Idiot Wind

by Peter Kaldheim

  ‘Good money in that line of work, I’d imagine,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, the salaries are good, but the money’s not what I’m after so much as the travel and the fieldwork and the chance to discover a big deposit where nobody else has thought to look. Long as I get a shot at that kind of rush, they could pay me minimum wage for all I care. What line of work are you in?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m a freelance writer,’ I said, taking the safest tack. I was still feeling mellow from my ride with Strawberry Mountain Nate and had no desire to spoil the mood by rehashing the sorry details of my true situation. Instead, I trotted out my fall-back story about hitchhiking cross-country to gather stories for an updated version of Kerouac’s On the Road.

  ‘Cool book,’ Ned said. ‘We read it for English class my senior year in high school. I wanted to hit the road myself after I read it. In fact, a buddy of mine and I were planning to hitch out to the East Coast during summer vacation before we started college, but my parents thought it was a crazy idea. Said if I went bumming across the country, they’d take back my tuition fund and make me pay for college on my own. That ended that. But sometimes I still wish I’d said “fuck it” and done what I wanted. When you think about it, field geologists and freelance writers aren’t so different. Both jobs let you travel and do fieldwork, right?’

  ‘True enough,’ I agreed, as my stoned brain began spinning its wheels in the soft sand of free-association. ‘You could take the comparison even further than that, if you consider the similarities in method,’ I added.

  ‘Not sure I follow,’ Jed said. ‘How so?’

  ‘Well, look at it this way. Don’t geologists study the world for clues to what lies hidden beneath the surface? Writers do the same thing, really, when you get right down to it,’ I grinned. ‘You deal with rocks, I deal with people, that’s the only difference. Hell, some of the people I meet might as well be rocks, but that’s a different story.’

  It was nine o’clock when Jed let me out on Burnside Street in Old Town, the heart of Portland’s skid row district, which Jed said was the likeliest place for me to find a place to crash for free. On first impression, the neighbourhood seemed remarkably like the Bowery in Manhattan. I saw the same cast of bag ladies and grizzled winos haunting the sidewalks, and the same mix of cheque-cashing shops and cut-rate liquor stores and pawnbrokers. Even the air in the neighbourhood smelled the same as the Bowery’s, with a faint hint of wok-fried Chinese cooking overlaying the prevailing stench of urine-splashed dumpsters and diesel smog. Oddly enough, I found all these similarities comforting – I might be a stranger, but this was no strange land. Not to me.

  The block where Jed dropped me off had a multi-storey Salvation Army centre on one corner and the Portland Rescue Mission directly across the street, but both shelters turned me away for arriving past curfew when I tried to book myself in for a bed. Apparently, 9 p.m. was an unacceptable hour to arrive penniless in Portland. Who knew? Certainly not me, or I wouldn’t have been wandering the streets of Old Town on a cold and misty February night.

  At a loss for where to try next, I approached a white-haired old tramp who was nursing a mickey of Tokay in the doorway of a boarded-up storefront. He was within pissing distance of the Salvation Army shelter, so I figured he’d know the score. But when I asked him where I might find a free bed for the night, his response left me doubting I’d picked a reliable source.

  ‘Baloney Joe’s is your best bet,’ the wino replied without hesitation.

  ‘Baloney Joe’s?’ I repeated skeptically, not sure I’d heard him right. His voice was so raspy you could have grated hard cheese with it.

  ‘That’s right. Baloney Joe’s, you got it,’ he said. ‘Most all the other flops around here lock down at seven. You miss curfew, you’re SOL. Only Baloney Joe’s and the Gospel Mission stay open this late. You could try the Gospel, I guess, but I steer clear of the place myself.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ I asked him.

  ‘’Cause it’s run by Baptists, and they’re too damned preachy. A little ear-beating’s fine, but that bunch don’t know when to quit.’

  ‘I hear you,’ I nodded, just to be agreeable. I had no idea whether his jaundiced opinion of the Gospel Mission was justified, but he’d been right about the early curfew at the Sally and the Rescue Mission, so I decided to take him at his word.

  ‘Okay, I’ll bite,’ I shrugged. ‘Where do I find this Baloney Joe’s place?’

  ‘Over the river,’ he said, and leaned out of the doorway to point me in the right direction. ‘You take the Burnside Bridge, right up the block there.’

  ‘How far is it?’ I asked warily. My blistered heels were still throbbing from the long hike I’d made to the Pendleton rest stop and I was too beat to tackle more than a ten-block trudge.

  ‘Not far at all,’ the wino assured me. ‘Once you cross the bridge, it’s just a few blocks down on your left. There’s a big sign out front. You can’t miss it.’

  That remains to be seen, I thought. You could miss an awful lot in a fog as thick as the one that was rising up off the Willamette River. It had already swallowed most of the Burnside Bridge, and when I reached the river it swallowed me, too. Dim halos floating in the mist were all I could see of the bridge lights, and their fuzzy glow was too weak to light the walkway, so I had to cross the bridge by feel, like a blind man, with one hand skimming along the catwalk’s clammy railing, and as I shuffled through the fog toward a destination I still suspected might be nothing but a bad joke I suddenly broke out laughing in the dark. Maybe I was loopy from fatigue, or still feeling the effects of Nate’s Strawberry Mountain homegrown, but blindly crossing a bridge in the fog seemed such a comically apt metaphor for the current state of my life I couldn’t help but laugh. It was all too crazy. After eighteen days on the road, I was now three thousand miles from anyone who gave a shit whether I was still alive or buried in some roadside ditch. But, by God, I was still alive, and for the moment that seemed reason enough to celebrate – if not with a birthday cake, then at least with laughter, no matter how rueful.

  The fog was still thick when I reached the Willamette’s east bank, but a block beyond the river it began to thin out. Up ahead on Burnside I soon spotted a floodlit 7UP sign emblazoned with black lettering, and as I approached through the mist the letters gradually resolved into the words: Baloney Joe’s Junction – a name that struck me as even more ludicrous than the shortened version the wino had given me. Petticoat Junction and the Shady Rest Hotel immediately came to mind, and I couldn’t help wondering what twisted logic had inspired someone to give a homeless shelter a name that conjured a sitcom spin-off. But it didn’t really matter what the place was called, as long as they’d take me in from the cold.

  It was after nine-thirty when I walked through the doors of the storefront shelter, and when I stepped up to the reception window in the lobby area the young volunteer behind the counter informed me that all the cots in the dormitory were already full for the night. But he said I was welcome to flop with the rest of the overflow crowd in the rec room down the hall, or I could try my luck at one of the other shelters in the neighbourhood.

  ‘The rec room’s okay with me,’ I told him. It was already well below freezing outside and I had no desire to go searching through the streets of an unfamiliar city for another shelter at such a late hour.

  Once again, the flimsy carbon copy of the hitchhiking ticket I’d been carrying since Florida came in handy as ID, and while the clerk was signing me in I asked if there was any chance I could get something to eat. Except for the few butter cookies I’d mooched from Jakob that morning, I hadn’t eaten anything in more than twenty-four hours. I figured it was going to be a long night if I couldn’t scrounge up something to take the edge off my hunger pangs.

  ‘Sorry, the kitchen’s closed,’ the clerk said. ‘Supper’s at six. You missed it.’

  ‘Come on, brother, cut me some slack,’ I pleaded. I was way too hungry to let him brush me off that easily, so I tri
ed softening him up with my story about just hitting town after hitchhiking all the way from Boise, and finally, much to my relief, he relented and said, ‘Okay, wait a minute. Let me look in the back and see what I can find.’ A few minutes later, he returned to the counter and handed me a baggie with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in it. I thanked him for hooking me up and tried my best not to show my disappointment – I’d hated peanut butter ever since I’d first tried it at a friend’s house when I was a little kid. Considering the shelter’s goofy name, I’d been hoping for something meatier.

  ‘What happened?’ I grinned. ‘You run out of baloney?’

  The clerk rolled his eyes to let me know it was a stupid question, and said, ‘Believe me, we never run out of baloney around here. Rec room’s just down the hall on your right. Have a good night.’

  I followed the muted sound of a TV down the hallway and as soon as I stepped into the rec room I could see what the clerk had meant about the ‘overflow’ crowd. The low-ceilinged room was maybe sixteen feet square and crammed with more losers than a bullpen cell in Manhattan Central Booking on a three-day weekend. Which wasn’t really surprising. The colder the night, the bigger the turn-out. I didn’t care about the cramped quarters, though. After the freezing night I’d spent at the rest stop in Ontario I was just grateful to have a warm place to crash.

  All of the ratty couches and armchairs in the room were occupied, and most of the space on the painted concrete floor was already taken by men with bedrolls and sleeping bags. But across the room I spotted a narrow opening on one of the locker room benches that were mounted along the back wall and I cautiously tiptoed toward it through the maze of sprawled bodies, knowing from past bullpen experience that one misstep is all it takes to start a beef. I was far too road-weary for that kind of drama. Thankfully, I managed to cross the minefield without incident, and once I settled down on the hard pine bench I unbagged my sandwich and began stuffing my face.

  While I was making a pig of myself, I noticed the guy sitting next to me on the end of the bench giving me wary, sidelong glances. He was a middle-aged tramp, probably mid-forties, wearing thick-lensed glasses with a tortoiseshell frame, and the adhesive tape that held his glasses together at the bridge was the same grimy shade of grey as the curly hair on his head. Seeing him eyeing me, I offered him half of my sandwich. It occurred to me that he might be as hungry as I was. But he shook his head no, and then stammered, ‘A-a-anyway, I already ate supper at the Rescue Mission.’

  ‘You sure?’ I asked. ‘Hell, I don’t even like peanut butter. You’d be doing me a favour.’

  Again, he shook off my offer with a wag of his curly head and then, to my surprise, he added, ‘A-a-anyway, you shouldn’t talk with your mouth full.’

  What a pisser! I thought to myself. I’m getting lectured on table manners by a bum in a homeless shelter! It was hilarious. Even with my mouth full, I couldn’t help smiling. Leave it to me to sit down next to Emily Post’s most dishevelled disciple. The guy was a gem too rich to pass up, and I decided I had to make his acquaintance.

  ‘Name’s Pete,’ I said, offering my hand.

  He sized me up with another wary look before deciding it was safe to shake. ‘A-a-anyway, I’m John,’ he said, smiling shyly.

  And that’s how I met John Anyway, my improbable guide to Portland in the days ahead.

  After hearing John start three straight sentences with the word anyway, I could tell I was dealing with someone who had a few scrambled wires in his control box, but that didn’t put me off. He seemed harmless enough, and I was happy to spend the next half-hour pumping him for information about Portland until we both started yawning and nodded off for the night.

  At five the next morning, one of the shelter’s volunteers turned the rec room’s lights up full, and the harsh glare chased all of us out of Baloney Joe’s and into the chilly predawn darkness. ‘Who the fuck is out on the street at this hour except cops and burglars?’ I heard one of my fellow tramps grumble, and I thought, Who the fuck indeed? It’s certainly a confusing, and degrading, way to start your day. One minute you’re a lost soul worth helping, the next you’re pushed out to the kerb like a bag of garbage.

  What’s the point of turning a horde of unemployed men loose in the streets before daylight, when there’s nothing for them to do but huddle in doorways or hunker down on park benches until the rest of the city opens for business? I suspect it’s the national abhorrence of idleness that underlies these premature evacuations. And once you realise that the so-called ‘social safety net’ gets its tensile strength from that most durable of American fibres – the Protestant work ethic – the perverse logic of such a misguided policy begins to come clear. The brothers’ keepers who make the shelter rules would no doubt tell you they’re just trying to build character – Early to bed, early to rise, etc., etc. – but as far as I could tell, all they really built was resentment. Which explained why so many of the homeless men I’d met in my travels refused to stay in shelters. (Other shelter policies, such as the ban on alcohol, and the mandatory communal showers, kept even more away.)

  ‘Anyway, we need to get over to the Rescue Mission now for breakfast,’ John said, taking me in tow as we set off towards the river. ‘Anyway, this is the Burnside Bridge. Portland has seven bridges. Anyway, the Food Stamp office is over by the Steel Bridge, that’s the next one downstream. Today’s Saturday, so the Food Stamp office is closed. On Monday, you can go sign up for your stamps. Anyway, all you need is your Social Security card.’

  ‘That’s going to be a problem, John. I lost my wallet back in North Carolina a few weeks ago. I need to find a Social Security office and apply for a replacement.’

  ‘Anyway, the Social Security office is downtown by City Hall. I can take you over there on Monday if you want.’

  ‘That’d be great, if you can spare the time,’ I said.

  ‘Anyway, I can just hunt for cans when we’re downtown,’ he replied, and that seemed to settle the matter.

  When we came down off the bridge, a few dozen men were already gathered in front of the Rescue Mission, their faces bathed in blue light from the big neon cross above the entranceway, and for a second I had the weird impression I was looking at a pack of grizzled Smurfs. John and I joined the crowd, and at six o’clock a Mission worker opened the big double doors and we all filed inside to the chapel for the mandatory morning prayer service before breakfast. The shelter’s overnighters were already slumped in the chapel’s pews when we arrived. Up on the stage at the front, a white-haired, hawk-nosed preacher in a white button-down shirt and tweed sport coat was pacing back and forth, Bible in hand, waiting for the last of the walk-ins to settle in before starting his sermon. I’d never attended a Protestant ‘ear-beating’ before, and had no idea what to expect, but John had assured me that the Mission preachers usually kept the morning service brief. Hungry as I was, I hoped he was right.

  After welcoming us and introducing himself as Pastor Floyd, the preacher opened his Bible and read a passage from Psalm 118 – This is the day which the Lord hath made; be happy and rejoice in it – and followed it up with a brief exhortation: ‘When you leave here this morning, take the Lord with you into the streets, and I promise you, He’ll give you the strength to resist temptation and keep your steps on the righteous path. Now, before we go in to breakfast, let’s start our day with the Lord’s Prayer.’ The entire service took less than five minutes and seemed no different than I’d have expected from a Catholic priest in a similar setting. I only felt out of place when we got to the end of the Lord’s Prayer and I betrayed my Catholic roots by prematurely saying ‘Amen’ before the rest of the congregation had finished reciting the extra verse that Protestants tack onto the prayer (‘For thine is the kingdom . . .’).

  As soon as the final ‘Amens’ were properly muttered, we all trooped next door to the refectory for a hurried breakfast of oatmeal and watery coffee, and in no time at all we were back on the street, with John Anyway leading me on a
tour through the still-sleepy streets of Old Town. Despite his peculiar verbal tic, John’s running commentary on the local homeless scene was not only fluent but practically encyclopedic, and as I tagged along and tried to get my bearings on the unfamiliar streets he pointed out every shelter and rescue mission in the neighbourhood, while rattling off a barrage of information about each one. Check-in times. ID requirements. Number of beds. John had it all down pat. Want to know which shelters make you sing for your supper? Whose showers have the hottest water? Whose day-old doughnuts are the freshest? John Anyway’s your man.

  What John Anyway didn’t tell me about the neighbourhood, I picked up on my own, just by reading the signs in the shops we passed along the way. ‘Restrooms for Customers Only!’ ‘We Accept Food Stamps’. ‘Loose Cigarettes – Ten Cents Each’. ‘NO LOITERING!’ ‘Government Checks Cashed Here’. I didn’t need one of Bob Dylan’s mystery tramp decoder rings to decipher the signs’ real message: Welcome to Desolation Row. But I was okay with that. If I was going to turn my life around, the end of the line seemed like a logical place to start. ‘Anyway,’ as my stoic guide John would say, ‘here I was.’

  With street-savvy timing, John’s tour brought us to Glisan Street, a few blocks from the bus depot, just in time to join the line for lunch at a Catholic soup kitchen called the Blanchet House. There must have been at least a hundred hungry locals milling around on the sidewalk in front of the place, despite the steady rain that had been falling. By the time John and I joined the line it snaked all the way down the block and around the corner. A few minutes later, a volunteer in a rain poncho stepped out of the two-storey brick building with a fat roll of paper tickets in hand and started working his way down the line, issuing everyone a numbered chit. John told me it was a good system, because it cut down on all the line-jumping that went on at a lot of the other shelters. I could see his point, and wondered why the Brothers at the Oz, down in New Orleans, hadn’t installed the same system.