Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories (13 page)

In the morning he took the kids to Bea’s. She had put out stuff to make boxed muffins. She had done this with them before, and they had liked how inside the box there was a can with blueberries. It was a simple thing to have liked, but they had liked it. He stood there while they went down the hallway. Eventually they would leave, or he would leave. They couldn’t stay like this forever. The night before on the steps, Bea had talked about his son. We weren’t that close, our families, she had said. But still, when he was young, and I would be on my porch at night, it must have been after your dinner, I could always count on him coming out the back door, and the minute he got out, he always started to run, usually down the field, as if it was something just being outside. It was a terrible thing, what happened, she said. The way he disappeared. I didn’t know what to say after. I wanted to tell you that. That I wanted to say something but didn’t know what to say.

She had spoken quietly, in the dark, while they had both looked ahead at the field. He lay in bed afterward trying not to think of it. He thought of how they had found the house where his son had taken the kids, where they had stayed for two days. How it was small and brightly lit, and there were blankets there still, and a few of his son’s shirts.

During the trip, the lover I had left behind in New York had stopped calling. I was glad to be traveling, for the movement it gave me, but I was uncertain how my life would be when I got home. I didn’t want another period of instability, and I felt the suspension you feel when you’re fine, but you’re worried it won’t last, and there’s nothing you can do to make it stay.

I had come up with the idea years before—when I first became interested in soup kitchens. I made the plan to travel the United States, going to small interior cities and going to kitchens there. I had volunteered in kitchens in the past and had found it comforting. I would work for a few hours and then would sign my name and get in line and eat, scrunched over, not poor enough to eat there if I hadn’t worked, but not a volunteer doing it out of goodness. Lost, probably, in ways that made me more comfortable in places like those—the church halls, the Styrofoam plates, the trays, the gentle feeling of caretaking and cafeteria lines—and lost perhaps in ways understandable to those around me.

I didn’t get far in the trip, however, before I became unsure why I was doing it. My first city was Buffalo and I arrived late, by train, taking a taxi to the hostel. The next day I walked to a mobile kitchen that was supposed to be parked outside the library at 7:00 p.m., but it was already gone when I arrived. I decided to stay an extra night so that I could go to the kitchen the next day, at the time the kitchen now arrived. The next day I stood in line to get the plastic bag that held dinner. A woman carried a box with more food—Baggies filled with granola bars and crackers—and people took those as she passed. When she came to me, I said that I only wanted the food there, pointing to where dinner bags were being passed down. I was surprised to hear my voice, that vulnerability that was of such little help usually, but it was honest in that line, honest and understandable. No, it’s okay, the woman said gently, this is food, too. I took the bag of snacks, and, when it came time, took the plastic bag that held dinner.

I carried the food into the library. Holding the bags changed how I felt about myself. It made me feel more vulnerable or exposed or fragile. For a number of years I had been struggling to hold myself together, though I had worked to disguise this, and now carrying the thin bags made this visible, made people look at me. I walked around the library until I found the café. I asked the man working the register if I could eat there, and he said yes. Dinner was bland macaroni with tomato sauce and meatballs. There was also a turkey sandwich and cookies for the bus the next day.

After, I stood in the foyer. Windows overlooked the street where the mobile kitchen had been. It was gone now, and I felt the loss of it, as if I had not done it properly and wanted to try again. Others waited there. An older black man asked if I was waiting for a bus. No, I said. He then assumed I was waiting for a ride. No, I said, I’m just here.

I walked toward the hostel. It was overcast, rainy, and cold. The streets were mostly deserted. There was much about Buffalo that was difficult to put into words. It felt like a city that had been deserted and then, years later, been repopulated by the poor. Or maybe the poor had been in the city all along, but had waited to emerge. The main street was being ripped out and a metro ran through the rubble. Though the streets were deserted, there were always people in the metro car when it passed, so it felt like they, too, were leaving. All the metro stops—and there were many, every block or so along that street—piped music, and at first, walking the street, I didn’t know where the music was coming from. Then the metro passed and disappeared under the street. One man on the sidewalk said to his friends, There goes our metro to nowhere.

What struck me most were the decorations: a sweeping arch over one metro stop, a gold globe on a roof, the opera hall sign that lit up six stories into the sky. This had once been another place. And the signs made me lonely because they were built for another time and for someone else.

I thought of the cab driver who had picked me up from the train at one in the morning. He said I would know him by the dice. His name was Ed. Ed’s taxi service. He never turned around, just talked and drove facing forward. Blue light hit the sharp line of his cheek. I’d found that people who worked those jobs—the picturesque and hard jobs of the cities—were aware of what they were and were aware of what you were after, and often told stories as part of the service.

All drugs in here, he said as we drove through a boarded-up neighborhood. Last week a taxi driver, he said, in one of those white taxis you saw waiting by the train, was found murdered. It won’t be solved. What someone does—someone who needs money—is hail them—the taxi drivers or pizza drivers, because they have cash with them—the drivers need to be making change, so they’ll always have cash with them.

I imagined, as he talked, the fragility of those men, of Ed coasting through the quiet early morning, lit in blue. Got robbed one night, Ed said, then I became friends with a couple of black drivers to learn the tricks. Now you think about who to pick up, who not to pick up. He showed me where they were building the new houses, the new developments. All the old houses are past repair, he said.

Later, I read about the cab driver who had been shot and left in his backseat. Most articles were the same—giving the details of the death, and then the details of the funeral—but one writer interviewed several taxi drivers, calling them a close band of brothers. One man had rushed to the scene thinking it was one of his drivers, but it had been a different company. Another man talked about the additional security that people were calling for. He said that you could put in cameras, you could track the people, but in the end, the man in the article said, I walk in faith.

All day I sat in the lower bunk in my hostel, the only one in the room. A heating vent blew and from time to time I heard the sound of rain. Otherwise it was quiet. It was a relief whenever the vent turned on.

In Detroit I took a picture of a man on the street. I thought a lot about this. I wanted to take pictures of what I was seeing, but it didn’t feel right. Poverty was everywhere and was overwhelming. People lived in this poverty, and this life was filled with details that I wanted to hold on to, but I found it was passing too quickly. I walked the outskirts of Detroit, and black men wandered past as if drifting or lost in the landscape. I sat and waited for buses and people came up to me. They said simple things—good day, or don’t get hurt, or would I like a bag to sit on. Or they would ask if I knew where the Salvation Army was, or if I knew where the Greyhound station was.

In Cleveland, I was walking down a street filled with bistros and shops when a man hailed me. He was selling beauty products from a plastic bag and walked a block with me. He said he was from Detroit, but he meant Detroit Street in Cleveland. I bought bodywash for five dollars—a bottle of expensive, local bodywash—then he walked away. It occurred to me that I could have taken his picture. He had sadness deep in his face, but the surface of his face was buoyant, lit. It was too much to have the moment and then have the moment pass, and to be the only one who saw that face.

It was that way in Detroit when I passed a row of abandoned apartments near the hostel. Two long buildings faced each other across an empty field. White children played in the field, and parents stood in a sliver of doorway watching them. I wanted to take a picture, but I didn’t want to disturb the quietness of passing them.

When I finally took a picture, it was of a man begging near Slows Bar BQ. I had eaten and was carrying leftovers. A man sitting in a lawn chair on the sidewalk told me to be careful, to not bump into the garden. He was in front of a brightly painted wall, and before I could ask, he said, You want to take a picture? He moved out of the way. At my hesitation he said, Or you want me in it? You in it would be nice, I said. As I took the picture, he energetically held up his sign. I wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to do that, but instead I gave him change and asked, Do you mind that people take your picture? He said that he didn’t. People want a picture of the homeless, he said. Then it was clear that he wanted me to move along.

In Detroit, I ate in the Capuchin kitchens. They ran two places. One served people in extreme need, mostly men, many homeless, and many with mental illness. The other fed working poor families, many with children. I picked the second kitchen, though it was an hour away on the bus. When I arrived for lunch, I was cold and shaken. I felt that fragile feeling again. There was no sign-in or token system. I walked right in—past a listing of places where you could get a free shower—and stood as volunteers passed my tray down. The last one set a drink on it and said it was real Coke. There were no open tables. I asked a man if I could sit at the table with him and he nodded yes. Many of the people there knew each other. In one corner hung a mix of Christmas decorations and St. Patrick’s Day decorations, though all were green, as if to work for either holiday. Cartons of milk were piled on the table, and the man asked if I wanted them, and I said no, so he took them. I gave him my milk. Another man sat and said, I wish there was cheese on this. I said, I think there’s cheese on it. He took a bite and said I was right.

Eventually another man sat next to the man with the milks, and they had a conversation about drugs, and pills, and Oxycontin, and where to get the different things. I looked at the people volunteering, at how hopeful and kind they looked, and at the thin, spare wood cross on the wall behind them, and also at the people eating, who were kind in their own way. I thought that those few people passing out food—with their hands in little plastic gloves, and their cross behind them—should not be our major defense against this kind of poverty; as a defense it felt hopeful, frail, and largely hidden.

Because I spent a lot of time on the street, I met other people who spent time on the street. If I was traveling between cities and had my suitcase, these people asked for money, which I tried to give each time. I felt I was giving a lot of money, but this money—a handful of change from the bottom of my bag, or a dollar bill from my pocket—didn’t add up to much. I had bought the bodywash from the man on the street, so that was five dollars. But it was also the best bodywash I had ever used. It felt like honey that cleaned you instead of making you sticky. So there was five dollars, and maybe I had given out, to others, another ten dollars, so that was fifteen dollars. Many times I was blessed by the people I gave money to. In Detroit, I gave money to a man on the street and afterward thought he was asking for more. No, I said, that’s what I can give right now. He said he was only saying thank you. He told me a story about a new kind of hearing aid, one so small that others can’t see it. Do you get what I’m getting at? he said. Yes, I said, though I was looking at the gray building behind him and imagining a pale ear over it. Also, I was thinking of whether I could take a picture of him.

At the Chicago train station, a stand sold tacos for two dollars. I stood in line while a man asked people for money. He kept pointing to food and asking the cashier how much it was, and then looking at the money in his hand, which never amounted to enough. I gave him a dollar. I thought of how little I was giving. I could have bought him what he wanted. Or, when I took that picture, in Detroit, of the homeless man, I could have given him the leftovers I was carrying, but I found I wanted them. More than a dollar would be giving money I felt I needed. Of course, none of this would add up or matter. Except that I didn’t give people something that wasn’t easy for me to give. I paid for my tacos and gave the man the change. Bless you, he said.

In Iowa City I walked through a park. It was warm, or the air wasn’t warm, but the sun was. The night before, getting in by bus, was bitter. My throat had swollen and I felt weak, but at least it was warm enough now and nice to walk through the park. There was a sparsely attended fair going on. A man said something that I didn’t understand and reached for my hand. He seemed to ask what it was, what this fair was, and I said I didn’t know. He held on to my hand as I drew it away. Another man tried to get me to sign a petition, but I said I wasn’t from there. There was a table to legalize marijuana, a banner on free speech, and a sign against surveillance, mentioning both drones and what I thought to be strip clubs.

I saw a couple sitting on a bench with a sign saying that they were homeless. I walked up and gave them a dollar and asked where they were from. They had come in from Wisconsin. The woman said that her sister’s husband had just received two life sentences. They were surprised that I hadn’t heard about it. The husband had lit the house on fire and his three boys had died. The wife had gotten out with third degree burns. I looked it up later, and it was true, and the wife’s picture looked like the woman on the bench. They were both large and both had pale round faces and red hair. Articles said the husband was tired of not having money and had wanted to start over. There was also a baby, and the wife had saved the baby, but the husband had tried to put the baby back in the fire. I told the couple I was very sorry. I also wanted to take their picture and thought of that while I was listening, thinking about whether it would be wrong to ask.