Tales of Two Americas
Page 26
“People visit Portland and they are shocked by what they see,” said Rodgers. “They tell me, ‘No decent society should let people sleep on the street.’ This is true.”
But for now, with such a scarcity of affordable housing units and shelter beds, you could make the argument, as Hales has done, that helping to make campers’ lives easier is the most humane option in our present “state of emergency.” The goal, of course, is to secure permanent housing for everyone living on our streets. What would it take to make that goal a reality?
Rodgers endorsed our mayor-elect, Ted Wheeler, and called Wheeler’s initiatives “a huge step forward,” but warned that they will not be enough to make up for lack of involvement by the federal government.
“The difficulty is, how much can any mayor do? The entire landscape needs to be remade.”
Here are some more numbers, just for context. Portland has 4,000 people on the streets. Seattle? 10,000. Across Los Angeles County? 46,000.
Rodgers also complained that no presidential candidate has pledged to do enough for housing and homelessness, in part because the issues that plague Portland have yet to affect many other regions of the country; housing is still affordable in Buffalo and Cincinnati.
“What’s a crisis here is not in Oklahoma yet. . . .”
I mentioned to Rodgers that we’d purchased a home in November, after nine months of looking with a Realtor and seven offers. “You were lucky,” he said, and I agreed. We started discussing the influx of tech money that has contributed to the 14 percent annual increase in Portland’s housing market—again, the fastest in the nation.
“If you’re wealthy and plugged into the economy, you’re doing as well as you’ve ever done. . . .”
And if you’re not?
Wages have stagnated or declined since 2000, at a time when one in three Oregonians are spending half their paycheck on rent. It’s getting more expensive to be poor everywhere. According to a recent Pew report, the poorest third of Americans now spend about 50 percent more on all their housing costs than they did in 1996. If you are spending half your income on housing, the scepter of eviction is always near. It’s a nightmare that many people camping outside tonight have lived through—their worst fear becoming a foregone conclusion.
In a recent article, “Let Them Drown,” Naomi Klein discussed the poor who bear what she makes literal reference to as the “toxic burden” of our policies: “This is happening because the wealthiest people in the wealthiest countries in the world think they are going to be OK, that someone else is going to eat the biggest risks, that even when climate change turns up on their doorstep, they will be taken care of.”
Klein is talking about climate change, but when I read this my mind leaped to the tents mushrooming across downtown Portland. I saw the hundreds of campers living by the river, their tents extended infinitely in the glassy facades of the new luxury apartments. When I’d mentioned Klein’s piece to Rodgers, he immediately said, “We don’t treat the housing crisis like a natural disaster and we should.” Rodgers contrasted the outpouring of emotion and aid that follows a natural disaster to people’s often benumbed, resigned, apathetic response to our homeless.
“If I told you a tornado swept through here and left thousands of people hungry and without shelter tonight, how would you respond?”
Rodgers is on the board of directors of Street Roots, a newspaper that covers issues related to homelessness and poverty; the vendors of Street Roots are often people who have been homeless. He described his joy at watching vendors “rewired” back into the community. He mentioned a man named Raymond who lived in chronic orthodontic pain—that kind of shooting red tooth pain that keeps you riveted to your gumline. The trick candle of chronic pain, a fire that never goes out. Night and day, for all his waking time on the planet, his mouth had been pulsing.
Standing on the same corner, selling the Street Roots paper, he began to form friendships and connections to the neighborhood. Rodgers told me, “Thirteen people got together to buy Raymond a new set of teeth. It really changed his whole life.”
We’d been talking about the danger of letting the global statistics depress and overwhelm you to such a degree that you opt out of caring entirely. Stalling out in the cul-de-sac of guilt. You’d be justified, Rodgers said, in feeling extremely pessimistic about the likelihood that we are going to “solve” America’s homelessness crisis. You’d be correct to note that an extra hundred-billion-dollar commitment per year from the federal government to America’s poorest citizens is nowhere in sight. You’d be in good company if you found yourself daunted by the massive structural changes that would be necessary to prevent more Americans from becoming homeless. At the same time, none of the above negates the value of our individual, eye-level efforts to reach one another: the homespun web of neighbors helping neighbors.
“Because you might also think of it as, ‘Raymond’s doing a lot better.’”
Visible City
Washed in a green, webby light, festival, playing
A chord, playing the near-most exotique
For a sterner nation, a brass mirror, a song where the word
Sin stands out, is thought to, anti-puritan but not
Anti-god, playing a flirt, saying you could land a landed kiss
Here, quick, lick; and,
Later, this city washed more literally and more blue
With waters as close as cousin Cuba, as far as the far-walked shores
Of my playful Brazil,
So that it was its image, not just its people, not just our bodies puffy
As a hemorrhoid against the water’s
Advancing image, that was flooded; and
If sense is true, sight like a deeper speech,
An art, if that is true, then it is between these many poles
The city is seen:
The city, not just the given
Notion of the city, that screen we call myth, call the dark,
But the brick and spit of it, iron, horseshit, the river,
A mosquito vetting it for blood, mud, August,
The cathedral in August—it is in these, first, the eyes build their purpose,
Build a line: New Orleans
As that modern text, witnessed and revised by the light as radically
As by the water, which is history, which
Slips through your hands. This city is a ghost I wear.
—Rickey Laurentiis
PORTION
Joy Williams
ARTHUR HAD BEEN going to the asylum to visit a friend he had betrayed who foolishly had become quite undone. The young man had once been mesmerizingly attractive and desperate but was now slack, slothful, and weepy. He had also fallen into the habit of repeating the vatic phrase When you think of chocolate think of Sparrow, which Arthur felt to be a particularly annoying British affectation. They had never favored chocolate as a couple. Chocolate had never been a feature of their relationship.
It was during one of these utterly unsatisfying visits that he caught the Governor’s eye, or his presence did not escape the notice of the Governor, Arthur was no longer sure.
When you think of chocolate think of Sparrow, the addled and former lover was intoning desperately when the Governor with smooth assurance escorted him to a corner of the hobby room where jigsaw puzzles in much mended cardboard boxes were stacked, their lists of missing pieces printed neatly on the lids to forestall distress, disappointment, or rage as the case might be.
PART(S) OF:
Cloud 4
Paw 2
Big Wave 7
Little Wave 9
The Governor then returned to Arthur and held his hand.
“Let me ask you something, let me ask you something,” the Governor whispered, “that phrase ‘I’m going to send a letter to the Governor . . .’ how did that start? Som
eone going to the crapper says, ‘I’m going to send a message to the Governor.’”
“I don’t know,” Arthur whispered. “I’ve never heard it.”
“Why are you whispering? People say it all the time. Vulgar. Folks are vulgar. The problem with people who say they love nature is that they’re crazy. You know the last leader of this nation’s largest environmental organization—the one who holds an alligator over his head and screams From My Cold Dead Hands—he’s got Alzheimer’s. Doesn’t know his dick from a fountain pen. . . .”
He looked at Arthur merrily, then shrugged. “That was the head of the National Rifle Association, holding a flintlock rifle over his head. I’m speaking phatically here. Just establishing tolerance for our mutual presence. Chitchat. I’m trying to get a feeling for you. Friend or foe? Phatic talk serves to prolong the moment before the possibility of communication. No other purpose to it. Now, you might be curious about my term as Governor. This is a sore subject with me. I didn’t complete my term. Wolf took out a state trooper stationed outside the kitchen where I was having breakfast. It was the morning of the shortest day of the year and I was being served breakfast, at my request, by a young woman in a white nightie with candles in her hair. The wolf, Darling Bea, jumped the trooper. What was the fellow to do, shoot the Governor’s wolf? He went down like the man he imagined himself to be, without a cry. It was unfortunately the public’s first glimpse into the style of my administration. Had to whisk her off in protective custody. She’s with monks now. God knows what they’re trying to teach her. They promised me they wouldn’t punish her until she understood. They assured me of that. I asked them pointedly. Still, I know men dissemble and deceive other men. I know men. I had brothers. I was the youngest. They hung me on the doorknob by the back of my underwear. They went out, they came back in. I laughed with them, this is how you survive. All dead now, those boys. But enough gloom. Tell me, what’s the state of the state? Has my legacy of infrastructure endured? Subsidence continuing to be a problem? How is the road?
“The road . . .” Arthur began. What a peculiar word . . .
“Agriculture’s in decline too, I suppose. I’ve heard that farmers are turning their fields into mazes to make a buck. Disaster fields all the vogue too. Farmers are sly ones, they press any advantage. Lives freely taken, people dropping out of the sky on their worthless fields. Plane crashed, everyone amazed, disbelieving, horrified. How could this happen! Then someone figures out that a human disaster of a certain magnitude makes the area sacrosanct and eligible for public funding and tax deferral. Or a lesser magnitude will do if the circumstances have an innovative resonance. Once the fields are cleaned up farmers can start charging. Enforced donations to keep order, keep it nice, maintain it as contemplative space. This is what I would tell my environmental friends who have never considered me their ally, I’m afraid. Take a page from the farmer’s book: Only way left for them to preserve land. Presence of a rare moth won’t do it. Those little flower-faced owls no bigger than your fist, forget it. Not a rumor of one of the last of the big cats. Certainly not a rumor of one of the last of the big cats. Has to have a human angle. And they can’t be choosy. Land may not be ecologically ideal but they should claim it early on, swoop in soonest before teddy bears and bouquets start piling up, stake it out as a pioneer space with all due respect, of course, but quick on the heels of death’s untimely unfair undiscriminating mass transit operation. Then if beast or bird does manage to make its way there they will be seen as acceptable symbols of hope and healing and will be tolerated by those seeking comfort.”
The Governor paused.
“But I can get by without the environmentalists. Does the environmental vote even exist anymore? I’m now recollecting that those people took a hit when they protested the draining of the Everglades when that airbus went down and all those passengers plus crew vanished into the muck. Their ‘Let them be a part of the great Everglades which has no counterpart anywhere on earth’ didn’t sit well with the next of kin. Just made them mad. Environmentalists flat-footed around most people. First part of the statement was okay, should have left it at that. Second part was where they went astray. The next of kin felt it as their lost loved ones that had no counterpart on earth and not some nasty melancholy swamp. So they sucked each rag and bone out, divvied it up for proper burial and drained the place right down to the pandemonium rock. Now there’s a Legoland in the works there. Going to be a Taj Mahal totally made out of Legos. The actual Taj is a mausoleum, that’s how they got the concept approved.”
When the Governor laughed he hissed a little.
“Ever made it to India?” he inquired. “Had an opportunity to converse with a Hindu?”
Arthur looked at him sleepily.
“Too late now,” the Governor went on. “Cultures everywhere being suppressed by mass civilization, by agnostic humanism. There’s a hatred of what’s considered the picturesque. The annihilation of the picturesque is quite acceptable. Assimilation is no longer the vogue. You might ask why I am addressing you. Your sweet inquiry breaks my heart. Whole goddamned state breaks my heart. It should be put on a ventilator. I made mistakes before, I admit. Built too many roads. Liked clever argument, was fond of peculiar grammars, but I was no one’s creature. I made my way sucking no one’s toes. Now I have amends to make, wrongs to right, wealth to spend, and I can’t do it because I’m here you see.”
“Yes,” Arthur ventured. “You are.”
“I have a proposition for you,” the Governor said.
But a black-smocked orderly appeared and announced lunch, another odd word . . . lunch, road. Who came up with these things . . . and the Governor was led away.
■ ■
He had been christened Arthur Barrow and had been a clever imaginative lazy youth. Before the arrangement with the Governor in the activities room of the asylum, before he had signed the contract, he had made a harmless and modest living by bilking everyone he met but now, little more than a year later, he felt himself the bilkee, and by a dead man, cornered rather like a noble cougar, treed by petty dogs. The arrangement was that he, Arthur, would take on the Governor’s life when the Governor felt no longer qualified to do so which, the man had the remaining marble to realize, was a shade past imminent. For a considerable amount of money and the interesting contents of several footlockers, Arthur would assume the Governor’s guilts and strive to make amends for his unfortunate decisions when in office. Those roads. He had directed ten miles of new asphalt to be laid down for every woman and child in the state, not including parking lots and private driveways.
They even discussed the Governor’s—rather Arthur’s—final gesture in this fallen world. Arthur suggested that when the time came, after the money was gone and, of course, all reparations had been made, he would go into one of those thousand-acre car and bulldozer dealerships and immolate himself in the showroom. Strip to a snowy white diaper—the Governor liked that detail as he was both fond of ceremony and vain about his sinewy limbs—and combust, but the Governor argued that the days were past when an event like that would give anyone pause, to say nothing of bestirring further consciousness.
“You ever see one of those gummy bears on fire?” he said. “One of those candies? You’d go up like that. Mean no more to people than that.”
“Death as protest might have lost her bump,” Arthur agreed.
“Such an exit opens no doors,” the Governor said. “But it might be the best we can do. The important thing is not to wait too long. You don’t want to die of pneumonia. That’s what they call the old person’s friend. Some friend. Like having a three-hundred-pound officer of the law sitting on your chest advising you that it’s not in your best interest to draw that next breath.” “The leaving will be in as magisterial a way as possible,” Arthur promised.
The scam seemed innocent enough. What was the harm?
The Governor imagined all the other inmates in the dre
ary facility to be the dim-bulbed legislators he had known though with larger heads, but Arthur, he believed, had the potential to be himself, that is, the Governor. Arthur began visiting him regularly and the details of their accordance were hammered out. After this was done to the Governor’s satisfaction, the Governor seemed to lose all interest in him, devoting his days to protecting the piano, which existed, marginally, in the hobby room along with the tower of puzzles. The Governor had taken it upon himself to not let anyone near the beat-up out-of-tune old thing, believing like the innocent young Nietzsche thrust into a brothel that of all the beings there it was only the piano that still possessed a soul.
A burlish inmate finally had enough of the Governor’s behavior and attacked him, banging his head with the piano’s scarred lid, crushing his skull actually beneath the lid. The smirking spineless attendants were affording themselves sundaes in the adjacent ice cream parlor and were slow to react. By all accounts—Arthur had not been present—the murderer then sat down to play, and quite brilliantly, before he was wrestled away from the trembling instrument.
So the Governor died. By piano.
He had once confided to Arthur that he did not wish to play the piano, he believed himself to be the piano. Glenn Gould said that players want to be either the music or the piano, they hate being middlemen. As a child the unparalleled performer had begun an opera about nuclear destruction. In act I everything dies. In act II a superior breed of frog emerges.
Another nut, Arthur thought. Not that he didn’t think frogs were underrated in this life.
Arthur wished he were an unparalleled performer but he was not and the opportunities afforded by the Governor’s faith in him were, he had to admit, unrealized. He had not taken on the other man’s guilts nor had he reflected much on expiation. But after pretty much racing through the Governor’s assets and down to the surprises of the last trunk, he had been thinking more and more about the clause imposing substantial penalties for early withdrawal—or had it been serious penalties? But the contract couldn’t be valid, the man was insane: He hadn’t even been a governor.