Unlikely Brothers

by John Prendergast

  I had a roommate in the dorm, a smart and charismatic guy named Geoff Mills, and I never let the poor fella sleep. Either I was clacking away on my little portable typewriter writing long-winded papers at the last minute, or I was keeping him up with arguments about Kerouac’s On the Road, or Tolstoy’s War and Peace, to a sound track of Bob Dylan songs. I slept only a few hours a night; I had an alarm clock on which I wrote “Wake Up You Hopeless Wretch” and left it deliberately on an overturned steel garbage can across the room so that the can would amplify the alarm and I’d have to get out of bed to shut it off and get back to my reading.

  Urban poverty was still my obsession, so I signed on with a Georgetown program run by my buddy Dan Porterfield that sent volunteers to teach reading to kids in the projects in one of the low-income African-American neighborhoods in D.C., the section of the city you don’t see in the tourist promotional materials and the monuments. I roped my roommate Geoff into some of those expeditions; we’d have to wear these bright orange vests, and we would be let off at night outside these ominous high-rise towers, abominations of some social engineering experiment of decades gone by. Walking down the dark corridors and venturing into those airless, dilapidated apartments was, for me, a passageway to finding my purpose; I felt I was approaching ground zero of America’s need.

  Another important friend during freshman year was the guy who ultimately led me directly to Michael: John Kaiser. John was British, with a fair complexion and pink cheeks, and he slept in his sleeping bag the entire year, ready to leave Georgetown at a moment’s notice; we called him “the dawg.” John and I fancied ourselves the social conscience of the dorm. Everybody else was going to use their Georgetown degrees to become investment bankers, we believed, but he and I were going to help save the world.

  One perversely positive thing happened during freshman year. I discovered the miracle cure for acne: Accutane. I took them as religiously as if they were birth control pills. They dried my skin so completely that it created incredible flaking, but at least it eliminated the cysts that had been my mask since the onset of the hurricane otherwise known as puberty. I have a vague memory of beginning my transformation from the ugly duckling I thought I was destined to be, but I studiously paid no attention at all, as absorbed as I was in my learning.

  I did, however, take a small emotional chance on a young lady who I had become close with during my senior year in high school, an equally socially awkward student-athlete with whom I used to take all-night walks in our Pennsylvania neighborhood the summer before Georgetown, tentatively sharing our pain and our dreams. We began some form of long-distance full-fledged dating in the fall semester. During Christmas break, I was driving around with some of my old basketball team, and one of the guys told me that he had seen my girlfriend holding hands with another guy. A little research unearthed that she had been seeing him the entire time I thought we were together. What shred of self-esteem I had begun to build in the early stages of life without acne was smashed on the rocks. I went back into my cave and didn’t come back out for a long, long time. I emerged, strangely, as a guy who was almost bizarrely confident, but only in superficial encounters with women, devoid of intimacy and as self-protective as a porcupine, so certain of my inability to be loved for who I was.

  I was too restless to stay at Georgetown, and I wanted desperately to discover my country for myself. So I dropped out after that first year and went off on a kind of hitchhiking expedition trying to absorb as much real world knowledge and experience as I could. I remained an enigma to my parents, who genuinely worried that I was drifting dangerously toward some kind of bad outcome that they couldn’t imagine but could fear.

  For part of the time, I hitchhiked around working on various political campaigns in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Albuquerque, and finally Chicago (where Harold Washington was seeking to become that city’s first African-American mayor), trying to better understand how our political system works. In between campaigns, I was on the road with my thumb out, going from place to place, talking with everyone, and living out of a tent and a backpack. I also went to Texas and cut across the border to Mexico to learn about labor issues from a tough old union organizer and Latino advocate named Jack Ortega, alternatively nicknamed “El Tigre” and the “con man for the people.”

  But the stretch in San Francisco in the fall of 1982 was particularly meaningful because of three role models who laid the foundation for the monumental life choices I was to make a year later. Patrick Goggins, Paul Comiskey, and Johnny Maher. Three Irish guys, all blazing a trail so bright for social justice that they eliminated any doubts I might have had about whether one person can make a difference.

  Mr. Goggins was my Georgetown dorm-mate Billy’s dad. When I showed up at his doorstep in the late summer of 1982, Pat Goggins and his wife Ute welcomed me with open arms. He told me that first week that I had wild eyes and I talked so Philly-tough that he thought I had some broken cartilage in my tongue. Mr. Goggins had worked on civil rights issues in the sixties and Native American causes in the seventies, but he had now focused on what he could do to contribute to solutions in the place of his heritage, Northern Ireland. A law encyclopedia salesman, he set up an organization, the Irish Forum, which aimed to get beyond the polarization between the Catholics and the Protestants there and discuss solutions to the challenges Northern Ireland faced. His work emboldened those back in Belfast who were courageous enough to chart a course toward peaceful coexistence, and it helped neutralize some of the hard-core sentiments back in the United States for one side or the other. An encyclopedia salesman in California contributing to peace in Northern Ireland!

  Mr. Goggins introduced me to Father Paul Comiskey, a Jesuit priest and lawyer who wore all black and cowboy boots as if he were Johnny Cash or something. Father Paul took on as his ministry the battle against the death penalty and a campaign to improve the shockingly bad conditions of the residents of California’s penal institutions. He helped form the Prisoners’ Union, and he would visit people in prison, advocate for their rights and for smarter policies (serving bad food and having poor prison health care ends up INCREASING costs to the state, not decreasing them), and help with their cases. (The quality of public defense is shockingly bad or even nonexistent in many cases, leading to a situation in which the accused are effectively deprived of counsel, even though the right to defense counsel is a basic hallmark of our justice system.) Father Paul focused on the individual, the person, the human being who—yes—had been accused or convicted of a crime but still deserved to be treated with dignity and fairness, and who was more than the worst thing he or she had ever done.

  If Mr. Goggins and Father Paul weren’t enough to inspire me, I had been reading a book about a guy called John Maher, the co-founder of the Delancey Street Foundation, a cutting-edge rehabilitation program for people fighting addictions, overcoming homelessness, or reentering society after incarceration. John Maher was also the subject of a 60 Minutes episode that so enthralled me that I went to his office one morning wearing the Irish scally cap that was my trademark that whole year, and sat in the lobby all day hoping for a chance to meet him. Eight hours passed, and they told me I had to leave because they were closing up, so I came back the next morning and waited again.

  Finally, that afternoon the doors burst open and there he was, Johnny Maher, arm in arm with Cesar Chavez, the legendary farmworker activist. He looked at me and said, “So you’re the kid who won’t leave, huh?” And with that he signaled me to follow him, and for two weeks he let me shadow him around San Francisco, attending labor meetings with Chavez, political rallies, clandestine fundraising events for Northern Ireland’s independence, and inspirational speeches he would make to the residents at Delancey Street. Johnny, as people called him, never asked me a question, including my name, but he never stopped talking to me either. He dispensed some of the most motivating advice and stories I have ever heard or read, infiltrating my head and heart with the simple idea that no injustice should be
allowed to stand, and that if it wasn’t for us to confront it, then who?

  Meeting these huge personalities, these social reformers who saw injustice in the world and had the moxy to think they themselves could change it, taught me to be undeterred by tough odds, and it taught me that an individual can make a difference and that we should see the world as we want it to be and work like hell to make it come true. I even began writing a column entitled The Way We Will for the University of San Francisco paper.

  I was drinking from the fire hose of life, but all in a hit-and-run manner. This applied to my education, volunteer work, jobs, and relationships. I’d work a little bit at some internship or soup kitchen and then move on. I’d take classes at one college and then move on to another, working in odd jobs to make enough money to survive, with an occasional “loan” from my baffled parents. I was a grazer, a nomad, constantly moving on to the next thing to learn a little more, but never making any kind of emotional attachment to anything. My instinctive impulse, as always, continued to be well-guarded withdrawal.

  I still felt deeply misunderstood, so not only did I bounce from project to project and school to school in a rapacious ramble to learn and move on but I also veered away from the precipice of intimacy. I went through a lot of short-term girlfriends in those days, and I remember now with sadness that I wasn’t sufficiently concerned with other people’s feelings. I was angry, hurt, and much too self-absorbed.

  The universe, though, abhors imbalance, and it has a way of sending us exactly what we need, even if it isn’t what we want. As the summer of 1983 began, I unexpectedly heard from my old Georgetown buddy John Kaiser, the dawg himself, who said he was overseeing a homeless shelter on Fourteenth Street in D.C., near a corner marked by prostitution, drug dealing, and public drunkenness. I went up there one day to visit him, and nothing’s been the same since.

  It is life’s most random moments—its chance meetings—that can be the most profound ones.

  MICHAEL MATTOCKS

  Those Hefty bags, man, I’ll never forget that. We must have stayed in every shelter in the District of Columbia twice over.

  There was one shelter at Fourteenth and N, right across the street from a big-ass church. It was a townhouse, red brick, and there was a big room on the top floor with lots of cots in it. This white dude named John Kaiser kind of ran the place. He wore shorts and flip-flops and had a room off to the side that wasn’t much better than ours. He slept in a sleeping bag on a ratty old couch with his cool Russian girlfriend named Kashi. I remember he used to let me and James look for coins in the sofa cushions.

  One day me and James go tearing in there—I was about seven, James six—and there’s this other white dude in there. He was tall and wiry, with kind of rough skin on his face and a short beard that ran around the bottom of his chin. Right away I could tell this white man was different. I was used to grownups towering over me and kind of talking down at me, but this guy got down on the floor by me and James so his eyes were at our own level. And he used a different voice than other grownups used, not like he was telling us to do something—or stop doing something—but like he was interested in what we had to say. Man, he was full of questions! “What’s your name?” “How many brothers and sisters you got?” “Where do you go to school?” “What’s your favorite subject?” “You like basketball?” I’d answer one, and he’d be off to the next. I’d never had a grownup so interested in me before; it was kind of funny. Then I remember he asked me a really weird question. He said, “Do you know how to read?”

  Read? I was only seven years old! So this white dude, a guy I never saw before, asks if me and James want to go to the library, that minute, and learn how to read.

  That was how I met J.P. I guess he asked my mom if he could take us out, and when I think about it, it’s strange she said yes. I mean, she didn’t know this white dude either. He was just some stranger, and he could have taken us anywhere. She liked John Kaiser, though, and trusted him. If this white dude was a friend of his, then he must be okay. Next thing I knew, him and me and James were out there onto Fourteenth Street together.

  It was all whores up there back then, and man, some of them were fine! Little as I was, I used to love sitting out there on the stoop and watching them. J.P. asked us if we’d eaten that day, and I’m sure we probably had, but it probably hadn’t been anything but cereal, or peanut butter on bread, or some chips. We was always ready to eat, and J.P. took and got us a McDonald’s. Then we walked up to this little library they had up there. Not the big Martin Luther King library; I guess it was a branch. In a townhouse. Beautiful inside there, and quiet in a way I wasn’t used to. Like, thick quiet. J.P. sat there with us going through books, trying to teach us how to read. We hunched over the books, J.P.’s finger sliding along under the words, and I’d steal little glances sideways. His face was down close to mine, with that rough skin all over it. He’d be all focused on the book, and on me, like nothing else existed in the world. I remember thinking: Who is this white dude? Why is he doing this? Why does he care?

  Left to right: Sabrina, Elsie, Denise, André, Michael, and David

  JOHN PRENDERGAST

  John’s shelter was a tall townhouse. The street outside was raucous. Back then on Fourteenth Street, right there on the corner of that homeless shelter, the prostitutes openly paraded their wares while other people offered all kinds of illicit paraphernalia for sale. The top floor was almost entirely one big room full of beds; John had a small room of his own in the corner. He and his Russian girlfriend, Kashi, shared that same ratty sleeping bag from his days at Georgetown on a couch that was covered with cat hair and cigarette burns; he hadn’t changed a bit. It was great seeing him still involved in the struggle, trying to bring some peace and dignity to people who were temporarily without a home. The Reagan Revolution was in full budget-cutting flower at this point, and John and I immediately launched into an intense discussion about the infuriating indignities we felt it was inflicting on poorer households—both the withdrawal of funding for services and also the chronic demonization of poor people as lazy and immoral. We were thick into our discussion when suddenly two tiny boys came tearing into John’s room like a pair of little tornadoes. The older one was seven; he had a big round caramel-colored face and the brightest and widest eyes I’d ever seen. The younger one, six, was skinny and darker, and he didn’t move more than three inches from the side of his big brother. My friend John made them slow down a second and introduce themselves. “Michael,” the big one said, pointing to his own chest with a pudgy finger. “This is James, my brother.”

  He ain’t heavy, father.

  They asked John if they could look through his sofa cushions for dropped change, to which he said yes, and they went at it like a couple of gold miners.

  I’d been around a lot of kids by then. I’d met children from all sorts of backgrounds at the shelters in Philadelphia and New York, in the projects during my freshman year at Georgetown, and coaching youth basketball teams. Up until then, the kids were never fully three-dimensional individuals to me, but instead they were symbols of something bigger—of poverty, of the inadequate way city governments delivered services, of rotten school systems, of absent fathers. This day, though, I found myself staring at these two little boys as though encountering something entirely new. A light came off them—particularly off the older one, Michael—that just about blinded me. He seemed to glow with a cheerfulness and optimism that was totally counterintuitive given his circumstances. I mean, these boys had nothing and yet radiated with life and sunshine.

  As they rooted around in the couch, John took me out into the main room to meet their mother, Denise. She was pretty, and she had a certain dignified air about her, but she also seemed as overwhelmed and exhausted as anyone I had ever met. Their things were strewn around their cots, spilling out of big black Hefty bags that they’d obviously been living out of and lugging through the streets.

  By the time we got back to John’s room, the boys ha
d started shooting hoops with balls of paper into the trash can, interspersed with vigorous wrestling. It was like watching a couple of lion cubs rolling around on each other. Here I’d been studying the effects of poverty on children and these two seemed utterly unaffected by it. The word that comes to mind is undefeated; they were completely joyful in the moment. I sat down on the floor to bring my face down to their level, and when Michael turned that big moon face of his at me, it was like a burst of unexpected sunshine.

  I began doing the thing my dad used to do—firing questions. “Do you go to school? What do you like about it? What don’t you like about it? What’s your favorite food? What’s your favorite TV show? What’s your favorite basketball team? What’s your favorite football team? What’s your favorite baseball team? Why? Why do you like them? Who’s your favorite player?” Questions, questions, questions—it didn’t even matter what they were, just a constant stream of stimuli in the hopes of getting something back. Michael, the older one, was very sparkly and eager to please. It was clear he loved having all this adult attention turned on him. He was a little bewildered, but he did his best to keep up. James, on the other hand, hung back. He was more wary, and a little sneakier too. He tried to get his little hand into my pocket. Then he took a pair of scissors from John’s desk. Not bad things, really. Just sneaky.

  “Hey,” I heard myself say. “You guys know how to read?”

  They lit up and laughed as though I was Bill Cosby, their faces a riot of pink tongues and white teeth. I may as well have asked them if they could fly. “I’m serious,” I said. “If you want, I’ll take you to the library and teach you to read.”