June 22…

I’ve long been a believer that in order to understand the center you have to know about the extremes. It is not enough to know what polite society does with its Wednesday nights. You have to know what the uncouth masses do, if for nothing else than to provide context. Let me tell you about the bums. They are different from you and me.

Motives aren’t important. Call it a sociology paper gone awry, a twisted bet that I lost, or won, maybe even a sick desire to learn about the finer hobo arts. Only the facts matter. This past Wednesday I wandered the darker side of High Street and its tributaries dressed up like a bum searching for the American Dream.

Preconceived notions are difficult to remember. I think I wrote them on a piece of paper before going out, but I’m not sure. I was drinking beer and probably something else during the planning process, to get into character. Putting on a bum’s attire was the easy part, some ripped jeans, a dirty shirt, and foul smell. Trying to figure out what I thought the American Dream was proved to be much harder. We’ve all heard the words countless times, but what about the definition. It has to be specifically American; it can’t be the European Dream or the Ethiopian Dream.

What is it that makes America special? There is over three hundred years of bloody and deranged history that says we are just like everyone else, or are we? Perhaps the difference is that before the white man came there wasn’t much here. Sure there were Indians, and I don’t want to knock their culture, but mathematically there weren’t a whole lot of them. And besides, our forefathers saw to it that they became a non-issue. So a bunch of white men opened up shop in a virgin land. Without much baggage in the form of history, they were free to do things they way they wanted too. Flash forward 226 years and this is where we are, but where is here?

Everyone wants to succeed, that’s not American. What is unique is that America says anyone can do it, at least in theory. The public eats up the rags to riches story. The single biggest indicator of this is the multi-billion dollar state lottery industry. Buy this ticket and you will have a 1 in 101000000000000000000000 chance of becoming a fat cat. People like to say the dream is dead, but maybe Schrödinger’s cat is only half-dead. No one will know until the box is ripped open and the American Dream is poked and prodded with abusive medical equipment. That’s what I decided to do sometime during the haze of Wednesday afternoon.

By 10pm I was wandering the mean streets in full bum gear. The first order of business was to buy a forty and some smokes. The convenient store clerks were damn mean until they saw I had money. What gives them the right? Working at a kwike-mart is not what I would call living the dream. There aren’t that many feet of social class wall separating them from the bums. The all mighty dollar makes it all right though. My work was with the rags not the captains of kwike industry, so I got my supplies and flipped the finger.

We’ve all heard about the success stories, the Donald Trumps and Bills Gateses of the world. I wanted to hear from the utter failures of the world, the people who were living as far from the dream as possible. One has to be careful with proper bum selection though. Many of them just look the part, but are actually pan handlers, leeches with cars and apartments. One would be surprised at how much money can be made with some dirty clothes and a cup. The epicenter of bum culture seemed to be the corner of 13th and High Street. During the day gutter-punks sloth around, but at night a more hardened crowd takes over.

I sat down on the stairs to a vacant building and awaited the changing of guards. After about twenty minutes Harry walked over to ask for a smoke. He was wearing old army fatigues and called me chief. A gave him a cigarette and we started talking about Viet Nam. He was old enough to have served, but his actual knowledge of the war was suspect. His stories seemed to have been taken from b war films and cheap documentaries. So I pressed him to tell me about his life after the war.

During the 80s he was married with four children living in a rat-hole apartment. He had a job as a mechanic, but money was tight. Apparently nothing much happened during this time. As he described it, he worked from 8am to 6pm, then went home to fight with his wife, and finished off the evening drinking cheap beer. That was his life until the mid 90s. He lost his job and his wife left him, so he held a few odd jobs living here and there. Then a few years ago he be came a rock bottom bum, just gave up.

By midnight there were five of us hanging around under the sulfur street lamps. For the price of a pack of cigarettes I got four mostly complete autobiographies. Everyone has a price, bums are just cheaper. All of the stories closely resembled Harry’s. They had the same depression and sick failure. I was beginning to think I had wasted an evening when a bum named Morris started yelling at Harry. Apparently he was actually in Viet Nam and, just like me, saw right through Harry’s story.

Harry’s pride was wounded, so he lashed out with the first punch. Morris took it on his jaw and stumbled back a few steps. Some insults were thrown back and forth then Morris lunged. Two broken down men seeing if they could break each other down a little more. Morris got hit a few more times before landing a few solid ones. Harry fell down with his left eye bloodied and I thought it was over. However he got back up and started attacking again. The other three of us had great ring side seats and two bike cops did as well. I don’t know how long they were watching. I only noticed them because I heard their laughter. They didn’t stop the fight until Morris was sent sprawling to the ground by an excellent right hook. I clapped and went to congratulate Harry, but the cops had swooped in. The combatants were separated and everyone was put in cuffs.

While we were waiting for the paddy wagon, I asked Harry to tell the truth. I offered him the pack of cigarettes I had stashed in my pocket. I didn’t want the bums to sniff me out as an imposter, so I was careful to only show them one pack and keep the rest of my wealth hidden. He got angry and threatened to ‘hurt’ me. I worked my cuffed hand into my pocket and grabbed my smokes. Then I placed them on the side walk next to him. His anger faded as he stared down, and then his face twisted. He confessed that he was a dirty hippy during the war. He never served and his life was very much like it is now, only he smoked more pot back then. Staring down at his moldy shoes, he looked even more depressed and broken than we I first met him.

When the paddy wagon finally came I recognized the driver. We had taken a criminal justice class together a few quarters ago. He talked to the other cops for a few minutes and then looked at me and laughed. I was set free with a some what stern warning to stay away from unlicensed bum boxing matches. On the walk home I couldn’t help but thinking of how close I had come to spending the night in jail with those filthy hobos. It pays to have a good working relationship with the police.

I’ve spent the past few days secluded in my apartment. I want to try and make sense of that mess with the bums, but I can’t. Maybe my methods were flawed. I could have paid Harry twenty bucks for his time and taken him to a coffee shop. Then I could have grilled him all I wanted to and no one would have ended up in jail. But, I wouldn’t have seen a good boxing match. Or maybe the American Dream is just that, a dream, a hazy vision that haunts the dark regions of the mind. When the lights are turned on it vanishes. So that even its victims don’t know what they’ve failed at, all they know
is that they failed. I imagine that the rich are much like the rags; they just know that they succeeded. Maybe that’s all there is to it, success and failure. That’s not uniquely American though. I refuse to give up the ghost until I can nail it too a wall or prove it isn’t there. Maybe I just need a beer…..