Travels with Lizbeth

by Lars Eighner

  The officers assigned to the market area—the park patrol and the foot patrol—had been disinclined to put themselves at the vendors’ disposal. Perhaps the officers thought the vendors little better than the winos, or they had enough legitimate complaints to deal with, or perhaps it was their policy to leave well enough alone. However it was, the winos had no complaint of the officers on the beat.

  The winos said the public intoxication arrests were examples of private law enforcement.

  I had won the winos’ confidence by telling them of my eviction from Adams Park. They sympathized. They said the mounted police were the worst. They told me they had never heard of a mounted patrol so far north, and that was in agreement with my belief that the mounted police had been off their beat.

  The winos suggested that I had experienced another example of private law enforcement: Somebody at the school on the bluff had used private connections to encourage the mounted police to sweep through Adams Park—perhaps one of the officers had a child in the school, or perhaps the owner of a restaurant that abutted the park, though his establishment was out of sight of my place in the park, had been consulted and had used his influence, for he had once been a policeman and was very popular among his former colleagues.

  I always suspected something of the sort. That the winos reached the same conclusion independently encouraged my suspicions. The police dispose of poor people however they will, on a whim, as a favor, and the officers know they will never answer for anything they do so long as their victims are not fortunate enough to afford a lawyer.

  It is a crime to be poor, so the winos said. So it is, for it is a crime to sleep in a public place and a crime to trespass to sleep in a private place. But more than that, to be poor is to be subject utterly to the agents of the law. This as much as anything, I think, is what a middle-class person fails to appreciate about being poor. A middle-class man may want to avoid being stopped for speeding in his BMW, but if he is stopped he sees a face of the law very different from the face shown to the poor. The traffic officer who stops a man in a BMW knows the man’s sister might be a lawyer, the man himself might be a lawyer, at any rate the man has the resources to make trouble if he is dealt with unfairly. Middle-class people have rights and they like to think that everyone does. The rich, of course, know that rights are bought and sold, and the poor know it too. Those between them live in an illusion.

  The winos told me I had been fortunate to be in the park when the officers arrived. Otherwise my gear would have been seized and anything left loose would have been torn up. They said the police often did such things. Opinions differed as to what the police did with the things they took. Some said the officers went through things and took for themselves anything they wanted. Others thought the gear was searched to gather intelligence about the owner. The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, of course, applies only to people who have homes. The third opinion was that the police just did this for fun and they disposed of the gear in some remote place.

  I returned to the market on several days. All that the winos had told me about their arrests seemed to be true. The park patrol and the foot patrol came to the market and never bothered the winos except to say a few words, and as often as not these appeared to be congenial exchanges. Day after day the other officers came, parked their patrol car on Guadalupe, and conversed with the vendor who was supposed to be the sister-in-law of one of them. Mr. Two Dogs tried to insinuate himself in these conversations and volunteered many opinions, but clearly he was superfluous to the proceedings. The officers would arrest three winos and depart.

  Once I was convinced of the winos case, I wrote a crank letter to The Austin Grackle. My letter brought a sharp reply. The vendors denied nothing. Instead they excused themselves on the grounds that the winos dealt drugs, looked disreputable, smelled bad, and offended potential customers.

  All of these were precisely the complaints the established merchants had had against the original vendors.

  THIRTEEN

  Daniel

  One evening at dusk a young man approached the pew and called Lizbeth by name. I did not recognize him and I did not know how he came to know my dog’s name.

  He explained that he had roomed with Jerry. Lizbeth was supposed to have been Jerry’s dog. He adopted her when he lived with me at the shack on Avenue B, and when he moved out he woke me from a nap to say that he could not afford a pet deposit at his new apartment, but he would take Lizbeth to be destroyed if that was what I wanted.

  Jerry now lived somewhere that Lizbeth and I passed often. He had pointed us out to this young man. In fact, the young man said, he had just come from Jerry’s place. He had hoped to spend the night there, but Jerry had not come to the door. Whether Jerry was avoiding him or was sleeping, the young man did not know. Jerry is a sound sleeper.

  The young man told me his name was Daniel. Lately he had been staying at an apartment he had supposedly vacated. The manager had not changed the lock and Daniel had been letting himself in with a duplicate key. But at last Daniel had been discovered and he did not dare return.

  Daniel said he was on the waiting list for admission to an AIDS hospice in Houston. He expected to be admitted within a matter of days. In the meantime he had no place to go.

  I nodded. Daniel looked as if he had AIDS. I never knew it if I had met anyone before with full-blown AIDS. Daniel had the hollow cheeks and the emaciated look about the neck that I had seen in photographs of people with AIDS and otherwise only in photographs of concentration-camp survivors. I asked Daniel what the local AIDS agency had done for him. He said they were mostly burned-out on him.

  Although I had donated what I could to the AIDS agency, I did not have much confidence in them. I could see, however, that Daniel was a hard case, a prickly pear.

  Most agencies, and especially their volunteers who do so much of the real work, want cuddly, warm clients. In the case of AIDS, that means the volunteers are best prepared for people who will lie down and die quietly. Many people who apply to work with persons with AIDS envision themselves as ministering martyrs among the lepers. They imagine the work will involve many tender and touching moments as their patients struggle to express eternal gratitude before expiring gently. Such scenes are filmed through gauze and Vaseline.

  But what if the client was not a model citizen before he became ill? What if having AIDS really pisses him off? What if suffering silently is not his cup of tea? What if he resents the hell out of having to have things done for him? What if he feels entitled to steal five dollars from Florence Nightingale’s purse?

  And even when the client is a saint, there is a great deal more to being of real service than fluffing pillows and holding hands.

  I asked Daniel whether it really had come to the point that the agency would do no more for him. He said he was afraid that it was so.

  They had discovered he had been trading his hard-won food stamps for marijuana. That was, I gathered, only the last straw. In the present crisis, the agency had given Daniel the name of a man who supposedly had a standing offer to put up people with AIDS. But the agency had made a point of saying they did not recommend Daniel call the man, but passed the name along for Daniel to do with as he wished.

  Other than to make this rather peculiar referral, the agency would do no more. Having no better plan, Daniel called the number in spite of the agency’s disclaimer. The man invited Daniel to stay with him and gave Daniel directions to a house in Hyde Park.

  When Daniel got to the address, the man offered him a sofa bed, and Daniel, being by then very tired, lay down. He said he had almost fallen asleep when the man began to massage him. Daniel did not want this attention, but he was too weary to make an issue of it until the massage reached his crotch, whither it arrived with uncommon haste.

  Daniel asked the man to stop, but the man had not. And thus Daniel left.

  I recognized Daniel as a manipulative sort of person. That someone would open his home to people with AIDS in order to make passes
at them seemed incredible.

  But Daniel mentioned the man’s profession—which was an uncommon one for men—and the neighborhood of the man’s home. These rang a bell with me. Daniel had not written down the man’s name and had forgotten it. But he had the slip of paper on which he had recorded the man’s telephone number. I wanted to take the number to the telephone book at the convenience store across Twenty-ninth Street to see if I could confirm my suspicions. But as I questioned Daniel, he remembered the man’s name in a flash. I knew the man.

  I cannot say that Daniel’s story was true, but only that, whether fiction or fact, it captured the salient features of the man’s character better than any other single anecdote might. I believed Daniel then and all the more because he could see I could not give him any money.

  What Daniel did want was to sleep on the pew as Lizbeth and I watched over him. He proposed to take a number of Valium and he perceived that the bench was not the safest place in the world. I sat on the curb beneath the pew. As the evening was growing cooler, I offered Daniel my sleeping bag. He threw it over himself and, after being reassured I would not leave him until morning, took some pills and promptly fell asleep.

  Lizbeth was upset to lose her place on the pew. She paced for a while and then curled up under the pew, where she was hidden by the drape of the sleeping bag.

  Daniel left his pill bottle standing on the pew near his head. Without disturbing the bottle I could read its label. The patient’s name matched the one Daniel had given me. The doctor was one of two in town I knew to have a large AIDS practice, and even before the AIDS crisis he was known for prescribing drugs like Valium with a free hand. I saw Daniel had exceeded his prescribed dose, but not to an alarming degree. Eventually I nodded off to sleep, my back braced against the pew.

  Lizbeth roused me three or four times when men approached the pew. The adult arcade, which was in the storefront next to Ramblin’ Red’s, stayed open all night, and any of its patrons might have inquired of us, since late at night the pew is usually occupied by hustlers or other available men who cannot or will not pay the two-dollar admission.

  Occasionally when I worked late into the night, the staff of the arcade came out to investigate complaints of a possibly dangerous vagrant. But I enjoyed the favor of the clerks on the night shift at the arcade, for I had once seen a number of magazines fall from the pants leg of an inebriated shoplifter as he stumbled away from the arcade. I knew inventory of the display items was taken every shift and the clerks must make up any deficit as much as if the cash drawer were short, so I had returned the magazines.

  We had nothing to fear from the staff of the arcade or its regular customers, but perhaps one of the men who approached us in the night had meant us harm. All of them were surprised when Lizbeth leapt from concealment to announce them.

  Daniel woke shortly after dawn. He was to go to some agency that would give him a voucher for a bus ticket if the hospice was ready for him. I told him I would leave the sleeping bag under the steps at Sleazy Sue’s in case he had no better place to stay that evening and I was, for some reason, elsewhere.

  When Lizbeth and I returned to the pew that afternoon, Daniel was wrapped in the sleeping bag although it was an hour before sunset and still very warm. He had taken a chill and what is more he had not got anything to eat all day. Lizbeth and I had eaten as we came to things. Our reserves were exhausted.

  I left Lizbeth with Daniel and my gear and went around to the Dumpsters to find what I could while there was light remaining.

  These were bleak days at the Dumpsters. We ate orts from the dormitories. I did not think I could give anything of the sort to a person with AIDS. I stirred through the Dumpsters with little hope of finding canned goods or other sealed items such as I had taken in better times to the AIDS food bank. I found a few open things that I would have eaten myself. But I had a recollection that one of the more perilous opportunistic infections to which PWAs are subject is transmitted by cat shit, and few Dumpsters are entirely free of used cat litter. I found nothing I could give Daniel.

  At the end of the line of the best Dumpsters I turned and retraced my steps. I sifted through the Dumpsters again, determined to make them yield something.

  When I reached, save by one Dumpster, my starting point, a college woman came down the back stairs of one of the apartment buildings. She carried a paper bag that I believed she was going to discard. I returned to business, taking as little notice of her as I could for fear of alarming her. “Do you want something to eat?” she asked, startling me slightly. I had not realized she had approached me. She handed me the crisp brown bag. “I made some sandwiches,” she said.

  I was not speechless but nearly enough that I said nothing intelligible. I do not appear much in need of food. The woman meant to do a little good by feeding me, but had done much more than she meant by feeding Daniel. Unfortunately I tried to tell her so all at once and she understood not a word.

  The sandwiches were freshly made and not her leftover lunch and she had put a nice apple in the bag. Daniel made quick work of the food and I could believe he had not eaten all day.

  We spent the night at the pew as we had the night before. But the next night Daniel did not return and I assume he went to Houston.

  FOURTEEN

  Lizbeth on Death Row

  I still had the down jacket Jack Frost had given me in Hollywood, and besides that I had made a poncho of a run-of-the-mill wool blanket I had found in a Dumpster. But the blanket would not cover my arms as I went through the Dumpsters and the down jacket was too warm. I wanted something with sleeves, for the only shirts I had were T-shirts.

  Fortunately, the sororities observed the birthdays of their members, and a favored way of presenting a gift that season was to present the recipient with the end of a piece of yarn. The recipient had to trace the yarn to its other end, around and around the house, with several skeins spliced in.

  The mess of yarn was discarded.

  I collected the yarn and untangled it. When it seemed to me I would have enough yarn, I made a circular knitting pin of a length of television cable and the point guards of two ballpoint pens. This implement left a lot to be desired and my sweater went slowly. As the fall winds grew crisper, I carried my knitting everywhere and worked on it whenever I had a spare moment.

  While I knitted I liked to imagine I was knitting while the heads of yuppies rolled past my feet.

  As I knitted in the Renaissance Market one day, a woman approached me and asked if I could not use more yarn. As very commonly happens, she had undertaken a knitting project some years ago and bought all the yarn for it, as is recommended because colors vary slightly from dye lot to dye lot. After a brilliant start, the project had been laid aside to be completed someday. At last she was willing to admit that she would never take up the project again and would be just as happy to be rid of the yarn if I had a use for it.

  I certainly did want the yarn. I wanted to make the sweater quite long so it would not ride up and expose me when I stretched to reach into a Dumpster. I had untangled the scraps of yarn into balls according to color. I was knitting the sweater seamlessly, in narrow horizontal stripes, arranging the colors more or less at random. I was unsure I would have enough yarn. As I knitted, the balls got smaller, and as they got smaller, they got smaller more quickly.

  The woman said she came to the market every day to pick up someone who worked nearby. If I were at the market the next day, she would bring the yarn and I could have it.

  The next day began windy and cold, bleak and gray. If not for the yarn, I would have found a leeward place and stayed there. But I led Lizbeth to the market and the weather improved as the day progressed. True to her word, the woman brought me the yarn. By then the clouds were much higher and the wind had died. I decided to stay in the market and knit.

  The Christmas season was upon the market. It was nothing like it had been in the old days. Vendors did not occupy as many as a third of the marked-off spaces, but it w
as busy enough that Lizbeth and I could not sit on the benches around the planters.

  We sat instead on the sidewalk in the unused western part of the market. There a row of small trees had been circumscribed with six inches of curbing, and I could from time to time rest my back against the curb.

  I had installed another snap on Lizbeth’s leash, making one on each end. This had proved handy in many ways. In camp I could extend Lizbeth’s range by attaching a strap or whatever I had to a tree and snapping her leash onto that. When we left camp, I had nothing to untie, but had only to unsnap the leash. I could fix her easily to Dumpsters when I needed both hands to go through the contents.

  When I sat on the sidewalk at the market to knit, I put the leash around my waist and snapped the usually free end onto her collar. As I am uncommonly stout, this left Lizbeth only a little slack. When the weather was cool, of course, she did not want much slack. She got on my lap and curled up, and somehow I managed to knit. So it had been many days that we visited the market.

  That day I had no sign of impending trouble, but suddenly Lizbeth jumped up with a snarl.

  Students from the blind school were brought to the market to practice getting around in crowds. One of them had approached us from behind. If the student had been feeling the sidewalk with his cane he would have hit my leg with it. But instead he was waving the cane through the air about a foot from the ground, and so, with an accuracy a sighted person would have had difficulty matching on purpose, he poked Lizbeth in the face.

  The student, who was about twenty years old, began shrieking curses immediately and demanded that Lizbeth be killed on the spot. I knew that some forms of blindness caused by brain damage can be accompanied by a personality disorder that results in the subject being especially demanding and impulsive. Whether the student had that particular disorder or not, I could see from the attendant’s expression that the student’s outburst was nothing unusual. The student repeatedly demanded to know why Lizbeth had attacked him. At last the student’s energies were mostly spent. The attendant, a rotund distinguished looking middle-aged man with a carefully trimmed white beard, said firmly, “Because you won’t keep your stick on the ground, you poked the dog in the face.”