Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron's Ghost

by J. Malcolm Garcia

  Randy had drunk himself out of job after job. As shelter director he earned just $22,000 a year. When he turned sixty-five, he knew he would receive next to nothing from Social Security.

  He took Susan’s hand. She looked at him. He inhaled and said that without her he would need something to fall back on. It wasn’t about the money. It was about managing his life without her. He paused a long time before he asked her to name him her beneficiary.

  I can’t imagine her reaction, dying a slow, painful death, as aware as Randy of the wasted years, only more so now that she would have no future with him to put those years deep into the past. And here Randy sat asking her to take care of him beyond the grave. No, I can’t imagine. But I do understand why she told him in a rising voice to leave her house. Now. Go now, Randy. That’s all you have to say? How dare you! Get out!

  He left for San Francisco that night.

  The next morning Randy called me, sounding out of breath and panicked. He asked me to meet him at Geary Boulevard and Leavenworth Street. When I got there, I saw him slouched against a bus shelter near a liquor store and a strip joint. Mud smeared on one side of his face and his disheveled clothes. His breath reeked of booze. I stared at him. I had no words.

  “Susan makes me so mad,” he said.

  Without another word he left, lurching on and off the sidewalk as he made his way south toward Market Street.

  Susan died soon after Randy began drinking again. I looked for him, even wandered Sixth Street all the while praying I didn’t run into Bill. I called people he knew. Nothing. Eventually I gave up and tried putting him out of my mind. I felt so naive. Randy had been a recovering alcoholic and embodied all the risks those two words conveyed every day. Among my clients, I had seen many alcoholics graduate from treatment programs only to start drinking again, but I had been unable to imagine Randy giving in to his own impulses in the same way. I thought of him as a recovered alcoholic, not a recovering one. I’d not anticipated losing him. I felt betrayed.

  I never expected to see Randy again and I didn’t, but two years later he called me at work. He said he had stopped drinking and had a job in a San Jose homeless shelter, I don’t recall the name. He was also engaged to a woman from Healdsburg, a good three-hour drive north of San Jose. He stayed with her on his days off. He suggested the three of us have dinner.

  He spoke as if no time had elapsed and nothing out of the ordinary had happened since we last saw each other, and that made me furious. Did it occur to you that maybe, just maybe, your friends have been worried about you? I wanted to say. Instead, I made excuses. No, I can’t see you this weekend. No, next weekend is out too. I didn’t trust his sobriety. I didn’t trust him. After a while, he no longer called. Months passed. Then his fiancée left a message. Randy’s two-pack-a-day smoking habit had caught up with him and he had died of throat cancer. Like other alcoholics I’d met and grown close to at the Ozanam Center, life, recovery, and death had happened again.

  I no longer work with homeless people. In 1997, I quit social services for journalism. I like the detachment of reporting, of participating in someone’s life one step removed. I sit across from the people I interview, my notepad a bulwark between us. I ask questions, jot down answers, and write a story. I rarely see them again.

  I hope Johnny stayed sober. I hope Bill stopped drinking. I hope I have the courage now to confront friends when they falter rather than avoid them. I hope, but have little certainty that any of us change that much. I consider Bill, Johnny, and Randy with an awareness I could not possibly have had when I was at the Ozanam Center, a few years out of college and working with people almost twice my age whose problems I did not share and who had hit the lowest rung of their personal hell. Recovery, digging out and up and back, was a distant galaxy to most of them. Down, really down, was their life, just as begging on the street was for the war widows and their children I met years later in Kabul. Securing the next pint or finding enough rice to eat, that was life.

  Unexpected moments remind me of my time at the Ozanam Center. The other night about seven o’clock, I saw a homeless man outside a gas station on Grand Boulevard, across the street from the Kansas City Star. He wore mismatched work boots, shorts, and a corduroy coat stained with bird shit. No shirt. A bottle stuck out of a torn pocket. He shifted from foot to foot and kept rubbing his hands together against the damp. He asked passersby for change. He was someone Randy and I would have admitted into detox back when I was younger and thought the problems that would trip us up later only affected the people we wanted to help.

  Now I watched him walk away.

  Granny

  (1988–1994)

  Her name was Marcella Brooks, but everyone called her Granny. I would see her sitting in her wheelchair in the doorway of a boarded-up Walgreens on Market Street near San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza, a ragged brown-and-white dog named Missy sprawled across a yellow blanket in her lap. Granny’s eyes would be closed, mouth open a crack. She wore tennis shoes and at least three socks on each foot. Long underwear showed beneath the hem of her dress and a wool cap covered her gray hair. The handwritten cardboard sign around her neck—“Help the Homeless”—made passersby pause. A downward tilt at the corners of her mouth even in sleep suggested that Granny disapproved of those who stopped and stared. Some of them dropped change in a cup by her feet, unaware that she received a thousand dollars a month in Social Security benefits, money she spent renting four storage lockers. Engulfed in a heavy winter coat, Granny looked smaller than she was and gave the impression that at any moment the damp, hard winds rising off the San Francisco Bay might whisk her away.

  At the time I knew Granny, in the early 1990s, I was the director of the Tenderloin Self-Help Center. We were supposed to serve San Francisco’s homeless mentally ill, but really we assisted anyone who walked through our doors. Most of our clients—“participants,” we called them—were alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes, and homeless Vietnam and Gulf War combat veterans. All of them could probably have said they had a mental illness: schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, bipolar disorder, or one yet unnamed that defied categorization. They had been triaged out of most social-service agencies because they required too much help, effort that most likely would not have resulted in an outcome positive enough to share with potential donors. They were difficult, cantankerous, and at times violent. They had burned through most available rehabilitation programs. They weren’t going to find jobs, and if they did, they weren’t going to keep them and would spend what money they earned on booze and drugs before they ever paid the rent. They had big hearts and wanted to be liked and to be useful, but they believed failure to be the inevitable outcome of any endeavor, so why even try?

  Despite all this, I hired many of our participants to work at the center and signed up many more as volunteers. My reasons were simple: they knew the bureaucracy of the city’s social-services system better than me, and therefore were the best ones to guide other homeless people through it. I like to think that from this task they derived a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. The self-help center was a place people entered, found solace for a while, and then left.

  Granny came to the center every morning for coffee. She used her wheelchair like a walker, standing behind it and pushing it through Civic Center Plaza and uphill toward our building with the dog in the seat, stuffed plastic bags bouncing against the chair’s worn wheels. Seeing me, she would stop, shake her head, and let out a long breath as if to say, Isn’t this something?

  One day climbing the hill proved too much for Granny. At first none of us realized anything was wrong. She pushed her wheelchair into the center and parked it by the front desk, as she always did. The front-desk supervisor, “Poppa” Ron, asked her to sign in, but she said, “Shoo. Everyone knows me.”

  Ron had grown up in the Ozarks and always wore a floppy leather hat and cowboy boots. He’d fought in the Korean War and had come to San Francisco after being discharged from the
army. He called his glasses “spectacles,” said “y’all” and “I declare,” and thought billboards spouting Scripture were as natural as trees. Ron got the name Poppa from the homeless teens he helped. He gave them a dollar here and a dollar there and sometimes let them crash in his battered 1970s station wagon, sagging on bald tires in front of the Lyric Hotel, where he lived. But he never let the kids into his room, where he drank and passed out. Ron wasn’t a predator, just an old man who wanted to be needed.

  “Get you some coffee, Granny,” Ron said.

  Granny wagged an arthritic finger knotted with three silver rings at her dog, telling it to stay. Free of her wheelchair, she moved in a kind of forward-leaning, jittery shuffle that picked up speed with each hesitant step and gave the impression of an impending fall. She passed through the drop-in center, a combination waiting room and hang-out area for people who were between appointments or had no other place to go. Men and women were eating day-old doughnuts there and shouting to one another as if they were miles apart. Finally, Granny made it to the small kitchen where Doug, a volunteer, asked how she wanted her coffee.

  “Black,” Granny said, breathless, as if she had run a block.

  Doug reached for a foam cup on a shelf above the coffee machine. He got a monthly disability check and rented a studio apartment in the Tenderloin with his brother, Paul, also a volunteer. Like Granny, Paul shuffled rather than walked. He was perpetually stooped and staring at the floor, and saliva hung from his protruding lower lip. Paul suffered from stomach ailments that gave birth to farts so prodigious they would raise him to his feet if he was sitting down. He seemed oblivious of the effect this had on anyone near him and didn’t understand why the others had dubbed him “Napalm.” One time, Granny walked into the restroom after Paul had used it. The door had no more closed behind her when it burst open again, and Granny trundled right back out holding her nose and gasping, which explained why people left the center to relieve themselves rather than be exposed to what Paul had wrought.

  Now Paul was standing behind Doug and mopping the floor as Doug poured Granny some coffee, careful not to spill any on his clothes. He liked to dress formally in black pants and white button-down shirts with starched collars. He dyed his gray hair a bright orange-red and combed it back from his forehead, parting it in the middle. He even wore a metal name tag he had paid for himself. To anyone who asked, Doug explained that he was not just a volunteer but the kitchen supervisor. But because he had a speech impediment, he pronounced “supervisor” stupivisor, and no one gave him the respect he felt he deserved.

  “Here you go, Granny,” Doug said, sliding the cup toward her.

  Granny opened her mouth but said nothing, her chest heaving with effort. She leaned on the counter, lowered her head, and sunk to her knees.

  “I can’t breathe,” she whispered.

  The paramedics knew Granny by name. “Hi, Marcella,” they said. They asked about her spot on Market Street and if she made much money.

  “Enough,” she told them.

  The paramedics spoke loudly, and Granny protested that she wasn’t deaf. They tugged on plastic gloves and peeled back her coat and layers of sweaters and T-shirts and listened to her heart. They looked through the plastic bags hanging from her wheelchair and examined some pill bottles with prescription labels, including one for heart medication. Granny could not say when she’d taken her last pill. The paramedics made some notes on a chart and asked her age. Seventy-eight, Granny said. They loaded her on a gurney. Granny protested, worried about her dog. I asked Terry, a floor supervisor, to call around and find a kennel where we could board her until Granny was released. Terry picked up the dog and went to lock her in a back room.

  “She has lice,” a paramedic whispered to me but loud enough for Terry to hear, and she dropped the dog, which yelped and ran behind the wheelchair and peed.

  “Jesus!” Granny gasped. “What are you doing to Missy?”

  “Not the dog,” the paramedic said. “Granny has lice. Head lice.”

  I looked at Granny, who was holding her cap in her hands, gray, sweat-dampened hair plastered to her forehead. She made a face as the paramedics wheeled her out.

  Terry found a kennel and asked Poppa Ron to take the dog there. Terry had been at the center about a year. She was short and stocky and wore a fatigue jacket and military-style boots. When she wasn’t talking, her mouth settled into a perpetual frown. During staff meetings, she would cross her arms and lean back in her chair. She reminded me of one of those inflatable punching bags that always bounces back no matter how many times you knock it down. She said she had been an army nurse and had served in Vietnam, but whenever any of us asked her a health question, no matter how simple, she would refuse to answer. She claimed that, as a retired medical professional, she could be sued if she gave incorrect advice. We took her no more seriously than we did Doug.

  Shortly before Granny began coming to the center, Terry had announced that she had stomach cancer. She had not been diagnosed with it; she just knew, she said, because of her medical training. She began seeing doctor after doctor. Each told her she had an upset stomach, nothing more, and recommended an antacid. But then her abdomen began to swell. She wasn’t pregnant—not at fifty-eight. A doctor at San Francisco General Hospital ran some tests, and to everyone’s surprise she did indeed have stomach cancer. Terry began getting chemo and lost her hair but continued to work, dying slowly on the job.

  Three days later I was in my office talking to Julie, one of my volunteers, when Granny returned from the hospital. A social worker had given her a bus token and referred her to us, recommending that we place her in a homeless shelter. Granny leaned on a cane by the front desk until Doug helped her into the drop-in area. She carried a plastic bag full of medications and had on clean clothes: a white button-down shirt too big for her narrow frame, corduroy pants held up by suspenders, clean sneakers, and a Windbreaker. Her shampooed hair floated about her face. Granny asked for her wheelchair and her dog. Doug yelled to Poppa Ron about picking up the dog, then got the wheelchair from a padlocked closet. Granny sunk into it, exhausted. She stared into a corner with that isn’t-this-something look on her face and then closed her eyes. Julie stood up to help, but I waved her back to her seat.

  Julie was transgender, over six feet tall, a hulking figure. She often wore a pink blouse, a red skirt, and a pair of scuffed red heels. Old track marks lined her arms and calves, and her weathered, rouged face looked as if she had gone twelve rounds with life and lost. When she spoke, she took cavernous breaths, bringing forth words from somewhere deep within her. Her voice would not sound feminine no matter how hard she tried. She wore a blond wig that slipped off when she was in a hurry, and stray lipstick spotted the stubble on her chin. The day of Granny’s return Julie told me she needed to take time off to attend her grandmother’s funeral in Jackson, Mississippi. She wondered if the center would help pay for her bus ticket. I told her I’d check our petty-cash fund.

  “Are you going to the funeral as Manuel or Julie?” I asked. Manuel was the name her parents had given her, and she used it sometimes.

  “I haven’t decided,” she said. “I’d like to go as the woman I am.”

  “If I were you,” I said, “and I didn’t want to be buried with my grandmother, I’d go as Manuel.”

  “You’re not me.”

  As Julie left my office, I glanced at my watch. Almost five. The center closed in an hour. It had originally operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Then our funding had been cut. Now we remained open seven days a week but for only nine hours a day. I looked at Granny asleep in her wheelchair, wrapped in her Windbreaker, the rise and fall of her chest barely discernible. Then I stood and looked through her plastic bag and found three pill bottles and a note explaining that the medications were for her heart, blood pressure, and pneumonia. Pneumonia. Outside, a rolling fog descended. I shouted for Poppa Ron to call some homeless shelters.

  But all the shelters with bed
s for women had dealt with Granny before and told Ron they would have nothing to do with her, pneumonia or no. The reasons varied: She insisted on sleeping in her wheelchair. She would not take a shower. She had a dog.

  Granny, as Ron would say, was “ass out” of options. We could do nothing more for her. Julie gave her a blanket so she might keep warm on the street at night. I watched her tuck it around Granny’s lap. I had turned a lot of homeless men, women, and families away. “We’re full,” I’d explain, or, “We’re closed now. Here’s a blanket. Here’re a couple of sandwiches. Come back tomorrow.” I had always been able to shut down a part of myself and rationalize that I had no other choice, that I could do only so much.

  However, I couldn’t justify throwing Granny out. Not an old woman with a bad heart who a few days earlier had looked as if she might die in front of us. No shelter would accept her because she insisted on some measure of independence. Difficult as Granny could be, I found in her stubbornness something life-affirming and admirable, and worthy of effort on her behalf.

  I stared out the window at an abandoned car and a homeless guy talking animatedly to a parking meter. The owner of a burger joint across the street was standing in his doorway, sipping a Coke. When he’d first opened, he had allowed my staff and volunteers to charge their lunches. I don’t know how much money he lost before he wised up and became a cash-only business and my staff went back to the soup lines and raiding the center’s canned-goods donation closet—until I put a lock on it. I listened to the whistling wheeze of Granny’s breathing. The evening light, filtered by fog, shaded the planes of her cheekbones, the sunken hollows of her jaw. I turned back to Ron and told him we’d put Granny up at the center.

  “Here?” Ron said. “She can’t be here alone.”

  “I’ll stay tonight.”

  “And tomorrow?”

  “We’ll figure out tomorrow, tomorrow,” I said.