Idiot Wind

by Peter Kaldheim

  What the fuck? I stood there silent for a second, dumb as the can of beans in my hand, wondering what this Ancient Mariner had seen in me that would prompt such a question. Stumped, all I could think to say was, ‘Yeah, thanks, I’m starting to get the hang of it.’

  ‘Well, good. I’m glad to hear it. I’ll see you around,’ he said, taking his bony hand from my shoulder to grip the bannister before resuming his trip down the stairs.

  Back in my room, the Mariner’s question kept ricocheting around in my brain. So, are you starting to find your way? The more I thought about it, the more it gave me the chills. Wasn’t that exactly why I’d hit the road? To find my way?

  Maybe I was reading too much into the whole encounter, but it was hard to shake the idea that an old survivor like the Mariner might have a keen eye for those who’d lost their bearings. If so, it was eerie to think that his discerning eye had unerringly picked me out on my very first night at the Joyce. What was I supposed to make of that? By the time I nodded off that night, I still hadn’t figured it out.

  On Saturday morning I slept in late for the first time in weeks and didn’t awaken until I heard the sound of bagpipes faintly bleating through my open window. Which puzzled me at first, until I remembered that Portland’s premature Paddy’s Day parade was taking place that day. Erin go bragh! I muttered, rolling out of bed and reaching for my hand-me-down Oregon Ducks sweatshirt, the one piece of green clothing in my wardrobe. That would be my only nod toward the Emerald Isle this year. For the first time in twenty years (except 1985, when I was locked up on Rikers Island), I was about to celebrate St Patrick’s Day as a sober man – a hopeful sign that perhaps I was, indeed, ‘finding my way’ at last. I chose to think so, anyway. Of course, if you’re too broke to afford a drink, you can’t really chalk your sobriety up to willpower, but that didn’t discourage me. Breaking the cycle was all that mattered, regardless how you managed it.

  I’ve never subscribed to the notion that the sins of the fathers (or mothers) are visited upon their children, but the truth remains that my mother’s people, the McGuires, were a family much plagued by the ‘Irish curse’ and, sad to say, my mother was one of its unlucky victims. As a child, I got so used to seeing her with a can of Rheingold beer in her hand I never gave her drinking much thought. But as I got older and began visiting the homes of my schoolmates, I couldn’t help noticing that their mothers weren’t wearing their bathrobes at four in the afternoon, or doing household chores with one hand while clutching a can of beer in the other. That’s when I first began to suspect that my mom had a problem. However, I didn’t fully grasp the depth of her problem until the night I went rummaging through her dresser drawers.

  It was the week before Christmas and I’d been left at home to babysit my brothers while my parents attended a house party down the block. I was an overly curious nine year old at the time, and I couldn’t resist the urge to do a little spying while my parents were away. I was hoping for an advance peek at whatever gifts might be coming my way under the Christmas tree, but the only surprise I found waiting in my parents’ bedroom was hidden in my mom’s lingerie drawer: four warm cans of Rheingold, her emergency stash, tucked out of sight beneath a pile of rubbery girdles.

  I couldn’t look my mom in the eye for days after that. By invading her privacy, I’d uncovered a sad truth she’d surely meant to keep hidden – even from my father – and I was ashamed of myself for it. But I was ashamed of my mother too, and, to my discredit, I judged her with the naїve and self-righteous severity only a disappointed child can muster.

  Though I tried not to let my feelings show, I’m sure my mom must have noticed the sudden changes in my behaviour. On our weekend trips to the A&P, I’d still push the grocery cart through the aisles for her, just as I always had, but now when we’d get to the beer section my ears would burn red with shame as I loaded the weekly supply of Rheingold cans into the cart – the same three cases every Saturday, out of which my father never drank more than two six-packs. My mother could hardly have missed the furtive glances with which I now scanned the aisle before loading the beer into her cart. Furtive glances that telegraphed my fear of being spotted by anyone I knew from school. But though my mother must have noticed, she never questioned me about it, and for that at least I was grateful.

  Happily, the passing years made me less judgemental, and by the time I dropped out of the seminary and returned home to attend public high school I had long since come down off my high horse. Now I felt perfectly at ease with my mom when she’d hand me a cold can of Rheingold at night and invite me to sit with her while she watched Johnny Carson and waited for my dad to get home from his second job. I was seventeen at the time, still a year shy of the legal drinking age, but that didn’t seem to trouble my mom. She’d just give me a conspiratorial wink and caution me to keep mum about our nightly get-togethers. My brothers would be asleep by the time Johnny Carson came on, and I always retreated to my bedroom before my dad returned home from work, so we had no difficulty keeping our little secret from the rest of the family.

  Our conspiracy drew us closer together than we’d been in years, and it seemed to me I was finally showing my mom the loyalty she had a right to expect from her first-born child. Which made me feel better about myself, and about my mom too. After all, what did she have to be ashamed of? Her drinking had never kept her from being a good wife to my father, or a good mother to her children, so who was anyone to judge her, least of all me? But, as I would shortly discover, she still felt judged. It just took her a while to admit it.

  I turned eighteen during the winter of my senior year, and after that I began spending my nights hanging out at the local bars in Ronkonkoma with my friends instead of with my mom and Johnny Carson. At first, my mom seemed to take my defection as nothing more than a teenager’s natural urge to run with the pack and she gave no sign that it bothered her. But by Eastertime I began to notice the pained look that would flicker across her face whenever my pal Kenny Brown would pull up in front of our house in his old Falcon and summon me outside with a double toot of his horn.

  I saw that same hurt look in her eyes when the Falcon’s horn sounded on the night of Good Friday, but I said nothing except a quick goodbye on my way out the door. I didn’t return until midnight, a half-hour before my dad was due home, and when Kenny dropped me at the kerb in front of my house I was surprised to see my mother open the front door and step out onto the porch in her bathrobe, where she stood waving forlornly at Kenny’s car as he pulled away.

  I had a pretty good buzz on, and everything was slightly out of focus, so I didn’t notice the tears streaming down my mother’s cheeks until I was nearly to the doorstep. ‘Mom! What’s wrong?’ I blurted out, alarmed and suddenly sober. I reached out to put my arms around her, but she backed away into the open doorway and just fixed me with the saddest look I’d ever seen.

  ‘Are you really that ashamed of me, Peter? Your own mother?’ she sobbed.

  I was stunned.

  ‘Ashamed of you? What are you saying, Mom? Of course I’m not ashamed of you! Why would you ever think that?’

  ‘You never invite your friends into the house. Ever. Don’t you know how that makes me feel? Like I’m not good enough, that’s how. Like there’s something wrong with me. Something my son’s ashamed to let his friends see. Honestly, am I really that bad?’

  My heart ached when I heard her say that, and then my eyes were brimming with tears just like hers. Pleading with my mom to believe me, I insisted that I’d never kept my friends away because I felt ashamed of her. But, of course, my actions had proved otherwise.

  The truth was that I avoided bringing my friends into the house not because my mother drank but because she was such a voluble talker. If you gave her an opening – especially when she had a few beers in her system – she could talk your ear off for an hour before you’d ever get a word in edgewise. I’d always thought my friends would find that uncool, so I spared them the ordeal by meeting all my visit
ors in the street. But I had never once stopped to consider how my efforts to avoid an embarrassing situation might hurt my mother’s feelings – not until that night when I was finally forced to see things through her eyes. Then the only person I was ashamed of was myself.

  Though I managed to soothe her before my dad got home – and would later make a point of bringing Kenny Brown into the house whenever he stopped by to pick me up – my relationship with my mother after that Good Friday was never again as carefree as it had been on those happy nights when Johnny and Ed McMahon made us laugh so hard that I could hardly keep from choking on my ‘secret beer’. A few months later I left for college, and my own career as a problem drinker got underway in earnest.

  A psychologist would no doubt point to my mother’s influence to explain why I took to drinking so heavily myself, but I don’t buy that. Every drink I ever swallowed was raised to my lips by my own hand and I’ve never been tempted to blame my mother. I only wish I’d had the grace to keep my habit from hurting others – grace like my mother’s. But my mom always had the family to anchor her against the idiot wind, so she was luckier than me. All I had to cling to when it began to blow was a flimsy sense of self-regard – and by now it should be clear how that worked out for me.

  Still, except for the tallboy Bud I’d had on the ride into Mobile, and the two cans of Dixie beer on the ride to New Orleans, I had now gone forty-six days without a drink and, surprisingly, I felt no urge to go out and break my streak with a shot of Irish whiskey and a pint of ghastly green beer, so I counted my blessings. And there would be many more blessings to count in the coming days, as I busied myself settling into my new home.

  After lunch that day I hiked out to Camp Anyway to retrieve my radio and left John a note in his stash spot, giving him my room number at the Joyce. ‘Stop by and visit if you’re in the neighbourhood!’ I wrote, and then set off for the public library, where my rent receipt from the Joyce was the last piece of ID I needed to qualify for a library card. Wandering through the stacks for the next hour, I gathered my five-book limit: four novels (by Jack Kerouac, Knut Hamsun, Fred Exley and Saul Bellow) and a collection of essays called The Geography of the Imagination by Guy Davenport. When I got to the check-out desk, the friendly librarian even threw in a shopping bag to help me tote them back to my room. Now I had everything I needed for a cozy night at the Joyce – music and books. What more could a civilised tramp ask for?

  The next day I hiked across the Morrison Bridge to the southeast side of town for the Sunday afternoon meal at St Francis Church, where the charismatic Father Gary had recruited me to join the volunteer kitchen staff the previous week. When he’d approached me, I said sure, why not? I had nowhere better to be, and it seemed only fair that I pitch in after all the free lasagne I’d just eaten.

  I wound up being assigned to run dishes through the kitchen’s restaurant-size conveyor-belt dishwasher, a stainless-steel behemoth that certainly earned its keep. The average crowd for the Sunday meal was usually close to three hundred – not just street people but poor young families too – and the stacks of dirty dishes and trays kept me busy for nearly two hours. (Thank goodness they didn’t have a manual dishwasher like the old beater at the Blanchet House, or the job would have taken a lot longer.) But even that small amount of volunteer labour left me wonderfully light-hearted when I walked out of the church for the hike back to Old Town. It had been a long time since I’d done anything so worthwhile and I was itching to work another shift in the kitchen, just to get that feeling back.

  Sundays at St Francis also gave me the opportunity to stay in touch with my pal John Anyway. For whatever reason, he never chose to visit me at the Joyce, but I could always count on running into him at Sunday dinner – God bless him, that man never passed up a free meal.

  On my way across the river, I remembered that the St Vincent de Paul thrift shop was also located in the southeast part of town, and since I was early for the Sunday meal I decided to make the most of my hike by paying it a visit. The shop was located on Powell Street and 27th Avenue, painfully further from St Francis than I’d expected. My heels were throbbing by the time I got there, and as I hobbled the last few steps toward the shop I said a silent prayer that I’d finally find a pair of shoes that wouldn’t torture my feet.

  When I stepped inside, I was surprised to find the place mobbed by a pack of giggling college girls, scouring the racks of secondhand clothes and squealing with delight whenever they found something funky enough to qualify as ‘bohemian chic’. They seemed to favour items that were so hideous they could only be worn ironically, and I confess I felt a twinge of nostalgic envy as I watched them shop. Enjoy it while you can, girls, I thought, remembering the days when I, too, had nothing more to worry about when I went clothes shopping than the burning question: ‘Will it look “cool” on campus?’

  Squeezing past the giggling girls, I made my way through the narrow aisles to the shoe section at the back of the shop but found nothing there to squeal about. There were rows and rows of cast-off shoes on the shelves, but unfortunately not one pair in my size. Which was a real letdown. But at least I had more luck in my hunt for spare clothes, and when I walked out of the shop a half-hour later I was toting my second shopping bag of the weekend. Thanks to Father Gary’s voucher, I now had two fresh sets of street clothes, plus a sport coat, dress slacks and a button-down Oxford shirt that would come in handy when I started interviewing for jobs. All at a price that couldn’t be beat.

  I was already in a good mood after my score at the thrift shop, so the welcoming smiles and backslaps I received from the volunteers in the St Francis kitchen made me feel even better. Most of the ‘regulars’ on the kitchen crew were parishioners of the church – a mix of middle-aged women and spry old retired businessmen – and I recognised many familiar faces from the week before. What surprised me was that so many of them recognised me, too, after only one stint in the kitchen. I hoped it was because I’d impressed them with my speed at the dishwasher. But it might have been just my hobbling gait that made me memorable – a few of the volunteers asked how my feet were holding up!

  While we were cleaning up after the meal, Father Gary stopped in to visit the volunteers, and I thanked him again for the clothing voucher and told him I had put it to good use. Then I mentioned that I had experience working in restaurant kitchens back in New York and offered to volunteer my time as a prep cook, if the kitchen needed help on Sunday mornings. Which brought a broad smile to Father Gary’s bearded face.

  ‘Your timing is perfect, Peter,’ he said. ‘One of our regular morning volunteers, Mrs Quinn, just had her hip replaced. She’ll be out of action for a few months, so we’ll gladly take all the help you’re willing to give. Can you make it next Sunday morning? The prep shift starts at nine.’

  ‘Count on it, Father,’ I said with a nod, glad to feel needed, and already looking forward to peeling and chopping onions – the newbie prep cook’s inevitable first assignment, the Vale of Tears. In my book, that beat scraping dishes any day of the week.

  When I said goodbye to my fellow volunteers and left St Francis that night, I was in high spirits – a man at peace with the world and happy to be homeward bound. Dusk was settling over the city and in the misty air the lights of the Morrison Bridge glowed like Chinese lanterns. It was magic hour in Portland, and as I crossed the Willamette I paused midway and just stared down at the water for a while, content to do nothing but watch the river flow. And as I stood there in the gathering shadows, I heard a quiet voice inside me.

  Right now, Pete, there is nothing more you need.

  I smiled in recognition when I heard that. My inner voice was echoing the same sentiment I’d come across in On the Road just the night before, while skimming through my library copy before bed. Describing Dean Moriarty – newly at loose in the world after a stretch in prison – Sal Paradise says: ‘He was alone in the doorway, digging the street. Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness – everything was
behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being.’

  I knew I wasn’t there yet, but that’s where I hoped the road would take me. And for a few golden moments on the bridge that night I could almost believe I was getting close.

  On Monday morning, I was up with the sun, fully rested after my second good night’s sleep in a row and glad to be getting an early start to my day. It promised to be a busy one. I had the Stab Lab ahead of me, plus I’d have to swing by the drop-in centre at some point to show my rent receipt from the Joyce and take care of the paperwork for my ‘leap cheque’. If I hustled, I might be able to get both chores out of the way in time to make lunch at the Blanchet House, which would be helpful, since I was just about out of Food Stamps. I had only two one-dollar stamps left in my booklet. Just enough to cover tomorrow morning’s coffee at McDonald’s and a fresh pouch of Bugler tobacco. Of course, neither could be purchased with Food Stamps. I’d have to convert them to cash first by doing the Food Stamp shuffle.

  There were only two ways to convert Food Stamps into cash. The first way was the easiest: you took your stamps to one of the shadier grocery stores in Old Town and sold them outright. But the scam artists who owned those places only paid you fifty cents on the dollar for your stamps, which seemed too big a rip-off to me, so I always opted for the second method: the Food Stamp shuffle. I’d walk into a grocery store, pick out a Food Stamp-approved item that cost less than a dollar, pay for it with a one-dollar stamp and leave with coins jingling in my pocket. Repeat as necessary. Keep shuffling.