The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America

by McIntyre, Mike

  “Man, you’re a hard person to get drunk,” J.D. says.

  When Kristin comes back, she’s wearing fresh lipstick. She sits at a table next to the pool table and orders nachos. When she’s through eating, I move in and scarf down the leftovers.

  “Okay, I want your best game,” J.D. says. “Let’s play for something.”

  “I don’t have anything to bet,” I remind him.

  “Yes you do. If you win, I’ll give you a bow tie. If I win, you gotta wear it.”

  J.D.’s game steps up a notch, and it’s likely he’s been sandbagging me. That’s okay, I’ve been holding back, too. But now I’m playing out of my head, sinking everything and wishing I had money to bet.

  “It’s three o’clock,” Kristin says as I drop the eight ball for the win.

  We pile into the pickup and head back to Wanda’s. J.D. stops at a minimart for a six-pack of beer and a jar of caffeine pills, which he pops when his supply of speed runs low.

  “You wanna do a little crank with us, Mike?” he says.

  “Nah, I can’t. In my profession we get drug tested.” It’s true, but I also have no interest in taking methamphetamines.

  Kristin says to wait in the car while she goes inside to Wanda’s to buy the drugs.

  J.D. pulls a dollar bill from his wallet and folds it into something that makes me laugh.

  “Here’s your bow tie,” he says. “I’m trying to corrupt your trip.”

  I put the dollar bill in my pack, knowing I’ll give it away later.

  Wanda’s husband hasn’t turned up with the drugs, so we go inside and wait. A baby girl bounces in a portable swing in front of the TV. Wanda sits on the couch, sprays Bactine on a cut on her hand and blows on it. She keeps spraying and blowing, and I think she’s going to use up the whole can.

  A man appears from out of nowhere. He’s wearing a camouflage T-shirt.

  “Need to talk to ya,” he says to Wanda.

  I assume he’s her husband, but J.D. says he’s not. I sit in a chair, drinking beer. I can’t believe how stupid I am, waiting in a house full of strangers for a drug delivery.

  Kristin fidgets and says she can’t wait any longer. We get up to leave.

  “I don’t know what could’ve happened,” Wanda says. “It usually only takes him two hours. Try calling me at four-thirty or quarter to five.”

  She turns to me. “So, do you want some money?”

  Wanda knows I’m traveling penniless. “No, I can’t,” I remind her.

  “I’ve always wanted to say that!” she cackles. “Well, at least I can give you some food.”

  She hands me an apple and a piece of freshly baked peach cobbler wrapped in a napkin. I eat the food on the ride back into Billings.

  J.D. says to Kristin, “How ’bout we say our adioses to Mike and get us a motel room?”

  So this is it. Next thing I know, the prostitute and her boyfriend drop me in the middle of downtown Billings. It’s cold and the sky is gray and Billings looks hard and mean, and it’s only after J.D. and Kristin pull away that I realize I’ve left my sweater in the back of their pickup.

  The heavy afternoon hangover is on its way. I wobble down the street, searching for whatever it is that’s supposed to happen next.

  CHAPTER 14

  I find the Montana Rescue Mission where I figured it would be—on the other side of the tracks. The houseman looks like a biker, equipped with ponytail and beard. He tells me to attend chapel at seven, eat dinner, then check back and he’ll see about finding me a bed.

  I sink into the last vacant chair of the shelter’s TV room. The men around me are dirty and damaged. One guy is missing an arm, another a leg. The fellow by the door mumbles to himself and clutches a colostomy bag.

  The man next to me gets up and Al takes his place. Al is 67 and looks like Bob Hope. He worked 30 years as a waiter in New York City. He remembers every meal served, every tip received. He never married. He roams the country, staying in homeless shelters when broke, cheap motels when flush. He’s heading for a VA hospital in Tennessee, where a doctor may be able to fix his eyes. Al is going blind. He lives on his monthly Social Security check of $596. The next check arrives in 10 days.

  “I may stay longer than ten days, let the money accumulate,” Al says. “It’s a hundred thirty-nine a week. But if I stay an extra week, it’ll almost be two hundred. See?”

  The houseman announces over the speaker that it’s time for chapel and everybody shuffles out. I walk downstairs, pack on my back, for what I think is the chapel.

  The houseman stops me. “Sir, where are you going?”

  “To the chapel.”

  “This is the chapel,” he sneers, rapping on a sign I missed. “See? Right here on this door where it says ‘Chapel.’”

  The guy is a smartass and a thug, but I hold my tongue because I’m too tired to argue and I’ve yet to get a bed.

  In the chapel, the preacher wears jeans and a blue blazer. He’s a cross between a third-rate televangelist and a bad stand-up comic. He paces before the pews, arms flailing. He talks rapidly about his former life as a drug user, alcohol abuser and chaser of wild women. He moved to Los Angeles, where one day he found a pile of human feces on the seat of his car. Shortly thereafter, he found God.

  Dinner is meatballs and noodles, salad and powdered milk. There are also a few stale cakes donated by a local bakery.

  A shelter worker walks down the line, randomly asking men to blow into a breathalyzer. Two guys don’t pass the test, and the worker orders them out of the shelter. They protest, but the preacher is there to help drag them away.

  I suddenly realize that if I’m asked to blow, I’m out of a meal and a bed. I guess I don’t look as drunk as I feel because the man with the breathalyzer skips me.

  I can’t check in until all the regulars have, so I wait in the TV room. I lean on my pack, too exhausted and hungover to focus on the tube. Al plops down next to me.

  “Don’t let me interrupt you if you’re watching a program,” he says.

  Before I can answer, the retired waiter is off on another restaurant-related reverie.

  “I had a second breakfast today at a little place near here. It was good. Eggs, sausage, potatoes, toast, coffee. Three-ten. Tipped her fifty cents.”

  Al elaborates on his finances, but it’s all noise. I unzip a pocket on my pack and pull out the bow tie J.D. gave me.

  “Here, have a bow tie,” I say, handing Al the folded dollar.

  “Isn’t that something,” he says, handing it back.

  “No, that’s for you. It’s my last dollar. I don’t need it.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t need money.”

  “You need it for some things, I’m sure.”

  “No, you take it.”

  As I’d hoped, Al is up and out the door with the dollar. But he returns all too soon. He carries a few loose cigarettes he bought at the corner liquor store. He gestures to a grubby man talking on the phone.

  “I met that guy outside and I told him the story of how I came into the dollar,” Al says conspiratorially. “I was gonna give him a few cigarettes. Now I see he’s on the phone, so I know he’s got someone. Even if it’s just a friend, he’s got someone. So I don’t know now. I don’t know if I’ll give him the cigarettes or not.”

  I can barely hold my head up. Al sounds like he’s talking through a tin can pressed against my ear.

  “See? He’s on the phone. That tells me he’s got someone. He told me outside he didn’t have anyone. I’m not gonna give him the cigarettes.”

  The man with the breathalyzer strides into the TV room. He stands in front of an Indian slumped in a chair. The Indian is passed out. The man with the breathalyzer shakes the Indian awake. He pokes the tube into his mouth.

  “Blow hard.”

  The Indian blows.

  The worker reads the contraption. He squats down so he’s in the Indian’s face.

  “What’s your name?”

 
“Kelly,” the Indian says.

  “That your first or last name?”

  “Last.”

  “What’s your first name?”

  “Johnny.”

  “Johnny, you’re intoxicated. You can’t stay here tonight. Get your things and leave.”

  The worker walks away and the Indian falls back asleep.

  “See, look at him on the phone,” Al is saying. “He’s got someone.”

  The breathalyzer man returns and wakes the Indian.

  “Johnny, get your shoes on and leave. You can’t stay here tonight.”

  “You know what?” Al says. “I’m gonna give him those cigarettes after all.”

  The houseman calls me into his office. He reads me a list of questions, marking my answers on a form attached to a clipboard.

  “I’m gonna put your address as the mission.”

  “Fine.”

  “How long you lived here?”

  “I’ve been in Montana five days.”

  “Any drug or alcohol problems?”

  “Nope,” I say, trying my best to look sober.

  An old whiskered man enters the office. “My mattress has been pissed on,” he says.

  “Ernie, all those beds been pissed on.”

  The houseman turns to me and asks his last question. “Do you consider yourself homeless?”

  I have to think on this one. I know I’ve got a home I can go back to any time I want. I also know that at least part of the reason I’m standing here relates to my work as a writer. But at this moment, I don’t feel any more special than old Ernie here and his pissed-on mattress.

  “Tonight, yes,” I say.

  A bed costs $3 or four hours of work in the morning. I consider myself lucky to draw laundry detail. The houseman hands me my bed number, and I go upstairs.

  The dorm room is wall-to-wall bunks. The beds are covered with funky patch quilts. I find my bunk, a top one. The mattress is ripped and sunken and yellow. An empty soda can and two hair-clogged razors are stuffed underneath. I wonder if Ernie wants to trade.

  “Whattaya gonna do with that pack?” someone calls out to me from the sea of bunks.

  “I don’t know.” It dawns on me that my pack is worth more than the combined possessions of my bunkmates.

  Flabby men with tallowy legs and stained underwear step from the communal showers. A few guys read atop their bunks. One bearded man with greasy hair and a moronic look stares at me while picking his feet. There are no windows. The smell is awful.

  I leave my pack and shoes on the floor and climb into my bunk. I curl up in a ball to keep my feet from kicking the head of the guy to my south, and my head from touching the feet of the guy to my north.

  “Lights out!” the houseman barks over the intercom.

  I fall asleep to a symphony of wheezes, coughs, snores and farts.

  The morning pancakes are burnt, but they taste better than Barbara’s. I sit across from the only woman in the cafeteria. She sleeps in her car and eats at the shelter. She has a black eye.

  “As soon as my old man’s outta jail, we’re gonna go to Florida,” she says.

  I ask why her boyfriend is in jail. She makes a fist and presses it to her black eye.

  I report to laundry duty and learn that I’ve been reclassified. The supervisor, Jimmy, hands me a push broom. I guide it up and down between the rows of bunks. Jimmy whistles a lonesome cowboy tune.

  When I finish sweeping, Jimmy rolls out a bucket and mop. He tells me to change the water every two rows, and don’t let anybody track my work up. He comes out from the laundry room every so often to reposition a fan that blows dry the spots I’ve already mopped.

  The man with one leg I saw in the TV room sits on the dorm floor, scraping gunk off the trim with a putty knife. When I get to him, I mop over the tiles where his leg is supposed to be, and remind myself to go back later for the rest.

  A skinny tattooed man brings my mopping operation to a halt in row six. He takes his time getting dressed. I don’t want him muddying my good work. He puts on every article of clothing he owns—five layers and two pairs of gloves. He transforms from Spider Man into the Incredible Hulk.

  Jimmy chases the man out and I finish mopping. I empty the trash and sweep the stairway. Jimmy hands me a Brillo pad. He says to wipe up the tar stains tracked in by the homeless men who have day jobs as construction grunts. It’s harder than mopping, but I hunt down every bit of tar. Jimmy seems the type to check.

  I finish at 9:30, two hours ahead of schedule. Jimmy praises my work. He says I’m always welcome on his detail. I tell him I’m heading east. Still, it’s nice to know I’ve got something to fall back on.

  It’s cold and rainy when I hit the street. I turn around and walk back through the mission door. As they say, there’s no place like home.

  CHAPTER 15

  I leave the shelter the next morning, intent on reaching South Dakota by day’s end. I’ve always wanted to see Mt. Rushmore. All the places I’ve been, I don’t know why I’ve never been there. There were times when I actually got in a car and headed in that direction. But I always got sidetracked. I figure today’s the day.

  I walk east out of Billings, Montana, along the interstate. My sign is not out because the freeway splits a few miles ahead. There’s not much of a shoulder, and the cars blowing past almost topple me down the embankment.

  An old pickup with a camper shell stops ahead of me in the middle of the road.

  “Where yew goin’?” an old man says when I reach the window.

  “South Dakota. Where are you headed?”

  “Albuquerque!”

  I throw my pack in back and climb in. I can hop out in northeast Wyoming and cut over to Mt. Rushmore.

  Lester is 63. His white hair and mustache pokes out in every direction. His black horn-rimmed bifocals rest on a nose that resembles a strawberry, with little hairs sprouting off it. He’s been visiting his grown step-granddaughter near Helena. He worked on her house a bit, then backpacked for nine days in the Beartooth Wilderness, sleeping under a piece of plastic. He comes from a family of 13 kids in southern Missouri. He pronounces it “Misery.”

  Lester asks what’s up and I tell him.

  “Yer not that feller I read about in the Bozeman paper, are yew?”

  Before I left Barbara’s, she took me down to the local paper and told the editor I’d make a good story. I was surprised when a reporter interviewed me for two hours, and amused when I saw my picture splashed across the front page the next day.

  “Yep,” I say.

  “Well, I’ll be dipped in shit.”

  Lester points to a loaf of homemade bread resting on the seat.

  “Tear me off a hunk of that bread, will yew. I gotta get rid of this heartburn. Have yerself a piece, then take the rest with yew. I’ll contribute that much to your trip.”

  Lester is a backgammon fanatic. He’s on the road much of the year, traveling to tournaments from California to New Mexico. Before that, he laid sewer lines in Albuquerque.

  “I spent forty-one years in a ditch. I been buried, hit on the head by a backhoe bucket, cursed at by drivers, invited a few to step outta their cars—none of ’em ever got out. I’ve had a full life. “

  The freeway bends south toward Wyoming, and I can see a dusting of snow on the Bighorn Mountains in the distance. The willow trees are turning from green to yellow, with some already a burnt orange. Antelope galore graze on both sides of the interstate.

  Lester pulls into a rest stop.

  “This is a good place to piss. I gotta piss out this coffee. When yew get to be my age, yew don’t buy coffee and beer, yew just rent it for a while.”

  Back on the road, Lester says, “If yew make it as far as Casper with me, I’ll buy yew lunch. And to show yew my heart’s in the right place, I’ll let yew order anything on the menu—long as it’s not more’n thirty-five cents.”

  He grins.

  Casper, Wyoming, is nearly 300 miles away. If I ride that far, I ca
n kiss off Mt. Rushmore again. Still, my gut says stick with Lester. Unlike Mt. Rushmore, my itinerary is not carved in stone.

  We cross the state line and gas up in Sheridan, Wyoming. I slide into the driver’s seat. I haven’t driven a car in three weeks, and the old truck’s steering wheel feels squirrelly in my hands. But I’m glad to be helping out.

  Lester doesn’t have any kids. He was married for 31 years.

  “I got a divorce last April. Got tired of the ass chewin’. Cost me a hundred fifty thousand dollars, and it was worth it!”

  He turns to me. “Yew married?”

  “Nope.”

  “Good! Keep it that way. I saw no point to it in the end.”

  “Why were you with her thirty-one years then?”

  “I don’t know!” Lester says, shaking his head. “Her first husband couldn’t keep a job, so she threw him out. Then I work every day and I get thirty-one years of ass chewin’ for my thanks. It didn’t matter what I said, I was wrong. Even when I didn’t say a thing, I was wrong.”

  Before he divorced, Lester bought a mobile home under a friend’s name so his wife couldn’t get at it during the settlement.

  “I told the feller that if I go and kick the bucket, sell the trailer and throw a party.”

  The trees disappear and the sheep have eaten the grass down to the dirt. It hasn’t rained since spring. The interstate stretches out across the land like a ribbon wrapped around an unwanted gift.

  Lester tells me he was supposed to be back in Albuquerque three days ago, but the fishing was too good in Montana.

  “I’ll wait a couple days, then call my girlfriend,” he says. “Yew don’t wanna spoil ’em.”

  “How long you been with your girlfriend?”

  “Been seein’ her about fifteen years.”

  “But I thought you just got divorced.”

  “I couldn’t get any at home. When they shut yew down, no point in arguin’. Just go get it somewheres else.”

  “How old is your girlfriend?”

  “Fifty-two.”

  “A young one.”

  “Hell, I got one that’s forty I pat on the butt once in a while.”

  We reach Casper, where the peaks of the Laramie Range are blanketed with snow. Lester guides me to a diner on the truck loop.