My new companion, the one recently discharged from the service, talked for a while about what John Lewis said, applauded its sanity and simplicity, then he went his way, disappeared from my life, heading back on the road presumably, getting his head together, sorting things out, I suppose. And I went my way. To the liquor store. It was still early afternoon.
I would wake each morning with my head in a vise and make my way, if I didn't have it already, to get a half-pint, a wake-up, at whatever nearby package store on Ponce De Leon. I loved the connection with the discovery of the Fountain of Youth.
Au contraire, amigo, au contraire. Youth gave way to premature aging and drying up on the street, like a crate of dried up apples spilled, and just spent the day rolling slowly down Ponce, to come to rest in a heap in a field of weeds and tall concealing grass, often sharing a Pepsi jug filled with Lysol and tap water.
The first half-pint, in other words, in its seemingly small way was in fact a grail, holier than I can explain. A grail and a charm for the darkness.
The first half-pint, the wakeup, loosened the vise. The second got me in the mood to move. It internalized me and set me free to float there. I began to be released from my body and feel like a camera, or one of those overhead camcorders, taking in the most outrageous details of what was around me. I would feel like I wasn't in some weed patch; or some drab or smelly back place, but in an interactive gallery. That the people I would eventually run across were mobiles. It was all just display. The stagnant corner I was in was only a state of mind. I was numb to all of it, registering it and cataloguing, but fundamentally unimplicated, safe, untouched. Afloat, like a dust mote. Like a bobbing apple.
Except for cops. Cops were indeed problematic. I met some good ones, real good fellas; but damn, I met a whole lot more that were just meaner than hell. Beat me with their batons and once in lockup back in Norfolk some detective swatted me on the side of the head with a blackjack. I can run your fingers across the lumpy ridge. And the ridge on top-knot and the ridge by my eye and over my forehead, and I can describe the rest even if you can't see them. I try to keep in mind how much of a person is concealed when I see them and think I can know them, by remembering how much of me lies beneath the surface, in memories. Same for everyone.
Once, the day a friend had finally tracked me down and got me the news about a close relative, I wandered out by the tracks and was drinking with some fellas out there. It was mid-summer. They were unknowns, just passing through. We sat and drank in the weeds by the tracks concealed by an overhead bridge enjoying the cool of the shade. They might have been drowning something too.
The last I remember was the cops. And being shackled and dropped in the back of a squad car and left. I slept.
When I woke I was in solitary at the city jail. It was completely dark. Pitch black and cold. A deputy came in to take me to a larger lockup with the others. My first reaction was that I had somehow not lost my glasses. That was cool. Then I tried to hoist myself upright.
My left arm wouldn't support me. I collapsed on my side. My arm was numb and useless. Would be for another year, as it slowly, insufficiently repaired. The deputy's response was to slug me in the chest. I was, after all, street scum, a worthless drunk, and he was duty bound to treat me accordingly. To dismiss me and purge me, if he had his way. There were plenty like him, good fundamentalist Christians, on Atlanta's police force. I dealt with them on a routine basis. Homeless, for them, were the embodiment of evil and were addressed as such. If we could just somehow rid the earth of such, we would finally be pure.
It was their moral requirement. I always keep that in mind when scrutinizing the behavior of police in other cities. With the badge and uniform, they were licensed to act on their religious prejudice, whatever mean-spirited cruelty and degradation they felt was authorized by it. And they were usually in sync with a sizeable population of others on the force. Big city, small city, all the same. And in the Bible Belt they were god. Had you by the 'nads from the get-go.
