The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America (10 page)

“I’m gonna have a heart attack,” Alicia says dramatically.

She pops up and gets a carton of chocolate ice cream from the freezer. She scoops with a teaspoon into a coffee cup. She keeps missing and picks the ice cream off the counter with her hands and puts it in the cup. She collapses on the couch.

Paul mumbles something and leaves, closing the door behind him. Barbara sits in a round rattan chair held together with duct tape and stares at the door.

Alicia says what I’m thinking.

“He’s got a stick up his butt. He’s stupid. He’s the biggest kiss-up. He’s a pussy.”

“Ali!” Barbara says. Then she turns calm. “Ali, Colleen thinks you’ve had sex, but I told her that if you had, you’d tell me.”

“Mom, I kissed a boy last night.”

“You kissed a boy?” Barbara squeals. “Who? Who?”

“Ryan.”

“Ryan?”

“Then I got laid!” Alicia blurts.

“Ali!”

“I got laid.
Laid
—I love that word,” Alicia says, spooning ice cream into her mouth.

“Ali, don’t talk like that. That kind of talk is not becoming.”

“
Coming
,” Alicia moans, writhing on the couch. “You said
coming
.”

The rattan chair breaks and Barbara crashes to the floor. The chair lands on her head. Together they look like an upturned cup and saucer.

Alicia bounces up from the couch and flies out the door.

“I’ve lost my childhood,” she yells to the world.

I can’t stay in the basement alone with Barbara. I grab my journal and leave.

When I come back, the apartment is nearly dark. Barbara stands in the kitchen, a vacant look on her face.

“How you doing?” I say.

“Not good. I was in a coma for four hours.”

“What?”

“I’m going through abandonment syndrome. When Paul closed that door in my face, it triggered it. I had flashbacks and went into a coma.”

I get a sick feeling, like someone who nearly reaches the end of a long dark tunnel only to see an oncoming train. It’s too late. I’ve stayed one day too long.

Barbara stirs the pieces of a burned pancake in the skillet with a knife. She says she’s making pancakes for my trip. She tells me she’s dizzy. She starts to cry.

I tell her I’ll finish the pancake, and I help her to the couch.

“I’m going into shock,” she says.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Don’t call the hospital! I can’t go back to the hospital again!”

She holds her head in her hands and weeps uncontrollably.

I’m frightened—for her and for me. Alicia isn’t home. I haven’t seen Colleen since last night. There isn’t a phone in the apartment. I could run upstairs, but I’m afraid to leave Barbara alone.

“Have you taken your medication?”

“Yeah,” she wails.

She shudders and bawls about how her two husbands abandoned her, how her father locked her outside, how Paul shut the door in her face.

She asks for a box of crayons and a pad of paper from the kitchen drawer. She attacks the paper with a crayon, slashing as if she held a knife. A picture of a sleeping woman emerges. She’s purple. Barbara fills the rest of the paper with sharp geometric figures, colored red and orange and yellow. When she’s finished, she cuts up the picture into heart-shaped pieces and tears them all in two.

“Help me think of other reasons for Paul’s behavior,” she says.

When I don’t answer, she says, “I was gonna get on a bike and then pull in front of a car.”

“You don’t want to do that.”

“It would be less painful,” she cries, heading off on another jag. “Part of it would be for the pain. I need to be hit right in the face.”

“Do you want me to call Colleen?”

“No! She’ll try to commit me. I can’t go to the hospital again! I’ll lose Ali!”

“You’re not going to go to the hospital,” I try to soothe her. “You don’t want to. Just relax. Don’t think about everything at once.”

Barbara wails and weeps as she draws, hacking away at the pad.

I’m afraid to go and I’m afraid to stay. Five hours pass. Just when I think she’s calming down, she loses it again.

I wash the dishes. I scrub the knife Barbara used to flip pancakes. It has a melted handle, a triangular blade and a serrated edge. Barbara catches me looking at the knife and reads my mind.

“Don’t worry, Michael, I won’t snap and take it out on you. I could never hurt you.”

That may be true, I think, but perhaps someone else inside her could.

“God sent you here to save me, Michael. You’re a godsend.”

She rocks back and forth, holding herself.

“I don’t usually treat my guests this way,” she sniffles. “You are seeing me have a total nervous breakdown.”

She catches her breath, then bawls, “See what you pay for pancakes?”

CHAPTER 13

When I climb the stairs from Barbara’s basement apartment the next day, I feel like I’m emerging from a torture session in a dungeon. I welcome the freedom, but I’m more nervous than ever about what lies ahead. All the goodwill saved from the early part of the trip was spent in Bozeman. There’s nothing left in reserve. I’ve lost my edge. I’m fat and weak and vulnerable. The pack on my back feels strange. The sign in my hand feels strange. It’s like I’m starting over.

I’m good for only 12 miles, which puts me in Livingston, Montana, a town that could serve as a set for a Hollywood western.

The bartender at the Hotel Murray lets me watch
Monday Night Football,
even though I can’t buy a drink. I help myself to a free slice of happy-hour pizza. I’m grateful when the game goes into overtime, delaying the search for a place to sleep.

I bed down on the lawn behind the train museum. But when my eyes adjust to the dark, I see I’m not as hidden as I thought.

After a furtive stroll, I unroll my bag on a patch of grass behind the city library. It’s bordered by a public parking lot and an apartment building whose tenants keep odd hours. The locomotives in the switching yard shake the ground all night. I’m not sure if I sleep or not. When I notice the time and temperature sign at the bank, it reads 6:38 and 46°. My eyes sting. The Absaroka Mountains looming above town are the color of a bruise.

J.D. and Kristin stop for me at the I-90 eastbound on-ramp.

J.D., 26, is a ringer for the late rock legend Jim Morrison, with long, curly brown hair, dark shades and a pretty-boy pout. Kristin, 20, is a walking wet dream, with bleached blond hair, short cutoffs and centerfold breasts. Her T-shirt says “Jaegermeister,” and I can read every letter.

They’ve been driving all night from Oregon. They’re both originally from Bismarck, North Dakota. J.D.’s mother is driving from Bismarck to meet them tomorrow in Billings, Montana. She has the couple’s seven-month-old daughter, Summer, who she’s been watching while J.D. and Kristin worked in Oregon. J.D. says he’s a welder. Kristin doesn’t say what she does.

We barrel down the freeway, heavy metal blaring on the stereo.

J.D. pulls into a truck stop 30 miles west of Billings. While Kristin uses the restroom, J.D. opens an ice chest in the back of the pickup.

“Want a beer?” he says.

It’s nine in the morning. I’ve got an empty stomach. I’m riding through America with a pair of perfect strangers.

“Sure, why not?” I say.

As I gulp from the can, I see the sky reflected in J.D.’s sunglasses, and by the time I reach the bottom, I’ve got a feeling that anything can happen, and that’s just fine.

Back on the road, J.D. reaches into a second ice chest below the seat.

“Want another?” he says. “They’re like potato chips, you can’t have just one.”

“If you’re gonna be a bear, might as well be a grizzly,” I say, cracking open the beer.

J.D. opens another for himself and one for Kristin, who sits between us, the knees of her sleek legs pushed high from the mounded floorboard.

“What are you doing out here?” J.D. says.

“A month ago I went in and told my boss I’d had enough.”

“You woke up with one nerve and he was on it,” J.D. says, grinning.

“Something like that,” I say, and I tell them the rest.

When Kristin hears I’m from San Francisco, she says she was recently in the Bay Area. Some town that starts with the letter
M,
she says. We spend a few miles trying to figure out the name of the place. I give up and ask her what she was doing there.

“Visiting a friend,” she says.

“Tell him what you were really doing,” J.D. says.

“You tell him. You’re the one who put me on the plane.”

“We were running a scam on some old guy,” J.D. says. “Some rich dude who wants to marry her.”

“I met him in Vegas,” Kristin says.

“That’s what she does,” J.D. says. “Hustles and dances.”

“I was an escort,” Kristin corrects him. “This guy picked me up in a limo, and two hours later I had fourteen hundred dollars. I didn’t even have to fuck him. The first time. Now he wants to marry me. He even wants to adopt my daughter. He had this financial statement printed out on a computer, showed me how I’d be taken care of. But I said, no way. I like my freedom.”

“We’re scamming him for thousands,” J.D. says.

“It’s not a scam,” Kristin says. “It’s money. I only sleep with guys that have money. If you’re gonna do this, you might as well go for the high end. Why fuck someone for twenty bucks?”

Kristin ran away from home when she was 13. She lied about her age and worked as a stripper in a Portland bar. Two years later, she stole a car and returned to Bismark, where she met J.D. They’ve been traveling for five years, Kristin turning tricks in every state in the West. Somewhere along the line, I’m guessing she got breast implants. But there are some things I can’t ask a woman, even if she is a whore.

“How’s all this sit with you, J.D.?” I say.

“It was hard when we first got together, but it’s okay now that I’ve matured. With her, I’m never broke.”

Kristin drags on a cigarette. J.D. fishes out three more beers. I spot the Billings skyline in the distance as J.D. tells me he’s really not a welder.

“This summer in Oregon, we were dealing drugs. Dealing ’em and using ’em. Dealing enough to use.”

“What kind of drugs?”

“Crank,” J.D. says. He grins. “Yeah, life’s always a lot more complicated than it looks. Another reason we’re coming over to Billings is she’s gotta have an abortion tomorrow.”

“Yeah, one baby’s enough,” Kristin says. “I wanna be a good mother.”

She pulls out her wallet and shows me pictures of Summer.

“I’m fifteen weeks pregnant. Too late to get an abortion in Oregon. They let you have one up to nineteen weeks in Montana. It’s gonna be a two-day procedure.”

While Kristin has her wallet out, J.D. asks her how much money they have.

Kristin counts the bills.

“Three hundred.”

“And we owe my mom two-fifty for the abortion,” J.D. says. “That leaves us fifty bucks to play with.”

He looks at me. “You’re welcome to hang with us. We’re just gonna go to a bar and make some calls.”

“Well, you know my story. I don’t have a penny.”

“It doesn’t matter to me,” J.D. says.

“Sounds good.”

J.D. parks in front of a dive called The Lobby. When we hit the door, sunlight washes over a roomful of professional alcoholics. I use the bathroom. When I return, a draft beer is waiting for me on the bar.

“Who should we call?” J.D. says. “Carol?”

“No, I don’t wanna call Carol,” Kristin says. “She’s a bitch. Besides, if we call her, we’ll have to see Alex and them.”

“Let’s call Wanda then.”

“Wanda outta jail yet?”

“We’ll find out,” J.D. says, and walks to the payphone.

The morning disappears in a blur of beer and shots of tequila.

J.D. and Kristin try their luck at the video poker machines. The $50 gets chewed up fast.

Kristin moves down the bar, and a man in a cowboy hat chats her up. Kristin leans over the bar, affording the cowboy a better look at what’s stuffed inside her T-shirt. The cowboy buys her a drink. Then another.

J.D. continues to play the poker machine.

“You got a real lucrative act going here,” I say.

“Yeah, I never have to buy her a drink.”

Kristin and the cowboy walk by us.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” she says.

“Okay,” J.D. says without looking up from the screen.

Kristin and the cowboy return five minutes later. There’s suddenly money for more beer and video poker. I guess Kristin doesn’t always work the high end of the hooker’s ladder.

An old man with three teeth in his mouth sits at a table crowded with empty beer cans and a sketchbook. J.D. and Kristin sit down and pay the man $20 to draw their caricatures.

J.D. challenges me to a game of pool. I win. Then I win three more games. Then it’s one o’clock, time to go to Wanda’s.

We drive down a country road, my hand riding the air outside the window. I’m drunk and the sky looks like a scene from the Bible.

J.D. pulls alongside a prefab house with a couple of junked cars out front. Kristin goes inside.

“You’d never know these guys were millionaires,” J.D. says.

Kristin and Wanda come out to the truck. Wanda wears hideous eyeliner and has the torn-up look of a meth addict. She’s under house arrest, serving time for a drug bust. She wears an electronic bracelet on her wrist. If she leaves her front yard, the police will know.

“It’s gonna take two hours,” Kristin says to J.D. “And it’s sixty.”

Wanda’s husband is holding the meth, and he’s not home.

J.D. pulls a fifty from his wallet.

“If you want,” Wanda says, “I’ll go in for a quarter and you guys pay forty-five.”

J.D. and Kristin agree.

“I better get back in, in case they call,” Wanda says, shaking her bracelet.

We drive to another bar on a freeway frontage road. J.D. and Kristin argue on the way. I can’t tell over what because the stereo is cranked to 10. Kristin leaves us in the parking lot.

When we catch up to Kristin in the bar, she’s nudged up against another cowboy. J.D. and I take the stools on the other side of Kristin. The cowboy shoots us a glare. J.D. gets up and walks away, chuckling. He’s still wearing his sunglasses.

Kristin and the cowboy walk toward the bathroom.

There are more games of pool and more beer.

“Man, you’re a hard person to get drunk,” J.D. says.

When Kristin comes back, she’s wearing fresh lipstick. She sits at a table next to the pool table and orders nachos. When she’s through eating, I move in and scarf down the leftovers.

“Okay, I want your best game,” J.D. says. “Let’s play for something.”

“I don’t have anything to bet,” I remind him.

“Yes you do. If you win, I’ll give you a bow tie. If I win, you gotta wear it.”

J.D.’s game steps up a notch, and it’s likely he’s been sandbagging me. That’s okay, I’ve been holding back, too. But now I’m playing out of my head, sinking everything and wishing I had money to bet.

“It’s three o’clock,” Kristin says as I drop the eight ball for the win.

We pile into the pickup and head back to Wanda’s. J.D. stops at a minimart for a six-pack of beer and a jar of caffeine pills, which he pops when his supply of speed runs low.

“You wanna do a little crank with us, Mike?” he says.

“Nah, I can’t. In my profession we get drug tested.” It’s true, but I also have no interest in taking methamphetamines.

Kristin says to wait in the car while she goes inside to Wanda’s to buy the drugs.

J.D. pulls a dollar bill from his wallet and folds it into something that makes me laugh.

“Here’s your bow tie,” he says. “I’m trying to corrupt your trip.”

I put the dollar bill in my pack, knowing I’ll give it away later.

Wanda’s husband hasn’t turned up with the drugs, so we go inside and wait. A baby girl bounces in a portable swing in front of the TV. Wanda sits on the couch, sprays Bactine on a cut on her hand and blows on it. She keeps spraying and blowing, and I think she’s going to use up the whole can.

A man appears from out of nowhere. He’s wearing a camouflage T-shirt.

“Need to talk to ya,” he says to Wanda.

I assume he’s her husband, but J.D. says he’s not. I sit in a chair, drinking beer. I can’t believe how stupid I am, waiting in a house full of strangers for a drug delivery.

Kristin fidgets and says she can’t wait any longer. We get up to leave.

“I don’t know what could’ve happened,” Wanda says. “It usually only takes him two hours. Try calling me at four-thirty or quarter to five.”

She turns to me. “So, do you want some money?”

Wanda knows I’m traveling penniless. “No, I can’t,” I remind her.

“I’ve always wanted to say that!” she cackles. “Well, at least I can give you some food.”

She hands me an apple and a piece of freshly baked peach cobbler wrapped in a napkin. I eat the food on the ride back into Billings.

J.D. says to Kristin, “How ’bout we say our
adioses
to Mike and get us a motel room?”

So this is it. Next thing I know, the prostitute and her boyfriend drop me in the middle of downtown Billings. It’s cold and the sky is gray and Billings looks hard and mean, and it’s only after J.D. and Kristin pull away that I realize I’ve left my sweater in the back of their pickup.

The heavy afternoon hangover is on its way. I wobble down the street, searching for whatever it is that’s supposed to happen next.

CHAPTER 14

I find the Montana Rescue Mission where I figured it would be—on the other side of the tracks. The houseman looks like a biker, equipped with ponytail and beard. He tells me to attend chapel at seven, eat dinner, then check back and he’ll see about finding me a bed.

I sink into the last vacant chair of the shelter’s TV room. The men around me are dirty and damaged. One guy is missing an arm, another a leg. The fellow by the door mumbles to himself and clutches a colostomy bag.

The man next to me gets up and Al takes his place. Al is 67 and looks like Bob Hope. He worked 30 years as a waiter in New York City. He remembers every meal served, every tip received. He never married. He roams the country, staying in homeless shelters when broke, cheap motels when flush. He’s heading for a VA hospital in Tennessee, where a doctor may be able to fix his eyes. Al is going blind. He lives on his monthly Social Security check of $596. The next check arrives in 10 days.

“I may stay longer than ten days, let the money accumulate,” Al says. “It’s a hundred thirty-nine a week. But if I stay an extra week, it’ll almost be two hundred. See?”

The houseman announces over the speaker that it’s time for chapel and everybody shuffles out. I walk downstairs, pack on my back, for what I think is the chapel.

The houseman stops me. “Sir, where are you going?”

“To the chapel.”

“This is the chapel,” he sneers, rapping on a sign I missed. “See? Right here on this door where it says ‘Chapel.’”

The guy is a smartass and a thug, but I hold my tongue because I’m too tired to argue and I’ve yet to get a bed.

In the chapel, the preacher wears jeans and a blue blazer. He’s a cross between a third-rate televangelist and a bad stand-up comic. He paces before the pews, arms flailing. He talks rapidly about his former life as a drug user, alcohol abuser and chaser of wild women. He moved to Los Angeles, where one day he found a pile of human feces on the seat of his car. Shortly thereafter, he found God.

Dinner is meatballs and noodles, salad and powdered milk. There are also a few stale cakes donated by a local bakery.

A shelter worker walks down the line, randomly asking men to blow into a breathalyzer. Two guys don’t pass the test, and the worker orders them out of the shelter. They protest, but the preacher is there to help drag them away.

I suddenly realize that if I’m asked to blow, I’m out of a meal and a bed. I guess I don’t look as drunk as I feel because the man with the breathalyzer skips me.

I can’t check in until all the regulars have, so I wait in the TV room. I lean on my pack, too exhausted and hungover to focus on the tube. Al plops down next to me.

“Don’t let me interrupt you if you’re watching a program,” he says.

Before I can answer, the retired waiter is off on another restaurant-related reverie.

“I had a second breakfast today at a little place near here. It was good. Eggs, sausage, potatoes, toast, coffee. Three-ten. Tipped her fifty cents.”

Al elaborates on his finances, but it’s all noise. I unzip a pocket on my pack and pull out the bow tie J.D. gave me.

“Here, have a bow tie,” I say, handing Al the folded dollar.

“Isn’t that something,” he says, handing it back.

“No, that’s for you. It’s my last dollar. I don’t need it.”

“What?”

“I don’t need money.”

“You need it for some things, I’m sure.”

“No, you take it.”

As I’d hoped, Al is up and out the door with the dollar. But he returns all too soon. He carries a few loose cigarettes he bought at the corner liquor store. He gestures to a grubby man talking on the phone.

“I met that guy outside and I told him the story of how I came into the dollar,” Al says conspiratorially. “I was gonna give him a few cigarettes. Now I see he’s on the phone, so I know he’s got someone. Even if it’s just a friend, he’s got someone. So I don’t know now. I don’t know if I’ll give him the cigarettes or not.”

I can barely hold my head up. Al sounds like he’s talking through a tin can pressed against my ear.

“See? He’s on the phone. That tells me he’s got someone. He told me outside he didn’t have anyone. I’m not gonna give him the cigarettes.”

The man with the breathalyzer strides into the TV room. He stands in front of an Indian slumped in a chair. The Indian is passed out. The man with the breathalyzer shakes the Indian awake. He pokes the tube into his mouth.

“Blow hard.”

The Indian blows.

The worker reads the contraption. He squats down so he’s in the Indian’s face.

“What’s your name?”

“Kelly,” the Indian says.

“That your first or last name?”

“Last.”

“What’s your first name?”

“Johnny.”

“Johnny, you’re intoxicated. You can’t stay here tonight. Get your things and leave.”

The worker walks away and the Indian falls back asleep.

“See, look at him on the phone,” Al is saying. “He’s got someone.”

The breathalyzer man returns and wakes the Indian.

“Johnny, get your shoes on and leave. You can’t stay here tonight.”

“You know what?” Al says. “I’m gonna give him those cigarettes after all.”

The houseman calls me into his office. He reads me a list of questions, marking my answers on a form attached to a clipboard.

“I’m gonna put your address as the mission.”

“Fine.”

“How long you lived here?”