‘Not sure,’ he shrugged. ‘Maybe work at the bottling plant with my aunt for a while and save up some money for truck driving school. I wouldn’t mind driving long-haul rigs coast to coast. Be a good way to see the country and get paid for it, right?’
‘Sure, go for it,’ I said. ‘But if I hit you up for a ride at a truck stop one of these days, you’d better not be one of those chicken-shits who quotes the rule book and leaves me hanging.’
‘Okay, you got it,’ Kalvin laughed. ‘Let me give you my aunt’s address,’ he said, and scribbled it out on the back of the Traveller’s Aid map. ‘Send me a Golden Gate postcard when you get to the coast.’
‘I’ll do that,’ I promised. The kid had been good company the past three days, but I was back to travelling solo now. Off to Oz, to spend my first-ever night in a homeless shelter.
Even without the mimeographed map, I’d have found the place easily, just by following the herd. Dozens of street people were trooping through the Warehouse District toward Camp Street to join the queue for supper at the Oz. When I reached the shelter, the line in the parking lot outside the three-storey brick building was getting longer by the minute. I climbed the front steps and rang the office doorbell. A ruddy-cheeked man invited me in and introduced himself as Brother Kevin, of the Little Brothers of the Good Shepherd. I showed him my voucher from Traveller’s Aid, and he ushered me over to his desk and handed me a brochure to look at while he registered me for a bed. Scanning the pamphlet, I saw that the shelter’s actual name was the Ozanam Inn, in honour of Frédéric Ozanam, who founded the Society of St Vincent de Paul back in 1833. The list of services the shelter offered included not just food and lodging, but also clothing, medical check-ups, addiction counselling – even a barbershop – all free of charge. I could see why the blood bank tramp had called the place a good flop.
There were two plaques on the wall behind Brother Kevin’s desk. One said: We give a man a fish today, we teach a man to fish for tomorrow! The plaque beside it quoted St Vincent de Paul: It is because of your love, and only your love, that the poor will forgive you the bread you give them. Inspiring words, even to a seminary drop-out like me. But the good folks at the Oz didn’t have to worry about me forgiving them their bread. My belly was too empty for anything but gratitude. I couldn’t wait to chow down.
‘All right, Peter . . .’ Brother Kevin smiled. ‘We’ve reserved you a bed for the week. The dining-room entrance is around back. Just join the line in the parking lot and our volunteers will call you in when supper’s ready.’
Fifty or sixty hungry people were already queued up when I joined the line, and more kept straggling in until the crowd was nearly two hundred strong. We were a sorry assembly of the hobbling and the unhoused, burdened by backpacks and bulging garbage sacks, by duct-taped suitcases and grimy khaki duffle bags – misfortune’s impedimenta, everywhere I looked. There were a handful of shopping-cart ladies in the crowd, but most of the Oz’s clients were men my age and older, boozers for the most part, passing pocket pints back and forth with their buddies as they stood in line smoking hand-rolled tobacco and coughing like fugitives from a TB ward.
As I waited in line, taking in the scene, my eye was drawn to the graffiti-tagged wall of the warehouse building that overlooked the far side of the parking lot, where some sardonic joker had spray-painted in big looping silver letters: It’s never too late to have a happy childhood! I wondered how quickly you’d get laughed out of the parking lot if you tried peddling that Peter Pan bullshit to this crowd. And yet, the truth of the matter was that all of us, whether by hard luck or our own bad choices, had been reduced to needy children. Children waiting patiently for the grown-ups at the Oz to feed us our supper. Happy childhood, my ass. ‘The mother of dissipation is not joy, but joylessness’ – now there’s a tag that would have been more resonant under the circumstances. But how many graffiti artists read Nietzsche these days? Not enough, it seemed, or they wouldn’t be wasting good paint on bad quotes from a pap-slinger like Tom Robbins.
‘How’s the chow here?’ I asked the guy in line ahead of me, a short black man in his fifties who stood leaning on a tripod cane.
‘Oh, they feed us plenty good here,’ he said. ‘You ain’t been to the Oz before? Must be new in town then.’
‘Just got here this afternoon,’ I admitted. ‘Traveller’s Aid hooked me up with a voucher for this place. Glad they did, too. I’ve hardly had a thing to eat in two days.’
‘Well, at supper they only feed us sandwiches, but you’ll get your belly full anyway. Breakfast and lunch are the two hot meals. You a drinkin’ man, son?’
‘Not much any more,’ I replied, with a hint of Dixie beer still bitter on my breath.
‘Even so, watch your step when you’re walking around town,’ he warned. ‘Mardi Gras is coming up soon, and the cops are doing what they always do this time of year – snatching drunks off the streets so the crooked judges can sentence them to community service. That’s who gets stuck putting up most of the bleachers along the parade route.’
‘That sucks,’ I said. ‘What a scam.’
‘Slave labour, you ask me. Cousin of mine got snatched two days ago. He was fresh out of detox. Hadn’t touched a drop in a week. But the cops still charged him with drunk in public when he stumbled on a rough patch of sidewalk. So, like I say, son, mind how you step.’
When the bells of St Patrick’s Church up the block began to toll five o’clock, everyone on line surged forward, jostling for position as the dining-room doors swung open. I heard a loud argument break out behind me and turned around to see what was going on. Two drunken latecomers who’d tried to cut the line were being set upon by four or five other tramps intent on teaching them some manners. It was more a Punch and Judy show than a real beat-down, but it drew hoots of approval from the others in line. The last shall not be first if we can help it! That seemed to be the general sentiment. The crowd’s solidarity was touching to see. They might be low down, but they weren’t doormats – and the two line-jumpers were being taught the difference.
The Oz’s low-ceilinged dining room was about the size of a basement banquet room in your average Knights of Columbus hall, with a steam-table serving line along one wall, and three long rows of picnic tables with attached benches and plastic tablecloths arranged in the centre of the room. Along the far wall, floor space had been left clear for the Oz’s guests to deposit whatever baggage they were carrying before they sat down to eat. ‘No bags at the table’ was one of the house rules. ‘No shouting or swearing’ was another. ‘Clear your own table’ was the third. Other than that, it was a beggar’s banquet, and you were welcome to eat your fill. I wolfed down three ham and cheese sandwiches and a quart of fruit punch before I was done, and relished every bite.
After our meal, one of the shelter’s volunteers got on the microphone and announced that any man with a bed reserved for the night should line up outside the stairwell to the second floor. I joined the line, and after the volunteer checked off my name on his clipboard I trooped upstairs with the rest of the overnighters, where another volunteer explained the dormitory rules. Everyone had to strip down to their skivvies and put their clothes and belongings into big plastic bags, to be held in storage until the morning. After that, we were each given a bath towel and a tiny tube of shampoo and told to hit the shower room. ‘Be sure you wash your hair,’ the volunteer instructed us. ‘Anyone comes out of the shower with a dry head won’t be given a bed.’
I thought I’d seen a lot of scarred bodies in the showers at Rikers Island, but the tramps at the Oz made the gangbangers in prison look like milk-fed choir boys. There were tattooed Vietnam vets with jagged shrapnel scars, diabetic alkies with amputated toes, and more than a few bellies and chests cross-stitched with raised surgical scars like welted laces on a football – all in addition to the usual grim assortment of healed-over knife wounds I had seen often enough at Rikers. And me without a scar on my body. I suppose that was something to be grateful
for, but as I stood there surrounded by so much disfigurement I couldn’t help feeling conspicuous. However, my failure to blend in didn’t stop me from enjoying the first hot shower I’d taken since Petersburg, and by the time I traded my wet towel for a set of clean pyjamas at the linen room down the hall I felt right at home. Which wasn’t how I’d been expecting to feel on my first night in a homeless shelter, believe me, but you get a lot less picky about what passes for ‘homey’ after you’ve been roughing it by the roadside for a week. This isn’t bad at all, I thought. It’s like a sleepover camp for prodigal sons. What more could I ask for?
The Oz’s narrow beds were comfortable enough, but once the lights were switched off I only managed a few hours of fitful sleep. All around me in the dark the dormitory reverberated with consumptive hacking and the night moans of men in the grip of troubled dreams. Even after I ducked into the men’s room and fitted myself with toilet-tissue earplugs it was hard to snatch more than an hour’s sleep at a time before the next coughing fit or nightmare cry woke me up again. Which made for a long night – a night I was more than happy to put behind me when the wake-up alarm came blaring over the intercom speakers at 5 a.m.
All the other overnighters looked as tired as I did as we trooped downstairs for breakfast, and when the shelter volunteers shooed us out the door at six o’clock I’d wager most of us hit the streets with the same intention – to find a quiet spot where we could sack out for just a few more hours before facing another day. That’s what I had in mind, anyway, as I set off up Camp Street, looking for a likely place to catch a nap. Three blocks later, I came to an address made famous by JFK conspiracy theorists like Jim Garrison: 544 Camp Street. It was then I realised I’d spent the night on the very street where Lee Harvey Oswald had once been based during his shadowy days as an anti-Castro pamphleteer. A coincidence to which I attached no real significance, but it would add a bit of local colour to my road journal nonetheless.
Across the street, in Lafayette Square, some of the Oz tramps were already settling in beneath the trees for their morning snooze, so I joined them on the dewy grass and caught a few more hours of sleep myself – until I was awakened by a loud metallic clanking nearby. I looked around to find the source of the noise and saw a work gang of jumpsuited prisoners unloading sections of steel pipe from a public works truck in front of the Federal Courthouse, just down the block. Under the watchful eye of a uniformed guard, a second work gang was bolting the pipes together to form the framework for bleacher seats that would no doubt be reserved for the wealthy and the well-connected come next week’s Mardi Gras. Apparently, the tramp at the Oz hadn’t been crying wolf when he’d warned me about the local cops. I’d have to heed his advice and watch my step, or risk being shanghaied into service with a socket wrench.
I had a few hours to kill before lunch at the Oz, so I hiked across Canal Street and drifted through the French Quarter, taking in the sights, but I found myself growing sadder by the block. Everywhere I turned, I kept seeing places Kate and I had visited on our honeymoon. Pat O’Brien’s bar on Bourbon Street, where we’d gotten giddy-drunk on Hurricane cocktails after a jazz show at Preservation Hall. Tujague’s Restaurant on Decatur, where we’d eaten the prix fixe Creole dinner each night of our stay. And across the street from Tujague’s, the Café Du Monde, where we’d loitered every morning on the terrace beside the levee, sharing the Times-Picayune while we sipped our cafés au lait and made plans for a life we imagined would be as sweet as the Du Monde’s famous French beignets.
Those decade-old memories were now only bitter reminders of how much I’d let Kate down in the end. When Kate died, I had no steady job and could barely pay the rent at the flophouse hotel in the Flatiron District where I’d been staying. There was no way I could scrape together the money to give her a proper burial. Which left me no choice but to call her mother and explain that she’d have to foot the bill for flying her daughter’s body home to Alabama to be buried beside her dad. Kate’s mom, a devout Baptist, had never seen much promise in me to begin with, and I hated proving her instincts right, but I swallowed what little pride I had left and did what had to be done. Though it made me feel like the world’s biggest shit-heel, I might have learned to live with it if only I’d had the balls to fly down to Cullman and show my face at Kate’s funeral. But even though my friends at the Raccoon would surely have chipped in to buy me a plane ticket, I didn’t ask them for help. Why bother? I knew I’d never have the nerve to stand at Kate’s graveside and pretend to be the dutiful husband while all her church-going relatives looked on with contempt. Of all the chicken-shit junkie moves I’d ever pulled, skipping Kate’s funeral was, hands-down, the most cowardly, and as I discovered in the days afterwards, no matter how many shots I drank, or how much coke I snorted, there was no escaping the shame I felt for not manning up and doing the right thing.
A fresh start on the West Coast might save my life, but I was under no illusion it would ever ease the burden of my guilty conscience. I’d be carrying that weight to my grave, and I accepted that. Still, some days it felt heavier than others, and that morning in New Orleans was one of them. If I hadn’t turned tail and fled the French Quarter, it would have brought me to my knees.
Back at the Oz, my mood improved when I learned that Tuesday was ‘clothing exchange day’. I’d put fifteen hundred miles on my tattered Reebok high-tops since leaving New York and by the time I hit New Orleans they were coming apart at the seams, so I gladly joined the line outside the exchange office after lunch. When it was my turn at the pick-up counter, I told Brother Kevin I needed a sturdy pair of shoes before I could get back on the road to California. ‘Come on in and see if you can find a pair that fits you,’ he said, and led me to the rear of the storeroom, where the shelves were stocked with at least a hundred pairs of dusty shoes, most of which looked like they’d been scavenged from the closets of dead husbands by pious Catholic widows. The soles of the faithful departed, on display and up for grabs.
There were enough wing-tip brogans to outfit a platoon of FBI field agents, and scattered among their stolid ranks were all sorts of shoes not likely to be claimed by even the least discriminating of derelicts. Flimsy suede moccasins, white duck boating shoes, sporty two-toned saddle shoes, and – for that exceptional tramp with a touch of savoir faire – even a shiny black pair of patent leather ballroom shoes. Foxtrot, anyone? Fortunately, tucked in among all these ludicrous cast-offs, I found a thick-soled pair of work boots that looked like they’d never been worn. When I tried them on, they felt about a half-size too small, but I laced them up anyway. I figured they might pinch for a while and give me blisters till I broke them in, but so what? At least they wouldn’t look ridiculous on my feet. If I had to put up with a little discomfort to avoid crossing the country looking like a clown, so be it. I was willing to pay the price. Cervantes said knowledge of yourself will preserve you from vanity. Clearly, I still had a lot to learn – and down the road, those boots would teach me some painful lessons.
That night at supper I met Arne Hill, a guy about my age who said he was planning to hop a freight train west in the morning. As soon as I heard that, I asked if he’d let me tag along. ‘I’ve never hopped a freight,’ I admitted. ‘But I’ve been dying to try it since I was a teenager. Did you ever read On the Road?’
‘Ah, a fellow Kerouac fan,’ Arne grinned. ‘Not many of us left these days, sad to say.’
‘You’re right about that,’ I agreed. ‘Thumbing down here from New York, I didn’t catch one ride with anybody who’d ever heard of him, much less read his books.’
‘I believe it. But out in Denver, where I’m from, he’s a little more well known. I guess because Neal Cassady was one of our own. When I was in high school, sneaking into dive bars on Colfax Avenue, you could still find old-timers who remembered drinking with Neal in the forties. My old man was one of them. He’s the one who turned me on to On the Road. He said if I wanted to know what Denver was like during his misspent youth that was the
book to check out.’
‘Well, if you don’t mind breaking in a rookie, I’m down for a train ride. What do you say?’
‘Sure, why not? Where you heading?’
‘San Francisco.’
‘That means we’ll have to split up at El Paso, but you should have the hang of it by then,’ Arne said.
I woke up the next morning raring to hit the rails, but the hard rain beating against the dormitory windows put a damper on our plans. Arne said the nearest railyard was across the river in the town of Avondale, about fifteen miles outside the city, and he wasn’t up for hitchhiking that far in the pouring rain. Which was a letdown, but I could see his point, so I resigned myself to another night in New Orleans and spent the rest of the day hanging out at the public library, sheltering from the weather between mealtimes at the Oz.
Maybe it was the rain that put me in an Irish mood, I don’t know, but I wound up pulling a copy of Dubliners from the stacks and rereading James Joyce’s familiar stories to pass the time. When I came to ‘Grace’, a sentence I’d never paid much attention to in the past suddenly jumped out at me: ‘His line of life had not been the shortest distance between two points and for short periods he had been driven to live by his wits.’ That was me in a nutshell, no doubt about it. Except in my case what Joyce called ‘short periods’ were threatening to add up to a lifetime sentence. A gloomy possibility I’d rather not have thought about, but it was that kind of day.
On Thursday morning the weather cooperated, and Arne and I caught the free ferry across the Mississippi to Algiers, the town where ‘Old Bull Lee’ – Kerouac’s pal William Burroughs – had lived in the forties. We both agreed it would be fun to go hunt down Burrough’s old house, but a side trip wasn’t on the cards. We had a train to catch.
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