Central Park Empire

“How did we come to this? How…” he took a breath, “on earth did we come to this?”

Alex felt themselves sunk into an abyss whose depths were hitherto unimaginable. “How could we have come to this? How on earth…could we have come to this?” The closest either of them had ever come to homelessness was going camping or giving a few cents to a man on the street. Neither of them had ever been homeless before, or spent a night in their car. Neither of them had been related to anyone who had become homeless, neither of them had ever heard of anyone they knew knowing someone who is homeless. It was outside the realm of possibilities in their world. Homelessness was not meant to happen to them.

 

Arthur, the one less prone to emotional indulgence, was working in his head. His thoughts were already swirling toward the resolution of this issue; toward the solution to their conundrum; to the salvation from this unfathomable depth to which they had descended. “It’s j�" just a phase” Although he believed the words, he was having difficulty uttering them, for he knew that Alex was not ready to hear them. Stuttering he said, “It’s just a stage in the history of our business. We’re�"you know�"down now, but we’ll be up again soon. We’ll be really up.”

 

“Nothing can justify the base position to which we have stooped. Nothing can justify the base position to which we have become prostrate,” Alex confirmed to himself.

 

“Look, we take it as a learning experience. Now is the time that we can make a change in our lives. A real change. We can bring things back up from this place we’re at. I know we can. I have faith in us. I mean, it could be worse.”

“How on earth could it be worse?”

“We could be dead.”
“I would prefer dead! Like a car accident, or a f*****g meteor, something you have no control over. There’s no shame in that. No embarrassment.” Alex could not restrain his anger. “That way it would have been something that happened to us. Not of our doing. But this, this ? We have brought ourselves to this. This is our fault. No one is there to blame but us. We have made ourselves f*****g homeless do you realize that. If we had been hit by a car, or crashed in a Cessna on a weekend flight to Martha’s Vineyard then it would have been ‘Poor boys! They had such promise, such a bright career ahead of them. They would have been millionaires, but now look at them, cut down in the prime of their lives by this horrid accident.’ But this is of our doing. We’re f*****g homeless!”

 

It was the third night of their captivity, their captivity in the cage that was ‘not society.’ The first two nights had seemed to Alex a stopover. Like a transfer from one train to another, sitting on a bench waiting for the one that read ‘your future destination’ to arrive and come to an abrupt halt. He was expecting the doors to slide open directly in front of them, with two buxom brunettes sitting on the bench directly opposed the door, eyeing them in. Saying ‘come with us. Come ride this train to everywhere you want to go, and then take us home and ride us. The tracks have been laid just for you. They will go where you tell them to go, and we will do, what you tell us to do.’ He looked up from his bench, looked to his side and saw Arthur sitting there with a distracted look on his forehead. He looked in front of him and saw the pit that the train was to be in. He wished he had been pushed by someone onto the third rail. The train did not come. The train was not coming. He looked up to the ceiling to see the signs. Where were these trains coming from and where were they going. The signs read: “From: Somewhere” and “To: Nowhere.” His future and his past had collided in the present moment which had annihilated itself into a blinding, paralyzing realization: I am homeless.

 

Over the next day and the next evening he forced himself to stay with the thought. He did not want to escape from it, as he was wont to do. He did not want to run from the thought of his disastrous state. He wanted to own the thought. He knew deep inside, that if he owned it, he could fix it. If he didn’t own it, it would plague his soul, if not his existence, forever. Through every daily action the reality of his homelessness clung to each curve and turn of the endoplasmic reticulum in his cells. To the fatty folds of his medulla oblongata. His cerebellum drowned in the thoughts of his homelessness, and his superior and inferior vena cava carried the thoughts of his state from all those inundated cells into his heart to leave that tireless organ awash in the inescapable realization that this promising young boy had now become a homeless man. It was this type of unflinching confrontational embrace of his reality that would allow Alex to cope with this problem and fix it. To solve this horrid situation.

 

Arthur, felt no need to swim through the understanding of his predicament. It was simple, they had made serious mistakes which had brought them to a state of cash flow, where they could not financially support the basics of survival: food, clothes and shelter. They had no home and they needed one. They had no food security and they needed it. They had no renewable source of clothing and they needed it. He thought back to the times before cities. He thought to the tribal times, when homelessness would have been a near impossibility. Not only would the tribe not allow it, but the rearing of a child would have provided it with such tools that it could only become homeless if it discontinued acting in the world it lived in. Food was provided through things such as hunting, gathering and cultivating. Clothing was made, often as a function of the same hunting that brought food. Shelter was made, from the materials that he could still see around him when walking down the street. He knew that trees could be chopped, and then fashioned into domiciles. He had not, however, the faintest idea on how that could be done.  He had left that world long ago; it had been at least two centuries since he had lived in that world. Now, all of the essentials of life were purchased, none could be got directly. A middleman, there was always a middleman. One could not take the animal from its environment and turn it into food. One had to purchase the food from the man who displayed it in a store, who bought it from a company who distributed it, who had purchased it from the man who had turned the animal into food, who had bought the animal from the man who had bred it, who had bought the animal from the man who originally took it’s progenitor from the wild. He thought about it again and came to a central axiom of capitalism: there were many middlemen. The more middlemen the merrier�"for the market that is. Whatever his analysis of the situation be, he knew that he needed again to generate cash flow in order to survive in the world he lived in. “What we need to do is develop a plan. A plan to bring us out of this situation.”

“Our plans haven’t worked well thus far. Our plans have gotten us here,” replied Alex.

“I know. But it doesn’t change the fact that we need a plan to get out of here.”

 

Alex was in a stupor that was familiar to Arthur. It had never been this deep nor this prolonged, but Arthur had observed his partner indulge such emotional caverns before. He knew that he was as yet unreachable. But he also knew that the boy needed time. Until then he would work on a short-term plan for day-to-day survival for the two of them.

 

‘Elimination,’ he thought. ‘We have clothes enough to last a while. It’s warm enough this time of year that shelter is of minimal concern. First we need food. Where can we procure a steady stream of food? What do homeless people do? They beg. We’re not begging. What else do they do? Well they get food from dumpsters. We’re not going into dumpsters. Hmm, they get leftovers from restaurant goers. Okay, we’re not doing that either. They go to homeless shelters. Homeless shelters! Hey maybe that’s it. Maybe they can give us some strategies. Maybe there’s an easy remedy for people who just became homeless to become normal again. Maybe if we go to one of those, they can help us get out of this.’

 

“Come on, get up.” The command made Alex stand. “We’re going.”

They rose from the bench they had been sitting on and for the first time that morning, both of them realized the jostling speed of the activity that was happening around them. They were like a heavy stone in a fast stream. Everything around them�"the trains, the cars, the bicycles, the people�"moved at breakneck speed, while they slowly tumbled into a realization of where they were. As they ascended the escalator of the Bleecker St. subway station Alex caught what felt like his first glimpse of daylight; so sunk was he that he did not notice the woman checking him out on the down escalator. Emerging onto the street Arthur began walking in a direction that he felt might bear fruit. ‘How does one find a homeless shelter?’ he asked himself. “Ask a homeless guy,” he said aloud. He walked three steps and then chuckled to himself when he realized that he just had asked a homeless guy. He was a homeless guy, but he didn’t know where a shelter could be found. “We’ve got to find some homeless people; keep your eyes open,” he said to Alex.

“Making friends?” Alex asked.

 

They walked up Bowery and on to Third Avenue looking for homeless people or a homeless person. Arthur’s thoughts double backed on themselves. ‘If it was Christmas time all those Salvation Army guys would be everywhere, they would know where a homeless shelter is. But then it would be freezing cold, and we’d really need a shelter and all the shelters would be full and we’d be screwed. Where do all those Salvation Army guys go in the summer?’

 

The old saying, ‘there’s never a cop when you need one,’ holds true for homeless people as well. When you don’t want them, they come up to you asking for money or yelling obscenities. When you need one, they’re in hiding. They had walked 32 blocks north and 8 blocks west and had still not seen a homeless person. Arthur had peered down every alley they had passed. Finally he decided that they were going to enter one of these alleys and that it would contain a homeless person. “Come this way.” He said to Alex and they turned into a foreboding open-air hallway.

 

The terminally dry alley, panted. The oil on its gray skin spoke of blemishes and pimples. The scars of old pimples, lay in the form of potholes, and the discoloration, that came from years of exposure�"not from bad birthing�"covered the surface of its face. The buildings loomed over its trash strewn dumpsters, which were like a mop of disgustingly tangled and putrid hair that could not be washed, that could not be cleansed. That needed to be shaved off, chopped from the roots. The front sides of these buildings�"their clothing�"did nothing to hide this disfigured countenance. The alley, was as ugly as homelessness.

 

“Let me guess. It’s been three days.”

“It’s been four”

“Ha! I knew it! I can always tell a newbie. Yeah this is what you do. First of all, don’t ever sleep in a dumpster. Trash truck’ll come get ya. Now that’s a rude awakening.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“Yeah, so this is what you do. You gonna wanna go back down this way until Third. Turn right. Go all the way down past Bleecker, past Houston; that’s when you’ll see the Bowery. That’s the best shelter in town. Well, close by anyway.”

“Bleaker Street?”

“Yeah.”

“F**k me.”

“How do you get on the subway? How do we get on the subway?” Alex asked.

“Yeah you got some choices. You pick up those cards that people drop on the ground and try them. You buy a ticket. You hop the turnstile. You go in through the emergency exit. That’s about it.”

“F**k,” Arthur said. “What’s your name?”

“Herb.”

“I’m Arthur, this is Alex. Alright thanks Herb.”

They walked back out of the alley and headed towards Third Avenue, walking back on the tracks of where they had come from.