Uncomfortable Places I've Slept In

Not the actual van. Duh.

A Nonworking Van in Someone's Driveway, Rural Minnesota

I used to get around everywhere by bike. I loved my late 80s white Specialized Stumpjumper, bought for about $200 brand new and lovingly obsessed over for a decade by me. I especially enjoyed the feel of speeding down hills on roads, sitting straight up evoking the sensation of time whipping past me.

I took several bike trips after I'd moved to Minnesota. This one was the cycling tour I took to visit my soon-wife while she was doing a radio internship in the small Wisconsin town she'd grown up in. I rode several days from Mankato where we were students on the Sakatah Trail and then began riding back roads east across Minnesota to the Mississippi. 

It may have been the third or fourth evening of the trip. I was on a road bordered by long lines of trees with occasional houses. Back then I used a slim backpack US atlas where I traced my travels with markers, including stars at places I'd spent the night. But I've long since lost that, so my best guess is it was along one of the rural roads between Northfield and Prescott. A storm was brewing that I expected, having heard about it on a radio playing at the McDonald's where I'd had breakfast that morning. But by midafternoon I didn't need a weatherman to tell that. The sky had been a milky grey before covering what was left of the sun by 4 or 5.The wind, which had been pleasant through most of my trip, picked up so I was pressing the pedals as hard as if I'd been riding through a river flowing in the opposite direction. 

I didn't have a watch--I haven't worn one since the mid-80s--so my estimate of the time of day is really a guesstimate. But I was certain it was darker earlier than it should be. I'd started looking for someplace to set in for the night, hoping my tent would weather it but worrying it wouldn't. So I was searching for a place under trees where, even if I was at risk of a limb falling on me, would afford better protection than being in the open. 

I'd decided to start looking for an abandoned barn but while they were plentiful in that part of the state the only ones I could see were all in use by cows and horses. I was beginning to wonder if I could ask some family if I could cower on their porch when I passed a house with several vehicles in the driveway. My eye was caught by a van up on blocks. It looked like it was unlikely to suddenly be dragooned back in use. I stopped just past the house, listening to the sounds of people inside it, determined they were unlikely to hear or see me--it was the kind of place built into a hill where the ground floor on one side was actually the basement with no windows and the living was done on the next floor--and without giving it another thought opened the back of the van, popped my bike and gear inside, and closed it behind me.

The sharp smell of disuse and gasoline intoxicated me. The floor was a collection of tools, laid out where they could be grabbed easily from the door, and beyond them it was comparatively clear. I laid out my mat and mummy bag and read by what thin light was still available; when I decided it was safe,  I used my tiny reading light for a while until I gave in to exhaustion.

The wind had been pretty steady while I'd read and for the initial part of my sleep until the sound of a train barreling down the tracks at me shook me awake in a panic. The wind had  become a behemoth during my nap, a massive dragon snuggling up to my shelter and buffeting it enough that the sides shook. 

But I felt safe. The van had stood on those blocks for a long while and through many storms. Nothing was going to pierce those walls, not the harridan wind or the rain that hit the roof and windows sounding like stilettos. It probably went on for hours but I had little trouble, once I determined there was nothing coming into the few holes I noted in the van's floor, sleeping the sleep of the just plain tired. 

Despite my referring to it now as uncomfortable, it actually was pretty warm and secure and, most of all, dry. I slept close enough to one of the holes the smell of gas didn't bother me. When I woke the sun was just cresting the horizon. I usually spent the first minutes of my day brushing my teeth and splashing water on my face, but I didn't want to be caught by my unknowing saviors, so after a quick gulp from my water bottle, I opened the door as quietly as I could, and stepped out into a brilliant aqua-tinted world. Everything looked washed clean by the storm. Even the air seemed like it had been spiffed up. I took my bike out, closed the door just as quietly, walked it to the road and hopped on it without looking back. Tree limb after tree limb had been flung to the road and huge puddles were easy to navigate away from. Reaching the next town I heard it'd been a severe thunderstorm with sub-Category One winds, only(!) reaching speeds in the 60s. I was dry and safe and celebrated with a full breakfast at the diner. 

Uncomfortable Places Where I've Slept

 

There are no chickens in this story

MY LIVING ROOM FLOOR, NORTH CHESTNUT STREET, 

NEW PALTZ

 

I’d met this guy Jonathon while working semester opens at the college bookstore. He was really introverted but we got along. He invited me to a party in The City, although who he knew there I never figured out. The two of us rode out on the Trailways bus and took a subway to wherever the apartment was. I’m necessarily a little hazy on the details.

Most of the night for me was in bursts and flashes. I remember drinking tequila and then fashioning some concoction from other alcohols. I remember making out with a woman in a room away from the party but other than long reddish hair I don’t remember anything about her. This is a big part of the reason Jonathon later stopped being friends with me because I found out she was someone he liked and had hoped to get to know at this party. I wasn’t much of one for niceties like that in those years.

When the party broke up at 1 or 2 we took the subway back to Penn Station but there were no busses leaving until 7. So we joined the ranks of the homeless who squatted in the one room inside the station the cops kept open for them. Once an hour they rousted us to another end of the room, saying “No one sleeps!” But I did as I was riotously drunk and between bouts of laughing at the cops (not a practice I’d suggest) and trudging from spot to spot, I huddled on the floor and slept the fitful half-doze known to both the inebriated and those trying to have conversations with them. Jonathon spent the whole time standing and trying both to stay near me, like I was protection, and being as far from other people as he could.

Eventually the sun came up and at 630 we could buy tickets, with which we could stay the half hour to 7 while the others were bounced into the street. The bus ride was two hours but to me it seemed both like hours longer and just a few moments. We reached town, I walked with Jonathon as far as the corner of Main and North Chestnut where we parted, him to his room and me  to my apartment.

Now this is where it becomes uncomfortable.

I’m one of those lucky few born with some immunity to the bad effects of drugs and alcohol. I’ve never had a bad trip from LSD, never gotten paranoid while smoking weed or hash, never experienced anything but stupendous and unremembered epiphanies on shrooms or peyote. Never had a hangover no matter how much I drank. Except that time.

My headache began on the bus but I put it down to the sun in my eyes and lack of solid sleep. As I walked, I could feel each step travel from my foot through my body to the tiny hammer banging my brain. I had never felt so happy getting to my apartment, so much so I opened the door and did a faceplant on the floor. I didn’t feel like I could make it to bed, I just laid there and slept.

Or I tried to. It seemed that day everyone in the world I knew chose to visit me, either in groups or singly. Again, only fleeting memories but I do remember a stream of drool from my mouth to a small pool next to me when the first person, whoever it was, knocked at the door. Stupid me, it never occurred to me not to say, “Come in,” although that wouldn’t have accomplished much as I had a habit of not locking my door and encouraging people to walk in.

I alternately curled into the fetal position or spread full out like DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man. I may have even resembled that drawing a little as my hair was curly and long and sweat-plastered to the floor. I vaguely recall Jonathon coming by with another friend of ours, I don’t remember who, and looking smugly down on my pain. I probably cried once or twice. No one, fortunately, stayed long, or I don’t think they did, because I kept drifting back off to sleep after a few sentences describing my head variously as a deflated basketball, a cracked egg, a fishbowl full of fecal water, a balloon blown up by a congested drunken bum. There may have been more.

Eventually the night came, and far from being refreshed, I was so worn by the exhaustion of breathing through a mouth equal parts dry and swampy I fell finally into bed wearing the same clothes I’d worn to the party now 24 hours before and drifted in and out of consciousness until 5 or 6 the next morning, when I got up, stretched my 45 minute routine, and then put on running shorts and took a ginger mile and a half jog. Outside the day-long, incessant hammering, that was my usual start to the morning, which may have been why I didn’t usually suffer otherwise

Uncomfortable Places I've Slept

 

Wildcat Mountain, Frost Valley, New York

 I’d found Wildcat Mountain years before when working at a group home that took the kids to a camp during winter. It’s a comfortable mountain full of trails and a cable bridge across a creek, bluffs, and many places to hide out, along with a huge open field. I camped there for a month in the late 80s.

My first night, I found a spot off one of the side trails, certain I wouldn’t be seen or heard. I had a secondhand tent that smelled of mold no matter what I did to it, but I’d gotten used to, if not happy with the smell. After setup I sat on a bluff over the field and watched the shadows from the trees behind me lengthen and then take over.

I was awake for a while after dark, reading Gary Snyder’s The Old Ways by battery lamp. I fell into a dreamy sleep involving Neil Young (I’d sung “After the Gold Rush” to myself while on the bluff). I was wakened by a noise. I couldn’t place it but I sat up, listening for another.

Not long to wait. Another, nearer sound came from just outside the tent. The scant moonlight allowed me to see one edge of the tent buckle, like a finger or a fist was pushing it in slowly, then suddenly withdraw. Then another sound I still couldn’t identify, and another part of the tent buckled, then just as quickly returned to place.

I didn’t dare turn on the light. I didn’t know who might have found my camp or what reason they might have to bother me, but in my imagination, it was any number of dangerous killers high on coke who happened across me and wanted, if just for fun, to frighten me.

Beside me on the floor was a survival knife I’d been given, one of those long-bladed monstrosities with which you could fillet a fish, tell the direction you were facing, unscrew the handle to access the small sawblade and fishing line, crack open a beer, and presumably fight off nefarious attackers. I slid it silently as I could from its sheath and crept slowly to the front of the tent. Other spots on the tent continued those sounds and their pushing in and letting out.

Experiences like this led me later to conclude that if you have a weapon, you’ll find a reason to use it. I unzipped the tent door, screamed as loudly as I could, and, brandishing my knife, flailed into the open,. In my mind, I was Conan facing a squadron of cannibalistic enemies. Realistically, I was a naked, shivering man with wild hair watching the fast-retreating white tails of several deer in the dim light. The noise had been their sniffing at the moldy smell and their snorting challenges at my invasion of their trail to the creek.

Uncomfortable Places I Have Slept 2

 

Not my vehicle

Chilcott’s Mechanics, Route 32, north of New Paltz, NY

 I spent a week at a retreat put on by Direct Centering, the cult I was involved with in the middle 80s. I’m likely to write more about this in the future, but this is what led to a morning spent at a garage.

I’d driven down two friends, and while I remember their faces, I don’t remember their names. When we returned to New York from Florida, I also gave a ride to Shelley, my occasional friend with benefits (although we didn’t call it that back then). The four of us left Florida, where the retreat had been, and drove the east coast home, dropping each person off on the way. One lived in northern Jersey, one in Brooklyn, and Shelley was staying in Riverdale with her mom. It was a long drive, and only two of us, Shelley and me, had driver’s licenses. I don’t remember how often we changed drivers but at one of them Shelley ordered me to drink a full cup of coffee.

Now, here is the place to talk about my complex relationship with coffee. Growing up, my parents had regularly downed cups of what they called coffee each morning, and it wasn’t for decades I realized what they were drinking was Sanka or sometimes Kava. The liquid smelled terrific, but the actual taste was like a brown crayon dipped in tepid tap water. I vowed never to become a bean head like them. To reinforce this, the coffee Shelley had me drink was from a pot of late-night percolated stuff on the back shelf of some station where we gassed up. It went down like moist grit.

Years after this, I was at a Rainbow Gathering where I was introduced to Cowboy Coffee at an off-trail kitchen called The Mud Hole. [Kid to the guy hunkered over a pot on an open flame: “You got any water?” The guy, from somewhere in the recesses of his gut: “Nope, got mud.” Kid: “Oh, I get it. You got any coffee?” Guy: “Nope, got mud.”] My reaction to drinking this black distillate was like The Simpson’s Barney Gumble chugging his first beer: “Where have you been all my life?” And by now, I am a fully confirmed java-head, whose father was unable to drink more than a quarter cupful generously laced with water when I made it.

Anyway, it may have been the effects of that cup that made me refuse Shelley’s offer of a nap at her mom’s place, telling her, “I’m an hour from home, I can do this.” It was also bravado, which I had in great supply.

The retreat was in mid-winter and while we were south, New York had a couple snowstorms, none very heavy, but there were a couple inches on the ground. I was renting an apartment in New Paltz then and was kinda anxious to sleep in my bed. Most of my drive was uneventful, I was holding steady at about 60 on the Thruway, a little slower than most traffic because there were patches of black ice here and there. But I was a New Yorker, had driven in snow and sleet all my life, and I knew how to avoid them.

Up until between the exits to Newburgh and New Paltz. I passed a car going slower than me and fishtailed, first to the right, then left, then careened out of control, between two other vehicles, and over the embankment rear-first, sliding through about ten feet of snow, ice, and slush to come to rest at an angle where I had no choice but to look at the sky.

My first impression was amazement that things I knew belonged in the back seat were on the dashboard. My second was that the music, in the silence now of snow and my car rattling like a tin toy slowly dying, was all too loud, so I switched the car and the radio off. The tune was Sting singing “Russians," a song I was familiar with from dozens of anti-nuke rallies. It’s funny to me when I think back how clear like window glass this memory is.

I was unharmed. I had a car with no airbags but my seatbelt held firm, and in the sudden quiet, when I turned to discover my window was broken—for days I was shedding glass shards from my long hair—I could hear the wet snow landing on the car and the drifts now beside me.

The woman whose car I’d careened past stopped and called from the side of the road to me, asking if I was all right. I’m certain the first words out of my mouth were “I’m all right!” This is a thing for me, that when I am in an accident where I ought to be hurt, I hurriedly assure whoever is around “I’m okay!” It’s a way to convince myself of my own safety, my ability to survive.

I disengaged my seatbelt and trudged up the bank to the woman’s car, my sneakers and pants cuffs soaked. This part is outside my memory: I’m certain we spoke for a while and she was very helpful to me, but I genuinely can’t remember what we said to one another and, in this decade before the first car or cell phones, can’t remember how she contacted the state troopers so quickly. Because, in my memory, a patrol car was there within minutes. I suppose I was in shock, because really the rest of my memory of this incident involves my car being pulled out of the snow and then towed, with me in the cab, to the next exit and eventually to the mechanic’s shop, a nondescript block of connected garages along the highway between New Paltz and Kingston. 

Shortly after arriving I made several phone calls to find someone who could pick me up. I found someone who could do so several hours later. In the last moments of this memory, I settled on the lounge couch, an old, overstuffed, dusty thing that reminded me of the couch in the three-season porch of the home my family moved to in the early 70s, where I spent most of my summers reading yellowed comic pages and pulp novels from the 30s and 40s. Despite my uncertainty about whether my car was repairable and how I was going to pay for it, and despite the commotion—many others had been sliding off the roads—going on around me, the couch was familiar and calming and I fell into a deep, comforting sleep.

Celebrating a Chinese poet

 

“TO LIVE IS TO SHOUT AT THE SKY”

(With apologies to Nianxi Chen, whose title I have appropriated)

 

I woke because I had heard my name

Muttered in the lyrics to “Diamonds and Rust.”

I’d fallen asleep over an article about

A Chinese miner, an explosives worker, who

Had also been a poet. Waking, I sat, a dog

Curled against my haunch, my customary

Middle aged position, the middle finger

Of my right hand holding closed my right eye.

The second knuckle curled against the lid, thought-

Lessly, holding down a broken window shade

That keeps flapping up.

My Old Man

Twenty years ago, in an obscure regional magazine, I published a story about my dad. It was called "My Old Man" and it was funny and affectionate and my wife calls it her favorite piece of mine. I am, I think, rightly proud of it.

My old man, as described in that story, is a different old man than the one I come here to visit. There remain some indications he's the same man. He's funny and has the same goofy grin widening his cheeks when he says something he knows people will laugh at. He still sits with his arms folded or purses his lips, steeples his fingers, and puts them in front of his mouth when he's relaxing, often after a meal. He still doesn't want to be seen without his teeth in and a "nice" shirt and pair of slacks on. With shoes, not slippers. He's a favorite of the nurses and aides at his nursing facility, partly because he rarely complains and partly because he will spend days smiling at nothing.

In a deeper, more important way, he is a different person. He's like the hospice patients I visit. When I see him and he's asleep, I sit quietly in a chair next to him, touching his shoulder, holding his hand. When he starts to make sounds, like my dogs when they dream, I gently rub his shoulder, his hands, and he has the same reaction as them. He remains asleep and settles, calmed, relaxed, his breathing that of someone sliding into a warm tub. The flecks of dead skin on his cheeks or the dried milk on his lips remind me he has joined ranks of the elderly who have either forgotten to wipe their faces after eating or no longer care. He loses control of his emotions, on occasion, possibly as a result of his strokes, possibly because of the UTIs his body collects like stamps. It rarely lasts long, a flash of fear and hopelessness, tears, and then he's forgotten it. He's smiling again, at nothing again.

It took me decades to come to love the Old Man I grew up with. He was a good man although like most children I wasn't always aware of it. Frankly, it wasn't until my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and he became her primary caregiver that I realized just how good he was capable of being. When I began to visit him in the nursing facility, I was faced with a different Old Man, one who was more frail and, at that time, not even certain of who I was. He has improved, partly physically and partly mentally, to the extent he can occasionally use a walker instead of a wheelchair and he usually recognizes my face and voice. But he tires easily and I can't spend more than a couple hours with him before he's got to sleep, and doesn't want to see me until the next day. He is, in some ways, the same Old Man I've loved, but in a more profound way I've had to come to love a new Old Man.

my 1980s

[Although many dissed it, I enjoyed this Wayne Koesten-baum essay reprint on Salon, so much so that I've decided to write a similar one in the same style.  Mine will be, of necessity, shorter for the simple reason I'll try to say something in fewer words and images.]

"Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose."
Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

I wanted to be the Next Great American Writer in the 1980s. I published one very bad novel and an interesting monograph on Jerzy Grotovski and a few short stories and poems. But I wrote many, many other things.  In my teens a professor told me I was a Renaissance Man and I took that to heart, wanting to whip off novels and poems with the same alacrity as Victor Hugo or Thomas Hardy; tellingly, I didn't enjoy reading either of them at the time. I envisioned myself forever sitting up late at night writing hard, amber-clear prose that never quite satisfied me. There is a wordless comic strip from Love and Rockets by Los Bros Hernandez from that time that shows one of the characters typing and smoking late into the night in a high garret room, suddenly crushing a sheet of paper with dismay, and that's how I saw myself. I often accomplished the sitting up late, drinking instead of smoking, but rarely found anything near solid, precise wording.

***

I was married when the 80s started and divorced about midway through. It was by mutual consent and there were no kids or property to dispose of so it was relatively amicable. We had sex nearly every day because we were young and horny and it was one of the few times we didn't fight. After we divorced and I lost nearly a hundred pounds I found to my surprise she wasn't the only person attracted to me and eventually I would gain a reputation, not undeserved, for fucking nearly everyone who approached me. For a while I enjoyed sex with men as a sort of vacation from the emotional messiness of sex with women, a kind of palate-cleanser between courses.

***

I read a tremendous amount, usually on walks and under trees, from silly novels to dense philosophies. I tried to find at least one important line from every book or poem or short story or essay and then typed it on a slip of paper and taped it to the swinging door of my kitchen. I'd been given a portable manual typewriter as a graduation present and it was on this I wrote nearly everything during that time. I had had a larger manual office model someone gave me during my marriage and it was on this I wrote my novel and the monograph, but one evening after reading On the Road I stood up suddenly and began to move methodically around my little apartment collecting furniture, clothes, books, kitchen utensils, everything I decided I no longer needed, and piled them in the center of my living room floor to give away. The office typewriter was among the last items to make the pile.

***

Today I have a lot of friends who hop trains and call themselves train kids. I did that only a couple times and only for short distances, always returning to my starting point. I was alone each time and spent the whole ride hunkered close to whatever I was holding onto: my first time I clutched a pole tightly, scared shitless I would be blown off and my body found by kids a la Stephen King's "The Body," and the next times I went I belted myself to something secure. I was a road kid, spending most of my time hitchhiking or in my own car. I always had luck hitching; it was always a matter of patience and not looking angry as the cars and trucks whizzed past me. One of the few times I hitched with someone else was one of the least productive hitch times of my career; we walked hours on the side of the New York State Interstate--we were headed to Buffalo--but we made it within twelve hours of our starting by dint of catching a train outside Rochester because it was dark and no one could see out thumbs. Whenever I hear the Pet Shop Boys' "West End Girls" I go back to that time and think specifically of riding around in the back seat of a car driven by a lesbian who would come out as straight within a year and who was showing us the city.

***

I acted in porn movies for a short time, a single summer, but it was enough to fund my life for a year. $500-1000 for a weekend's worth of work was great money. It was easier and less anxiety-producing than I'd feared and I loved the sex. I never thought about AIDS, not because this was before it or I knew no one who had it--I lost several friends to its depredations and I carry a healthy hatred for Ronald Reagan and his ambivalence to this day--but because I was stupid enough to think I was immortal. I actually came through those years of mostly unprotected sex without a single STD, leading my friends to joke my mother, like Achilles', had dipped me in the River Teflon. 

***



Authors I read for the first time that decade who played an important role in how I write: Susan Sontag, Jean Genet, Bruce Chatwin, John Gardner, Joan Didion, Thomas Merton, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Dominick Dunne, Tom Robbins, Louise Erdrich, Tim O'Brien, H.P. Lovecraft, Raymond Carver, John Le Carre, Henry David Thoreau, Rita Dove, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Simic, Gore Vidal, Georges Simenon, Anne Tyler, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lord, D.H. Lawrence, Toni Morrison, Rita Adler, Carlos Castenada, Ursula K. LeGuin, Peter Straub, Stephen King, Clive Barker, John Irving, Thomas Pynchon, etc.

***

For years after my divorce I lived in New Paltz, the town where my college was located. The town is snuggled at the base of the Shawangunk Mountain range between the Hudson and Wallkill Rivers and is home to many freaks. I found myself fitting there like fingers that curl into a fist. Three years after my divorce, through some stunningly bad decisions, I was out of work and had to give up my apartment to a friend. I was in Manhattan for a job interview and, having waited too long because I was at a bar to catch the last bus out of the City, I found a quiet berth under a construction trailer on the overpass above the Grand Central Station. I was warm, safe, and it was astonishingly easy to get in and out without being seen. I ended up sleeping under that trailer for several months, until approaching winter made me decide it was time to visit my parents. They were against my returning to the trailer, or to New Paltz, where I might have slept on friends' couches, so I said, "Buy me a cheap car and I'll live in that." They found a 77 Dodge Aspen wagon for $500 and I spent a weekend making it habitable and then lit out for the road. I lived in it for three years, seeing almost all of the country and parts of Canada, before my mother's entreaties to come back out of it and go to graduate school prevailed. I disembarked in southern Minnesota and sold the Aspen and lived in a park seven miles from town, sleeping under a gazebo and riding my bike to classes. This was September, 1989, and in another nine months I would meet my second, or as she says, my last wife. 

"the churches are too damned timid"

"it seemed pretty tame to me; but [reverend dave] moss now made an announcement: 'after dinner we can't go outside until 7 am. we've gotta be really under the radar about this. if you have to smoke this evening sometime between now and six, go out in ones and twos at the most. we cannot be visible to the neighbors or we'll have to shut the program down.'

"a blondish young woman name charlene remarked that up in oroville she had rented a lady's front yard for three hundred dollars a month so that she could pitch her tent there, with kitchen and toilet privileges. the police arrested her. the neighbors came to her defense, the landlady brought proof of payment, and the police had to let her go, but did so in an angry spirit. she also said that in marysville the city council had posted signs in churches announcing that people were not allowed to stay there after dark.


"frank asked for a volunteer to lead us in prayer and thank the church. we formed a circle, holding hands, and a woman prayed in a weak, tremulous voice. I heard her express gratitude to safe ground...then the church people served us dinner from a buffet table, ladies first. I thanked one woman for the salad she ladled onto my plate, and she replied: 'it's my pleasure to serve.' people like her give christians a good name.



"david leeper moss, retired from the united methodist ministry, big-shouldered alumnus of the board of loaves and fishes, white of beard and mustache, had been involved with safe ground since july of last year. 'I heard about tent city and defying the anti-camping ordinance, and I thought, man, this is the place where I would like to be! there's a disconnect between the people who are supporting safe ground and the people who are living safe ground, and since I know my gifts and graces, I know that I can be a bridge between them.'



"I told him that the necessity of his guests' hiding themselves from the neighbors made me sad. he replied: 'the trinity cathedral on capitol doesn't have the same community that we do, so people can smoke on the sidewalk. also, it's larger. there are even facilities for pets.' (all but one of the animal owners here tonight had left their animals in their tents at the river. the exception was a woman with a tiny, utterly silent dog.)



"moss went on: 'if you ask me, the churches are too damned timid.'



"'there must be many homeless who for whatever reason won't follow the safe ground rules,' I said.



"'safe ground is not a solution for homelessness. it's part of a mosaic of solutions.'



"I liked that. it was modest enough that it might be true...



"lying on my back in the darkness, I stared up at the high ceiling and around me at the yellow-glowing door panes, the long low sleeping-bag islands against the walls, and dave moss sitting alone in the light of the restroom doorway, reading a book. he sat there all night as far as I know, for in the morning he was in the same spot. another sentinel manned the table by the front door. I suppose that if one of us had attacked another, or tried to go into where the women slept, one of them would have called for frank. as I lay there, I felt a strange feeling of happiness. I could hear a woman's high-pitched cough, rich with phlegm. now the church was almost entirely silent. a man rustled crossly in his sleeping bag. a pack buckle clicked quietly open.

"in the morning the lights came on at six o'clock sharp. some of us were already rolling up our sleeping bags as quietly as we could. frank was booming out: 'I need a volunteer to mop the floor. I need a volunteer to clean the men's bathroom. thank you, volunteers.' there came a prayer, and toast and cereal for breakfast."

--from "homeless in sacramento: welcome to the new tent cities" by william vollmann in the march 2011 issue of harper's magazine

franconia notch

in this dream I was homeless again and a group of us had been taken in by the young owner of a store--it might have been a pet store--and given blankets and pillows and allowed to sleep on the floor. it was actually pretty nice, a feeling like a big teen sleepover, although it got confusing when the place opened up and customers started walking around.

one girl settled down next to me on the floor and we shared a blanket and talked about our travels. she was from a town near the franconia notch in new hampshire and I have some fond memories of hiking there. that was really all this dream was about, was sharing some happy memories with another person about a place I liked in a relaxed, if somewhat outre, atmosphere.

(and speaking of atmosphere, I was also aware in my dream of eyedea's death over the weekend and somehow that had an impact on me. this then is as good a place as any to say goodbye to him.)