Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron's Ghost Page 5

  “Katrina was different than anything that has come through here,” Thompson told me. He had lost his house and lived at the hospital. Until recently he used a boat to visit his flooded house. Of the 450 medical staff members, only 150 have returned to work. Some, like Thompson, lived at the hospital now because they had no other place to go.

  When I finished talking to Thompson, I drove back to Gramercy to write the day’s stories. I flipped on the AC in the SUV and turned on the radio. A DJ came on and said a second storm was approaching the Gulf Coast. It already had a name, Hurricane Rita.

  * * *

  At Ripon College, the research projects I had engaged in when I was younger never translated into scholastic excellence. My parents let me know in no uncertain terms that they expected more from me than a low C average. I didn’t know what to say. College seemed to be nothing more than an extension of high school. Little inspired my interest. I grew tired of taking one meaningless course after another. I skipped most of my classes but not theater. My mother’s brother, Joe, was an actor. Influenced by his appearances in movies and on TV, I auditioned for the drama department’s production of the Terrence McNally comedy Bad Habits. I got the part of a sanitarium patient. Acting soon garnered my passion. On stage I was no longer a directionless student but an utterly different character divorced from my life and surroundings by the imagination of a playwright. After the final curtain, however, the drudgery of my classes resumed.

  April 14, 1977

  Dear Malcolm: I’m pleased to hear how serious you are about theater. So many people are content to just get along and take things as they come today. Believe me when I say your dedication to a job well done will pay off later in life. Warm regards, Dale

  At the end of my sophomore year, bored and restless, full of a false confidence that came from having lived on my own for almost two years, I transferred to Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where I had friends from high school. I majored in English and theater.

  June 8, 1977

  Dear Malcolm: Very nice to hear from you again and be brought up to date on your latest activities. Keep up the good work and don’t be upset by raised eyebrows and the loss of administration friendship [at Ripon College]. It’s people like you who change the world for the better. Best of luck in your new college. Yours, Dale

  My love for the theater and Titler’s confidence in my future did nothing to alleviate my parents’ concern. Neither did my 2.0 grade-point average when I graduated from Coe in May 1979. Adrift, I moved to New York City in September to pursue acting. Manhattan was also where Uncle Joe lived. I rented an apartment in a condemned Brooklyn brownstone on Cumberland Street, one floor above an alcoholic who collected stray cats and allowed them to use his bathtub as a litter pan. In the winter, the stench of cat pee rose through my noisy radiators, making my room nearly intolerable. Joe and his wife, Stella, often invited me to dinner, reassuring my mother that I wasn’t starving.

  I recall sitting with Joe in his 57th Street apartment as he listened to recordings of interviews he had given and critiqued his voice. He noticed when he mumbled, spoke in a monotone, and when his comments lacked precision. He encouraged me to pause between words when I didn’t know how to continue a thought rather than fill the silence with um, uh, or er. I liked his deep, rich voice, its sense of purpose and authority, and I followed his advice. Before I spoke I began considering what I would say and how I would say it rather than spouting the first unformed thought that came into my head. I was a college graduate, legally an adult, but I didn’t feel like one. I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I wanted to speak in a way that sounded as if I did.

  January 30, 1980

  Dear Malcolm,

  Nice indeed to hear from you again and hear of your new experiences in the big city. The only time I was ever in NYC was at a stopover in LaGuardia. Never really had the urge to live there—it’s safer not to, I think. It’s dog eat dog, but if you can survive a year of it, the addition to your writing repertoire will be well worth while.

  Perhaps I didn’t tell you earlier, but I was promoted to Kessler Historian in May a year ago and enjoy the work very much. It cuts into my freelance writing time, but I still find time to write on the side. Dodd, Mead has asked me to rewrite my first book, Wings of Mystery, for them so they can put it out in a new edition, and I’ll be busy on that beginning in mid-July.

  I enjoyed your letter and it was good to know you’re still in there working hard. Don’t get discouraged, keep plugging away and sooner or later you’ll get the right break. Warmest regards, Dale.

  My theater auditions never resulted in a director casting me in a play. Instead of earning a living as an actor, I accepted jobs through day labor joints in New York and across the country. I answered phones for the University of New York, filed grant applications for a YMCA on Wall Street, operated a paper shredder, and worked as a hospital receptionist at Sloan Kettering.

  When I got tired of New York, I trained as a whitewater rafting guide in Idaho and then cleaned test tubes for a Minneapolis lab. I rented rooms in houses that whistled with wind blowing through cracks in the walls, and I took in stray cats for company. I met construction workers, waitresses, Vietnam combat veterans, stock clerks, accountants, drunks, prostitutes, and junkies, and wherever I found them, I asked questions.

  About living, they’d tell me: “Have a good rest of your life”; about traveling: “All it takes is a thumb and some guts”; about a good car: “It’s as clean as it wanna be.” A tall, attractive woman was “fine.” They said “man” and at other times “maaan!”

  The stories I heard about hitchhiking, fistfights, job loss, and war were told in ways that made my feet ache from miles I’d never walked, my head pound from problems I didn’t have, my heart sink from losses I’d never experienced.

  I wrote it all down and continued my nomadic existence. My parents never knew where I’d be from one week to the next. I called home every Saturday. On occasion, when I had a somewhat permanent address, I’d write a letter. My mother responded to these short notes with enthusiasm, encouraging me to write more. You know a phone call is great, she wrote, but there is something about a letter. Thoughts on paper, not fleeting words airborne, is much more satisfying.

  I could hear the disappointment in my father’s voice about the life I was living, but Uncle Joe approved of my wandering. Or, I should say, he didn’t disapprove of it. He told me I reminded him of his own mother, who left for parts unknown for weeks at a time when she quarreled with my grandfather and was dubbed an “eccentric” traveler by her family.

  One March morning in 1980, a man sat next to me in a Minneapolis bagel shop on Lake Street. He ordered coffee and we began talking. He said he’d been hopping freight trains across the country. Just got off one, in fact. I asked him how he did it. You go to a “division point,” he explained, a rail yard where trains traveling across the country stop to load and unload. Determine which direction the trains are going, and just get on one.

  Division point. Something about the phrase appealed to me. I finished my bagel, walked back to my room, and wrote a story about a guy who had jumped freights when he was young but was now stuck in a dead-end job with coworkers who had never traveled beyond their commute to and from work.

  More fiction followed. I wrote about a homeless woman in New York taking comfort in a stray cat. In another story a man and a woman meet in a diner. He doesn’t have the money to pay for their meal. The woman walks out when she realizes the big plans the man has for finding a job are nothing more than fantasy.

  I submitted these and other stories to college magazines. Editors rejected them with form letters, but I kept writing.

  October 27, 1980

  Dear Malcolm,

  Not to throw a damper on your efforts, but I have given up writing. It’s just too much bother to fight with publishers by long distance and the rank and file of publishers aren’t, by any means, an honest lot. I say this after six books and half a hundred arti
cles in periodicals. It’s just not worth it any more, Malcolm. Enjoyed your short stories you sent me; I think you’re off to a fine start. Every good wish as always. Excuse the brevity of my note, please. Warmest regards, Dale.

  In the summer of 1982, I enrolled in the creative writing program at the University of Missouri in Columbia. I also submitted stories to the Columbia Daily Tribune with little success.

  August 17, 1982

  Dear Malcolm,

  I must agree with your observation about interviewing people; the best way is to see them face-to-face. However, I use the telephone a lot, especially on weekends when the rates are low. Once you contact a person you want to interview, ask them if you can send them a list of questions (number them) and telephone them at a certain time to discuss them. Use a tape recorder on the phone to record both sides of the conversation. Then transcribe the tape and use it as research material. Hang in there, Malcolm. You’ll make it yet. Sincerely, Dale

  A young woman I met at a party and fell blindingly in love with proved a significant distraction, however. Linda had long brown hair and a sway to her walk as if nothing else mattered. She also was as far from being monogamous as the moon is from the earth. In my heartbreak, I missed classes and flunked out of my second semester.

  I left Missouri for San Francisco in May 1983 for no other reason than that a childhood friend, Gabrielle, lived in North Beach and needed a roommate. Her apartment at the top of Vallejo Street overlooked the bay, and I’d often stare at the water and the Bay Bridge and think how far away I was from Winnetka.

  I had not been in San Francisco long when I began volunteering at the Ozanam Center on Howard Street south of Market. The center, a program of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, was named after a sixteenth-century French social worker. It offered a twenty-four-hour alcohol detox unit on the second floor of a brick building that from the outside reminded me of a warehouse. The first floor, called the drop-in center, served as a place for homeless people to spend the day reading, sleeping, or playing cards. At night, staff and volunteers converted the drop-in to a night shelter capable of handling up to fifty men. Women in need of shelter were referred elsewhere.

  I had crossed paths with dozens of homeless people in the years I spent traveling the country and thought the center would be a good way to fill my time while I looked for work. I had not been volunteering long before Gabrielle put me out of her apartment because her boyfriend was jealous. She suggested that I apply for welfare. Instead I stayed at the center, hoarding what little I earned through temp jobs. For weeks, I listened to men thrash around in their sleep, scream in the middle of the night and wake up from their nightmares wild–eyed and exhausted.

  “What did you dream?” I would ask.

  One Vietnam veteran we all called Red because of his thick red beard told me he had nightmares about the people he had killed. “Another enemy dead in Vietnam today,” he said when he woke up. “I got ’em in my sleep.” He didn’t remember any good days from when he was in the army. “There weren’t too many over there,” he said.

  I wrote it down.

  I thought I’d live for a few months in San Francisco and then leave for another city, another state, as I’d done before. This time, however, I stayed. I didn’t think much of my temp jobs, but I enjoyed my work at the Ozanam Center, the characters I met who, like Red, knew one another by their street names: Too Tall, a homeless man who was seven feet; Alabama, a southerner with a patchy red beard who suffered alcoholic seizures; Rocky, a guy who had a loopy, aw-shucks grin, among many others. They taught me pinochle, chess, and dominoes. They borrowed a dollar here, a dollar there, money I knew I’d never see again. I was twenty-five and still had zits. They called me kid.

  As the kid, I was assigned the grunt jobs: cleaning bathrooms, picking up trash outside, and working behind the coffee counter with Lyle, another volunteer. Lyle liked to wear white button-down shirts and creased gray slacks. He was fortysomething, balding, stooped, and had a slight paunch. I could imagine him standing by my father on a platform, waiting to catch a train into Chicago. He had been an accountant in “a previous life,” he told me. He carried a leather briefcase and made a great display of removing file folders from it as if he still had clients. At the time, Lyle had been sober two months.

  Then he stopped showing up. I assumed he’d quit, until one afternoon when I saw one of the shelter staff help him through the door. His clothes were torn and covered with dried mud. Cuts and bruises scarred his unshaven face. One eye was swollen shut. His hands shook as he sat down.

  “Where have you been staying?” a counselor known as Gypsy asked him.

  “Outside. Golden Gate Park,” Lyle said.

  I looked at Lyle. He returned my look, then turned away. Gypsy leafed through a thick worn file with a flap reading Norton, Lyle. Inserting a blank page, he asked Lyle how long he had been drinking this time.

  In August 1983, the Ozanam Center hired me as an intake worker for its detox program. At first, I worked the overnight shift. Then, after two months, I was moved to days. I signed homeless men and women into detox and put their names on waiting lists for inpatient alcohol programs. They were expected to stay sober while they waited for an opening. Sometimes six weeks passed before a program had a bed available. By then, most of my clients had been in and out of detox several times and were no longer considered eligible.

  Those who managed to hang tough were rejected too, victims of their own white-knuckle discipline. If they could last six weeks without drinking, a Salvation Army social worker told me, they didn’t need to be in a program. I would soon learn that rejection is part of an alcoholic’s life, the elixir of addiction. The guys who were refused took the news calmly. They asked me for BART money. I knew they weren’t going to buy a BART ticket, but I gave them the money anyway. I wasn’t going to hold them accountable for the failings of some by-the-book jerk on the other end of a phone who had the power to deny an alcoholic the help he or she needed. I watched guys who had fought against their desire to drink for weeks leave to buy a bottle of Thunderbird or Night Train.

  “Sorry, Malcolm,” they would tell me on their way out the door.

  I saved my money and found an apartment on Masonic Street in Haight-Ashbury. I wrote fiction at night and continued to receive form-letter rejections. The enjoyment I experienced in my job balanced the disappointment. In 1984, I enrolled in the Graduate School of Social Work at San Francisco State University to ensure a future in social services. I also took a creative writing class.

  At work I noticed that many of the homeless people we admitted to detox liked to write poetry and draw. In 1987, with the help of a colleague, I put together an anthology of their writings and illustrations. We called it Out of the Rain. Then we started a monthly publication, By No MEANS. The name came from a lyric in the song “King of the Road”: I’m a man of means by no means / king of the road. By No MEANS carried stories written by the homeless about life on the street. Those who couldn’t write, we interviewed. I followed the advice Titler had given me while I was in Columbia about using a recorder.

  November 7, 1991

  Dear Malcolm,

  So there you are! I’ve thought of you many times and have wondered how you fared in the world. Now I see you’ve done well—with your own newspaper! Not bad going at all. I’m proud of you. My best, Dale

  Titler had been keeping busy himself. He was researching a book about the death of Glenn Miller, the bandleader whose plane disappeared over the English Channel in 1944. He had also begun writing screenplays. His three children were grown and he was a grandparent of a two-year-old boy. His wife had retired but continued to work part-time at a school. All of those who helped me so generously with my book on von Richthofen have passed away, he wrote, and I’m not even in touch with their survivors anymore. Time moves on. I hope they are not forgotten.

  In September 1987, I left the Ozanam Center to direct the Tenderloin Self-Help Center, an agency for homeless mentally ill p
eople, including veterans suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. Despite my excitement about my new job, I felt tired. The bohemian call of social work, the finger snapping, hey-man-I’m-living-on-the-edge rap had lost its allure. The daily numbing of my heart as I dealt with the same people over and over again drained me.

  Only one percent of the more than one hundred men and women who daily came through our doors entered substance-abuse programs. We had no statistics on how many actually completed them. Those of our clients who found jobs signed up for shelter because their minimum wage-salaries couldn’t cover rent even for a welfare hotel room. But they were working and thus weren’t eligible for shelter. They had money, therefore should have been able to find someplace to stay. That was the thinking, a rationalization for triage. We didn’t have enough room to shelter everybody.

  If they drank, however, they could get into detox. Income didn’t matter if you were drunk. Many tried controlled drinking—just enough to get into detox, have a roof over their head for the night so they could work the next morning. They were back on the street in no time.

  I could have scolded them with patronizing nonsense to show my moral superiority but I wasn’t in a position to judge. I grew up in a ritzy Chicago suburb where alcoholics weren’t drunks but neighbors and acquaintances who’d had a little too much to drink on a Friday night. Somehow they managed to stumble out of bed the next day. Somehow their families covered for them. Somehow their despair found a parachute.

  We had no parachutes at the Ozanam Center. At best, we offered homeless people a safe place to spend their days and nights as they slowly killed themselves. We held memorial services under highway overpasses where they had died, to honor them and let God know they were worth remembering. Traffic rushed by as we stepped around discarded fast food wrappers and pop cans. Some prayed. Others of us just closed our eyes so that those who prayed thought we believed in a higher power too. I felt the empty space in the crowd at the center’s front door when a regular was gone.