On The Road With Al & Ivy: A Literary Homeless Chronicle - Oct. 19, 2018

"Though frightening, your dream is a significant portent. You must know the Gods have decreed that the lot of the living is to grieve. Your dream ordains mourning for the one who survives."

- The Gilgamesh (Gerald J. Davis 2014 translation)

"I have heard it said that there are men who read in books to convince themselves there is a God."

- James Fenimore Cooper (Last Of The Mohicans)

"...I was playing the guitar but heard an orchestra in my head."

- John Fahey

As of this writing (of this opening section), this blog has reached a wonderful milestone; a half million visits, virtually all of it for the "On The Road With Al & Ivy" homeless literary journal that began on the Delta Snake page and was later split off into it's own blog. The half million figure is the total for the two blog pages.

The earlier blog was called the Delta Snake Review, which was intended to be a continuation of my 80s blues and jazz newsletter (and later website), and to continue writing the music instrument reviews that I had been doing for the ePinions site (before it closed down the review sections).

I've been writing since the 80s, back then for my newsletter and as a freelance who was able to get work in regional weekly papers and later on the Internet. I've always identified as a writer, among other things, but found that freelance work tended to make the end game all about money and the prestige level of the customer, and not writing as art. A process that moves art into the realm of sales, which creates the age old artistic dichotomy of expression and craft.

The circulation of the publication (and it's grand arbiter, the Editor) was seen as the writer's "audience," at least by conventional wisdom according to writer magazines and other experts. 

Any freelance writer with half a brain quickly realizes that the real "audience" is that one person who has the power to buy the piece. A person has a better chance of making a sale working at a jewelry counter.

That didn't make me cynical. I'd been a musician, I already knew the entertainment business was brutal, and had my own reasons for playing music in spite of that, and that went for writing too. Freelance did teach me some valuable skills that I'll cover in a future blog.

I self-published to be able to write about music without anyone's approval, and found my audience. Sometimes that was a relatively small number of paid subscribers like with the Delta Snake Blues Review, or a larger number like with my ePinions instrument reviews with 370,000 visits.

...what's really important...

My priority was always audience, or to have actual people reading my writing. If it was profitable, great, if not, fine. 

The thing is, although writing for one's satisfaction and growth is important, public expression is about reaching people. If not, I would just tap all this out on my iPad, enjoy the inner rewards and be done with it.

If I had been like that, perhaps I'd now still be out there in a car, struggling alone without my good pal Ivy and thinking it was all fate (or punishment, more on that later in this blog).

Instead, because I was a writer, i kept writing, I called out for help and was saved by that very audience that read my blog.

I called out for help in spite of every shame instinct because, among other things, writing had taught me that real art was expression and that included possibly looking bad. 

...Good writing is about truth...

Truth isn't some corny Hollywood movie line. It's the difference between a work that connects with people and one that's forgotten quickly.

The subject of truth in art is, of course, much larger than what can be covered in this blog entry, but in my case, it was all about how art is a connection to the real self.

The musical equivalent is being able to play the sound that's in your head, and not having it filtered by concerns like money or approval, or limited by technical ability. Which is why "practice" in any art is important. You're not training to be play lessons or sound like some legend. It's to develop the technique to be able to play what you want to play.

Another way to say it is if you can master music scales on your instrument, you can possibly master yourself. Those scales and etudes are nowhere near as difficult as the music in the mind that wants to come out. 

Technical skill is a tool or path. Some stay stuck in it, some can move on. Neither is better or worse actually, but if you want to become a Van Gogh, the path is beyond the technical.

In terms of writing, what I'm talking about is being able to honestly write what's in your head. "Being honest" is a common writing axiom, but way too many writers interpret that as simply being blunt about other things and people, or listing things that are really designed to titillate.

There's things that are comfortable to say, and others that aren't. Society has made it easier to come out and say that drug's caused one's fall, for example, but it's not so easy to admit to the deeds done because of that habit.

If I had tried to finish the book out there in the car, I'd have probably not mentioned pimps and drug dealers, even in my blog. For my safety if nothing else. Fear is an effective censor.

The homeless scene was a sprawling collection of people, some of whom caused trouble, could get you in trouble, couldn't help but get into trouble, or avoided trouble. It might seem tempting to treat them as a purely sympathetic huddled mass, and it'd be OK to do that if I saw it that way.

But it would be artistically dishonest in my case if I saw it differently. There was no Godfather movie type glamor out there, no tough guy mean streets, or anything that would fit in a Hollywood film.

...life on the streets...

The "streets" are all too often portrayed as a tough Darwinian world where "street smarts" and toughness are a virtue, and the enemy is straight society and the cops.

As I've said in past blog entries, it's true if it is and isn't when it isn't.

One of the things that hit me out there was how different the reality of street life was out there, as opposed to what it seemed to be in books, TV and movies. It was supposed to be a world full of bad cops, criminals who were really rebels with loyalty and heart, and a poor noble multitude who had been forsaken by a materialistic society.

The real "street" is very Darwinan (and very capitalist), and it's as repressive as any police state (and not from the cops). All the elements are there; from leaders who look out for number one, brown shirt type thugs, and most importantly for any police state to exist, a vast system of informants and commissar types who keep the faith.

Fascism has become a stereotype with Nazi images as the default portrait, but it is, and always has been really a modern ideology, an outlook concerned about power. It's about control and the use of force and can develop anywhere. George Orwell wrote that it was a development that came after the 19th century colonial/imperialistic period (in a nutshell anyway, it's explained a more complex way in his essays).

Put more plainly, it was a world with sharks and little fish.

You had to be selfish out there. My goal was to get Ivy and me out, to survive, and without committing any crimes if at all possible. I did manage to not commit crimes, and survive, but in all honesty, it was because I was rescued by a lot of good people, and not due to any heroic acts on my part.

I didn't rob anyone, but in the later drafts of the book, as my life began to return to "normal," it became apparent that for whatever reason, good or not, I had to not act on or report on a good many crimes out there.

There was a woman, for example, out there that everyone could see was getting too deep into drugs in the worst possible place, and was being cultivated by a dealer/pimp whom no one dared cross. Another young woman was cultivated by a man from respectable society who showered her with gifts then disappeared after using her. Another guy was almost certainly a sociopath who preyed on men, and the list could go on, other than the usual (and true) disclaimer that most of the people out there were good and decent.

Sure, I didn't see the actual crimes...no one can ignore that sort of thing unless absolutely heartless. I'd have had to take the risk of telling the police. But that possible male predator, for example, actually targeted me before another homeless guy. I sensed a trap and avoided any contact, but the next guy didn't and only then I realized what was happening and how lucky I was.

I also kept my mouth shut.

It happened in that awful period when my car was immobile for two months on a street, and there was good reason to not say say anything; the most obvious being that there was no way to leave and avoid reprisal. 

...the early drafts...

The early drafts projected a sense of abject fear, covered by a mask of bravado and street smarts. It was tempting to edit out the fearful ruminations and portray myself as a brave soul with a faithful dog that formed an indomitable team.

The reality was that the homeless life took a real toll, and I reacted in a variety of ways that showed strength, but also weakness and frailty. There was apathy around, as described in past blog entries, but the underlying element was always fear.

It even affected Ivy. She certainly grew into an indispensable hero, but also came to realize that I was the main link to safety in a life centered around a car seat, and experienced moments of fear and anxiety.

It wasn't doggie paranoia or separation anxiety. There was at least one attempt to break into the car to get her that was broken up by a homeless friend who intervened. It was by this seemingly well off couple that had been shadowing me for  couple of days. The attempt to grab her through a partially open window was traumatic.

It's part of a bigger story in the book, but in a nutshell, there were more than a few people who tried to get dogs taken away from the homeless for various reasons.

One reason that honesty is difficult in art is we all like to avoid criticism. We prefer to create work that people will like, to enjoy, and let's face it, to perhaps buy. No one buys things that makes them feel bad.

The fear described in the book wasn't cowardice. It was close to some things experienced as a child, but nothing I could say was experienced before, but in writing honestly about it, the chance has to be taken that people would consider it cowardice or not caring about those around me.

No one will learn anything new if I just get into a Grapes of Wrath trip (the movie version) and write about a glorious struggle in broad terms and beloved archetypes.

So the book has to be honest, and part of that means I have to risk readers seeing all that I did out there to survive, and being critical of me. A true writer can't be thin skinned.

...get out of town stranger...

Ivy and I did have to do many things to survive. Things I never imagined we were capable of, both good and bad. We were scared and at times frightened out of our wits, but pulled together and managed to create a life out there that sustained us until I was able to leave that car.

As we all know, Ivy didn't make it out, though I took her ashes out with me. I'll only bury her when we get home, and we'll know when that is. Like said in an earlier entry, we found out what home was out there, and I'll know it when I see it again.

Back to honesty; one thing that made me leery of leaving certain parts of the first drafts intact was how much I obviously depended on Ivy. The first thought was that it was projecting an awful lot onto her, but as the drafts were refined, it became obvious that she changed a lot and grew. 

That little shih tzu was indeed a sentient being that could comprehend things and learn. She was transcendent at times, but also did things that in one instance forced me to flee a city and never go back. No one was hurt, and in the great scheme of things in homeless life, forgivable, and if truth be told, ultimately my fault.

Plus in retrospect, it was pretty funny. Not so at the time, but now, it's funny to picture me and Ivy having to get out of town before the sheriff deputies, called in by a bunch of old ladies, arrived to arrest us.

My past analogy about having formed a pack, and its implications will become clearer to the reader after reading many of the chapters. It's not about friendship in the usual human ways, but how life itself responds to adversity.

By being honest about how I lived out there, and in expressing my often less than heroic thoughts, I think the book will be less about cardboard heroes and villains and more about things that people will recognize as real life. Life didn't end when I found myself living in a car.

Like I said earlier, the reality was that I was rescued, and the real heroes are those blog readers and friends that decided I was worth saving. The reason they knew about my plight was that I was a writer and that skill too saved me.

...getting back to the Delta Snake...

The blog started off as the Delta Snake, which by 2016 had drawn about 5000 visits. It was intended to be a "sequential magazine" that had features to be added as each was written and not in groups presented on publication dates.

The early "On The Road With Al & Ivy" entries started off under the Delta Snake banner but had to be split off into it's own blog after Twitter flagged tweets from the Google site, blogspot.com. By that time, traffic had grown to over 100,000 visits and I figured that growth would stop once the blog had to be moved.

Instead it kept growing, and it was a real source of pride and comfort out there.

Art, in this case writing, and the people it reached saved my life. That's as rich as an artist can get. This morning the blog reached a half million visits, Friday October 19, 2018.

I feel profound gratitude, and thank you all for the greatest gift a writer could get, an audience that reads his work.

...on the eve of a music gig...

I'm writing this section on the eve of my first live musical performance since the late 70s. Back then, I had played with the a punk band (first in my area) and later founded a blues band, The Delta Snake, that went nowhere but gave my newsletter (and now a music blog) it's name.

It'll be at the Central Illinois Pagan Pride Festival, and I was asked by one of it's organizers, author Melodie Ramone to play a couple of sets. I agreed as long as I didn't have to follow the Goth Metal Belly Dancers. No solo acoustic guitarist on this planet can follow that act.

I'll be performing a set of American and World "Primitive" music, a term that John Fahey used to describe his solo acoustic guitar music that influenced and inspired a generation of musicians that included Leo Kottke, George Winston, Robbie Basho and many others.

The first time I heard him play was in the early 70s at this place that eventually became the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, California. He was the opening act on a bill the included Robbie Basho and folk legend Dave Van Ronk. He played first because he had to be at a later gig up north, and needed to get off early.

I was a teenager then, and hadn't even picked up a guitar yet. My musical background was as a violin player playing classical and show tunes in school events.

Fahey came on, and seemed to go into a trance, then started to play a medium tempo fingerpicking piece and from there the set flowed from song to song, only stopping at times to change the tuning on his guitar or switch to slide.

It was a mesmerizing performance, covering a lot of folk and blues styles but in a way I hadn't been heard before. Even my classically trained (and maybe a bit rigid) mind could tell that much of the music was as improvised as a jazz piece.

By the early 70s, folk and folk blues had become pretty much set in how it sounded, almost on the level of an oldies show, though perhaps hipper. The tonalities were familiar and crowd pleasing.

Fahey's music was similar in ways; it was essentially a concert version of folk and country blues instrumentals with one major difference, it freely moved in and out of dissonance, which was as different to my ears as avant-garde classical was to Mozart.

What he did during the  break was interesting, and I never saw any other performer do it. Fahey put his guitar down, lit up a cigarette and just sat there, calmly looking at the audience. 

The ending was even more unusual. After the set, he stood up, waved to acknowledge the applause, then jumped off the stage and ran up the hill towards the parking lot and gradually disappeared from view. We watched him run all the way to the parking lot, and I later learned he was eccentric like that.

After that concert, I bought my first Fahey album, "The Dance Of Death And Other Plantation Favorites," which is probably still one of my favorite recordings.

The key thing that influenced the purchase of a guitar afterwards wasn't the music per se, but that Fahey showed me that a person could create and live in a universe with just one instrument. You didn't need a band or orchestra, you could say it all with a guitar.

I think anyone who writes, or loves books knows this already.

...music is life...

In the earlier drafts of my book, music didn't seem very important. In fact, one of the earlier conclusions was that my love for music had degenerated into instrument collecting for it's own sake and was just one of the layers of the material world that was shed during a time of painful rediscovery.

It took some time and distance to realize that the conclusion was actually fueled by a deep sense of loss. A little part of me went away as each instrument in my collection was sold off to survive.

My blog entries, which first started in the Delta Snake section, originally show a person who thought that music (and the original conception of the book, the epic poem) would be a key element in surviving homelessness. 

I still had my instruments then, which were in storage, and there was still optimism that homelessness was just a temporary bump in the road. As things got worse, the carefree entries continued and masked a growing realization that it was all no longer a simple road trip.

As said in an earlier blog entry, it wasn't losing the valuable pieces that was depressing. There was still plenty of stuff left in the collection early on. It was when the last instruments, the cheap ones, were sold for just a few more days of survival that it hit home that things weren't going to get better.

My narrative in the first drafts expressed disillusionment about music as a lifestyle, about it being part of a past that had to be let go. That it all went away.

But that wasn't true. 

For one thing, I did come out of it with some instruments; a charango that no one would buy, and two harmonicas. All of which I shipped to the Midwest ahead of my arrival. The charango was both a survivor and now a treasured instrument.

Plus I did play music out there. 

It had to be done discreetly, as it wasn't smart to let the druggies out there know that my car had instruments that were easy to covert into quick cash (and more importantly, that Ivy might be in the car at the time it was broken into). 

Which was ironic as the charango was, at least according to legend, an instrument built to be easily hidden from the Spanish colonialists who ran Peru and Bolivia and made it illegal for natives to own a guitar. Whether that's true, I don't know, but it gave the charango mojo, so I chose to believe it.

I also avidly collected music for Spotify playlists, thanks to their customer service who gave me free time after finding out I was homeless. Though oddly enough, I rarely listened to the music afterwards.

It became too melancholy to play and after a while to even listen to music. I thought it was disillusionment about living a life that revolved around music, but it really was a profound sense of loss over a love that went back as early as I could remember.

...arrival...

I arrived in the Midwest in 2017, shell shocked, and even now, still have moments that feel like flashbacks. There was so much lost out there, and as parts come back, like music, it feels like I'm recovering pieces that were left out there.

One of the key parts of the book, and this is perhaps a small spoiler, is this recurring vision or dream of me sitting playing a guitar. How that vision changes and develops is one of the threads that run through the book. 

I constantly saw it in dreams and was puzzled at how it changed, but it was consistent in one respect; it was me, sitting, playing guitar and seen from the back.

When author Melodie Ramone asked to play at the Festival, I agreed quickly without much thought. Normally I'd have said no, as my main interest is in recording music for my YouTube channel, but she asked on a day that was a milestone; I had bought this beat up old acoustic guitar from a pawn shop, and was going to play a guitar for the first time in a few years.

That was a couple of months ago, and on this day, whether I'm truly ready or not, or even intend to play live again isn't the point.

When I go on Saturday morning at 11:00 am, I'll have another piece of my soul back, and maybe that vision that kept coming to me out there will become clearer. If John Fahey was right, that music comes out of the unconscious, then all will be revealed then.

If not, I'll keep playing till it is. 

...give me that old time religion...

One of the elements of the book that took the longest to integrate into the narrative was spirituality.

There was plenty of the old time religion out there. There was at least one Christian cult trying to recruit followers and another church with well heeled parishioners who were heartless with the homeless when no one was looking.

That's an important point, what goes on when people aren't looking. In mainstream Islam, for example, it's said that God looks more kindly on those who do good works out of the sight of others. 

This can run counter to Western practice, where doing charitable work is a popular PR exercise, and donors walk around with T shirts or other merchandise to commemorate their support.

That's not bad per se, but like all human endeavors, engaging in symbolism often leads to a gap between belief and practice. People can maintain appearances and treat it as practice. What they do when no one is looking is revealing.

...there are no atheists in a foxhole...

There is that old saying that there are no atheists in a foxhole (during a battle), and plenty of people out there looked to God to rescue them. I think it's a more nuanced concept, in that when things seem hopeless, it's natural to look for someone or something to rescue you, to hope or wish for a miracle. 

God tends to be the default option because so many people over the centuries have said that a miracle will come if you have faith.

Other popular saviors include angels, drill sergeant or alpha hero types who'll kick your butt and make you man up, Uncle Sam, fairy godmothers, true love, Lady Luck, and the one that was often more popular than God out there, the handsome Prince or hero who comes to save you.

I can list all those out with a wry (and slightly sad) grin now, but all those symbols or psychologies were out there, and often used by some pretty tough characters who understood those as basic human psychologies that could be manipulated.

People reacted differently to the homeless life. There were the barely hanging in there survivor types, some who seemed to thrive, but most had to deal with a variety of demons that made some easy prey for predators.

One common denominator was pain, and the way out on any narrow path not only took patience and faith, but physical and emotional endurance. That last element, endurance, was the real test. At first there's optimism, then hope, and then as things drag on, wishing and asking for rescue, and finally any end to the pain. At that point, looking for a hero can be dangerous.

...faith is all you need, maybe...

A key element of faith isn't that it gives one physical strength or triggers endorphins, but that it's rooted in the concept that the mind can make a decision that's not based on physical symptoms or the apparent reality surrounding you.

In other words, if you believe that the pain is temporary or something that can be overcome, then a decision can be made to endure. Religion can add the possibility of reward for keeping the faith.

That's not just a religious concept; if there was no ability to view the mind and body as separate, then torture would be a sure fire way to make people talk or confess. People would quit at the first obstacle, etc.

Still, enduring is easier said than done.

 I once related in a past blog that many of the homeless have a neutral attitude towards the drug use of others. It wasn't that it was viewed it as an activity that should be legal or something like that, but a recognition that the druggies were self medicating.

I eventually saw it that way too, once I had one too many crappy desperate days. I'd look at a stoned person and not see some loser or sick person but someone who had probably reached the limit of their endurance and just wanted the pain to stop. 

...back to God...

My concept of God and spirituality went through many phases, as with many of the other common ideas that people believe in.

Whether my life in a car was God's will, punishment, karma, dark night of the soul, a temporal phase, necessary failure in a winner/loser system of capitalism, laziness, failure to get up and go, subconscious fear of success, or whatever, I explored every one of those notions.

I had to find myself. I did come out of it with a belief in God intact, but a lot of notions surrounding that central faith had to be examined and discarded. 

Holding on to a main concept, and examining the surrounding clutter isn't something that just relates to questions about God. It applies to any idea that mankind has taken and added the inevitable politics and frailties.

It would have been easy to dismiss God, for example, when I ran into that cult mentioned earlier. That church was certainly not about God, but about power and money.

But I didn't judge Christianity by that church any more than I'd dismiss democracy by the actions of corrupt politicians. The fact is that any concept that mankind touches moves away from principle and into politics and manipulation.

I should add, it isn't always good to judge a belief system by the behavior of it's followers either.

...reading the label...

Much of any group or belief system described in the media will be defined by outsiders. 

Examples include atheists who say that Christianity causes all wars are atheists, Christians who believe all Muslims are terrorists, Liberals who assume Conservatives are money grubbing fascists, and the latter thinking that the former are nanny state Socialists intent on destroying democracy, those are all definitions and labels imposed from outside of a group.

One can argue that groups or subcultures can't always be trusted to honestly define themselves, and that's true. However, that's why hearing both sides is such an important axiom in truth seeking. A lot of so-called truth is really opinion and riddled with self interest.

Most of what people think the homeless are is defined through the media in the same way, through viewpoints filtered by various biases.

There's a tendency to view the homeless as a herd, defined in this or that story as drug users or whatever. It creates a mentality that judges the group by the actions of an individual or individuals. Make no mistake, the homeless are a collection of subcultures, not a uniform mass.

...So, getting back to saviors...

As I said, people out there reacted to life out there in different ways, but all had to confront the various ideas we grow up with, from God to Darwin. As those "faiths," as you will, proved to work or not, people began their rise or fall.

One character in my book is a young woman that lived with a group of homeless, whose life has a tragic trajectory that affected me very deeply. Several people went at her with this or that faith or system, and she tried out most. There were a couple of Princes, who turned out to be just be horny males willing to take advantage of desperation, dealers who promised escape but really were in the business of drugs and prostitution, the drill sergeant leader who projected strength but was just another run of the mill alpha jerk, and respectable society that applied tough love to her and then dumped her back out onto the street.

The final one drove her mad, yet even then, she had a safety net that society doesn't, and can't provide. She had friends. It only saved her biological life, but as a young person with strong survival instincts, time is on her side and the spirit can still win, but I doubt she'll thank any savior. She's been there, done that.

...the biggest God of all...

One other element that can become a faith out there is luck. 

I once discussed a book by Phillip K. Dick called "Solar Lottery," which described a society that was convinced that luck was an ability or in spiritual terms, having a blessed life or a special connection to God that others didn't have.

I describe luck differently in the book, because it isn't an ability or gift. It's part of what goes on randomly in the universe, and it's called fate, luck or fortune.

That is to say, we try to understand an infinite concept by describing it with words and end up with only a snapshot that captures a section, which then makes it seem comprehensible. It's sort of a way of trying to control it, to reduce fears, like reducing the world to God and Satan.

Knowing that it's a flawed idea to use words to create a snapshot of an infinite concept isn't new.

The early Catholic intellectuals, called Mystics back then, wrote that trying to use words to describe God limited the understanding of his infinite power. They weren't talking about shooting off thunderbolts or destroying a city full of sinners. Super powers are a finite concept. The point was that a person couldn't describe infinity with words, that attempts to define it in words limited it.

Or, a cynic may say, control it,

One thing that did became apparent out there, is that as long as there's a God, there'll be men who will put words in his mouth. That's not a problem that only plagues the religious.

...be lucky...

So...I talk about the infinite nature of the universe, using limiting words for chrissake, but mainly I'm talking about one thing described in quantum terms, which is "chaos," or the seemingly random movement of the universe that actually has patterns.

The various patterns, or universes do collide among other things, and that collision is luck in a nutshell...when you think about it, it makes sense...or at least as much as any explanation of luck can be.

That's why one should keep trying even if the odds seem stacked against success. The odds that good things will happen is zero if you don't. That's the underlying principle that powers all faith, keep going and give life a chance to change for the better.

I say all this here in this blog because it won't be described that literally in the book. One by one I've been replacing (as intended) the various philosophical points and essays and putting in stories, conversations and vignettes that illustrate the points. 

Frankly, if you're not philosophically inclined, and that's perfectly OK, it won't be obvious in the book that there is any underlying heavy duty truths. My intention is to write a book that will reveal different things the more times it's read, but will be rewarding on any level you care to take it.

There is a practical reason; to avoid having people think the book is about this or that because of a chapter or passage taken out of context. 

Yes, the book is about the homeless life, but also about the larger issue of displacement, a phenomena that has occurred constantly throughout history. It isn't about gentrification, drug users, runaways, hobos, parasites, crusaders, or whatever per se, even if all show up in the book.

I'm avoiding easy answers. When you read that young woman's story as it threads it's way throughout the book, many emotions and thoughts will come to mind, from pity to admiration. Same with others in the book, none were one dimensional personalities, and after reading about them, you'll recognize that they are very much like the people around you now who were more fortunate than my characters.

It's written that way because that's what I saw. It's also written that way because I recognize that you may see the same thing (as described in the book) and think different. 

That's fine with me, because I know that's how the universe works.

- Al Handa

  Oct. 19, 2018

...cover reveal for Hide In Plain Sight...

This is the cover for the upcoming book, Hide In Plain Sight, hopefully out sometime in the summer of 2018.

-Al Handa

djboogieunderground@gmail.com

The Al & Ivy Homeless Literary Journal Archive:

There are earlier blog entries on the Delta Snake Review section of this site that aren't on the On The Road page:
http://deltasnake.blogspot.com

On The Road With Al and Ivy: A Literary Homeless Chronicle - July 1, 2018

"Then, here in Argos, we’d have often met in love and gladness, two as friends and guests, with nothing that could ever part our paths till, wrapped in blackest clouds, we met our death. A god must have been envious of that, for he has destined him—a fate not known by any other—never to come home.”

- Homer (The Odyssey Of Homer, Allen Mandelbaum 1990 translation) 

No one, be it remembered, seeks the desert for a pleasure-ground. Life and business traverse it by paths along which the bones of things dead are strewn as so many blazons.

- LewWallace (Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ)

One of the concepts that's made it into the Pop Psychology/Philosophy canon is that life is about the journey, and not the destination, and like most truths, it's true if it is, and isn't if it isn't.

In the Middle Ages the Christians in the lower economic classes were taught to endure the present or at least enjoy the little things in life for the greater reward of Heaven after death. That was the ultimate goal oriented life, and perfect for a culture where spirituality (I'll trade you one lamb for good fortune) was materialistic and the powerful didn't want the peasants looking too closely at their earthly lives. 

In all fairness, that was hardly just a Western world thing.

People might think that the average homeless person is just out there laying around stoned as a rock, boosting bike parts, pestering people for change, or living the herd life in a tent city, but that is just a narrow surface view as reported by the media. You'd be surprised to know that many out there think about life as much as any celebrity New Age guru or movie star, and that they might know more about which life philosophy, goal or journey works in the real world and what doesn't.

...what works, what people will actually do, and excess baggage...

One of the first things a Civil War soldier learned was to throw away that two pound bayonet, any pistol or sword (maybe four or more pounds), body armor (popular in the early part of the war if he had means), helmets, or anything that wasn't essential or not subject to court martial (even so, officers had to watch for solders sticking bayonets into the ground).

That included swords, contrary to the stirring images in movies. Union cavalry found that they weren't good at the Confederate game of charging with swords, so they revived the old dragoon, or mounted infantry tactics, so when the Rebels came charging with swords drawn, they were met by a line of Yankees firing carbines. A hasty change in Confederate cavalry tactics followed. It was said that when Stonewall Jackson's sword was examined, it had rusted in it's scabbard due to lack of use.

Most of war back then was marching back and forth in thick uniforms, heavy packs and equipment, in rain or shine, and maybe a battle, albeit an awesomely bloody one, every few months. When you have to trudge 20 miles a day in summer weather, every pound gets scrutinized and discarded if not necessary.

It's the same with life. In a comfortable situation, there's the luxury of which Netflix plan to buy, which phone plan is best, and if you can get thin in time for summer. It's a life with goals and often very pleasant journeys with high aspirations. When the daily food budget is five dollars for man and dog, then four bucks for coffee is out if the question, and safely waking up the next morning can become the future.

None of that disappears out there...at least at first.

I went out on the road with the goal of simply waiting out the bad luck, believing that it was all just a hiccup in the Silicon Valley lifestyle, and like a person not watching where he was going, fell into a hole that had been there for a while. That was goal oriented thinking, that my life would soon get back on a good track, but that thinking was flawed as it made me just wait around, and that was a good way to sink even faster in the streets.

The thing is, an outlook on life, whether material or spiritual, needs to be simpler than even a self help book message (which perhaps is a misnomer, as a simple principle shouldn't need an entire tome) but the idea of a simple principle is time tested, as is the inevitability of decay and inefficiency that comes with elaboration and detail (which is generally group think that marginalizes the individual).

Jesus, for example, preached a very simple message and never created a bible or a church. It was a simple vision that probably made Christianity in that period as workable as any religion could have been before money and power came into the picture.

The Internet is another good example. In the early days it was all about freedom and being a responsible member, and even hackers followed a code of independence from the powerful and a love for programming for the art. It's still a force that benefits, but it's mainstream now, with mainstream vices and controlled by money.

That's basically the fate of groups or systems, and it's not due to the elitist theory of the able being pulled down by mediocrity. The able, which in modern society generally translates to the privileged, really have nothing to fear from the so called rabble. The lower classes rarely have a say in such things, but things tend to go south when the betters of society muck things up for profit or power.

...the wild Wild West...

A good example is the popular media arts image of a wild and woolly western town taken over by respectable society, who bring in the usual hang ups, but it's just a variation of the leveling thing versus freedom. It's supposedly about people hating freedom or trying to control the free spirits or whatever. The "free" bunch is almost always depicted as a bunch of unwashed rootin' tooting Cowboys, gamblers, drunks, saloon women and pimps, and that's no accident. People who are outside the system will looked at as black sheep, even by those who claim to support them.

Sure, put in a large group of people anywhere that's untamed, and they'll seek to protect their investments and weed out sinners. That looks like the fight, but that's foot soldier stuff, down in the trenches and late on the chain of events. Any reasonably deep study of history books makes it clear that the story starts much earlier.

It's too detailed to examine in a blog entry, but in a nutshell, in the Wild West, a bunch of commercial interests saw a lot of wealth potential in land being wasted on a bunch of Native Americans, so the media did their part by publicizing various crowd pleasering stories like go west young man, gold rushes, free farm land, and massacres of white people. The railroad people stood ready to move the masses out there (for a fee), and the massacre stories brought out calls to send out the Army, which created the image of civilization advancing westward and justice being served on the bewildered Native Americans who couldn't wrap their minds around the concept that people could now buy and sell land that was there before people existed, and being portrayed as bloodthirsty savages.

...back to the wild Wild West...

All that movement west solved another big problem...big enough that if it hadn't have been solved, it would have threatened the fabric of society in that era. Dangerous enough to cause revolution.

It was that the economy of the era couldn't support the rapidly growing population (by birth and immigration) exacerbated by the discharge of huge Civil War armies that threatened to create a layer of poor as large as Europe (who used immigration to lower that percentage). If there had been no Western expansion, the United States would have had to deal with the question of social services, homelessness, unemployment and massive unrest.

Getting back to journeys, goals, and such...

There was a lot homelessness back then. A countless amount of Irish and Chinese lived in camps building the railroads, wagon trains were all over the land heading west, tent cities of prospectors, bandits, wanderers, missionaries dotted the landscape...all of the sinews of an evolving nation. 

But they weren't seen as a social problem, lazy asses, or boozers, and that was because there was a journey or goal concept at work. It was the 1800's version of giving them a bus ticket out of town, but with a purpose.

...meanwhile, back at the Native American villages...

On the Native American side, they were seen as a bunch of uncivilized savages, yet had a saner view of life...so much so that in modern times there's a lot of public sympathy toward their side of the story (not enough to rectify it all of course, that would cost money). They lived in tent cities, and weren't transient in the sense that it's defined now, but in many ways were viewed the same way as modern homeless.

One reason was that they didn't have a goal that the so called modern people of the era could relate to, as their life was about the journey, being in harmony with nature. That view perhaps has a little bit of New Age revisionism in it, but it's essentially true. They didn't engage in the then modern types of wealth building, and that was seen as lazy, dissolute, wicked and so on.

Americans from top to bottom had a goal to become economically better off in material terms, and if that involved screwing over the natives, so be it. In this country, seeking wealth is considered a virtue (and maybe it is) and thus can justify a lot of means, some of it shady.

There's that old saying that behind every fortune is a crime. When a rich family can become revered now even if the original fortune was obtained illegally, the message is clear; Goal orientation works.

...a new simple message...

All this activity was guided by a principle called "manifest destiny" and was simple like any idea that worked. That idea could be understood on any level, and allowed people to interpret it subjectively with any good or bigoted idea as achieving the basic goal didn't require Saints...just take over every bit of land to the west and if necessary, kill any Native American who got into the way. Participate, and you got land, possible wealth and a chance to enter the exhalted ranks of the fabulously wealthy. An idea that sold itself.

As I've written in earlier blog entries, this method of solving the homeless problem is no longer workable. There's no more untamed land to ship people off to, and any open space space is now owned by somebody, and none of the owners (even the taxpayers) want transients there. More than a little of that hostility is due to modern liability law, otherwise most people wouldn't really care if a tent city pops up in a remote area.

The issue has never been about whether the homeless should have shelter. Most people with any heart believe that. It's always been about where. Setting up a homeless camp out in some open public land will rarely work because like warfare, it's not about strategy but logistics.

When I was out there in a car, my location was always based on where I could get the cheapest food and where services were available. Early on, I did try to hang out in the foothills of Marin County, where it was open and no one cared if I was there, but food and bathrooms were down in the cities. You might be able to make water behind a tree, but to be seen squatting and doing more brought in an immediate police response. Farming and foraging were not options, so drug zones or not, home was in the cities.

...home sweet home...

The book will have many "themes" as I've related, but a central one of people searching for a "home" is very simple. It's not simply a roof over one's head, it's a concept that's a goal, and that's why simply putting the homeless into housing won't work for many of them. Almost all were in a house or apartment before that life...it's important to understand why that roof went away as it is to put another over them.

There was one meth head out there who ended up living in a car and sold it off to maintain the habit. He was given an RV by a charity, and that was gone in three months and he was back on foot with his dog, and sometime later, even the dog was gone.

Incidentally, that dog has a story, and it's in the book. He was there when I arrived in Gilroy in the summer of 2016, and he was there when I left for Salinas in 2017.

Any assistance has to start with humanizing that apparent mass of homeless, and then you'll know who needs deeper help than a new roof, and who would have taken that RV and built a better life with it. That's why I keep saying that the goal of the book is to make that mass into a group of faces. Some that a person will not want to help, some that you'd sympathize with and want to help.

Those tent cities that are a central media image aren't an accident or a random event. Although I avoided living in those for various reasons, I understood why those were there. The reasons appear complicated, and it took a full chapter to fully describe the surface reasons, but those gatherings are part of a basic human instinct to find a home. I wrote in the story of a woman who became homeless and entered a camp as a way to cover that subject, and to highlight one that wasn't there because of drugs. There's plenty there who won't use even when offered free stuff, and their stories will relate to many women who aren't homeless.

That concept of home took a couple of drafts to express clearly, or simply, to be exact. It's not an instinct that can be easily explained in an essay, and by this final draft, I realized that it was better to simply tell the stories and trust that the reader would find the meaning in the word in those characters and themselves.

Ivy and I became homeless, and we found a "home" that survived even her death out there. If I still think of her now and then it's because I still live in that home we built. It was just a word back in 2016, but now I know what home is.

- Al Handa 

  

...cover reveal for Hide In Plain Sight...

This is the cover for the upcoming book, Hide In Plain Sight, hopefully out sometime in the summer of 2018.

-Al Handa

djboogieunderground@gmail.com

The Al & Ivy Homeless Literary Journal Archive:

There are earlier blog entries on the Delta Snake Review section of this site that aren't on the On The Road page:
http://deltasnake.blogspot.com

On The Road With Al & Ivy: A Literary Homeless Chronicle 5/11/18

"So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality —"

- Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)

The caged bird dreams of clouds. 

- Japanese Proverb

To believe in one’s dreams is to spend all of one’s life asleep. 

- Chinese Proverb

I began work on the final draft of the book last week. I had planned to do maybe three or four more revision passes, but realized over the past few weeks that it was ready to be finished.

There were several issues with the earlier versions, the most serious was figuring out what the basic "story" was. The original structure was chronological, and that was the best way to get it all down. What made the revision passes difficult was that it wasn't how I wanted to tell the story, but was stuck in a linear structure.

The original conception, which dated back to the 80s, as related in a past post, was to create it like a piece of music, which sounded fine on paper. 

One famous model is Finnigan's Wake (by James Joyce), a brilliant "musically" worded novel that no normal human being can read without a translator. Which is too arcane even for a bookworm like me.

There is that age old form called poetry, and it's been around for centuries. It's basically very tight and expressive prose (in most cases) that has a "metre," or rhythm, and in some forms, a lot of rhyming but the problem was that the second anything is called poetry, most people tune it out.

We hear do hear poetry all time, in song lyrics, opening phrases in TV shows and movies, etc, but there's a problem with writing that sounds best when read aloud...which is, it won't always be read aloud and if it was, people would think you can't read without moving your lips. Actually, I would imagine a melodious, if obscure book like Finnigan's Wake would be an ideal audio book.

Most of us can feel a sense of music in our heads, though, triggered by metre and word choice, so I've spent a lot of time reading a lot of the old classics, (which I do anyway) and looked for phrases and passages that triggered an internal rhythm, that gave a sense of ebb and flow, but the final inspiration came from an unlikely place, ice skating.

...Hanyu and ice skating...

I had been reading about this skater named Hanyu, who's been described by the New York Times as the Michael Jackson of figure skating, and who won an unprecedented second gold medal in the Winter Olympics in Seoul.

Ice skating, particularly the men's competition, had become boring to me. It seemed like it was going from one jump to another. Spectacular moments to be sure, but you kind of find yourself just waiting for the next jump. That and the seemingly endless controversy and trolling, but that's true for most sports talk actually.

Watching Hanyu on video seemed different for a number of reasons. There were skaters who could do more quad jumps but few could match how complete he was. If you took away the big jumps, his routine was still mesmerizing.

His choreography wasn't the only thing that caught my eye, it was the joyful energy. I'm sure they all love what they're doing, but this guy really made it look like it was only thing he wanted to do in life. Perhaps it goes further than that, in that he's found the thing that transforms the boyish self into something transcendent, beyond just the craft, or technique.

I think most writers know that feeling. Trying to get beyond the "craft" and write something transcendent.

Understanding the concept of craft is important. I remember Marlon Brando in his famous Playboy magazine interview talk about that; how so many settle for craft, and why that's seductive. For one thing, you can often make a living with craft, and that isn't always the case with art. 

Yet the road does go through craft, as a gate or departure point.

One thing that struck me about the way the commentators talked about Hanyu was they admired how he kept pressing himself, risking failure and easy victories to keep changing and become better. That's a quality many artists don't have. If you can get to a point where the money rolls in playing a particular sound, or acting in genre movies, it's tough to give that up to grow, to risk failure and struggle again.

The list of major artists who've taken such a true risk is pretty small. Miles Davis, for example, did several times. At one point giving up ballads, which were a fan (and his) favorite, and a form he loved doing. He gave it up and moved into rock fusion (or created it to be more accurate) to keep growing, and he said later in interviews that giving up ballads was one of the hardest things he ever had to do.

If Hanyu hadn't changed with the times, he'd have maybe won one gold medal, he was that good, and then retired or skated till younger skaters started beating him with newer and more athletic routines. He managed to translate his artistic style into the newer athletic jump oriented era, and won a second gold. Given his love for the sport, he's a good bet to be the type who'd work four more grueling years to get to the next Olympics, and compete against a young generation of skaters who are already winning on any day he was less than 100%.

To us, it seems like intense pressure, but to him, it's like a dream life, with rewards worth the effort. Even if he loses in the next Olympics, he wouldn't consider it a wasted life.

He's clearly worked very hard to become a great skater, and persevered through some big setbacks. The dream he reached for was a real goal that encompassed a life, and not just wishing for stardom or riches. If he'd never reached such heights, I get the feeling that he'd still be skating in some rink and that joy so obvious in the videos would still be there.

...more about dreams...

I can't say writing the book has always given me joy, and I'm sure Hanyu has hated skating at times, but there's been moments when a passage came out perfectly or a chapter came together in a way that made me read it again with pleasure.

I try to remember that the real dream isn't the book being published, but that in writing it, I'm in it in the now and to enjoy it.

What I saw in Hanyu's skating routines was the look on his face, the aura of a guy who's totally in this world he created and lives in, and the rest is just, at best, icing on the cake. He doesn't just skate from one jump to the next, what happens in between is just as important, which means he's really in the moment, as connected as a person can be to life.

If I can get that feeling while writing this book, then it'll have succeeded beyond my expectations. I know it'll be a lot of work, but I can see when Hanyu skates, it's all worth it to him.

I want that feeling too.

...the edge of darkness...

I know that parts of my book will have to be dark. Ivy and I weren't in a pretty place. The later drafts of the book became darker in parts because over time the distance from past events developed where I could (but not always comfortably) visit times and places that were fearsome back then, seeing lives that were so crushed in spirit (or heading there) that it was a wonder that more people didn't die out there.

The book could have become a Grapes of Wrath trip, or a lurid description of the low life, but that would just be craft. I had to find what was trancendent about what happened, what was human and universal, so that the average reader could see and relate to what was going on. 

By transcendent, I mean, what could make the reader feel like the book was as much about him or her as it was about the people out there. I had to go back there in my mind and really look around, and step out of the detached observer viewpoint of the earlier drafts and see what I was doing too. 

For example, I had to admit to myself that at certain points I was a wreck, making all sorts of mistakes, and living in various dream worlds. I've talked about that in earlier posts, that it's a complex subject underneath that single word.

There were some dreams that saved my life, protected my self esteem and most importantly kept me ready to leave that life when the opportunity arose.

There were also dreams and images that we hear throughout our lives in movies and media that are lies, that will cripple you or make you susceptible to a con. 

...life is survival of the fittest...

One of the worst ideas seen in movies and media is that "the streets" are a tough Darwinian environment that can be survived with toughness and "street smarts." 

The idea that street life is Darwinian is true, but the idea that life is a food chain" where there's alpha predators on top who rule the scene is a human conception, and a male one at that. Movies generally show the streets as ruled by bad dudes who can kick butt and live like sharks among the sardines, but those types don't last long and are easy to avoid, and it's a good idea to do so. The main danger isn't from the alphas, it's getting caught up in any trouble they seem to attract from the police and competitors.

Even the biggest shark in the ocean doesn't have the power to make another species extinct. Tuna and Dolphins can eat all the sardines they can find, but there's too many to wipe out (unless mankind is involved).

If those animals could actually wipe out other species, they would only accomplish their own destruction, as they're as dependent on food as the lowliest ant or clam. An antelope in good condition has a better than equal chance to survive an environment with big cats in it, and a predator in a place where there's no food has no ability to create or grow it and will starve.

Plus those big teeth or claws are only a relative danger to most species. An earthworm has very little to fear from a lion or rattlesnake. Those who are what we call prey have developed all manner of survival strategies from speed to stealth, and most of it works.

Writers often describe this or that person's "street cred" and it has some basis in this or that circumstance or scene, but it's never a universal language or skill set. A "street wise person" from Detroit probably wouldn't last long in Chicago.

Don't get me wrong, I never underestimated the ability of a pusher or pimp to cause me serious pain or trouble, but I was more wary of their lower rent customers needing quick cash via crime for the services. Most of those alphas tended to treat people well, and didn't kick ass all over the place like in the movies. Because to most, you were either a potential customer or not worth the effort to even bully if you minded your own business. 

Sure, some were flamboyant, but the police were generally right on top of their heads all the time, and if you could see them, they were small fry. The real money stays hidden and low key.

For a homeless person, the rules were a bit different.

As a homeless person, I couldn't just call the cops on a dealer unless I was willing to (or was able to) leave the area, and I didn't have that option. There weren't many areas I could live in, and that meant if the word got around that I was an informer, it was easy to find me.

If I spotted a dealer, I'd just quietly go elsewhere. I wasn't generally scared of them...like I said, most didn't care about some guy living in his car but when they hit an area, and the customers started flocking around, the police in that small town were almost certainly watching or had informants around. I was deathly afraid of being seen in the wrong company or being questioned (and being seen talking to police).

The scariest time was that six weeks stuck in a meth zone in an inoperative car. That's when a lot of the druggie scene went on all around me and I couldn't leave. It's the main center of the book, the summer chapters, and I kept a lot of the passages as true to what I was writing at the time on my gofundme updates and blog. 

For example, one incident described in detail was when a guy in a van that I figured was a dealer parked in front of me to meet his couriers. He knew I was a regular there, and I'd put up the window period shades up when he came, a signal indicating that I had no interest in seeing anything, but still, he didn't know for sure and his couriers played the intimidation game with me with racist shouts and other bullying gestures to keep me in line. 

I had to learn to see past that stuff, and realize that they were the scared ones and if I kept that in mind, I'd come out ok. It was a crime zone and contrary to popular belief, crime zones are crawling with cops all over and the fear I felt was shared by everyone, though we had different bogeymen in our nightmares.

It was the most fearful and paranoid period I've ever experienced and it couldn't be fully written about at the time as it was known to some that I was a blog writer, and I couldn't take the chance that some bust or trouble could be traced back to, or blamed on my writing. 

Not that I had that kind of power, but people out there can have this inflated idea about any kind of media out there. When you read those chapters about that time, you'll see many interesting things written that go against the normal ideas about street life.

Much of what became the first draft of the chapters about that summer were typed out on an iPhone. I had a laptop, but frankly didn't dare show it in a car. In fact, I rarely showed the iPhone for that matter. I discreetly treated it like a notepad, jotting down passages intended later for the blog if I ever got out of there (hadn't really decided to write the book yet), but was best kept off the internet at that time.

As the drafts have evolved, a lot of perspective came in, plus the safety of being thousands of miles away freed me up to describe things and events that would have been a bad idea to publish if there was even a slim chance it would be seen by any who knew me out there.

...the only thing you have to fear is...

One of the things I marveled at was how paranoid and fearful I had become, perhaps with cause, but still, it was a mindset that in some ways was similar to the druggies and hard core homeless out there. My prose at the time reflected a tough, detached and dispassionate sensibility. It was disjointed at times, often running off on long spurts of jacked up descriptions of situations that blended reality into inner perceptions and dreams. I may not have taken any meth, but the atmosphere did affect me.

I would patch dreamy images into the scenery to make sense of things; one finds that a lot of what is going on out there is really partly playing out in your mind and influences what you see. Even the meth or bath salt users weren't just numbing out, but were really trying to adjust their inner TV sets, so to speak, to get a better picture. Reality isn't a purely objective state.

I made it a point to refine but not change the passages written at the time. Paranoia and fear intensify certain details, as does dispair or pity, and I had thoughts and attitudes that differed from my previously settled life. I saw the people's fates trend upwards or downwards, and frankly, for many reasons, couldn't have changed any of those trajectories if I tried. It was a helpless feeling.

Part of my detachment was because I was distracted by the effort to save myself. But seeing such things now, it became clear there were life arcs and progressions, with many of the lives redeemable.

Being homeless profoundly changed me, and while I won't spell out how, the perceptive reader will see in the events described in the summer chapters. Whether it was change, catharsis or revelation is something I guess will take more time to unfold. But the person I was that summer was the only one who could have written some of the passages preserved in the book.

The alphas out there weren't on top of any sort of food chain. It was only apparent power, and as fragile as any business run out of a car trunk. The ones who really taught me how to survive out there were the supposed prey, the gazelles and supposed small fry who had better skills like stealth and common sense.

The book doesn't talk about the alphas much, it's the ordinary souls out there that had grandeur.

...the Puritan Ethic, and shame, shame, shame...

One of the main concepts of life is the Puritan Ethic, both in the homeless and the people who lived around that world. It wasn't just the external stuff seen in movies, the prudishness which is really more Victorian Age stuff. It's about the concepts of work and commerce being Godly, and that sin is always punished.

There is a lot of contempt out there for the homeless. Not because they're homeless, most with common sense know that such things can happen to anyone, but because these people appear to be lazy and just do drugs all day. Most get that idea from the media who tend to prefer the dissolute images of the ones who've fallen pretty far down the chain. The media stories seem definitive, but are a narrow view (which has been discussed in detail in earlier blog entries).

The Puritan Ethic isn't really about being prudish. The Puritans weren't any different from the rest of England and Europe about it at the time.

The key concept is that sin deserves punishment. That's a concept that continues to this day, even with enlightened or liberal minds (if given political cover).

A young woman who becomes pregnant out of wedlock generally has to carry a big burden of guilt, and being poor or on welfare is often seen as the product of sloth or laziness.

That combined with the strong streak of individualism in American culture implies responsibility, that one's fate is due to choices made, which is certainly true, but failure has come to be seen as the sum of bad choices, or decisions mainstream society doesn't approve of.

Homelessness is more nuanced than that. Most of us will agree that drug abuse can cause a severe fall, and accept that it's a condition as well as a choice. In a real estate market like parts of California, where you often have to earn 250,000 a year to live under a roof, a young woman who wants to leave a bad relationship often will end up homeless. It may be anecdotal, but I saw it out there. The supposed increase in homeless in Southern California isn't because a bunch of people exerted the druggie life but many were probably burned out of their homes by the huge wildfires last year and simply have nowhere to go. 

Many of the women I saw out there began that life as runaways, or were escaping abusive relationships and didn't have the economic means to stay independent as most men. That often put their fates into the hands of predators or men similar to the ones they escaped, and thus the downward cycle continued. Judged from outside, their lives seemed dissolute and, well, sinful.

I focus on some of those women in the book. There's a tendency to look at the homeless like some sort of herd, as I've said in earlier posts, and that's simply not true. If you see how some of these women had to live, for example, more than a few women would recognize that much of the experience was familiar, and simply on a lower economic rung.

...the village...

The homeless are a lot more connected to society than it appears. 

Virtually all of the drugs they use comes from the non-homeless (as long as we're generalizing) and those women who end up as prostitutes serve a market mainly made up of the so called respectable men of society. There's a lot of overlap in the various scenes, so I also talk about the truckers at the truck stop, who in more than a few cases patronize the same meth dealers, and the weekend warrior partiers who mingled with the young homeless were a key source of that scene's drugs.

I lost a lot of friends and even family after becoming homeless, most of whom felt that I had chosen that life. Once out there it turned out to be a commonality, that many that I ran into were black sheep or were considered losers by their families. So in a sense, it was "a choice" because to get help they were asked to go back and beg, or accept getting familial buttons pushed or shoved in their faces. 

I'm sure it's more complex than that, but again, there's elements of that issue that more than a few people could relate to, to be shunned, misunderstood, or punished. It wasn't important if it was true or a reality, but that it was a perception held by many and it created a reluctance to ask for substantive help. Begging on the street isn't as hard as it involves asking strangers, but it was still painful particularly for the older homeless, and there was a myriad of defense mechanisms that were developed to avoid the shame reflex.

Drug use was a key cause for many of the homeless, but as the book will show, that's mainly the visible part, the scene that I and many others stayed away from as much possible. 

...choices...gypsies, tramps and thieves...

Getting back to the concept of choice, there certainly were people out there who were gypsies, going back to their 60s hippie days, and due to unaffordable rents in areas like the San Francisco Bay Area, made up a sizable population of nomads of all ages, some of which, like the elderly, have already been documented in other media. They chose (willingly or not) homelessness as an economic choice. You'll rarely see them around as they avoid the hard core aggregations that get media coverage.

These groups stay under the radar and avoid making trouble, pretty much like regular people do, and also do so to avoid the automatic lazy ass label that comes with being identified as homeless. Many people are quite kind and understanding about the homeless, but many aren't, and that conflict tends to run along economic lines with solutions to the problem geared towards protecting property and sources of wealth. 

As a rule, the poor don't get worked up about the homeless. Many know or are related to one or more, and realize it's a level they could drop into very easily. I avoided the class war stereotype in the book, as most of the attacks on the homeless came from individuals who happened to be well off, and not from a "class." 

Virtually all of the homeless I talked to out there didn't relate the situation to anything resembling class consciousness or politics.

...back to shame...

The concept of punishment for sin was present. It's close cousin, shame, well, that's another thing. 

There were varying degrees of shame out there, and it colored behavior in a veritable rainbow of shades. It affected how people approached getting out of that life and forced others into hasty decisions that trapped them. It was accentuated by the need for survival, and some did steal, beg, or lapse into apathy. 

There were some very cool individuals who managed to find a center, and while they chose to be nomadic, did their best to help others. Their greatest gift was acceptance, and it helped more than a few out there.

I remember one asking me why I was homeless, that I seemed too smart.

My reply was that I wasn't as smart as I looked. We had a good laugh over that, and one thing I remember about him and others was that they never judged me, and constantly told me that I was someone who was going to get out.

Such people helped make things bearable, and their sense of acceptance gave the book an important center; that the concept of self esteem coming from within was very true, and that things like shame and punishment for sin is a self-inflicted wound. 

That terrible summer of 2016 ended when I quit punishing myself. The 90 degree heat, I'm afraid, lasted a little while longer for my good friend Ivy and me.

...a note about my good friend Ivy...

The anniversary of Ivy's passing was in February, but I decided not to commemorate it in my social network accounts. The reason was that I've kept her presence in such places, where I use her picture as an icon or profile picture. In a sense, she's still around.

I figured to say a remark or two in the next blog entry, where it'd be a little more permanent.

The anniversary passed a bit painfully, as I honestly still miss her. Until this book is finished, I imagine many parts of our life out there will be revisited over and over.

Her role in the book gradually expanded, or should I say, come to reflect what she really was out there. Most pet owners come to see their little friends as family, and I viewed Ivy like that. One of the things that came out of the drafts was that she did her best to be a good member of the pack. Not just being extra cute for survival, but evolving a role. 

The trick was how to write about her, to avoid having her becoming simply a cute waggy tail character, or a atavistic spirit like in Jack London's Call Of The Wild. I deleted earlier passages that simply described cute behavior and looked at the various incidents we were involved in, and after a lot of rough draft passages, evolved her role and responses that did in fact vary with each event.

There was one incident where we got charged by a large dog, and it was coming at us fast. I instinctively picked Ivy up, as she normally would bolt, yet this time, she stayed very calm, and I followed her lead and didn't go into a defensive mode.

It didn't stop charging, and it began to lunge at me, yet it didn't finish the attack...at that point I knew it wasn't trained to fight, it was just unruly. After a few seconds, it calmed down and just stared at Ivy, and I realized that it was a case of a male dog encountering a female, where they tend to lose aggression. Seconds later, the owner arrived and tackled the dog, thinking it was still attacking. He asked if I or my dog was hurt. He looked at Ivy and said that it was a good thing she was a female, and led his dog off without waiting for my answer.

We ran into other strays and loose dogs out there, and I developed a habit of checking Ivy's response in the enounters and found that her instincts were quite good. There was one dog she wouldn't warm up to, so we avoided it even though it seemed friendly. I later heard from other homeless that it had in the past suddenly attacked people and animals if the owner, a woman, didn't constantly repeat the word "friend" to it.

I didn't judge that too harshly, as that dog was the owner's only protection. Nonetheless, that was one pair we stayed clear of. Ivy's verdict on that dog was good enough for me. 

She was highly sensitive to angry voices due to her past before adoption. Which was why I had to avoid getting mad at the car or things like that, because it made her nervous.

There were arguments, or people getting angry at whatever, particularly at night. Once Ivy realized that when such things happened that I would leave the area immediately, she began to pull away and try to leave without waiting for me to see why. More than a few times when she did that a loud disturbance would start up shortly after. She could hear the rising voices that often preceded a full dust up.

That extra warning was valuable. People may ignore arguments coming from another house, but out in the open, an argument will bring the police so it's a good idea to get clear of the scee. They come even faster if a homeless fight is reported. The officers generally know who all the regular transients are, but it was a good idea to not be a regular part of such scenery. A minute of warning time meant we could be out of the area well before any trouble got serious.

Ivy and I walked around at night, and with a dog you have to. If I let her define the strolling area, then the route was virtually always safe. When I read about how soldiers get attached to their bomb sniffing dogs, I know why. If the little buddy understands what you're looking for, they will work at getting good at the job.

Ivy made the connection that certain sounds (and smells, like with needles) needed to be called out or avoided, and so she became a veritable sonar for trouble. In one scene in the book, I describe how she helped me map out a safe zone where we stayed for a week. She developed signals for sirens, arguments, people approaching fast or slow at night from blind spots, and if the requested walk was urgent (otherwise, she merely indicated that it would be nice if it happened soon, which was helpful if I preferred we walk outside at night in a different place).

A car parked on a street at night is a glass house that isn't as safe as it might seem. When you sit in one at night and know that once asleep you're defenseless, it can create a constant state of fear and dread.

However, a good dog makes you feel that there's another sentient being there. When you can trust that friend to look out for you, it moves up from merely having a cute pet that can make you laugh to having a partner who can take on a part of the load. That's a fancy way of saying you no longer feel alone, but as a pack, we navigated life out there as well as possible and it felt safer.

Once she was gone, I not only lost a good friend, but will say that without her help the night became darker, more mysterious, and scary. 

- Al Handa

   Feb. 20, 2018

...cover reveal for Hide In Plain Sight...

This is the cover for the upcoming book, Hide In Plain Sight, hopefully out sometime in the summer of 2018.

-Al Handa

djboogieunderground@gmail.com

The Al & Ivy Homeless Literary Journal Archive:

There are earlier entries on the Delta Snake Review section of this blog site that aren't on the On The Road page:
http://deltasnake.blogspot.com

On The Road With Al & Ivy: A Literary Homeless Journal - June 25th, 2017

 

"...and you are out of the old life and into the new! Then some day, some day long hence, jog home here if you will, when the cup has been drained and the play has been played, and sit down by your quiet river with a store of goodly memories for company."

- Kenneth Grahame (Wind In The Willows)

...ruminations on food...

One of the biggest adjustments in my return to the real world (or maybe I was in the real world and have returned to the Land of Illusions) was culinary. I could disregard every precaution and eat without fear over one of the greatest calamities that could befall a homeless person; to have an intestinal emergency with no bathroom in sight.

That's one reason 24 hour Walmarts and rest stops are so popular. Sure, it's a safe place to park or hang out, but both have bathrooms open at all hours. Contrary to the popular notion that homeless love to pee and poop out in the open, the main reason is the lack of available bathrooms.

I learned early on that old habits like eating pizza every friday had dire consequences. Even if the place has a 24 hour bathroom, no one really wants to need the facility at 3AM or in the middle of a rain storm.

One prophylactic measure was taking Pepto Bismol in the evening or before a meal. It was something I used to do before going to a rock concert or some place where bathrooms would be scarce (or worse) and the food of questionable quality. It was effective against the runs and had the additional benefit of some protection against food poisoning. 

It wasn't a recommended practice as it could cause acid reflux or constipation, but if you've ever raced down a one lane road in pitch darkness for 30 minutes to try and reach a bathroom in time, a little irregularity was the lesser evil.

...fast food? Not so fast....

One of the more common sights out there is a panhandler in front of a store holding a bag of fast food and not eating it. That was almost always a case of a good samaritan following media advice to gift food instead of cash to prevent the purchase of drugs or alcohol. I occasionally overhear or read comments that same homelss guy was ungrateful or preferred drug money, but that isn't always the case.

If I was standing out there, and someone handed me a bag of fast food, it'd be accepted with gratitude, but would be thrown away later or given to someone else who wanted it. The reason was fast food would give me the trots, and it certainly would for anyone who was living on a poor diet or had a stomach that wouldn't tolerate grease or heavy salt.

I've described living on beans and bread, and that wasn't just about not being able to afford better. I'd have loved to have peanut butter with my bread, for example, but that stuff tended to work my guts over. Same with most cheeses and other tasty treats that were often cheap and could stretch a budget, but would later send me running to the men's room.

Any non homeless person who visited San Francisco in the 90s when public bathrooms seemed to have disappeared would understand about having to take access to lavatories into consideration. It's a basic convenience taken for granted by most that becomes a outsized problem when living in a car.

Sleeping under a roof didn't change my consumption of food at first. For one thing, everything was too rich. I certainly ate pizza at any opportunity, and tended to act like it was caviar, but it took a few weeks to be able to bite into a slice without mentally mapping out a route to the bathroom at the same time.

Another civilized vice is snack food. Before going on the road, I loved it all...doritos, chips, dips, cheese, crackers, pretzels (Ivy adored pretzels), you name it, I'd eat it. Out in the car, I virtually never ate that stuff. A bag of chips costs an average of 1.49, and that's equivalent to three cans of beans; a full days ration. Snack food doesn't make you feel nourished, and that sensation of feeling sustained is important when the diet is simple.

The psychological feeling of eating well (and clean) was the real reason pork and beans were a mainstay. I could envision earlier eras when soldiers and travelers ate beans and feel a sense of tradition. It kept them alive, and it kept me alive.

There was another reason I ate beans, spam, bread and similar stuff...to save money. I often saw other homeless binge on food when they came into some cash. One couple I knew once had a good day panhandling and grossed forty dollars, and immediately spent 25.00 of it at a restaurant. I understood why they did it, it was a huge psychological boost, but it was buying food on an empty stomach. After spending the rest on gas, they were back out begging the next day. My goal would have been to make that 40.00 last so Ivy and I could eat clean food for at least a week. Food consumption was measure in both quantity and time.

We did binge in a scaled down version. Our bi-weekly thanksgiving was a 5.00 rotisserie chicken that I split up into two parts. Ivy got the breast meat (I never liked that part) and I got the rest. We'd happily feast on chicken, eating every edible part. That would be the meal for the day. It was breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Some of the low cost food, like spam, might strike many as unpalatable. I understand that, as even steak isn't everyone's idea of fine dining. Appetite is psychological and influenced by circumstances. When I found my diet boring, I just skipped a meal or two. Whatever was on the menu then started to look pretty good. We do that to cats and dogs all the time when they get stubborn about eating dry food, and it works on humans.

The other day I saw that Frito Lay had come out with a new Biscuits and Gravy flavored potato chip. It looked awfully good, and that outlook tells me that my culinary recovery from street life is coming along nicely...

...the origins of my upcoming book...

I'm finding that writing a book about my experience is about preserving two snapshots in time. The first, the poetic part that runs through the main narrative was composed in the late 80s, while working a grave job. The second, my homeless life instead of a "Pilgrim's Progress" type story.

I took an vintage 1920s portable to work and found that it was a fun instrument to write on, but not for anything that required speed, like large bodies of text. It was perfect for poetry, at least the way I composed it, which was to type out a phrase and then to slowly add lines. It became a pretech era notepad.

I didn't worry about correction with whiteout or tape, mistakes were simply crossed out and after a draft was completed, a new page started and the next iteration typed out. I didn't try to "complete" pieces so much as to record every phrase or poem that crossed my mind.

The project at the time was to create a long epic poem about a young blues musician migrating up to prewar Chicago and envisioned as a sort of beat poem set to music. It was to be a simple story with most of the action conveyed in songs, and eventually became a private project done for personal satisfaction.

It evolved from a pastoral narrative complete with train trips and interesting characters to a darker story about a fall from grace, catharsis and redemption. I really didn't know what to make of it, and after a year of intense writing put the project away. 

I kept all of the original typed notes, and images and ideas would surface from time to time and added to the manuscript. One time I pulled it out and added just one line on a sheet of paper. I had no idea where that phrase was supposed to go, only that it belonged with the work.

I took that pack of typed out sheets, filled tablets and scribbles on scraps of paper on the road. The original intent of the journey wasn't to be homeless of course, merely to travel about until a job came along. This epic poem became a project to work on in the various motels we stayed in.

There were old passages that seemed haunting and obscure at the time, that began as jazzy nonsense phrases intended to be musical in the James Joyce sense.

The story line of the work, which I called "Jook," a common 20s spelling of the term Juke, or Juke Joint, started off like our road trip. It was full of optimism, dreams, and music. As the sojourn continued, it became darker, as if the freedom that makes the road seem so open also unleashed a host of buried demons.

They talk a lot about freedom in the homeless community, but like the bluesmen who played their music with the conviction that they were damned to hell by the church community, there are a lot of choices made that bring out our worst instincts. Bad decisions shaped by the perception that the life only offers certain choices, with the rest being cut off or denied by a real or imagined society that judges us as worthless or lost.

We get lumped into a single mass or image by media or society, and thus find ourselves perceived in the company of the worst, the false prophets who subvert the illumination of sacrament into numbing hedonism or escape and the innocent judged by the actions of criminals whose only commonality is the lack of a roof.

Many people apply labels to the homeless that they'd never dare to use to describe minorities or women. The character I created in Jook was luckier in one respect, being homeless in 30s America wasn't so bad if you were at least headed somewhere like a hobo or pioneer. Now, there's nowhere a homeless person can go to escape judgement.

The original idea of the epic was to have two points of view; discrete poems, and a flowing narrative in 50s beat style prose. As the poetry was organized into story order, I saw that my current life fit the flow. The idea of doing some sort of Kerouac trip became less appealing when sitting in a car eating beans. It was more interesting to write about my life, which is probably what a real author should do anyway.

So the poems became chapter prologues. I eventually eliminated the traditional verse structure, and ran the words as a solid stream while still keeping the metre (rhythm). After each prologue, the following opening narrative paragraphs were put into the same basic metre to create pairs that seem different on the surface, but when carefully read are really the same opening.

One of the important things about my book is that the first two drafts were completed while still out there living in the car. I'd never be able to recreate that mood that was present when typing out the manuscript on an iphone in a dark street or parking lot, distracted by sleep deprivation, and never totally certain that Ivy and I were in a safe place.

There's been the temptation to rewrite certain passages in a more literary or poetic way. In some cases it was appropriate where some insight had come after being a safe distance from that life. In others, the passages were written as I felt and thought at that moment, and any revision would alter the mood.

There's a lot of individual stories floating out there and not heard because much of the the media and others have succeeded in making the homeless seem like a pitiful herd of cows. When people read my book, they'll see that it's only one of thousands of stories out there to be discovered. The book has plenty of details but the important point is that there's a real person telling the story living a real life that wasn't some inescapable destiny lived by someone who wanted it.

- Al Handa 

   6/2/17

-Al Handa

ontheroadwithalandivy@gmail.com

The Al & Ivy Homeless Literary Journal Archive:

http://deltasnake.blogspot.com

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