Part II Day 259: November 5, 2010 (birthday lunch with the poor, and rolling nowhere . . .)

Sometime in high school, we were asked what we planned on doing after graduation, and I sarcastically answered, "I'm going to die." It was an undeniable truth, is still true, but it masked the fact that I lacked a plan for living my life. In some ways, I still do. You see, I grew up skateboarding, and our only ambitions included getting sponsored and traveling as much as possible. We admired anti-heros and vagrants (a few close friends even called ourselves "Team Vagrant"), the homeless we encountered around Fresno, and the apartments in San Francisco that housed up to nine semi-squating skateboarders. We slept on fellow skateboarders' floors or in people's garages, waiting for the day it would be our turn to move to SF or hit the road on a real company's skate tour.

I tell you all of this because someone recently asked me why I was interested in homeless people. And since I've been reading Ted Conover's book about railroad riding tramps and hoboes (tramps work, hoboes just ride, bums do neither), Rolling Nowhere, I think he puts it more succinctly than I can, when he writes, "I grew up with a romantic vision of hoboes as renegades, conscientious objectors to the nine-to-five work world, men who defied convention and authority to find freedom on the open road." And in my own way, I've accomplished the same thing, traveling the roads of North America, working jobs without alarm clocks or inflexible schedules, and never living in one place more than two years straight. And what has that gotten me?

Today is my thirty-seventh birthday, and while I've traveled everywhere, I've gone nowhere. I'm working part-time as an instructor at at university (who would have ever thought that could happen?) with no health insurance and no job guarantee, not even for next semester. If I didn't have the savings and family I have, I would be on the edge of abject poverty. Maybe that's another reason I'm interested in the poor (and the rich). So today, I've decided to spend my birthday lunch among the poor of Tuscaloosa at the Community Soup Bowl. (To tell you the truth, I have always felt more comfortable around poor people than the rich. There's no formality, no pretension.)

The scene in the Soup Bowl is similar to my earlier visit, with mostly older black males scattered about the cafeteria tables. An elderly white woman serves me a tray containing boiling hot chicken noodle soup, two packs of Saltines, and an overcooked square of cornbread. I pick a Styrofoam cup of apple juice off the counter and take a seat near an older black man who eats with his right hand and holds a crutch with his left.

Again, I'm struck by the sense of community around the dining room. The effervescent black woman who runs the dining room sits and chats with a man. Each person who enters says hello to a few other men around the room, and they genuinely inquire about one another. "You doin' all right?" a recent arrival asks the man at my table. He nods his head and says a slow, "Yeah." But from my perspective, he isn't. While many of the men wear thrift store-like clothes or blue collar work shirts, the kind for plumbers and mechanics, this man's dirty windbreaker and T-shirt betray his possible homeless state. And he needs a crutch to walk. And bread crumbs, the kind a wife would wipe off an oblivious husband, are all over his face, which looks like a Susan Clayton sculpture. He's screwed, I think, but I'm glad he has a place for community and food.

In Conover's book, a tramp tells him that "a fellow could get along if he simply knew the cities and their free resources," utilizing the "Sally" (Salvation Army facilities), the "Willy" (Goodwill stores), and the St. Vinnie's (St. Vincent de Paul). But while citizens often complain of people abusing our system of charity and welfare, it only allows you to "get along," and tramping or poverty is not a glamorous life that many would want nor choose to live. As Conover concludes,"If we're not going to make room for tramps inside society, we can at least make allowances for their presence outside it. We can repeal laws against victimless crimes such as public intoxication and vagrancy, and we can make sure that no one is denied food, warm clothing, and shelter, all which are basic human rights.

"That these things have not been done already can be explained by the way most of us still see hoboes as a race apart, strangers whom we have no need to know and no way of knowing."

That last part reminds me of what I wrote in my last post about the problem of de facto segregation in our cities and not caring about people we don't know. In opposition to that spirit, I came here today hoping to have a conversation with a few people, but I'm feeling too shy, too contemplative on this birthday I never thought I'd see. (I survived the rock star age, 27, but this is my Vincent van Gogh year.) When I finish eating, I walk up to the counter to speak to Amy, the woman who runs the joint. She doesn't recognize me, maybe because I've grown a beard, and she asks me if I need seconds. I tell her I came by a few months ago to volunteer, but never heard anything from her. I ask if I can help, but she says she has more than enough help, which I think speaks volumes to Tuscaloosa's community, driven by Christian charities.

I leave wondering where I go from here. Like the tramps in Conover's book, "plans [are] simply possibilities," not necessarily "something you made and carried out." My life so far, like this project, has been an essay, an experiment in living. But, as Conover says, "sometimes you can get enough of experimenting. Sometimes you want something normal and dependable." I'm hoping to stay in Tuscaloosa for several years, to build my own sense of community, and work toward those things I know I want: a home; a love/life partner; a published book; a stable job; possibly a post-apocalyptic child; and more wonder and travel . . .

Part II Day 196: September 3, 2010 (living in a song, rubber necking on the turkey necks, and locating the homeless)

I’ve been places in the world––Auvers-sur-Oise outside of Paris, France, where Vincent van Gogh is buried; the sunflower-filled countryside of Pisa, Italy––where I’ve felt like I was actually living inside of a painting for a short time. At the Community Soup Bowl, a free soup kitchen in Tuscaloosa, AL, I feel like I’m living inside of a blues song. I sit between two African-American men whose accents are so thick, the only lines I understand are when the older guy in front of me says, "Man, I’m so hungry today," and when, after saying it again a few minutes later, the other guy next to me says, "You eatin' like a bear today."

The female dining room volunteer stops by and asks the older man how his wife’s doing. "Hard-headed," he says. They have an exchange that I can’t follow, then, as she’s walking away, she says, "I’m gonna hafta come over there an’ talk to her ass." He looks at me and says, "Hospital ain’t nothin’ to be messin’ with." I nod in agreement, and continue eating my meal of chicken salad, peas, corn, Saltine crackers, mixed salad, and a Styrofoam cup of fruit punch. The old guy says, "Don’t tell me I’m gonna eat all this." He pauses. "I ain’t gettin’ no seconds." (People are allowed to get two plates of food, and some do, but you'd have to be really hungry to want seconds.)

When I arrived this morning, the dining room was almost exclusively African-American men of various ages. Since then, a 55-year-old white guy with prison tattoos and his wife came in, a few African-American women, a pair of Latino laborers, a couple of white women who looked like possible meth addicts, and an entire African-American family--tomorrow is the daughter's thirteenth birthday. Surprising to me, many of the people were overweight.

Amy, the kind diminutive white woman who runs the kitchen, was talking about how she couldn't feed kids healthy meals when she was in charge of school children somewhere: "They wouldn't eat the green beans or other vegetables I made. They wouldn't even eat mac 'n' cheese because I made it with real cheese. No wonder we have an obesity problem." When she said that, the man serving the peas and corn turned around and said, "We've got an obesity problem 'cause we're fat." We all laughed.

I called the other day to ask about volunteering, and Amy said, "We're on Greensboro, right between the Piggly Wiggly and Church's Chicken." I've only heard of Piggly Wigglys through Steve Yarbrough's books, but since I arrived at the center early this morning, I decided to check this one out.

Somewhere along my bikeride over here, I passed an invisible color line in town; maybe at 15th St. With the exception of one white customer, everyone in the Piggly Wiggly was African-American. I strolled the aisles, enjoying the air conditioning, and when I reached the butcher's section, the raw meat "family packs" with bright orange stickers caught my eye: turkey necks, neatly arranged in rows; pigs' feet, four or five per pack; and some dark red bits labeled "stew meat" all sat wrapped in clear plastic. I'd never seen anything like it.

When the door of the Community Soup Bowl opened, Amy took me into her office. She said they serve between 100 and 150 lunches daily, seven days per week, but that today would be slow because people receive their Social Security and disability checks on the first and third of each month. "We'll be busy again on Monday." She tells me about a few of the 29 homeless agencies in town, which were mentioned in this article in Tuscaloosa News about the Homeless Advisory Group, who counted "223 homeless people in Tuscaloosa, including 41 children" this past January.

(I've also found out about a strange program that my bank, Albama Credit Union, does called "Secret Meals for Hungry Children," where they surreptitiously stuff food into needy children's backpacks at school. Seriously. You can read about it in this article from Tuscaloosa News. The Secret Meals program says that 20% of Alabama children live below the poverty line. Paradoxically, Tuscaloosa's 8.6% unemployment rate is below the 9.5% national average, as well as Alabama's average of 9.7%.)

But, as I asked in my previous post, where are all the homeless people? Amy says the people not living at the Salvation Army's facility or the VA Hospital live under the Northport Bridge on the Northport side of the Black Warrior River (apparently, I was looking on the wrong side of the river) and behind the Wal Mart on Skyland Blvd. on the south side of town. I'll probably check out the Northport homeless camp on Sunday.

In the meantime, it feels like a tight community here in the Community Soup Bowl. None of these people seems homeless--two guys even wear their flourescent worker vests--but you never know. As when I arrived, there are only African-American men left in the dining room. They all know and greet each other by name as a new person walks in or someone leaves. The old man in front of me says to a tall thin elegant man, who's name would be "Slim" if this were a novel, "Just keep walkin’ like you don’t know no one." When the tall man, wearing a nice shirt and fitted pants and a baseball hat and sunglasses, smiles, the old man says, "What’s up, pimp daddy?”

Not only does the Community Soup Bowl provide meals for whomever walks in the door, the Alabama Retarded Citizens group comes in to wash the dishes every other day. They are a jolly bunch, and their presence and enthusiasm brightens the kitchen. The men in the group all shook my hand when I walked in--one said he hadn't seen me in a long time--and now that they're leaving, one of the men gives all of the women volunteers from various churches hugs and the men, including me, handshakes.

When I finally go to leave, Amy shouts out, "Be sure to tell your students to come here and eat. They can write about it." As she told me before, everyone's welcome. So come on down and meet your neighbors, Tuscaloosa.