Travels with Lizbeth Read online

  She pulled me in the direction of Avenue B.

  I guess she thought I was crazy. Here we were back in Austin. But we were not going home.

  Real rain began to fall. I led her to the bridge over Shoal Creek at Twenty-ninth Street. We got under the bridge.

  SIX

  Temporary Arrangements

  In truth it was several more weeks before Lizbeth and I were on the streets for much more than a few nights at a time. But that first night in Austin I despaired. It was the first time I began to understand the reality of homelessness.

  On our way to California I had my hopes. I was convinced at least once that we, or one of us, would die before we got there. But either I would die or I would reach California, and what is more, the outcome would be clear within some few days. To progress was to get nearer California. Some days we progressed and some days we did not. Whether we would end in Los Angeles or in our graves, our direction gave meaning and measure to the days.

  Such a structure is utterly lacking in a life on the streets.

  Home is the natural destination of any homeless person. But nothing can be done in a day, in a week, in a year to get nearer that destination. No perceptible progress can be made. In the absence of progress, time is nearly meaningless. Some days are more comfortable than others. And that is all the difference. A homeless life has no storyline. It is a pointless circular rambling about the stage that can be brought to happy conclusion only by a deus ex machina.

  Rent, deposits, transportation, suitable clothing, living expenses: the kind of money required to obtain a home cannot be saved from pennies picked up on the street. Moreover, no homeless person would be likely to be able to obtain employment immediately even if he were somehow delivered from the streets. His fate is no longer in his hands. He may survive, but no more than survive. If he is to hope, he must have hope of the purest kind, unconnected to any intelligent appraisal of the actual prospects.

  In the national forest and in the fire zone, I had work to do on Frost’s script and I believed I had some possibility of selling him the script. On the return trip to Austin, I had the goal of reaching Austin. But once we were back I had not only nowhere to go, but also nothing to do, and nothing within reason to hope for.

  Sometimes, especially when the rains had come and gone through the night many times and I had packed our gear up and led Lizbeth to some slight shelter and the rain had stopped and we had returned to our bedroll only to be woke by renewed rains, sometimes I would think, my mind still fogged with sleep, “The hell with this. I am going home,” as if I were some backyard camper, as if I had only to admit that my expedition was not so much fun as I thought it would be, as if I could give it up, pack my gear, and go inside to my own warm bed. I did not have many nightmares, but this was the crudest dream.

  My first thought, on our first day back in Austin, was to call Billy. I did not expect him to take me in, but I felt I could face the streets better if I got cleaned up and had a good night’s sleep. But Billy’s telephone number had been changed and I could not discover his new number because it, like the old one, was unlisted.

  While I was in California I had talked to Billy by telephone several times. He had rather encouraged me to continue to use his telephone credit card so long as it was useful. Now I did not know if he had changed his mind when the bill arrived, but he had his number changed fairly often in any event.

  Billy was paid monthly and as it was still early in April I knew he would have the money to go out drinking. Sunday afternoon I went to Sleazy Sue’s, then the oldest gay bar in Austin and the one Billy most favored, and of course he arrived soon and insisted I come home with him.

  Billy was always expansive and generous at the first of the month, but once he drank through his salary, his mood darkened sharply. Moreover, he knew this was his pattern as well as I did. He suggested that I visit him in the first week of every month. He knew he would be happy to see me then, and I could get some respite from the streets. Beyond that Billy had stored my manuscripts and a manual typewriter, which I could use to prepare anything I had written in longhand on the streets. Of course, once the month had aged to the point that Billy would have to start hocking things to keep drinking, he would resent my presence and throw me out in an alcoholic snit—we discussed this explicitly—so I ought to be ready to leave at the end of the first week.

  Billy and I had been platonic friends for many years, but more than this, his interest in helping stemmed from his job. He worked for the state welfare department. He had a back-office sort of job and he had often doubted that the welfare department did any good. His doubts had increased when the state moved its payday from the last day of the month to the first. Ann Richards, who would become governor, was then the treasurer of the state and she had realized that by moving payday one day the state might collect an extra month’s interest on the money it used to pay salaries. Unfortunately a large number of state employees, many of whom worked in the welfare office, realized that the month this conversion was made they would not receive any check. They would be paid the last day of the previous month and the first day of the following month, but in the calendar month they got no check they would technically be eligible for food stamps. En masse state employees, some of whom had salaries of more than two thousand dollars a month, applied for and got food stamps.

  This made Billy think his job, which pertained to food stamps, was a hollow mockery of what it should be. In order to prove otherwise to himself, he had gone around with me as I applied for assistance before I left Austin. Billy knew I truly was in need, he considered me deserving, and he believed that if I received some public assistance I would soon regain a productive place in society. In short, Billy thought I was precisely the sort of person that public assistance should benefit, and by following my case he hoped to prove to himself that the system worked and that his own job was really of social value.

  In many respects Billy was more disappointed with the outcome of my applications than I was, for I had a cynical view of the system and had not expected much.

  To give but one example, there was the matter of food stamps. In Texas a person cannot qualify for food stamps unless he or she does not really need them. A person who truly needs food stamps cannot be eligible to receive them. To get food stamps a person must have all to him- or herself a functioning kitchen; if the kitchen is shared, then all who share the kitchen must, as a group, qualify for food stamps. To prove that you have the kitchen, you must have a rent receipt, which opens the question of where you got the money to pay the rent. If you cannot pay the rent then you must get a written statement from the landlord that he allows you to live rent free, which statement the landlord will not give you if he is properly advised, because it prejudices his case in the event he wants to collect back rent or to evict you for nonpayment.

  If someone in the household has a job and so the rent is somehow paid, then the employed person must get a statement from his employer that the amounts shown on the stubs of the paycheck are in fact correct and that the employee is not paid more. With Texas employers, this will endanger the job of any employee who asks for such a statement. Moreover, there is the problem of proving that the household members who have no income have no income. A person who has a slight income can get documents to show that it is slight, but a person with no income has no employer to provide a statement that no wages are paid.

  Anyone who happened to have a place with a kitchen and yet had not the money to buy food would most logically do one of two things: He would find a cheaper place without a kitchen—thereby becoming ineligible for food stamps—or he would take in a roommate to help pay the rent—again making the household ineligible for food stamps unless the roommate was willing to subject every aspect of his finances to scrutiny and to ask everyone with whom he does business to attest to his poverty. People who do get food stamps are people who can afford to have a kitchen to themselves, or in other words, people who do not really need public assistance to feed
themselves. People who cannot pay rent, or who cannot pay enough rent to have a kitchen to themselves—in other words, the people who really need food stamps—are ineligible to receive them.

  Those are just a few of the immediate implications of one of many requirements for food stamp eligibility. There are of course many other requirements and regulations so that virtually no honest applicant is qualified for food stamps. People do get them, but only when they lie and some social worker decides arbitrarily not to look too closely at the application.

  Billy could not at first believe this. His sense of identity was strongly connected with his job and it seemed to him his job was a fraud. Of course he still had his nice income and I had none, but in the end it was I who was trying to console Billy.

  I explained to him that he had the wrong idea. The purpose of welfare systems is not to help poor people. If the object were to help poor people, then that would be most surely done by giving money to poor people. But that is not the idea, as our tax code proves. If you give twenty dollars to someone on the street, there is not a way in the world you can deduct that donation from your taxes. To claim a deduction you must give the money to an organization that employs clerks and administrators and social workers and that, more than likely, puts nothing material into the hands of the poor, or if it does provide some material benefit, those benefits are not as much as a dime to the dollar of the original donation. When the agency makes an accounting of the good it has done the poor, it will count the money it spent on paying social workers to hold the hands of the poor the same as money, if any, spent on bread. The purpose of welfare systems is to provide jobs for social workers and bureaucrats. This is, I said, I supposed a sort of good in itself. I told Billy he should be grateful to have a job in the poverty industry, but to ask that such a job be meaningful is to ask too much.

  Somehow he did not find these remarks consoling.

  * * *

  AT BILLY’S I showered and washed my clothes and had a good night’s sleep on his sofa. The next day I pored over my manuscripts and cobbled together a couple of short stories from various scraps. I sent the stories out and none too soon, for Billy found an exceptionally convivial crowd when he went out that night and he drank through his money much faster than anticipated.

  In the morning Billy was reasonably contrite about the tantrum he had thrown the night before. But the fact was he had spent almost all of his money. He would have to hock his TV and VCR and to write hot checks just to have enough money to drink for the rest of the month. Insisting that I was still invited back on the first of May, Billy drove us to the Hyde Park area and let us out.

  The two most serious problems, it seemed to me, were to find a safe place to sleep and to find a safe place to stash my gear. In hopes of getting some help with the latter problem I called on Dan Archer.

  Dan was a speed freak I had known back in the hippie times—about 1971. He had begun doing more and more speed then. At first this made him ambitious. He got a job and then he got another, and for a very brief time he was holding three jobs at once. Then he had his psychotic break.

  The textbooks say that amphetamine psychosis is often clinically indistinguishable from schizophrenia. The most reliable method of differential diagnosis is to withdraw the patient from amphetamines for three months and then to see whether he is still crazy. But Dan never stopped taking amphetamines for as long as three months. No one can say whether Dan is naturally nuts or whether it is only a drug effect. In any event, Dan was declared totally disabled and placed on Supplemental Security Income. Because he held the three jobs when he first became ill, Dan will receive in excess of $650 a month from the government for the rest of his life.

  After he got on SSI, Dan stayed around Austin for several years, working as a roadie and doing other jobs for which he could be paid under the table. Then he moved to a small Mexican town where, from the standpoint of cash income, his SSI checks made him by far the wealthiest man in town.

  He was much resented by the landed locals who, though they owned everything and had the power of life and death over the peasants, could not lay their hands on nearly so much cash. They plotted against Dan even as they trotted out their daughters in hopes of making a fortunate marriage. He was immune to the plots because his cash put the bishop and all the functionaries of the state at his disposal.

  Dan did marry, but he admits he deliberately chose a girl from the tiny middle class because she had no dowry and thus would forever be under his thumb. She reigned as virtual queen of her hometown for several years, but was dismayed to discover, when Dan decided they should move to Austin, that he was far from the richest man in Austin. Dan’s family, on the other hand, was wealthy even by Texas standards, and to celebrate his return and his marriage, they presented him with a condo in Hyde Park. Each year when they buy a new car, they give Dan their year-old one.

  Before I left the shack on Avenue B, Dan had come over about twice a week with his Bible and several quarts of beer. He could see my finances were deteriorating and he thought my life might be turned around if, between swallows of beer, he managed to convert me to his religion. My own theory was that if I were spotted a condo, a car, $650 a month, and first claim on a spouse’s wages, I might manage my finances better even if I remained a pagan. I explained my theory to Dan. He said that my having such an opinion was sure proof that Satan had sent a demon to infest my soul.

  But Dan had usually been good for a donation of a couple of packs of cigarettes and he very quickly learned to keep his Bible shut, as I would not put up with him otherwise. He could not be caught doing any productive work for fear of losing his SSI. He had sent his wife to work as soon as they reached Austin, and as such was the custom among her own people, she had not objected. Dan dabbled in church politics for a while but lost interest when he failed by a few votes of being elected elder. He was bored to death and was always grateful for any little conversation.

  When I looked him up, Dan agreed I could store what I wanted to in the storage closet at his condo. It had an outside entrance and he never kept anything of value there. I could also do my laundry and shower at his place from time to time, if I came while his wife was at work.

  She had developed a morbid fear of germs since her arrival in the United States. Whenever she knew that someone else had used their bathroom she went through an elaborate ritual of disinfection and Dan objected to the smell of the many cleansers she used. Curiously, only the bathroom bothered her in this way. Dishes that visitors had used received no special treatment.

  * * *

  THE PROBLEM OF a place to sleep proved more intractable. Dan suggested I sleep on a covered porch behind the sanctuary at his church. The church had established a policy to ask people found sleeping there to leave, but not to call the police. Unfortunately, like every other place I tried, the church porch was infested with fire ants.

  April had become warm. With most of my gear stashed at Dan’s I could go about with a small bookbag and a large towel. At night it was warm enough for us to sleep on the towel, but wherever Lizbeth and I lay down, we were attacked by fire ants. Most nights I did not sleep at all.

  I encountered a former roommate who let me stay the night at his place once or twice, and a few other times let me shower and nap on his sofa in the afternoon. I do not know how I survived April, but remember only that I always wanted sleep.

  On the first of May I returned to Billy’s. I slept through the first two days there. The third afternoon I began to feel human again and started to sort through my manuscripts. Billy’s cat Phantom sat on Billy’s bar and glared at me as I worked. Phantom was a cat of tastes so precious that he would not deign to lick a tuna can, insisting instead on having only the kind of gourmet cat food that came in tiny cans. Lizbeth, of course, is a gourmand, and whether it was Lizbeth’s low standards or something else that inspired Phantom’s disdain, Phantom very much resented Lizbeth whenever we visited. This caused Billy some concern at first. But Lizbeth rather likes ca
ts and only chases them if they run from her. Phantom, after he was neutered, never ran, but stomped about in a stately manner. Thus, Billy had become convinced that Lizbeth was no physical threat to Phantom, and Phantom would just have to lump it. Lump it Phantom did, but never graciously.

  Billy’s friend Tim arrived before Billy did that evening. Billy was working the swing shift and would get off work at eleven. But since he had just been paid and all of his favorite bars were between his place of employment and his apartment, I could not say when he would return. Tim was supposed to meet Billy to transact some very small marijuana business, but whether Tim was the buyer or seller I never learned. At any rate I was sure Billy had forgotten this appointment or that he would forget it after his third cocktail.

  I had met Tim once before at Billy’s, just before I left for California. Tim had come there to change out of his work clothes before going to visit someone at a hospital that was very near Billy’s apartment.

  I learned from Tim that he had been visiting his very much older companion who had died a few days after Tim had come to Billy’s to change. The companion had not mentioned Tim in the will. The family soon evicted him from the estate and did not recognize his claim to several valuable works of art that he thought his companion had given him. Nonetheless, the family had wished to conceal that Tim’s companion had died of AIDS, and so in hopes of securing Tim’s silence they had established him in an efficiency apartment behind an older home in Hyde Park.

  Billy arrived home in a terrible rage, for he had spent all his money on cocktails. He told me immediately that I would have to leave in the morning. In that event, Tim said, I should come and live with him.

  * * *

  AS USUAL BILLY was not so venomous in the morning. But I was packed and ready to go by the time he got up. He took me to the address Tim had given me. Tim was not home. Lizbeth and I sat on his stoop and made the acquaintance of his flea-ridden dog, Harley. When Tim arrived I could see that he was not really prepared to receive us, but had invited us only to spite Billy. I had suspected as much and would not have gone to Tim’s place at all had it not been close to where I thought Lizbeth and I might fare best on the streets.