Travels with Lizbeth
Page 20
The most ominous change was that the private school on the bluff that overlooked the park began its fall semester.
In some respects Austin seems a liberal town. It is not altogether so. It was one of the last cities in Texas to integrate its schools. When integration came at last, a large number of private schools were established. These were not the crude lily-white academies of the Deep South. Many of the schools were quite good, and the strategy of the schools was to admit one or two token minority students, from selected families, to each class. Since the public schools had remained essentially segregated for so long, by the time the private schools were thought necessary, land was scarce. Few of the private schools could afford a sizable campus with athletic fields. A private school simply adopted the nearest public park as its own.
And so it was in Adams Park.
Every hour of the school day, instructors descended from the bluff with their classes in tow. They commandeered whichever court or field they pleased. They called roll, they organized the games, and they made notations on their clipboards. It was not just supervised play, but the private school used the park as a part of its regular course of instruction.
Several afternoons I returned to the park to discover the place occupied by classes from the school. I did not give the situation much thought at first, but it did seem to me that by giving the schools the use of the parks, the city was winking at the white-flight schools. With some regard for the likely range of a softball, I laid a single blanket on the ground, as picnickers did, and worked on my novel.
As it happened the police caught me abed. I had got little sleep in the night, but had closed my eyes about dawn and stayed in my bedroll later than usual. That was not really so very late. The police came at seven or seven-thirty, and I had just woke up.
I came to believe that the police had planned this raid in advance and that they meant to get me in particular. Yet if this is true, the police had faulty intelligence because on any other day I would have been gone by the time they arrived.
They were mounted police.
In Austin the mounted police are composed exclusively of volunteers from the police ranks who own their own horses and board them at their own expense. This arrangement tends to overrepresent, in the mounted force, officers who have seen a few too many cowboy movies.
I was sitting on the bedroll when they came near. The first officer demanded to know who was with me. In fact, a young man I had met at the pew had spent the night with me. I doubted that was the reason for any complaint there might have been against me. True enough, I had brought young men to the park in recent weeks and one night there had been three of us, but I thought our love-making had been reasonably discreet in comparison to that of the wino couple and of the young people from nearby apartments who sometimes came to the park at night. But the young man who had been with me left in the dark before dawn. I replied that no one was with me.
The officer indicated a largish lump in the bedroll. I pulled back the cover to reveal Lizbeth, who strange to say had remained asleep thus far. She did not remain asleep for long, and taking the horse for a big dog, she hopped up and barked and strained at her leash. Although it was evident she was tied securely to a tree, the officer drew his weapon.
Curfew had expired at 5:00 A.M. and the officers had not found me asleep. I thought I was in the clear.
While the officer who had drawn his weapon detained me, his companion rode up the bluff, directly to my stash of gear in the bushes. He must have been informed of its location, for it was not obvious and he spent no time looking for it.
I was ordered to leave the park and never to return. That, I knew, was quite beyond the officer’s legitimate authority. If he could have connected me with the stash in the bushes, he might have charged me with dumping or something of the sort. Instead he lectured me on sleeping in a public place and could come up with nothing better when I pointed out to him he had no evidence that I was sleeping. I hoped he might give me a clue as to the source of the complaint against me, for I had observed that the police had seemed to have singled me out.
I learned nothing. The officers left the park without bothering anyone else, although they had to ride past the wino couple, who on their mattress were about a bottle-and-a-half into breakfast.
Perhaps the officers meant only to make an example of me. Against that is that the police seemed to know where the rest of my gear was stashed and that the wino couple stayed at least a few more weeks in the park without being bothered. I do not know who might have been observing me closely enough to notice the sex of my bedfellows, and I cannot think of any other reason that the police would want to bother me while leaving the others unmolested, but I think that they did come to the park to annoy me in particular.
My stash in the bushes had been scattered and trod on by the horse. Most of my stuff was common geegaws from Dumpsters. But Lizbeth’s large bag of dog food—since my leg trouble I had always tried to keep a reserve for her—was a total loss.
If the police knew where to look for me in Adams Park, the game was up. I had no intention of trying to remain there. Indeed, I had not intended to stay so long as I had, for my first plan had been to move fairly often. At first I kept my eyes open for new campsites. But I had not moved because I did not want to poison another area if I could avoid it.
I gathered up as much of our gear as could be salvaged, and Lizbeth and I moved to a place I called the Triangle. One side of the Triangle was a very high, very steep bluff, another was a creeklet that prevented mowing machines from getting at the Triangle—and which, I thought, a horse could not jump for want of a sufficient landing area—and the third side was a large boulevard with fast traffic that made a pedestrian approach from that direction unlikely. Here between the limbs of a horizontal oak we camped through the fall and into the winter.
* * *
AS FALL PROGRESSED, the migrant homeless—the snowbirds—returned to Austin from their summer habitats. So long as I stuck to my orbit, from my new camp to the pew at Ramblin’ Red’s and around to the Dumpsters near the pew, I saw little of them, perhaps because Lizbeth and I occupied the pew so regularly and so completely or perhaps because the panhandling was better elsewhere.
The cause of the homeless was fashionable; it was a presidential election year. Some group of purportedly homeless people had adopted a goose and named it, of course, Homer. From time to time they threatened to eat Homer in order to dramatize their plight. I do not know whether Homer was eaten, but only that after he attended the Democratic national convention in Atlanta he dropped out of sight. Some activists built a flotilla of ramshackle houseboats which were painted in gaudy slogans and launched on Town Lake, which is what the Texas Colorado River is called in downtown Austin. Some homeless people supposedly lived in the houseboats, despite the questionable seaworthiness of the craft and their lack of sanitary facilities.
This last proved to be a divisive point. The Liberals—who wished to dramatize homelessness—rather overlapped the Environmentalists—who objected to people’s defecating in the river. The houseboats violated a number of ordinances, but the civic authorities hesitated to create a cause célèbre. The university, however, could be relied upon to be less discreet.
The university had exercised its eminent domain to condemn several blocks of shacks in a black neighborhood east of campus. The shacks were shoddy and the university was certain to raze them, but for the nonce they were boarded up. Some activists, possibly including a few genuinely homeless people, removed the boards and moved into several of the shacks.
Whether to save trees or houses, people lying in front of bulldozers is a traditional theme of Austin political demonstrations, and—as it seemed easier than attempting to police the area—the university soon obliged by sending in the bulldozers.
Thus the activists had the illustration they wanted of their cause: Here was the university destroying affordable housing just as homelessness was becoming more apparent on Austin’s street
s and just as the issue of homelessness was beginning to penetrate Austin’s middle-level-bureaucrat mentality. Of course the people the university had displaced were all black and the new squatters, to judge from the photographs in the newspaper, were white. Moreover I never saw anyone in the photos whom I recognized from the street. The people I recognized were the usual gang of semiprofessional spokespersons who seem always to be in the forefront of whatever issue is hot.
I had been in Austin for a long time. I knew what an Austin political movement was. This knowledge put me off having anything to do with the homeless movement. But I was curious about other homeless people.
Before I became homeless, I had a vague interest in astronomy. Once I was sleeping under the stars, I could not learn enough about them. Similarly, I thought it a shame to be well situated to learn of other homeless people and to neglect to try to do so. Besides being intellectually curious, I thought I might acquire some practical skills from them. I believed I got by as well as any homeless person might, but I was not smug.
I had discovered I could learn nothing of value from social workers. Social workers, after all, never try to use the systems they establish and operate. I thought that perhaps I would have better luck in learning the skills of homelessness from the homeless. I could not believe I was the only sober and reasonably sane homeless person; there had to be others whose society I might enjoy.
I read in the daily newspaper that some of the homeless could be found at the Renaissance Market near the university. When I was in college many hippies hung out in that area, but being a hippie of no particular address in 1970 was very different from being homeless in 1988. Before, during, and after the hippies, a band of panhandling winos frequented the market. If they were who the paper meant, I did not think I was especially interested in meeting them.
I had not been to the market in a long time, and years had passed since I observed it any longer than I required to pass through. On the remote chance that the newspaper had reported something really new, I resolved to go there.
One day I found the pew at Ramblin’ Reds occupied by snowbirds who seemed to have settled in. I thought it was as good a time as any to take Lizbeth to the Renaissance Market to see what I could learn of the homeless people there.
The Christmas season was still sufficiently remote that only a few of the spaces were occupied by vendors. Lizbeth and I sat on a bench that had been erected around one of the planters. I remembered the tree in the planter as a sapling. But it had grown up so that Lizbeth and I were quite in the shade.
Austin was having a bit of a Sixties revival. I was amused to see the tie-dyed T-shirts being offered by one of the vendors; the dyes were very much brighter than anything I remembered seeing in the Sixties. I supposed the colors were fast, too. Either because they had always dressed that way, or to capitalize on the return of the fashion, many of the vendors were dressed as hippies. I did not look so out of place, I thought, for I was anticipating cold weather by letting my hair and beard grow.
The Renaissance Market had begun in the late Sixties when hippies had sold love beads, tie-dyed T-shirts, sandcast candles, and similar things on the sidewalks near the university. The sidewalks had become crowded and the established merchants had objected.
The issue posed perplexing dilemmas on all sides. Leftists tended to side with the vendors but wanted an ideological basis for preferring one sort of capitalist to another. Conservatives generally sided with the merchants, but that flew in the face of their entrepreneurial myths. What settled the issue was that the market quickly became a tourist attraction, and in Austin politics there is no sacred cow save tourism.
A more-or-less useless cross street was converted to a market square. At first it was called the People’s Market and it had many of the qualities of the so-called liberated zones of the time. The years went by.
The rules of the market changed to eliminate jobbers—that is, middlemen who did not produce the goods they offered. To reflect this change in the market’s rules, the name was changed to the People’s Renaissance Market. Those vendors who were successful began to have proprietary feelings about the market. Licensing requirements were stiffened, fees were raised, and a commission was established to examine the artisans and the products they intended to offer. The number of licenses was limited. The illusion that anyone could make things and expect the chance to sell them at the market was dispelled. The word People’s was dropped from the name.
I had not grasped what the changes in the policies of the market might mean in practice, but I was soon to find out. Almost as soon as Lizbeth and I sat down, the vendors’ enforcer, whom I call Mr. Two Dogs, noticed us and asked me to leave. The market is, legally, a public park. I declined Mr. Two Dogs’ request. Mr. Two Dogs said that if I did not leave he would summon the police. I thought that very unlikely but replied only that I had nothing to fear from the police. When Mr. Two Dogs returned to his dogs, they greeted him by cowering and flinching.
Thereafter when I was in the market I made a point of observing Mr. Two Dogs closely. He was not a vendor himself—not an official vendor. He sold drugs, but he was very discreet and selective in his clientele. Evidently the vendors granted him this exclusive concession in exchange for his services in expelling undesirables, a class that seemed to include me. At any rate, Mr. Two Dogs enjoyed the vendors’ confidence and he would be asked to sit at a table if its proprietor had to be away to get lunch or use the rest room.
Students solicited me for drugs but had better luck with a drinking group that was seated in a more remote part of the market. Allowing for the usual turnover in personnel, these were the panhandlers and winos who had been in this area for years. They evidently were the homeless people the newspaper had discovered.
At first I thought the winos were far enough away to be beyond Mr. Two Dogs’ jurisdiction. A park patrol car cruised up the alley that bisects the market. The park patrol have brown uniforms, but their cars look like ordinary police cars except that the car numbers are prefixed with a P. The park patrol seemed to take no notice of the winos. And it was the same when the blue-uniformed foot patrol that polices the university area came through.
Presently, however, a patrol car on the Drag, as Guadalupe Street is called in this area, stopped at the market. The officers got out of their car and had a small conference with Mr. Two Dogs and one of the vendors. Mr. Two Dogs pointed first at me and then at the group of winos. The officers came toward me. I was not especially alarmed. I had done nothing wrong and if the officers spoke to me they would perceive I was sober. Lizbeth barked fiercely as the officers approached. They walked past us. The winos were not so fortunate.
The officers shook down the winos but did not find the contraband. Nonetheless they arrested three of the winos and manhandled their prisoners as much as circumstances might permit. The officers left without molesting me.
I remained where I had been sitting long enough to show Mr. Two Dogs that I was not intimidated. Then I joined the winos to learn what had occurred.
The three were arrested for public intoxication. If not entirely without foundation, the charge was reckoned by all present to be a bum rap. Public intoxication is a charge usually reserved for persons found unconscious or for the passengers in a car when the driver is arrested for drunk driving, in order to prevent the passengers’ trying to drive the vehicle.
None of the three arrested appeared especially intoxicated, certainly no more than any of their fellows. I was told the arrests occurred daily. The choice of whom to arrest, so far as any of my informants could tell, was arbitrary.
The park patrol and the foot patrol never gave the winos any trouble unless someone really was out of line. Little or no effort was made to enforce the drug laws. But sometimes someone would be careless enough that the drugs would be detected on his person. With a drug so easily concealed as LSD, the winos admitted, to be caught was criminal stupidity and they reckoned it only just that the party be arrested in that case.
The group reckoned it fair, too, if the cops were to employ undercover agents. This had never happened to anyone in this group and they figured the police had better things to do with their undercover men.
But the public intoxication charges were bullshit. Everyone I talked to explicitly denied caring much whether he went to jail or not—it was a given in their lives that they would spend some time there. That part of their way of life was not especially pleasant, but it might be said, almost, that going to jail for a few weeks had its advantages.
Unfortunately public intoxication entailed only four hours in jail. The prisoner would not get his laundry done and probably would not get a shower or a meal. He would not get a medical or dental examination. He would not get as much as one night’s sleep. He would be released downtown, far from his friends. It was all hassle and no payoff.
Had the officers on the beat been especially tough and made the public intoxication charges a matter of policy, the winos would not have liked it but would have had to accept it as a matter of fact. The galling thing was that the cops who made the arrests were off their beat. That was the reason they took three prisoners, or so said my informants. Three would fit in the back of a patrol car. More would have required the officers to summon a paddy wagon, and that would have raised the questions of what the officers were doing so far from their appointed area and of why they had not consulted the officers assigned to the market area.
The answer to those questions, according to the winos, was that one of the officers who made the arrests was the brother-in-law of one of the vendors. The vendors wanted the winos out of the market.