Idiot Wind

by Peter Kaldheim

  John had acquired a good supply of discarded appliance boxes from the dumpster of a freight-hauling business a block from the campsite and we stacked the flattened boxes on the hard-packed dirt beneath the overpass and used them as makeshift mattresses. They weren’t soft to sleep on, but at least they gave us a layer of insulation between our bodies and the cold ground. John also had a couple of quilted pads that he’d pilfered from the back of an empty removals van. He’d been using them both as extra cushioning before I moved into camp, but when I arrived with no bedroll of my own he graciously gave me one to cover myself. With the removals blanket wrapped around my overcoat, I was usually warm enough to sleep for a few hours at a time. When the cold woke me, I’d get up and do a bunch of lame-footed jumping jacks to get my body heat back up again, and that’s how I’d make it through the night.

  Much of our discomfort could have been easily avoided if we’d been able to build a small campfire. But John said that was a sure way to bring the cops down on us and he wouldn’t allow it. So we put up with the cold as best we could, and on the really frigid nights we’d stay in Old Town and crash on the hard pews in the Gospel Mission.

  ‘Anyway, it looks like you made out all right at the Stab Lab,’ John said, when I arrived at camp toting my shopping bags.

  ‘It all went just like you said it would, so tonight the party’s on me, John,’ I grinned.

  John’s eyes lit up when I pulled out two quart jugs of milk and the box of Devil Dogs. Fresh milk is something you learn to live without on skid row, since none of the soup kitchens can afford to serve it. Sometimes they’ll serve a powdered milk mix, but most of the time you get Kool-Aid or watery coffee or weak iced tea. So when you get a chance to down a quart of fresh milk at one sitting it’s a treat you appreciate – especially if you’re washing down Devil Dogs instead of a crusty day-old doughnut. John appeared to appreciate it as much as I did, because he didn’t make a peep for the next ten minutes, till he smacked his lips and belched when the milk and cake were finally history.

  After our pig-out, I showed John the radio and that brought a gleam to his eyes as well. ‘Anyway, the Blazers are playing tonight. Can you tune in the game on that thing?’

  ‘I’ll give it a try, John, sure,’ I said, a little surprised by his request. I wouldn’t have taken him for an NBA fan. The Trail Blazers were the only professional sports franchise in Portland (in all of Oregon, for that matter), so rooting for the home team was probably more closely tied to civic pride here than in most places. The funny thing was how many tramps you’d see in the Burnside District wearing scarfs and knit caps with the Blazers’ logo. At first, I’d wondered how the NBA had made such inroads into the skid row market, until I figured out that the team loyalty displayed by my fellow bums was more likely just a reflection of what Portland’s charitable citizens saw fit to deposit in the Goodwill bins outside their local Safeway supermarket. And, no doubt, also a telling indicator of how many could afford to replace their team gear on a yearly basis.

  ‘Anyway, there you go, you found it,’ John exclaimed, as the sound of a cheering crowd crackled from the radio and the announcer’s voice gave the first-quarter score. The Blazers were up ten points on the Utah Jazz. John grinned and pumped his fist as we settled down side-by-side on our cardboard mattresses, with the radio propped between our heads, and gave our full attention to the game.

  Even with the radio’s volume cranked, it was impossible to hear the play-by-play whenever a heavy tractor-trailer crossed the overpass above our heads, and we cursed in unison every time we heard a big rig approaching. But the radio was a real hit with John, and I got a kick out of hearing him cheer the Blazers on to victory. ‘Anyway, go Clyde!’ he’d chant, every time Clyde ‘the Glide’ Drexler swooped past the Jazz defenders for another fast-break lay-up.

  John’s childlike glee was infectious and reminded me of all the nights I’d lain awake listening to Knicks games as a kid, a transistor tucked against my ear and pillows piled over my head to muffle the sound so my parents wouldn’t hear me breaking curfew. I hadn’t listened to a game on the radio in years, but that night beneath the bridge all the old thrill of watching a game in my imagination instead of on a TV screen came flooding back. By the time the final buzzer sounded, I felt like a kid again.

  The following day, after my now customary lunch stop at the Blanchet House, I set off down Glisan Street to put in my application for Food Stamps at the shiny new DHS headquarters that had just been built on a razed lot in the no-man’s-land beneath the Steel Bridge entrance ramps. I’d wager not one in ten of Portland’s locals could tell you where the Department of Human Services was located – which is likely what the city planners had in mind when they chose such an out-of-the-way site (a clever way to neutralise the NIMBY crowd, I had to admit). But the Portland cops knew the address all too well: the DHS centre is a place where frustration frequently boils over into the sort of violent behaviour that requires police intervention.

  Everyone forced to turn to the DHS for help has some kind of chip on their shoulder. Many are mad at the world. Others, like me, are simply mad at themselves. Either way, none of us are happy to be humans who require ‘servicing’, and it doesn’t take much bureaucratic sleight-of-hand to turn our disgruntlement into disorderly conduct. When that happens, all the centre’s elderly security guard can do is call 911 and take cover behind his desk until the cops arrive.

  In fact, there was a PPD squad car pulling up in front of the building when I arrived that afternoon. Two young cops piled out of the cruiser and hustled toward the entrance, unsheathing their nightsticks as they ran. I knew better than to follow them inside. I was there for Food Stamps, not collateral damage, so I hung back and waited for a few minutes until the cops reappeared, herding two handcuffed men out of the building ahead of them.

  Both of the men in custody were Native Americans, and they were both unsteady on their feet. When I got a good look at their faces, I realised I’d seen them before. Two wino drinking buddies named Leonard and Bear. I’d slept beside them at the Gospel Mission one night when the cold drove so many men in off the streets that some of us were forced to crash downstairs on the dusty concrete floor of the church’s boiler room. I didn’t get much sleep that night. Bear, the stocky one with a pockmarked face, was snoring louder than the racket from the furnace, and his partner, Leonard, a pony-tailed Vietnam vet about my age, kept jerking awake with the night terrors, kicking my back in the process.

  The two buddies must have gotten an early start on their drinking that day. It was barely one-thirty in the afternoon and they were already glassy-eyed and slurring their speech. I gave them a comradely nod as the cops marched them past me, but they were too preoccupied to notice. Bear was busy serenading his handler with a tone-deaf rendition of the old Cher tune ‘Bang, Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)’.

  ‘Whatever you say, Cher. Just watch your head,’ the cop muttered, as he wrangled Bear into the squad car.

  Leonard wasn’t going quietly either. I could hear him ranting at the cop who had him in tow. He seemed to be claiming that he was a Vietnamese refugee. ‘Here to get my shit like everyone else, goddamn it!’

  ‘Hear that?’ Leonard’s cop asked his partner. ‘This Gallo Brother thinks he’s a Veet-namese refugee.’

  ‘Better lay off the sauce for a while, Chief,’ the other cop laughed. ‘It’s pickling your brain.’

  Leonard’s brain might very well have been pickled, but it made me angry to hear the two young cops belittle him. They were probably playing dodgeball in grade school gym class while guys like Leonard were being shipped across the Pacific to risk their lives in the jungles of Vietnam. So they had no clue, and couldn’t see the sad logic underlying Leonard’s argument. Because, from his point of view, he really was a refugee from Vietnam. And so were all his comrades in arms who were part of the lost battalion of homeless vets that I’d met since I’d hit the road. Twelve years after the fall of Saigon, they were still haunting the stre
ets of America – trying, but mostly failing, to get their shit like everyone else.

  Bear’s off-key singing sounded almost melodious compared to the banshee wailing that assaulted my ears when I stepped into the DHS centre. Everywhere I turned, I saw welfare moms pushing collapsible strollers, doing laps around the perimeter of the spacious waiting area in the vain hope that steady motion would soothe their little screamers and give everyone’s ears a break.

  I’d thought a Rescue Mission bunk room was noisy until I heard those angry little Kool-Aid kids. To my ears, there was something almost prescient about their wailing. As if they could already tell where all those laps around the DHS centre were leading – and were letting the rest of us know exactly how they felt about starting out life on the dole. I couldn’t help sympathising with their protests, but that didn’t make their crying any easier to take. By the time I finished filling out my application form I had a throbbing headache – a side-effect John Anyway had neglected to mention when he’d told me how easy it was to sign up for Food Stamps.

  The young mothers and their noisy infants were the most conspicuous DHS clients that afternoon, but they were just a small minority of the crowd assembled in the waiting area. Scanning the room, I spotted a handful of twentysomething skateboard slackers and a few muttering bag ladies, but the majority of the crowd was made up of ragged-looking men, ranging in age from their early thirties to their late sixties. The predominantly male crowd seemed to support John Anyway’s claim that Portland was a popular destination for homeless men in the wintertime. He’d told me lots of guys from colder states like Montana and Colorado and Wyoming would turn up in Portland, winter after winter, because the city’s social services agencies had a reputation for being much less nit-picky than their counterparts in sunny California.

  If my experience at the DHS that afternoon was at all typical, Portland’s liberal reputation was well-deserved. The cheerful caseworker who reviewed my application, a middle-aged Latina with greying bangs and a bright toucan-patterned scarf around her neck, quickly checked my ID cards and my paperwork and pronounced them all in order. But then she pointed out that I hadn’t provided proof of local address with my application, and I thought, Oh, Jesus, here comes the deal breaker! How the hell does someone who beds down under bridges prove where he resides?

  I really expected to be turned down as soon as I explained my situation, but it turned out I’d underestimated the flexibility of the good-hearted souls who staffed the Portland DHS. After hearing me out, the caseworker simply swivelled on her chair and snatched a new form from the wall shelves behind her, which she slid across the counter to me. ‘This should solve your problem,’ she smiled.

  Glancing down at the Xeroxed sheet she’d passed me, I was surprised to see it was a simplified map of the downtown bridges and freeway overpasses, crudely hand-drawn, like those throwaway maps they hand out at campgrounds to help you find your way to your assigned site.

  ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ I asked.

  ‘Find the spot where you’ve been camping and mark it with an X,’ she said, handing me a pen. ‘Then sign and date the bottom and you’re all set.’

  ‘That’s it?’ I asked, in disbelief. ‘X marks the spot?’

  ‘Simple as that,’ she replied. ‘If you change camps, or move to a permanent address, let us know and we’ll update your file. In the meantime, since you have no permanent address, you’ll have to report to the centre in person to pick up your Food Stamps.’

  I studied the map for a moment, and when I spotted the 405 Freeway I traced its path with my finger until I came to the overpass where John and I had been camping. Assured by the caseworker that my information wouldn’t be shared with the police, I marked my X, signed the form and suddenly I was officially a resident of Portland.

  Next came the business of snapping my mugshot and printing my photo ID, and once that was done the caseworker explained that it would probably take about two weeks before my application worked its way through the system and my Food Stamps arrived.

  ‘In the meantime,’ the caseworker said, ‘here’s a twenty-five-dollar book of “emergency stamps” to tide you over. Make sure you take your ID card with you when you go shopping. The store cashiers aren’t allowed to accept Food Stamps from anyone who doesn’t show a DHS card. Any other questions before I let you go?’

  ‘Just one,’ I said. ‘How do you stay so cheerful in a place like this?’

  ‘That’s nice of you to say,’ she smiled. ‘But it’s not hard, really. Not if you enjoy helping people.’

  Clearly, this was a woman who shared Kerouac’s view on practising kindness. She’d certainly given me the help I’d been hoping for, and except for the wailing babies the whole process had been so painless that I couldn’t help raving about it when I got back to camp that night. John grinned as I told him how surprised I’d been when the caseworker handed me the Xeroxed map – and his response cracked me up.

  ‘Anyway, most guys call that the Troll Map.’

  Of course they do! I thought. What could be more perfect? Isn’t that how most people see the homeless? We’re hairy, we’re scary, we live under bridges – and just like the trolls in the old fairy tales, we demand to be paid our toll.

  Food Stamps Accepted Here.

  The longer I hung around Portland, the more I was impressed by the variety of assistance programmes the charitable locals made available to the city’s street people. The storefront ‘drop-in centre’ on West Broadway in Old Town was a prime example. Its modest reading room, stocked with donated paperback books and comfortable old couches, was a popular place for transients to kill a few hours between mealtimes at the various soup kitchens, but it was more than just a warm, dry hangout. The volunteers who staffed it also offered help with job counselling and résumé preparation, as well as assistance in filling out applications for the federally funded Low Income Energy Assistance Program (LIEAP), which provided financial subsidies in the winter months to those who needed help with their home heating bills (on the street, this subsidy was known as a ‘leap cheque’). For those of us with no homes to heat, the centre did the next best thing by distributing warm winter coats they solicited from local corporate donors.

  A few days after I’d signed up for Food Stamps, John Anyway heard a rumour that a new supply of ‘leap coats’ was about to be given out at the drop-in centre that afternoon, and he urged me to get over there right away so I wouldn’t miss out. Which was good advice, because when I hiked over to West Broadway there was already a long line forming outside the drop-in centre, with dozens of tramps eagerly waiting for the doors to reopen once the volunteer staff’s lunch break was over.

  Inside, the grandmotherly woman who served as the LIEAP liaison was handing out coats from a big pile of boxes that filled most of the cramped corner where she had her desk. The boxes all bore the logo of the Columbia Sportswear Company, one of Portland’s biggest corporate success stories, and though at first I cynically assumed the donated coats would be defective goods, palmed off on the poor for the sake of a tax deduction, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The insulated parka she handed me was sturdily made, with a waterproof Gore-Tex shell, a handy drawstring hood and plenty of Velcro-seal pockets (a definite plus for anyone living on the streets). I couldn’t believe my luck! The new parka was a big improvement over my vintage wool overcoat, which soaked up Portland’s incessant rains like a tweed tampon, getting heavier and heavier as the day wore on.

  Besides being lighter and more waterproof than my old overcoat, the new parka was certainly a lot less seedy-looking and as I wandered around town that afternoon I kept checking my reflection in the storefront windows, delighted by the newly respectable image I presumed I now presented to the world. More than just a warm coat, the parka seemed to me a welcome bit of camouflage that would let me blend in with the well-adjusted majority, and, for a change, go happily unnoticed.

  Alas, my illusions of respectable anonymity faded all too quickly t
he following morning when I hiked back to the Burnside District from Camp Anyway and discovered, to my dismay, that the streets of Old Town were now swarming with homeless people sporting brand new parkas exactly the same as mine.

  Needless to say, this was a deflating development – and disheartening proof that even charitable intentions are subject to the law of unintended consequences. With a little foresight, perhaps the Samaritans at Columbia Sportswear might have realised that donating coats that were all the same colour wasn’t such a good idea. But, apparently, no one had considered the repercussions. And now that slate-blue had become the official colour of ‘Team Homeless’, those of us who’d made the roster and donned the new uniform found ourselves suddenly more visible than ever.

  Naturally, our enhanced visibility now made us easier to target, and it wasn’t long before the random indignities of life on skid row became noticeably less random if you happened to be a ‘Bluecoat’. Restroom keys would go missing more often – and stay conveniently ‘lost’ until I left the premises. And at night, when I’d hike back to camp, bored cops looking for amusement would shadow me in their squad cars, busting my balls with the kerbside crawl.

  Of course, the cops weren’t the only ones getting in on the action. It took no time at all for Portland’s swastika-tattooed skinheads to realise that slate-blue was the new black, and now when I cut through Pioneer Square, where the young cretins in black denim and Doc Martens bum-stompers hung out in packs, they’d flick their cigarette butts at me and shout, ‘Get a job, you lazy fuck!’

  Even the earnest young clowns in clip-on ties who managed the local McDonald’s jumped on the bandwagon. Now, any Bluecoat who stepped up to the counter for the customary free coffee refill was just as likely to get the McBrush-off instead. It was all so petty and unnecessary, but I must admit that it gave me daily confirmation that Claude Lévi-Strauss got it right in Tristes Tropiques when he observed that a traveller’s experience of any new place is inescapably coloured by his exact position in the social scale while he’s there.