Ghosts of Tom Joad

by Peter Van Buren

I grabbed a good—sized bag off the fast food counter that one day and headed to the door, only to run whack into this guy coming in. First time I ever saw him. The counter trash must’ve had a bad day or something, because she screamed I was a thief and I felt no strength to push past, or fight. If a place with so much food being thrown away wouldn’t spot me a Happy Time Meal Box, fuck ’em, I’d go to jail and eat there. Society cares a lot more it seems about feeding a criminal than a hungry man.

  “Imagine that,” the guy said to me, “A man willing to go to jail for seven dollars. I’ll pay for it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s okay, I’ve had hard times too. Want to sit down? What’s your name?”

  “Uh, Gilligan.”

  “No it’s not. What’s your name?”

  “Spiderman.”

  “C’mon brother, sit down. I’ll buy coffee.”

  “Thanks buddy, but I ain’t like that. You go somewhere else for that.”

  Hell, a lot of guys did a lot of bad things for money, only thing they had left to sell I guess, and he wouldn’t have been the first to try with me. I had no job, and they wanted me to have no soul.

  “No, no, I’m a preacher. I’m Casey, call me Preacher Casey if you like. I run a shelter at Calvary Church. You’re welcome here for coffee, and you’re welcome there. You can take the bus, Number 3A. If the driver is Robby, with the dreads, tell him Casey’ll pay later. Drop you right at Calvary. He knows.”

  So people laugh at you because you were once the shoemaker and now you walk around barefoot. Well, buddy, things can change pretty fast. Back in Reeve a million years ago I had gone to the factory with my father looking for work, but they said they no longer hired “entry levels” or “apprentices.” They wanted younger men who would work for less, but who already knew more or less what the older men who worked for more did. The new owners cut back to one shift, then sub-divided the jobs so that one man did not need to know very much. That made ’em easier to hire but mostly easier to fire and replace, modular-like. The deal was, take my dad’s friends’ jobs for less money. My friends would take my dad’s job. That would last for a while, until the whole plant closed down and the land was sold to developers. Might be jobs in the retail store they planned to build, I was told while security walked us the way out. At least the economy created some new jobs for those guys. That was it for me and the factory, top of the heap, best job I never had.

  I tried to get by for a while on public assistance, to eat. Food stamps sounds like something from an old movie; the first version of the program was created during the Depression, so I guess it fits. Now it’s called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or, to make you feel stupid while feeling ashamed, SNAP. In Ohio they pay us out the whole state on the first of the month, millions of people—Pay Day, Food Day, Mother’s Day. Most stores open early and stay open late that day, ’cause most people don’t—or can’t—budget well, and they’re pretty hungry come the Day, kind of a mini-economic boom. It’s the government keeping families—and businesses—sort of alive, thirty days at a time. The use of actual stamps for food has been replaced by EBT and debit cards, so you can’t sell off some of the stamps for liquor money. I qualified for all of $200 a month, and that’s being cut across the board to save on tax money for the government to spend on more important stuff. I’m pretty skinny, but only $50 a week for food is hard, my friend, hard. I’m just one guy, and I can skip a meal if I need to, and I do. But it seems like in Reeve these days, a lot of families with kids don’t have enough to eat, and a lot of them are getting some SNAP money to get by. To me, that is a crime, same as burning down their houses.

  After you solve the eating problem, you gotta tend to the sleeping problem. I’d held on to my old car as long as I could. But you quickly learn that you can’t just park a car anywhere and live in it. Stay away from schools, cops are always watching out for perverts. Churches are better, except on Sundays when people come to pray and need the parking spaces to get closer to God. Best thing to do is hide your clothes in the trunk so no one steals them, and it’s less obvious you’re living there. During the cold months, get a car cover, one of those canvas things, and nobody knows you’re sleeping all cozy inside. That isn’t much help in the hot times when the mosquitoes chew you apart ’cause you gotta leave the windows down. Keep in mind while a car parked at night attracts all sorts of attention, one parked in a shopping center in the daytime is just fine. “Just taking a nap, officer, while the little woman shops for God-knows-what. Heh heh, you know how it is. You too, have a good day, officer.” If they think you’re just resting between buying things, you’re still on the right track and okay. The poor world is a dark place in some ways, but finding a dark enough place to sleep makes you like a shark, always swimming.

  At night, when the stores close, you become the enemy. You obviously ain’t there to buy things, so you are not wanted or welcomed. Even if the place is open late, cops have been patrolling twenty-four hour stores’ lots longer than you’ve been homeless and know who is consuming and who is trying to sleep. Wal-Mart makes a big deal of offering overnight space to RVs as a sales gimmick, because those people buy shit, but unless your car is an RV or you buy shit, you are unwelcome. Wal-Mart don’t want us ’cause there is nothing left for them to take from us.

  Still not sure how it works, brother? The cops will watch over you like guardian angels when you camp out on the sidewalk in front of the Apple store before they’re ready to sell something new and you got money.

  Location, location, location.

  Modern architecture now accounts for us homeless, putting metal bars on ledges and benches so it’s impossible to lay down. Stuff like that’s invisible to most people, but for us it marks a spot like dog scent: this is mine, not yours, go away. Nobody wants a homeless person around, and I guess I can’t blame them. Takes some getting used to, though. At first when someone wanted me to move on, I’d think “It’s a public park bench. Why can’t I sit on it all day if I want to? There a law?” and I’d get angry, bark back. But sooner than later I’d just move on, same as the wind would blow newspapers off the same bench. Days I’d feel like a ghost wearing a Halloween Earl mask. If you got money you can tell homeless people where they can sit. Most times though there wasn’t any law about how long you could sit on a bench, just a sense that we wasn’t supposed to be there. Laws nobody made are the easiest to break.

  So overall, friends, sleeping outside is tough. Cough syrup works if you’re gonna try without getting too drunk every night. After a while you’ll probably be ill anyway, so it ain’t really cheating. You’re always worried about getting sick, but in the end the most contagious thing you encounter is despair. Most cops’ll just move you along if you don’t give them guff, but watch out for the odd one with an attitude. The ones to really watch out for, though, are private security, rent-a-cops. Those guys got no oversight and usually want to impress whoever is paying them, and they’ll kick your ass for the fun of it. It’s a new economy business—a good portion of our labor force is focused on protection rather than production.

  So that’s eating and sleeping. Next is the toilet stuff. Gas stations are filthy, but you can usually get in. Fast-food toilets are cleaner but sometimes the manager won’t let you in without buying something, and they’re always watching. Best is the ones in a supermarket, except they are always in the back and you have to make it through the store. And don’t fucking steal the toilet paper for later, because I might be the next one in.

  It takes three things to get clean, hot water, soap and towels, but hitting the trifecta is rare. You don’t get to bathe much, and washing up in a sink only goes so far. Baby wipes are pretty good if you don’t have running water. The first time in two weeks you actually are someplace you can take off all your clothes it’ll feel weird to be naked again. I do remember the first time I had to go for a while without a shower. I didn’t feel right. I smelled a bit, more like old clothes though ’cause I wasn’t so much dir
ty like with real dirt as I just smelled too much like, well, me, I guess. Maybe if I lived in Africa or somewhere poor it’d be okay, but here it was un-American. My hair itched, and other places too. I kept wiping my hands and face with McDonald’s napkins, trying to wash up in public restrooms without soap, but being unwashed kinda became how I was, like having a cold, a new state. When I had begged up enough for a night in a motel, it was like every part of me felt better as that warm water poured over my body. I turned it up hotter than Hell, because I could. I made some lather, and felt my hands over my own body in ways and places like I used to do. Sometimes I’d go deep-dish, soaking up to my nose in the tub. I tried to rub the soap into my skin so I could smell like I had a job again.

  It gets real shitty out there when no one cares what happens to you. No matter what you don’t have, someone else has less and wants yours. I nearly lost an eye over a pair of boots, got razor-cut because of a jacket. The best way to win a fight is not to be in a fight, so stay away from other people, sheep attract wolves. That band of brothers shit works in hobo movies and folk songs, but not in America where we are too good at business to allow opportunities to pass by. Yes, the romanticized fantasy of street living is entertaining right up until the first time you get your jaw busted over a pair of warm gloves, a soiled old bed quilt, or two dollars’ worth of dimes.

  You may want a knife or even a gun, but don’t get caught with either by the cops, because your best defense to the police is appearing innocent, poor and smelly, but at the same time boring and safe. Lockup sounds like free food and a clean bed, until you been there. Jail is full of criminals, and if your crime is just being homeless, everyone else is going to be meaner and tougher. The people who run the jail could care less what happens inside, and it’s easy to get fucked up over who gets to use the one toilet first, or who gets the last serving of lunch. Stay there more than a night or two, and you start looking for someone even weaker than yourself to push around. I did it, pushed some twink aside to grab his breakfast, but it isn’t like normal stealing—it feels worse.

  I can tell you that the risks include being physically and sexually assaulted on a regular and ongoing basis, in or out of jail. This is an eventuality, not just a possibility, especially if you are a woman, or a thin-slight young man, because without things to affirm you as a member of society, you are just prey. Sometimes it feels like worse just gets worse.

  ON THE BUS, Casey remembered to me that first time the two of us met and was starting to get to know each other at that fast food place.

  “So, Earl, is it? What brought you to homelessness?”

  “I ain’t really homeless, Preacher Casey. I just can’t find work.”

  “Drugs? Alcohol? Been arrested for anything serious? Done any real time?”

  “I just can’t find work.”

  “You taking your meds? You not taking your meds? Got to talk out some problems? Can’t get along with people? Vet?”

  “I grew up in a working family, Preacher. My grandpa and my dad both worked in the same factory here in Reeve. Now it’s gone, being developed.”

  “Developed? What’s that mean?”

  “Means I ain’t got a job, and if I get one it’ll be part-time in a store.”

  “Owe child support? Busted parole? Killed a man? Abused? Abusive?”

  “I ain’t committed no crime, but some food stealing, like you saw.”

  “Come on man, you sound like you got most of a high school education, you look like you can stand a day’s work. You aren’t stupid. What’s your dope?”

  “The jobs I was planning on disappeared. The jobs my dad did went to Japan, then to China, then Vietnam, then someplace even cheaper they found. The stuff I learned in high school turned out not to be skills anymore. I took Home Ec with my girlfriend, so I went for work at a bakery in Gibbsville, but they wanted programmers, not bakers, and said most employees don’t have a clue how to bake bread. I thought working hard would help, but every job I got was broken down into little steps so it was easy, so easy that hard work didn’t matter. Even when I tried to impress the boss, you know, do a little extra, stay a little later, he just cleared me out when profits fell that quarter, saying it was overhead—fuck, I was overhead. He’d hire someone back someday if he needed the help, but for now, corporate headquarters was on his ass demanding cost savings. Said nothing personal, he was just doing his job by getting rid of mine. I went back a month later to see him and beg, but he’d been downsized himself, so keep an extra bed open.”

  “Well, you can stay at our shelter for a while, get back on your feet.”

  “My feet is fine, preacher. My hands is fine. My head is fine. I don’t need a place to shelter—what am I hiding from? I need a place to work, is all.”

  “Either way man, c’mon in.”

  I had been to some shelters before. A lot were just for women, and their young kids, as often times older boys of say fourteen years old were sent to the adult men’s shelters where sadly some of my brothers fed on them.

  I was in pretty bad shape, but it was nothing compared to a woman trying to find work, living in a shelter, trying to feed her kids alongside herself. I thought of Jodie from Bullseye, but at least she had that job. Where can you leave the kids that’s safe during the day when you’re out looking for a job—shelter don’t wanna babysit them. Even the clean shelters smelled dirty, in the way a hospital does. For me, most of the places that weren’t always full, or full of people so far outta their minds that they were dangerous, were part of some religious thing, but not like Preacher Casey’s turned out to be. The other places start off acting like they want to help you, but they end up selling you something, same as if you’re at the store. Price of a meal is listening to some God talk, same as the price of watching Monday Night Football is seeing commercials for trucks and credit cards. If you don’t say “Praise God” often enough and sound like you’re havin’ a squirt for ’em, they throw you out. What do I want from God, Father? Same as I want from anyone—give me a job to do.

  Now, this is not to disrespect. Religion was important in Reeve, and some said we had more pews than people. We all believed in God, the Baby Jesus and the Holy Spirit, but in leavened amounts. Preacher had sixty minutes on Sundays to make his point and Amen, maybe ninety minutes around the holidays. People kept their religion to themselves, and anyone walking around town knocking on doors with some new Word was more likely to be met with an angry dog than a sympathetic ear. We understood that getting along meant you could only be so selfish, that only watching out for yourself just would not work in a place where we had to live together. Sermon on the Mount said all that Casey told me, but we did it on our own in a practical way. I guess you can make a life outta not getting along if you only read one book, hating on certain people because one page of the Bible says to, while ignoring the rest of what it says, which is pretty goddamn clear about love.

  Casey was still laughing on the bus when I remembered telling him that. Casey said:

  “God focuses on the big issues, who we are, what we make of ourselves, maybe most of all how we treat others. As for myself, I’m a preacher. I play for the team of angels, but I’m not always one of them. But imperfect is just a step. You come on by the shelter, keep your nose clean, help out a little, and God and me’ll not worry too much about the rest.”

  Casey and me ended up talking a lot as we became friends. Casey read a lot of books. He seemed to understand things that had happened around me and my life in a way that made it clear that Reeve was not an island like we thought it was. In fact, what had happened to us here had happened to a lot of places. A “hollowing out,” Casey said, in a kind of sermon of his own:

  “Earl, money isn’t spread around like it used to be. After the war, until about the time you were in junior high school, incomes rose at the same level for everyone. But then things changed—you saw it, your mom and dad for sure. The top one percent of Americans watched their income grow dozens of times more than the rest of us
, until that same small group of people held forty percent of all the wealth in the U.S.”

  “Look at Detroit,” Casey went on, “my old hometown. The U.S. emerged from the Second World War with Heaven’s only functioning army, with more than half of the industrial capacity in the world and as banker and creditor to allies and enemies. That was the highest hill our country climbed, and Detroit sat at the summit. Detroit was looking into a future where the rising prosperity was going to fuel a demand for cars unlike any consumer demand in human history. There was so much money and growth and potential that everyone ate well. When it rains like that, people can’t help but get wet. My own father started as a toolmaker’s apprentice right after high school and ended up making $35 an hour, with a pension, health care, employee discounts on the cars he helped build and a union picnic every Fourth of July.”

  “Detroit rode that all up until about 1973, when everything went over the hill, not just in Detroit, but most everywhere—wages fell, benefits fell, production fell, population fell, home values fell. You can buy a house in Detroit for $6,000 today. Greatest generation and all, no, they were the greatest exception. It all happened quickly, in only the course of a few decades, two or three generations. My dad got out okay, but my older brother didn’t. He told me he felt thrown away, that he never thought this was so fragile. I hate to say it so crudely—God forgive me—but America lost its balls.”

  “C’mon Casey,” I said, “that’s what business does, even I know that. It’s their job to make as much money as they can for them, not for us. A dog can’t help being a dog, so you don’t kick at him for peeing on a tree, right?”

  “Earl, I’m not talking about anything radical here. I’m talking about a little bit of a balance. Those fights between your mom and dad over money you told me about, they were real. They were talking to each other about what was happening in America, all around them, without even knowing it. A very few people were choosing for them. Business became all appetite. Now we are reaching for a zero-sum point where wealthy people believe that to gain anything requires them to take it from someone else. Wal-Mart already makes billions, but it fights even tiny increases to the minimum wage. If McDonald’s doubled its employees’ salaries to $14.50 an hour, a Big Mac would cost only 68 cents more. Actually, even all this talk about minimum wage is missing a big point: more Americans work for sub-minimum than for minimum wage. People who might get tips only have to be paid $2.13 an hour in some places. And that $2.13 has not changed by law in twenty-two years due to lobbying by the restaurant business. Owners are doing okay, as restaurant prices have gone up in the last twenty-two years. Just like in Roman times, the lion’s share beats the Christians’ share any day.”