by R.P. Burnham
Harold and Elroy
A Dialectical Dance
I.
Elroy (The Thesis)
Elroy's long death began the day he, along with hundreds of others, was turned out of the mental institution in an effort by politicians to save taxpayers the evil grief of bankrolling freeloaders. Elroy, confined to a wheelchair because a stroke had left him partially paralyzed, was given twenty dollars and released onto the streets of the city. "Here's your stop, Elroy," the fat driver said as he wheeled Elroy out of the truck. Giving him a friendly little shove, the driver, who was partial to the sweet cadences of Spenser, murmured this parting benediction: "Sweet Tom, roll softly till I end my route." So just like that Elroy found himself free to pursue the American dream with a twenty dollar headstart. And this pleased him very much, for in addition to having an ulcer, cirrhosis of the liver, poor circulation, and the interesting condition up in the file cabinet that experts called schizophrenia (all this at the tender age of 46), Elroy was a bone fide alcoholic, and it had been months upon months since last he'd gone on a good toot.
Now Elroy was no vulgarian, so first he looked around to make sure he wasn't standing up the welcome wagon. Seeing only a mangy mut pawing through a garbage can, he concluded that there would be no danger of impropriety if he sallied forth directly in search of a liquor store.
Such beacons of welcome for weary wayfarers on life's long and lonely journey are fortunately never far away. Elroy found one after wheeling only two blocks. It even had an automatic door, making it easy for him to enter, but nevertheless he had to stop to collect his breath and still his beating heart (the presence of so much booze in one space always made Elroy giddy with happiness -- his idea of heaven would be to have the run of such a place forever). "Let's see," he said to himself as he eyed the rows of bottles. "Hmmm." In the past he would buy rotgut, but with the twenty dollar bill crumpled tightly in his sweaty palm he felt it would be sinful to settle for anything short of the finest scotch. Just to prove to himself that he hadn't lost the common touch of a man of the people, he added to that a bottle of cheap wine. The next step was to find a private place where the gallant men in blue would not interrupt his libations with friendly little reminders of his exalted place in the scheme of things. This alley, thought he, as he espied a narrow thoroughfare between two warehouses, will do just fine. He wheeled in and set up shop behind a dempster, and there he found, like Satan, a heaven in what unimaginative people might denominate a hell. Glug, glug, glug. Sweetly it burned. Pang in the belly. Then warmth flowing through the half of his body that could still feel. And most of all the condition of wellbeing up there in the file cabinet. Glug, glug, glug. Ditto the sequence of physical sensations and spiritual joy. Glug, glug, glug. Ditto. And so forth through the whisky and wine.
It was fun while it lasted, but the trouble was a twenty spot doesn't go that far what with today's prices. Take rent, for example. When Elroy woke up in the morning he perceived that two rather unsavory looking gentlemen who were evidently sharing accommodations with him in the alley were going through his personal effects. One of them, a rough looking customer indeed, had Elroy's last six dollars in his hand.
"Hey," Elroy said indignantly. "That's my money."
"Oh yeah? Sez who?" the fellow growled. "This 'ere's our alley. And this”—he waved the six dollars in Elroy's face— “is your rent. Ain't that so, Bart?"
"It's so, Burt," the other agreed.
Before Elroy could so much as ask to see his lease, Bart, who was a tall skinny fellow and obviously the intellectual in their private corporation, suggested that Elroy's wheelchair had dollar signs written all over it. By which observation he did not mean that they should sell the wheelchair—rather that it would be handy in soliciting funds from philanthropic individuals with liquid assets on their persons.
Thus Elroy's diurnal routine was settled on his first morning back in the land of opportunity. He would panhandle until he got enough money for rent and a bottle (usually the same thing). Then he'd get loaded with Burt and Bart, his landlords. When he felt hungry (which wasn't often), he'd go to a soup kitchen nearby. On those occasions when the booze would make him vibrate like a bowstring, somehow someone would see that he got to detox. A couple of times when his ulcer acted up someone from the soup kitchen would take him to the hospital.
And so the times between Phoebus's gentle kiss of yonder hill and Diana's chaste reign was filled, and so he lived. One thing about such a life, Elroy was as contemptuous as Plato about mere temporality, as scornfully indifferent to his physical surroundings as the Buddha. Yes, he scorned to be a vulgar creature of the earth. His spirit lived not in the alley he called home, his wheelchair touched not the gross substantiality of the sidewalk concrete or the unclean dirt of the gutter. Trailing clouds of forgetfulness that the booze and his own private chaotic filing system afforded him, his soul found nirvana with such regularity that sometimes weeks would go by without Elroy having a single recollection of the hours and how he'd filled them.
By this time he was so skinny that if he wore striped pajamas they'd only need one stripe, but he didn't eat much because his ulcer was killing him. Of course the booze would give it a stab too, but that was offset by the sweet burning of the whisky in his throat and by the warm tingling sensation that would suffuse the half of his body still capable of a tingle. And by the feeling of wellbeing up there where the self was misfiled.
And yet there was no danger of Elroy being happy. Deep down he knew it was a living death he was enduring and he knew where it all was leading. In the moments, rarer and rarer though they be, when he'd come to full consciousness, he'd steadfastly refuse to think of the future or the forgotten past. True, sometimes he'd take from his paper bag of personal effects a worn teddy bear and consider it with a far-off look in his eyes, but then he'd forget and busy his mind with the best way to raise funds so to reach again that blessed state of nirvana where his consciousness, such as it was, could merge into the cosmic whole. It was all he cared about, poor lad, and the world, or at least that part of the world where he was enduring his earthly trek, didn't care one way or the other about what was going on in that chaotic filing system that was captain of his wheeled vessel as it sailed through dark and turbulent water -- or, if you prefer, as it rolled over concrete and dirt.
II.
Harold (The Antithesis)
