1979

by Ray Robertson

  Chatham’s Youngest Hobo Wasn’t

  Always a Hobo

  “What—You Thought I Was Born with a Bindle Over My Shoulder and Patches on My Knees?”

  NO ONE DECIDES to become a bum. No one says, when they’re eleven years old, “When I grow up I want to worry about where I’m going to sleep at night and whether or not I’ll have enough to eat.” When he was eleven years old he wanted to grow up to be like his dad, over there in Korea killing communists and helping keep America free for people like his mom and him. A picture of his father in his uniform taken in their backyard in Kalamazoo, Michigan, at a goodbye barbecue sat on his bedside table alongside his baseball-card collection so that he could see it first thing every morning when he woke up. He brought his picture of his father in his uniform to class for show-and-tell and got the loudest applause of anyone, even more than Bert Watson and his picture of the two-headed cow that was still-born on his family’s farm.

  His Dad mailed him letters that were just for him—“It looks like there’s something for somebody in today’s mail,” his mother would half-sing—and he’d tear the letter from her hand and run upstairs to his bedroom and sit cross-legged on his bed and read his letter with his father’s picture on his bedside table turned to face him. When he finished and slid it back inside its envelope and put it with the growing pile of other letters he kept together with a rubber band, he’d feel sad, of course, because reading his father’s words meant hearing his father’s voice, meant missing him even more than he already did, but it also made him feel secretly guilty, because if his dad hadn’t been 6000 miles away he wouldn’t get letters in the mail covered with crazy-­coloured stamps and people at school, and not just in show-and-tell, wouldn’t think he was special.

  A dead soldier is a different kind of hero—people lower their eyes and no one applauds. His mother eventually began dating the man who owned the bowling alley where she’d gotten a job because army-widow benefits weren’t enough for her and her son to live on. He wasn’t supposed to know, but sometimes the guy spent the night; even with his mother’s bedroom door closed he could hear him in there snoring in the same bed where his father used to sleep. He still wanted to be a soldier and joined the Junior ROTC at his high school as soon as he was old enough, shined his shoes with purpose and learned to drill with admirable intensity. His Sergeant Major said he had real officer potential, and he might have stayed that way if he hadn’t read On the Road and learned to like sniffing glue. Kerouac’s book made him want to go places—any place at all, just as long as it wasn’t Kalamazoo, Michigan—and because he wasn’t going anywhere, a dollar tube of Testors airplane glue helped him get there. He liked to lie in bed on his side and sniff and nod, sniff and space out, and one Saturday afternoon he woke up with the tube stuck to his teeth. He snuck down to the kitchen and pulled out his father’s tool box from underneath the kitchen sink and used the ball-peen hammer to separate the tube from his face. He stopped attending ROTC.

  Huffing glue was good enough to get him through high school—and his mother’s marriage to the bowling-alley guy (“You don’t have to call me ‘Dad’ if you don’t want to, son”)—and pot was as pleasant a discovery as the books that weren’t on his Western Michigan University freshman course syllabi: more Kerouac, of course, plus Jack’s unbeatable Beat buddies Ginsberg, Burroughs, Whalen, and Corso. Not only could you retain what you were reading while smoking weed, it was a wonder drug when experienced while listening to Miles or Trane or Lester Young, a 3D sound facilitator with headphones on and consciousness blown wide open. He managed a semester and a half before his mother and step-father pulled the pecuniary plug on his “selfish, self-destructive lifestyle.” He really didn’t care; he’d been meaning to drop out anyway, just couldn’t be bothered to go down to the administration building and fill out the necessary forms.

  It was a chance to do what he’d always said he was going to do one day anyway: move to Detroit. Going to university was supposed to cure his hometown blues, but his glue-tainted grades meant Kalamazoo’s own Western University was the only school to offer him admission. Now he could read what he wanted and get high when he wanted and meet people who were like him. He rented a room in a house near the Wayne State campus with a shared kitchen and bathroom and got a part-time job in the stockroom of an art-supply store and waited for life to happen. What happened was he met a girl working as a waitress at The Cup of Socrates, a Beatnik coffee shop near the university, and they fell in love, first with each other, then with heroin. A part-time stock boy and a minimum-wage waitress have a choice: either quit using heroin or start making more money. The guy at the café who’d initially turned her on offered them an alternative, set them up as his dealers around campus. They didn’t make any more money than they had living on her waitressing tips, but they stayed high.

  Every once in a while they’d talk about getting clean, about both of them going back to school, maybe even having a baby, but it took more than good intentions and possible plans to get straight. He was already so messed up on wine he missed his vein entirely, but she was always the better shot and fell over on her face a minute after the needle was out of her arm. They’d been excited to try the new stuff, been told that it was unbelievable. He didn’t believe it until she was in the ground and he had to leave town because the police were looking for him. When he got his draft notice—different yellow people to kill this time, Vietnamese, but for the same no-good reason—it made it simple: he crossed the Ambassador Bridge to Windsor and told the customs officer that he’d lived in Michigan his whole life without once having visited Canada. The man told him welcome and said to have a nice weekend.

  Weeks make up months, months make up years, sometimes your mind is made up for you: he hadn’t planned to stay in Canada, he never made a decision when to leave, he just… lived. More or less, just like most people. Crappy, cash-under-the-table jobs, usually outside, hot in the summer, cold in the winter; crappy one-room basement apartments when he was lucky, a small room in somebody’s house who doesn’t want you there, only your money in their hands the first of every month, when not; wine, cigarettes, coffee, a book, sleep—what else was there? Eventually, it just seemed to make more sense not to give a shit.

  The idea of living on the street was understandably hard to accept at first; after awhile, surprisingly easy. To him it was just what happened to him. To the people where he somehow ended up, Chatham, Ontario, a little town an hour north of Windsor, it was who he was. He could disagree, he could try to explain, but who would listen? And what would he say?

  ~

  It was easy to forget to return a library book. Having anything long enough, being around it all the time, it begins to feel like it’s yours even when you know it’s not. But Hell on Earth: 20th Century Atrocities wasn’t hard to remember to return. I read it—although looking at the pictures that adorned each smooth, oversized page was the most difficult part—and had it back to the library two days later.

  Napalmed Vietnamese children. Wives with their throats slashed by their husbands. The tortured victims of serial killers. Where were their miracles? It didn’t say so in the book, but I bet some of them prayed to be saved too. Prayed as hard or harder than I had when I was lost. Why hadn’t God listened to them?

  Chapter Ten

  You knew it was spring when it rained and the earth smelled like worms. September smelled like school. Even if you never admitted it, even to yourself, the first day of school was exciting, everyone wearing their coolest new clothes but pretending as if they’d thrown on the first thing they’d found in their closet that morning, and friendships and flirtations interrupted by summer vacation instantly resumed on the playground before the first bell of the year rang. Rainy days excepted, there would always be a ball-hockey game going on, and this year was no different but for the fact that none of this years’ grade eights—us—were playing, just a mixture of grade sixes and sevens. I saw Dale leaning a
gainst the red brick wall of the school watching the game. I walked over and leaned and watched too.

  “Stevens is such a spaz,” he finally said.

  “Which one is he?”

  “The kid with the fro and the big honker. Look! Check it out! Empty net and he kicks it a mile wide.”

  There wasn’t actually a net—just the two metal posts that supported the basketball backboard and hoop—but Stevens, if that was his name, sent the tennis ball soaring off the blacktop with his running shoe and into the grass. Everyone stood around with their hands on their hips waiting for him to retrieve it.

  “Here come Bennett and Wilson,” Dale said. Eddie Bennett and Scott Wilson emerged around the corner of the school tossing a green Nerf football back and forth. I wondered when Dale stopped calling people by their first names; it seemed kind of rude, like swearing but getting away with it. I wondered if he called me by my last name when I wasn’t around.

  “Hey,” they said.

  “Hey,” we said.

  When he knew they couldn’t hear him, “Did you see that?” Dale said.

  “What?”

  “A Nerf football? C’mon.”

  I shrugged, watched the resumed game. I suppose we’d made just as much noise, shouted and laughed just as much as them, but I couldn’t remember, it was hard to tell if something was true after you were done doing it. It was hard to tell when you were actually doing it, too. It was getting closer to nine o’clock and more grade eights showed up, including Sarah and Allison, Allison saying something and Sarah laughing while they walked toward us. Allison was wearing the Adidas track suit she always wore. Sarah was wearing tight jeans and a white shirt with the top two buttons undone.

  “Hi, guys,” Allison said.

  “Cutting it pretty close to the bell the first day of school,” I said.

  “I’m here, I’m here.” Allison had been more peeved than disappointed when I told her I wasn’t going to keep jogging when school started, or join the cross country team in the spring. She wasn’t going to miss me—not much, anyway—she just hated to see anybody quit. Maybe I wasn’t going to be a medal-winning long-distance runner, but it wasn’t so weird to talk to girls anymore.

  “Hello, Dale,” Sarah said.

  “Hi.” When it was clear he wasn’t going to say anything else, “Okay, see you guys later,” Allison said.

  “Did you guys have a fight or something?” I said.

  “Who?”

  I made a face.

  “Sarah? We broke up. You didn’t know?” He said it like I’d done something wrong.

  I looked at my running shoes. We couldn’t afford Converse or Nikes, so I’d gotten a new pair of North Stars. North Stars were okay, there wasn’t anything wrong with them—it wasn’t as if they were Chex—but they were mostly white with blue stitching and they looked too new on the first day of school, like I was trying to impress someone, and they got dirty too easily, like I was wearing the same pair I’d had the year before. So many things were either too little or too much.

  “What about that time you got lost in the sewer?” Dale said.

  “What about it?”

  “What was it like?”

  “I already told you.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “Yes I did.”

  I had already told him. I’d told him what he needed to hear about his dad. I knew he must have been feeling bad about breaking up with Sarah, but I’d already told him what he needed to hear once already. Then the bell rang and it was time for school and there wasn’t any time anyway.

  I still got my morning and after-school ride from Mr. Brown most days, but we didn’t talk as much as we used to now that Harrison Hall was slated for destruction. Mr. Brown didn’t talk as much as he used to—I talked more, because he said less. I didn’t like to hear the sound of my own voice so often, but it was better than hearing Mr. Brown saying nothing.

  “So my dad says it’ll be about the same amount to own our own building as it was to rent where we are now.” Our own building. I didn’t mind hearing myself say that.

  “Uh huh.”

  “And even if it is a little bit more expensive because of property taxes and other stuff, there’ll be more people downtown because of the… you know, more people downtown, so he’ll get more business and he’ll make more money.”

  Not even an Uh huh this time, and I knew why. There were going to be more people downtown and more business for Dad and more money for us because of the new mall. The mall was one more thing Mr. Brown didn’t talk about anymore. I wasn’t thrilled about Harrison Hall getting knocked down either, but now that the fight to save it was officially over, why couldn’t Mr. Brown be happy that people were going to do better, people like Dad and us? Mr. Brown, I decided, was selfish. Some people just couldn’t stand other people being happy.

  We were almost home as we passed by the big empty space that used to be the old stores that had come down to make room for the mall’s main parking lot. There was a crane with a big wrecking ball hanging from it that hadn’t been yesterday. I hoped that when they used it on Harrison Hall I’d be there to see it. You didn’t see something like that every day.

  I wanted stuff—who didn’t want stuff? Birthdays were mostly about getting things, and for my fourteenth there were a few things I was counting on. Julie was always good for a record or two, although she decided what I wanted to hear and what I wanted to get so I never bothered dropping any hints otherwise. It bugged me a bit that she thought she was giving me good taste as much as she was doing her sisterly duty, but because she was usually right—it had been hard listening to REO Speedwagon after she’d introduced me to The Ramones, like going back to walking after you’ve travelled on a rocket ship—I didn’t complain. Ever since we were seven or eight years old, Dad always gave us cash for our birthday. One year, I’d use the money for a Phantom Mustang airplane model, the next for a Farrah Fawcett poster. I always got a birthday card from Mom, and although it was nice to find a letter in the mailbox with your name on it, the card itself wasn’t much, the ever-present five dollar bill tucked inside along with the same insipid inscription (Tom/Best wishes on your big day/God bless you/Love, Mom). But Mom would also phone me on my birthday, the same time every year, 7:43 p.m., the exact moment I was delivered into the world. Everyone knew to stay off the phone on September 30 when the hands on the clock were praying together 7:43.

  Julie was at work and Dad was somewhere else. Whenever he knew Mom was going to call, he tried to be somewhere else. The phone rang ring-ring and I was officially fourteen years old and the tick-tock countdown to fifteen had already begun. I cleared my throat and lifted the receiver from its mount on the kitchen wall.

  “Hello?” Answering the phone like you didn’t know who it was when you actually did felt dishonest, but if I said, Hello, Mom, that would have felt showoffy. You did things the way everybody else had always done them not because it was necessarily right, but because it was just simpler that way.

  “Hello, Tom, it’s your mother!” Ever since Mom found God, you could hear exclamation marks at the end of her sentences.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Happy birthday!”

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  Every year she asked me the same thing. Every year I answered the same way. “7:43. When I was born.”

  “To the minute, that’s right. You didn’t think your mother would forget, did you?”

  “No.” It was what I was supposed to say, but I really didn’t think she would forget. I knew she wouldn’t forget. She’d left us for Jesus and Toronto, I hadn’t seen her in a long time, we talked on the phone only a few times a year, during which she always said she really needed to get back to Chatham someday soon to visit us, but I knew she would call me on my birthday, to the minute. Maybe that was what people mea
nt when they talked about faith.

  “How’s school?” she said.

  “It’s alright.”

  “You’re in grade eight, king of the castle now.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “And now you’re fourteen. You’re a real teenager now.”

  “At least it’ll be easier to get into good movies.” Without having to lie quite as much about my age, I meant.

  “I’m sorry, Dear, what do you mean ‘good movies.’”

  “It’s just—” It’s just that it would be easier to gain cinematic access to naked boobs and the bloodiest of murders “—just movies, that’s all.”

  I could hear her nod. I could hear her thinking of something else to ask me. I could hear the phone hum.

  “How’s Silver Wings?” I said.

  “Oh. Well. As a matter of fact, there have been some very interesting changes going on, and not just in our little company but in the whole courier industry itself, at least in the bigger urban areas like where we are. I say that—‘little company’, I mean—although with a full-time employee now plus the several part-timers that work for us on and off—and that’s not including Bob and me, who work more than full-time, believe me—we’re not really a little company. But anyway, what I was saying was, we’ve started using bicycle couriers now, can you believe that?”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yes, and it’s actually surprising that no one thought of it before. With all of the traffic and general congestion down there around Bay Street, it’s amazing that it never occurred to anyone to give it a try, it really is. Bicycles can get around so much easier, you see, and you don’t need to look for a parking space and you don’t need to pay for gas.”

  “That makes sense, I guess,” I said.

  “It really does.”

  I thought of telling her about how I cycled to the cemetery this summer and jogged with Allison, but she was interested in telling me something and it didn’t feel right to be interested in anything else.