Authors: Beth Gutcheon
Amy and the reporter from the local paper snapped to attention when Laurie said, “You know, I’m from Blaine County, and there are people who’ll tell you all the Democrats there are millionaires.
I certainly wish we were. But my family are working ranchers, and the last time we had any millionaires on our road was when a carload of movie stars got lost trying to find Sun Valley.” This was not the stock answer.
“I do
know
some millionaires because a lot of them ski, and so do my kids. I know a woman who wears a diamond pin that looks like a
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set of headlights. She brags about buying it with her Social Security money, like she’s playing a joke on Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I told her, ‘I think that’s shocking. You don’t need that check, no matter how much your husband paid into the fund, and you can afford to buy your own health insurance. You don’t need Medicare. If I’m elected senator, I will fight for a means test so that money goes to people who need it and not to those who can help themselves.”
There was a worried silence in the room. “Do you know what that woman did?” Laurie went on. “She sent me a thousand dollars for my campaign.”
At headquarters that night, Walter said dryly, “I’ve known candidates who would have saved that speech for another venue.”
Laurie apologized. “You weren’t there though,” she said. “They understood me.”
“It doesn’t matter whether they understood you, what matters is what the press can do with it.”
Amy, who privately thought Laurie had been perfectly right, was delighted to see that in the next week there was a steady stream of five- and ten-dollar contributions from Twin Falls. They came with notes on lined paper, or sometimes on notepaper printed with old-fashioned flowers, and were mailed in inexpensive drugstore envelopes addressed in spidery cursive handwriting.
H
OMELESS HERO read the headline in the
Post
. The
News
called John Henry Howard a “Citizen Hero” and the
New York Times
carried a long story in the Sunday Metro Section.
The mayor, who had been taking a beating in the press and the polls for heartlessness toward the city’s least fortunate, invited Mr.
Howard to Gracie Mansion, presented him with a plaque, and posed for pictures with him on the steps.
Asked by the press if he didn’t think a plaque was a stupid present to give a homeless person, John Howard said with dignity that he did
not
think so. He intended to send it to his mother, who lived in Baltimore. He expected she would hang it over her mantelpiece, along with his high school wrestling medals, his father’s certificate of thanks for distinguished service that he got when he retired from the railroad, and his sister’s summa cum laude degree from Emory University.
The
Times
ran a picture of John Howard in his high school graduation cap and gown. He had an enormous round Afro and an expression of solemn purpose. He had won the science prize, it was reported at the time, and was hoping to go into medicine.
The papers had talked to his high school teachers, his wrestling coach, his mother, his piano teacher, and his sister, an intensive care nurse in Atlanta. He had begun to show signs of erratic behavior when he was a sophomore at City College, they said. There were no drugs involved, that anyone knew of. He’d grown agitated, and then obsessed, especially with the Gulf War. He’d given some speeches
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about visions he’d had of lakes of burning fire. He’d disappeared from school, and from his night job. He’d turned up in Bellevue.
Twice he had seemed to recover and had gone back to school.
Then he’d gone home to Baltimore for a Christmas visit and been stuck for a six-week stretch in which he couldn’t get out of bed. After that he had disappeared, and his mother hadn’t known where he was until the New York press started calling.
Why had he decided to get involved, he was asked, when he saw the young lady being attacked? It seemed like the right thing to do.
Had he heard her call for help? Yes, he said. He had heard her scream. Had his wrestling training helped him in subduing the attacker? He thought perhaps it had. And what were his plans now?
The city was, for the moment, in love with John Henry Howard.
He was articulate, soft-spoken, attractive. He was modest; he had a sense of humor. An anonymous donor offered to pay his way if he would go back to college. A church offered him a job as sexton. There were several offers of private security jobs, and a call from a rap singer wanting a bodyguard.
“Have you decided which one to take?” a reporter asked as she checked her watch. This was great stuff, the press pool knew, and they wanted to be sure to wrap it up in time for the evening news.
“What are your plans?”
John Henry Howard was entirely composed. “I’ve given a great deal of thought to what work I am most suited for at the present time,” he said. “I would like some warm clothes, and I like to watch people coming and going. The job I would like at the moment is to be a doorman.”
Jill was sitting on the couch in the den where her parents used to have their cocktails. She had wept a lot in the last few days, but they didn’t seem to be tears of grief. It was more as if an iceberg inside her were breaking up. Every few hours or so there would be another great shivering and cracking and then some huge splintering mass of emotion would start sluicing away, chattering and sharp and painful. But with each storm of weeping she seemed to grow lighter.
She seemed
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to be able to fill her lungs more completely; there seemed to be more room around her heart.
Her father, sitting in his leather chair, looked across at Jill as the segment with MacDuff ended. The swelling on the side of Jill’s head was slightly better, though her left eye was purplish and her lips were puffy and cut. There was a bandage around her left wrist where her watch had been. She’d been cut by the blade that hacked through the band, a shallow but dirty wound.
She had begun to cry again when MacDuff said he liked to watch people come and go, but would like to do it in warm clothes.
“You okay?” Noah asked after a moment. He had switched off the television.
She nodded and smiled, although tears were streaming down her face. It was as if she were experiencing two entirely different emotional systems at one time. It was like being a wall that is turning into a river.
“No reason he shouldn’t be a perfectly good doorman, is there?”
her father asked her.
Jill wondered how she was supposed to know, but decided it didn’t matter. No, she shook her head. Wonderful doorman. She’d watched him on the news as she had struggled to imagine him face-to-face, and was no closer to understanding what he was. Why shouldn’t he be a Janus, a two-headed doorkeeper, simultaneously looking at the past and the future? Maybe someday he’d be able to get all the way back inside, and go back to being the person he had expected to be. Like somebody else she could think of.
Noah picked up the phone and dialed.
“This is Dr. Burrows. Is Mr. Lewin home yet?”
A pause.
“Yeah, Stu, Noah Burrows. Didn’t happen to have the news on, did you?”
A pause.
“No, the gentleman who tackled the mugger…yeah…. Yes. You could find a place for him in one of your buildings, couldn’t you?”
A pause.
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“It’ll be great PR. I know it’s a union thing but I’m sure you can…
“Thanks. That’s what I thought too. Yeah, we’ll get his records and see, maybe there’s…
“Yeah, let Payne Whitney check him over and see if there’s something that would…
“No, no reason. I just thought he looked like the kind of fella who could use a break…. Yeah. Yeah, I thought so too. No, I don’t know, but I’m sure those reporters do, or the mayor. Yeah. Let me know.
Thanks.”
He hung up and smiled at Jill. She smiled too, apologetic, and cried. She could almost hear his thoughts: tell your mother I’m doing the right thing. Tell your mother I’m taking care of you. But he wouldn’t say it out loud. He looked pale and ten years older than he had in Mexico.
D
ona Reo was a big woman, and this was a good thing.
She would probably have been a dead woman several times over had she weighed less. She looked like a pirate, except for when she went to church; for church she wore a dark dress and put in her glass eye. The rest of the time she wore bright shirts and skirts and a green patch over her right socket. Her orange hair she wore cut close to the scalp. Once, in jail, everyone in her cell had had head lice and they had all had their heads shaved. Dona found she rather liked the feeling of air on her scalp, and the stiff velvet texture of the hair itself as it started to grow in again. And it sure as hell was easier to take care of.
She’d lost the eye in a knife fight, the result of a miscalculation she would never have made if she hadn’t been beginning to shake and needing to get to her supplier. Of course, if she hadn’t been using, she wouldn’t have been trying to roll a john in the first place.
She wouldn’t have been hooking at all. But if she hadn’t been such a big woman, she would have lost more than an eye. That guy had looked like he was planning to take out her liver.
The other time being so big had saved her life her friend Mickey had scored some shit for them from a dealer south of Market. The second she took the rubber tubing off her arm she knew something was wrong; this stuff had been cut with something terrible. When she came back into her body, it was morning. Her clothes were stiff with dried sweat and there was vomit all over her sweater. Mickey, however, sitting up on the green couch beside her with his eyes bugged open,
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had been dead for twelve hours. He was a skinny little dip, and she figured that had made the difference. He hadn’t had enough body mass to slow the stuff down, so it had slammed into his heart like a locomotive going full speed into Grand Central.
Quitting had not been fun. But it had been more fun than being dead. When she found she would have to wait over a year to get into a methadone program, she had gotten a friend with a pharma-ceutical connection to score her a ton of Valium. Another friend drove her out to Marin and left her in a crappy little motel room near Stinson Beach. There she sweated it out. At first she slept and shook. After several days she began to walk on the beach. By the time her money ran out, she knew everyone in the town, walked miles by the water every day, and had even taken to wading into the water up to her waist, though she couldn’t swim, until she felt clean inside and out.
Back in the city she had gotten a job working in a community garden that hired ex-cons. They raised chayote and sorrel and orange peppers and yellow tomatoes and sold these to fancy restaurants.
She was grateful for the work and the peace. But she was a woman with big appetites and she’d thought some big thoughts while she was walking on the beach and aching, and before long she had begun to feel restless.
The backers of the felon farm found out that Dona was great at PR. They soon had her leading groups of wide-eyed potential donors around the arugula beds, telling them lurid tales of her days and nights on the street, of the two children she hadn’t seen in twelve years, and the way the farm let criminals like her feel connected again to a world that was natural and simple and God-centered, to feel themselves part of creation. After an hour with Dona, visitors opened their checkbooks and then fled home to be sure their doors and windows were locked and their children were safely enrolled in private schools.
But Dona knew she wasn’t a criminal. She was an addict. There was a difference, or should have been. She began asking the money people questions about how a thing like this was set up. Whose idea?
Who bought the land? Who made it happen? Finally, two of them took her aside.
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“We don’t have much extra money,” was the first thing they said, and she had learned that in the great scheme of things, they actually didn’t. One ran a reasonably famous San Francisco restaurant and the other was an architect. Both of these were professions you conducted while unarmed and wearing clean clothes, and that had looked like a lot to her at the time.
“But we have jobs to offer,” they said. “Have you thought about your future? We know people who need people like you,” said the architect.
But it turned out that Dona did not picture herself in designer clothes, saying, “Right this way, Mr. Coppola, your table is ready.”
She did not see herself tooting around town in a convertible. She wanted her own piece of ground to garden.
That had been nine years ago. For the past eight years, she’d been the director of The Safe House, a health clinic, counseling service, and needle exchange for junkies. She’d started in a rented space in a church basement in the Haight. She had just a drug counselor and a couple of doctors at first, and a semi-reliable rotation of ex-con volunteers. After a year, the church had burned down. She reopened in a storefront. She exhausted the architect and the restaurant guy but not before she’d squeezed everything she could learn out of them about helping the least appealing of the needy, those with unattractive symptoms whose misery seemed to be self-inflicted.
The first two had gotten lawyer friends to serve on her board and file her papers. Those got doctor friends to counsel and volunteer.
They got a member of the police commission to run interference for her when she started the needle exchange, which City Hall hated.
Naturally, her biggest problem was raising money. Her clients were junkies. You couldn’t exactly send junkies door to door in Pacific Heights. Who would open the door, they look out and see a big spacey guy in dark glasses, twitching?
Sometimes she could afford her own apartment. The last three years she’d been living in a room behind a curtain at the back of the store. She had a cot with a quilt a recovered crackhead had made for her, and a small plaid dog bed filled with cedar chips for Sebastian, an