Lemme Tell You About The Last Time I Lost Everything!

THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF LITTLE WHITE LIES CAN MAIM AND EVEN KILL ~ Jonathan Swift

What happens to a person once a person (an actual human being) returns home from, well, not exactly Ithaca: only to a place with a roof over it?  

Oh, it's just so easy.  No problem goblin.  It's like the TV show "White Collar", the opening scenes of which feature a handsome young man lying back in his prison cell looking like he'd just been to a hair stylist on Rodeo Drive--everything is pretty, all young men--they just walk into the apartment, leave the front door unlocked, and, like sleep on a fairly and badly damaged old office couch, the only piece of furniture Dallas Metrocare could provide.  

EZ!  Nothing really happened the previous four+ years.  Nope.  Big men don't lose it.  Life is exactly the way it is on television.  

The "White Collar" star prances out of prison with the help of an FBI agent who wants to gain the ex-prisoner's expertise in catching white collar crooks, but honestly, even after the second episode, I was a little honored to see, literally every single fashion-model stranger he encounters falls in love with immediately.  

My experience of five years and the American Gulag System?  Too scared to even dare myself to look.  Jesus.  Being a literal and stigmatized outcast for nearly five years does take a toll on even the biggest of all big men.  Not that I'm bigger.  Nope.  I'm like all homeless men who are offered a chance to redeem whatever is left of their lives.  

By the time I got into an apartment in October, 2001, only months after 911, my Public Storage bill was two months overdue.  Maybe more.  I do not remember.  Sue me.  Lack of memory--high crime.  I guess I could consider myself lucky: an honest friend of mine, John Funke, gave me $250.  Why?  To help me.  A gesture of support.  In a world where the most endemic disease in the US is called "absolute self interest".  

Something was wrong with me.  I took the $250.  However (life has all sorts of howevers in store for homeless people offered a chance to escape the American Gulag Archipelago), my emotional and mental states were badly damaged after years of something that makes, say, the blame-stream media feel all lovely inside: 

S-T-I-G-M-A.  

I spelled it out so the children over at Fox Pretend News won't know what I wrote.  You know.  Like mommy spelling out C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S so little Johnny won't know what was spoken.  

No, really.  I was schitzed.  Scared.  Worried that some tornado or forest fire or tidal wave would eagerly come to ruin even this.  Storms come and go, but the people they damage usually "go away", i.e. perish or live maimed and confused for the remainder of their single lives.  Need an example?  Here I am, 25 years after the fact, still going all catastrophic (trauma?  Nah.  That's for people who spill their lattes at Starbucks don't you know anything?) when one horrible error in my thinking arrives to disturb that pile of garbage lurking way beneath the heart: 

H-O-P-E.  

Scratch that.  On my tomb.  "He hoped and the big kids said Nope".  

Whatever.  While I am hardly bitter these days, when I have any expectation at all, I feel that red flag go up: Be cautious.  You may never know who's out there ready to wreck everything you've ever had or done or known.  Just for the high crime of not doing whatever stupid thing they "have desire and lust" for you to accomplish for their sodden selves and Plastered In Paris causes.  

Catastrophe always follows honest men.  

The $250?  I did what I had done to escape my feelings, serious feelings, terrifying feelings: I drank away much of the money.  Oh.  And the famed Wendy's Texas Burger, a hamburger for only one dollar.  

Now that's eatin'.  Every day.  Little silver wrappers of meat between two buns.  Flashing before me like some creepy male prostitute turning on the plank at Cannes, all for whoever is to see.  

I'd seen a bunch of those guys while homeless.  I knew of several men who strutted on downtown Dallas' Jackson Street.  Perfect name.  "I am a Jackson!"  There they were, on street corners, in door alcoves, standing before luxury high rise apartment buildings and, of course, the then-abandoned bus line across the street from the Dallas Public Library.  Continental Trailways.  For maybe $15.  Whatadeal!  

I drank and fast food-ed my way through the River Styx within an inch of my life, the Dallas version of Cerberus, three-headed dog as big as the famed Dallas landmark: the triple underpass.  Yes, Dallas pseudo-conservatism's hotly coveted low road.  The River Lethe, where all good men "do not recall". 

Oblivion.  That's an off-the-shelf commodity to be slathered like gray spray paint over any and all graffiti--call and response, maybe? 

I think I had maybe $100 left when I bused out to the Public Storage location ironically situated adjacent to Love Field--hurriedly because I didn't want to lose it all.  

I had H-O-P-E because the couple who managed that location understood what had happened to me.  Given their latitude, I did have hope I wasn't too late.  

As I remember, the female co-manager even teared-up when she had to tell me: "We have a new assistant manager (Pharaoh) and he decided to sell everything.  We told him to keep your journals intact."  

I don't remember what happened for a while there.  What I do remember is standing on a traffic median, triangular shaped, raised my head and shouted.  Yes, I was angry at God for allowing some shrimpy assistant manager sell books like Ira Progoff's book about synchronicity, or Heidegger's "Being And Time", a book I proudly and diligently strove to decode before getting "flushed" and sent to Gulag.  

But America has no gulags!  And, as one Soviet writer observed, and "Moscow has no tears!" 

No home?  Gulag!  No money?  Gulag!  No success?  Gulag!  This, readers, is the invisible empire of the United States readying itself to be born--and borne upon the entirety of an already-troubled planet.  Right now, it seems, the invisible empire is being quite careful to kill off the host.  

AMERICA!  YOU ARE IN THE WAY OF THE PILE OF MONEY WE DESIRE!  

G-U-L-A-G!!!!!

I stood on that traffic median for a good 15 minutes, tears streaming down my face.  I'm sure passing spectators figured I was just another out-of-home crazy.  

OK, spectators, what does one do when one has only around five or six bucks and still need to eat for a week before SNAP kicks in?  

Cici's Pizza.  A harrowing memory, that: Me, skulking in, a pair of woebegone grey-cotton warmups slipping down my waist, standing at the pizza buffet, quickly filling one big plate of pizza slices, finding a table, eating two, then squirreling a plastic vegetable bag I'd copped from a grocery store, and then stuffing as many slices of pizza into it.  

Then, I nodded to the cleanup guy.  He looked away.  

After all, the table of my life already had been bussed.  Why worry about any rules at all if one is in need of at least a little nutrition.  

La la la!  Wasn't the fall of 2001 just fantastic?  I was a veritable rock star of ignominy then.  And all that occurred once the fast-food and Miller Tall Boy money eeked out of my hands and into traumatic reaction.  Sigh me.  Right?  Do it to me all over again, I thought.  

Humiliation?  My second helping in only two months.  

But it's all so easy. Jack Kerouac.  He went homeless, hitchhiked, drove drunk, and went to a lot of parties.  

I-M-M-O-R-T-A-L-I-T-Y

No wonder so many literary cheapskates honor him: He's covering the back door to escape actually learning to write the way he did--with the help of editor Malcolm Cowley, the editor of On The Road who had to rewrite the entire account as typed in Mexico.  In a tiny shack.  Reputedly just an old typewriter and him on his knees.  Yes, his On The Road bears an authenticity rarely heard of these days among the mass of public admirers like Johnny Depp, an actor who has recorded several Kerouac "Pomes", some I'd assume from his collection "Mexico City Blues".  

I've got a used paperback.  It has a black and lime green cover.  His poetry, a little wild-eyed and sometimes almost nonsensical, likely contains all sorts of arcane messages only his roadbound cohorts fully understood.  

Around that time, after another friend gave me his nine-inch black-and-white TV that at least got "some" reception" (couldn't afford cable are you kidding), I spotted the Jeep commercial I believe may have lit fire under the rumps of many fairly well-heeled young professionals.  A quaffed-up dude in a jeep is "exploring the wilds" (meaning, driving around on country dirt roads...) with a dangling copy of OTR swingin' from the windshield mirror.  

I think my father's withered first paperback edition of OTR was tossed into the garbage after his 1970 suicide.  Oh yeah: Winning!  

That was no oppression.  That was no suppression.  That was no repression.  Yeah yeah yeah.  Only another lazy bum out on Sunday mornings, scouring the parking lots in hope of finding some bus money.  Good times!  

I had a library of coveted books once.  I had a good shelf full of classical CDs--Beethoven's Ninth, Mozart's Jupiter, Holst's The Planets, Bruckner's Fourth.  

No good asshole bum! 

As I did mention, I was holding: A large stack of journals that delineated and summarized hard times both before and during homelessness.  Many homelessness-related journals I managed to fill using a library "P-slip" pencil, one of those half-pints of graphite and yellow-painted wood.  

Holding evidence.  I quip to some these days that because the journals are writ in "pencil water" that by the time they earn value, the writing will have faded into coal dust.  

Hell yeah I'm angry about those stopgaps seemingly bred to halt my return to the real world in its tracks.  

Oops!  I didn't pray.  Instead I wished.  I did not turn right.  I chose the leftward path.  I didn't succeed in eradicating my own humanity and become a pioneer of STEM.  

Exactly, supposed (successful beyond belief) humans are all stem and no brains.  In my opinion.  Besides, rumor has it that once a person "gets saved", suddenly money comes pouring in from unexpected places.  Voices carry.  Maybe word simply gets around.  Like joining the Elks Club and getting pool room privileges.  

"Let's make it look like that-there Jesus gave him earthly rewards."  And all this time, we supposedly believed in real miracles.  

"Let's make an example of what happens to talented men who choose the un-way, not our right way!" 

Fuck those people.  Chase them down the street with a running chainsaw?  Maybe.  Let's hope life never gets that far into their lily white psyches.  

I made it through four more years of money-free existence.  Were it not for a friend named Chris Zimmerly, a guy who took time to pick me up five mornings a month and took me to his parent's advertising specialty warehouse, where I would stand on my feet all day (with an aching back, no suppression, no repression, eh boyz?) and dutifully do the best work I could: assembling packages to send to Long John Silvers locations nationwide.  Sales.  Ads.  All sorts of pens, mugs, teeshirts, gimme caps, etc.  In many ways, the work was actually fun.  And rewarding.  

Hey, dude!  I can afford toilet paper and now no longer to filch it from a men's restroom!  I can buy toothpaste!  And maybe a CD for the trouble.  And as always beer to wash down the hurt of trying to come up after getting the lowdown from the big shots.  

In the mornings, at Zinc, the warehouse in a decrepit warehouse district just east of Harry Hines Boulevard, Zimmerly had us all listening to his Grateful Dead and Widespread Panic jam band music.  He loved that.  I did too.  Then, in the afternoons, it was really on: The nearly all-black crew turned it to a hip-hop station, KKDA, or K104--and boom!  We were listening to Beyonce's first solo outings!  

Once I caught on, I really enjoyed the upbeat nature of hip-hop.  Often, in the afternoons, the station would play "Lean On Me", the classic Bill Withers song.  All the men in line would begin singing along, joining arms, swaying and bowing their heads.  

With an aching back and stiff neck, meanwhile, I sometimes leaned on the counter.  Those men, reliable and always returning to Zinc as offered, were yeomen.  An air-conditon-less warehouse gets hot in the summertime.  It might have been 100 degrees outside, outside with a breeze, but inside, sometimes the temps would hover around 111.  

I remember one afternoon when a new friend, Rufus Fulton Young, a fellow Bipolar and apparently a former editor at Sacramento Bee, blue into my apartment, his beloved Maker's Mark in his hand, and we all sat down to listen to a new record I'd purchased at the Tower Records down the street: TV On The Radio's "Return To Cookie Mountain".  I still listen to that recording.  At first, early after its 2005 release, the music seemed strange.  Today, when I listen, I have a familiar band of friends in the room.  

Recently, one of the original members of TV On The Radio (from Brooklyn), Tunde Adebimpe, released a solo outing: Thee Black Boltz.  Best record I've heard all year.  And it's American.  Most of the good music familiar to me is from Great Britain.  Why?  

Because the British government, knowing music sales, and strong advertisement (those are due to something called "marketing strategies", unknown in the US's tragically commercial side of a vast indie array of amazing musicianship from Portland, Eugene, Vancouver, Seattle, New York and elsewhere. 

That is hope.  Yesterday, while reading Dylan's book of poetry, Tarantula, I noted his jabs at the "7-0" re-commercialization machine that is apparently in need of something to satisfy ambulance chasers and third-column accountants out in the City of the Lost Angels.

Weird how a supposed plenary-obsessed cabal of calumny wants to crush a true moneymaker due to paranoia that the Sixties "could happen again".  Even though that never stopped happening.  And will continue during the Halloween Parades that may last through December or even until Z Year, otherwise known as 2026.  

Czar Nicholas II tried cultural repression.  Look what happened to him.  

And right now, Czarina of Whiteness is trying to pick a fight.  You know: so he can declare martial law.  Of possibly, but murky, while working with Vladimir Putin to orchestrate another 911 excuse for an emergency--right there in Turkmenistan.  Coders should develop skills in the humanities.  Seriously.  

All beside the point.  The moment my housing caseworker appeared to find me sitting on that old battered sofa, he found me surrounded by a crescent of empty beer cans and silver wads of Wendy's Texas Burger wrappers.  

"Cone go with me, Gordon." 

He trucked me to my nurse assistant.  Those people understood.  I wasn't alone in finding myself at odds with something so simple as living alone and secure: once secure, all trauma victims being reenactments.  Even if a trauma is a military excursion, a car wreck, a rape, an assault, a mass shooting, or worse, a US House of Representatives who'd rather allow rape victims in the Epstein la-de-la fracas to dangle--all to protect what they most certainly know involves all the dirt our Czarina has on every single one of them  

That's how mob bosses maintain control.  Who knows?  Maybe those weirdos are now looking into my family's past--as in 1921.  Or so I've suspected in quick between-the-lines scans.  

"Get him!!!" says the Big Git.  

Git?  That's a British euphemism for...nah.  Let him look it up himself.  

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