea-Tac Airport in thirty minutes. The passengers, after all, needed to have the fast train so they could get to the airport four hours early, where they would stand in line to get through security.
The local police cruised through the park every couple of hours to make sure the campers were obeying all the signs the rangers had put up and to see if any family had become so unruly that a major show of irresistible force was needed. They surveyed each campsite as if they were looking for weapons of mass destruction.
Where were the invitations to the “Interpretive Programs,” where the smiling ranger would greet the campers and share his knowledge of the forest? Where were the campfires where the people could gather to sing “Kum Ba Yah,” tell campfire stories,
or describe sightings of a Sasquatch in the camp bathroom? Where were the guided nature walks, where the ranger would point out the antics of the blue jay, the deer tracks, or which berries could be eaten and which ones shouldn’t?
The roar of no less than five generators running from morning till night drowned out the songs of the birds and drove the deer and the squirrels from the park. The generators were sending power to RVs, inside of which children were playing computer games and the parents were e-mailing their friends and watching Dr. Phil on television. They would peek out from time to time, and some came out to refill the generators with gas.
There were no dogs catching Frisbees or frolicking children playing tag in the grass. The children who did venture outside were rollerblading or riding their power scooters in the parking lot.
Some RV campers were actually seeking a non-smoking campsite—unable to see the irony of that, with all the pollutants they brought in.
But we were here to camp, for real! C’s survival instincts kicked in in this woody wonderland, so he did what he always did when he found himself in a foreign region: He went dumpster diving. After about half an hour, he returned with a copy of You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe, a worn-out oven mitt, a broken Realistic radio, and two bottles of unopened Washington Hills blush wine that obviously hadn’t pleased the palate of more discriminating campers. It didn’t take C long to unscrew the top of the blush blend and find a place in the sun to read Wolfe’s prose. He read aloud as he always did, accentuating the sentences that stirred him. The crows began to gather, and C continued to read to his feathered friends.
Meanwhile, the back door of the 40-foot mobile home (appropriately named an “Auto Villa”) in campsite number 5 opened, and a man remarkably resembling Osama bin Laden came out to smoke a cigarette. “Naw, it can’t be,” I said to myself. But the more I looked, the more he evaded my gaze, until he turned his back to me and kept puffing.
The cast of characters became more intriguing when a mustard-yellow Ford Econoline van roared into campsite number 8. It was truly a Dijon color—definitely not French’s. The passenger mirror on the truck was secured by a mass of duct tape. The engine sputtered and coughed and spit out a noxious smell when the driver turned it off.
Through the cloud of smoke produced by the gasping engine appeared the driver, who made a beeline for our campsite like he was a long-lost friend. He did a quick study as he walked our way. “Homeless guys, huh?” he said, approaching. “Me, too. I live in my van,” he added as he twitched and looked away, like an old prizefighter who had taken too many lefts to the head. “Livin’ in your car?” he asked, twitching again.
I nodded and wondered if it was really that obvious. Did I have “homeless” written on my forehead? Or was it because we had no tent, no sleeping bags, no Coleman stove, or any of the usual camping paraphernalia? C, engrossed with Wolfe, ignored our visitor and continued reading to the crows that were now pacing about the campsite.
“What’s with your friend?” the newcomer asked.
“He likes to read,” I replied.
As a come-on, he said “I’ve got some food and stuff in the truck, if you want it. I’ve just been to the food bank—beef stew, canned salmon—good stuff.”
I pulled myself up and started following him to the Dijon van when he turned around and extended his hand. “I’m Achilles,” he said. “Most people call me Chris.”
“I’m Richard,” I said, shaking his hand, and we headed for his van.
Achilles had turned his 1972 Ford van into a home. From the door I could see he had bolted a dark-blue La-Z-Boy recliner in the back and welded a platform on the inside wall to hold a small battery-operated TV. On the floor of his home-on-wheels were twenty or thirty copies of Penthouse and Galley magazines, a half-dozen books, and a .38 pistol. He had several paint cans he used for storage. One can was full of Bic lighters, another contained some tattered photographs, and yet another a bunch of snipes. Achilles picked up a sizeable snipe from the can and lit it. “Wait a minute,” he said, “I’ve got to dump this.” He reached into the van for a big white bucket, picked it up, and threw the contents onto the ground outside. “I pissed in there this morning and forgot to throw it out.” He set the bucket back in place, climbed into the van, and handed me two big cans of Dinty Moore Beef Stew, three cans of smoked salmon, a can of peaches, a jar of peanut butter, and a box of Triscuits.
Achilles settled himself in the La-Z-Boy and blew a smoke ring in the air. “What’s your problem? Drugs? Booze? Gambling?” he asked. “How come you’re homeless?”
“It’s a long story,” I said, juggling the cans and boxes in my arms as I stood alongside the van.
“Mine’s drugs, man. Narcotics. My wife kicked me out two years ago, and she took everything.” He was twitching again. “You’re in luck today; you’re here to see me shoot up for the last time,” he said, taking off his wool shirt. “You want to watch me?”
I tried to think of an appropriate answer to his question. I didn’t have one. I felt obliged, because he had just given me food for dinner, and I sensed that somehow he needed someone—namely me—to witness this last act of self-degradation. My mind was locked and my eyes focused on one thing: that gun. “What’s the gun for?” I asked.
“Sometimes when I get down,” he said, leaning over and picking it up, “I play Russian Roulette. Like this,” he said, putting it in his mouth and pulling the trigger.
“SHIT! Don’t do that!” I yelled. “It might have been loaded!”
“It is loaded,” he laughed. “Just one bullet, though.” Then he put the gun down.
I shuddered.
“Look at this, man,” he said, pointing out the needle holes in his left arm, and then his right. He was skinny as a rail, and the needle marks stood out like craters.
He picked a Bible off the floor, randomly opened it, and laid it in his lap. Then he reached down in one of the paint cans and picked out a spoon, a Bic, and a small Ziploc bag with one white pill in it.
“It’s my last one,” he said, taking the pill from the bag and placing it on the spoon. “My ex-wife sells me these for ten bucks a pop. It’s her heart medicine. It gives you a good ride.” He got his needle from the paint can and flicked his Bic, sterilizing the tip. “This is how it’s done,” he said, as he moved the flame under the spoon and began melting the pill.
It was show-and-tell by a drug addict. I felt like I was enrolled in “How to Shoot Up 101.” No wonder his ex-wife needed heart medicine, if she’d been married to him for very long.
“You’ve got to do this just right—skim the stuff off the top,” he said, taking another spoon to add the finishing touches to his elixir. Then he filled the needle, placed it in his vein, and pressed the plunger.
When he was done, he dropped the needle in the bucket and picked up the Bible from his lap and read. “‘Unto thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul. O my God, I trust in Thee; let me not be ashamed; let not my enemies triumph over me. Yea, let none that wait on Thee be ashamed; let them be ashamed which transgress without cause. Show me Thy ways, O Lord; teach me Thy paths. Lead me in Thy truth, and teach me; for Thou art the God of my salvation. On Thee I wait all the day.’”
“That’s a Psalm of David, man. Psalm 25,” he said. “Jesus is telling me to quit this stuff, man. And Jesus is too strong to mess with. This is history you’re watching here. Jesus came to me in 1976. A friend asked me to go to a revival at the stadium in Anaheim. I didn’t want to go, but I did. The preacher was calling out to people who wanted to be saved. They were singing ‘Amazing Grace,’ and people were holding their hands up to the Lord. I was sitting in the top row with nobody behind me, when I felt something pick me up by my armpits and push me toward the stage below. It was Jesus! He walked right behind me all the way down to the stage through those thousands of people, all the way to the minister, who touched me. It was like a lightning bolt went through my body, man. I was saved. Don’t mess with Jesus, man. He’s too strong.”
I was still standing there—now needing to take a pee so bad that I was beginning to cross my legs like a little boy—and still holding cans of food and a box of crackers, listening to his life story come rushing out like a stream.
“My mom and dad came to visit me that night after the revival,” he said, leaning forward in his La-Z-Boy. “They were dead, but they came to see me. My dad was named Demetrious; he came here from Greece and worked in the mills in Chicago. He had big hands. He was a rough, burly guy, and he became a prizefighter and won a lot of fights. He knew everybody, and everybody wanted to buy him drinks. Man, he could belt them down. He had a temper, too. But you know, he never hit my mom and he never hit me.
“We moved to Anaheim with some of his winnings. Our next-door neighbor was Duke Ellington, man. That’s where my mom got hooked on drugs. I spent seven years taking her to doctors and cleaning up her puke before she OD’d. This shit is going to kill me too, if I don’t stop. You’re witnessing a miracle here, man.
He was getting high now, and he pushed his La-Z-Boy back until the footrest popped up. Then he picked up his Bible again and asked me to close the door.
I rearranged the foodstuffs in my arms to free a hand and pushed the door closed. I could hear him inside, starting to read again. “Remember, O Lord, Thy tender mercies and Thy loving kindnesses; for they have been ever of old. Remember not the sins of my youth...”
Even after I returned to our campsite, I could hear Achilles reading. His voice was getting louder and louder. I could picture him rocking back and forth in his La-Z-Boy, calling out “Holy Ghost power! Holy Ghost power! Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!”
C was still reading aloud at the table, with just as much passion as Achilles in his van.
Breakfast at Sally's Page 27
