Idiot Wind

by Peter Kaldheim

  Hostess Fruit Pies were my favourite purchase when I was working the shuffle. You could get them for thirty cents (or even a quarter, if there was a sale on), which yielded a healthy ratio of change. It was funny how quickly I found myself budgeting my daily expenses in units of pie. Two pies equalled one cup of McDonald’s coffee, plus a pouch of Bugler. But the two stamps still in my booklet were all I had left until my regular monthly allocation came through. The DHS centre would definitely be my next stop after lunch at the Blanchet. I’d been checking in every day for the past week, but my stamps were still stuck in the pipeline. Maybe today I’d finally get lucky.

  For the first time in weeks, the sky over Portland was bright blue. From the heights of downtown, you could see clear to the snow-capped peak of Mount Hood. It was milder than usual, too, with a false hint of spring, and as I hiked from McDonald’s to the Stab Lab I wondered where this weather had been when I’d been freezing my nuts off at Camp Anyway! But it was a glorious morning to be out in the world, even on gimpy feet, and I was cheerier than usual when I limped into the Alpha Center. I’d arrived early enough to beat the crowd and get a bed right away.

  For a change, the hours passed quickly and next thing I knew I was standing at the cashier’s window receiving the amazing news that I had just earned a twenty-dollar incentive bonus for completing my eighth donation in four weeks. I was flabbergasted. What a windfall! And I knew exactly how to spend it. And where.

  The hotplate will have to wait, I told myself, as I hobbled out of the Stab Lab and set off straightaway for the local Army-Navy Surplus store. I was sick of limping around on bloody feet. It was time to do something about my ridiculous footwear situation once and for all.

  I had already scouted the Army-Navy store in my travels around Old Town and for weeks I’d been coveting a pair of Vietnam-surplus ‘jungle boots’ on display in the window. The boots had thick rubber soles, sturdy black leather heels and toecaps, and vented nylon-canvas uppers that laced all the way to your calves. Ideal boots for a soggy town like Portland. And, even better, reasonably priced at only seventeen dollars a pair.

  Having learned my lesson in New Orleans, I made sure to take my time trying on several pairs until I found a perfect fit. Then I kicked in another two dollars for a thick pair of cushiony wool socks, which I put on right there in the store. After lacing up the jungle boots, I stuffed my blood-stained socks and old boots into the new shoebox, and as soon as I was back on the street I hustled down the block to the nearest trash can and did what I’d been wanting to do for weeks. Good fucking riddance!

  My feet were already thanking me as I hurried down Burnside Street toward the drop-in centre on Broadway to take care of my LIEAP paperwork. I was cutting along at a clip I wouldn’t have thought possible when I’d rolled out of bed that morning, and I arrived in plenty of time to set up my ‘leap cheque’ and still make it over to Glisan Street for the final round of lunch seating at the Blanchet House. If I’d still been hobbling, I would have gone hungry – I’d never have made it in time. Though I’d barely been wearing the new boots an hour, they were already improving my life, and I sat down to lunch dazed with gratitude, still marvelling at the stroke of luck that had brought them my way.

  The day had gotten off to such a good start I didn’t see how it could get much better, and I was already bracing myself for bad news at the DHS centre as I hiked toward the Steel Bridge after lunch. But my run of luck wasn’t over just yet. Miracle of miracles, my Food Stamp allocation had finally arrived, and all of a sudden I was sixty-eight dollars richer. What a day!

  I was grinning like the Cheshire cat as I set off for downtown Portland and a shopping spree that would put plenty of miles on my new jungle boots before the afternoon was over. Fate had handed me the opportunity I’d been praying for – a chance to lay up in my room for three or four days straight and give my blistered heels a chance to finally heal – and I was determined to seize the moment. All I had to do now was hit the stores for enough supplies to see me through my convalescence.

  Deciding I’d better take a moment to get organised first, I stopped off at the McDonald’s on Alder Street and treated myself to a celebratory coffee while I jotted down a shopping list. Then I headed downhill to the Newberry’s five-and-dime store at Fifth and Alder, a relic of the twenties that still had an antique turnstile you pushed through to enter the sales floor.

  It was a sad old place, but it was the cheapest in town for toiletries and household gadgets, so it was a popular destination for the down-and-outers from the Burnside District. I wasn’t surprised to spot two other Bluecoats wandering the aisles with handbaskets when I got there. I grabbed one myself and soon gathered everything on my list, plus one item I’d never thought to look for until I stumbled across it in the housewares aisle – an immersion coil heater! As soon as it caught my eye, I knew I’d have to buy it. At under two dollars it was a lot less expensive than a used hotplate and would be a hell of a lot easier to smuggle up to my room. True, you couldn’t fry an egg with it, or heat up a can of beans, but it would boil water in minutes, and as long as I had boiling water there were plenty of other things I could cook, so it was a real find.

  Most of the nine dollars I had left in blood money was spent by the time I walked out of Newberry’s, but I now had everything I needed to set up a makeshift kitchen in my room, except groceries. The only supermarket within walking distance of skid row was the Safeway out near the art museum, twelve long blocks from the Joyce Hotel. I usually dreaded the painful hike out there, but today my new boots made it less of an ordeal, and for a change I wasn’t wincing the entire way.

  The best thing about the Safeway was that they had lots of cashier stations. Multiple cashiers made doing the Food Stamp shuffle a lot less embarrassing. I could buy four or five Hostess Fruit Pies, one at a time, and never have to face the same cashier twice – which eliminated all the scowling you’d have to endure if you worked the shuffle on a single cashier. It took me four pies to accumulate the change I needed for a four-day supply of Bugler, and once I had that covered I was ready to do my bulk shopping and get out of there.

  My arms and shoulders were on fire by the time I lugged my two heavy grocery sacks all the way across town, and it was a relief to finally catch sight of the Fish Grotto, the restaurant that leased the southwest corner of the Joyce Hotel building. The Grotto, which had its own entrance on Stark Street, around the corner from the hotel lobby, was a curiously bipolar place. By day, it was your basic kitschy seafood joint, with cork floats and gill nets hung from the ceilings, a ‘Catch of the Day’ slate board propped in the window, and a desultory lunch clientele that could usually be counted on the fingers of one hand. But come five o’clock Happy Hour, the phrase ‘catch of the day’ took on a whole new meaning, as the Grotto morphed into a gay bar that drew a packed house nearly every night of the week.

  The early crowd was already arriving when I reached the corner, and Stark Street was clogged with double-parked taxis and town cars dropping off smartly dressed men who stuck out in that neighbourhood like peacocks slumming in a flock of park pigeons. I could see them clocking me out of the corners of their eyes as I trudged through their midst with my Safeway bags. It was almost comical how deftly they stepped back and gave me room to pass. I felt like a Bluecoat Moses – parting the shiny shoes.

  Inside the hotel, I saw Vern nod his flat-topped head in noncommittal greeting as I crossed the lobby, and I took that to mean I was cleared to head upstairs without showing my key at the desk any more. Progress. The Joyce was starting to feel more like home every day. And it felt even more homey when I got up to my room and began unloading groceries. I stowed my perishables – milk, mayonnaise and margarine – out on the window ledge, then pressed one of the empty dresser drawers into service as my pantry, where I stashed all the freeze-dried soup and instant oatmeal packets I’d loaded up on at the store, along with a box of tea bags, a jar of instant coffee and a supply of canned tuna fish and Cling peaches.
Which pretty much filled up the drawer, so I had to store my bread and strawberry jam on top of the dresser.

  Once I had my food stock organised, I opened my daypack and unloaded all the kitchen supplies I’d bought at Newberry’s. In addition to the coil heater, I had picked up two wide-mouthed ceramic soup mugs (one for boiling water in, one in which to mix whatever freeze-dried convenience food the boiling water would be added to), as well as one of those little butterfly-shaped can openers, a ‘Picnic Pak’ of heavy-duty plastic utensils and a stubby set of throwaway cardboard salt and pepper shakers. In short, everything I needed to cook myself a hot meal, and I wasted no time putting it to good use.

  Within minutes, the mug of water atop the dresser was boiling so furiously that it fogged up the mirror in the room’s far corner. Of course, in an eight by ten room the ‘far corner’ is a relative term, but you get the idea – the gadget worked as advertised. Next thing I knew, the water was threatening to boil over the edge of the mug and I had to quickly yank the plug out of the wall socket to keep it from flooding the dresser top. This left me standing in the middle of the room nervously clutching a cord from which dangled a glowing coil that was still so hot it posed a real fire hazard. I didn’t breathe easy until the infernal thing was safely hissing in the porcelain sink – the only place I could think to toss it without setting the room ablaze. Next trip to Newberry’s I’d definitely have to pick up an extra ceramic mug to use as a coil-cooler.

  That hairy moment didn’t dull my appetite, though, and my mouth was watering by the time I finished mixing up what the Knorr packet promised would be ‘a steaming cup of hearty chicken rice soup’. Since the room had no table, I improvised one by removing the last of the dresser’s empty drawers and setting it upside-down on the edge of my bed. Then I pulled the chair over next to the bed. Chez Joyce was open for business.

  As I sat there unwrapping a stick of margarine to spread on some bread to go with my soup (‘Everything’s better with Blue Bonnet on it!’), a familiar smile came over my face, as I recalled my old mentor at Dartmouth, the genial poet Richard Eberhart, who conducted his limited-enrolment poetry seminars from a big leather armchair in the fire-lit living room of his house on the edge of campus – a poet-friendly retreat overlooking the Connecticut River, haunted by the benevolent ghost of its former occupant, Robert Frost. Besides the opportunity to interact with a Pulitzer Prize-winner in an intimate setting, the six or seven students admitted to the seminar each semester were also treated to surprise visits from Eberhart’s house guests – a roster that in my time included Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, William Everson (aka Brother Antoninus) and Amiri Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones). I spent many memorable evenings talking poetry in that cozy living room, but oddly enough the night I remember best was the night Professor Eberhart offhandedly remarked that, in his opinion, the most euphonious word in the English language was (of all things!) oleomargarine. Ever since that night, I’ve never thought of the poor man’s butter quite the same.

  It was impossible for me to recall those happy times without also remembering the creative energy that had animated me when Richard Eberhart took me under his wing, and no doubt that’s what sparked my idea to make the next four days a sort of writer’s retreat. Holed up in my room, with no distractions, I’d have the perfect opportunity to get back to the one thing in my life that the idiot wind hadn’t stripped away: my enduring belief in the power of words. The only belief that had sustained me after I’d dropped out of St Mary’s and drifted away from the Church.

  I was eager to see what could be made of the road notes I’d been gathering since I’d left New York, but first I had to collate all the scraps of paper stuffed into my original Wonder Bread bag, then transcribe them into the hardbound composition book with the old-school marbleised cover that I’d remembered to buy at Newberry’s. It was a job that took me the rest of the night and a good part of the next day. Many of my notes had been sketchy and needed fleshing out as I transcribed them, which made me glad I was tackling the task while the trip was still fresh in my memory.

  Whenever writer’s cramp got the better of me, I’d take a break and prepare a meal, or just kick back with one of my library books, or zone out listening to the late-night jazz programming on KMHD, the student-run radio station at Mount Hood Community College. And sometimes, in the wee hours, I’d hear the clacking of typewriter keys echoing in the air shaft outside my open window. I’d smile and think, Maybe Charles Bukowski has moved in upstairs! Skid-row hotels were Bukowski’s home turf, after all. A place like the Joyce would be right up his alley.

  By the second night of my retreat, I had finished transcribing my road notes – fifty pages worth – and I began to wonder what to do with them next. I hadn’t yet decided whether to use the notes as background for a novel or as the raw material for a straight-up memoir.

  Might as well sleep on it, I told myself, after an hour’s muddled deliberation made it clear I had no idea which path to choose. Meanwhile, Bukowski continued to hunt and peck somewhere on the upper floors, and it was hard not to take the steady clacking of his typewriter as a reproach to my own lack of productivity. But I finally said fuck it, and climbed into bed with On the Road, which proved to be the right decision. I awoke in the morning with Kerouac’s words echoing in my head and knew I had found my opening. The one line that had stuck with me was about prison being the place where a jailed man promises himself the right to live and, with that thought in mind, I belatedly realised that all the material in my road notes would have to wait. Before writing about my time on the road, my gut told me I’d have to tackle my time on Rikers Island first. As soon as I’d downed a mug of coffee, I dug out my brand-new Newberry’s legal pad and began at the beginning, in an overcrowded bullpen cell, on the day I first arrived.

  ‘Handle It!’

  Upwards of thirty other inmates were already crammed into the eight by ten bullpen when I arrived at Rikers for processing, but the noise in the place was even worse than the overcrowding. It seemed like half the guys in the bullpen were shouting through the bars at once, all of them voicing complaints to the guards at the duty desk. Complaints so uniform and repetitious they took on the hypnotic quality of schoolyard singsong.

  ‘Hey, CO! They tryin’ to starve us or what? When are we getting’ some chow?’

  ‘Hey, CO! Can’t you close these windows? It’s freezing in here!’

  ‘Hey, CO! When we gettin’ beds, CO? Ain’t no room in this fuckin’ bullpen!’

  When they deigned to answer at all, the guards’ reply to this whining was always the same two words, delivered with macho disdain or weary detachment: ‘Handle it!’

  Handle it! Handle it! I’m sure I’ll never hear another phrase that turns my stomach more than those two words did during my time behind bars. It’s a phrase with a built-in sneer, a vile command that keeps your nose well-buried in the muck of your own impotence, and I wasn’t in the bullpen a half-hour before I was already sick of hearing it.

  In the bullpens at Rikers hours drag on into days, the guards come and go in changing shifts, but still the ‘intake process’ produces no ‘intake’. The machinery is overstuffed and choking; it wants to break down. Too many faces to photograph. Too many fingers to be printed. Too many wallets to collect, too many receipts to issue. Too many physical exams, too few doctors.

  Thirty hours after arriving in the bullpen I was frazzled with exhaustion. The noise and cramped quarters made sleep an impossible dream. Tempers in the cell were shorting out and flaring into fights more rapidly every hour, and only the frigid blasts of January air – from the windows the guards refused to close – kept the anger in the cell from boiling into a riot. Whenever a fight did break out, the guard on duty would blast his whistle and the flying squad would come running, batons and riot shields at the ready, and storm into the bullpen to drag the two opponents out and hustle them away to a private cell for a ‘beat-down’. These beatings were never conducted in view of the rest of us, but the groan
s and screams painted a picture that was clear enough to everyone – a sickening lesson in ‘handling it’.

  On my third day at Rikers, while I was still housed in the ‘intake unit’, a guard entered the cellblock and read out a list of names, among them mine, and ordered us to line up double-file on the ‘count stripe’ painted down the middle of the dorm’s central aisle. Then the guard marched us all off to a classroom in a different wing of the prison, where a veteran corrections officer spent the next three hours lecturing us on the rules and established procedures we’d be expected to know and adhere to during our incarceration. Judging by the bored looks on the faces of most of the prisoners in the room, the CO was preaching to the choir. The only ones in the class who seemed to be paying any attention to the lecture were a handful of newbies – or, in prison parlance, ‘fish’ – like me.

  I’ll admit, getting schooled to be a proper convict was about as bizarre an example of ‘continuing education’ as I could possibly imagine. Still, I found it fascinating – and by the time the lecture ended my brain was crammed with all sorts of information I would never have guessed I’d need to know. For example, who knew that the guards didn’t like being called guards? Not me, that’s for sure. Apparently, our jailers preferred to be addressed as ‘officer’ or (the more common term) ‘CO’. Nor did I know that the proper response when a riot broke out in the mess hall was to prostrate yourself on the floor, with your hands clasped behind your head, or else risk being taken for one of the rioters by the baton-wielding flying squad when they stormed in to crack heads. Riots in the mess hall? I remember wondering. Were riots really such a commonplace occurrence that prisoners needed to be schooled ahead of time in how to react when one broke out? If so, the months ahead were going to be more hazardous than a fish like me had envisioned.