I live in the attic of a house with basically four levels. Basements in most of the mid-west aren’t just musty storage areas with a washing machine and furnace. Though Texas and Oklahoma and trailer parks get most of the press, most of the Mid-West has at least one Tornado season. This house was built right after WWII and built with the idea of baby boomers and Eisenhower era families. Four bedrooms on the second floor, kitchen, dining room, living room on the first floor, the basement separated into a musty furnace/washer/dryer area (If y’all have never seen a 220 fuse in the states --- well, good on ya) and a family den area; wood paneling, a fire place, tiled floor, and concrete reinforcement.
The attic, the place where I lived, when I was in town and not living elsewhere, from 74ish to, aww shit let’s call it 78ish (though my caveats eat up larger chunks of the calendar year the closer it gets to 78ish) and from 9/4/2012 until the present, was designed as a den slash office for, not to get too Coen brothers on yours asses, the Pater Familial (he’s bonafide!).
So I wake up this morning to thunderbolt and lightening (yes, I know, I woke up with “… very very frightening, eek, Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, Figaro magnifico, oh, oh” hopping around my skull without regard to what parts were rotted and where the support beams might be). It was kind of cool. I flicked on a light to keep from stubbing a toe on the first leg of my journey coffee-ward, and saw a book I had displayed to read the title “ No one is Neutral on a moving train” one of those eight zillion sixties sociology type treatise on modern times things. The title is day glo pink against a background of Warhol-esque stamps of the same suit facing towards the dust jacket. One flight of stairs; pee. Next flight of stairs say hi to my mom who has her bag lady collection of things around her dining room chair. She has always been the most organized person I know. It’s covert, you wouldn’t want to play poker with her, she was born to get to play the dotty old lady, but before that she could pull off the eccentric professor’s eccentric housewife. Because of the fairly recent hitch in her getalong (five maybe six years) she has to hide her extreme organizational skills under stacks of used paper plates, laundry, catalogs from places no one here has ever bought anything (though, in the last year, she’s begun collecting cigar catalogs with some just cause that a resident here might buy something. I’m not interested in catalogs so she can use them for camouflage. Since the rash of home invaders with delicate sensibilities started showing up we’ve hidden all my dad’s playboys, an old colleague of his drops them off every three months or so, and leave catalogs by his sitting spot. It doesn’t matter, he isn’t really reading anything, it’s a habit. He no longer has the attention span or memory to really read.).
Not trying to denigrate her little throne, but it really looks more like a bag lady who has spread out her rags for the evening than anything else. If you don’t get this image --- well, good on ya. Cities in the Northwest have a lot of homeless people; although SF, Portland and Seattle all get cold it’s a rare night that you’ll freeze to death. I don’t recall ever seeing a homeless person outdoors at night here in the mitten and although I didn’t make an exhaustive search I wasn’t sheltered. I made it a point not to be sheltered. I had to travel this whole damn continent by boot leather and thumb to make that point to myself. I made it a point to go to places without shelter. I can make those tales sound romantic, they are romantic, but also terribly naïve and a lot more self-serving than the romantic version implies. I’m just saying I’ve seen a lot of bag ladies. I don’t have a social commentary for that. In Portland it seemed damn near appealing at times; keep your shit limited to one shopping cart and wander the beautiful streets scaring the shit out of citizens.
My first real place, the little rooms my son was born in, was in a neighborhood that once upon a time was notorious for whack-job homeless. I don’t know if they had meetings to figure out territories or what, but this neighborhood didn’t have the winos, the transient, the sob story, the economic disaster, or any reason you can think of that makes a person live on the streets. That neighborhood was the fighting-weather-demons, cussing at feral squirrels, loud-arguments-with-self, bat shit larger than life character sort of homeless. I mean maybe not exclusively, but the ones I was on a first name basis with sure were off their mother-loving nut. This one guy, George, the first time I met him I rattled my pocket for change, offered a palm full of dimes and pennies and wound up getting into a fairly wacky discussion that ended with “Ask people for money huh? That’s a good idea. You think they’ll give it to me?” Oh and somewhere in the middle we exchanged names.
To get ones social justice panties in a wad over that neighborhood being gentrified is just silly. The point of being homeless is that you don’t have a neighborhood. When I say it was gentrified I just mean all the flavor was taken from it and boutique stores popped up. I don’t mean poor folks were driven from their homes. Them what owned property in that neighborhood were not poor folk by a long long shot. Most of the beautiful large Victorians were owned, oddly enough, by the hospital, Good Samaritan. It wasn’t until they were absorbed by the huge HMO Legacy Health Systems that the property was sold off and boutiques started to pop up. Even the flavor of health care was sucked out of the neighborhood, and I say this as someone who thought the flavor of Good Sam was bitter and tart the way tuna gone bad is tart. Those were the bastards that kept me waiting in an empty ER for three hours before telling me to put my croup coughing son’s baby head in a fucking refrigerator. Fuck Good Sam, but double fuck them for ceding to Lega-fucking-cy.
I still never quite understood city homeless except it’s a good place to feed off the scraps of corpulent opulence, I mean in corpulent opulent times. I identify better with freeway and rail yard homeless. When I was trying hard not to be sheltered I always found cities to be claustrophobic, restricting. Velocity cures all sorts of woes, you stand still too long and the woes know where to find you. By you I mean me. I’ve been still for way too long. I do have an attic and in a few months when autumns thunder storms have come and gone I’ll be damn glad to have a cozy little attic. If I didn’t I’d freeze my way down to Interstate 10 and come to visit y’all.
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