Short Thing #10

five dollars for breakfast

He remembers why he started drinking. On occasion. It was fun. It was what you did. It was what everyone did. So he did.

And then he didn’t stop.

He didn’t actually get kicked out of his house. She never actually told him to leave. The bottle of whiskey wasn’t even the problem at the time. It was the events after the bottle of whiskey was finished that had something to do with it. And although he blamed her, for years, until now, when the occasions occur that he remembers why he started drinking, he also remembers that it wasn’t really her fault.

I was fifteen years old when I first saw someone that was actually homeless. I was in the city with my new boyfriend and we were walking around town to visit all the independent record shops. We couldn’t afford to actually buy any new cd’s in the independent record shops although I did buy a poster of the Red Hot Chili Peppers for my bedroom wall. It was on special for eight dollars in an alley way store. We thought we were pretty cool back then, trawling the cobbled streets in our Doc Marten’s. Walking in and out of the only places to be seen if you were a grunge/punk/rock/metal teenager at the time. We thought we were pretty cool.

A few streets over a woman walked out of one of the exits of our city’s famous department store. She walked straight up to a man sleeping in filth in an enclosed doorway on the building next door. She put a rolled up ten dollar note into his sleeping hand. The other hand held a brown paper bag with an unidentified empty bottle inside it.

I’m still trying to figure out the story.

She knew the man. She’d seen him when she went to work every morning and was his guardian angel. She was his long lost daughter. She knew who he was but he was always too drunk or crazy to recognise her anymore. She was rich and ten dollars to a homeless man was nothing to her. She was poor and ten dollars to a homeless man was kind and she could wait to eat dinner rather than eat any lunch.

She walked briskly away.

His life wasn’t really a choice. It was a result of a series of choices. A series of events that turned into his way of life. He never assumed when he walked out that night that he’d never walked back in again. He never assumed anything else would happen other than going to get another bottle of whiskey and drinking that until it was finished.

And so he did.

On the occasions when he remembers, he replays some of the events. But mostly he lives his day to day. That’s all one has ultimately, the inevitable ‘right now’.

When I was at university a girl came up to my group of friends. She couldn’t have been much older than us. But her skin was grey. Her eyes didn’t really open. Her clothes were dirty and her fingernails were cracked. She’d asked us for some change for the train. We said no. We’d just stockpiled all of our change to buy the bowls of chips in front of us. She went to the next table. The couple said no. And then the next. The teen agers said no. And then to the guy walking past talking on his mobile phone. He didn’t even look at her.

On the night he’d walked out, she had been screaming at him. Or maybe it just sounded like screaming after the whiskey was finished with. Or maybe the baby girl had been screaming. But he had tried to shut the screaming up. Had tried to make the noise go away.

Now he remembers. It had been the baby girl.

He’d tried to stop the baby from screaming and then it had been his wife that was screaming. She was screaming and clawing and pounding at the back of him.

So he had turned around and screamed back at her. He had been ferocious, he remembers that, although he doesn’t remember what he said. Or what she said. He does remember roaring. Roaring back at her.

Once I went to Thailand and this was my first overseas trip. The first of many. We spent some time in Chiang Mai. Famous for night markets and tailors, we consumed all that it had to offer and got some suits made. On our last night in town, we were watching a street performer and his magic tricks and I nudged my husband in the side. The eight or ten year old boy who’d been begging outside our hotel was standing up perfectly fine, enjoying the entertainment. Laughing. He’d been pretending the whole time that he didn’t have any legs. I looked at him and upon recognising me, he returned to his broken skateboard and the rags over his legs. He returned to his paper cup.

The few days after the screaming are a bit of a blur now. That is to be expected after so many years. Memories are blurry for most people. He does remember sleeping in his clothes though. Maybe after being kicked out of a bar.

He also remembers sleeping in the park one night. It was summer and it was warm. It had been like camping and there wasn’t anyone screaming in the park. Only the muttering of a few crazy homeless guys.

In London, on my way to work one day, long after my divorce, a woman walked through the carriage of the Tube. She was dressed in such a cliché gypsy outfit, I had to look for a few more seconds than etiquette determines polite to ensure that she truly was begging and not a performer. The dirt on her skin, and on the skin of her small child, were the give away signs. And then she stood at the end of the carriage and sang a song in a language I couldn’t quite place. I could tell that the song was sad though.

After a while the park became the best choice. He couldn’t go home now. And he didn’t really want to. Work was something he had done for a while but then he didn’t really want to do that either. Clothes and food and whiskey lasted while his money did. And then he found other ways of getting food.

People threw so much away.

When I was in Ireland for St Patrick’s Day my best friend and I got so drunk for so many hours in a row that our joint memories are ones we had to figure out in discussions after the event. So many things happened in a twenty-four hour period that we really had to put the puzzle back together. One thing that always makes us laugh when we reminisce about that night is she sitting in a doorway of a closed shop, vomiting into the street while I held her hair back. Two shops up the hill from us, another guy was tending to his friend who was vomiting in a very similar fashion. The guy and I exchanged “what are you gonna do? They're our best mates” kind of looks and before we knew it, our vomity friends were flirting with each other. Us responsible ones, got the vomity ones out of there straight away. To enjoy more drinking and debauchery.

After time had past and he could no longer afford whiskey he took to drinking whatever he could scrape some change together to buy. People were more generous in the city but he found that if he slept most of the day and only asked for money in peak hour he was more likely to get enough to buy something worthwhile. Otherwise, asking for money during the day meant that he would also get too hungry. And he didn’t want to have to waste money on buying food. Sometimes he even had enough to get some of the spirits they sell at the supermarket. The essences people used for cooking. They hurt his throat but they were cheap.

My son and I had to cross a busy intersection on our first night in Medan. I didn’t really like Sumatra because I’d felt lost from the moment we landed. It hadn’t felt safe and the guys with the guns didn’t help much.

My three year old was holding my hand as we walked past a woman sitting in the middle of the intersection with her hand out to passing motorists. Wrapped up against her breast was an infant, sleeping.

He’d made some friends over the years. Some that had moved on or gotten ‘help’. Some that had been so crazy that someone had taken them away. Some that had a home to go back to and medication to fix things. Some didn’t make it through winter. Some did. But mostly he kept to himself. It was easier that way.

Lonelier. But easier, too.

We had a favourite street in New Orleans, Royal street. It was the epitome of everything I’d imagined the French Quarter to be, without the stink of liquor and vomit that radiated from the aptly named, Bourbon street. My son and I were a family and at nearly five years old, he loved the jazz and blues that came from every other window of every other bar and café in the Quarter. Every morning we ate breakfast at a little place that sold good coffee and beignets. It was next to the Quarter Police station. A big old building with white columns and tall black iron fences surrounding the small gardens at the side.

One morning a man asked me for some change and I smiled politely, shook my head and walked on.

Then I walked back.

I gave him five dollars and told him to please get some breakfast. To get something to eat. He thanked me, smiled with teeth missing, and told me my son was a good one.

On the night of the screaming she’d threatened calling the cops. He remembers the colour of her eyes as he held her up against the wall in the hallway. Outside the baby girl’s room. Her eyes had started to change colour and the screaming had stopped. She kicked him in the knee and scraped her shoe down his leg. He’d dropped her to the floor.

And there was silence.

He remembered it hurting his leg when he had stepped over her. He slammed the front gate behind him and walked away.

Then there was the screaming again.

...

After we had our beignets and my coffee, we passed the man again. He had a bottle of coca cola sitting on the steps next to him. I asked if he’d gotten anything to eat.

He shook his head and said he’d needed a drink first.

(c) Samantha Florence, 2012.