by Lars Eighner
I suppose by some standards I was no longer homeless once I reached the bar, but it seemed to me only an improved camp.
Clint stayed at the bar more and more often until at last he had moved in, although his presence had to be concealed from Lefty.
We remained in the bar until September 1991, surviving on what I could glean from the Dumpsters, my occasional checks from writing, and what Clint could make at odd jobs. Without a shower, a car, or telephone and with only an abandoned bar for an address, Clint could not find a job. At times our income was good enough that we could have paid the rent and bills in a small apartment. But we could never get ahead enough to afford all of the various deposits. Although I deceived Lefty that I was alone with the dog in the bar, I deceived him in nothing that affected his ability to rent the property. At times, however, he would accuse me of telling prospective tenants of the property’s defects. He falsely accused me of telling people the building had been a gay bar, for he wished to conceal the fact and had not realized Sue’s was locally famous. He asked me over and over what I had done with various furnishings, although it would always be something that he had seen Tiny put on the truck. For the defect in his hearing he could not deal with prospective tenants without an interpreter, and he accused me of misrepresenting things when I served him that capacity. The roof had several small leaks when I had moved in, but Lefty would not pay to have them fixed. When, as small leaks will, the small leaks became large leaks, he accused me of punching holes in the roof so that he could not rent the building. He often threatened to board up the bar and send me packing, and he discounted every claim I entered that the services of a watchman are worth something.
He decided the patio concealed the building from the view of prospective tenants. He ordered me to demolish the patio fence and the various awnings and roofed parts. That required a week of heavy labor from me, and at the end of it he gave me a check for five dollars.
He remained in fear that someone might park on his property, and I was another week at building barricades and painting signs to prevent it. He was very pleased and wrote me a two-dollar check with every indication that he sincerely thought himself generous. That someone might park in the lot of his strip center without going into one of the stores was a thing against which he was eternally vigilant. Before I arrived he had ordered several cars towed, some of which had belonged to legitimate customers, and for that reason his tenants pleaded with him to leave the parking situation in their hands.
But he could not. Almost every day he came to the bar and honked. Then I had to sit in his car with him for three or four hours while we observed the lot for illicit parkers. Unfortunately his powers of observation were not good and he frequently annoyed customers, and sometimes more than annoyed them. The parking aside, he enjoyed watching people go into the shops and he would try to guess how much each of them spent. Whenever one of the stores in his center experienced a little rush he said the store was getting too prosperous at his expense and he would have to raise the store’s rent when the lease came up for renewal.
In truth, parking was a problem in the area. Yuppies who went to the yuppie bakery across the street from Lefty’s property parked their BMWs and Volvos where they pleased. I wondered that people who so much relied on the concept of property had so little regard for it. Many of them thought I was insane when I insisted they remove their cars from Lefty’s lot, but if I winked at one of them, there would soon be ten cars in the lot—and when that occurred, invariably Lefty would drive by and tell me that if it happened again he would put me on the street.
I cannot be bitter at Lefty—for he had come to the end of his long life having learned nothing but how to squeeze a dime, and that seems to me to be sad enough. After we left, he tried boarding up the building as he had always said he would do if he evicted me, but as was bound to happen to any such structure in that neighborhood, it began to be demolished a board at a time. That must have hit Lefty very hard.
On my own account, I do not believe I could have got out of the bar on favorable terms. But just as it seemed most certain that Lefty would act on his suspicions of me—after many months of applications—Clint was accepted as a normal subject in a drug study with one of the several firms in Austin that conducts these studies for pharmaceutical companies. This firm always schedules many more subjects for a study than the study requires, to be sure enough of them will show up, and Clint’s time was taken in getting worked up for several studies, without pay, before he finally managed to get in one. Once he was admitted to the paying part of a study, he was subjected to scores of blood draws and he had to remain at the firm’s facility day and night, where the diet was so poor by comparison to Dumpster fare that he lost weight. In the time Clint had to spend applying for various studies and undergoing various tests, he might have made more money at minimum wage, if he could have found work without an address. But the drug study did pay off in a lump sum. With the proceeds, Clint obtained for us a very small apartment within a block of the shack on Avenue B that I had left as this narrative opened.
As I write these last few words we still must rely on the Dumpsters from time to time, and we often do not know from one day to the next where the rent will come from.
I found an XT personal computer in a Dumpster and it seems possible I will soon be able to provide myself a regular income. But it is far from certain. Any little difficulty with my health—or that of the machine—could put us on the streets again.
I certainly would be there if Clint had not worked to pay all the bills and rent some months and did not every month bring in some money from trading in rocks and minerals and doing odd jobs. I feel as if I am a struggling swimmer who has got his head above water but who remains far from shore.
Lizbeth is now eight years old and loves her comfort as much as ever. When we pass the shack on Avenue B, she gives no sign of recognizing her puppyhood home. She had, however, remembered Clint, and she is now as much his dog as mine.
AFTERWORD
In the more than twenty years since I parted with the galleys of the first edition of this book, it has had its career, and I have had mine. At first, of course, we were close companions and I traveled widely with it and its various editions. There might have been even more of that if I had allowed Lizbeth to fly as baggage, but I would not do that. Instead she remained with our companion, called “Clint” in the book and here, in a rented house with a fenced yard she could excavate at will.
I was exceptionally bad at reading my work aloud; I wrote for the page and could not get my mouth around many of the sentences I had written. I do not suppose I made an especially pleasant appearance. I often thought that if I had been very good at that sort of thing, I would have undertaken to be an actor or lecturer—or perhaps merely a personality, not a writer. I had thought that modern poetry had largely become performance art, but as I traveled and participated in group readings it seemed the same was true of prose.
Several times I was met with mysterious and vague skepticism. I found those who had not met me tended to think I had written the book but that the events had not happened, while those who had met me thought the events had happened, but that someone else had written the book. In the years since, I have learned something of the situation of outsider art in general and outsider literature in particular. At the time, I had no idea what was happening to me. I knew from the beginning that the book was suis generis, and I have no argument with those who prefer to call it a fluke. At any rate, unlike someone who gets caught up in being the outsider flavor of the month, I knew this book could not lead to a sequel or a series.
After the book’s publication, I cast about for something else to do, but many of the factors that had led to my being homeless in the first place had not changed. Lizbeth, Clint, and I faced many new perils and had many more adventures, and the book went its own way. Every semester I still receive a few inquiries from students, which I answer, so far as I am able. Their questions taught me much, and with the s
tudents’ help, I have become an expert on my own book. Traveling back in time to meet one’s former self is a staple of science fiction, but barring some great revision in physics that I do not foresee, revisiting this book is as near to that experience as I will ever come. Often that encounter is embarrassing; occasionally it is delightful. But it is clear that the once-was-me is me no longer, but the book remains what it is and what it was.
Reviewers have been kind enough to provide me with lists of my antecedents. I had never heard of Travels with Charley when I wrote my title. Travels with My Aunt was the title that suggested mine to me. I had not read it either and somewhat confused it with Auntie Mame, which is not so far-fetched an error, considering the parallels in the characters of the aunts and their naïf nephews. I also had not read the London parts of Down and Out in Paris and London. When I did, I found those parts much more pertinent than the Paris parts. I encountered the Paris parts in anthologies for students, and I suppose editors thought that squalor and poverty would be less distressing to students if set where people speak French.
Many of the homeless (tramp, hobo, vagabond) books were written by people who were only masquerading as homeless. Whether those writers thought of themselves as journalists or participant observers, or something else, they certainly had the right approach for learning something about homeless people. I would have made a more informative book about homelessness and homeless people if I had set out to investigate them. But in fact, my object was never to learn more about homelessness, but was always to learn how to cease to be homeless. After the book came out, I was shown diverse homeless situations from the camps under New York City’s West Side Highway to Copenhagen’s Christiana (now so well established that it is more commune than homeless camp), but my subject was my experience, not homelessness per se.
My adventures were considerably more adventurous for lack of cell phones and wireless communication. There were many missed connections, wrong turns, and mistakes that could have been ameliorated—if not eliminated entirely—if I had had a prepaid cell phone that I could have refilled with the small amounts of cash I could reasonably have come by. If the social sites and free Web pages that exist today had existed then, I cannot help but wonder what my memoir would have been, or whether it would have even existed at all. I do not believe the material facts of homelessness have changed, or are likely to so far as I can see, but writing a memoir can clearly never again be quite the way it was.
* * *
I did indeed write the book myself. Some of the first draft was printed in The Threepenny Review, which created the impression that the book was heavily edited. It was, but heavily edited by me. I can always use plenty of copyediting, for I often write from mental composition and think ahead of myself as I write, omitting prepositions and pronouns, dropping tense endings, and making careless errors that I would correct immediately if I read them. I rarely catch these errors because when I attempt to read my own copy, I see it as I intended it. I had an extensive, Tristram Shandy–like first draft with lengthy digressions and a wide-ranging subject matter. When I focused on my experiences most related to being homeless, I cut perhaps 90 percent of the extraneous material. And I suppose the best 10 percent of anyone’s stuff is likely to be pretty good.
The events did indeed happen to me. There are some disagreements among the participants and observers, such as those involved in the event that led to Lizbeth’s impoundment. I am told I misstated the various regulations for public assistance. The few differences there illustrate the difference between journalism and memoir. The journalist should seek out every side of the story, research the regulations, be certain that every point of view is represented—especially where there are contradictions. This is generally a good approach, especially when the differing accounts are well matched, but there is the drawback that absurd or idiosyncratic views may be disproportionately represented. Nonetheless, that is the journalistic approach to truth.
The memoirist, on the other hand, owes only a single honest account, not every account at once. I wrote what I was told when I applied for assistance; a journalist perhaps might have found that the published regulations differed. I wrote my side of the story. I expect readers understand that. No one should be surprised that autobiographical writing tends to take a charitable view of its subject; I trust readers can account for that. I do not expect, and no one else should, that other parties in crises and conflicts would agree with me in every detail. While the points of view and opinions of the events I wrote about would naturally differ in the accounts of others involved, there were no fictional incidents and no composite characters. This is the truth of experience, the truth of memoir.
Around 2005, a number of phony memoirs were exposed, which in turn led to a number of articles recalling earlier literary frauds. I think it only fair to the authors to point out that several of the books had first been proposed as novels, and some of them would have been good reads as such. I had a very minor role in one of the exposés. This seemed to explain a number of odd questions, winks, and nudges I received when I was interviewed or questioned less formally about my book. Apparently many literary people suspect that an outsider memoir is not entirely on the up-and-up. On the other hand, I was often uncomfortable and mystified when strangers seemed to know so much about me—especially since I often have trouble recognizing acquaintances from long ago and am seldom sure if they are strangers or someone I’m supposed to know. Many awkward moments like this reminded me that I had written a memoir, and it was much too late to reconsider whether so much self-revelation was a good thing.
I resist being identified as an expert on homelessness. I am not. I flatter myself that if I had intended a study of homelessness, I would have done a better job of it. The experience, of course, is a valuable part of understanding the problem, but experience is necessarily limited. Charts and graphs cannot answer the questions of experience, but neither can the limited perspective of experience answer the broad questions.
The chapter on Dumpster diving has been widely anthologized. I have learned that it has been claimed by recyclers, Freegans, diggers, anti-consumerists, and various other groups and interests, some of which preceded me. I intended it to be something of a protest of an economic system that produces waste and excess on the one hand and want and privation on the other. My essay was based on the facts of my life. My model was Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (which I had recently reread in a Dumpster copy of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, where my Dumpster essay now also resides). Although his proposal was fantastic, I did not intend to write a field guide to garbage, but I noticed that Swift’s Proposal benefited for the detail of his plan. Swift had to imagine his details; I had only to record the facts of how I lived. I did not mean to advocate that anyone try to live as I did any more than Swift meant for anyone to undertake to enact his proposal. I meant to encourage reform, which was also Swift’s intent.
From Swift I also took the dispassionate tone and elevated register which is now especially pronounced in Swift although no doubt he was elegant even by the standards of his own age. Irony, as they say, is a two-edged sword.
Swift was much better at it and only a few readers took his essay at face value, but nearly everyone thought I was teaching urban survival.
Many have noticed my dispassionate tone throughout the book. I am naturally very reserved to the point of Stoicism, and besides, I was determined not to whine. Lately it occurred to me that there might be an underlying cause for my attitude, but I am not qualified (if anyone is) to make a reasonable diagnosis after so many years. I am at a stage in life where it hardly matters. I acknowledge I am indebted to Jim Parsons for his portrayal of Sheldon Cooper; I now understand so much better what has always been wrong with me.
The circulatory problems in my left leg, first described in this book, recurred with a vengeance. Perhaps the problem was exacerbated by the long airline flights I took in connection with the book. At any rate, I am now all but crip
pled and can get around only a few yards at a time with a walker.
We do not live where eating from Dumpsters is practical, but Clint sometimes picks up a computer or something of the sort, which I gut for parts. Clint also recycled copper from discards and items he found in creeks until the prevalence of copper thieves made sales a nightmare of paperwork.
Lizbeth survived until September of 1998. She had declined rapidly that summer, but had some good days to the very last, and died quietly at my feet one night. Her remains were not committed to a Dumpster. We have since had another dog who has died just as I write this. She was a very different dog, they all are different you know, but she underscored to me how exceptional Lizbeth had been. Because of my age and condition I think it would be unfair for me to have another dog.
I did not say what became of many of the people and businesses in the book. In many cases I do not know. My memoir was a work of nonfiction, and I simply do not know what became of many of those who gave me lifts or who talked to me on the streets. If the events occurred today, many of them might have friended me on a social Web site, but nothing of the sort could happen then.
Billy was Robert David Crane. I saw him once or twice after the book came out. Because of his romantic obsession with Clint, it was impossible for me to maintain contact with Bobby without causing trouble. I cannot explain the beauty and the beast thing with Cliff and me, but Bobby thought it must have been that I was poisoning Cliff’s mind against him. Bobby seemed to be very ill whenever I saw him, but he survived until 2011.
Rufus is Russell Wade Ballew. After the book came out, I received a letter from a third party I did not know soliciting contributions for Rusty’s commissary account in a California institution. I do not know whether that letter was true in the claim that Rusty was incarcerated in California. Rusty was arrested and sentenced for a crime involving a minor in Bozeman, Montana, in 1994, and again for a probation violation in 2010. I have not heard from him directly and was mildly astonished to learn of his whereabouts.