Y SIN EMBARGO magazine

Por Alfredo de la Rosa para Y SIN EMBARGO

II.

My second day on the train west to California. I had slept in my city apartment in Boulder Saturday night and I woke up in it Sunday morning before the alarm, set to wake me at 5:00 a.m., went off. I’d showered before bed so all I had to do on waking was to take medications, brush teeth, pack computer. My neighbor Jim was already up, anxious to help, to make certain I’d leave the door to the place open for him to haul off all I left behind that I assured him he could have. I left behind as well things I felt other tenants could use. Everything in the place had to be taken before the sheriff arrived on Monday to haul my material life out onto the sidewalk taking possession of the place for the city.

Ready to split, I rode with Jim on the elevator to the lobby where we waited for George, retired from the postal service, who’d volunteered to drive me to Union Station. Bidding adios to Jim, I was hustled with my luggage into the car before George slipped into an empty street, two hours early by my calculation for the train to California. I offered George breakfast. He readily accepted, suggesting Denny’s, fast food he swore was real food. He ordered sausage, eggs, potatoes, coffee and toast. I had little appetite for the coffee I ordered.

The train was an hour late into Denver. Looking for a magazine at the free rack in the station, I responded to a woman anxious to talk to me. I mentioned I was at one time in my life from New York. The woman lit up. Wickedness and danger percolated through her. Was she acting out of hidden necessity? The woman asked me to meet her companion from New York who had come west from Manhattan to meet up in Colorado as she headed east from Nevada.

Awkward minutes characterizing myself to a pair of comely strangers passed quickly. I learned that Nevada Woman had recently been released from four months in a Nevada jail. Nevada Woman wanted solace from New York Woman that New York Woman refused to take in. New York Woman found it hard to soothe Nevada Woman’s wounded pride to boost her self-esteem. This was lost on Nevada Woman, as Nevada Woman had ears only for her own endless litany of protest, complaint.

Happily, we were not long together on the train. By Grand Junction the women were gone. Later in the evening, after dinner, I struck up a conversation with a man from England who had read Theology and History at Leeds. His work engaged him with the homeless in London. When I told him that I intended to be among the homeless, to write about being old and homeless in America, he quickly disabused me of the notion that it was a smart thing to do. Not only is it dangerous, he insisted, the police are likely to take me into custody as old and bizarre, incapable of caring for and protecting myself.

Rather, he suggested solemnly, I should work with an agency helping the homeless. Writing about life without shelter from an objective perspective might prove more fulfilling than doing so from the subjectivity of privation, risk, mayhem, danger and the threat of physical harm. His was an invitation to the pusillanimous wimp I actually am to stop being a romantic, foolish old man.

III.

Having, within my capacity for living, lived a full life, when I look back on events, I discovered that as I have read books, made love to too many of the opposite sex, was fearless in the face of danger, found it nice to talk to strangers, hated and loved God, resisted bargaining with the devil, have an educated Taurus daughter who married and has children with a talented man , etc., etc., that I can never truly be homeless in America. Coming into Emeryville on the train at midnight, six hours late, I met my daughter on the platform despite an absent-minded email that I would arrive the following day. How could this caring woman ever allow her dotty old geezer father wander the streets of San Francisco?

America for all its faults, its loss of nooks and crannies in which to hide out or lose oneself, its appetite for excess and extreme risk–you name the crime or the virtue and you’ll find the country is guilty of it–is a land of makeover, of reinvention, of finding oneself. As I say, one’s past is the true path to the future, as my tale on quitting frigid, mountainous Colorado for sea level, hilly and humid California proves. “What a relief to have you here,” my daughter explained. “I was not happy with the prospect of having to go to Colorado when you die to settle your affairs.” And she proceeded over the next two weeks to take over the direction of my life–what is left of the dozen or so years I expect to live

Quickly I learned how much more so California is in loco parentis welfare providing than is Colorado, which holds itself up as part of the do-it-yourself, less densely populated, west, but less inclined politically to run in deficit mode. The risks and dangers in both states are are as wide as they are different. In yesterday’s news I read that the Forbes list of the world’s richest people locates most of America’s billionaires as living in California. And certainly, its poverty cohort is more sizable than is Colorado’s, as is its elderly population, citizens and others over the age of 75. By population, Colorado is comparable to that of Los Angeles County

Despite my planetary wandering in 78 years of life, I am still sufficiently possessed of hard copies of the record of my life to install me efficiently and digitally in the numerous systems that an elderly war veteran living in California must be included in data bases to live out a comfortable old age. Cutting through bureaucratic tape assigns one to the limbo of delay if retracing the paper trail of life at the end of long waiting lists, schedules and appointments is how you designed your life in old age.

In a totalitarian state as East Germany was, the Stasi with its penchant for tracking its citizens and its records keeping habits probably knew more about its citizenry than they knew about themselves or it about itself. In the U.S. where citizens resist national identity papers and government tracking, and where corporate identities are listed unreliably in Who’s Who, if stuff isn’t lost in fire, flood, earthquake, theft and disaster, it’s up to the individual to keep track of who and where s/he is, has been and hopes to be.

Homelessness is perhaps a state of mind, of being and of fact. I can imagine, as an artist, a sense homelessness while living either fabulously wealthy or in squalid poverty, disconnected or well connected. I intend, however, to write not about alienation but being old and homeless in America, a condition for which I have not prepared myself nor have the wherewithal to endure.

I discovered in my quest for homelessness that mine is not a trek towards rootlessness. Even as I’m not famous or important enough, if it needed the government–the FBI or the local police–would locate me in a New York minute if it had to. It–government–cares if one drops out here. Dropping out is a drain on social resources. Our government nurtures and abuses its middle class to which it educates and encourages its citizens to aspire. While the government appears to gain from our being the largest consumer of narcotics in the world in not efficiently dealing with drug traffic along its borders, it deals harshly with consumers along racial and class lines in socially engineering the kind of country it wants us to be.

Mornings in my new setting I’ve taken to dropping in at a cafe with a costly internet connection. I take coffee and sit at a sidewalk table with the morning newspaper soaking up Vitamin D taking in rays. The economic news in the San Francisco East Bay, where I am hoping to be housed, reports that there are no jobs to be had, that the area is losing jobs, and that California is in recession. I am not, fortunately, on the dole. The government deposits monthly retirement and pension checks into my newly opened bank account. My bank encourages me to save, depositing a fixed amount from these checks into a savings account it opened for me. It pays my bills for me as well. It encourages me to manage a debt load, evan as I resisted its invitation to accept its credit card, opting to manage my financial affairs by paying for my needs with its debit card. My relocation is a rootedness in the culture of consumption, of acquisitiveness, of participation. Even as I subsist in what is termed here as living below the poverty line, I am at home in America, well fed, with opportunity for keepin fit. Living abstemiously and within my capacity to consume, in not overindulging my appetites, I may live well enough to die healthy and on schedule.

From here the better to follow the suggestion of my fellow traveler on the train to California, working as a volunteer with the homeless as I settle in a place of my own. But I ask myself, “What purpose will my activity and interest in homelessness serve?” My Brit friend on the train had read Theology and History at Leeds. My sense is that the answer to the question I ask myself lies in these two disciplines.

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