There had been a small windstorm in the afternoon just passed, which, if it had been summer, July or August say, in Atlanta would have meant a mountain squall. With rain by the bucket on the skillet of the pavement. But since it was mid-winter, it had only been wind. Small curlicues of dust to emphasize the bleakness of the season. The brown leaves were wed to the caked dirt in the alleyway I passed down.
By now it was just turned dark. The dinner hour. The windows in the apartment buildings lining the alley were all lit in an overhanging gallery. Identical furniture was arranged in each window, unoccupied.
To be outside when the lights came on and the windows revealed how empty it was inside. To be alone in that silence. Another day drained out.
Every night in other words I was reminded that there was nothing unique to my emptiness. It was inescapable. It felt like I was walking beside a sort of hollowness. A hollowness that was nothing unusual and wouldn't leave me alone. And I could look in the empty rooms of the apartment buildings and see I was, in reality, far from alone. That there was more than enough company where I was.
The alleyway led behind the Open Door Community off Ponce De Leon where the tramps and the disabled of various ages did their slog. Ponce de Leon, the boulevard of spent youth and spent dreams. Gents and dames bent on Stellazine bumped into telephone poles and sometimes avoided the traffic. Ponce De Leon, the boulevard of the challenged and defenseless.
Tramping was relative on Ponce. Old tramps tramped the sidewalks as they once had stalked empty boxcars. The life-long incapacitated slogged with them, all similar now in discard, though the stories of how they arrived at this linear wandering differed. It was just a rag-tag army of the deinstitutionalized, perversely salted with young workers seeking work after finding none in the Texas and Oklahoma oil fields. The American Dream refracted through Reagan's lens. Outsourced workers from all over the East and Midwest, leaving new families behind, desperate to keep the house, the car, the family itself intact. Slogging Ponce, looking for a place to be ‘til their families could reassemble, a distant prospect that was no concern of the Reaganites. Just collateral damage, part of their sterile immune calculus.
As for myself, I was vaguely heading I can't remember where when Bard called out that they were showing a documentary on Plowshares and the action at the GE plant in King of Prussia of a few years before.
He caught me in a reverie. In midwinter the alley was like a canvas spread on a gallery wall with textures concealed by the weeds in summer. I was thinking of afternoons spent munching lunch in the National Gallery back in D.C. Lazily studying the canvases on the gallery wall. Or on the Mall. Back when there were protests of note — against war, against nukes, against all kinds of things, and more than local college kids came to attend. A grand political theater of outrage at injustice and predation. Half a million strong raging against the Nixon-Kissinger war machine.
Now, in Reagan's Amerika, the equivalent was the army of homeless, the rag-tag wandering crowd strung out along Ponce De Leon. Of all names for such a habitat of humanity so inhumane, so nonsensical. Heads bowed, just moving in a straight line while the new commercial development money raced past on Ponce in Porsches and BMWs and the occasional Jag — a heavy statement about our country's misleadership and disproportion. Such shortsighted, inept policies when human solutions were so simple. Instead, you provide the mentally ill released from one prison insufficient funding for transitional and permanent housing and support services, so they wind up in a new prison: hostels, where their checks are taken by parasitic predatory landlords, and streets, where they are left to themselves. And if they don't stay on their meds or cause some inconvenience, the landlord tells them get the rosy hell out! And out the door they go. And they did go: to compete for space pounding the pavement with downsized workers cheated of their families.
But before all that there was life on the D.C. Mall and afternoons munching lunch in the National Gallery to think about. And a sense that a new world was possible, if we just made it through the hell of Nixon and his kind. Famous times long ago. The White House had an ear back then. Too many, in fact.
A president was ousted back then. A war was stopped by the people. Or so we told ourselves.
Alleyway weeds flourished during summer in the red clay and ground pepper — like dust because of the determinate rain. You could practically tell the time of day by when the squall arrived and washed all things clean and filled the gutters for awhile with blood red torrents. Each afternoon the rain came like tolling a bell and just as quickly left. Only echoes left in errant puddles.
Bard was massive and bearded and said the film would be shown over on the other side of North Highland in the Episcopal chapel hidden in its English ivy, and I should hurry. I knew where it was because it was right across the street from the Krishna Temple. And every Sunday I gathered at the Temple with some other street folks I knew and we festivated and ate their subjis. They had great prasadam meals, for sure. I wasn't into the ecstatic dancing so much, and the cymbals which messed with my buzz, but it was a kind place and heated and I knew a couple of the people there and as I intimated, I dug the subjis, halava, and that other stuff I can't remember the name of, with the rice and sweet milk. The Episcopalian chapel I knew from occasional feeds there but it was just in and out, just a driveby. Place had no personality, no pizzazz, no humor. Get my anonymous plastic bowl of Uncle Benbow's rice and Campbell's soup with a cup of Kool-Aid and sit wherever a seat happened to be open, or on the floor. I remember I never knew anyone there, didn't care to know anyone, and didn't make it a habit to go by.
But this night, watching Father Dan Berrigan and the others from Plowshares administer their ritual beating to the missile casings at King of Prussia in defiance of the war machine; this evening I remember.
Following the film, I was offered a ride to go to a vigil against the white train where it passed down in northern Alabama. There were some hippehzz down there we could stay with and join for the peace circle as the train roared past with its King of Prussia missiles, now having been armed in Amarillo and heading for the Trident submarine base in Savannah (Savannah? I think that's right. There're so damn many. “Installations.” Sound like art events, not death-mongering.)
I, of course, leapt on something new to do and said yeh. Peace, yeh. Good time for it.
The drive down in the old van was a treat. Singing and chewing the news. Reagan, Meese, et al., paving the way for the ascendence of Dubya. The elephant march from Nixon to Reagan to Bush. God, will there be anything left for those “business model” types to fuck up?
That van steamed up with the conversation was way different from the general torpor of the chapels during a homeless feed, when all that was discussed was condemnation for our sins and where to get clean socks. The trip in the crowded van down to northern Alabama was alive with rich political talk. Lathered wall-to-wall with simple solutions, as though the world was humane and actually listened to reason.
