When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? (25 page)

I GOT NO MONEY

While we in America have been busy creating politically correct euphemisms for old peoplethereby making their lives infinitely easierwe’ve also been working on our poor-people language problem. And we now have language that takes all the pain out of being poor. Having no money these days is easier than ever.

I can remember, when I was young, that poor people lived in slums. Not anymore. These days, the economically disadvantaged occupy substandard housing in the inner cities. It’s so much nicer for them. And yet they’re still considered socially marginal.

But as it turns out, many of these socially marginal people receive public assistanceonce known as welfare. Before that it was called being on relief, or being on the dole. And at that time, being on the dole was the worst thing you could say about a family: “They’re on the dole.” People were ashamed. It was tough to get a date if you were on the dole.

But public assistance! That sounds good. Who of us hasn’t benefited from some form of public assistance? Even huge businesses and agricultural interests receive public assistance. Ditto all the wealthiest taxpayers. So apparently, there is no shame attached to being on the dole after all.

I GOT NO HOME

In this country, about the only thing worse than having no money is having no place to live. And over the years, those with no place to live have had many different names: vagrants, tramps, hoboes, drifters and transients come to

mind. Which name applied to a person sometimes depended on his, his God, this is difficult to saylifestyle. There, it’s out.

But can having no place to live actually be a lifestyle? Well, it seems to me that if you’re going to use a questionable word like lifestyle at all, you should be forced to use it across the board. After all, if there’s a gay lifestylewhich I doubtand a suburban lifestylewhich seems more arguableit stands to reason there must be a homeless lifestyle. And even, one would assume, a.prison lifestyle.

Indeed, is it possible that those doomed souls in places like Buchenwald were actually enjoying a concentration-camp lifestyle? Jf they were, don’t tell their families; you’ll be misunderstood. And, taking this unfortunate word to its ultimate, logical extreme, I will not be surprised to someday see one of those spiritual mediums doing a TV show called Lifestyles of the Dead. (Incidentally, shouldn’t a group of mediums be called media? Just asking.)

Back to the subject: vagrants, tramps, hoboes, drifters and transients. Without using a dictionary (which in many cases is no help at all), here are the distinctions I picked up in years past by listening to how people used these words. The sense I got was: Vagrants simply had no money; tramps and hoboes had no money, but they moved around: drifters moved around, but occasionally worked for a while and then drifted on, whereas tramps and hoboes didn’t work at all. Well get to transients in a moment.

There’s one other distinction between tramps and hoboes that’s worth mentioning. The word tramp might also have been used to describe the young woman your son brought home. Rarely did anyone’s son bring home a hobo. Unless, of course, he was into the gay hobo lifestyle. Actually, there weren’t too many gay hoboes. That’s because if a hobo didn’t have a home, he certainly didn’t have a closet either to be in or to come out of. (Sudden thought: hobo rhymes with homo. Sorry.)

Another way to categorize this class of people was to call them transients. Sometimes, on skid row, where they had a lot of bums and winos (we’ll get to them in a minute), you’d see a cheap hotel with a sign that said TRANSIENTS WELCOME.

Transients were like drifters, except transients seemed to stay in cities, whereas drifters moved through small towns and rural areas. You had to move through those places, because they weren’t as tolerant as cities; they didn’t have signs that said DRIFTERS WELCOME. It was usually just the opposite. Ask Clint Eastwood. By the way, isn’t a hotel that says it welcomes transients a little like a restaurant that says it prefers people with stomachs? Just asking.

First cousin to a transient hotelwas a flophouse, a magnificently descriptive piece of language that has all but disappeared. (Just for the record, these days transient hotels are called limited service lodgings.) Several cuts above all these places were furnished rooms, these days known by the phrase SROs, short for single room occupancy.

So, staying on track here, we began this section with people who have no place to live, which brings us to today’s hot designation, the homeless, also known as street people. When I was a boy, we never heard those words; a dirty, drunk man on the street who wanted money was normally called a bum. Simple word, three letters, one syllable: bum. And a bum was usually also a wino. You know, a substance abuser. He had a chemical dependency. Little did we know.

By the way, it should be pointed out that bum might also have been used to describe the young man your daughter brought home. Many’s the bum who didn’t pass muster with Dad. I wonder how many of those bums the daughters brought home wound up marrying the tramps the sons brought home? That might explain all those homeless children.

But the word homeless is useless. It’s messy, it’s inaccurate, it’s not descrip-

tive. It attempts to cover too many things: poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction, schizophrenia, no place to live and begging on the street.

Homeless should mean only one thing: no home. No place to live. Many of these people who beg on the street actually have places to live. I had one guy tell me he needed money to buy tires for his van. I gave him a dollar; I considered him both honest and enterprising.

The first word I remember for these people was bag ladies. I don’t know why men were left out of this; I never heard anyone say bag men. I guess that’s because a bag man is a different thing. A bag man is someone who delivers bribes or illegal gambling money. Probably, in today’s evasive, dishonest, politically correct language, they’d be called bag persons. In my opinion, the closest we’re ever going to get to a good descriptive name for these lovable grimy folks is street people.

And by the way, isn’t it ironic that shopping bags (and shopping carts) symbols of plentyshould be the objects most preferred by people who have nothing at all? I guess if you have nothing, you need something to carry it around in. Especially if you’re crazy.

WILD AND CRAZY GUYS

That’s what a lot of these street people are, you know. They’re crazy. I avoid terms like mentally disturbedand emotionally impaired. You can’t let the politically correct language police dictate the way you express yourself. I prefer plain language: crazy, insane, nuts. “The whole world is crazy, and many of its inhabitants are insane. Or am I just nuts?” And for the most part, we humans do enjoy being colorful and creative when describing the condition of someone who’s crazy. Here are a few descriptions of craziness that I enjoy:

One wheel in the sand.

Seat back not in the full, upright position.

Not playing with a full bag of jacks.

Doesn ‘t have both feet in the end zone. ‘ Lives out where the buses don’t run.

‘ The cheese fell off his cracker a long time ago.

His factory his still open, but it’s makin’ something else.

Here’s an odd one: His squeegee doesn V go all the way to the bottom of the pail. I think you have to have some serious time-management problems to be sitting around thinking up stuff like that. But there you are. This next one sounds really good, but I confess I don’t quite understand it: He belongs in a cotton box. For some reason it sounds exactly right, though, doesn’t it?

And if you’re going to be irreverent about describing crazy people, you can’t get soft when it comes to describing the places we keep them. Or used to keep them. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan decided the best place to keep them was on the streets, which actually makes a lot of sense, because the streets are nothing more than a slightly larger, open-air asylum, anyway.

But around the turn of the nineteenth century, many states had places called institutions for the feebleminded. That name seemed too long for some people, so instead they referred to them as madhouses. “They took him to the madhouse. Boy, was he mad.” Then these places became insane asylums, mental homes, mental institutions and, finally, psychiatric facilities.

I have three personal favorites. I always liked the hoo-hoo hotel. To me, that says it all. Here’s another one that’s not bad: the puzzle factory. It has a certain class to it, doesn’t it? But if you prefer a gender approach, you really can’t beat the enchanted kingdom. “They took him away to the enchanted kingdom.” And guess how they took him there? The twinkymobile. Now that’s descriptive language.

A TOAST TO THE CLASSICS

When I see a symphony orchestra, a hundred or so people playing some incredibly difficult piece of music in complete and perfect unison as if they were a single organism, I remind myself that each one of them started the day in a different kitchen. A hundred different musicians in a hundred different kitchens, scattered across the city. And sometimes I find myself wondering how many of them had eggs that morning and how many chose cereal. I try to guess whether the percentage of muffin eaters is greater among the strings or the brass section. I ponder whether or not the percussionists drink a lot of coffee, whereas, perhaps, the piccolo players lean more toward flavored teas. I don’t know why these thoughts come to me. But they sure fill the time between scherzos.

FUCK YOU, FATHER, FOR YOU HAVE SINNED

Catholic kids are stupid; they don’t know how to handle a pedophile priest. Here’s what you do: First of all, you don’t get all scared and do whatever he tells you. Who wants to get sucked off by a forty-three-year-old clergyman with beard stubble? Not me. Instead, what you do is kick him in the nuts. You kick him squarely in the nuts, and you get the fuck out of there as fast as you can, and you go tell somebody right away; you tell as many grown-up people as you canone of them is bound to believe you.

That’s what you do. You don’t wait thirty years. You kick the priest in the nuts and say, “Fuck you, Father, I don’t do that shit. Try Jimmy Fogarty, I heard he blew the choirmaster.” And you’re out the door. And don’t forget to take your rosary. On second thought, leave the rosary. A lot of good it did you in the first place.

THREE SHORT STORIES THE VELVET HAT

She wore a velvet hat. She walked down the steps slowly, as if each one were a significant achievement. Her arm, bent severely at the elbow, pinned her purse close to her side. The surface of the last few steps was cracked and uneven, and so she extended her tiny arm to grip the railing. At that moment a man ran up and jammed an entire box of peppermints into her mouth.

NOT MARTHA STEWART

Vinny had just squeezed off three really vicious, warm, partially liquid farts and was now trying with all his might to suck down from the back of his nose a huge gob of hardened snot that felt as big as a human embryo. Ignoring the dog shit encrusted under his fingernails from several weeks earlier, he reached deep into his throat, pulled loose some partially digested food, swallowed it again and continued to make hamburger patties for the kids.

GARNISH

The man in the tweed hat stood by a tree, rolling a half-dried snot between his thumb and forefinger. Moments later, the snot now completely dry, he strolled casually past a sidewalk cafe and gently flicked it into a young lady’s lemonade.

. . FINISH YOUR SENTENCES?