One Golden Opportunity That Was Frito Lay

It's OK now.  I can forgive.  But the painful experience I now describe did traumatize me.  I'd just moved out of the condition of homelessness, and what did I really need?  

Love. 

I did not really need some sort of sexual validation after such a strange chasm--homelessness or the real world?--had only begun to close.  

Most familiar with the 88 percent recidivism rate of men (and women) who have been hit with homelessness know that the transition into a quiet place to live is exceedingly difficult.  The second you're safe, all the things you've held inside as a matter of what I identified even then as "survival mode", in thought and word and deed, all come roaring out.  That itself was going to flatten me.  While I knew my mental health caseworkers and doctors were able and happy to assist me in that transition, the hurtful ridiculousness that ensued felt like--and still feels like--some kind of means to the end of hurting me even more than I could have expected.  

In 1996, when I hauled a black garbage bag to the bus stop on the day before my birthday, the sun was excruciatingly hot.  Summer.  A long walk.  Humiliation in being seen trudging the street on the way to a bus stop where I would begin "my new life"--in a homeless shelter.  

The first six months were to be expected: I was "freaked".  I felt sick, stressed, and achy most of the time.  I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, I was worried about being jacked, of being beaten up by strangers, predators who wait for the newly homeless--to demand money (I had none), or to demand sex, or to demand the innocent to run hard drugs across town.  Or to be raped.  I'd heard all kinds of horror stories.  But like I have always been, I quickly made friends.  Or, better, running buddies.  

Slowly, I did settle into this experience.  I learned how to get vegetables from the Farmer's Market, home to fresh vegetables.  I'd need fresh vegetables. While the Dallas Life Foundation shelter did offer some pretty good meals, I always noticed the vegetables there were often overcooked.  And meat?  It was lowbrow fare.  I'd heard the manager of the shelter was often seen going through donations from major grocery stores happy to offer homeless people food the groceries would otherwise toss out.  What was he taking, according to some witnesses (who would be relied upon to say almost anything...)?  Steaks.  Roast beef.  Prime pickings, one said, all being loaded into his big white pickup truck.  

You hear things like that.  You also learn to keep your head down.  

Adjusting to "a sheltered life", as I labeled the experience, albeit a little sarcastically, was a slow process.  I had to get to work immediately because Dallas Life Foundation required, I think, around eight dollars for residents to pay after a very short grace period where lodging, food and showers were free.  I got evangelized by this arm of the First Baptist Church in downtown Dallas.  I sat through the speeches condemning Liberals, etc, and sometimes laughed quietly to myself: as if anyone there was even remotely interested in politics or wackadoodle ideologies like "Christian conservatism".  I saw one wheelchair bound friend taken to a dangerous streetcorner (in her wheelchair) to sit it out because she turned her back to the sermon.  She told me, "I'm native American. I do not need to hear that stuff!"  Thus punishment, coercion, and worse sometimes.  

But that is neither here nor there.  I lasted nearly five years.  I rarely slept outside or as it's known "gone rough (think of Mark Twain's famous autobiographical account called "Roughing It"), but like most people left without homes, I remained in one of three homeless shelters, ending up with a taste of all three, two of them operated by 1) Southern Baptists, 2) "non-denominational", and 3) the Episcopal Church along with the Methodists.  The first two had "religious requirements", i.e. we had mandatory church services before dinner: punishment to reward, a typical evangelical gospel-mongering tactic: Hurt them, break them, then "remold" them.  A propagandist's dream.  

Yuck.  

My final year of homelessness began and ended with opportunity.  A chance to use my journalism skills by serving as "the" journalist for Endless Choices, a street newspaper sold by homeless volunteers for one dollar a paper. That kept a little cash in my pocket.  I didn't need much.  I stayed in a shelter.  Which brings up a bit of a warning: If you see panhandlers, look for the convenience store, liquor store, or grocery nearby--those are dead giveaways that it's probable the panhandling is supporting a habit.  I saw all kinds of strangeness involving panhandlers--like the midget named Moe who must have looked pitiful standing beside the I-35 service road, begging for money.  He exploded after a reporter caught him on film receiving a sack lunch, thanking the arm that stretched out the window to give, and then discarding the lunch in a runoff drain.  Moe had managed to save up around $5,000 in "funds"--which bought him plane fare to Las Vegas, where he lived like a king, gambled money, won more, then flew back to his life as an opportunistic panhandler.  

I got loose of all that in August, 2001.  I'd really run the extra mile for my community.  My publisher, the ex-wife of an oil company executive, set up interviews: City Council members, a couple of (shady) developers who wanted the paper on their side in their quest to take the property the City had slated for The Bridge, a homeless shelter that was not only secular but also one that offered "rough sleepers" or "river rats" as we called the denizens of the Trinity River--people so near to feral existence they were afraid to sleep indoors.  With security guards to protect them from being rolled.  Those under the pavilion could come and go.  If they wanted a night out drinking--OK. 

It was generally understood by the community's service providers that my journalism skills had convinced the City of Dallas to build a non-religious shelter to meet the estimated 6,000 person overflow.  Even though the religious-based shelters objected to "competition".  Union Gospel Mission even had one priority: bring people to their version of Jesus.  That always disgusted me: no mental health assistance, no hygiene training, no psychological help, no job training--nothing but Jesus and the typical obsession with the "magic show" aspects of the New Testament.  It's easier to obsess over miracles, visions and big dreams than to get to the nuts and bolts and learn to act on what Jesus taught.  Some do get to the latter, others feed on the former like it's ambrosia.  

A few even gave me credit for bringing attention to the citywide need to unify all social service providers for the homeless community--emergency shelters, food banks, clothing banks. rape crisis shelters, and shelters for women and children only.  Raising awareness can really make change. 

One time, I got into the pickup truck with John Fullenwider, a local activist who had been engaging with the powers that be over issues like the famous homeless community tent city/protest right there at the intersection of US 30 and US 75.  The leader of the exposure was named Prince.  He was lured away by someone, and killed.  Many, including Fullenwider, believed he'd been murdered.  Once that story hit the hands of homeless paper men, a story that quoted Fullenwider talking about that belief, I got the evil eye from several downtown cops I knew.  It was like, "Stay away from this."  I didn't.  

Life in dangerous times.  I suppose I was already battle-hardened.  

Home again resulted in a one-bedroom apartment at the corner of Bowser (!) and Knight, an intersection in the then rapidly-changing area most of us called "the gayborhood".  I didn't mind that.  But I did like the 'hood's nearness to places I knew.  

Back up a little: IIn August, 2001, I went into a transitional housing setup, a place I shared with four other men who had mental health issues.  While my Bipolar was stable, the situations for those men were not stable at all.  Anger issues.  Drug and alcohol issues.  Even profligate sex issues--as a means, I suppose, of not dealing with the hard issues that face any one of us.  

While there, I witnessed 911 when I woke that morning.  As I was ready to leave my trauma behind (by dealing with it), the United States entered its widespread trauma.  I was so saddened by this.  All kinds of conspiracy theories flowed through every mind for days.  What did I do?  

I'd learned there was a poetry group called the Oak Cliff Poetry Circle. It was a small group.  That's when I met a "patrician" (we'll leave it at that), a very pretty faded rose, 52 years old, half Cherokee, half Japanese.  She'd been raised in a Japanese internment camp.  At my first meeting with that group (which I learned to love), the patrician approached me, told me she'd read Endless Choices.  She wanted to have coffee with me.  I gave her the telephone number for the transitional apartment only three blocks away from the Bishop Arts District, home of Suenos Sabroso, the ice cream shop that held the Saturday night readings.  

The patrician called me.  "Let's go to the Trinity levee and watch the sun set."  I liked the tone of her voice.  I felt that familiar stirring, and looked forward to that.  

But...red flags.  She finally made good on our "date" on Christmas Eve, 2001.  She came to my empty apartment with a torn up office couch, she showed up wearing black velvet pants, black boots, and a satiny red blouse.  In my mind, after all I'd been through, I felt she was moving too fast.  I didn't say so, but yeah, she sat too close to me.  Her hands.  Those were "skinny" and a little too showy of her blue blood veins, so I told her "your hands are like haiku".  I still don't know what she was expecting.  I've always been, well, like a favorite lover once said, "You were like a little lamb at first, but now you're a roaring lion."  Barbara, the Harkness Monster.  The perfect activist woman who'd been on the road in an RV (like, our V, dude!) for nine years.  Nineteen seventy one through 1980 or so.  Like The Who's song, Mobile".  

At a later reading, I suggested we have maybe lunch together.  She suggested the Farmer's Market.  A nice Mexican restaurant.  But wait.  When the City of Dallas had passed funding for The Bridge, a few shady developers, developers who had big plans for Farmer's Market condominiums, and big restaurants--and even--get this!--setting up a restaurant right next to where Robert Johnson may/may not have recorded Hellhound On My Trail.  That was a nondescript building across the street from the city's only lunch place for the homeless community: The Stew Pot.  Apparently, developers had an eye of closing that too.  A hard thing to do when the lunch spot is backed by the Presbyterian Church.  

I call such developers "groundhogs".  Anything for some turf.  

The next summer in fact, one developer had the gall to tell me he'd pay me $200 a month to kind of take his side.  My publisher, Clora Hogan, thought that was a great idea.  I refused.  I know about news values and journalistic objectivity.  I was unwilling to basically take a payoff.  

In their offices during their planned deal with me, a woman I'd met at poetry meetings, a swarthy former Italian fashion model named Gianna seemed to take the cake.  Really?  What's up?  She mob connected too?  I did meet her husband.  A sort of hard driver, a guy who, I jokingly told myself, had

a head the size of a baseball.  I was unimpressed.  Another red flag.  I didn't take the deal.  I'm not dumb.  I may play dumb.  But that's a good characteristic for a journalist to cultivate.  

The patrician (we'll get to that mysterious name in a moment) picked me up for breakfast at the Farmer's Market restaurant.  I had migas.  I remember this.  Not MAGAS--but possibly close.  

The patrician had once been a California surfer girl.  I later saw photos of her when she was young, and indeed, as a looker she was a catch.  And apparently did get caught: by one of the vice presidents of the Frito Lay Corporation.  Let's insert a laugh track.  My dad always used to laugh at the company name: Free To Lay.  

We chatted about her life.  She truly resented being "an internee" at that Japanese prison camp during WW II.  I didn't blame her for her anger.  What I did find odd about her as we talked is that what seemed like an interesting mind in her skull was actually AD/HD.  That too could have been a red flag for me.  

After that, when it began to rain (I think this was in early spring 2002) she and I coasted around the high-dollar Inwood area and her neighborhood in the Hillcrest area.  We wound up at her home.  A pretty home on the outside--but a mess inside.  Boxes everywhere.  Still, she was a bit overly friendly.  Why can't shy men just take it easy?  There we were, sitting at her kitchen table.  There she came up with a catalog, tuned the page to the underwear offering (I'm laughing about this), and asked me what color would look best on her.  More seduction I wasn't ready to take.  Whatever she thought she was doing, she was moving awfully fast.  

"A color to match you?" I asked.  "Jade."  

Anyway, this was my second refusal.  I simply wasn't sure about the woman.  Something didn't fit.  But we remained friends all through spring and into the summer.  I began falling for her.  

She wrote odd but sometimes good poetry.  She won a citywide poetry contest sponsored by Dallas' Writers Garret.  "Corn Woman".  Whoa.  It was OK. 

But here's the big issue: The patrician was given an opportunity to read poetry before what turned out to be a lackluster audience at a Deep Ellum theater called The Undermain.  Because it was "under Main Street".  She asked me to go with her.  At the time, a man named Ron Wilcox, elderly, and obsessed with the patrician, began bugging her for her attention almost the minute she and I entered the theater area.  She asked him to leave, took me to a room, shut the door and asked me if I would go to a nearby Cafe Brazil and fetch her some food. This was July, 2002, and I soldiered through scorching heat to bring her a box lunch.  She ate--with me as maybe her butler.  After all, she'd been married to the vice president of a potato chip company.  Frito Pie.  

Wilcox suggested we three visit an Indian-style vegetarian restaurant called The Cosmic Cup for wine.  I think I had a coke.  The patrician, apparently agitated by appearing before an audience, got spankin' drunk.  Red wine after red wine. She even began to slur her words.  

Oddly, I spotted an old friend of mine: Alice Parrimore Tyler, a pretty, tall, former FBI agent who'd been sent by the CIA to  Kyrgyzstan.  She was with her boyfriend, a nice New Age fellow, sitting on the patio.  I hadn't seen Alice in several years.  I stepped out to hear some of her adventures.  That's when the patrician stalked out and demanded to know, "Who is she?"  

What?  

At the time, as I'd fallen for the patrician, I felt like that was a definite signal from her.  She was jealous.  Over a chat with a former CIA agent sent to Kyrgyzstan--to teach (to serve as a forward recon for the area that still seemed in chaos after the collapse of the USSR a few years earlier).  Alice told me that she and all agents in that part of Asia had been called home after 911.  Nobody knew, really, where the terrorist attack could lead. 

"I was teaching kids all kinds of subjects," Alice told me.  "But some out there were looking for trouble.  Rumor spread around the residents of a small village that I was a witch.  That I was responsible for all kinds of misfortune."  Are we ready to be on the receiving end of politicization?

Alice is clearly a resourceful woman.  "Someone painted my door with blood.  Bad sign.  I probably was in some danger," she continued.  "But I had a couple of smudge sticks in my bag--just in case."  She laughed.  I went outside and began, as I told people, purifying the area of evil spirits."  

That worked.  

"Who is that woman?"  Hell, patrician, you just met a US government employee.  Really.  How weird do things have to get with me?  Anyway, Alice became a hero to me.  A heroine.  I knew she'd worked at FBI downtown.  I knew nothing about the whys and wherefores of why she'd disappeared while I'd been homeless.  Me? 

Foreign recon out to spot total weirdness.  Ha.  

The patrician, drunk as a skunk, drove me a few blocks to my apartment. She got out of the car, I circled round it, and I tried "a deft move".  I wrapped my arms around her and tried to kiss her.  

She exploded, started shouting from the parking spot right beneath my bedroom window.  "I don't want that!  I just broke up with someone!  No!  Don't kiss me!"  

How do you spell "humiliation" with a slant or a veer?  I felt I'd been led on.  At the time, that was a devastating event.  I was crushed.  I was already too vulnerable to begin with.  In need of love and kindness, I had serious trust issues from what I'd been through.  I already felt like an outcast, someone tossed out of the world where I'd begun to strive toward being a good poet.  I knew I had those snaps.  But this?  I was immensely hurt.  

When I got inside, I went to my second-hand jalopy of a PC: an ancient Acer.  I emailed the patrician to apologize.  With no response, days later I tried again.  "I didn't understand.  It was my mistake."

What did the patrician do?  She contacted the head of the housing program--Jesse Valdez--and demanded I be removed from the Shelter Plus Care program--for what?  Stalking her. 

Jesse called me.  Asked me my part of the story.  "Gordon, I did talk to her.  I think you're the one who needs protection.  From her."  Jesse knew me.  I wasn't some weirdo.  But that "adventure" did yield an advantage: All that pent-up trauma blew out of me like a windstorm.  I was freaked too.  I resorted to writing every thing down, part to document, part to air it out all by myself.  

Back to the Oak Cliff Poets Circle, I consulted a couple of men who knew her.  

"She's nuts.  She didn't break up with the guy--he nearly fled for his life.  She stalked him so obsessively that he eventually moved out of state.  Wow.  The issue may have been AD/HD and its tendency to cause the subject to misunderstand simple gestures or even intentions.  

I was torn up for months.  The patrician had her friends at the readings.  They knew nothing of her part in that oddity of "attempted dating".  They of course sided with her.  One, Jim Dolan, one of those life coaches who in my opinion thinks he's a literary genius because he recently wrote a piece for D-Magazine, the ostensible city magazine like the New Yorker, but more about "10 places to see in Big-D" or "20 places to visit while in Dallas".  Sucky.  It had been, for a time, a magazine with some political heft.  That has all been vanquished for boosterism.  

Oh well.  Jesse tried setting up a meeting with the patrician and me--at a Dallas Metrocare office.  She agreed.  Jesse and I drove to the meeting.  The patrician never showed.  Ill intent--I still believe.  

I was emotionally staggering for months.  My friends at Oak Cliff Circle advised me to avoid her.  Then she disappeared.  

That spring breakfast had begun with a discussion about Bob Dylan.  She'd claimed to have never heard of him.  I was astounded by that.  

When the patrician reappeared, we learned she'd been in a short love affair that had also exploded.  There she sat in Suenos Sabrosos--and read a piece from Dylan's "Time Out Of Mind". Dylan had written he was sick of love.  

Hilarious.  But also spooky.  There were too many rhymes in that story.  I've always felt uneasy about those events.  Then the so-called nightcap: The Oak Cliff Circle was invited to be a feature performance at the Dallas Poets Community--which used to meet First Fridays at the Half Price Books location on Northwest Highway.  By then I had myself back together.  I'd made friends with the poets at the Oak Cliff Circle.  Dolan still stuck up his nose at me--no matter.  I'd met a narcissist.  So beautiful.  So brilliant.  Eternally superficial.  Much of a man's life--any man--is sight unseen.  

I got up and read.  I got plenty of applause. That was nice.  The room was filled.  But afterwards, the patrician, who was either there or not really there, approached to praise me--and to introduce me to her new boyfriend, a tall, fit, New Age character.  That was weird too.  I didn't want to talk to her at all.  After shaking the guy's hand, I turned away, spotted a book carrel, and picked up Charles Dickens' "Bleak House".  

The patrician had also humiliated me at an earlier Dallas Poets Community meeting.  I don't know what triggered her other than a brief remark at an earlier time that I had a great uncle who had served as chief of military intelligence at Los Alamos.  Thus at that reading, the patrician upbraided me for the bombing of Hiroshima.  

Right.  I am a high crime and misdemeanor.  Can't you tell?  Man leaves inferno of homelessness, a shattered man, is teased within an inch of his life, and then blamed for an atomic attack.  

My mother and I already knew local patricians had an axe to grind with the family.  The intelligence general had a brother.  Richard Rives, 5th Circuit, had helped take down Jim Crow.  He personally dealt with the Rosa Parks case.  

Guilt by association is not much fun when you are, as your mother once joked, part of the horse thief side of the family.  

What does all this strange rhyming mean?  I do know that some in the DPC thought I was a mess.  I think the entire English Department of SMU has decided I am persona non grata (for only SMU poets should get the good stuff! Whatever).  

When I returned to the DPC in 2016, more in need of community than validation as a poet, the first thing one of the "leaders" there did was shouted this:

"Let's hope you have your shit together."  As a poet,  Alan Gann definitely does not have his together.  That for certain.  Being honest sometimes means being a little mean.  Lots of inflated egos in the city's poetry community.  Only myself and a few others have actually made progress as poets in the 25 years since these dumb-as-dirt events.