by Dave Kindred
That boy was Patrizio, tall, dark, and exotic. So Jared rounded up people for a Sarafina-Patrizio wedding, set for seven o’clock in Jackson Square, on the walkway in front of St. Louis Cathedral.
For a wedding, he wanted music. He enlisted the Illinois kid, Hall. They’d made some money on the street, Hall with the guitar, Jared singing along on “Wayfaring Stranger.”
I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger
Traveling through this world below
There is no sickness, no toil, nor danger
In that bright land to which I go
And Jared remembered, from Halloween night on the wharf, the girl with the mandolin, the girl traveling with Lyndzy.
“Put the word out,” he said at the gathering. “I want Maggie and her green mandolin.”
That afternoon Maggie came to the cathedral. Goblin took her in his arms and they danced, and soon enough he didn’t care if she played the mandolin at all. Stray had been right when she said, Forget the runaway in San Diego, you’ll find better in New Orleans. The better was Maggie. There would be others, and they would come along soon, but Maggie was the one. They danced that night, and she said she was leaving NOLA the next day and they ought to meet up again sometime somewhere.
All the Scurvy Bastards who could get upright came to the wedding. The ceremony’s officiant was a dandy dressed in all whites, and from a distance he seemed to be wearing a fine tuxedo. Up close, the whites turned out to be a line cook’s shirt and
apron.
Christine Maynard attended the festivities in her roles as a
chronicler of the street kids’ lives and, more important to her, as a caring, protective presence. She had nearly been killed in an automobile accident years before. For her, life ever after had been an adventure, the more daring the better. She came with an earth mother–goddess–warrior–princess gonna-save-the-world vibe. She saw in the street kids a freedom so beautiful as to be seductive and so seductive as to hide its dangers. She made her home their home when they needed it. Both Sarafina and Patrizio had stayed there, and then the trouble named Puzzles came to live with her, and in a time of need, Jared too would crash at Christine’s.
The day of the wedding, Christine knew Jared only as Puzzles’s friend, another of the travelin’ kids she saw now and then. In her photographs made at Jackson Square, Jared looked a weary mess. Doctors in Myrtle Beach had given him permission to travel, but those doctors may have thought of travel as something done in comfort, not on a bouncing Greyhound. Jared was three months removed from a near-death experience and only two weeks before had taken his mother’s mile-on-the-beach test. Still, in every Maynard photograph, with a walking stick in hand, a weary mess or not, the Admiral was in charge and laughing.
Jared had created his preferred life, a wanderer’s life, at home nowhere and everywhere. He had chosen to live on the streets of the nation’s capital and then wherever the winds of whim took him. By saying no to a lawsuit that might have won him $600,000, he passed on a chance to get out of a life with dangers more subtle and just as deadly as an automobile appearing from nowhere.
His first week back in New Orleans, I called and said what everyone who ever loved an addict has said: “I love you, Jared, but you gotta quit it. Quit the drinking. You gotta take care of yourself.”
He said what every addict ever has said: “I will, Grandpa, I will, don’t worry about me.”
He was lying, and we both knew it. His words were designed to let me know only that he heard my voice. He knew that if he told me, after a few minutes, “Don’t worry about me,” I would understand the conversation was over.
What Jared did too much of on the road was drink, and what he did too often was fall into fights with guys who beat the shit out of him. His original urban-survival mentor in Virginia, Michael Stephen, said that Jared, though small and thin, could “seriously fuck you up if you messed with his friends.” But this ability came with a flaw. “He was not the smartest guy about it. He would fight really big dudes.”
The morning of May 15, 2011, Lynn called with the results of one of those encounters.
“Jared’s back in the hospital,” she said.
He had been gone from Myrtle Beach for seventy-three days.
“He got slugged in the face last night, fell, and hit his head on a flagstone,” she said. “There’s bleeding in the brain. The doctor said he’s ‘serious but stable.’ Then a nurse came on and asked if anyone had power of attorney for Jared. I said, ‘Why do you want to know that?’ She said, ‘It’s a life-and-death issue, and we need to know what to do.’ I told her, ‘Just fix my child. Whatever you need to do, fix my child.’”
A son facing a “life-and-death issue” should have caused a mother and a father, or even a grandfather invested in a boy’s well-being, to go to New Orleans. Why we didn’t go, I don’t know, other than it seemed that being beaten was not as serious as being run down by a car. In thinking that we didn’t need to go to New Orleans, we could not have been more mistaken. Read these hospital reports and weep:
TULANE MEDICAL CENTER
Name: Kindred, Jared
DOB: 12/08/88
Admit Date: 05/15/11
History: This is a 22-year-old male who presents after being “beaten up.” The patient arrives by EMS. He states he was in a fight and he got “bleeped” up. He states he was not hit with anything other than a fist. He states he was not knocked out. He did get knocked to the ground on a couple of occasions. The patient admits to alcohol intake tonight. Denies any drug use tonight…
On discharge May 26:
ADMITTING HISTORY AND PHYSICAL
Mr. Kindred was admitted to the intensive care unit after being assaulted and having bilateral frontal contusions. He is a well-known alcoholic. He did extremely well despite alcohol withdrawal. He was put on Ativan drip for treatment of delirium tremens with vitamin B12 every day. Mr. Kindred wanted to leave against medical advice initially, and psychiatry restricted him to hospital. The patient had no further complications and his behavior came under control. He did not have neurological deficits. CT scan of his head showed contusions were more than 95 percent resolved without any mass effect.
The patient’s behavior was much better, and he stated several times that he was wanting to go to Baton Rouge, to decrease his drinking behavior.
Discharge Instructions: No driving, no weightlifting, no sports activities, no drinking for at least two weeks. The patient was told that he will put his life at risk if he were to resume his drinking behavior.
His was a life of risk. Trains. Beatings. Vodka. If he could do something about the first two, there was little he could do about the alcohol addiction. He could nod to doctors and say what was expected of him, that, yes, he planned to go to Baton Rouge and cut down on the drinking. But a week after he left the hospital, Jared was not in Baton Rouge. He was hobbling, with his walking stick in hand, along Decatur Street in the boiling heat of a New Orleans summer’s-coming day.
“Yes, somebody hit him, and his head hit a rock down by the Mississippi where his crowd would congregate and drink,” Christine Maynard said. “Probably stupid drunk stuff. A few times every year, a ton of really dangerous street people, grown men and women, show up. There are knifings, and these people get in your face and demand money. They’re scary. He was wobbly and still dizzy from the head injury and looked horrible. I asked him to come to my house, but he was a little drunk and guys on the street teased him. He kept saying something like, ‘Houses are for pussies, and I’m not going in any house.’”
Puzzles, who was on the street with Maynard looking for the friend he called “my little brother,” wrapped an arm around Jared, lifted him, pulled him close, and half-carried him through that red door at 907 Decatur Street and up the stairs to Maynard’s apartment. Puzzles dropped Jared on a fancy leather couch from which he seldom stirred for the next five days.
CHRISTINE’S STORY
In those five days, Jared made a remarkable turnaroun
d. Nourishment, some cleaning up, lots of sleep. He was living on a very comfortable couch and was cared for and loved on and listened to. It was a sacred space, and I didn’t understand why at the time. I didn’t question. It was what it was supposed to be.
And then he wasn’t sleeping all the time anymore. His color was better. That’s when he started talking.
The talking—that’s when I realized how much he loved life. His stories were kaleidoscopic and filled with minutiae, and he was gulping down experiences. Nothing was lost on him. Everything he said showed his love of people and the dizzying possibilities and never, never wanting to slow down. Never wanting the kaleidoscope to stop turning. He wanted life to be burning jewels all lit up forever.
About 8:00 a.m. every day, he’d wake up and go to the bathroom, where he’d throw up, or have the dry heaves, and then he’d feel better. He’d say, “I just need a little vodka and I’ll be all right.” I’d buy him a half-pint of Taaka, maybe a pint, it was $9. He’d have just a little bit, and then I’d make him eat the omelets Puzzles made, goat cheese and other delicacies—really eat, as with the fork actually going into his mouth. Puzzles would say, “Little baby Goblin getting fed.” And Goblin would say, “Fuck you, Puzzles.” And they’d be laughing.
I spoke a lot about his future possibilities for a sustainable life. He wanted to work with his hands. I wanted him to write stories about his traveling adventures and the life. He was light and funny and kind and easy to please and special. I loved him very much.
He talked about his childhood in amazing detail. He seemed to remember everything, what the setting was, the hills, trees, what one person said and what the other person said, and what the weather was. He told me about riding a bike in his neighborhood and how much he liked the feeling of the wind—like, I imagine, the wind he felt on trains.
In those times, he was my glorious Peter Pan. He had created a world he loved and never wanted to leave. That other world can be so cold and cruel. He wanted a place where he could be himself and not what somebody thought he should be. That other world—he said you had to have a job and a car and a house or else people thought you were worthless. We need more kids brave enough to tell that other world, “I don’t need you, I can be happy without you.” We need more Goblins, not fewer.
Eclectic in her collection of passions, Christine had a soft spot for men who beat up each other for a living, a crowd of young prizefighters that she had photographed in a New Orleans boxing gym. “When Jared found that out,” she said, “he quite excitedly told me that I ought to talk to his grandpa about Muhammad Ali.”
I met Ali in 1966, covered ten of his heavyweight championship fights, and in 2006 wrote a dual biography of Ali and Howard Cosell. Best of all were the bedtime stories I told the boy about another boy, Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., who grew up to be Ali.
In the summer of 2011, Jared called and said, “Christine wants to see that picture of you and Muhammad.” In that photograph, I held a notebook and watched Ali warm up for a fight. I texted it to Jared. Three years later, after everything that would happen, I looked through the messages on his phone. He had kept the picture.
I’d look at his vodka bottle and by 11:00 a.m., before we’d gone outside, he would have had just two ounces of vodka, estimating. I was no expert, but my understanding was that the DTs could kill him and he had to keep a little bit of alcohol in his system. I did make him eat, those baby-bird bites. He began to wash up a little bit, which caused Puzzles to remark that he hadn’t seen that before. Cleaned up, Goblin was pretty, with lovely, delicate features and so fair and blue-eyed. The girls all loved him.
His manners were perfect. If someone knocked on the door and I was indisposed, he’d answer the door, introduce himself, and ask the person to wait, she’ll be right here. He was so polite. He loved people. Without the blue tattoo on his face and the dirt everywhere, he could have been anything. Fraternity president, campus leader, organizer of a cause group—anything. He was just so darn upbeat with an infectious enthusiasm for whatever was going on.
We talked, too, about the train-hopping. He did it both for the fun and to get somewhere. He loved it. There was the secret hoboes-only white book [the “Crew Change Guide”] of what each train route was like, friendly or not, where to stash your pack, everything you needed to know to hop out. There was the anticipation of going on a vacation, what food and drink and what to bring to burn for heat. The fear of the “bulls” catching you. The uber-coolness of it all. The scenery, the challenges, the caring for others, the hiding from bulls.
Getting ready for the trains was as much of a drug for Goblin as the actual hopping. There was danger, and he knew it. Sarafina Scarlet was dragged by a train and lived—her leg got hung up and she didn’t make the jump into the moving car, and finally her leg came loose and she got lucky, she didn’t fall under the train. And the other dangers: drugs, alcohol, hepatitis infections, and bad people KO’ing you. The danger seems to me something to balance how the kids romanticize the hoppin’ hobo life.
After Goblin left my apartment and rejoined the revelers on the street, anytime he saw me, he would wave so big and run a few steps and have to hop and hobble. I’d run toward him, and he’d hug me like he hadn’t seen me in twenty years. If there was a new addition to the kids, he’d introduce me. “This is her, this is Christine, she’s the lady I told you about.”
He brought joy. He was graced with beauty, almost a feminine beauty, with a symmetry of lips, nose, eyes. As the summer went on, his coloring changed from glowing golden brown to rosy. And he had a strong musculature, no weakling, like a bantam rooster.
My hobblin’ Goblin. He made my heart light with laughter and love.
SEVEN
Stories grow slowly. A detail here, a memory there. Looking for something else, the storyteller finds a photograph, a document, lines from a forgotten journal. More often than he cares to admit, he doesn’t at first see what’s there to be seen. He sees it only later when he has told parts of the story so often that he finally hears how those parts connect. It was late in this story when I realized that Jared’s troubled times on the road overlapped my mother’s last days in a nursing home. So I should tell her story.
My father built a little white two-story house by the Illinois Central Railroad tracks. When I say “by the tracks,” I mean our house was separated from the tracks only by a dirt road. My bedroom was upstairs. I climbed through a window onto the porch roof, and with a Boy Scout telescope in my rear pocket and my knees and elbows scratching against grainy shingles, I scooched up the steep roof and leaned against the chimney and through my looking glass searched for distant places. I wanted to know what was out there. I could see McLean, a village three miles north. My hometown, Atlanta, Illinois, population 1,600, sits along the famous US Route 66, which ran on the other side of our railroad tracks. The 10:10 Illinois Central caused my bedroom to tremble. Sometimes I dreamed I was Superman, faster than a speeding locomotive. At night, trains passing our house would shake my bed with their sudden thunder. The train would be at my window and then gone, moving in the darkness. I could hear its whistle at the depot crossing just before it left the city limits heading to destinations unknown to me. Dad said the trains came our way from Chicago.
“Where’s Chicago?” I said.
He said, “The Cubs play there.”
I thought it would be fun to swing up into a boxcar, the way cowboys did in movies. It wasn’t that I wanted to go to Chicago, wherever that was. I just wanted to be someplace else, a place far away, even farther away than my telescope could take me. Long before Jared, I wanted to be Jared.
During the day, trains stopped at the depot in Atlanta. From boxcars at the back of the string, men would jump out. In the 1940s, the hoboes knew if they hustled down the ballast and across that dirt road to that little white two-story house with the apple trees in the backyard, a lovely woman would have cheese sandwiches ready, wrapped in waxed paper or, if she had run out of paper, wrapped i
n pieces of the bread sack itself. Before they left, the woman would hand the men brown paper bags to carry apples back to the train. Maybe it happened that way everywhere along the Illinois Central route. I prefer to think that only my mother was so lovely as to care that hoboes had something to eat while they rode the rails in search of a day’s work.
Some of this I remembered. Some of it my mother told me one day in May of 2011—a day when Jared had been taken to a New Orleans hospital, where he was reported to be in “serious but stable” condition after a head injury incurred in a street fight.
Mom was ninety-four years old and living in a nursing home in Morton, Illinois. After forty-five years away, Cheryl and I had come home. To say the decision to move from Virginia to Illinois puzzled our friends is to understate the pity they held for us. Gene Weingarten, a two-time Pulitzer winner for the Washington Post, said, “To Chicago, America, I hope, not some stinkweed hamlet.” Even our New Zealand–born horse veterinarian wondered why anyone would voluntarily exchange the rich, verdant landscapes of Virginia for the arctic/tropic weather of a bankrupt flyover state whose governors made a habit of winding up in prison. She said, “What did you do wrong?”
Each of our previous moves—from Illinois to Kentucky to Washington, DC, to Georgia to Virginia—had been made for a job. This move was for better reasons. Mom was failing, and I felt a tug of the heart to be near her. My sister, Sandra, was there with a wonderful extended family of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. It was time to close the circle. My father had died forty-eight years before, only fifty-one years old. When it was Mom’s time, I wanted to be there.
