The Way of the Wanderers (Part One)

I can’t spin a proper yarn about a Californian pseudo-apocalypse without dedicating a significant segment to our endemic unhoused problem.

So buckle up.

If you thought I spit a little piss and vinegar before…wait a while.

I’ve always had a strong sense of…something…regarding the unhoused. I have never been able to figure out what exactly it is. When I was younger, it may have been vicarious, perhaps a fear of becoming an unwitting member of their ranks. That so many folks could lose their way in spectacular fashion, sleeping outdoors, panhandling, scruffy malcontents and drug addicts and mentally challenged souls ranting and raving and scavenging through the streets, having fallen through the cracks of mainstream society – it seemed like madness.

It still does.

That a single person on this North American soil is perpetually allowed to suffer needlessly without support, shelter, proper sustenance, or medical care, is a clear sign of a declining civilization. Multiply that by hundreds of thousands of souls, and you have a society teetering before its inevitable fall.

Whether it’s Skid Row in Los Angeles or the ghettos of New Delhi, it really doesn’t matter. When we are a species who forsakes their neediest members, despite popular opinion, it isn’t Darwinian survival of the fittest at play. It’s a self-defeating lack of empathy, and advanced empathy is absolutely one hundred percent required to move up the ladder of higher sapience. Any species that fails to overcome that obstacle is not going to make it.

It was a fascination, really, not so much about the citizens themselves or their occasional, attention-grabbing behaviors, more a curiosity. It was less about how or why they ended up where they did, but rather as to my confusion in realizing nobody was assisting them. I was seeing the problem through a child’s eyes, a simple equation of this begets that. So why not reverse it and correct it? Why weren’t the police taking them to shelter? Why weren’t their friends or families caring for them in distressed times?

Elementary, I know. As a child, I didn’t know caring for the unhoused required significant funding from state coffers bookmarked for more upper class issues, I didn’t know governance and voters had to debate on how to allocate resources, I didn’t know about the depths of mental illnesses or complex cycles of addiction, and what I super duper didn’t know were the ways in which a class-based society disregards, neglects, or ignores its supposedly least productive or high-risk citizens.

In my kiddie brain, I thought, “Let’s get them some food, let’s find them a place to sleep, let’s get them back on their feet, give them a job, send them to AA meetings, whatever we have to do, if we can send a man to the moon, we can get that guy a fucking sandwich.”

If only it were that easy, little Bard.

Actually, with the benefit of hindsight, it is that easy.

Given proper resource allocation.

You know, like providing meals and shelter and medical care to our unhoused, rather than upgrading our nuclear arsenal every year for no good reason.

I remember the first time I ever noticed a drifting soul like it was yesterday.

My family used to take cross-country drives across the southwest to my mother’s relatives who lived in Kansas. We’d often take the southern route via Arizona and New Mexico. My father picked up a beat-to-shit RV for pennies, a rattletrap ’75 Winnebago complete with cranky, foldout kitchen table beds, shag carpet, and zero air conditioning units. We’d go during summer, a poor time to traverse the southwest sans a cooling system, but like many middle-class families in the seventies, we made do with what we had. Some of the best and worst times my family ever had were on those cross-country drives. You all know what I’m talking about.

Anyway, we were soldiering through a stretch of the New Mexican desert, somewhere outside of Albuquerque, blazing sun and open skies and blistering, late afternoon heat. We stopped for the night at a KOA campground off the Interstate 10 freeway.

It was a roadside claptrap joint with faux concrete teepees and artificial fir trees erected around its fire pits, hyping an Indigenous motif. In the center of the RV park was a Stuckey’s billboard advertisement. Stuckey’s was a sort of Southwest - Midwest franchise chain of truck stop style convenience stores. If you’ve never had a Stuckey’s salted pecan log roll, you probably didn’t grow up in the seventies.

As I walked around the desert oasis, stretching my legs while Dad hooked up the rig to the dump station, I noticed a man, likely Indigenous in origin, behind the billboard, clearly inebriated, urinating, uncaring of his broad daylight exposure. He was dressed in tattered clothes, a pair of well-worn, taped-up boots, and his shopping cart was full of trash and dusty personal belongings. He looked at me with faded brown eyes that had seen many miles, his cracked skin flushed with sunburn and alcohol. He waved at me with one hand, the other still directing the arc of his flow. I waved back, nervous, unsure of how to deal with the new social situation.

Drifting sounds romantic enough to some, but it’s utter bullshit when you’re penniless. It’s one of the hardest American lives, day to day on the road, on foot, without a vehicle, having to seek charity just to eat. Watching that guy, in the twilight of his tenure on earth finishing up the race in that fashion, just felt wrong. I didn’t know how he’d gotten to that stage in his life and I didn’t care, only that he ought to be helped, never mind the possibility he may not have wanted help. I couldn’t imagine that, who wouldn’t want to be helped, if they were living out of a shopping cart? (ahem, white privilege, take a bow).

So I ran back to my Dad, asked him what the deal was with the guy. He took one look at him and told me he was a vagrant and not to mind him. I asked Dad what a ‘vagrant’ was, and he said a guy with no job, no home, and probably no family, or at least, no family that wanted anything to do with him. Then I suggested maybe we ought to give him a little money, to which my father naturally refused, telling me he’d just use it to buy booze or something else bad for him, guys like him had chosen that life, there was nothing we could do for him. At ten years old, I thought there was nothing we Americans couldn’t do if we really wanted to do it. Moon landings and world wars and all that jazz. I begged him for a few bucks, he refused, I turned to my mother who also refused, and finally I talked them into letting me take the guy one of our lukewarm ham sandwiches from the cooler.

I went back over to the man, under the watchful eye of my father, and held out the baggie-wrapped offering. He took it from my small hand, eyed it for a second, snorted, and tossed the sandwich into a nearby trash bin. As you might imagine, I was taken off guard. I didn’t know what to say – a rare occasion for me even then – and so I walked away, silent, sullen, back to my father, who was smiling, as was my mother. He asked me if I’d learned anything. I didn’t think I had, actually. I was as confused at the end of the interaction as I was at the beginning.

To say the KOA drifter dude struck a chord in me would be an understatement. For whatever reason, he instilled in me a lifelong advocacy for those whose personal demons have consumed them, or whose champions have failed them.

For every wandering vagabond I come across in my travels, I think, I feel, like they’re my brother or sister, once removed, a lost bond that somehow, we’ve both forgotten. Once in a great while, an alternate universe déjà vu descends upon me, and in that dimension, it’s me garbed in raggedy gear, collecting alms and dumpster diving and raving at Macy’s department store window dummies, dodging addiction and rape and murder in the back alleys of American cities, and in those multiverse kind of reflective moments, I hope that version of Bard came down with underdog syndrome and eventually won his way off the streets.

Continued…

*Compiled from June 17, 2020